THE INHERITANCE
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“It’s a mile and a half direct,” he said, pointing into the woods, “longer by road.”We crossed the deer park and had nearly reached the edge of the woods when we heard voices. It was a woman’s voice that swam through the rain, up the gravel drive to her children and over the park as far as us. “I told you, Tom. It’s too wet. They ’t work when it’s raining like this.” The children had e to a halt in disappoi at seeing the stationary es and maery. With their sou’westers over their blond heads, I could not tell them apart. The woman caught up with them, and the family huddled for a moment in a brief ferenatoshes.
Aurelius was rapt by the family tableau.
‘I’ve seen them before,“ I said. ”Do you know who they are?“
‘They’re a family. They live ireet. The house with the swing. Karen looks after the deer here.“
‘Do they still hunt here?“
‘No. She just looks after them. They’re a nice family.“
Enviously he gazed after them, then he broke his attention with a shake of his head. “Mrs. Love was very good to me,” he said, “and I loved her. All this other stuff—” He made a dismissive gesture and turoward the woods. “e o’s go home.”
The family in matoshes, turning back toward the lodge gates, had clearly reached the same decision.
Aurelius and I walked through the woods in silent friendship.
There were no leaves to cut out the light and the branches, blaed by rain, reached dark across the watery sky. Stretg out an arm to push away low branches, Aurelius dislodged extra raindrops to add to those that fell on us from the sky. We came across a fallen tree and leaned over it, staring into the dark pool of rain in its hollow that had softehe rotting bark almost to fur.
Then, “Home,” Aurelius pronounced.
It was a small stotage. Built for enduraher than decoration, but attractive all the same, in its simple and solid lines. Aurelius led me around the side of the house. Was it a hundred years old or two hud? It was hard to tell. It wasn’t the kind of house that a hundred years made much differeo. Except that at the back there was a large ension, almost as large as the house itself, and taken up entirely with a kit.
‘My sanctuary,“ he said as he showed me in.
A massive stainless-steel oven, white walls, two vast fridges—it was a real kit for a real cook.
Aurelius pulled out a chair for me and I sat at a small table by a bookcase. The shelves were filled with cookbooks, in French, English, Italian. One book, uhe others, was out oable. It was a thiotebook, ers blunt with age, and covered in broer that had goransparent after decades of being handled with buttery fingers. Someone had written RECIPIES on the front, in old-fashioned, school-formed capitals. Some years later the writer had crossed out the sed I, using a different pen.
‘May I?“ I asked.
‘Of course.“
I opehe book and began to leaf through it. Victoria sponge, date and walnut loaf, ses, ginger cake, maids of honor, bakewell tart, rich fruit cake… the spelling and the handwriting improving as the pages turned.
Aurelius turned a dial on the oven, then, moving lightly, assembled his ingredients. After that everything was within reach, aretched out an arm for a sieve or a khout looking. He moved in his kit the way drivers ge gear in their cars: an arm reag out smoothly, indepely, knowily what <tt>?t>to do, while his eyes never left the fixed spot in front of him: the bowl in which he was bining his ingredients. He sieved flour, chopped butter into dice, zested an e. It was as natural as breathing.
‘You see that cupboard?“ he said ”There to your left? Would you open it?“
Thinking he wanted a piece of equipment, I opehe cupboard door.
‘You’ll find a bag hanging on a peg inside.“
It was a kind of satchel. Old and curiously designed, its sides were not stitched but just tucked in. It fastened with a buckle, and a long, broad leather strap, attached with a rusty clasp at each side, allowed you presumably to wear it diagonally across your body. The leather was dry and cracked, and the vas that might once have been khaki was now just the color of age.
‘What is it?“ I asked.
For a sed he raised his eyes from the bowl to me.
‘It’s the bag I was found in.“
He turned babining his ingredients.
