A Rather Lovely Inheritance

by C. A. Belmond

“Are you still in love with your ex-wife?” I dared to ask. He looked utterly horrified.

  “God, no!” he said, shocked.

  “Okay, okay, take it easy,” I said in an equally cousinly tone.“What was she like?”

  “Beautiful, neurotic. Elusive. Accused me of giving up on us first. Not sure of that. She said I didn’t make enough effort to change, which is true. I’m to blame for getting testy in the end,” he said, glancing away momentarily.“Lost my sense of humor, which is deadly. She was surprisingly harsh, once she made up her mind that we were through,” he admitted.“Best way to break it off, I suppose, but it left a bad taste. I would have preferred kinder memories.”

  He’d seemed offhanded enough when he started talking, but looked faintly horrified again toward the end, as if he’d revealed more than he intended and somehow couldn’t stop once he got started. Hastily he added, “But you’re dodging the question yourself, putting it back on me. Have you got a boyfriend? Should I look him over and see if he’s fit for an heiress?” He put on a mock stern expression, but there was something genuine in his inquiry. I shook my head.

  “We broke up, and this time it’s really for good,” I said, suddenly mortified that my voice had just waffled on whether it was over or not, without consulting my brain, which sternly said that it was. My face felt hot, and I was sure that it was beet-red.“Nothing dramatic in the finish, either,” I said lamely, trying to sound more definite. “It just ran out of steam. I realized he was bored with me and I was tired of him. It was depressing once I figured it out.”

  God, it was getting worse, the more I said. I’d better quit while I wasn’t ahead.

  Jeremy comprehended my lingering agony and uncertainty. His voice was soothing. “I can’t see anyone being bored with you, of all people,” he said affectionately. “Surely not. I’d expect seething passion, even at the end, like hurling books and bric-a-brac at each other.”

  “We did that, too,” I said. “Before we got too weary to fight. I’m not really boring. I just retreat into my shell when I feel cornered. He wanted to get married just weeks after we met, I think because all his friends were having weddings. It seemed so impersonal. I wanted to live together first, and we did, but he was pissed off the whole time, and he still seemed like a stranger somehow. I felt bullied and rushed, and it just freaked me out more.”

  “That’s because some guys know perfectly well that they can’t be trusted,” he said quickly and surely. “Hence the big hurry. They want to capture you before you figure out that they’re useless bastards. But don’t you let them.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “I always wanted a big brother. It’s very restful.”

  He bowed his head. “At your service, anytime,” he said.

  “I’ll have to watch over you, too, and make sure that some gold-digger doesn’t go after you and your villa and your devastating English charm,” I said.We shook hands on the bargain.

  The plane was tilting toward Nice now. You could see blue swimming pools attached to the villas that were nestled into the craggy hillsides, and the soft blue Mediterranean Sea was lapping at the pebbly beaches. My production company had finished the Riviera shoot and gone home now, and Erik and Tim were doing the flea-market circuit, to scrounge for props and antiques, starting in Spain. For once I didn’t have to hurry off to a meeting or a shoot. Jeremy had rented a car, and he’d given me a map so I could be his navigator out on those winding corniche roads.

  I thought of Aunt Penelope, boldly buying her villa in the 1930s, when she was young, in the time of cocktail parties, slinky evening gowns, sweet love songs amid plunging stock markets, sandwiched between two world wars. None of her relatives remembered being at that villa, and it was quite likely that she’d stopped going there a long time ago. Yet she held on to it all this time, when she could have sold it for lots of money. And she went there one last time, and died there. To me that meant memories of love and a lost era that she didn’t want to dwell on, but still, in the end, felt more at home with. Already I could feel that the house would be full of impressions, energies, indications of past passions, sorrows and joys.

  Jeremy smiled at the look of anticipation on my face. “You don’t want to expect too much of this garage,” he cautioned gently. “One woman’s treasure is another woman’s clutter.”

  “I know that. I was just thinking of all the ghosts in the house,” I said enthusiastically.

