Inheritance

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  'Well, have you finished?'

  'Nearly.'

  Goodman exploded. '"Nearly" pulls no man off his horse, Andrew. I need it marked up PDQ,' and glowered at his desk. 'Is that it?'

  'Not exactly.'

  'What is it - exactly ?' Suspicion told him that Andy was being ideologically lax.

  'Just something I was considering,' his voice more defiant than he meant, though not as defiant as he felt.

  Goodman sprang forward, seizing what Andy had read and leafing impatiently back through it until he reached the title page.

  ' Missing Montaigne . . .' his mind working quickly. 'What's it about?'

  'A French philosopher.'

  Goodman pondered. 'Modern, is he?'

  'Sixteenth-century.'

  'What's his shtick?'

  'He believed that in each one of us can be found the whole pattern of human nature.'

  'Did he now?'

  'He also believed that the state of the world is created by the individual actions of each of us.'

  A strange look came into Goodman's face. Grizzly bears have this look just before they swipe off your head. Ever so slowly, he put down the pages. The sharp blast of his disapproval, the wind that blows over the Karoo, reached Andy across his desk. 'I think not, Andrew. We don't want another fiasco, merci beaucoup . I shall need the Tansley by Friday afternoon, absolute latest,' and he left the room.

  The Valentino Alfresco Sex Guide by Enid Tansley was the latest addition to Carpe Diem's Valentino list, the titles of which were reliable in this respect: in thirty months not a single one had produced in Andy a smidgen of erotic stimulus. Goodman's fiat of minimum expenditure meant that a cousin of Angela's had taken the photos. Dominic's beaming young man and woman (students on the same art course) looked at first glance to be advertising garden products. Closer scrutiny revealed that they posed for a series of 'daring' outdoor positions, each accompanied by a caption containing sensible Tansley advice. 'A bird-bath is the ideal height for upright sex, but make sure it's secure.' Or: 'Inserting fresh fruit is no more dangerous than inserting a dildo, but best to avoid spicy plants (red chillies, peppers, ginger).' Or: 'Use a code word like "Basingstoke" to stop.'

  In the early days Andy would have joked with his friend David about this, but he was now immune. Tansley was like every author in the Carpe Diem catalogue. The advice she gave was daft, though not so daft as people had to be to take it. He picked up a pencil and was marking the first page when a phrase brought him up short.

  In Andy's hard-earned experience, most self-help books contained at least one marshmallow of truth. This was Enid Tansley's - lifted, no doubt, from Ruth Challis, who had clearly pinched it from Montaigne: 'Above all, be yourself.'

  But who was he?

  The self he had been had vanished that night at the Camoes. Taken from him by a man in a burgundy V-neck. His dark hand on her breast . . .

  The door opened.

  He could only think of her.

  The rain cracked down and there was the sound of a body collapsing heavily on a sofa.

  He could only think of her.

  Andy heard from the snores that it had been another good lunch.

  But he could only think of Sophie.

  Sod Basingstoke, he thought - and reached for the telephone.

  Sophie was not at her agency. She did not answer her mobile. He tried her flat.

  'Hello?' said a voice he thought he recognised.

  'Is that you, darling?'

  'No, it's darling's mother.'

  Andy had not yet met Mrs Sobko, although they got on well enough on the telephone. Sophie had failed to mention that she was visiting London.

  'I hope the fraternity houses are behaving themselves,' he said with a plausible attempt at excitement. He had had to become something of an expert on Grand Forks.

  'I'll get her,' in a new acerbic tone.

  'How is she?'

  'She's sure in a mess, but you know how it is . . . Wait, here she is. It's him.'

  'Hi.'

  'Sophie?'

  'Oh, hi.'

  His heart spiralled to hear her voice. He had hoped to be holding her, but he was grateful to be holding the telephone with her voice coming out of it.

  'How are you doing?' she said.

  He could not bear it any more.

  'Were you so unhappy with me?'

  'No,' sounding miserable. And started sobbing as though she had been unhappy and had not understood this till now.

  'Goodbye, Andrew.'

  And put down the receiver.