The bag he was found in? My eyes moved slowly from the satchel to Aurelius. Eve over his kneading he was over six feet tall. I had thought him a storybook giant when I first set eyes on him, I remembered. Today the strap wouldn’t even go around his girth, yet sixty years ago he had been small enough to fit inside. Dizzy at the thought of what time do, I sat down again. Who was it that had placed a baby in this satchel so long ago? Folded its vas around him, fastehe buckle against the weather and placed the strap over her body to carry him, through the night, to Mrs. Love’s? I ran my fingers over the places she had touched. vas, buckle, strap. Seeking some trace of her. A clue, in Braille or invisible ink or code, that my touch might reveal if only it knew how. It did not know how.
‘It’s exasperating, isn’t it?“ Aurelius said.
I heard him slide something into the oven and close the door, then I felt him behind me, looking over my shoulder.
‘You open it—I’ve got flour on my hands.“
I undid the buckle and opehe pleats of vas. They unfolded into a flat circle in the ter of which lay a tangle of paper and rag.
‘My iance,“ he announced.
The things looked like a pile of discarded junk waiting to be swept into the bin, but he gazed at them with the iy of a boy staring at a treasure trove. “These things are my story,” he said. “These things tell me who I am. It’s just a matter of… of uanding them.” His bafflement was i but resigned. “I’ve tried all my life to piece them together. I keep thinking, If only I could find the thread… it would all fall into place. Take that, for instance—”
It iece of cloth. Linen, once white, now yellow. I disenta from the other objects and smoothed it out. It was embroidered with a pattern of stars and flowers also in white; there were four dainty mother-of-pearl buttons; it was an infant’s dress htgown. Aurelius’s broad fingers hovered over the tiny garment, wanting to touot wanting to mark it with flour. The narrow sleeves would just fit over a finger now.
‘It’s what I was wearing,“ Aurelius explained.
‘It’s very old.“
‘As old as me, I suppose.“
‘Older than that, even.“
‘Do you think so?“
‘Look at the stitg here—and here. It’s been mended more than nee. And this butto match. Other babies wore this before you.“
His eyes flitted from the scrap of lio me and back to the cloth, hungry for knowledge.
‘And there’s this.“ He poi a page of print. It was torn from a book and riddled with creases. Taking it in my hands I started to read.
‘… not at first aware what was his iion; but when I saw him lift and poise the book and stand in act to hurl it, I instinctively started aside with a cry of alarm—“
Aurelius took up the phrase and tinued, reading not from the page but from memory: “… not soon enough however; the volume was flung, it hit me, and I fell, striking my head against the door and cutting it.”
Of course I reized it. How could I not, for I had read it goodness knows how many times. “Jane Eyre, ” I said wly.
‘Y? Yes, it is. I asked a man in a library. It’s by Charlotte someone. She had a lot of sisters, apparently.“
‘Have you read it?“
‘Started to. It was about a little girl. She’s lost her family, and so her aunt takes her in. I thought I was on to something with that. Nasty woman, the aunt, not like Mrs. Love at all. This is one of her cousins throwing the book at her, on this page. But later she goes to school, a terrible school, terrible food, but she does make a friend.“ He smiled, remembering his reading. ”Only then the friend died.“ His face fell. ”And after that… I seemed to lose i. Didn’t read the end. I couldn’t see how it fitted after that.“ He shrugged off his puzzlement. ”Have you read it? What happeo her in the end? Is it relevant?“
‘She falls in love with her employer. His wife—she’s mad, lives in the house but secretly—tries to burn the house down, and Jane goes away. When she es back, the wife has died, and Mr. Rochester is blind, and Jane marries him.“
‘Ah.“ His forehead wrinkled as he tried to puzzle it all out. But he gave up. ”No. It doesn’t make sense, does it? The beginning, perhaps. The girl without the mother. But after that… I wish someone could tell me what it means. I wish there was someone who could just tell me the truth.“
He turned back to the torn-out page. “Probably it’s not the book that’s important at all. Perhaps it’s just this page. Perhaps it has some secret meaning. Look here—”
Ihe back cover of his childhood recipe book were tightly packed ns and rows of numbers aers written in a large, boyish hand. “I used to think it was a code,” he explained. “I tried to decipher it. I tried the first letter of every word, the first of every line. Or the sed. Then I tried replag oer for another.” He poio his various trials, eyes feverish, as though there was still a ce he might see something that had escaped him before.
