The Legacy

by Melanie Phillips

  But along with this excitement came a redoubled feeling of dread. Suppose it was a fake, a forgery? Suppose Kuchinsky was either a fraudster or—more likely—he genuinely believed he possessed a rare manuscript but had himself been duped; or even that his family had been duped generations back? And how could Russell be certain one way or another? After all, translating Hebrew was bad enough. But translating a transliteration, deciphering a bastardized form of old French written in Hebrew characters—the more he thought about it, that was a challenge he doubted that he could meet.

  But if he could do it, and if it was genuine…then, the prize! The prize!

  He couldn’t sit still. He needed a drink. He got up to fetch a beer from the fridge, and it was only then that he noticed the missed calls. He played back his messages.

  “Hey Dad,” said Rosa’s plaintive voice, “I, like, needed to ask you something but, er, as you aren’t there s’pose it doesn’t matter?”

  If it didn’t matter, he thought, why did she ring in the first place? And why was there always that hint of accusation in her voice (along with that idiotic upwards inflection)? After what had happened, didn’t she know that a call like that was bound to ring an alarm bell or two? Why were the young so…immature?

  The second call was from Kim, the secretary at Pollyanna Productions, letting him kindly know that his interesting idea for a documentary called Whither Turkey? was thought to be too derivative, but there might be an opening soon on a Channel Four show about suicidal vets which was coming down the pipe and they’d be back in touch.

  He played the message again to check she hadn’t said suicide vests.

  The third message was from his last girlfriend, Helena. She’d lost an earring which had some sentimental value. Had he by any chance come across it buried down the side of a chair perhaps? A description of the earring then followed.

  He’d had some hopes of Helena. She’d seemed a bit different from all the others who’d passed through his bed since Alice. They were usually rather drunken one-night stands; the following morning both he and they had discreetly reassessed and the girl had disappeared, sometimes with a cheery wave and sometimes, to his embarrassment and mortification, appearing a little scornful. Worse yet were the ones that suddenly looked at him with a certain compassion.

  Helena had had a slightly ethereal quality that reminded him of Alice. She had moreover stayed for more than one night, indeed seemed quite enthusiastic about what he did with her; which made him feel for the first time since Alice that he hadn’t completely lost it. But then one day she’d sighed and said he was a sweet guy but she wasn’t ready for all these complications, packed her things and departed.

  It was simply, he decided, so much easier to be alone.

  The fourth message was from Michael Waxman.

  He grabbed a Budweiser from the fridge, pushed a pile of papers and books off an armchair to join their fellows on the floor and flopped down into the leather cushions.

  Waxman! He hadn’t thought about him for years until his old life had started to reclaim him. They’d been at the same school where Russell had disliked him. Hadn’t everyone?

  Waxman had been an attention-seeker, an exhibitionist. Everywhere he went, whether in the classroom or the playground, he had to make himself the center of attention. He would insinuate himself into every conversation; his hand was always the first to go up in class. Not that he ever had anything very interesting to say; indeed, the sight of his upwardly springing fingers usually induced a sigh from whichever teacher it was.

  Was that why no one liked him, Russell now wondered, or did he behave in that manner because no one liked him?

  Either way, Waxman seemed to have no friends. Physically weedy and with a voice a high-pitched whine, he was conspicuous by his absence of sporting prowess. He was the boy no one wanted on their team. On the rugby pitch or cricket field, he seemed to lack any vestige of coordination, fumbling every ball; in the swimming pool, he would rapidly fall several laps behind.

  “That boy will never make anything of himself,” said Sylvia with what Russell thought was ill-disguised satisfaction. She didn’t like Waxman’s mother, who she thought gave herself airs and graces.

