Inheritance

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  Andy's choice of fiancee did not go down well with his mother or sister, but it was not Sophie's fault that she came from the same hemisphere as the person his father had run off with.

  Sophie's maisonette in Chesterton Road was a ten-minute walk from the first-floor flat that Andy rented in Hortense Avenue. He pressed the top-floor bell and waited for her to let him in, instead of which she came out and closed the door behind her.

  'Hi.'

  Her face hurried across the space between them to kiss him. 'Hi.'

  She was wearing her chunky-knit chinchilla coat belted at the waist and, underneath, an orange cashmere jersey that he had not seen before.

  'You look lovely,' he praised. 'Sorry I'm late.'

  Why the faculty of running late was so highly developed in Andy, he was unsure. It was not something he was proud of. It was systemic - from his tenth year on.

  'I'd never make a good prince,' he said.

  Sophie did not answer.

  The cold wind gusting off Ladbroke Grove flushed her cheeks as they set off for the Camoes.

  The restaurant was emptier even than the chapel in Richmond. On this Saint Valentine's Day evening, all those who normally ate there must have been sunning their guts in Praia da Rocha, save for a brown-haired young man four empty tables away with a book propped in front of him. When he saw them enter he looked up, and returned to what he was reading.

  It was good to be inside, away from that snapping wind.

  'Oh, I've been looking forward to this all day,' said Andy, rubbing his hands as Rui limped across with two menus.

  Andy sought Sophie's eyes and his heart ballooned. He forgot the cock-up at Richmond. In that moment, everything shone with a pure enchanted glow; nothing could flourish except their love and the expanding sense of himself about to discuss their honeymoon in Cintra. The man across the room had his book. Andy had Sophie.

  After Rui had taken their orders, Sophie said: 'Did you get your pay rise?'

  'No,' Andy said. 'Not yet.' He worked in a small publishing house that specialised in self-help books: living with loss, grief, how to get through pregnancy. Plus a whole lot of syndromes that he had grown too jaded to joke about. 'Goodman said he'd sleep on it and get back to me tomorrow - but it's looking good. He gave me the afternoon off.'

  'I'm sure you'll get it this time,' she nodded, not catching his eye.

  'Even if I don't,' he smiled, 'we'll survive somehow.'

  At the thought of their life together, their shared bed, Andy felt a sexual tightening. He brushed her knees with his, and though she did not move her legs away she did not respond either. He started to feel, not nervous exactly, but as if he had failed Sophie as well as Stuart Furnivall. He wanted her to know that she could rely on him. She was making the money right now, but time would come when the photo-shoots and freebies would dry up - and it would not matter. By then he stood to be an established publisher, running his own list. He would look after her. She would never fade in his eyes.

  'Conrad fixed the front door yet?' she asked, although Andy had the idea that it was of no interest to her whether his landlord had repaired the lock. Neither did she appear to notice that he was wearing the Emilio Zegna jacket that she had given him on their first anniversary.

  'Not yet,' he said. 'Jerome's sorting it out.' A drug-dealer who lived on the ground floor.

  'What about the fridge?'

  'An engineer's coming on Wednesday.'

  She wrinkled her nose and stared straight ahead. She sometimes had that see-nothing look on the catwalk.

  'Andrew?'

  'Yes.'

  Her cheeks were no longer pink. She was pale and had an odd expression.

  'You know I love you.'

  Her voice.

  'I just wanted to let you know,' she said quickly.

  But he himself was too much in love with the moment at hand to see that something vital was being left unsaid.

  Rui limped from the kitchen carrying their main course, grilled cod for Andy, chicken milanesa for her.

  ' Bom apetite ,' he said sombrely and left. The Gipsy Kings were playing and then they stopped and it was fado moaning from the loudspeakers.

  Sophie was studying the cod on his plate. She opened her mouth and closed it.

  'I don't know about you,' Andy smiled, 'but fado makes my toes curl up like a rose leaf.'

  She put her knife and fork neatly together, gave a quick look round, and said: 'Sweet, I'm not coming home with you.'

  He felt a moustache of heat form. 'Why, you have something to do?'