  “Ghosts?” he inquired, looking faintly alarmed. “Do you know this for a fact? Are you one of those people who can sense the presence of evil spirits? If so, please don’t tell me.”

  “No, not that,” I assured him. “Come on. Aren’t you excited? You’re the proud owner of a villa in the South of France! Admit it. You must be thrilled.” He smiled indulgently.

  “Slow down, child,” he said. “It ain’t ours till the fat lady sings.”

  “Oh, phooey,” I said. “Let’s be the first ones off the plane.”

  “All right. Got your map?” he asked, looking rather excited himself now. “I’m counting on you to help me find the damned place.”

  Part Four

  Chapter Nine

  “SO WHAT’S THIS PORTFOLIO YOU’VE BEEN CARRYING AROUND WITH you everywhere?” Jeremy asked me after he’d negotiated his way out of the Côte d’Azur airport in a gleaming midnight-blue Maserati he’d rented from a luxury service. He was a good driver, and steered it expertly through the airport labyrinth, toward the corniche roads. He liked the car he was driving today, and he handled the stick shift with ease, testing it on the narrow, steep, winding roads impossibly carved into ancient cliffs that had been historically daunting for centuries, to even the toughest pirates and the most aggressive invaders.

  I knew from my research that the Romans, on their way to Gaul and Spain, had carved the main road along the edges of these cliffs. Then Napoleon basically followed in their footsteps in his path of conquests, and that route was now known as the spectacular grande corniche, the highest of the cliffside roads that ran all along the Riviera. Far below, slowly snaking along the coast, was the lowest, corniche inferieure. We headed for the middle road, the moyenne corniche, which was still breathtakingly high.

  We had to drive up, up, up to reach it, weaving through ancient shady village streets, climbing past steep medieval walls spilling over with bougainvillea, freesia, acacia, hydrangea, and rose, forming a beautiful red, white, and pink profusion of flowers tumbling over each other in reckless and joyous abandon. I saw trees with blossoms of an intense color somewhere between purple and violet, a shade I’d never seen before on a tree. I’d hardly seen any sights at all when I worked here days ago with my film cohorts. Just airport, taxi, hotel, locations, libraries, via the inland superhighway, which didn’t have these views.The scenic natural world had been barely in my peripheral view, through the fogged lens of jet-lagged exhaustion. Now I lay back in the passenger seat, lazy and happy, nearly drugged with the soft sunshine.

  Higher up we climbed, to where stone farmhouses with peach-colored roofs were stubbornly built into any scrap of land that could be found clinging to these impossible cliffs, along with the precious olive trees that for centuries had been coaxed into growing on narrow terraced ledges, to make the liquid golden olive oil prized the world over. Monks and perfumers had labored in these fields to perfect the fine art of harvesting the exquisite herbs that grew here in such fragrant abundance—lavender, sage, thyme, and the borage that knights put in their wine cups to give them strength and courage.

  As I gazed out my window with the soft, diffuse sunlight kissing my skin, I could feel more centuries of history flashing by me. These old villas hiding behind iron gates, stone walls, and dense hedges of rhododendrons attested to the Victorian era, when sad sweet tubercular writers, musicians and artists wintered here in hopes of regaining their health and strength, while Russian and English royalty gambled and played bridge with railroad tycoons and rich eccentric botanists. Then came the summer crowds in the glamorous Roar
ing Twenties and the thirties,Aunt Penelope’s time, when Coco Chanel made sun-tanning chic, and expatriates like Fitzgerald and Hemingway toasted the good life with each other; and artists like Cocteau and Matisse rediscovered their wild-child links to the primitive art of cave paintings and sculpture. Despite the layering of centuries here, that prehistoric world was not so very far away. Whenever we shot through a tunnel I saw that these were not the smooth man-made concrete tunnels of New York, but craggy, ancient Gothic cathedrals carved right into the magnificent cliffs.

  When at last we burst out of the tunnels onto the moyenne corniche road, I gasped at the staggering view of the open blue sky and the sheer drop to the sea below, where the harbors were filled with bobbing fishing boats and yachts. Every time we rounded a turn the view changed and I gasped again, twisting in my seat to compare the angle of where we’d just been with the glimpse of where we were heading, unable to decide which picture-postcard image was the more perfect and beautiful.

