New beginnings, p.1
New Beginnings, page 1
New Beginnings
Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Part One
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Part Two
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Part Three
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
Almonds and Raisins
Copyright
In memory of Lillian and Nat Malimson
‘The greatest thing in the world is to know how to be one’s own’
Montaigne
Part One
Inheritance
Chapter One
On a bleak, October day in 1988, the gallery at the House of Lords was dominated by a family group, assembled to hear the maiden speech of one of their own.
To the elders of the family, the new peer of the realm looked alarmingly young for his responsibilities. To his contemporaries, the grandeur pervading the atmosphere was out of key with the life he had so far lived, nor could they easily envisage him robed for State occasions, a jewelled coronet atop his fiery hair.
For the lad himself, a sense of unreality prevailed, though some time had passed since the death of his maternal grandfather had metamorphosed Abraham Patrick Dean, better known as ‘A.P.’, into Lord Kyverdale.
While the debate after which he would be called to speak proceeded, A.P.’s gaze roved to the gallery, where his grandmothers were seated side by side. Irene, Lady Kyverdale and the author Marianne Dean had never liked each other, he reflected, but today they were briefly united.
He was an only grandchild to both – and the older generation had expectations for their descendants. That had certainly included Grandfather Kyverdale, to whom A.P. had never felt close. Inheriting the title had seemed a bit of a lark.
But a lark it wasn’t, as A.P.’s Jewish father would put it. The Kyverdales were steeped in history, one of the oldest Catholic families in the land. And his lordship had been a prominent Member of the House, taking his duties seriously. Not one of the dodderers who treat this place as somewhere to drop in for a snooze, A.P. thought, glancing around the opulent Chamber.
Well, he said to himself, the Kyverdale heritage is now vested in you, to make of it what you will.
* * *
That evening, A.P. returned to Oxford for a celebration with his friends. His cousin, Jeremy Bornstein, a fellow undergraduate at New College, travelled with him from London and the two went directly to the Trout Inn, where the party had begun without the guest of honour.
‘We should’ve waited for his lordship to arrive and order champagne,’ said Gary Potter, a miner’s son from Newcastle whose brilliance had won him a scholarship.
A.P. submitted to the mock deference that followed, which he had known would be in store for him. Nor was it in every case good-natured. Inherited peerages were anathema to some of those present. To Gary in particular, and how wouldn’t they be? thought A.P., though Gary wouldn’t be a pal of mine if he held it against me personally.
While the party grew more boisterous, A.P. did his best to join in. Suddenly there was a hollow ring to his inheritance. Perhaps because everything about it was rooted in the past. Kyverdale Hall was a bastion of the aristocracy set in acres of parkland and A.P. was now its guardian for his lifetime, following in the footsteps of his ancestors. So much for his telling himself to make of it what he would, he was thinking when Jeremy was called to the telephone.
Jeremy returned to the bar ashen-faced and momentarily unable to speak. ‘I shall have to leave,’ he eventually told A.P. ‘The call was from my dad’s secretary. She’s been trying for hours to reach me and the college porter advised her to try the Trout—’
‘Never mind that,’ A.P. interrupted, ‘what’s the matter?’
‘I haven’t taken it in yet,’ Jeremy muttered. ‘It’s Laura and Dad – she flew to Venezuela to join him – yesterday. He had some business to attend to there and then they were going on a cruise. The first real holiday they’d managed to take together for years. That’s why they weren’t in the gallery to hear your speech—’
‘Laura rang up to explain and to wish me luck,’ said A.P.
A pause followed before Jeremy went on. ‘There’s been some sort of accident in Caracas. Laura and Dad – they’re both dead. How am I going to tell my sisters?’
A.P. conveyed to their friends that Jeremy had received bad news, put a comforting arm around his shoulders and together they left the inn.
‘What you need is a few minutes to pull yourself together,’ said A.P., ‘while I fetch the car. Then I’ll drive you wherever you need to go.’
‘You’re a real pal,’ Jeremy declared.
‘You’ve been that to me since your father’s marrying Laura brought you into my family,’ A.P. replied before striding away.
Jeremy remained by the rustic bridge, gazing down at the river, recalling the times he and A.P. had stood here together, tankards of ale in their hands, watching the trout glitter in the sunlight. His mind was still refusing to accept that his parents were dead.
Though Laura was his stepmother, a true mother was what she had been to Jeremy and his sister Janis. As Dad was a real father in all but the blood sense to Laura’s daughter, Bessie.
Oh dear God – poor little Bessie, Jeremy thought. How would she, still a schoolgirl and obsessed by her own plainness, manage without the parents who had seen her through anorexia and were still bolstering her recovery?
Were. Laura and Dad were no more. And Janis was doing her own thing – whatever that was – in Australia. Until she got fed up with it and took off for somewhere else!
