Inheritance

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  Andy realised even before he left Cornwall that he was going to be working hard over the next weeks, submerging himself in Krikor Makertich. Now, with David's persistence and Maral's help, he had the opportunity to achieve something.

  He drove Maral back to London after three weeks in St Buryan and reinstalled her in Clarendon Crescent. Separately, they had telephoned Vamplew and requested him to cancel the forthcoming sale of the house and its contents. The lawyer saw no reason why the two of them could not continue jointly to own the property. Andy's opinion of the house swiftly changed. In broad daylight with the shutters open and the lawn mown, 11 Clarendon Crescent was a lovely place. Much lovelier than his own.

  It was the middle of October when he returned to pack up his Kensington flat: the Warhol, the Corbusier chair - they belonged to another person, a friend he had had for a while and tired of without even the need for an argument. He donated them to charity.

  In a holdall on the next chair was the manuscript that he had been working on since.

  He wrote it at Clarendon Crescent. He set up his desk in the tower and switched on the central heating and kept the windows open to blow away the stale tobacco smell. Maral was around to answer queries and make coffee. Initially, he worried that it would creep him out to be in Makertich's space, but the effect was the opposite. Idle and guilty for a year, Andy worked with a vitality that was new to him.

  'Anything else we need to talk about?'

  'Not for the moment,' Vamplew had said.

  Even so, Andy could sense the lawyer lingering on the line. No longer sweeping Andy's concern into the dustpan of his absolute indifference.

  He waited.

  'It's nothing important, but I was wondering,' Vamplew said after a while, 'if you have seen his daughter again?'

  'I'd love to read his book.'

  'And read it you shall.'

  One reason Andy had not turned up last time at the Camoes was his impetuous promise to Jeanine. He had never stopped asking himself: Why did I agree to let her see her father's autobiography?

  Had they met eighteen months ago, he would have had to confess that her father's life story - which in a further act of idiocy he claimed to have edited - did not exist, was a ruse to get her out of his flat before she started to suspect the extent of his ignorance. Then, he would have had nothing to show her save for a manuscript concerning a centuries-dead philosopher. All that had changed since he had whisked Maral off to Cornwall.

  'Is that the end of the wine? A pity.'

  It was their last morning at the B & B. Clouds resembling eagle tails floated over the treetops and in the field a young roe deer picked its way between the furrows towards Tregiffian.

  He suggested a walk. They put on their coats and he drove her along the lane, past the Merry Maidens, to a farmyard where he left the car. A breeze blew up as they descended the deserted path to the sea.

  They passed Furnivall's bungalow and when they reached the next clifftop Andy stopped and said outright: 'I would like to speak to Jeanine.'

  Odd to see a blush on that wrinkled face and lending to her cheeks the aura of dried roses. The way Maral glanced at him, he could tell what she was thinking. He shrugged.

  'So would I, Mr Larkham, so would I.' Maral's sigh came from the deepest part of her. 'She hears my voice, she puts down the phone. I write to her - letter after letter. She returns them unopened.'

  'You haven't been able to tell her any of this?'

  'Not one word.'

  Maral rubbed below her eye with a speckled hand and turned away. 'When I was cleaning up Krikor's room, I found a photograph of her great-grandmother. The resemblance was uncanny. I sent it to Jeanine. Maybe it shocked her, because she won't talk to me. Last time we spoke, it was a week after her father's funeral. She rang to say that she had learned she was not going to inherit and who were you - the only thing she wanted to know. I told her that I'd mistaken you for Don Flexmore. She said: "Impossible." That was the end of our conversation.'

  She promised to write down Jeanine's address.

  They returned to the B & B and went upstairs to pack, but Andy could not get out of his mind the image of Jeanine's father, surrounded by ashtrays and whodunits, brooding. He pictured him in his tower, combing through his past, looking for the white ants. What was going on in his head? The only thing to show for his time up there - a short, bitter diatribe about love, its impossibility.