  She stared in an abject way at her broccoli. But something had shifted inside her. Something very simple and important that explained her forgiveness-seeking smile. 'Andrew, you're far too nice for me.'

  On hearing those words, Andy sat very still. 'Oh, I can be nasty if you like. How nasty would you like me to be?' But he felt a chilling shame spread over his skin, settling in a stone weight at the top of his knees.

  'I don't want you to be nasty.'

  'I'm too poor for you,' he tried growling.

  'You are not too poor for me.'

  She opened the menu. There was a cord running down the middle of it like the string on his mother's spectacles. Sophie plucked it in a desultory way, as though she intended to break into hoarse, aching song with Amalia.

  'Andrew, I've met someone.'

  It was the opposite of sprouting wings. The sense of something caving in; of his insides - his beams and rafters - crumbling.

  He sat even stiller. Persuading himself that there was an appropriate reply and if he waited a few heartbeats longer the right words would click into place. But nothing came. It was what he feared most. He was falling. Tumbling away from himself. Disappearing.

  'Oh,' he said. And then again: 'Oh.' And then, to protect himself by saying the most reasonable thing he could think of saying: 'Well, if you love someone you have to let them go.'

  'Which was a pretty pathetic response,' he would admit afterwards to David. 'No wonder she preferred to be with someone else. I mean, how sexually attractive is reasonable - or Jonathan Livingston Seagull for that matter? The odd thing was, I didn't feel angry. I was unsure what I felt, but anger was not part of it.' He was only aware that the room had altered shape; the photos of Cintra looked embarrassed; the sprig of lavender had turned away in disappointment. Even the invisible guitarist was having trouble playing fado, he was so busy straining to listen.

  As was the young man at the table behind.

  For some reason - and this was precise in his mind - Andy was becoming very aware of him. He had the impression that he was sliding backwards down a tube and the light was getting smaller and smaller, until all he could see was this man's face. So he resorted to a trick he had developed as a boy whenever he was unhappy, of trying to crawl out of himself and imagine he was Someone Else. He thought: If I put myself for a moment into that person's shoes and force myself to believe that all this has been a joke and Sophie has been pulling my leg, maybe everything she's been saying will erase itself. So that is what he did. He concentrated very hard on the only other person in the restaurant.

  The young man wore a burgundy V-neck jersey and striped blue shirt, open at the collar, and was wiry and compact and had dark, sly features that he had not bothered to shave.

  He was leaning forward, but his fierce involvement in his book was not convincing.

  Sophie was saying in a small voice: 'It's not that I don't love you. But I'm fond of Richard, too. I haven't been able to concentrate on anything since I met him.'

  Andy flushed. He wiped his face with a napkin. 'Who is he?' he heard himself say.

  'He works at Lehman Brothers. I don't know how it happened. But it's unstoppable,' her voice rising to a defiant falsetto before it became small again. 'Do you hate me? I haven't been to bed with him. Say something.' Her red lip trembling.

  He pushed his plate away. 'I'll get the bill. Or do you want pudding?'

  'No, no, let me pay.'
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  He was opening his wallet.

  'Andrew, put that away,' she said miserably, and looked for a moment as if the music had tangled itself in her hair. 'I can claim it.'

  He waved his card at Rui. 'No, I invited you.'

  By the time Rui came back with the bill to sign, Andy's eyes were too glazed to read the amount. The waiter stood there, a reassuring presence, as Andy worked out what to tip him. It had nothing to do with Rui, any of this.

  The lines on Rui's face were expressive of the knottier chords of fado. He gave Andy a sympathetic look and tapped his Mastercard. 'Do you 'ave another one, senhor ? This does not function.'

  'It's the metallic strip. It's probably just been demagnetised . . . Try again.'

  Not looking at Andy, Sophie said: 'Here, take mine.'

  A moment later, she accepted Rui's pen and with a veteran's scratch signed her name, unreadable as a signature, but as credit-rich indisputable.

  Andy pushed back his chair and stood up, waiting for Sophie to leave with him. He had not yet accustomed himself to the idea that they were not going to be together till parted by death. But it was turning into one of those evenings when insult to injury kept happening.

