Inheritance, p.12
Inheritance, page 12
Because, unlike Isabel, they were so obviously down at heel (literally—the state of the physicist’s shoes was alarming), I found myself confessing, only the second time I joined them for lunch, about the Toby jugs and the cigarette picture cards. In the weeks that followed, much merriment was expended, over egg-and-cress sandwiches, on thinking up ridiculous subjects for Art & Antiques—Victorian kitty litter trays, Restoration spittoons.
But beyond all that, they took a protective interest in my welfare, putting such resources as they had at my disposal. The historian, whose eternal cardigans were so shapeless, so full of cigarette burns, they seemed like something out of a 1950s movie, reviewed occasionally for the New Statesman, and hooked me up with his editor there. The French professor, whose gold-rimmed spectacles slipped to the very end of his nose whenever he became animated, had a son at the TLS he persuaded to assign me an occasional review for the “In Brief” section—all on American subjects, though, which wounded me a little. I dashed off my articles for the antiques magazines and labored mightily over a five-hundred-word piece on a history of the WPA, for which I was paid twenty pounds.
The old notion of the literary life was still alive then, if just barely—at least it was to me, though my new friends assured me I was deluded, it was dead as the dodo, had been for some time. But it seemed to me they embodied the very ideal they were warning me against, something shabbier and more thrilling than mere glamour, an unworldly kind of striving in which failure was hardly relevant and unhappiness a perfectly reasonable price to pay. I was thirty-one years old, and had renounced all forms of romance, but it didn’t occur to me to guard against exalted feelings about the dome of the Reading Room, or the sight of the handwritten manuscripts of “Kubla Khan” and Jane Eyre. Even the grubbiness of my bedsit and the leanness of my daily existence began to feel like points of honor. It was perversely exhilarating to turn my back on consumerism just as the rest of England was discovering its joys with a vengeance.
At Stony Brook I had “mother-sat” one weekend for a visiting economics professor from Portsmouth whose elderly mother was staying with him for a month; she was afraid to be left alone in his house while he was off at some conference. All her remarks were of an almost surreal banality, everything was described as “ever so nice,” whether it was a Hostess Twinkie or her sister Edith’s room in her nursing home in Dorset or the stewardess on her flight from London, who had given her an extra blanket. But somehow it was very soothing, listening to her; after a while I felt lulled rather than bored. On both Friday and Saturday evening she had sat knitting beside what she called the wireless, listening to the local station, and then clucking her tongue when the news came on—“Isn’t it shocking, the things some people get up to, you wouldn’t believe they could be so wicked, would you,” or, alternatively, “the poor dear.” At nine o’clock she went and made us cups of cocoa, which she brought out on a tray along with homemade shortbread, of which she ate just one, while I had to stop myself from finishing them off. “I suppose you think it’s very silly of me, dear,” she said, as we sat down to a Sunday meal she’d insisted on cooking without assistance, “not wanting to be alone here, but it’s not the same in a foreign country, is it. And not being able to drive…it’s ever so nice of you to have kept me company like this.” I felt ashamed that I had only agreed to do it for the money.
“I hope you didn’t find it too trying,” the professor said, as he was driving me back to campus. “Not the world’s most scintillating conversationalist, my mother.”
“Oh, but I really liked her,” I said. “She seems much more tranquil than Americans…at least the ones I know. Just contented with what is, not always thinking about wanting something else. What she’s going to buy. It was very restful somehow.”
He laughed. “There’s nothing Zen about it, it’s to do with a long history of deprivation. The old working-class mentality, make and mend all the way.” In fact, he told me, he was working on a book about the consumer culture in America, the emergence of shopping as a replacement for churchgoing, in pursuit of spiritual fulfillment. “And of course consumer capitalism can only perpetuate itself successfully if people are left permanently unsatisfied; at the point at which they’re sated, they stop shopping, and the whole system falls apart. My mother’s generation grew up poor, got married just before the war, and then lived with rationing for ten years. There was very little choice to be had. Hence they ceased to want. Whereas in America there’s always been at least the illusion of choice.”
