What's she thinking? surprised that she did not listen when he mentioned her father. He began to talk about Maral, but her eyes looked frightened, and an instinct told him that Jeanine had been taught by her mother never to trust a word that 'Mary' said.
He had not got very far when he was interrupted by the girl with the calf eyes plucking at his sleeve. Her broad, dimpled face reminded him for some reason of his sister, who had telephoned two nights before with the news that she was expecting a baby.
'My mother says you dropped this.'
'Thank you,' accepting the loose page.
The girl resumed her seat, folding her arms to obscure the tablecloth.
'What is it?' Jeanine asked, perplexed.
He scanned the sheet of paper that the girl had returned to him.
'It's the penultimate page of your father's autobiography.'
She took the news calmly. 'Written by you?'
'That's right. This isn't what your father wrote. I wrote it.' He lifted the holdall onto the table and withdrew the manuscript. 'Sorry it's taken so long.'
She gave the title page a look, part-asteroid, part-fascination.
' The Trials of Christopher Madigan ,' she read.
'I guess it's what you might call a self-examination.'
'Why "trials"?'
'It was the original meaning of the word "essay". But it's an apt word to describe his life - at least in my opinion.' The pleasure it gave Andy to talk about him was unexpected. He patted the mound of pages the way his father used to pat his head. 'See what you think.'
She turned a page. 'Who,' she wanted to know, 'is Stuart Furnivall?' What did he have to do with her father?
Andy told her.
She listened. 'And this other person?' pointing to the name of the second dedicatee.
'My best friend. Without his help, I never could have written it.'
Her face assumed a terribly sad expression. 'How do I know it's the truth?'
He did not have time to elaborate, because Rui was splashing out the Casal Garcia for him to taste.
'Why don't we talk about this later?' Andy said. 'Once you've read it?'
'You're right,' she nodded. 'I can read this later.' And scooped the manuscript back into the holdall, putting it down on the next chair and her handbag on top of it.
'Delicious, Rui,' Andy said, after smelling the cold tart bubbly liquid and swirling it around and taking a sip. 'Quite delicious.'
'But, Mane, you've got him to a T!' exclaimed the girl's mother at the next table.
5
O NE THING HE WANTED to know: 'Why didn't you challenge the will?'
Slow to drink her wine, Jeanine told him about the process that Andy had initiated in Hortense Avenue. The seed he had germinated when - grabbing at a straw - he had begun to describe a man considerate, honest and wise. As Andy filled in the blank with a tender portrait of his teacher, something unbelievable and bewildering had occurred: if only for a second, Jeanine had stopped hating her father.
'Of course, this was just the start. It didn't happen at once.'
Andy's homage was open to so much interpretation; the person he evoked impossible to reconcile with Jeanine's long-entrenched impression of a rapacious, licentious and tyrannical bolter. She had attacked and questioned this new identity, and gone away full of self-doubt, exposed to emotions she had never expected to feel, and also thinking that it was possible her father had had a friend. From the cold grey embers of her dislike, she had seized this tiny warm coal, until gradually, gnawingly, with the fertile promise of something undivulged, Andy's version took hold and began to seep through her, until it pulled at her heart. The upshot was: she had respected her father's decision - 'perhaps the first decision of his I was able to respect', she reflected, her wryness disappearing.
Rui refilled their glasses, then produced from his red jacket a pad and a pencil that he scratched behind his ear, waiting.
'What would you like to eat?'
Andy had never felt so ravenous.
6
H E HAD THE BEST conversations with Furnivall.
Over the years many of his teacher's remarks had bubbled back into meaning, into a delayed explosion of sense of something not understood or ignored at the time.
'You won't catch big fish unless you're prepared to get snagged on the bottom.'
'Ah, progress. The Gadarene swine made progress - rapid progress.'
'Yes, Larkham, run. You can't walk through a game of rugby.'
'It's hard work being anyone.'