  Other memories flapped at him. The heated look in her eyes. The first time he had touched a dead person. Gulls around a landfill site of his own garbage - screeching, pecking, clawing.

  He had bought off Jeanine's threat to challenge her father's will with a pledge to tell her about Christopher Madigan. But why pretend to have known her father in the first place? Andy had no legal obligation to tell her anything. Out of what long-suppressed habit, then, had he sprung to his defence? It wasn't only the money.

  A noise from the lane made him look outside. A flat-chested girl with a heavy lower lip walked by, humming.

  His eyes followed her until she disappeared, but a sound remained in the air. He craned forward. Starlings meddling in hedgerows. Sparrows perched on the telegraph wires. Suddenly notes for an out-of-reach calypso that his father used to sing coming up the stairs.

  It wasn't so simple picking away at the past. You try to unpeel it like one of Mrs Nettlefold's breakfast eggs and sometimes it's easy, but sometimes a memory or an image comes away with soft chunks clinging to it like flesh.

  On the last morning of his childhood Andy went for a walk along the Nadder. He lay there in the summer sun in the grass beside the river, careful not to move. From time to time, a trout rose to the surface and sipped. He pushed himself to his feet and two large fish flared off.

  The plane was due in at ten. 'I'll try and be with you by one,' his father had promised. In time for lunch.

  His mother, a terrible cook, had prepared his father's favourite meal of lamb shanks. She had trimmed the roses and bunched the freshest-looking into a vase. But she was not pleased with her hair. It mimicked her swells of anger and hope. What was he coming back for? What was this 'something' he had to tell her, that was better said face to face? The paparazzi idea - stalking her, popping its flashes - that he wanted to consign to oblivion the past three years, begin again.

  'He's only coming back because Lynn dumped him,' his sister said in a jabbing voice.

  'He never said that he was going to stay,' defended his mother chirpily.

  'Of course he doesn't want to stay,' at her most sarcastic. She stood on the landing in her old green sweater that she wore all the time, slopping about in it like a large bath. 'What he wants is for you to forgive him.'

  'Well, I still think you should look nice for your father.' Meaning: Go and put on that dress I bought you .

  Back from the river, hair brushed, teeth cleaned, hands washed, Andy waited for him to arrive. At the sound of a car engine, he flung open the door.

  'Tell him to wipe his shoes,' called his mother, and went to take the lamb out of the oven.

  He ran across the front lawn.

  A thin man in a cloth cap was paying the driver. Then turned.

  His revenant father.

  George Larkham saw Andy and awkwardly raised his hand, and after straightening his cap, lifted a small suitcase and began walking towards him. The tie he had taken off made a lump in his pocket. He started to unbutton his jacket when he stumbled.

  He swore. His face had gone pale. And his hand - his hand was clutching his side. Gasping in the air of a late summer morning. He looked at his feet as though surprised to find himself still upright. A yellow cedar swaying in a dazed, perplexed way.

  'Dad!'

  Andy raced over to where his father had crumpled to the lawn. He kneeled, bending over the grey corduroy face. There was a tired, hunted glaze in his eyes. They stared into space, reflecting a depth of anguish no one could have invented. His arms clawed the grass and there was a dribble at the corner of h
is mouth.

  'Dad!' slapping him. He could smell something medicinal in his breath, and then he lost the scent.

  'George?' His mother had stepped outside. 'George . . .' flying towards them, her oven gloves still on. A lone tundra swan. 'George!'

  Upstairs in her room his sister was unaware. She was pushing her new dress up over her head and it had got stuck, her arms in the air, her face pressing, ghost-like, through the stretched cotton.

  Down on the grass, Andy clutched his father's face in desperation. Everything irrelevant except the words that his father had come home to say. But no words came.