Resentment that his elder sister was not here when he needed her surged through Jeremy. He had never quite forgiven her for suddenly ending her engagement to Kurt Kohn. Not just suddenly, but inexplicably, and Kurt had afterwards returned to his native Vienna, a good deal more scarred by the experience than Janis had seemed.
Jeremy forced himself to switch his mind to what he must. And this wouldn’t be like it usually was with deaths in the family, the older members arranging the funeral and the younger ones turning up at the cemetery, as they had when Laura’s Great Uncle Nat died peacefully in his sleep, last year.
For this funeral, the bodies must first be flown to England. Bodies? Laura and Dad? That vibrant woman still in her prime, and the go-getter whose deals, worldwide, had made him a millionaire?
Jeremy wanted to put his head in his hands and weep, but there was no time for grieving. Too much to do and to sort out. Like who his sister Bessie would now live with; a girl of fourteen couldn’t live alone. And the family home in Hampstead. Would it have to be sold?
But first things first, he thought, as A.P. brought the car to the roadside. Tomorrow, he would fly to Caracas to bring his parents home.
It had yet to occur to Jeremy that he, like A.P., was now the recipient of an inheritance, nor could he then have envisaged the far-reaching consequences of his father’s entrepreneurial dealings.
But for Jeremy and A.P., though neither could have expressed it in words, it was as if they had grown up that day.
Chapter Two
After Jeremy had called her, Janis went to make herself some tea. Why wasn’t she sobbing her heart out? she asked herself. She’d had too much practice in keeping her feelings locked inside her. The last time she’d shed tears was the August afternoon when she went to confide to A.P.’s Grandma Marianne her true reason for breaking it off with Kurt – and Marianne would never tell.
Since then, Janis had roved from place to place, supporting herself with an assortment of fill-in jobs. As if she was killing time between the past she’d run away from and she knew not what.
While she waited for the kettle to boil, resting her back against the counter dividing the kitchen from the living area, her fragmented life since leaving home flickered before Janis’s eyes. She had briefly been a nanny in California, a florist’s assistant in Paris, receptionist at a hairdressing salon in Madrid, and chauffeuse to a crusty old lady in Bombay. Among other things. But, put together, what did it amount to?
Aimlessness! Was she to have no sense of purpose for the rest of her life? And the more wasteful her meaningless existence seemed for her parents’ deaths. More positive people than Laura and Jake would be hard to find – and the real reason Janis wasn’t shedding tears for them had to be that shock had numbed he
r.
She carried the mug of tea to the tiny balcony and fixed her gaze upon the view of the ocean visible between the rooftops. This district of Sydney was largely a young people’s bedsitterland and fine for me, she reflected, for the transient I’ve become. Though her place was a flat, sooner or later she’d be moving on. Jeremy said she had itchy feet. But it wasn’t quite that. It was something inside her that kept her on the move.
She had arrived in Australia three months ago and had spent some time with Laura’s old schoolfriend, Peggy Morris, who now lived in Melbourne. The home comforts, though, had palled when Peggy tried to mother Janis. If mothering could help what ailed Janis, Laura would happily have supplied it, as she had from the day she married Jake Bornstein.
When Peggy’s mothering included introducing Janis to ‘suitable’ young men, Janis made her escape to Sydney, where she was now working as a waitress in a coffee shop. Since she had a degree in psychology, she could, if she wished, seek employment in that field, but Janis could summon no more enthusiasm to anchor herself professionally now than she had been able to throughout her travels. Whenever she forced herself to give the matter serious consideration, a lethargy of spirit overwhelmed her and she always concluded by asking herself, ‘What’s the point?’
But if ever I put down roots anywhere, Sydney would be a good place, Janis reflected now. She hadn’t gone short of companionship from the young people she had met at a Reform Synagogue service, some of whose parents hailed from South Africa, as Janis herself did. Her father’s remarriage was the reason he had moved his family and his office to London.
He did it for Laura, Janis thought, though in other ways it was Laura who deferred to Dad. Or had she just known how to handle him? Better than Janis’s mum, who died in her thirties, had…
Janis couldn’t recall ever hearing her mum and dad rowing, but there’d been times when she’d sensed that all was not well between them. Laura and Jake, on the other hand, used to have tiffs that didn’t leave the air heavy with animosity.
Janis was sure that they’d been happy together, that all their differences had been about their children, all three of whom had in their own way contributed to the aggro.
Well, it’s too late for regrets now, Janis told herself as she went to pack a suitcase. Tonight she would be on her way back to London. Jeremy had said that Dad’s secretary would arrange Janis’s flight, so she could just pick up her ticket at the airport.
No doubt the ticket would be first class, as befitted a millionaire’s daughter, though Janis had refused to accept money from her father while she roamed the world, and he must have spent sleepless nights worrying about how she was getting by. Laura, too.
Remember we’re always here for you, they’d said each time she called them. Now, that sole security in her life was no longer there and Janis had never felt more alone.