I k was hopeless.
‘What about this?“ I picked up the objed couldn’t help giving a shudder. Clearly it had been a feather once, but now it was a nasty, dirty-looking thing. Its oils dried up, the barbs had separated into stiff brown spikes along the cracked spine.
Aurelius shrugged his shoulders and shook his head in helpless ignorance, and I dropped the feather with relief.
And then there was just one more thing. “Now this…” Aurelius began, but he didn’t finish. It was a scrap of paper, roughly torn, with a faded ink stain that might once have been a word. I peered at it closely.
‘I think—“ Aurelius stuttered, ”well, Mrs. Love thought— We both agreed, in fact“—he looked at me in hope—”that it must be my name.“
He pointed. “It got wet in the rain, but here, just here—” He led me :o the window, gestured at me to hold the paper scrap up to the light. ‘Something like an A at the beginning. And then an S. Just here, toward he end. Of course, it’s faded a bit, over the years; you have to look lard, but you see it, ’t you?“
I stared at the stain.
‘’t you?“
I made a vague motion with my head, her nod nor shake.
‘You see! It’s obvious when you know what you’re looking for, isn’t it?
I tio look, but the phantom letters that he could see were invisible to my eye.
‘And that,“ he was saying, ”is how Mrs. Love settled on Aurelius. Though I might just as easily be Alphonse, I suppose.“
He laughed at himself, sadly, uneasily, and turned away. “The only other thing was the spoon. But you’ve seen that.” He reached into his top pocket and took out the silver spoon I had seen at our first meeting, whee ginger cake while sitting on the giant cats flanking the steps of Angelfield House.
‘And the bag itself,“ I wondered. ”What kind of a bag is it?“
‘Just a bag,“ he said vaguely. He lifted it to his fad s delicately. ”It used to smell of smoke, but not anymore.“ He passed it to me, and I bent my o it. ”You see? It’s faded now.“
Aurelius opehe oven door and took out a tray of pale gold biscuits that he set to cool. Then he filled the kettle and prepared a tray. Cups and saucers, a sugar bowl, a milk jug and little plates.
‘You take this,“ he said, passing the tray to me. He opened a door that showed a glimpse of a sitting room, old fy chairs and floral cushions. ”Make yourself at home. I’ll bring the rest in a minute.“ He kept his bae, head bowed as he washed his hands. ”I’ll be with you when I’ve put these things away.“
I went into Mrs. Love’s front room and sat in a chair by the fireplace, leaving him to stow his iance—his invaluable, indecipherable iance—safely away.
I left the house with something scratg at my mind. Was it something Aurelius had said? Yes. Some echo or e had vaguely appealed for my attention but had bee away by the rest of his story. It didn’t matter. It would e bae.
In the woods there is a clearing. Beh it, the ground falls away steeply and is covered in patchy scrub before it levels out and there are trees again. Because of this, it provides an ued vantage point from which to view the house. It was in this clearing that I stopped, on my way back from Aurelius’s cottage.
The se was bleak. The house, or what remained of it, was ghostly. A smudge of gray against a gray sky. The upper stories on the left-hand side were all gohe ground floor remaihe door frame demarcated by its dark stone lintel and the steps that led up to it, but the door itself was go was not a day to be open to the elements, and I shivered for the half-dismantled house. Eveos had aba. Like the deer, they had taken themselves off out of the wet. The right-hand side of the building was still largely intact, though to judge by the position of the e it would be o go. Was all that maery really necessary? I caught myself thinking. For it looked as if the walls were simply dissolving in the rain; those stoill standing, pale and insubstantial as rice paper, seemed ready to melt away under my very eyes if I just stood there long enough.
My camera was slung around my neck. I disenta from under my coat and raised it to my eyes. Was it possible to capture the eva appearance of the house through all this wetness? I doubted it but was willing to try.
