Inheritance

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  Unsparing when it came to business, at home Makertich denied Cheryl nothing. She was the person for whom he had composed his essays, with whom he shared initials, pillowcases, a daughter. Everything that was his was hers.

  So that his wife might continue with her art, he bought Cheryl a studio in a mews off Oxford Gardens. One summer, in the same week as Jeanine's third birthday, a gallery in Portobello held an exhibition of Cheryl's tree etchings. 'She went round telling everyone how her show had been a sell-out. She never discovered the truth. Krikor had purchased the lot.'

  He allowed Cheryl complete freedom. She was able to go where she liked, spend what she liked. Because of what she called her dyscalculia, he had a lawyer deal with her affairs, notably her work for the Cicada Foundation, the children's charity that he set up not long after he arrived in London, and of which he continued to be the anonymous benefactor. He appointed Cheryl a trustee on the audit committee, responsible for the mailing lists, with a signing authority of PS100,000.

  His generosity extended 9,000 miles to the family in Perth who had rejected him all those years ago. Among the photographs pinned to the cork-board in Jeanine's bedroom was a Polaroid of her grandparents on board the Daphne .

  Jeanine had turned five when Maral started to notice a distractedness in Cheryl, a look of absence in her eyes.

  A devoted mother at the outset, Cheryl took to asking Maral to drop off Jeanine at her primary school in Bassett Road. She asked Maral to collect Jeanine from school as well, although her studio was around the corner. She wore more make-up. Sometimes she came home from her studio with dark circles under her red eyes that her face-cream could not hide.

  Makertich noticed, too. Or perhaps his lawyers alerted him. Money was going missing from his Foundation. In small but steady amounts. A consultant hired by Cheryl to help her with the mailing lists had submitted invoices from an offshore company in Jersey that specialised in buying property. Not in London, but in the oddest parts of the world. To begin with, Makertich chose not to question Cheryl. If his wife's consultant decided to invest in a Moroccan tower block, that was his business. But the amounts grew larger, until it reached a stage when too much money was leaving his Foundation for Makertich to ignore.

  The first time he broached the subject with Cheryl, he kept his concern vague. His wife had to be approached obliquely; if head on, she adopted the superior detachment of her mother. He stroked her arm and said, 'Are you in something over your head?' and she gave a brittle laugh. 'What are you talking about?' And when he asked, 'What have you got yourself mixed up with? Why are you behaving like this? Are you being blackmailed?' she could not or would not tell him.

  Maral said: 'I've wanted to say this to Jeanine for a long time, but I'll say it to you. Her father had married a woman - Jeanine's mother, I'm talking about - who was obsessed by someone else. It happens. After Carl-Andrew abandoned her at the altar, she never quite recovered. So when, in another country ten years later, she unexpectedly meets up again with her first boyfriend, Krikor, and he brings back memories, not of himself necessarily, but of an uncomplicated time before everything went sour for her, she is surprised and I dare say flattered, to discover that in all these years, ever since her mother threw Krikor out of their house, he has not forgotten her, but still loves her. And believing that she will never have this other man, whom even now she cannot get out of her mind like an itch permanently out of reach, she agrees to marry Krikor.

  'Is his marriage what he hoped and expected? It can't have been. He was not that foolish, to think they could continue from where they had left off. But he could not stop feeling that she was the one. He had met no one else and was unable to form any kind of relationship. She was the swan - although from Krikor I learned that swans in Australia are black. What he was not able to see until it was too late was that no amount of money could have regained her, what she had been to him. Someone else, a worldlier man, would have understood that, but he was innocent despite his wealth. He was that guileless.

  'Was Cheryl happy? Well, she didn't love him, I could see that. But it certainly wasn't my place to say anything. Even if she was happy, it's not allowed.'

  'Not allowed?' Andy said.

  'I'm sorry if I'm not making sense. It's the wine. I must be tighter than I thought. Let's go back a few steps . . . before the disappearing money and the dark circles under her eyes. One day, Cheryl's old lover tracks her down. He has discovered who Cheryl is married to. And not only that, but where she lives. He even knows the time when she'll be there alone.'

