The Inheritance (8 page)

Having never put roots down anywhere other than Furlings, it had never occurred to Tati to acquire furniture or clocks or books or favourite cushions, the things that would have helped to turn a house like this into a home. She hated the poo-brown sofas, and the incongruously modern, sixties-style Ikea plastic chairs around the dining-room table. As for her landlady’s rugs, they were so vile – swirly affairs in orange and lime green and other colours that had no place in a beautiful, Grade II-listed Sussex hall house – that Tati had rolled them all up on the day she’d arrived and stacked them en masse in the back of the garage. The original flagstones and wide-beamed oak floors beneath were infinitely preferable. But without a single rug of her own to warm the place up a bit, the overall effect was one of bareness. Stark and barren, like a tree stripped of its leaves after a storm.

The kettle switched itself off with a click, the steam from its spout fogging up the kitchen window. Tatiana wiped the glass clean with her sleeve and looked out into the garden. It was a stunning day, blue-skied and clear, like the summers of her childhood. Greystones Farm was really little more than a cottage on the outskirts of Fittlescombe, but its garden was enormous, its various sections – rose garden, orchard, vegetable patch and lawn – tumbling into one another willy-nilly, as each exploded and overflowed with colour and scent and fruit and life. There must have been a planting plan once, a design. Tatiana could see where the crumbling walls and overgrown beech hedges had once delineated and organized more than an acre of space. But now, untended, other than a weekly lawn-mowing by old Mr Dryer from the village, the garden was a joyously jumbled eruption of blossoms and greenery. Gazing out at it, watching a rabbit skip about in the white carpet of fallen apple blossom, even Tatiana’s spirits lifted a little. Making herself a cup of Earl Grey and two slices of toast and honey, she pushed open the back door and wandered outside.

Could I be happy here?
She wondered, savouring the deliciously sweet, buttery toast as she strolled through a towering row of hollyhocks. Tati hadn’t lived in the countryside, or spent more than a week at a stretch here, since her childhood. And those weeks had always been spent at Furlings, riding her beloved horse, Flint.

There were times when Tati thought she missed Flint even more than she missed her father. The grey stallion was a former racehorse, and had been a wildly extravagant tenth birthday present from Rory Flint-Hamilton to his daughter. Mrs Worsley had disapproved from the start, but Tatiana would never forget that magical day. Rory leading her, blindfold, around to the stable yard and telling her to open her eyes as Flint pranced majestically out of his horsebox.

‘For you, my darling. What do you think?’

‘Oh, Daddy!’ Tati had gasped, fighting back tears of joy. ‘He’s beautiful. He’s so beautiful! Is he really mine?’

‘All yours, my angel. You deserve him.’

Memories of that day still brought Tati to tears. Perhaps because it represented a time before it all went wrong? A time when her father adored her unconditionally. A time before she’d disappointed him. Before she grew up.

Six years later, Flint had also been the cause of one of their worst-ever rows, a terrible turning point in their relationship. Blind drunk after breaking into Furlings’ wine cellar and stealing Rory’s Pierre Ferrand 1972 Vintage Cognac, Tati had ridden Flint bareback up to the main A27 road. Terrified by a passing lorry, the stallion had bolted into a nearby field, badly injuring his right foreleg.

‘How
could
you be so irresponsible!’ Rory had chastised her the next day. The vet was still not sure whether or not Flint would be permanently lame.

Tati, severely hungover and secretly riddled with guilt, had lashed out defiantly, refusing to apologize. ‘He’s my horse. I can do what I want with him.’

‘He could have been killed, Tatiana. You both could have been killed.’

‘So? It’s my life. I can do what I want with that as well,’ Tati snarled at her father before throwing up violently all over the tack-room floor.

Looking back now she couldn’t for the life of her remember what she had been so angry about. She only remembered that she was angry, and out of control, and that somewhere deep down, even back then, she knew it.

Standing in the garden at Greystones Farm, she wondered whether that episode with Flint had been the turning point. The horse had recovered and been sold, and Tatiana pretended not to care. But losing Flint had marked the end of an era.

And now I’ve lost Furlings, too.

It was Furlings that had brought her back to Fittlescombe. The house itself had always been the draw. It was the house that kept calling to her, through all the later dramas and distractions of her adult life.

Now, banished from Furlings, and with her former London party life gone up in ashes and smoke behind her, she found she was noticing Fittlescombe village and its glorious surroundings almost for the first time. This garden, for example: humble and gone to seed, a far cry from the formal grandeur of Furlings, was equally idyllic in its own way. So were the rolling chalk giants behind it, and the lane leading down from Greystone’s front gate to Fittlescombe High Street with its shops and church and green and wisteria-covered pubs. It was all beautiful. A wonderland, really. Tati couldn’t imagine what had prevented her from seeing it before.

But as time passed and she meandered through Greystones’ garden, Tati’s heart began to harden.
Wonderland indeed. Get a grip. You’re not some tourist on a sodding walking holiday
, she told herself sternly.
You’re here to get Furlings back.
If she lost sight of that purpose, that goal, there would be nothing left at all. No point to her life. No identity. No future. No hold on the past.

She shivered. It was cold, and getting dark. How long had she been out here, walking and thinking? Too long, clearly.

