The Legacy (5 page)

“Guess not. Who’s Dinny?”

“Dinny . . . was a boy we used to play with. When we came here as kids. His family lived nearby. So . . .” I trail off. Why should talking about Dinny make me feel so conspicuous? Dinny. With his square hands so good at making things. Dark eyes smiling through his fringe, and his hair a thatch that I once stuck daisies into while he slept, my fingers trembling with suppressed mirth, with my audacity; to be so close and to touch him. “He was a real adventurer. He built a fabulous tree house one year . . .”

“Can we see it? Is it still there?” he asks.

“We can go and look, if you like,” I offer. Eddie grins, and jogs a few paces ahead, taking aim at a sapling, tackling it with a two-handed blow.

Eddie’s adult teeth haven’t sorted themselves out yet. They seem to jostle for position in his mouth. There are big gaps, and a pair that cross over. They’ll be clamped behind braces soon enough.

“What did I hear the other boys calling you from the train?” I call out to him.

He grimaces. “Pot Plant,” he admits, ruefully.

“Why on
earth
. . . ?”

“Well, it’s kind of embarrassing . . . do I have to say?”

“Yeah, you do. No secrets between us.” I smile. Eddie sighs.

“Miss Wilton keeps a little plant on her desk—I’m not sure what it is. Mum has them too—dark purple flowers, with furry leaves?”

“Sounds like an African violet.”

“Whatever. Well, she left us in there on detention at lunchtime, and I said I was so hungry I could eat anything, so Ben bet me a fiver I wouldn’t eat her plant. So . . .”

“So you did?” I raise an eyebrow, folding my arms as we walk. Eddie shrugs, but he can’t help but look a little pleased.

“Not the
whole
thing. Just the flowers.”

“Eddie!”

“Don’t tell Mum!” he chortles, jogging on again. “What was your nickname at school?” he calls back to me.

“I didn’t really have one. Just Rick. I was always the youngest one, tagging along. Dinny called me ‘Pup,’ sometimes,” I tell him.

We are closer than many aunts and nephews, Eddie and I. I stayed with him for two months while Beth recovered, while she
got help
. It was a strained time, a time of keeping going and pretending, and being normal and not fussing. We didn’t have any big conversations. We didn’t bare our souls, pour out our hearts. Eddie was too young, and I am too impatient. But we shared a time of extreme awkwardness, of concentrated sadness and anger and confusion. We jarred along, the both of us feeling that way; and that’s what makes us close—the knowledge of that time. His father Maxwell and I holding hushed, strangled arguments behind closed doors, not wanting Eddie to hear his father call his mother
unfit
.

All that remains of the tree house are a few ragged planks, dark and green and slimy looking; like the rotten bones of a shipwreck.

“Well, I guess it’s kind of had its day,” I say, sadly.

“You could rebuild it. I’ll help, if you want?” Eddie says, keen to cheer me up.

I smile. “We could try. It’s more of a summer thing though—it’d be a bit cold and mucky up there now, I should think.”

“Why did you stop coming here? To visit Great-Grandma?” An innocent question, poor Eddie, to ease the moment. What a question for him to ask.

“Oh . . . you know. We just . . . went on holiday with our parents more as we got older. I don’t really remember.”

“But you always say you never forget the important things that happen when you’re a kid. That’s what you told me, when I won that prize for speech and drama.” I had meant it to be a positive thing when I said it. But he won the prize while I was staying with him for those two months, and what we both thought, at the same time, was that what he would always remember was coming home from school and finding Beth the way he did. I saw the thought fly across his face, shut my eyes, wished I could pull my words back out of the air.

“Well, that just goes to show that it can’t have been that big a thing, doesn’t it?” I say lightly. “Come on—there’s loads more to see.”

We head back toward the house, ducking into the orangery as it starts to pour with rain. From there, barely getting wet, we dodge from shed to shed, through the old stables to the coach house, which is congested with junk and spattered with bird shit. Above our heads we count the swallows’ nests, clinging to the beams like fungus. Eddie finds a small axe, the blade garish with rust.