  When he listened to the tone in which Sophie said goodbye, as if he were some cowboy developer who had bulldozed her holiest site into its interestingly shaped swimming pool, Andy knew that the rupture was final.

  There did not seem a lot else left to do in the world except consecrate himself to Enid Tansley. Oblivious to the city outside, he sat correcting her manuscript for the rest of the afternoon. There was a steady, oppressive rain. He could see the glare of the headlights refracted through it onto the wall above his desk; the lights raking the glass, illuminating the words Release the need to be unpleasant to others . By the end of the day he came to life for a moment, even felt quite content. But then despair returned in greater force.

  He worked until midnight and missed the last bus. He walked with bent head through the dark, glossy streets, to his flat. What you needed to be to live in London was an umbrella, he thought. The darkness pressed in on him. Black and bitter and damp. Like the inside of a bird.

  A month after his father failed to return from Canada, a letter arrived from Moose Jaw for his mother. She stood there muttering to herself, then ran up to her room. She did not open the letter for a week. Keeping it in her handbag like a grenade.

  She sat with her light on after reading it.

  The information fluttered into her lap, less explosion than dead leaf.

  'But isn't he already married to you?' Andy said when she explained what his father wanted.

  'Not any more he doesn't wish to be,' flashed his sister.

  'Stop it, you two!'

  His mother could not remember the best age for children, when they were supposed to be easy; whatever it was, it kept shifting, first ahead of where she happened to be; then a long way behind.

  Such a coward. Not to look her in the eyes and tell her.

  But she refused to denigrate their father in front of them. Her public position: 'Every so often it happens. You meet someone. You meet someone and you don't want to go back.'

  Fighting words. His strangely loyal mother. Who would go on missing the letter-writer. His big brown burly head. His optimism. Do what people tell you and you'll be hunting fish in the woods - the line that had made her laugh when they first met. The man of many women who had dreamed of going into space.

  Tongues wagged. Word got round that this time George Larkham was not coming back. His new wife was to be a Canadian. All true. Except that she ran off before he could divorce.

  When the divorce finally came through Andy would hear his mother turning in bed upstairs. It was the overriding tone of his childhood. His mother's restless sadness.

  Then, the autumn after his father's doomed visit home, after Lynn had rejected him for a pilot more her own age, Andy's mother fell in love, with - of all things - a Japanese elm.

  Everyone has a Phase One and Phase Two of their lives. His mother's defining moment was seeing a red and gold Zelkova serrata in an arboretum near Romsey. 'Someone had struck a match on it - it had all the colours of the bonfire.' She might have discovered a new star that did not exist for anyone else but sent his mother into her own happy heaven. For too long everything in her life had moved at a helicopter's pace, her husband up in the air always. The first time she set eyes on that elm, its gorgeous shape and colour - the shape of something that needed to stay put - she understood how badly she wanted to come back to earth. It grounded her, that elm.

  She had tended the garden during her husband's
extended absences, finding positive delight in being outdoors and getting her hands dirty. Now, she began to work with plants professionally, in a nursery near Gillingham, where she exhausted herself moving pots, bringing them in for the night, and, if it was raining, sticking them outside. If the weather turned cold, she would rush out in a worry that her darlings needed to be wrapped up. She could not bear for her plants to be hurt or damaged. Plants were her children, almost as much as her children were.

  Andy had never seen his mother so involved. One evening after work, she took a piece of paper and sketched a large oak. She made a long line under it and drew the oak again, upside-down, like a reflection. 'Plants have anchoring roots which correspond to branches in the air,' she told him. 'If you dig down, you'll find a similar branch-pattern in the fine feeding roots that take in water and nutrients, like the veins and capillaries in our own bodies. As above, so below. It's in the Bible.'

  Her husband had ripped out a whole arterial system, leaving her bloodless and pale in the sunless English weather. She would not fall into that trap again: of wanting to please.

  After the Japanese elm, a rare coastal beard-heath that was impossible to make flower - until she was told a trick by a German woman at the nursery.

  She packed the coastal beard-heath into a garbage bag and added a teaspoon of white wine vinegar and tied the bag up. Then left the plant alone for three months, until what came out was a stinking, rotting, horrible mess.