  I kept exclaiming, “Oh, my God, look at that! Wow, did you see that? Phew, isn’t that gorgeous?” until I finally gave in to the sheer delight of not being able to keep up with one spectacular angle after another after another. I just sat back in my seat and laughed out loud, and my laughter made me think of the endless sprays of flowers tumbling over the walls in such excessive profusion that it must be Nature laughing, too, at how many flowers there were to smell, how many fish gliding through the sea, how many stars glowing in the sky, and how many silly people trying with their minds to keep up with it all.

  Jeremy smiled indulgently at me, enjoying my reactions with the amused pleasure you get when you watch someone experience something you love for the first time, like a city or a book or a good wine. When I caught him smiling at me I grinned back.

  “It’s amazing,” I said. “I was just here days ago, working, and I never saw any of this. I was like a little caterpillar chewing on my leaf, just too wrapped up in work, work, work.”

  That gave him the opportunity to ask me more questions about the portfolio I’d been carrying, with all the Lucrezia Borgia artifacts, sketches, swatches, and samples. I started off with my usual quick spiel about my work, designed to get it over with. Normally, when people find out that you work on set designs for movies, they exclaim, “Oh! Isn’t that fascinating! Doing what, exactly?” but the whole time that they’re nodding and listening, you can see the wheels turning as they try to figure out how much money you make—and when they realize it isn’t much, they lose interest.

  But Jeremy didn’t act like that. He listened attentively when I told him about people I worked with regularly, like Erik and Tim; and other “wild-card” elements on the set, such as child actors or old veterans or new crew members, who at first might drive you crazy, yet later they sometimes surprised you by emerging with valor by the shoot’s end. And often it was a little sad when a production wrapped and you knew you might not see some of those people ever again, after the strange intensity you’d shared with them for a couple of high-strung weeks.

  When I ran out of steam and Jeremy ran out of questions, I tentatively asked him about his career. And somehow it was easier for both of us to talk about it today, with the gentle green-and-blue sea sparkling below us, and the great blue sky stretching endlessly ahead, with the soft yellow sun that was serenely fading into a coral-colored sunset.

  “Father wanted me to go into corporate law, of course,” Jeremy explained.“More money and influence and all that, but I found it too sick-making, to be honest. It’s just as well, because the company that wanted to hire me fell like an elephant to a massive stock scandal, and every lawyer and accountant who worked there got a bit tainted when it came to being hired elsewhere.”

  “Did your father adjust when you told him what you wanted to do?” I asked tentatively.

  For once he didn’t seem to mind talking about his dad. “Oh, he trumpeted a bit,” Jeremy said reflectively.

  “After all, it’s not like you told him you wanted to give up law entirely and become an actor or something,” I said.Then I remembered his childhood ambitions and added,“But you wanted to be a musician when you were a kid, didn’t you?”

  “A rock guitarist,” he said. “Which Father never thought of as a musician.We cut a record, actually.”

  “Let’s see, your group was...” I said searchingly, “the Dogs of War.”

  “Good God!” he moaned. “No woman should have a memory like that.”

  “So what happened to the Dogs?” I asked.

  “We had fights, and stole each other’s girlfriends, and broke up when it was time to sit exams and graduate.” He grinned. “Besides, we got a good look at the music industry and didn’t fancy being told what to record by committees of corporate marketing boys.That’s not what produced the Beatles. I guess I didn’t want it that badly, and you have to, to survive.”

  “So—did you and your father reconcile before he ...” I started out being daring and reckless, but I lost my nerve. Fortunately the landscape seemed to be keeping Jeremy philosophical, therefore not at all offended by my tactlessness.