“Awesome!” he breathes, brandishing it in a swooping arc. I grab his wrist, test the comprehensive bluntness of the axe with my thumb.

“Be extremely careful with it,” I say, fixing him in the eye. “And don’t bring it into the house.”

“I won’t,” he says, swooping it again, smiling at the thrum of severed air.

Outside, it grows darker and the rain falls faster. A stream of muddy water bubbles past the coach house door.

“Let’s go in, shall we? Your mum’ll be wondering where we’ve got to.”

“She should come out and see the tree house, see if she thinks we could rebuild it. Do you think she would?”

“I don’t know, Ed. You know how quickly she gets cold when the weather’s like this,” I say. Nothing between the core of her and the winter chill. No flesh, no muscle, no thick skin.

Beth is making mince pies again when we clatter into the kitchen. She’s rolling the pastry, cutting the shapes, filling them, baking them, bagging them. She started yesterday, in preparation for Eddie’s arrival, and shows no sign of stopping. The kitchen table is awash with flour and scraps, empty mincemeat jars. The smell is heavenly. Flushed, she brings another batch out from the Rayburn oven, slapping the trays down onto the scarred counter. She’s filled every tin and biscuit barrel. There are several bags in the ancient freezer in the cellar. I pick two up, pass one to Eddie. The filling scalds my tongue.

“These are fabulous, Beth,” I say, by way of a greeting. She shoots me a small smile, which broadens when it moves to her son. She crosses to kiss his cheek, leaving ghostly flour fingerprints on his sleeves.

“Well done, darling. All your teachers seem very pleased with you,” she tells him. I pick up the report card from the table, blow flour from it and flick through. “With the possible exception of Miss Wilton . . .” she qualifies. She of the African violet.

“What does she teach?” I ask him, as he squirms slightly.

“French,” Eddie mumbles, through a mouthful of pie.

“She says you aren’t trying nearly hard enough, and that when you do try you prove that you should be doing much better than you currently are,” Beth goes on, holding Eddie’s shoulders, not letting him escape. He shrugs ambiguously. “And—
three
detentions this term? What’s that all about?”

“French is just so
boring
!” he declares. “And Miss Wilton is
so
strict! She’s really unfair! One of those detentions I got was because Ben threw a note at me! It was hardly my fault!”

“Well, just try to pay a bit more attention, OK? French is really important—no, it is!” she insists, when Eddie rolls his eyes. “When I’m rich and I retire to the south of France, how are you going to cope if you can’t speak the language?”

“By shouting and pointing?” he ventures. Beth presses her lips together severely, but then she laughs, a rich, glowing sound I so rarely hear. She can’t help it, not with Eddie. “Can I have another mince pie?” he asks, sensing victory.

“Go on. Then go and get in the bath—you’re filthy!” Eddie grabs two pies and darts out of the kitchen.

“Take your bag up with you!” Beth calls after him.

“I’ve run out of hands!” Eddie calls back.

“Run out of inclination, is more like it,” Beth says to me, smiling ruefully.

Later, we watch a film; Beth curled with Eddie on the sofa with a huge bowl of popcorn wedged between them. When I glance at her I see that she’s hardly following the film. She turns her chin, rests it on the top of Eddie’s head, shuts her eyes contentedly, and I feel some of the knots inside me loosen, slipping away into the warmth of the open fire. The weekend passes quickly this way—a trip to the cinema in Devizes, school work at the kitchen table, mince pies; Eddie out in the coach house, or marauding through the deserted stables, wielding his axe. Beth is serene, if a little distracted. She stops baking when she runs out of flour, and stands for long moments, watching Eddie through the window with a faint, faraway smile.

“I might take him to France next summer,” she says to me, not breaking off this vigil as I pass her a cup of tea.

“I think he’d love it,” I say.