  Andy turned from the window, grabbed his holdall and suitcase off the bed, carried them downstairs. Something in him rejected Krikor Makertich's bleak vacuum. He refused to believe that Jeanine's father had accomplished nothing other than to read shelf after shelf of books about Armenia, stare at the spaces between his toes and do the Telegraph crossword, all the while smoking Gitanes. Better to imagine that he was contemplating the mystery of life like a desert father - like Montaigne. And should he have reached the conclusion that love is a cheap illusion that doesn't pay, Andy wanted to prove him wrong with every particle in his body.

  Maral waited for him downstairs. She stood in the conservatory, looking out of the window. 'One thing I never see any more: deer.'

  He had already settled the bill with Mrs Nettlefold ('What's this?' 'Corkage.') and was piling their bags into the back seat when Furnivall's manuscript slipped from the holdall in which Andy had been lugging it around all these months. He stuffed the pages back in, his eyes falling on a sentence. In every man is the history of all men . . . Wait a moment, wait a moment. What if . . . ? And he was a boy again, leaning out of his father's helicopter. Filled with the same calm certainty as when he watched the grappler seize hold of a grey ghost, a parachuting sense of what was right. In that moment - he remembered it with pinpoint accuracy - it came to him what he must do, which was to follow the example of the young woman who had loved Montaigne: his adoptive daughter, Marie de Gournay. The driving theory behind Furnivall's book was that Marie had destroyed the missing Montaigne manuscript not long after her mentor's death, but only once she had extensively drawn on it to edit the posthumous - and significantly altered - version upon which everyone relied today.

  By the time he reached London, Andy was resolved. He could not bring Krikor Makertich back to life, but he might go a small way to reuniting him with his daughter.

  It took two intense months to blend Missing Montaigne into The Trials of Christopher Madigan . It was important that he honoured his teacher by putting the essence of his book, its philosophical core, into his 'self-portrait'. No less important was to find a way to respect what Maral had told him.

  Andy would never have pretended that her words, which he had written down, were precisely the same, or in the same order, as in the narrative that he stitched together from a range of sources and using the unexercised muscles of the editor he had hoped to be. There were also thoughts that entered his head as he wrote. To paraphrase Montaigne, he stole from this flower and that, but always with the aim of turning his 'pilfering' into a honey that was Makertich's own - even though in order to do this he had to look into himself. Because, as David had pointed out, this was also about Andy. Only in writing this story would he set himself free. Montaigne again: 'If I must serve as an instrument of deception, let it at least not be at the expense of my conscience.'

  To begin with, he was beset by doubts. Wasn't he making a forgery of another man's life and character? No. He was revealing to Jeanine the truth of her father in a way that he could not hope to do on his own, but perhaps in combination with Furnivall.

  His task was to develop what his teacher had written and adapt it towards a goal after Furnivall's own humanist heart. In the end, all he was doing was using a little imagination, plus connective tissue. Only the imagination knew how to turn a manuscript about Montaigne's missing essays into the autobiography of an anonymous Armenian.

  But he had no doubt, as fumblingly he discovered the process of his storytelling, that the man whose distinctive shadow he had sensed during his conversations with his fellow Attender was, out of all competing versions, the authentic one.

  4

  A NDY PLACED TO ONE side the page he had corrected and checked his watch: 8.00. He looked up. But did not see Jeanine, and then he did see her. Standing at the entrance - talking to Rui, who was taking her coat. She wore a leaf-green dress with a yellow scarf around her neck.

  His mouth went dry. He wanted to stand up and leave. It would still be snowing outside, and under the trees it would be dark and he could hide in the street. He wanted to run along the icy pavement. Past Sophie's maisonette. Past his old flat. To Shaftesbury. Where he would not be overcome by this panic that was engulfing him. He knew that his mother would accept him as he was, at this moment, and stood abruptly to his feet, spilling pages everywhere - which he stooped to retrieve from the floor, hastily pushing them back into the holdall - then turned, in time to see her weaving towards him. Brown eyes, jet black hair, pale.

  'Hi,' hesitantly extending her hand.

  'Hi,' grabbing it.

  He was relieved that his hand did not tremble. On hers was a silver bracelet.