  'Hey, where are you going?'

  She had risen from her chair and was walking over to the other person. The angle at which she leaned over him was unusually solicitous and the man looking up at her seemed younger, his nervous unshaven face now filled with everything that Andy had been feeling when he walked into the Camoes - joy, love, hope.

  'Have you managed to eat anything? You must be hungry?' and she laughed in a thrilling way before turning back to Andy. That silver libidinous blade of a voice had never sounded so seductive, so charged with sexual possibility. 'This is Richard,' sticking it in to the hilt. 'I asked him to be here in case things got ugly. I should have known you'd be a gentleman.'

  'Hi,' said Andy.

  'Hi,' said Richard, who Andy could see was stingingly good-looking.

  As for Sophie, she stood so close to Richard that there was no room for Andy to crawl between them. He wanted to beg. To make her feel sorry for him. He wanted pity to win her back. But pity does not win anyone the kind of friend he wanted Sophie to be. The abyss had opened. He was never going to cross it by wrapping his arms around her legs, his face against her knees, pleading.

  'Well, I'd better be going,' he said after a pause. A gut-shot dog smiling to keep the tears in. And left them there, looking into each other's eyes with no sign of shame. Absolutely no sign at all. Just the lazy, besotted expression indicative of lovers the world over. And relief that he was letting them get away with it so easily.

  ' Boa noite, senhor ,' Rui said, pulling open the door.

  3

  T HE OFFICES OF C ARPE D IEM occupied the third floor of a converted warehouse on the west side of Hammersmith roundabout, near the entrance to the Underground. It was a much reduced person who pushed through the revolving doors from the street next morning.

  Andy walked past the meaty Caribbean presence of Errol like a calf with the staggers, plodded up the stairs and was barely through the door when Angela strode out of Goodman's office.

  'You're late,' she pointed out, as she organised herself into her chair.

  A curt nasal voice sounded from within. 'Who is it?'

  'Only Andrew.' Who was not greeting her with the normal, 'Hi, Angela, how was your dowsing class?'

  In a lowered voice: 'He's been waiting an hour to speak with you.' Then looked up. At the sight of his reddened eyes and his blond hair stuck out, like something torn up by the roots, she gasped.

  'My God, what's happened to you?'

  He felt a martyred expression enter his face. 'My fiancee just dumped me.'

  'Oh, Andrew . . .' She stared at him, and then, abashed, down at the manuscript that she held. 'Poor you.'

  'I'll get over it,' he muttered bravely, though unbelieving.

  He had always found it a leap of the imagination too big to understand how people could die from love. Now he knew.

  'Hey, Andrew?' came his master's tetchy voice. 'Have you a moment?'

  'I'll bring you a coffee,' she promised.

  A large man in green braces and with a rubicund face suddenly appeared, a sheet of paper in his hand and a Magic Marker clamped cigar-like at the corner of his mouth. He had a sizeable paunch and close-cropped dark hair, and the buckles of his braces stood out like gold teeth.

  'Come through, come through,' in a voice tinged with the veldt, and shut the door behind them.

  'Please sit.'

  Andy dumped his satchel on the floor and sat down and after a while looked up.

  On brown-painted walls hung framed homilies illustrating the benign rules of Goodman's publishing house. If in doubt, smile . If you follow your bliss, your bliss will meet you half way .

  The daddy of them all was contained in an outsized frame behind Goodman's desk. Andy had stared at it on the morning of his first interview, two and a half years ago.

  On that occasion, Goodman, pleased to note the direction of his gaze, had swivelled in his high-backed leatherette chair and together they read the message. Andy had the idea that Goodman was keen for him to understand how it constituted the doubly-distilled essence of Carpe Diem. Its motto, as it were.

  Be assured that you are a grain of God who sprouted up in human form at the precise moment you were meant to. And as such you're entitled to a life filled with joy, love and happiness.

  Swivelling back, Goodman had looked at him companionably. 'A life filled with joy, love and happiness . . .'