  “Does one ever really reconcile with a father?” he asked. “But we came to respect each other. Forget about ever getting his approval.To some extent he treated everybody that way—a habitual disapproving act that kept people off-balance so they didn’t get too close. But I was his own flesh and blood, yet he behaved as if I was genetically disposed to becoming a bum!” He shook his head wearily, remembering. “If I wanted something, no matter how harmless, he’d say I couldn’t have it, simply because if I wanted it, then surely it must be wrong. I learned to pretend that I didn’t give a damn about the things I wanted badly; and vice versa, which can really fuck you up, because you forget not to do that all the time, with everybody else.”

  “I have to confess, he scared me a little,” I said.

  “You knew him at his feistiest. He was pretty tough in those days,” Jeremy said. “Even when I began to do well in school, it caught him off-guard at first, until he decided it meant that I was finally ‘seeing things his way,’ as if he’d been proven ‘right’ and I’d been proven ‘wrong.’ He was so insufferable about it that I wanted to turn round and become a jewel thief or a drug dealer. Then I thought, no, that would be just what he expected. Finally I said, sod it, I’ve got to get him out of my head. So I went to study in Paris for as long as it took. Rather a good moment, that, when you first hear your own voice inside your head.” I nodded in agreement.

  “But your parents are perfect, right? So you’ve no idea what I’m talking about,” he went on, glancing directly at me with a smile. The intensity of his curiosity gave me an unexpected surge of excitement, and I actually had to turn away for a moment so he wouldn’t see clear through me and detect this flash of pleasure I’d experienced, just basking in his company.

  “I bet your parents were cool with you,” he was saying. I recovered my light attitude.

  “Not at all,” I said. “My father kept warning me that men were unreliable and I should find my own métier, but he never gave me a clue about how to start a career, and he never wanted to give me specific advice for fear I’d follow it literally and not be able to think for myself. I mean, once in awhile you want a cut-and-dried opinion, you know? And my mother simply refuses to seriously believe that her daughter isn’t a kid anymore.”

  Then I gave him a sideways squint. “Wait a minute. We haven’t finished with you yet.Tell me more about what you do.”

  He liked two main things about his field, he said—the global reach of international law, and the human factor in inheritance and estates. “The human factor?” I repeated.

  “You learn a lot about national preoccupations,” he explained. “I mean, people are basically the same, but, for instance, in France, I think paternity is a much bigger issue than in England. It’s a big part of their identity—French men worry a lot more about having a son to carry on the family name, and being sure that it really is their son, et cete
ra. So bloodlines are very important.”

  “Inheritance law is so much more personal than corporate law,” I mused. “Things must get pretty emotional. But at least you don’t have to worry about getting embroiled in some skanky stock-market scandal.”

  He gave me a scolding look. “My dear girl, if you think that inheritance is any cleaner than business, then you haven’t been reading your Balzac,” he said.

  “We did a movie on Balzac and his mom,” I shot back. “He liked unusual doodads. Had a special pocket-watch, a kind of nineteenth-century ‘organizer.’ Drove me nuts, finding those props.”

  “He also clerked in a law firm when he was a boy, and said that he learned just how low people would stoop to get their mitts on a tiny, grubby little inheritance,” Jeremy informed me.

  “Are you saying people would kill their relatives to inherit a couple of sous?” I asked.

  “Or to inherit a few goats, out in the country,” he said, nodding. “Oh, perhaps they didn’t kill their relatives outright, but just hastened the end along.”

  “I think our exit is the next one coming up,” I said, suddenly remembering my role as navigator with the map.

  “Great.Thanks,” he said.We followed the signs to get off the highway, skirting past the actual town of Antibes. Once we pulled away from the main roads, and onto narrower streets, we were on our own, because there were no more road signs. We flagged down an elderly man on a bicycle who actually had a loaf of French bread in his basket and a black beret on his head, like a man in a travel poster. He listened obligingly when Jeremy slowed the car and I spoke to him in my patchy French, and then he pointed out the way.

  “That can’t be real French bread, can it?” I joked after we drove on. “He’s just posing like a tourist brochure, right, for our benefit?”

  “Right. He works for Disney. He’ll probably yank off that beret the minute he turns the corner,” Jeremy agreed. Then we both fell silent, sensing that we were just minutes away from Aunt Penelope’s villa.