  Makertich was one morning meeting his lawyer and Maral taking Jeanine to ballet when, as his wife would afterwards confess to him, the doorbell rang.

  Standing on the front step, in a slightly larger suit but the same stripes on his tie as when she last saw him in The European Club in Perth, and humming 'all of my life, all of my kissing' -

  'Carl-Andrew . . .'

  'I'm back,' his tongue sticking out of the side of his mouth and his blue eyes smiling at Cheryl as if he had stepped off the plane from Montevideo and had only stopped by to reassure her that he was - even now - on his way to St Mary's and none of the intervening twenty-one years had occurred.

  She started to shake, wanting to hug him so much. 'Where have you been?'

  'Singing the Lord's song in a strange land,' he deadpanned, and held out his arms.

  'She wants him. She can't help herself. I don't know what he has over her, this good-for-nothing, this abominable, mendacious man. She's so pathetically pleased to see him that she's ready to make any sacrifice - same for his damned eucalypt plantations. She believes in his trees even more than he seems to.'

  He touched her face and pulled his finger down her cheek, and it felt to Cheryl as if he was unpeeling her.

  'He asked if she could lend him PS5,000 and that would be the finish of it, but it was only the start of it, and pretty soon she's siphoning off more and more. What did it matter to her husband? Krikor was not going to say anything. She knew he would honour the cheques. He was such an honourable man, he would be bound to ascribe it to her dyscalculia, until it's impossible for Krikor to keep silent, absolutely downright impossible.'

  One night he walked into their bedroom, where Cheryl was brushing her hair, and sat beside her and watched her in the mirror, and then he put down his glass of wine and said, 'Who or what is Xemu Holdings?' She lowered her brush and blinked, as if she had a hair in her eye and they started talking together, and he was saying: 'If you won't tell me, tomorrow I will instruct my lawyers to investigate,' and she was blurting out: 'It's a company I've been putting money into.'

  'Owned by?'

  Cheryl looked back at him in the mirror, his smaller eye a rabbit hole down which she saw a classroom in Perth, a teacher waiting for her answer and Krikor's outstretched hand clutching a scrap of paper, urging her to take it, go on, take it.

  She looked away. 'It's owned by the person I told you about.' Then, with an atrophying smile: 'The man I was going to marry.'

  'Carl-Andrew Purcell?'

  She nodded.

  He did not say anything. He was not ready to face her. He had a presentiment that if he asked another question his marriage was over. That the period of horrible grace in which he had thought himself happy was a sham. He could sense it in the way that barking dogs in Marash sensed an earth tremor before it happened, alerting his grandmother to race out of the house before the ceiling crashed down, and his heart started howling in anticipation of the rupture, and a moment like darkness came over him.

  He tried to put his hand on her shoulder, but she flinched, and he saw that she thought he was about to hit her. He stood up, spilling his wine, and kissed the top of her head. Her hair impregnated with the wrong smell.

  She was mopping up his wine with a tissue.

  'Did you two have a fight?' when he saw the bruises on her wrist, each the size of a grape.

  She pulled down her sleeve with its monograms on it. 'I thought you said people who as
k questions are enemies.'

  Makertich had a crisis. Two weeks went by. He did not refer to their conversation. He had clung to his wife's assurances with the obstinacy of his father, who had kept alive in Perth the notion that their family were horse-breeders. But the situation, it was not tenable. A catastrophe was imminent.

  The crunch came when his lawyer, Crispian Bennett, mentioned in passing that he had been chatting to a colleague about this latest venture.

  'I can remember precisely what I told him,' Bennett said, a snipe-faced man in his seventies with a small mouth. 'I would be extremely surprised if the soil there could support such quantities of the type of timber as the prospectus promised, and when he asked what the bloody hell was I talking about, out it came, how the Cicada Foundation had invested PS2 million in a business in Northern Ireland that involved the planting of 200,000 eucalypts.'