  Waxman’s mother certainly didn’t do her only child any favors. She collected him personally from school every day even after he was in long trousers; he caused incredulity by bringing smoked salmon sandwiches to school for his lunch; when they went on a school outing to the Roman ruins at St. Albans and were allowed to wear their own clothes, 12-year-old Waxman caused widespread sniggering when he turned up in a waisted coat with a velvet collar and clutching an embroidered cushion to prevent him from having to sit on hard ground.

  Inevitably, Waxman was picked on by the others. First it was insults; he was (inevitably) called waxwork, wankman; then pansy and poofter. Then his belongings started to be stolen. His homework books went missing, then a fountain pen; then his rather valuable watch.

  Russell was on the fringes of the group that was picking on Waxman. Warily, he watched what was happening. He was uncomfortably aware of certain similarities. Russell also hated sport and was bad at it; he also found it difficult to make friends.

  He had learned to get by, though, by making himself largely invisible. He wasn’t too showy or too loud; he wasn’t outstandingly brilliant at anything, nor was he a duffer, but he coasted along comfortably and unremarked somewhere around the lower middle of the top set. He also developed a dry wit through which he displayed a fashionably cynical view of the world, both of which afforded him a certain credibility. So the most powerful boys in the class let him tag along with them.

  He wasn’t going to jeopardize any of that by coming to Waxman’s defense. When he happened upon the scene behind the bike shed where a couple of them were giving Waxman a good thumping, he shrank back into the shadows and hurried away. Not, though, before he heard one of the assailants say, as he kicked Waxman’s prone body on the ground, “Take that, you filthy little kike.”

  He had put Waxman completely out of his mind. So when at the synagogue a thin, grey-haired man with a neat beard had stuck out his hand and said, “Long time no see,” he had done a double take.

  “Fancy meeting you here,” said Waxman.

  Even after all these years, Russell still felt a flush of guilt as he stared at him.

  It turned out that Waxman was a regular at this synagogue. He had married, late in life it seemed, a woman who was divorced with three daughters. He had become a clinical psychologist, and worked for a firm of management consultants advising firms on motivational employment practices.

  Now he had left a message to suggest they meet up for a proper chinwag. He had one or two ideas that might make great TV shows.

  Meeting him again had plunged Russell into a morose mood. He had written Waxman off as a loser. Yet from the sound of it he had been rather successful; you certainly didn’t end up working for a big management consultancy if you weren’t regarded very highly. How had he managed it? Had he just bullshitted his way in, like he’d done at school?

  Undoubtedly he would have a nice pension pot somewhere or other, an income for the rest of his life prudently squirreled away. Whereas Russell was reduced to scrabbling round for commissions, never knowing if the current show would be the last, always at the mercy of the media’s fixation on the latest cultural fad. Waxman seemed to have managed to make something of his life. Why hadn’t Russell?

  His stare, from those piercing blue eyes, had been as intense as ever. Dogged, Russell thought. That’s what Waxman had been above all else. Whatever was thrown at him, he just never gave up. That was what you needed to get on.

  It was a character thing, wasn’t it? It had very little to do with intellect. He himself had been clever enough, but never seemed to be able to settle down to much. “Butterfly mind,” his mother had said, not fondly.

  He knew he had d
isappointed them. They had wanted him to have a profession. All their friends had children who had become doctors, lawyers, lecturers. The idea that you had to get a professional qualification in order to move upwards in life—and no less important, to fit in—was hard-wired into those who, like his father, had left school without passing a single examination.

  Russell had loathed such mindless conformism. He had regarded it as the product of narrow minds. He had resented feeling the pressure of such expectation. He would be a free soul, a poet, a romantic, a radical in life as well as in his politics.

  But now he worked for a medium that, in its own way, was as conformist as any of those despised professions. It imposed its own form of drudgery, trapping him into accepting commissions for shows in which he either had no interest or which he actively despised. When all was said and done he still had to earn money to live; and he had to admit that he hadn’t been very good at that at all.

  Above all, though, he had wanted to do good in the world. “My son the dreamer,” his father had said in disbelief, torn between love and impatience.

