Inheritance

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  Andy went through the motions of ordering, but he ate without conviction. The events of the past three hours had shaken him. First, a headless Armenian saint; then, a couple of young lovers blotted out in a hit-and-run accident.

  Dinner over, he walked Gabriella back to their pensione and had the sensation of being watched by another figure. If he looked in a window, there, across the street, she stood. When he took the stairs to their room, she followed a few steps behind, gazing with steady brown eyes, one hand above the other on her umbrella handle.

  He escaped into the bathroom while Gabriella undressed.

  In the mirror, he saw himself through her eyes. Tall, English, approaching thirty, with straight fair hair parted across a wide brow that had been out in the sun, a long narrow nose, and his mother's careful eyes, pale blue and estimating. But the thing he noticed - how his face had an interrupted look, like a book that's been flattened at a page. It was the exhausted, resigned face of someone unsure of his passion, or hiding it.

  From the bedroom: 'Andee?'

  A clandestine image stole back - Jeanine sitting opposite him in his flat in Hortense Avenue. He remembered the burn of recognition when he looked into her eyes. Wasn't she - of all people - entitled to the truth?

  The question nagged at him long after their tired bodies rolled apart, disturbing what should have been his peace, like the sound of a phone ringing and ringing until it falls quiet.

  Breakfast next morning took place in silence. Whenever he looked over his shoulder or across the floor of the room, there Jeanine sat with heavy lids, waiting for him. The raw flavour she had left was a lever prising open a crack. Gabriella observed how he was particularly jumpy and low, and left him alone.

  He had intrusive thoughts about his life in London, his childhood. He was too depressed to drink or smoke and passed the day in a trance of irritability. He went to bed early and when he woke up it had passed.

  Bright and rested, with the clear head of a ten-year-old, he flipped open his laptop. Another e-mail from David.

  Haven't heard from you in a while. Are you OK? Am still on Madigan's trail. Guess what? You told Jeanine that her father was a good man - seems you were right.

  PS Sophie sighting. On the arm of M & S boss. Hair colour - red

  Andy began to drag it into 'David's Unreadables', when he stopped himself. Why was he angry with David?

  He stood up and opened a bottle of spring water, trying to pinpoint the source of his hostility. As he drank, he heard David saying: 'Don't ask this pig not to grunt, Andy. You asked me to do this, remember?'

  That morning, eighteen months after a chaplain in Richmond uttered the name Christopher Madigan, Andy sat down under the neon light of a not very good cafe in Ponte all'Asse and opened his 'David's Unreadables' file.

  Once he had scrolled to the end, he realised that this was David being David. He was doing the work that Andy should have done, and would have done back in the days when he had integrity; or integrity enough to be curious.

  Reading through David's e-mails - more than sixty - Andy felt reconnected. The time had come for him to return to London. But before he parted company with Gabriella, there was one outstanding trip to make.

  They were driving after lunch across a plateau of scrubby pines where the Dordogne becomes the Gironde when a prodding noise penetrated his thoughts: his iPhone, on which he had stored his favourite images of the past year, trilling the first five bars of 'I'm Your Man'.

  'Andy?'

  'Oh, hi Mum.'

  He tried to keep in touch with his mother once a week; usually on a Tuesday - her day off from the nursery.

  'Where are you right now?' she asked.

  'According to the satnav, about thirty miles east of Bordeaux. How about you?'

  'I'm staring over the lake towards Semley.'

  'What have you been doing?' he said.

  'Planting something you've never heard of - and I'd never heard of till last week.' A Cardiandra from Taiwan. The colour of a hydrangea, purply, but with flowers on extended stalks that she likened to butterflies. She had bought it in a nursery south-west of Paris. 'Forget Chelsea. Go to Courson.'

  At the sound of her excitement, his heart rose on a wave of affection mingled with envy. How much pleasure it gave her to find a new species, plant certain trees. Melaleucas and banksias, which fifteen years ago might not have survived in England, but now, because the climate was warmer, flourished in her nursery. He wished for himself even a fraction of her passion.