  Makertich was tenacious with figures. He had known what it was to lose everything - the bailiffs in Richmond had seized even the leather case of his Agfa Box. But right up until the moment when he heard his lawyer utter the words 'eucalypt plantation' he had not put two and two together. Like a cancer that you think has gone away, Don Flexmore had come back into his life.

  That was when he realised that he had lost his eye, and Cheryl her heart, to the same person. Only then did it blaze into his head where on a previous occasion he had smelled that smoky-sweet aroma in his wife's hair, and that Don was none other than Carl-Andrew, who had left Cheryl waiting in her white wedding dress, clutching her father's arm on Collins Street, at the entrance to St Mary's (in which every living soul of importance in Perth was congregated, not to say twisted around in their seats), watching each vehicle that motored towards them, a milk-truck, a Ford Zephyr that shot past at 70 mph pursued by a police car, even an old man on a bicycle (who raised his arm to call out something as he rode by, momentarily lost balance, and pedalled on), waiting, waiting, waiting for a blond-headed bridegroom with blue eyes and dark eyelashes to take off his milkman's cap or bicycle clips and turn around and say, 'Hi, it's me.'

  When he returned home that night Makertich opened a bottle of Colares and walked in slow steps up the stairs to confront his wife.

  'Mary, is that you?' hearing him enter, not lifting her eyes from her magazine.

  He put down his glass and felt the sorrow mounting in his heart. 'It's him, isn't it?'

  'Who?' looking up from the pages of Celebrity .

  'Don, Carl-Andrew . . .' And saw a face coming in and out of marijuana smoke. Saying: 'If you want to make money start a religion. Or plant a tree.'

  She lowered her head. In her expression, the utter fizzle of her attempt at secrecy. 'People do change.'

  'Once a liar, always a liar.'

  ' You don't know him, Chris. You think you do, but you don't.'

  'Did he tell you?' pointing to his eye.

  'About the apple tree? It wasn't his fault, he said.'

  Her face was very tight, her knees were shaking, her arm was heartbreakingly limp. But he looked at her with detachment, the carcass of his adolescent hopes, and thought again how much she resembled her mother, the hair flatter, the nose larger, the mouth always too wide.

  She tossed her magazine aside and took a tissue and blew her nose. 'You haven't asked.'

  'Do I need to?' He had never felt so far away from her, not even on the Hawkesbury. In that mirror.

  Her face said it was over, what they had.

  'I'm sorry, Chris. I know you think he's a shit, and maybe he is a shit, you're worth twenty of him, but what can I say that's not going to sound corny, he suits me.'

  He could talk to her reflection in the mirror. In this other dimension. 'All right, you love him, I see that. I won't stand in your way.'

  'He didn't try to hold on to her,' Maral said. 'He wanted her out of his life. Out of his daughter's life, too. At the same time, for Jeanine's sake, he didn't want it to get ugly. He offered to set Cheryl up handsomely in a big house in St John's Wood, where Don had a hankering to be, with enough money to live with him, and she agreed.'

  'But there's one condition,' he said.

  Her body tensed. He had had second thoughts. He was about to take it away, what he had promised.

  'You can have Don, but I keep Jeanine. You won't see her. Do you understand?'

  She hesitated. Then, in a church whisper: 'Yes.'

  But he needed to be certain. 'Once you leave this house, you do not visit Jeanine again. If you or that man come within one hair's breadth of my daughter . . .'

  Her smile took time to form and then she was weeping.

  'What do we tell her?'

  'We tell her you've gone back to Perth,' he said.

  'And Cheryl goes along with it. She wanted with all her heart to be with Don.'

  11

  C HERYL LEFT THE HOUSE the next morning and from that day on Makertich was no longer in love.

  'The break-up doesn't seem painful. No doubt, in time, he would have forgotten her and she would have been scattered to the four winds of long ago - if it hadn't been for Jeanine.