  'Some seeds have to go through a bird before they germinate.'

  Andy was present when she unknotted the bag. He watched her cracked hands with enormous tenderness remove the beard-heath and wash it, and then she planted it and - lo and behold! - a few days later it blossomed. He remembered small flowers and berries that started off green and finished white. Whenever he was in a bad or unhappy mood, one he could not escape by imagining that he was Someone Else, he tried to reach beyond it by telling himself: 'I'm going through the bird.' It never really worked.

  5

  N EXT MORNING , EARLY , STILL dark, the doorbell.

  Sophie! She had woken up to what a loser Richard was and, like the penitent they once observed together at Fatima, had shuffled the length of Hortense Avenue - on tattering knees - to plead with Andy to accept her back.

  He rose from his briny bed and crawled through the tip that his flat had become to the intercom. 'Yes?' he croaked with simmering hope and peered through the window.

  Outside, an overcast sky quarried by a wind that raised the white pebbledash of the facades opposite into goose pimples.

  From below, the postman's voice. 'Recorded delivery.'

  Immediately, Andy regretted answering the bell. Right at the bottom of the list of things he required this Friday morning was a summons.

  Months before, David had educated him in the practice of deferment. 'Those bills? You write back: "Because of a hereditary dyslexia, I require a slightly different form, with the As reversed and in Hindi, because I am seeking to become one of the last Tasmanian Aborigines."' This had bought Andy six weeks' respite with the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, but it no longer kept British Telecom at bay.

  Linoleum goes very cold in a London February. Andy dashed across the icy floor and propped up the envelope on the shelf as he brushed his teeth. His apprehension sharpened when he read: Vamplew & Whelan, Solicitors . And heard the judge's voice: 'You shall be sentenced to seven years' transportation to a place beyond the seas.'

  The letter was short.

  Dear Andrew Larkham,

  I represent the estate of the late Christopher Madigan. As you may be a beneficiary of his will, can I confirm that this is your permanent address?

  Yours sincerely, Godfrey Vamplew.

  It was not a summons. Andy felt such a flood of gratitude that he resolved to telephone Godfrey Vamplew and clear up this mess before it got bigger. The letter gave him the courage to act as he should have done at the crematorium.

  Once dressed, he made a cup of tea and went into the living room and called the number at the top of the page. A young-sounding woman put him through to Vamplew.

  'Yes, Mr Larkham. What can I do for you?'

  Andy recognised the grey hair in his voice. 'I've just received your letter,' he said.

  'I take it that is your permanent address?'

  'Yes, but it's not why I'm ringing.'

  Vamplew sounded oddly uninterested.

  Andy continued: 'Listen, there's something I'd like to say. I didn't know this man Christopher Madigan. I shouldn't have been at his funeral.'

  Silence.

  'You see, I should have been in Chapel 3,' Andy babbled on - he wanted to help him, 'but there was rain on my invitation and I misread 3 for 8.'

  The voice at the other end was polite, but firm. 'It doesn't matter whether you made a mistake or not. You've fulfilled the terms and conditions.'

  Andy really was at sea. He licked away the skin of milk sticking to his lips. 'Terms and conditions?'

  There was a sound that might have been a sigh. 'Mr Larkham, these are rather unusual circumstances. If you come to my office this afternoon at 2.30, I shall do my best to explain.'

  'How long will you be?' Angela asked suspiciously.

  Andy found himself wishing that she would go lose herself in a pothole. Angela often left early for her dowsing class, and did he say anything?

  'No more than a couple of hours.'

  'You do know he's expecting the Tansley,' she said officiously.

  'It'll be ready.'

  She needed to get it off her mind. 'And you owe me a hundred quid.'

  'First thing Monday.'

  He grabbed his coat and made for the Tube.

  Thirty-five minutes later, Andy followed a self-possessed young receptionist along a carpeted passage, past coloured prints of Worcester Cathedral and the Oxford college where he supposed Godfrey Vamplew had studied law, to a black painted door.