  'And what about you?' she asked. 'Have you seen it yet?'

  'Seen what?'

  'Montaigne's house.'

  'Not yet. But I'm about an hour from there as we speak.'

  'Anyway, it's not about that I'm ringing. It's about your sister.'

  'How is she? Found her heart's rest yet?'

  'She's getting married.'

  Andy closed one eye to make sure he was not hallucinating. 'Married?'

  'In three weeks' time.'

  'Run along.'

  'I am not joking, Andy.'

  'Who on earth to?'

  'Rian Goodman, you dolt. Your old boss. Who wants you to be his Best Man. You can't begin to know how grateful he is to you - how grateful both are.'

  'To me?'

  'For having been Cupid.'

  Andy was astonished. He was worried that if he opened his mouth he would start speaking in tongues. He had drunk two grappas on an empty stomach while waiting for Gabriella to return a dress he had bought her, and he could not tell if it was this or his mother's words that had sowed in him a queasy feeling like mountain sickness.

  His mother went on: 'She loves him. They're very happy. I would like you to suspend your insults for once and be happy for her.'

  'Then I'm very happy for her,' he said weakly.

  'You'll be even happier when you see her. She's lost a lot of weight. A lot.'

  'Good news?' said Gabriella.

  Andy followed Gabriella into a thirteenth-century stone tower - the only part of the original chateau spared by a fire in the nineteenth - and climbed a circular staircase to the third floor. A custodian shuffled up after them to show Andy the little room where Montaigne hid when he heard anyone coming. The cold floor reminded Andy of his bathroom in Hortense Avenue.

  The larger room was the library. Andy touched the bare whitewashed walls, imagining the five shelves where Montaigne had stacked his thousand volumes. He crossed the flagstones and stooped at the narrow window. The road along which Montaigne observed people arriving. The exposed hills. The forest where he set loose a stag for the King of Navarre to catch. Andy murmured: 'Just think. For three hundred years all this was English.'

  Andy stood there, taking in the space where Montaigne had dictated his essays, the beams above his desk with fifty-four inscriptions in Greek and Latin that he had had burned into the wood when he retired from public life. One of them he translated for Gabriella: 'I am a man. I consider nothing human foreign to me.'

  'How did you know that?' much impressed. She made him so sad, Gabriella.

  'I had a teacher who wrote a book about Montaigne.'

  And to the end of that road he came.

  They stepped outside and stood on the grass beside the car. His bags were packed. He was on his way home.

  'I want you to have this.'

  She looked at the cheque, a twitch in her slow, serious, deep-set eyes. They widened to read the figure he had written. But, hell, it was only someone else's money.

  'I'll drop you at the station in Bordeaux.'

  Gabriella was staring at him.

  You betray yourself in those moments. He felt sick at her eye contact. He told her, looking over her head at the round tower, its conical red roof: 'If you love someone, you have to let them go.'

  MARAL

  1

  W HEN A NDY WALKED UP the steps to the Chelsea Register Office, an attractive woman barred his way. She wore a simple cream dress and had short fair hair. She smiled down at
him.

  'Excuse me,' in his politest voice. 'Are you with the Larkham-Goodman wedding party?'

  'Hello, you poon.'

  He did not recognise his sister in the slender creature who wrapped her arms around his neck, smelling of something French and squeezing him to her. The fact that she was smiling may have had something to do with it.

  'When did you get back?' as she covered his cheeks with kisses. Lifted, the all-concealing burka of her gloom.

  'Last night.'

  'I'm so pleased you're here,' and leaned away to get a better look at him. She sounded as though she meant it, too. 'Rian was convinced you'd be late.'

  'You look so -' but he could not find the right word.

  'Andy! You made it!'

  And here he was, the congenial goliath of the self-help industry, his well-ordered stomach encased in a blood-red velvet waistcoat, beaming at soon-to-be-wife-number-three and informing her that Andy was the best editor employed in the history of Carpe Diem, and the only bad thing he would continue to hold against him was that he had never let on about his sister.