I was adjusting the long-distance lens when I caught a slight movement at the edge of the frame. Not my ghost. The children were back. They had seen something in the grass, were bending over it excitedly. What was it? A hedgehog? A snake? Curious, I fiuhe focus to see more clearly.
One of the children reached into the long grass and lifted the discovery out of it. It was a yellow builder’s hat. With a delighted smile he pushed back his sou’wester—I could see it was the boy nolaced the hat on his head. Stiff as a soldier he stood, chest out, head up, arms by his side, fatent with tration to keep the toe hat from slipping.
Just as he struck his pose there came a small miracle. A shaft of sun-light found its way through a gap in the cloud and fell upon the boy, illuminating him in his moment of glory. I clicked the shutter and my photo was taken. The boy i, over his left shoulder a yellow Keep Out sign, and to his right, in the background, the house, a dismal smudge of gray.
The sun disappeared, and I took my eye off the children to wind the film and tuck my camera away in the dry. When I looked back, the children were halfway down the drive. His left hand in her right, bbr></abbr>they were whirling around and around as they approached the lodge gates, equal stride, equal weight, eae a perfect terbalao the other. With the tails of their matoshes flaring behind them, feet barely skimming the ground, they looked as if they were about to lift into the air and fly.
JANE EYRE AND THE FURNACE
When I went back to Yorkshire, I received no explanation for my banishment. Judith greeted me with a strained smile. The grayness of the daylight had crept under her skin, collected in shadows under her eyes. She pulled the curtains back a few more inches in my sitting room, exposing a bit more window, but it made no differeo the gloom. “Blasted weather,” she exclaimed, and I thought she seemed at the end of her tether.
Though it was only days, it felt like ay. Often night, but never quite day, the darkening effect of the heavy sky threw us all out of time. Miss Winter arrived late to one of our m meetings. She, too, ale-faced; I didn’t know whether it was the memory of ret pain that put the darkness in her eyes or something else.
‘I propose a more flexible timetable for our meetings,“ she said when she was settled in her circle of light.
‘Of course.“ I knew of her bad nights from my interview with the doctor, could see when the medicatioook to trol her pain was wearing off or had not yet taken full effect. And so we agreed that instead of presenting myself at nine every m, I would wait instead for a tap at my door.
At first the tap came always between nine ahen it drifted to later. After the doctor altered her dosage, she took to asking for me early in the ms, but our meetings were shorter; then we fell into a habit of meeting twice or three times a day, at random times. Sometimes she called me when she felt well and spoke at length, and iail. At other times she called me when she was in pain. Then it was not so much the pany she wanted as the ahetic qualities of the storytelling itself.
The end of my nine o’clocks was another anchor in time gone. I listeo her story, I wrote the story, when I slept I dreamed the story, and when I was awake it was the story that formed the stant backdrop of my thoughts. It was like liviirely inside a book. I didn’t eveo emerge to eat, for I could sit at my desk reading my transcript while I ate the meals that Judith brought to my room. Pe meant it was m. Soup and salad meant lunchtime. Steak and kidney pie was evening. I remember p for a long time over a dish of scrambled egg. What did it mean? It could mean anything. I ate a few mouthfuls and pushed the plate away.
In this long, undiffer<samp>..</samp>entiated lapse of time, there were a few is that stood out. I hem at the time, separately from the story, and they are worth recalling here.
This is one.
I was in the library. I was looking for Jane Eyre and found almost a whole shelf of copies. It was the colle of a fanatic: There were cheap, modern copies, with no sedhand value; editions that came up so rarely on the market it would be hard to put a price to them; copies that fell at every poiweewo extremes. The one I was looking for was an ordinary, though particular, edition from the turn of the tury. While I was browsing, Judith brought Miss Winter in aled her in her chair by the fire.
When Judith had gone, Miss Winter asked, “What are you looking for?”
“Jane Eyre.”
‘Do you like Jane Eyre?“ she asked.
‘Very much. Do you?“
‘Yes.“
She shivered.
‘Shall I stoke up the fire for you?“
She lowered her eyelids as if a wave of pain had e over her. “I suppose so.”