  His name was in double pica letters on a small brass plaque. The receptionist knocked twice, and when she heard 'Come in' opened it. Shelves of blue-bound legal codes. A huge desk inlaid with maroon leather. And sitting on the far side, the silver-headed figure who had asked Andy to sign Christopher Madigan's condolence book.

  With the slow and considered motion of a man whose blood did not flow briskly, Vamplew continued filling his Mont Blanc from a bottle of blue Sheaffer ink, and when he had completed this operation glanced up.

  'Ah, Mr Larkham, here at last.'

  'Sorry I'm late,' without thinking, as he had said it a hundred times before.

  There was another person in the room, who sat in one of two mahogany armchairs facing the desk.

  That pale, wrinkled face, now wearing spectacles.

  Vamplew stood to introduce them. 'This is Maral Bernhard. Mrs Bernhard, this is Mr Larkham I was telling you about.'

  She was dressed in the same brown fur coat as at the funeral service and held a straw shopping basket in her lap.

  'Larkham,' she repeated, not getting up. She peered at him, an expression of obscure resentment on her face, as though she did not believe that Larkham could be his name.

  'That's right. Andy Larkham,' and held out his hand.

  She gave it a squelching look and moved her chair away.

  Vamplew returned to his seat and reached for a file on his desk, untying the tape that bound it.

  'Kate getting you a coffee?'

  'She is,' sitting down.

  'You won't change your mind?' to Maral Bernhard.

  She shook her head and picked at her basket, slumped in an attitude of dejected preoccupation. From the rigid set of her shoulders, she had arrived in this room against her will and would much rather have been squeezing avocado pears in Vladivostok or wherever she came from. Andy knew where he would have preferred to be. With Sophie. Taking off her slip. Falling backwards onto a lavender sofa.

  'Mr Vamplew -' he began, but the lawyer threw up a hand.

  'I apologise if what I'm a
bout to do appears old-fashioned, but I think the best way to proceed is for me to read this out. Then, if you have queries, I shall do my best to answer them.'

  There was a knock.

  Vamplew said nothing as the receptionist appeared with a tray on which there was a single small cup.

  Andy decided to enjoy his coffee and wait until Vamplew had finished before explaining why it was impossible that he could be a beneficiary of Christopher Madigan.

  'And, Kate' - they exchanged glances - 'no further calls.'

  The door closed. Vamplew filled a tumbler with water from a cut-glass decanter, took a sip, and opened the file, removing from it the condolence book. He put this to one side and next withdrew a stapled document.

  'This should not take long. It is couched in legal jargon, but for all that self-explanatory, I hope.'

  He rifled through the pages until he came to a page with a blue Post-it note.

  'There's a preamble which need not detain us. If neither of you objects, I shall skip straight to the will itself.'

  Andy glanced over at Maral Bernhard. She was straightening a strand of straw that had come loose from her basket. He gave her a nervous smile, the back of a hand for a dog to sniff. She turned her eyes to him, filled with venom.

  He looked at Vamplew.

  The lawyer took another fortifying sip, cleared his throat, leaned forward, and began reading aloud.

  'I, Christopher Leonard Madigan of 11 Clarendon Crescent, Holland Park, London W11, hereby revoke all wills and testamentary dispositions heretofore made by me and declare this to be my last will.

  'One. I direct that my Trustee as hereinafter defined shall cause my body to be cremated after a service in accordance with Clause Three hereof.

  'Two. I appoint Godfrey Vamplew of Vamplew & Whelan, hereinafter called "my Trustee" to be Executor and Trustee of this my will.

  'Three. I direct my Trustee to arrange at the expense of my Estate a funeral service at Richmond Crematorium as soon as is practicable after my death and to give not less than ten days' notice of such a service in the London Times and Daily Telegraph and London Gazette .

  'Four. I require my Trustee to attend such a service throughout and to take and keep a full written record of the full names and current addresses of all persons attending such a service who are present at the final prayer (excluding my Trustee and the officiating clergy, organist and choir and any attendant funeral directors and their staff) and such persons so recorded are hereafter called "the Attenders" and I direct that the decision of my Trustee as to what constitutes an Attender shall be final and binding herein.'