Once, voicing an abrupt thought, Andy asked him: 'At what point do you decide who you are? I mean, at what point are you going towards this person; at what point are you going away?'
'That's not the right question.'
Puzzled. 'Why not?'
'You need to ask: how can I be who I am? Discover that and you'll be fine.'
He persisted. 'What if you'd like to be other than who you are?'
'Then you make too much room for the wrong sort of person to slip in.'
Andy had come to understand certain things about himself, not least the various people he was not. All that sunny delusional thinking when he was ambitious to be Someone Else - he could not have been more mistaken. His evidence? Sitting across the table and looking with dark shining eyes into his face. And he thought of the image that he had nurtured in his most secret depths, of a couple floating together on a dimensionless sea.
'Fado', it came back to Andy, was Portuguese for fate. Those excruciating songs that Amalia kept singing, to which Jeanine was gently swaying her head, like a young woman trying to remember the words of a song that all of a sudden Andy realised he knew: they boiled down to the same tune.
7
'L OOK AT ME , A NDY . No, over here.'
He did as she asked.
'Maybe I was too quick to judge, too harsh,' her eyes alive and meaningful. 'I thought you were awful the first time we met.' He had seemed young, inexperienced, heading at a determined, canted angle away from himself. 'Then when I received your letter, I thought: At last. Someone's being honest .'
She went on, not in a voice used before: 'My father can wait. What about you?'
'Me?' He said it twice, pathetically.
She laughed and he felt found out. Her sonic laughter went through him.
'Do you have family? Where did you grow up? Who are your friends? I know nothing about you.' Was it his imagination that her eyes added: Your hopes, your fears, your likes, your dislikes?
Even as he began answering, something happened. He was visible - suddenly - to himself. In focus. After a few sentences, it made him happy to speak. He talked in a manner he had not felt in a while, animated. He used words that he wanted to say and had never found; but they were as nothing to what she was able to express simply by sitting there, listening to him. Until he never wished to be anyone else again. It was extraordinary. He did want to be Andy Larkham.
Jeanine heard what he had to say without interrupting. No longer staring at him as though he were a sky she watched with distrust. Her gaze lingered; her smile did not vanish so quickly. He felt her brown eyes sweeping through him, seeing all that there was to see.
The arrival of the main course gave Andy an opportunity to ask questions. And as she talked about herself, her voice was warmer, with more rhythm than he remembered. She's grown up as well, he thought, she's less judgmental. For the first time, he was seeing her in fine weather. He knew that everything she said was true. He did not know how he knew.
They had finished their main course when he had this unusual, strange sensation - the soft beginning of an emotion that he had not experienced before, but that he could liken only to an absence of fear. It was absurd that he should be feeling this way - he had met her but four times - and he could not say what triggered it or if it was a trick of the wine.
He looked sternly at her, afraid and suspicious of this feeling that spread from his face into his chest, making it difficult to breathe. What
it was like to feel like this, he had never imagined.
Rui, who had wheeled over a two-tiered trolley of desserts, was admiring her bracelet. 'What's that?'
She hesitated, and after a moment said: 'For good luck.'
Luck? This was not luck. After everything, it was nothing short of a miracle she was here - a miracle she was talking to him. But he needed more miracles if he was going to convert the mysterious heat and light radiating through him, and which he longed to continue, into a vital and enduring relationship. Easier to acquire PS17 million than to win the woman you wanted, especially after such a messy start. What had happened to Jeanine was traumatic, and the notion that anything could be resolved on the basis of a single conversation was, of course, absurd. Her involvement with Andy would follow a more ragged path. The fact that she had showed up at all was the first step of many. At last, though, he was playing an honest game. One with no assured outcome, but which was the only game worth playing. For the first time, he was playing with his heart wide open.