  That’s why he’d become a producer of TV documentaries. He wanted to harness the power of television to uncover what was being hidden from public view, to expose abuses of power, to help the vulnerable. When he’d started at the BBC, even his father was quite impressed; he regarded the iconic broadcaster, after all, as a secular Bible, the template of truth and the daily proof that Britain was the most civilized and safest place on earth in which to live.

  But then everything had changed; investigative stuff was out, Russell’s face didn’t seem to fit any more and one day he found himself rationalized and downsized and outsourced as a freelance producer, a desperate supplicant at the door of the myriad production companies which mushroomed in the new competitive environment that was the digital marketplace.

  And what good had he actually done, after all? Yes, he’d made a few documentaries of which he’d been proud, like the one about what life was really like on benefits (dreadful) or how the police treated black youths (worse). And the one on the drug companies had even been short-listed for a national television award. But none of them had changed a thing. Worse, by the following week virtually all had been forgotten. The ephemerality of television applied to those who worked for it, too. He had improved no one’s life. Nothing he had done had left his imprint on anything.

  Unlike Alice, of course. She was fighting all the time for real people, defending their human rights in court, saving them from injustice and worse. Now that was real achievement. How he had admired her. He couldn’t really blame her for not feeling the same way about him.

  His mother had wanted him to be a lawyer. He had raged against the very thought. Now he winced at the memory and wondered whether she had had a point after all. He’d probably always been too quick to dismiss what was valuable.

  He thought about his parents. Sylvia and Jack had been married for more than fifty years. A great achievement. He knew now what it took to keep a marriage going. He hadn’t managed more than nine years before Alice left him. He hadn’t even been able to make a success of that.

  The evening had closed in and he realized he was sitting virtually in the dark. He snapped on the light and blinked. He thought again about Eliachim of York. My Eliachim. He hugged his secret to himself. If this came good, he wouldn’t have to worry anymore about such things. Tomorrow he’d make a start on discovering Eliachim’s story. There was no time to lose.

  6

  EVEN BEFORE THEY arrived at the flat Beverley had started organizing.

  “You’ll need to bring bin bags for what you want to take. Make sure they’re the thickest ones. Clothes to the charity shop, crockery ditto, furniture to the dump. I’ll take the silver—presume not quite your style? And we’ll divvy up the photographs between us. Assuming that is you want any of them at all, of course. But I want the wedding one.”

  It all seemed more than a little…well, cold.

  Back when they were children she had bossed him around, even though he was the elder of the two. He thought their mother indulged her. When she did anything wrong it was he who invariably got the blame. That was because Beverley wasn’t very good at anything. She had to be protected. He understood that. But he resented it a bit.

  She fussed around, bustling from room to room with rolls of plastic sacks.

  “At least I made sure it was all spotless. Of course I had to do it all myself. The girl was useless. Apparently beneath her dignity to get down on her knees and scrub the floor. Quite the little madam. And we had to pay through the nose for her. Social services was a dead loss, quelle surprise. Of course I went to the very best agency. I mean, you can’t skimp on something like that, not when it’s your own father and he’s so completely helpless, poor old soul.”

  She dabbed at her eyes. Russell sat miserably on a plastic-covered stool in the kitchen as his sister pulled crockery savagely out of cupboards.

  This was Beverley’s place, her territory. Her existence was framed by the twin pillars of family and synagogue life, both of which she ran with volcanic energy. At home, she shopped, cooked, sewed tapestry, mended the puncture on the Volvo estate herself and supervised an endless stream of workmen performing home improvements while she snapped at the cleaning lady or au pair (pull the beds out to vacuum beneath them, please! Ironed tops folded inside out again!) in the same tone she used towards the children (homework, messy rooms, enough with the bongo drumming!) while making endless to-do lists for everyone on sticky-backed Post-Its which she stuck around the house.

