Inheritance

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  Through his father, Makertich understood iron and had seized his chance. Speculative eyes were trained on uranium, bauxite and titanium. Iron ore was never much prized, unless sited close to coal deposits. Plus, its export from Australia had been banned for twenty-two years. But Japanese mills were clamouring for steel. The documents that the pilot had delivered to Pyke were from the Ministry for National Development, outlining the Federal Government's plan to lift the embargo.

  Makertich still had hurdles to cross. The State Government refused to confirm his rights. That a twenty-three-year-old truck-driver could be the legal holder to 578,000 hectares of temporary reserves. But he was as obdurate as his ore. In December 1962, Makertich's rights were granted, and six months later he sold out to Rio Tinto for an undisclosed sum. The Marash lease was smaller than Lang Hancock's in the Pilbara, but the royalty that Makertich was able to negotiate on every ton of iron-ore mined from it, fractionally larger. Makertich had refound in himself his mercantile blood. He revealed to a correspondent from the West Australian that he had named the lease after his grandmother's town in Armenia.

  'Armenia?'

  'Do you even know where Armenia is?' in a voice of steel that startled his interrogator.

  'I wouldn't say America and I won't say Africa. Maybe somewhere in Europe?'

  In the course of the first and last interview he ever gave, Makertich explained that the iron industry began in Armenia with the Hittites, and he shared with the journalist his grandmother's conviction that the Man in the Iron Mask had been Armenian. More than that he was not prepared to say.

  7

  S IX WEEKS AFTER HIS interview appeared in the West Australian, Krikor Makertich vanished.

  He did not wish to be defined by his chance discovery. He left his adopted country and went to live in London under the name of Christopher Madigan. There, like his grandmother in Aleppo, he would learn to fit in as securely as the glass eye that replaced his patch. He would become - on the surface - an Englishman, with a feeling for oak trees and the jewel-like sweetness of the English spring.

  Maral said: 'He never had it in for the English. Some people do, not Krikor.'

  He bought a house in Holland Park that had belonged to a Scottish artist. He converted the brick tower into a darkroom, cocooning himself in his photography, and shed his Australian accent, as a decade before he had mislaid his Syrian one. He was massively secret. 'A spouting whale gets caught,' he told Maral.

  His wealth was an abstraction. It did not become, as for so many, an obsession. And though he caught the millionaire's disease to endow schools and hospitals, he would always think of himself as a young man on a Vespa, turning the corner into Peppermint Grove.

  'He fitted in so well that there was no room left for himself, the person he was,' Maral said. 'Let alone anyone else.'

  Witnesses other than his housekeeper gave away little. He surrounded himself with an entourage of lawyers, accountants and bankers that he kept separate from each other and who safeguarded his anonymity. Two or three mornings a week, he walked through the park to the family office in Duke Street where a team of five portfolio managers looked after his assets. Headed by a former chief investment officer of Morgan Grenfell, they invested the royalties that Makertich continued to receive from Rio Tinto and from his other mining investments. The bulk of the profits he put into a children's charitable foundation, although no one who had dealings with him would have known of his philanthropic activities or that Christopher Madigan was Armenian or of the story behind his astronomical wealth. He had chosen London because it was discreet. Because London of all cities is a place where you can hide your name, background, fortune, lover. At least, for longer than in most places.

  'He told me that he decided on London because his parents had wanted to go there first. Or was it because Cheryl had chosen an Englishman to marry over Krikor? Did that have something to do with it?'

  8

  N INE YEARS WENT BY . Despite his trials and tribulations, he was still a young man. The mothers who slowed their prams when they saw him on his morning stroll through Holland Park paused to admire a good-looking bachelor in his early thirties, wearing sunglasses and smart polished shoes, his dark hair thinning, although not his eyebrows, which had grown thicker.

  One mother in the group was bold enough to strike up a conversation, and upon discovering that he was a photographer approached him later with an embarrassed request. Did he do children's portraits?

  'To be honest, I haven't.'

  'Can we afford you?'