  Goodman came from New Bethesda in the Karoo and he saw in Andy - at that first interview - an impeccable provincial like himself. Suspicious of Oxbridge graduates - 'Horace-quoting misfits,' he called them - who would be aware that a job with Carpe Diem was not a thing to be sighed for, he had reacted positively to the CV that Angela had placed on his desk and from which, from time to time, he refreshed himself, being impressed with Andy's three-year stint in a second-hand bookshop in Abergavenny and, before that, his degree in modern languages at a university in the south-west. His stomach lapped onto the desk and his braces gave his thumbs something to pluck at while he flashed Andy an appreciative look.

  'I have found it a sensible policy over the years to treat all people who come to work at Carpe Diem as grains of God - including Angela,' he smiled. 'That goes for our readers, too. However, I ought to emphasise that being a grain of God is not the same as being a Christian. Not at all.' He leaned forward and looked again at Andy's CV. 'It says here that your ambition is one day to run a general list. What do you mean by a general list ?'

  'Oh, you know - fiction, poetry, biography, history, fishing, maybe even some religion,' Andy said brightly.

  'Maybe even some religion,' Goodman repeated in a dubious voice. He picked up a paper clip and dropped it back into the abalone shell from which it had escaped onto his desk. 'May I ask, Andrew, if you're a Christian?'

  'Not a practising one.'

  His answer had seemed to relax Goodman. He sat back and thrust a thumb under each loose green brace and rotated them. 'You see, Andy, the way I see it, the self-help culture is the precise opposite of the Christian culture.'

  To Goodman, the science of self-help was to the twenty-first century what geology was to the nineteenth and astronomy to the seventeenth, the battleground of old and new faiths. His governing principle towards anyone tempted to pick up a title with the Carpe Diem logo on the spine - a slumbering pussycat adroitly curled into the shape of a human heart - was to promise a contemporary model of salvation and a rescue from phobias and fears.

  'If the Christian message is to lose yourself in the Other, the self-help ethos is about putting yourself first. Let me simplify. Here at Carpe Diem, we give our readers permission to be selfish sluts!'

  Two and a half years listening to his pontificating, and Andy was aware that his boss did not extend the same permission to his staff. When Andy let slip to Angela
that he intended to ask for a salary rise or else his girlfriend wouldn't marry him, her cold grey eyes had looked at him in an ominous way. 'This is exactly how long the others lasted, until they demanded a pay rise.' Money was never mentioned spontaneously at Carpe Diem.

  When at the end of that first interview Andy had asked what salary he might expect, Goodman had squeaked forward in his chair, evaluating him. 'Tell me - Andrew, isn't it? - have you a private income?'

  'Heck, no,' and he burst out laughing. Andy did not know anyone with a private income. But neither did he realise that the man seated opposite was a chiseller who would grind you down to the last penny on a deal. Andy had only to discuss an author's advance for Goodman to brush away his hand in front of his mouth like a priest making a sign at a curse. 'Journalists have to think of the headline, Andrew. Publishers, of the bottom line.' Andy came to believe that Goodman almost expected his authors to work for free. In Goodman's opinion they were serving in the ministry of books. Those who wanted to be paid were not the real thing.

  A melancholy expression had passed over Goodman's mottled face after Andy revealed that he did not have a private income. He sighed, the spirit of his conviviality already watered with his concern for the bottom line, and said very well, seeing as Andy had no previous experience he would not be able to hire him as an assistant editor, but what about a position as an editorial assistant? A probationary period of six months to see how things worked out. And while he was not able to offer princely terms in the way of - his word - 'emolument', what he could offer was precious experience at the coalface of the publishing industry, something not to be sniffed at in present circumstances - publishers, like farmers, existing in a permanent state of never knowing things to be so bad.

  'And what could be better than that?'

  Andy took up Goodman's offer. PS15,000 a year was small money in London in the first decade of the twenty-first century, but he reasoned that it was his first proper job. It was a start. He was a neophyte. At last.

  While Carpe Diem was not everything Andy had hoped for, there was the smell of cherry blossom in the air and there were towering oak trees all along Hammersmith Grove where Goodman's publishing house, with its character as purveyor of dreams to those in desperation, had its offices.