Now all England was aflame with choice, or the illusion of it, the air was abuzz with people wanting things. I had only to get on the Tube or the 29 bus to be surrounded by young women with glossy shopping bags and artificial nails, chattering about what they’d just bought or were dying to buy or were about to exchange for something else. On my rare ventures to Oxford Street, where harsh blasts of rock music assaulted me even on the pavement, I was taken aback by how coiffed, how manicured, many of the women looked, and the nervous avidity in their faces. Reviews of themed gastropubs, flashy cars, different brands of truffle oil filled the Sunday supplements, alongside articles about architects building the City’s new towers and financial whiz kids with gleaming American teeth. Even I kept receiving fliers about throat creams and tanning systems through the letter box, along with offers of credit cards on generous terms.
My landlord, entering into the spirit of things, painted the front door scarlet, wallpapered the downstairs hall, and raised my rent from £13.50 to £16.75 a week. It was then, when I had just spent the last of the John Deere money and panic was setting in—alien that I was, I could not apply for regular employment—that I stumbled into a freelance gig almost as implausible as the fantasies of my library friends. First came an article on Coronation souvenirs, for which I was paid handsomely, then one about the founder of the Battersea Dogs Home. No newsagent I came across ever carried the magazine in which these pieces appeared. Later I realized it was run largely for the benefit of its writers, many of whom seemed to be indigent poets.
I doubt that its American proprietor had ever read it himself. He had come to London at the tail end of a European tour, meaning to leave after a week. But one night in a pub near Cambridge Circus he fell into conversation with the publisher of a magazine named London Calling, about to be shut down due to impending bankruptcy. By the time last orders were called he had decided to buy it, and to stay on.
Two years earlier, his only son had died, aged eighteen, in a motorcycle crash on I-90, just outside Buffalo; his marriage had collapsed under the weight of that disaster, and after their separation his wife had moved to Manitoba, where she was born, to live with her brother. Meanwhile the money was piling in from the shopping malls he had built throughout Erie County. And though his reading, as an adult, seemed largely confined to the tabloids, he had an exaggerated reverence for writers and writing: it seemed his immigrant grandfather used to read Dante aloud to him when he was a child. He would hand out wads of notes and tell his “boys”—I was one of just two female writers—to come up with something quaint to write about. That was pretty much the sum total of his instructions. And so there were articles about jousting tournaments, famous murders in Elizabethan London, the Chelsea Physic Garden, with here and there a little vignette about half-forgotten writers like Francis Thompson or Julian Maclaren-Ross, though he always insisted he didn’t want to go too highbrow, the magazine was intended for a general audience, however mythical.
He was large, rumpled, gloomy, with a booming voice and a Brooklyn accent left over from childhood; sometimes, in his office on the Strand, still filled with the debris (old newspapers, old issues of the magazine, files stuffed with lawyers’ letters) of his predecessor, he could be heard shouting at his minions back in Buffalo, always with reference to excrement. “Don’t bullshit me, Danny”…“Don’t give me that shit, Barreca”…“You gotta be shittin’ me.” But to us, his writers, he was the soul of courtesy. Whenever I entered, he would rise from his desk and remain standing until I was seated in the sagging armchair opposite, offer me whiskey even if it was ten in the morning, and ask hoarsely if I was okay for money. “Tell me the truth, now. Do you get enough to eat?” I got the feeling that if I said no he might start to cry.
Shortly after he took me on, he got the idea of distributing the magazine to hotels and B and Bs for free, which meant restaurants and pubs and even Madame Tussaud’s gradually started placing ads, so he could pay his contributors with someone else’s money. Once my philosopher friend saw someone reading it on the Tube. Mr. Cassini hired an advertising manager, whom nobody ever met, and installed him in an office somewhere in Hackney; he bought a new armchair, in red-and-green plaid, for his own office, and had the windows cleaned, though the debris remained.