  He smiled. 'You can if you make a donation.'

  She was delighted with the portraits that he took of her daughter and developed himself - hanging up the sheets like plates in a dishwasher, his face bathed in a green light, and writing the name of the girl in the margin beneath - but she never was able to summon the courage to ask him about himself. He showed little interest in flirting. He was like his handwriting: controlled, neat, slanted. At the same time, there was something roomy about him, generous, a sweetness.

  The young mothers, in short, did not know what to make of him. He never asked any of them back to his house. Those who invited him to their homes gave up after the third attempt.

  None believed he was homosexual, although one or two were reminded of the handsome, persecuted features of Dirk Bogarde in Victim . Word got round that he was a widower. Exactly how rich, hard to say, although one young mother fancied that she saw him step out of a Bristol. In fact, the car belonged to his lawyer. Madigan himself drove a Golf, and that only on rare occasions. Most of the time, he preferred to walk.

  'Meeting him in the Turl you would have thought him well-to-do, not flashy,' his cobbler said, a slim old man with the face of a greyhound. 'You would never have known his wealth, only by his wine - he always sent a crate of twenty-year-old claret at Christmas. And his footwear,' bringing out a ledger and leafing through it until he came to two drawings. 'First time he walked in, he wore moccasins. He sat down and told me: "I've been here, there and everywhere, and everyone looks and says nothing we can do." I could see as I measured them that his feet were wrecked. Arches dropped, heels misshapen, bunions, blisters - all sorts of nonsense. He said he had ruined them on an expedition through the Australian desert - for minerals, could it have been? But I made a beech last and lined the shoes with horse-skin, so that his feet could shunt up and down without getting calluses. After that, he ordered two pairs a year. There you are. Heavy gorse brogues - because he was a walker. Size nine-and-a-half.'

  One lunchtime, he walked into a pub in North Kensington and was served by a woman in her early thirties: buxom, short fair hair, opal earrings. She handed him his change and out of habit he counted it, and when he raised his head to thank her she was staring.

  'Chris?'

  For a while he stood there, not saying anything, as someone took cigarettes out of the machine, and the drawer opening and closing was the noise of a screen door shutting on a hot night in Peppermint Grove, and the face of the mother behind the screen merged into that of the woman who went on staring at him over the beer taps.

  'Cheryl?'

  'That's right.'

  'Cheryl . . .'

  What were the chances? His last action on leaving his makeshift ark on the Hawkesbury was to scrunch up her image and cram it into a milk-tin, along with each and every photograph that he had taken of her, and throw the whole lot overboard for the yabbies to nibble at.

  Her face was thinner, more elongated. Her gaze cloudier. Her smile less lazy than slack. She was different. Both were different. They should have left it at that.

  She was still looking at him. 'Your eye.'

  'I lost it. And you?'

  She gave a little laugh. 'My heart, you could say,' and he noticed that the corners of her mouth did not seem to get the joke.

  They talked for ten minutes. He learned that she was taking a night course in etching - 'Plants and trees, mainly'; her visa was about to expire; she was no longer in touch
with her parents; and was not married. Never had been. Nothing she said made him suspect that she had lost her heart - and her father his money - to anyone other than a neat, impeccable Anglo-German businessman.

  Makertich would visit her in the pub. It was hard to have a conversation with people interrupting all the time to buy matches and crisps. One night he stood there like a steaming horse and asked her to marry him.

  'In a way, one shouldn't reproach her,' Maral said. 'She was just a girl he thought he still loved.'

  He had appeared before Cheryl at an Anzac Day parade: a man in a well-cut midnight-blue suit and with a refined Pom accent, who introduced himself as Carl-Andrew, a businessman with an ancestry that began with King John and enough stripes on his tie to umpire a Test match at Lords. She was clutching a copy of Scarlet and Black . He told her that writing and reading books were not his thing, what was important was how you read people, and if she wanted to know the dishonest truth, books were tosh anyway, and enthused about his two nieces, how good he was with children and his strong belief in community. She liked Carl-Andrew immediately, his patrician energy. He seduced her within a fortnight. 'I don't think I've seen upstairs.' Which meant that he would start to tear off her blouse as soon as they stepped into her bedroom. 'My parents have gone to the Seacrest for lunch.' Which meant that she would let him. The strange thing was that when Drusilla Pyke found them in bed together, her twenty-two-year-old daughter and Carl-Andrew, she did not seem to mind. 'Oh, sorry, darling, I thought you were calling for me,' and gently closed the door.