  Andy looked back at his sister from the depths of Rian Goodman's scarlet embrace, her eyes gleaming with the light of passion. Goodman was, he supposed, an improvement on Swamp Thing. Still, Andy could not help thinking that it would not be long before he was visiting her in Vancouver.

  'Mum!'

  His mother, a broad-brimmed straw hat on her permed hair, stood a little way off, preoccupied. Her hands were upraised as though in prayer and she peered down through them in the attitude of a postcard he had sent from Rome. Oh please God! he thought. Don't make her have become religious .

  'Mum?'

  Still she stood there, like Saint Teresa in an ecstasy. Then she clapped her hands in front of her face, opened them and stared with a satisfied look at something on her palm.

  'Want to catch a fly, clap hands above it.'

  When they left the Register Office an hour later, the sun was dazzling.

  Even as Andy was acting the prodigal son, his ex-boss had seen clean into the marrow of what made his sister so witchy and spotted something that no one else had.

  An underactive thyroid. That's what the trouble was. One of Goodman's authors was on Woman's Hour to promote Carpe Diem's latest health compendium, Your Body, Yourself, You , and while on a riff about the pervasiveness of depression in the modern female, so pervasive that doctors frequently failed to investigate underlying causes, she mentioned an immune disorder with a Japanese name. Goodman located the passage in the book and showed it to Andy's sister, and listened to what she had to say and then ordered her to take a thyroid test. One doctor thought that she might have suffered from a form of hypothyroidism her whole life, and it was this that caused her to be obese and lethargic, and when she was not being lethargic to be scrapping for a steel-cage fight with anyone she came into contact with; another doctor said that the disease was more likely to have kicked in as a young adult. In any case, the presenting symptoms were consistent with low thyroxine levels. A simple case of hormonal imbalance.

  The upside was that within a month of starting treatment - just a daily pill - Andy's sister was no longer the size of a minke whale, nor her usual hysterical, maudlin self. All thanks to Goodman, she had joined the race of anthropocentrics. She felt normal and good about herself.

  Her startling transformation set Andy thinking.

  2

  A S I MENTIONED IN my last letter, when I came to Cornwall I resolved to potter around on a river bank, learn to tie flies, and read some of the books I ought to have read, and reread my favourites. Once I was diagnosed, I went back to Montaigne and 400 years had not passed. He was sitting in the same room, looking out over the same stretch of water where my reflections are at their liveliest. But then the strangest thing. I felt him taking me by the elbow and urging me back to my desk to re-examine the book that I'd abandoned umpteen times, about his essays and their relevance to today's world.

  There's no reason you should remember this, and I don't want to blow it out of proportion, but the edition of his essays we have today was overseen after his death by his young disciple and adoptive daughter Marie de Gournay, who made many revisions. What always interested me was the earlier 1588 edition, annotated in Montaigne's own hand, and which mysteriously disappeared. This contained numerous insertions and changes in outlook, and there is evidence that he expanded it in order to be more personal and revelatory. For some time I have been obsessed with my own speculations about what Montaigne might have slotted in/taken out. Modelling my reconstruction on what he termed his 'fantasies', I had a go at supplying the missing bits: his meditations on marriage and money, on courage and betrayal, on the daughter he never mentions, et cetera, et cetera. I had no desire to add another book to the mountain (200,000 titles a year, do I read?), but as you see, my scribbles took flight.

  3

  T WO DAYS AFTER THE wedding, Andy combed his hair and put on a coat and walked out along Kensington High Street. It was late afternoon and his sister would be on honeymoon in Cape Town with Rian, as Goodman insisted Andy now call him. Following his speech at the wedding, the couple had presented Andy with a five-year diary from Asprey's. The inscription inside, written in a firm hand in black ink, read: Thank you for bringing us together - with love from both of us , and their signatures.

  But the thought of Rian Goodman and his newest bride gambolling among the penguins at Camps Bay also irked Andy. He had had a year to think about his life and what he wanted from it, and what had he come up with? Nothing.