  'You can't believe that someone so intelligent, with his means, could be so stupid about not letting Cheryl see her daughter. When you think of the problems that stemmed from it . . . At the point where he agreed to pay for everything on condition that he and Jeanine could be left alone, he was rushing blindly into the eye of the storm. But he could not forgive Cheryl. He could not see that though she was a careless mother, this was her daughter too. Of course, it was more than that. He was desperate to protect his little girl. He did not want that man near her.'

  But the first days were difficult.

  'The tug of a child towards parents who separate is a loathsome thing. From the moment Jeanine opened her eyes, these two people were there. She was loyal to both. It was an assault on that loyalty when her mother left. Children are conservative in their emotions.'

  'When's Mummy coming back from Australia?' she would constantly ask him.

  'Not yet.'

  Waiting for the day when her mother would reappear, Jeanine busied herself. She read. She practised her dance steps. If the weather was fine, she sat on the lawn and sketched the copper beech as her mother had taught.

  'She was quiet, not good with other children, and sometimes very grumpy. I'd say: "What's the matter?" and she couldn't tell me. I'd touch her, and she'd say: "Go away," and I was not able to comfort her.'

  She felt divided, powerless. She resented that her mother had changed her world.

  'But what could she do - cut herself in half? She asked if her mother had gone to be with God. A bit like "Where do I come from?" I can't remember what I said.'

  As the days passed into months and the months passed into a year and still no word came from Australia, Jeanine turned to Maral.

  'I walk her to school, I dress her, I knit jerseys and scarves, I pin up the photographs that her father takes of her, I read her to sleep with the books that he gives me to read when he's not there - his work for his Foundation often calls him away. I tell stories of mountains and high plateaux and men on winged horses. I have to be her mother. And no one is more pleased when she is back to her old self. She stops wetting her bed. She has a friend to stay overnight. She is like any girl.'

  The return of his daughter to something approximating happiness brought Makertich back from the brink of collapse, on which he had teetered following Cheryl's departure. All his love concentrated on Jeanine.

  'That girl was his joy. She was his reason for living. Without her, I do not know what he would have done. You should have seen their faces when they were together. Whatever she says now, she adored him. She may try to tell you otherwise, but I was there and I saw it.'

  Their happiness lasted the best part of three years. In all that time, Jeanine's parents did not speak once; nor did Cheryl make contact with her daughter.

  12

  'T HIS PERIOD WAS A bright spot in our lives. We thought there was no reason it could not last.
But you always hope you'll have more time, more courage.'

  Like all things violent it began with a peaceful act.

  On the morning of Jeanine's tenth birthday, Maral sat upstairs with Jeanine while she wrote her holiday diary, prodding her to recollect what she had done the day before - on this occasion, a visit to the orthodontist to have a plate fitted for her front teeth, which were too far forward - and suggesting various illustrations that she might draw to accompany her account, after which, depending on the weather, they would walk to Holland Park.

  At eleven o'clock, they prepared to go out, Maral having relented, agreeing that Jeanine might remove her tooth plate for the duration of her birthday party - 'but this applies only for today' - when an urgent rapping sounded from downstairs.

  The noise interrupted Maral on the landing as she tried to scrub a white deposit from Jeanine's coat. It could not be Makertich knocking like that - he had driven off half an hour before to collect his daughter's birthday present, plus some extra balloons.

  'Wait here.'

  Maral came down the staircase and peered out through the hall door that was made of coloured glass and saw through it a woman's outline.

  'I open the door and the hair rises on my neck.'

  Opal earrings in the shape of dolphins dangled from her red earlobes.

  It shocked Maral to see the change. The expression so pitiful. The face of a mad, unhappy person who had lost everything.

  'Mrs Madigan!'

  That stricken look in her eye. Maral might have been looking at herself in Vienna. Her own little girl was three months old when she became infected, and Maral made a pact that she would exchange her life for her daughter's if she could be shown how - 'I said please God, transfer her sickness to me' - and her daughter revived for a few days, but then went downhill, a diminishing, gasping bundle of reddening flesh until she was just a cough in a shawl, and then she died. Seta, her name would have been.