Among the writers, his seeming favorite was a poet named Hugh, an old Etonian who dressed like a relic of the Mauve Decade, in a worn velvet jacket and a cravat, but for some inexplicable reason affected an Australian accent. His poems, which I’d occasionally seen in the London Magazine, were baroque in the extreme, with such knotty threads of allusion I rarely got through them, but he called Mr. Cassini “mate” and swilled bottles of ale in his office while they argued about Margaret Thatcher, whom Mr. Cassini admired extravagantly. One day, though, as I sat in the hall waiting to collect a check, I heard Hugh recite the whole of “Ode to a Nightingale” in pure Etonian English and then, at Mr. Cassini’s urging, say it again, almost singing it this time. I remembered the first time I’d heard it, lying in bed in the dark, the tremor in my father’s voice as he spoke the words. I went on listening as Hugh told Mr. Cassini what my father had told me that night, the story of illness and benighted love and early death, and “Here lies One Whose Name was writ in Water.” “I can’t stand it,” Mr. Cassini growled, “oh, Jesus, you’re killing me,” and when Hugh had left, and I went in to get my money, his eyes were damp, he was blowing his nose on a large checked handkerchief he drew from his breast pocket.
Twelve
She said she wasn’t trying to kill herself, she only needed to let the pain out. Like a gas leak, she said.” Sasha again, except this time it felt real. A razor slicing through flesh, the blood oozing out slowly and then speeding up, that was scary. And something in Isabel’s voice, harsher than I’d ever heard it. Biting back rage. I couldn’t understand why she was suddenly so angry at Sasha, especially now, until the story came out and I realized it wasn’t Sasha she was angry with.
Two subjects she’d never brought up with me till then, whether from delicacy or embarrassment I wasn’t sure: one was Julian (in fact I sometimes wished she would, I was curious, in a ghoulish way, but couldn’t bring myself to ask), the other was money. Of course I knew she had some—enough not to worry—but in my fantasy of her, she never gave it a thought, it didn’t enter into her scheme of things.
She must just have gotten back from Sasha’s when I phoned to remind her to bring a book I wanted to borrow to the Reading Room the next day. She sounded frantic, telling me about the gouges in Sasha’s arms. Then she said, “This always happens when she gets one of those letters.” What letters? I asked, and after a silence that went on until I thought we’d been disconnected the story came pouring out, a whole Victorian novel condensed into a quarter hour.
Six years before, the lawyers had advised Helena to transfer the assets in her estate, after which she only had to live seven more years to avoid death duties altogether. And so she had put Sidworth in Julian’s name. Everything but the house and the orchard that were Isabel’s “patch” would go to him on her death, on condition that Helena be allowed to occupy the Hall undisturbed until she died.
“It’s a bit of a joke, isn’t it,” Isabel said, “such a staunch feminist reverting to all those ancient notions of primogeniture. Perhaps down to genes after all. Of course a lot of people do that, but then they haven’t just told their sons that their father wasn’t who he thought he was. It seems a bit foolish of Mother not to have taken that into account.” Secretly I felt offended that Julian had never told me about inheriting Sidworth; had he seen me as a gold digger, on top of all my other sins?
Anyway, after the final papers had been signed, when they were all at Sidworth for Christmas, Helena and Julian had their worst fight yet. He called her a monster, a praying mantis; she told him he was an utter mediocrity, a disappointment from birth, he’d inherited nothing from either parent. That same night he packed his bags and left, and ever after refused all contact: her letters came back unopened, her phone calls went unreturned. A few months later he left for Kenya.
Shortly after his return to England Helena had a stroke. When Isabel went to see her in the hospital she pleaded with her to effect a reconciliation. “She lay there moaning, she kept saying, ‘My only son, my only son…I can’t die until I see him again.’ Over and over. It frightened me, I’d never seen her like that, I’d never seen her cry before. Not even for Maddy. Certainly not when my father died. But there she was, weeping, saying how sorry she was, how I must tell Julian she was sorry, she hadn’t meant what she’d said. Another thing I’d never seen before. She was never sorry about anything.
