The Inheritance (14 page)

Afterward he couldn’t get the place out of his head. He cursed his own curiosity, wished he hadn’t gone to Marjean. He was drinking more than a
bottle of wine every day when he went to the Playhouse one afternoon early in the new year at the suggestion of his friend, Harry Brooks, and met a young actress called Mary Martin for the first time.

Except that it wasn’t the first time. He was sure of that now. She’d been sitting on one of the stone seats in the college’s medieval cloister about a week before when he came round the corner one evening, burdened with two heavy bags of pamphlets that his action group had had printed at the University Press.

Half the cloister was dark even on sunny days, since two of its four sides were in the shadow of a great oak tree growing in one of the corners, and it was long past sunset when he saw her. In fact, the only light came from the moon hanging overhead, and Stephen could hardly make out the woman’s features, although he stopped when he came upon her and dropped his bags on the ground, arrested by her unexpected presence, almost jumping to the conclusion that she was a ghost, the spurned wife or mistress of some long-dead professor. But then he’d remembered that he didn’t believe in ghosts and been about to apologise when the woman got up and walked away. They hadn’t exchanged a word, but still, looking back now, almost a year later, he was certain it was Mary whom he’d seen in the cloister.

The strange part was that, all the time they were together, neither of them had ever referred to that first encounter. At the beginning he couldn’t be sure it was her, and later he’d forgotten all about it, but now he couldn’t get the memory of that January evening out of his mind.

And then the following Saturday after that first meeting, Harry came to his rooms with two tickets for a play. It was some forgettable melodrama, and Stephen never went to the theatre. He had more important things to do. But Harry insisted. He’d met this pretty actress at a party and she’d given him the tickets for the matinée, with an invitation to come backstage afterward. Stephen went reluctantly, complaining all the way, but then, when the curtain went up, he sat transfixed by the girl with the beautiful chestnut hair and the liquid eyes, whom Harry pointed out was the actress from the party, the one who’d given him the tickets. Stephen felt sure he’d seen her before, but he couldn’t remember when. She was so alive, it was as if he could feel the red lifeblood pumping through the myriad of blue veins under her unblemished skin.

Afterward, Harry took him backstage, and there she was, looking back at
him from a mirror hung on the wall of the dressing room, with her blouse half unbuttoned so that he could see the beginnings of her breasts. She smiled at him, and he sensed her understanding of his confusion. He stammered out some compliment about her performance and she laughed. It was infectious and it came from deep inside, and he laughed too, forgetting his awkwardness in the doorway.

“And so you must be Stephen,” she’d said, and he had never asked her then or later how she knew his name before they’d been introduced. He just assumed that Harry must have told her at the party. The way she said his name had made him feel that she had singled him out, selected him for whatever was going to happen next. Harry stood forgotten in the corner. He felt ill treated, but there was nothing he could do, and his friendship with Stephen didn’t survive that afternoon.

But Stephen didn’t care. He was in love, and the next day, in the early morning, Mary met him outside the front gates of New College and they went cycling away into the countryside. Mary had brought wine and sandwiches, and once or twice they stopped to drink, sitting on the roadside grass, which was still wet with the morning dew. But Mary wouldn’t tell him where they were going, until she suddenly turned off the main road just outside the village of Burford and freewheeled down a grassy path to the ruins of a medieval manor house, standing on the bank of a fast-flowing river called the Windrush. She said the name of the house was Minster Lovell, and it reminded Stephen irresistibly of Marjean, although he didn’t mention that to Mary. The present was good: an escape from his father and the past.

They sat in the shadow of a silver-grey tower with curving, well-worn steps that led up into thin air, and Mary told him the story of Francis, the last of the Lovells, who’d shut himself up in a secret room beneath the manor house after joining in a failed rebellion against King Henry VII at the end of the fifteenth century. An old servant had brought him food and all was well for a while, but then the servant died and Sir Francis Lovell, unable to get out of his hiding place from the inside, slowly starved to death. Two hundred years passed and no one knew his fate, until a party of workmen broke into the underground chamber by accident and found a skeleton sitting at a table with its hand resting on a pile of papers, which crumbled into dust with the sudden ingress of outside air.

Mary delighted in stories like this. Another time she took Stephen to a little nondescript cottage down by the canal and told him about an Oxford bargeman who had once lived there with his young wife. One day he had come back home unexpectedly from work and found his wife in bed with his neighbour, and so he picked up a hammer and killed the man. He was restrained before he had time to start on his wife.

“What happened to him?” Stephen asked.

“They didn’t hang him because it was a crime of passion,” said Mary. “They locked him up for twenty-five years instead. But the wife was already pregnant with the other man’s child, and she gave birth just a few days after the trial.”

“And then?” asked Stephen, realising that there was more to come.

“The bargeman did his time and got released early for good behaviour, and the same day he got out he killed his wife and her son, even though twenty years had gone by and the young man had nothing to do with what had gone before.”

“What a bastard,” said Stephen. “Did they hang him then?”

“They didn’t need to. He killed himself. He’d done what he’d been waiting to do, you see? His revenge was complete. There was no more reason to stay alive.”

“How do you know all this?” he asked.

“Books. Chapters in guidebooks. They come with being a tourist.”

“You’re not a tourist. You work here,” said Stephen, seeking reassurance that she wouldn’t be going away.

“The play won’t go on forever,” she said. “I’ll have to find other work when it’s over.”

But the season was extended and they didn’t return to the subject of separation for a while.

They were terrible stories that Mary told him, the stuff of nightmares, but she never explained why she felt the need to tell them. Stephen just accepted the stories with everything else that came with his new girlfriend. She made the rules and he was only too happy to play by them, if it meant that he could be with her. He could think of nothing else. It was as if she had him under a spell. And in truth Stephen was happy to submit himself to Mary. She gave him back the love he’d lost when his mother died. She put
the magic back into his life. And telling her about Marjean seemed to have exorcised his ghosts, at least for a while.