Ohe fire was burning strongly again, she said, “Do you have a moment? Sit down, Margaret.”
And after a minute of silence she said this.
‘Picture a veyor belt, a huge veyor belt, and at the end of it a massive furnace. And on the veyor belt are books. Every copy in the world of every book you’ve ever loved. All lined up. Jane Eyre. Villette. The Woman in White.“
“Middlemarch, ” I supplied.
‘Thank you. Middlemarch. And imagine a lever with two labels, On and Off. At the moment the lever is off. Ao it is a human being, with his hand on the lever. About to turn it on. And you stop it. You have a gun in your hand. All you have to do is pull the trigger. What do you do?“
‘No, that’s silly.“
‘He turns the lever to On. The veyor belt has started.“
‘But it’s too extreme, it’s hypothetical.“
‘First of all, Shirley goes over the edge.“
‘I don’t like games like this.“
‘Now Gee Sand starts to go up in flames.“
I sighed and closed my eyes.
‘Wutheris ing up. Going to let that burn, are you?“
I couldn’t help myself. I saw the books, saw their steady process to the mouth of the furnace, and flinched.
‘Suit yourself. In it goes. Same for Jane Eyre?“
Jane Eyre. I was suddenly dry-mouthed.
‘All you have to do is shoot. I won’t tell. No one need ever know.“ She waited. ”They’ve started to fall. Just the first few. But there are a lot of copies. You have a moment to make up your mind.“
I rubbed my thumb nervously against a rough edge of nail on my middle finger.
‘They’re falling faster now.“
She did not remove her gaze from me.
‘Half of them gohink, Margaret. All of Jane Eyre will soon have disappeared forever. Think.“
Miss Winter blinked.
‘Two thirds gone. Just one person, Margaret. Just oiny, insignifit little person.“
I blinked.
‘Still time, but only just. Remember, this person burns books. Does he really deserve to live?“
Blink. Blink.
‘Last ce.“
Blink. Blink. Blink.
Jane Eyre was no more.
“Margaret!” Miss Winter’s face twisted iion as she spoke; she beat her left hand against the arm of her chair. Even the right hand, ihough it was, twitched in her lap.
Later, when I transcribed it, I thought it was the most spontaneous expression of feeling I had ever seen in Miss Winter. It was a surprising amount of feeling to i in a mere game.
And my own feelings? Shame. For I had lied. Of course I loved books more than people. Of course I valued Jane Eyre over the anonymous stranger with his hand on the lever. Of course all of Shakespeare was worth more than a human life. Of course. Unlike Miss Winter, I had been ashamed to say so.
On my way out, I returo the shelf of Jane Eyres and took the one volume that met my criteria. Right age, right kind of paper, right typeface. In my room I turhe pages till I found the place.
‘… not at first aware what was his iion; but when I saw him lift and poise the book and stand in act to hurl it, I instinctively started aside with a cry of alarm—not soon enough however; the volume was flung, it hit me, and I fell, striking my head against the door and cutting it.
The book was intaot a single page was missing. This was not the volume Aurelius’s page had been torn from. But in any case, why should it be? If his page had e from Angelfield—if it had—then it would have burned with the rest of the house.
For a time I sat doing nothing, only thinking of Jane Eyre and a library and a furnad a house fire, but no matter how I bined and rebihem, I could not make sense of it.
The other thing I remember from this time was the i of the photograph. A small parcel appeared with my breakfast tray one m, addressed to me in my father’s narrow handwriting. It was my photographs of Angelfield; I had sent him the ister of film, and he had had it developed for me. There were a few clear pictures from my first day: brambles growing through the wreckage of the library, ivy snaking its the stoaircase. I halted at the picture of the bedroom where I had e face-to-face with my ghost; over the old fireplace there was only the glare of a flashbulb reflected. Still, I took it out of the bundle and tucked it ihe cover of my book, to keep.