It would be a few days following their dinner before Jeanine felt strong enough to read the story of her father's life, and was subsequently prepared to talk about the man she had known as Kes Wakefield, her father as Don Flexmore and her mother as Carl-Andrew Purcell. 'He was everything you have my father say,' and her way of not looking at Andy stopped him from asking more. Another occasion, she said: 'He only kissed me before he did something dangerous. Whenever one of us wanted to have sex, the other backed off. I used to say to him: "When you look at a woman you smile, but you don't listen." It got so bad, I made him come with me to a Pranik healer, who scrubbed away at our auras, throwing our black stuff into a bucket of salt water, so that what was left was a lot of blues and greens. The healer claimed to have X-ray vision. He maintained that Kes had a spirit on his shoulder, a jealous woman ruining it all, that's how it came out, but if you ask me the jealous woman on his shoulder was another man.'
Their relationship never recovered from her decision to cut off relations with her father - a decision vehemently opposed by Kes and which would result in Jeanine not being able to touch her trust fund until her father was dead. 'I couldn't explain this at the time. I realise now it wasn't so much the money Kes was after: he seemed to need my father in his life.' A month after her twenty-first birthday, Kes kissed Jeanine goodbye; he had an assignment in West Africa. 'I never heard from him again.' He had vanished like the profile he had created on Facebook to lure teenage boys and girls, and which she discovered on his laptop: a construct of quotations from L. Ron Hubbard, favourite novels and food, pet hates (Nicolas Cage, Michael Winner, crayfish), and wild loves (Trini Lopez, Jo Malone perfume, two goldfish - Fanta and Orangina). Another three years before she learned that he had perished in a plane crash on an island off Guinea-Bissau. 'His end - or what for a long time I thought was his end - was banal. His Cessna was coming in to land and the wind flipped it over and he was burned to a cinder. He was importing cocaine from Colombia.'
Only later was there any doubt that he had died. Interpol had sent out one of their best undercover men to rootle through the ashes of Kes's last aircraft, an Englishman called Joseph Silkleigh, who discovered that this was the fourth such accident in the self-same Cessna and that Kes had been living off insurance payouts all these years.
'Silkleigh did finally nail him - in Melbourne. He currently resides in a Supermax prison in Goulburn. For now.'
8
T HE RESTAURANT HAD EMPTIED . The waiters had stripped the paper tablecloths and laid out the tables for the morning, and to the mild astonishment of Rui, Andy and Jeanine were still talking.
Rui had allowed them a further half-hour's grace. He finished rubber-banding the receipts in the till and came over, on his way straightening a chair.
'We're closing, senhor ,' with immaculate regret turning down Andy's request for two more coffees.
They folded their napkins and stood up and walked to the front of the restaurant, where Rui waited with their coats. He held them for Andy and Jeanine to put on.
Rui unbuttoned his red jacket and hung it up. Andy watched him switch off the Christmas tree lights, and then the lights in the room and the last thing he switched off was the fado.
'Goodnight, Rui.'
'Boa noite, senhora, senhor.'
Outside, the snow was coming down sideways. The air current shifted, and the snowflakes, like particles of light, flew up from the ground as though out of it.
The frosty air was so cold that she let out a gasp.
'What would you like to do now?' she asked.
So that was the situation. And if he could not remember his exact reply, Andy did recall how the winter street jostled with young men and women not much different to them, each heading off in their own direction to face whatever the darkness was about to bowl at them, some to be deceived, some to deceive, some to break up, some to come together for the first time.
Table of Contents
Cover
Copyright
Also by Nicholas Shakespeare
Author Biography
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Inheritance
Western Australia, 1960
London, 2005
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
The Will
Maral
Makertich
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Table of Contents
Cover
Copyright
Also by Nicholas Shakespeare
Author Biography
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Inheritance
Western Australia, 1960
London, 2005
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
The Will
Maral
Makertich
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Table of Contents
Cover
Copyright
Also by Nicholas Shakespeare
Author Biography
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Inheritance
Western Australia, 1960
London, 2005
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
The Will
Maral
Makertich
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Inheritance Page 27