But then sometimes she would disappear for days without a word. Stephen hated her absence, but he knew better than to complain, and anyway he wouldn’t have known where to look even if he had tried to track her down. She’d told him she was sharing a flat somewhere in North Oxford with another actress, but Mary never invited Stephen there, and he never met any of her friends or relations—except Paul, and that was only in passing.

Paul was Mary’s brother. And the first Stephen knew of him was one morning soon after he and Mary had become lovers. He’d slept late into the morning, and not for the first time. Being with Mary seemed to have this effect, turning him from a virtual insomniac into a deep sleeper who sometimes slept ten hours a night.

There were voices in the room next door. One of them was Mary’s; the other Stephen did not recognise. Pulling a dressing gown around him, Stephen opened the door. Mary was standing over by the window talking to a tall, well-dressed man with a bony face and short cropped hair. They both seemed startled by his sudden entrance. Mary was the first to recover her composure.

“I’m sorry, Stephen. I didn’t want to wake you,” she said, coming toward him with a smile. “This is my brother, Paul. He had some news to tell me that couldn’t wait.”

“Hullo,” said Stephen awkwardly. He had a strange sense of being an intruder in his own rooms, and being half dressed put him at a disadvantage.

And there was something off-putting about the man. There seemed to be no warmth in his narrow eyes, and he didn’t look like Mary at all. He nodded a response to Stephen’s greeting and turned away, picking up a briefcase that he’d left on the floor by the door. And it was as he turned the handle of the door to leave that Stephen noticed he was wearing gloves.

“I didn’t know you had a brother,” said Stephen, after Paul had left. “You never mentioned him to me before.”

“There was no reason to. He’s quite a bit older than me and I don’t see him very often. He wouldn’t have come here unless it was urgent.”

“What’s wrong?”

“Our mother’s sick again. I must go and see her for a couple of days.”

Stephen
did
know about Mary’s mother. One evening soon after they first met Mary had told Stephen all about her. She was a Frenchwoman who had come to England in the 1930s to marry Mary’s father, an Englishman who hadn’t survived the war, dying like so many others on the shores of Normandy in 1944. And Mary had grown up in Bournemouth of all places—Mary’s mother had been told by her doctors that the sea air would be good for her delicate health. They spoke French at home after Mary’s father died, and Mary’s slightly accented English stood her in good stead when she started out acting in repertory theatres along the south coast after she left school. It gave her a touch of glamour and won her roles that she might not have got otherwise.

Stephen was impressed by Mary’s success at earning her own living, but he could never quite come to terms with her acting. Her transformation on stage into another person excited and frightened him all at the same time. In the week after they first met he went to see her perform almost every night, but afterward he preferred to wait for her at the stage door. It was easier that way.

The truth was that Stephen was jealous of this other world that Mary inhabited. It increased her attractiveness but also made him uneasy. And he had the same feeling when he thought about her brother, although in fact he only saw Paul once more before the end. It was one evening about a month later, and Stephen was returning from a lecture. It started raining suddenly, and he stepped into a coffee shop for shelter, and there they were, Mary and her brother, sitting at the back, deep in conversation. He thought of going up to them but something held him back, and, with a start, he realised that he was feeling something very close to jealousy, which was of course absurd. Conquering his hesitation, he called out Mary’s name and waved to get her attention. She seemed flustered when she caught sight of him and spoke quickly to her brother before she smiled, beckoning him over. And, by the time he got to the table, Paul had got up to go. He nodded to Stephen without speaking, and there was the same blank expression in his eyes that Stephen had noticed at the time of their first encounter. And then he was gone.

“Your brother doesn’t seem to like me much,” said Stephen, sitting down in the chair that Paul had just vacated.

“It’s not that,” said Mary. “He was in a hurry.”

“Obviously.”

“All right,” she said, smiling. “You’re right. He was rude. And I’m sorry he was. It’s because he’s shy. He’s not academic, literary, like you. He doesn’t feel at home here.”

“So where does he feel at home?”

“London,” said Mary briefly.

“Then why does he come here?”

“To see me. He is my brother, you know. It’s your choice that you hardly ever see yours.”

And they began talking about Silas and Stephen’s father and all the reasons why Stephen had left his past behind, until it was time to go home and Stephen didn’t even remember that Mary had changed the subject.

Summer had almost arrived and the play’s run had long since finished, but Mary had stayed on in Oxford, and Stephen had no idea how she was supporting herself. They’d never talked about money, until she told him one afternoon that her mother’s health had become much worse to the point that she urgently needed an operation that could only be performed in Switzerland. It was an unusual illness that had something to do with her heart, although Stephen never understood the details. Just that it would cost a lot of money. Mary said she’d have to go away and get a part in Manchester or London unless she could raise what she needed here in Oxford. It was his fear of losing Mary just as much as pressure from Silas that made Stephen write to his father, asking to come home, and the old man’s last act before he died was to refuse to give his son the money he needed for Mary, even though he had more than enough money to fund a hundred operations. If Stephen had won the game of chess, he could have had the money, but he had lost, and so he’d got nothing.

Stephen remembered like it was yesterday the mean, tight-lipped way in which his father had refused him. Enraged, he’d practically run out into the courtyard, gasping for air, because God knows what he would’ve done if he’d stayed in there with the old bastard. Instead, as it turned out, he’d left his father behind for the last time, because, in the few minutes that it took him to walk to the gate and back, someone calmly went into the study and shot John Cade in the head—put an end to him once and for all and left
Stephen to pay for something he’d never done. Who had it been? Who had it been?