The rest of the photographs were from my sed visit, when the weather had been against me. Most of them were nothing but puzzling positions of murkiness. What I remembered was shades of gray overlaid with silver; the mist moving like a veil of gauze; my owh at tipping poiween air and water. But my camera had captured none of that, nor was it possible in the dark smudges that interrupted the gray to make out a stone, a wall, a tree or a forest. After half a dozen such pictures, I gave up looking. Stuffing the wad of photos in my cardigan pocket, I went downstairs to the library.
We were about halfway through the interview when I became aware of a silence. I was dreaming. Lost, as usual, in her world of childhood twinship. I replayed the sound track of her voice, recalled a ged tohe fact that she had addressed me, but could not recall the words.
‘What?“ I said.
‘Your pocket,“ she repeated. ”You have something in your pocket.“
‘Oh… It’s some photographs…“ In that limbo state halfway between a story and your life, when you haven’t caught up with your wits yet, I mumbled on. ”Angelfield,“ I said.
By the time I returo myself, the pictures were in her hands.
At first she looked closely at eae, straining through her glasses to make sense of the blurred shapes. As one indecipherable image followed another, she let out a small Vida Winter sigh, ohat implied her low expectations had been amply fulfilled, and her mouth tightened into a critical line. With her good hand she began to flick through the pile of pictures more cursorily; to show that she no longer expected to find anything of i, she tossed eae after the briefest glao the table at her side.
I was mesmerized by the discarded photos landing at a regular rhythm oable. They formed a messy sprawl on the surface, flopping on top of each other and gliding over each other’s slippery surfaces with a sound like useless, useless, useless.
Then the rhythm came to a halt. Miss Winter was sitting with i rigidity, holding up a single picture and studying it with a frown. She’s seen a ghost, I thought. Then, after a long moment, pretending not to feel my gaze upon her, she tucked the photo behind the remaining dozen and looked at the rest, tossing them down just as before. When the ohat had arrested her attention resurfaced, she barely gla it but added it to the others. “I wouldn’t have been able to tell it was Angelfield, but if you say so…” she said icily, and then, in an apparently artless movement, she picked up the whole pile and, holding them toward me, dropped them.
‘My hand. Do excuse me,“ she murmured as I bent down to retrieve the pictures, but I wasn’t deceived.
And she picked up her story where she had left it.
Later I looked through the pictures again. For all that the dropping of the photos had muddled the order, it wasn’t difficult to tell whie had struck her so forcefully. In the bundle of blurred gray images there was really only ohat stood out from the rest. I sat on the edge of my bed, looking at the image, remembering the moment well. The thinning of the mist and the warming of the sun had bi just the right time to allow a ray of light to fall onto a boy who posed stiffly for the camera, up, back straight, eyes betraying the anxious knowledge that at any minute his hard yellow hat was going to slip sideways on his head.
Why had she been so taken by that photograph? I sed the background, but the house, half demolished already, was only a dismal smear of gray over the child’s right shoulder. Closer to him, all that was visible was the grille of the safety barrier and the er of the Keep Out sign.
Was it the boy himself who ied her?
I puzzled over the picture for half an hour, but by the time I came to put it away, I was no nearer an explanation. Because it perplexed me, I slipped it ihe cover of my book along with the picture of an absen a mirror frame.
Apart from the photograph of the boy and the game of Jane Eyre and the furnaot much else pierced the cloak the story had cast over me.
The cat, I remember. He took note of my unusual hours, came scratg at my door for a bit of fuss at random hours of the day and night. Finished up bits of egg or fish from my plate. He liked to sit on my piles of paper, watg me write. For hours I could sit scratg at my pages, wandering in the dark labyrinth of Miss Winter’s story, but no matter how far I fot myself, I never quite lost my sense of being watched over, and when I got particularly lost, it was the gaze of the cat that seemed to reato my muddle and light my way bay room, my notes, my pencils and my pencil sharpener. He eve with me on my bed some nights, and I took to leaving my curtains open so that if he woke he could sit on my windowsill seeing things move in the dark that were invisible to the human eye.
And that is all. Apart from these things there was nothing else. Only the eternal twilight and the story.
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