  No sooner had Cheryl accepted his marriage proposal than her parents fell under his charm too. How they approved, Drusilla Pyke especially. His Oxford education and refined manner - 'He was at Magdalen; his mother a Bodley, of the family who donated the money for the famous library,' she ululated to Mrs Anderson in the club-room of the Karrinyup. And went on to describe his lathe-turned face, his blond hair and black eyelashes, his all-consuming smile that crinkled his eyes at the corners and made you believe in him, made you fall for his confidences and wild schemes, so that his ideas appeared not only tame, but somehow extraordinarily sensible when you compared them to your own, to what you had in mind for yourself, which, once you began to consider it through Carl-Andrew's ever-so-blue eyes with their pinpoint pupils, stank worse, frankly, than a dead fish. So that Drusilla Pyke was persuaded to cancel every plan she had put in motion for Cheryl to marry Mrs Anderson's nephew - an honest, hard-working grazier called Hands - and was quite over the moon at the prospect of seeing her daughter united with the Hon. Carl-Andrew Purcell (MA, Oxon; MBA, MIT). So that instead of buying the boat that had transported his dreams for nigh on three decades, Henry Pyke was persuaded to sink all his super, every last cent of it - bar, naturally, the amount set aside for his daughter's wedding - into a 2,000-acre eucalypt plantation in Uruguay. Then five weeks before the wedding, Carl-Andrew invites Cheryl and her parents to lunch at The European Club and over a glass of Penfold's Grange, the same glass with which he would toast all their futures, tells them that he is going on one of his trips, to oversee the planting of Henry Pyke's 'bluechip investment' - that is what he calls it - in a place named Solis; it will only take a week, ten days maximum, after which no man on earth could be more impatient than Carl-Andrew to walk Cheryl up the aisle of St Mary's in her long white gown of embroidered satin that Drusilla Pyke has had designed by Jean-Jean, the best dressmaker in Perth. And is never seen again.

  When several months had passed, her mother reached for her address book to invite Heather Anderson's nephew for dinner. Cheryl organised her escape the following day.

  By the time - the early Seventies - she met him in the pub in North Kensington, Cheryl had stopped thinking of Makertich. What he had meant to her had grown very remote. The same could not be said of Makertich. He was still defined by what he had lost. Cheryl was the girl he had loved most in his life. She was life before it changed for him. He did not see the lumpier, disappointed Cheryl, on the verge of losing her figure. It was irrational, the happiness he felt on meeting her again. When he should have entertained doubt, he had no reservations. He had captured so well her image that he insisted on preserving what no longer existed.

  They married six weeks later in a civil ceremony. His Armenianness not an issue. Nor Drusilla Pyke. His comfortable circumstances allowing Cheryl to forget whoever he had been in Perth and whatever it was about him that her mother had objected to. She liked the name Cheryl Madigan and had C. M. embroidered on her cuffs and pillowcases: the initials, as she pointed out, might refer to either one of them.

  Five years on, following two miscarriages, she gave birth to an eight-pound baby girl. They called her Jeanine, after an aunt of her mother, at which point she did tell her parents about Makertich.

  'Her mother comes over, couldn't stay away, all forgotten now that Krikor is rich and her daughter soiled goods.'

  But the agility of Drusilla Pyke to celebrate what had been an obstacle did not impress Makertich. He remained aloof - and Drusilla Pyke afraid of her new son-in-law, because she had wronged him. She stayed until Christmas, helping Cheryl out with the baby.

  'This is where I come into the story,' Maral said.