  He walked and thought as he headed for his rendezvous. It was windy, but it was not raining, a typical September afternoon in London. Furnivall was fresh on his mind, and Andy was contemplating what his teacher might have made of his sister's metamorphosis when he heard voices yell out. Teenagers crouched around upturned flowerpots at the entrance to the Tube. 'Hey, mister, wanna guess which one's the Joker?' He walked quicker, ignoring the three playing cards.

  Andy had finished reading his teacher's book the night before. He felt empty after coming to the end. Void and empty. As it stood, Missing Montaigne had no relevance here, in London, in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Had he, instead of hurrying past, approached those teenagers and asked them: 'Excuse me, but can I interest you in the life and reflections of a French nobleman who died 400 years ago?' - they would have looked at him with eyes pumped up on speed provided by Jerome and slotted him with a flowerpot and scarpered.

  Montaigne had been correct to warn that 'he who commits his old age to the press is a simpleton if he thinks to squeeze from it anything but dreaming, dotage and drivel.'

  Even so, Andy's thoughts kept circling back to Furnivall. It hadn't taken much to transform his sister from a minke whale into a minx. Might the same be true of Missing Montaigne ?

  His teacher's voice remained stubbornly absent from the text, but that was not all. Something vital was lacking, some hormonal imbalance, as it were. Whatever it was, Andy could not put his finger on it, and he was still puzzling it out when around about 6.30 his legs, which were making better sense than his head, carried him up Hobart Street and into the packed bar of the Knopwood.

  4

  'I KNOW YOU ,' SAID the figure in the corner, who put down his paper and smiled, although his eyes were guarded: 'Didn't you used to be Andy Larkham?'

  'David,' hugging him. 'David. How great to see you.' It was, too.

  'Nice shirt,' rubbing Andy's collar between his fingers. 'Pima cotton?'

  'I don't remember,' Andy said modestly.

  Andy might have changed, but David had not. His salt-and-pepper beard and shirt hanging out and olive Crocs that looked as though he had never taken them off.

  Andy bought a round of drinks. Beer had never tasted so good.

  'Cheers,' clinking glasses, but David did not look him in the eye. He stared down at his paper. 'What swine we are,' and folded it. Another massacre in Iraq. One more in the Congo. 'Do you wonder why
the words most commonly used with "humanitarian" are "catastrophe" and "disaster"?'

  'You got my postcards?' Andy said.

  'I did. I did.' But David's expression said you can kiss my Crocs with your postcards.

  Andy sipped more of that excellent beer. 'I saw the Riley outside.'

  'Yes, still on the road.'

  Andy did not ask what had happened to the Toyota.

  'Julie?'

  'She's good.'

  'You're lucky, David, to have her.'

  'So, what frost has brought the pig home?'

  They were on their fourth pint when David turned to him.

  'I'm still waiting for your reaction to what I've discovered about Madigan.'

  'To be honest, I haven't considered it,' he said, subsiding, ashamed.

  'But intriguing, wouldn't you say?'

  Andy shook his head. 'Incredible,' in a stronger tone. 'The story I told his daughter turns out to be true . . . He was a good man.'

  He could see that David was listening and coming closer after keeping back.

  'I'm not sure whether he's a good man or not is the issue. It's just the beginning.'

  'The beginning of what?' Andy said.

  'Is he good, is he bad, is he crazy? Aren't you foaming at the mouth to find out more? If not, you should be, because this is really about you.'

  'About me?'

  When David let rip he did so with all his heart.

  'You didn't only inherit Madigan's money, you idiot. You inherited his story as well. As long as you refuse to investigate the legacy that comes with the money, you're going to be a miserable git. Why? Because you're paying the price of getting something for nothing. And the price you pay is that you're lost.'

  Andy coughed.

  'To yourself,' added David. 'I'm serious, Andy,' calling him this for the first time. 'You owe it to yourself to get to the bottom of Madigan's story, to understand why it's you and not anyone else who has ended up with his money. Because you won't know why it's you until you realise what kind of man Madigan was in the first place.'