  At the synagogue she chaired the functions committee, served on the welfare committee and the new building committee, ran a course on “How to keep your kitchen kosher” for 12-year-old bat mitzvah girls on a Sunday morning and was the Brown Owl to the synagogue’s brownie pack, in which capacity she periodically spent unlikely weekends under canvas, taking care not to interrupt her stream of to-do notes by remembering to tuck a waterproof pen inside her ample uniform.

  So when their father died, there didn’t seem to be any way Russell could question her assumption that he would attend the synagogue with her on that first Saturday after it happened to perform his duty as the son and say the kaddish, the prayer for the dead. He might as well have lain down in front of a steamroller as argue about it.

  Of course, he had always known that regardless of all that had passed between them this was one duty he had to observe. Simple cowardice? Maybe. But if he was being honest, it wasn’t just that either. It was rather that death, dammit, changed the rules of the game once again in a way he had never anticipated. He had thought he was free of all of it; and then he realized he was still hooked as securely as one of Rosa’s nose rings.

  Death is when it hits you: the primal attachment, the bond of connection, the thing you finally can’t shake off because it’s calling to you from somewhere deep in your gut. He had turned his back on him in life; he couldn’t bring himself in his death to turn his back on what had bound both of them together. He came back like a wretched homing pigeon, cursing all the while.

  And if he was really honest, it was more even than that. Because when he looked at his father in death, willing him despite everything that had happened between them to breathe again, not believing that he had finally gone because he was still there, lying in the bed large as life except of course he was dead, he just had one thought. “Is that it?” Was that really what it amounted to when all was said and done?

  He was still recognizably his father; and yet he was not that thing at all. He was lying in the bed in his old blue Marks & Spencer pajamas, with his bushy eyebrows and his strangely long fingernails and the hairs curling in his ears and nostrils, all of which made him his father, and yet he wasn’t there anymore. The room was overwhelmingly occupied by him in the bed; and yet it was empty of any human being.

  Now Russell slipped tentatively into that bedroom agai
n. He looked at the bed stripped down to the mattress, and he shivered in loneliness. He looked round the room, and he saw that nothing had changed and that everything had changed.

  It still had the same furniture, even the same carpets and curtains that he remembered from his boyhood: the same bedside photographs of Russell and Beverley on his mother’s side of the bed; the same pink ruched lampshades, now grey with age. All her taste, of course. Nothing of his father at all. And for the first time he noticed that the fitted wardrobe didn’t fit very well, and that the bed was cheap and thin.

  He wandered in a kind of daze into what they had called the lounge. In front of the television sat a small sofa and two armchairs covered in patterned velvet, all so familiar to him. His father’s chair, where he had sat every evening of his life, still had a depression in the cushion. There was a cocktail cabinet, reproduction Georgian, and a side table with curly legs on which rested a reproduction antique silver tea service on a silver tray. His father had loved that room as fiercely as Russell had loathed it.

  He sat on one of the chairs. Beneath the velvet pile, it felt like sitting on cardboard stuffed with sawdust. It was desperately uncomfortable. But Jack wouldn’t have known it wasn’t comfortable because he didn’t know there was any better to be had. He was eighty-one when he died, and yet he had never known what it felt like to sit in a well-made, comfortable armchair.

  Russell went from room to room. There were a few books, biographies mainly (his mother had been the reader), a few photographs, some Premium Bonds, his clothes (now being ruthlessly snatched off their hangers and stuffed into the bin bags by Beverley), folders of bank statements and bills. Jack’s life seemed to have been measured in manila. Of the man himself, of what had made him interested, engaged, a unique human being, there was nothing. He had left nothing of himself behind.

  What did Russell expect? Was there anything to be left? Jack had been a taxi driver. His life had consisted of car journeys, rows with traffic wardens, exchanges with passengers; just coping from day to day. Blink, and there was nothing. But then, what does anyone leave behind, he thought? Certainly he himself wouldn’t have anything to leave, the way things had gone.