  She sat down, resting a black-bead handbag on her lap.

  'So,' sounding nervous, her dark, tense eyes examining him from the boundless distance of the other side of the table, 'we've made it at last.'

  He sat on his hands. But did not hear his own voice, did not feel that he was sitting at the table. He felt adrift. Nothing he said taking flight. His words inert as the olive pits waiting to be tidied away by Rui. And Jeanine behaved no differently. The lavender sprig in the glass flute a microphone that made them both dry up; whatever words they uttered, stilted and self-conscious.

  Jeanine's recent trip to the Amazon with a shipload of scientists. The sale of his Mercedes at the weekend to a footballer. The weather, cold for this time of year - or was it hot? It can't have been hot, because it was snowing when he arrived at the Camoes. When Jeanine had arrived, too. 'I haven't seen snow like that for ages,' she said, 'not at Christmas time.' The conversation petered out and they sat in a sad and confused silence, each waiting for the other to speak.

  He shrank deeper into his chair. He was bursting with questions, and yet all he could think of asking was one more banal thing that had nothing to do with her father, the subject they were here to discuss.

  This time she did not reply, but looked rueful.

  He cleared his throat. He needed to get it out of the way. He should have done so immediately - what he had promised himself he would do without fail, first thing, soon as she sat down, had not a complicated feeling restrained him.

  Before he could say anything, she blurted out: 'Listen, I'm sorry.'

  He gave Jeanine a vacant look. 'What for?'

  She raised her hand as though lifting a veil. Her expression more serious than the girl with the calf-eyes drawing him.

  'I apologise for not turning up last time.'

  He looked blinkingly at her as she explained.

  In short, everything he had steeled himself to tell Jeanine: how the lawyers had instructed her not to make contact; how she had wanted to telephone, but did not have his number; how she had felt it inappropriate to burden Rui with the message, so that she had pictured Andy in a position more or less identical to the one in which he had imagined her, waiting on his own in this Portuguese restaurant for someone who was never going to show up etc., etc.; and how the uncertainty about her father that he had planted instead of vanishing had deepened, resulting in her decision, which Bennett & Blaxworth had greeted with horrified amazement, not to contest the will.

  The funny feeling that came humming out of his bones. 'I never made it here that evening, either.'

  'You didn't?'

  'No.'

  'You weren't sitting here, cursing me?' still cagey.

  'No.' He felt himself
unbinding.

  His eyes found hers. They looked at each other.

  He hailed Rui, who was heading for the kitchen - was it Andy's imagination that he no longer limped? - and with Jeanine's consent ordered a bottle of Vinho Verde.

  Amalia was singing ' Disse-te Adeus e Morri '. Was it his imagination that the fadista had developed a celestial voice?

  He gazed around the room at the honeycomb of faces and back to Jeanine. Emerging from the black bin liner inside which he had been swishing about for longer than he dared to remember.

  She had crossed her arms and was staring at him in a thoughtful way.

  'So, Andy Larkham, you didn't know my father.'

  'No.'

  'He didn't write a book.'

  'No.'

  'He never read Montaigne.'

  'Not as far as I know.'

  'Then what were you doing at his funeral?'

  He quickly told her. He felt such a relief.

  She nodded to herself. The riddle resolved.

  He waited for her to ask more, but she stared down at her wrist and started toying with her bracelet.

  'You had something you needed to tell me,' he said.

  She tilted back. Red-and-green reflections pulsing on her face. Her defiant look had returned. 'Yes - about my father's money,' and took a breath, but across the small round table he was holding up his hand.

  'Listen,' with a spring in his voice, 'I'm aware why you should think it's tainted, but it's not.' Again, he looked her in the eye. 'I need to tell you something. Your father is not the man you thought he was.'

  She fended him away with her familiar glare. 'So you keep saying.'

  'I mean it even more.'

  In a boneless gesture in time with the fado, her hand moved back and forth over the tablecloth.