“The next day I went up to London to see him. I told him she wasn’t the same person we’d known as children, she was frail and old and sad, and she really loved him. I said how he and I were grown now, we were the ones with the power, not Mother, and wouldn’t he rather use it better than she had? If he couldn’t love her, at least he could forgive her, and that was all she was asking, really, she wouldn’t expect anything more.”
“I don’t think this story is going to end well.”
“No.” She was silent for a moment. “He said to spare him the East Lynne rubbish.” I could imagine that so well. “But I still went on trying. That first night I met you, I was there to ask him again.”
(“Nothing much,” he’d said, when I asked him what she’d wanted to talk to him about.)
“Though by that time she was much better. The doctors had said she’d never walk again, but she proved them wrong. Much to her delight. And the stronger she got, the less humble she was. Until finally she was her old self again, and since then it’s been all-out war. She threatened to kill herself exactly one day before the seven years was up, so he’d have to pay the death duties after all. That was part of the reason she took those sleeping tablets last November, she was practicing.
“She started consulting lawyers, they told her she couldn’t alter the trust but there was a legal distinction between her personal estate and the ‘furnishings and fixtures’ at Sidworth, which had to go to him. Her personal effects she could dispose of as she wanted. So she had a codicil drawn up, leaving certain things to Sasha and me, and she started selling things off, to put more money in trust for Sasha. Unfortunately, someone alerted Julian to the presence of the little Renoir in a Christie’s catalogue, and after that he made sure his lawyers monitored the auction houses. But some of the furious letters flying back and forth are about objects that aren’t actually worth very much. Probably less than the lawyers charge for writing them. Like the Kelmscott Press edition of Utopia, which Mother is leaving to me. She says she bought it herself—I don’t know if that’s true—and Julian says it was Grandfather’s. She says the St. Nicholas icon Grandmother brought from St. Petersburg as a bride was Grandmother’s twenty-first birthday present to her. With Julian insisting they’re part of his inheritance. And so it goes on.”
It seemed both Isabel and Sasha were routinely enlisted to buttress one or the other’s claims. The latest object of contention was a Corot drawing of women reapers, which Helena maintained was a gift to her from Roger, and Julian claimed had belonged to his grandfather. Julian wanted Sasha to sign an affidavit saying it had hung in the study for as long as she could remember. “Which is completely meaningless, since Mother says Roger gave it to her in 1958, when Sasha was all of four. I told her I’d point that out to Julian, but she wouldn’t let me. Instead she went into a funk and sliced her wrists. She’ll do anything rather than say no to him outright. Because she’s the only one on his side, she says, he doesn’t have anybody else. It must be a sort of hangover from childhood…She worshipped him when she was young, though he could be really beastly to her, he wasn’t exactly the ideal brother. But she goes into a rage if I mention that. She says I never really loved him, not the way she does…and then she says it about herself, she’s just an object of charity to me, by that time she’s shouting, I don’t love her the way Lucy does, Lucy is the only one who really loves her. You see what a mess it is. Maybe I ought to ask Lucy to talk to her about the Corot, she might listen if Lucy said it.”
“But would Lucy do that?”
“Oh God, yes, she’ll do anything for Sasha. She always would. Even when she was very young, and Sasha was in hospital, she never seemed to find her peculiar. I suppose most adult behavior was mystifying to her anyway, Sasha’s no more than other people’s; those odd jumps she made, from one subject to another, they never made Lucy uncomfortable the way they did everyone else. She was pleased as anything when Sasha had a phase of only talking in rhyme, she did her best to keep up. And Sasha was good with her too, at least at times; she let Lucy order her around when she was in her bossy stage. ‘Come along, Aunt Sasha,’ she’d say, in the voice of her teacher from infants’ school, ‘time for a walk. The fresh air will do you good.’ And Sasha would walk out in the grounds with her, holding hands, though she never would with me.