Chapter Three
Bessie’s initial reaction to the news that would change her life was absolute refusal to believe it.
‘God wouldn’t do that to me,’ she insisted to Jeremy.
‘I’m afraid that He has, love.’
‘You’re making it up, Jeremy! And why are you suddenly calling me “love”?’
Jeremy glanced around the familiar living room – cosy, despite its spaciousness – his gaze halting briefly on the sofa where he and his sisters used to sit when watching TV together. He could not bring himself to look at the twin armchairs that his parents had usually occupied, and turned to give Bessie a compassionate smile.
‘I’m not used to you being so nice to me, Jeremy,’ Bessie went on.
‘And you’re not always nice to me, are you?’ he said, trying to lighten the atmosphere. ‘But that’s how brothers and sisters are with each other sometimes – and right now, Bessie, I’m as sorry for you as I am for myself.’
Laura’s mother, Shirley, who had been staying at the house with Bessie while her parents were away, intervened. ‘Let me deal with her, Jeremy. The child will be my responsibility from now on.’
‘I’m not a child!’ Bessie responded.
Shirley ignored the interruption. ‘I’ll be taking her back to Manchester to live with me,’ she told Jeremy, while rising to put her arms around Bessie. ‘We’ll be a comfort to each other – and when I look back on my life, one way and another it’s been nothing but loss after loss.’
Bessie broke away from her embrace, dark eyes flashing. ‘I don’t want to live with you!’
‘We’ll be on our way north immediately after the funeral,’ Shirley informed her. ‘You’re all I’ve got now, and I’m all you’ve got.’
Bessie’s defiant expression crumpled. ‘God did let them get killed, didn’t He? I’m never going to forgive Him for it,’ she added, fleeing from the room.
A silence followed her departure, Shirley rolling her damp handkerchief into a ball, Jeremy surveying the photo portrait of his father taken by Laura before their marriage.
‘If you’ll excuse me,’ he said, turning to Shirley, ‘I have a plane to catch.’
‘What I can’t excuse,’ she answered, ‘is your taking everything into your own hands. I’d have liked my darling daughter to be buried up North, where Bessie and I could visit her grave often.’
Jeremy ran a hand wearily through his dishevelled, dark hair, aware too of the stubble on his chin. He hadn’t had time to shave that morning. ‘You and Bessie weren’t up yet when I arrived, Shirley, and I didn’t want to waken you—’
‘To tell me I’ve lost my daughter he didn’t want to waken me!’
‘All right, so I was putting off telling you. And meanwhile I rang up our rabbi and made the necessary arrangements—’
‘Without consulting your elders, you had no right to!’
‘But it turned out to be what Laura and Dad wanted. I learned from the rabbi that they’d reserved graves in the Reform cemetery, side by side.’
‘Your father probably got his secretary to fix that up, he was that sort of man,’ Shirley said coldly, ‘and there’s a lot of him in you – though I didn’t use to think so.’
‘I’ll take that as the compliment it wasn’t intended to be,’ Jeremy told her. ‘Fortunately for her husband and children, there was nothing of you in Laura,’ he added before leaving Shirley alone with her anguish.
When shortly afterwards Marianne arrived, Shirley found herself weeping on her cousin’s shoulder.
‘We’ve never been friends, but you have to be sorry for me now,’ Shirley said through her tears. ‘First I lose my son, then my husband, and now this…’
‘I wouldn’t put it that way about your husband,’ said Marianne. ‘Divorce isn’t death and you were as keen to be free of Peter as he was of you.’
‘It wasn’t like that!’ Shirley blew her nose and calmed down. ‘After we lost our son – and then Laura ran away to London and you took her in—’
‘You’re never going to forgive me for that, are you?’ Marianne interrupted. ‘Though it was decades ago.’
‘What does it matter now if I do, or not?’ Shirley said bleakly. ‘Laura’s leaving home put the coffin lid on my marriage. All right, so divorce isn’t death, but a marriage can die and mine did.’
She added with bitterness, ‘My ex-husband will probably bring his new wife to his daughter’s funeral.’
‘Peter’s been married to Hildegard for years,’ Marianne reminded her.
‘But Laura was his daughter and mine, and I can’t bear to tell him she’s gone, Marianne. Would you mind making the call?’
Briefly Marianne felt herself back in her former niche, the person upon whom everyone in the family relied. Before she made her escape to Bermuda and a blissfully peaceful life.
‘But check with Jeremy, first,’ Shirley advised. ‘He may have taken it on himself to ring up Peter, like he did with the rabbi. His father isn’t yet in his grave and already that boy is running the show!’
Marianne said after a pause, ‘If I were you, Shirley, I’d be grateful and let him get on with it.’
‘Well, you were always the younger generation’s staunchest supporter, weren’t you? Encouraging them to run wild, instead of warning them like their parents would.’
‘Encouraging them to be their own person, you mean,’ Marianne rejoined, ‘which is everyone’s right.’