  9

  S O DEEP RAN MAKERTICH'S desire for privacy that he refused to employ live-in staff. But one evening, to avoid his mother-in-law, he flew to Vienna for a meeting of the Austrian branch of his Foundation. On the corner near his hotel he saw mounds of horse shit. He saw open carriages and coachmen in bowler hats. Then, walking through an arcade near the palace of the Habsburgs, he almost tripped over a sticklike young woman who lay sprawled on her side. Her legs stretched out on the pavement and her abnormally round, cupped eyes looked up at Makertich from an upside-down face wrapped in a dirty headscarf, but without false or dramatic expression and, remarkable to say in that city of fur coats and opulence, without hope. She muttered something to cause him to stop, turn around, bend down. Some words of his grandmother streamed back, and when he uttered them she nodded and sat up. She had the shyness of a tall woman without actually being so, but presently was able to make herself understood.

  She was a refugee from the overcrowded Traiskirchen camp. There had been an outbreak of meningitis. Her baby girl had died.

  He asked the woman her name. When she told him, he closed his eyes. Then helped her to her feet and escorted her back to the Sacher, where he ran her a bath, and after she had slept for two days and washed her hair and filled herself with noodle soup and schnitzel, they went out into Stephensplatz and along Vorgartenstrasse, where she chose a wardrobe of inexpensive but sensible clothes, including a dress of blue organza, two white shirts, five pairs of underwear and five of stockings, and a long thick possum overcoat that he insisted on buying her.

  After what she had gone through, nothing would matter again. But it was pleasant to stand with the coat on, observing him. One of his eyes seemed ringed with her own tiredness.

  'He helped me, but it was not a big rescue. More to help his daughter. I was a poor, defenceless refugee, but I was from his homeland. He had a sudden mad moment in which he envisaged I would take care of his child in a wonderful way, because I was Armenian and I had references to that culture and my own baby girl had died. It was a silly, romantic impulse. It did not last long. And here's the odd thing. I was his link to Armenia, but once he took me to live with him in London we never once discussed Armenia, not for years we didn't. Anyone coming into his house would not have known, listening to him, that he was anything other than an Englishman. Anyone would have thought, looking at his oak furniture and his oil paintings and his decanters of claret, this is an English gentleman's home from tower to wine cellar.'

  From Australia he had brought with him a few objects - an Aboriginal axe head; a lump of iron ore, molten shaped - 'like Henry Moore on a good day' in the opinion of his lawyer - and put them on a high display shelf in the hall. But not one thing from Armenia.

  'He refused to let an oriental rug thr
ough the front door. No horn music. No novels by William Saroyan. No paintings by Arshile Gorky. No kitsch tapestries of Ararat. All banned. He said that Armenia was like any other badly remembered dream pieced together at breakfast. The fact is, he was at war with his Armenian blood. Anyone whose name ended in -ian, he avoided. And he never spoke a word of Armenian, except that one time to me. But that doesn't mean he wasn't thinking in it.

  'Anyway, my arrival in London. Cheryl did not understand what this strange woman suddenly was doing in her house. She had this stubborn habit of mispronouncing my name. I soon stopped correcting her. Maybe she was right to be like that. I made mistakes. I could be difficult. I was a nonentity who had not read books. Not that Cheryl was a reader. I did not even speak English - so for six months Krikor sent me to the Bell's Language School in Fitzroy Square. Then after class I would go to a film or drink with another student in a pub.'

  10

  M AKERTICH PUSHED THE PRAM through the park, showing off his daughter to the young mothers. Cheryl, walking beside him in white socks, plimsolls and knee-length khaki shorts, likewise seemed content. The weak English sunshine made it too cold for swimming, even in August, but when Makertich put his arm around his wife's waist and slipped his hand up under her Pringle jersey, he could persuade himself that his fingers touched the bare back of the eighteen-year-old who had posed for him beside the Swan River. Right up until Jeanine was five or six, he was able to shake his head in happy disbelief at the long arm of coincidence that had bowled her mother back to him.