“The Dordogne, perhaps. Or the Lot Valley. We could go river swimming.” I love to hear her make plans. Future plans. I love to know she is thinking that far ahead. I rest my chin on her shoulder for a moment, follow her gaze out into the garden.

“I told you he’d have fun here,” I remark. “Christmas will be excellent.” Her hair smells faintly of mint and I pull it over her shoulder, smooth it flat against her sweater with a long sweep of my hand.

O
n Sunday afternoon, Maxwell arrives to collect his son. I shout for Beth as I open the door to him, and when she does not appear I give Maxwell a short tour of the ground floor and make him a coffee. Maxwell divorced Beth five years ago, when her depression seemed to be getting worse and her weight plummeted, and he said he just couldn’t cope and it was no way to raise a child. So he left her and remarried pretty much straight away—a short, plump, healthy-looking woman called Diane: white teeth, cashmere, perfect nails. Uncomplicated. Beth’s depression was very convenient for Maxwell, I’ve always thought. But he’s not all bad. He met her at a good time, that’s all, when she was all grace and demure beauty. She was like a swan then, like a lily. A fair-weather friend is what Maxwell turned out to be. Now his grey raincoat is dripping onto the flagstones, but the rain can’t spoil the sheen of wealth on hair, shoes, skin.

“Quite an impressive place,” he says, taking a gulp of the scalding hot coffee with a loud sound I don’t like.

“Yes, I suppose it is,” I agree, leaning against the Rayburn, folding my arms. I found it hard to warm to Maxwell when he was still my brother-in-law. Now, I find it near impossible.

“Needs a lot of work, of course. But huge potential,” he declares. He made his money in property, and I wonder, with a touch of spite, how the credit crunch is working out for him. Huge potential. He said that about the cottage Beth bought near Esher, after the divorce. He sees everything with a developer’s eye, but Beth kept the swollen wooden doors, the fireplaces that only draw when the windows are open. She likes it half broken. “Have you decided what you’re going to do with it?”

“No, not yet. Beth and I haven’t really talked about it,” I say. A flash of irritation crosses his face. He never did like diffidence getting in the way of good sense.

“Well, this legacy could make the pair of you very wealthy women—”

“We’d have to stay here, though. Live here. I’m not sure that’s what either of us wants.”

“But you needn’t rattle around in the whole house. Have you thought about converting it into flats? You’d need planning, of course, but that shouldn’t be a problem. You could keep an apartment and the freehold for yourselves, and sell the rest off with long leaseholds. You’d make an absolute killing, and keep to the terms of the will.”

“That would cost thousands and thousands . . .” I shake my head. “Besides, we’re having a recession, remember? I thought building and developing was at a standstill?”

“We may be in recession now, but in two years’ time, three? People will always need places to live, in the long term.” Maxwell tips his head, considering. “You’d need investors. I could help you with that. I might even be interested myself . . .” I see him look around the room with renewed attention, as if drawing up plans, measuring. It gives me a spasm of distaste.

“Thanks. I’ll mention it to Beth.” My tone is final. Maxwell looks at me with a stern eye but says nothing for a while.

He fixes his eyes on a painting of fruit on the opposite wall, and at length he clears his throat slightly, so I know what he will ask next.

“And how is Beth?”

“She’s fine,” I shrug, deliberately vague. Again, irritation shimmers across his features, puckers his forehead into a deeper frown.

“Come on, Erica. When I saw her last week she was looking very thin again. Is she eating? Has she been acting up at all?” I try not to think about the mince pies. About the hundreds of mince pies.

“Not that I’ve noticed,” I lie. It’s a big lie. She’s getting worse again, and though I don’t exactly know why, I do know when it started—when she peaked, and started to fall again: it was when Meredith died. When, by dying, she brought this place back into our lives.

“So where is she?”

“I’ve no idea. Probably in the bathroom,” I shrug.

“Keep an eye on her,” he mutters. “I don’t want Eddie spending Christmas here if she’s going to have one of her episodes. It’s just not fair on him.”