Inside the house she turned on the central heating and all the lights, forgetting the expense for once in her dire need for some cheer. What else did she want? Noise. Something mindless. She turned on the television and flipped channels, settling for Kelly Osbourne on
Fashion Police
poking fun at celebrities’ outfits. It didn’t get any shallower or more distracting than that. Finally, she opened the larder cupboard and pulled out a packet of Pringles and a bottle of cheap red wine, liberally filling glass after glass as she ate and watched, watched and ate, pushing all deeper considerations out of her head.

By the time she
thought
she heard the doorbell ring, Tati was in a warm, alcohol-induced glow. The process of deciding definitively that the bell had – indeed – rung, standing up, brushing the Pringles crumbs off her jeans and weaving her way unsteadily to the door took another few minutes, by which time the caller had gone. Leaning on the porch step in the darkness, however, was a tightly bubble-wrapped package.

Pulling it inside, Tati closed the door and ran to the kitchen for scissors. With drunken abandon she sliced away at the plastic wrapping, finally wrenching the contents free with her hands. It was a set of miniatures, tiny, intricately painted portraits of Tati’s grandmother Peg and her three siblings. Of course! She’d completely forgotten that her father had left her these too. Perhaps because, unlike the large Sutherland portrait of Peg, they weren’t particularly valuable. Not that Tati had any intention of selling any of them.

Tati turned each of the miniatures over in her hands. Granny, Uncle John and the two older sisters, Maud and Helen, whom she never knew. For a moment she thought it might be Mrs Worsley who had sent them in a moment of forgiveness. But the note was from Angela Cranley, who realized she’d forgotten them and had them sent over. Even Tati had to admit that that was kind and thoughtful. She tried not to resent it as she propped each of the tiny pictures up along the kitchen countertop. Picking up the large painting, she set it beside them, studying it closely for the first time.

There was her grandmother Peg, a young girl of twenty-one in the portrait but with the same sharp, knowing eyes she’d had as an old woman, and that Tati remembered so vividly from her own early childhood, in the years when her mother had still been alive. Peggy was Tati’s mother’s mother, but the two women hadn’t been remotely physically alike. Tatiana’s own mother, Vicky, was all softness and curves, a round, gentle loving woman, as welcoming as a feather bed or a favourite cushion. Peggy, by contrast, was intelligent and cynical, a tall, slender person of angular proportions and gimlet stares, rarely seen without a strong French cigarette in one hand and a tumbler of whisky in the other.
Much more like me,
thought Tati.

Sinking down into one of the ugly plastic dining chairs, Tati gazed at the painting for a long, long time. Her grandmother would have been horrified to see a family of Australians installed at Furlings, of that Tati felt sure. She was less sure as to whom Granny Peggy would have blamed for the situation: Rory, for changing his will? Or her, Tati, for driving him to it?

It doesn’t matter anyway. She’s dead. They’re all dead except for me. Peggy and her siblings. Mum and Dad. I’m the last. I’m the living. It’s what I think that matters.

She didn’t realize until hours later, when she got up to go to bed, that her face was wet with tears.

CHAPTER FOUR

Angela Cranley tied the silk belt of her kimono robe loosely around her waist and smiled down at her husband.

‘Come back to bed,’ growled Brett, reaching for her hand and pulling her towards him.

‘I can’t. You know I can’t,’ giggled Angela. ‘It’s Logan’s first day at school this morning.’

As always after they’d made love there was a glow about her. Brett loved his wife the most like this, with her tousled hair and flushed cheeks and that smile that said more about her love for him than words ever could. Thank God he’d left Sydney and that bitch Tricia! He didn’t know what he would do if he ever lost Ange.

It was three days since Brett had first arrived in Fittlescombe and walked through the front door of the house that was to be his home for the foreseeable future. All Angela’s anxieties about Furlings not being ready had been for nothing. Brett had instantly seen past the teething problems of the move and fallen almost as deeply in love with the house as he was with his wife and children. (Well, one of them, anyway. Jason still seemed miserable and distracted, but then that was becoming a permanent state of affairs with him.) Brett had seen numerous images of Furlings online, of course, so he’d already known the house was a beauty. But this was one of those rare cases where reality had trounced anticipation. Brett Cranley had grown used to having lovely things, to buying whatever he wanted and designing his life to order. Despite this, ever since he’d learned of Rory Flint-Hamilton’s will and seen those first pictures, Furlings had seduced him. It was a bit like having an arranged marriage and then discovering your bride was a supermodel.

He noticed that Angela had been nervous at dinner that first night, but he put it down to the house call she’d received earlier in the day from old man Flint-Hamilton’s daughter. Apparently Tatiana was threatening to challenge the will.

‘She seemed awfully determined about it,’ Angela said, refilling Brett’s wine glass and re-folding his napkin like an over-attentive Geisha. ‘She’s clearly heartbroken about losing the house.’

‘I don’t give a shit,’ Brett said brutally. ‘She had no right turning up here unannounced and worrying you like that.’

Angela didn’t say that her only real worry had been how Brett would take the news. Her husband doled out law suits the way that other people sent out Christmas cards. She couldn’t face beginning their new life in this idyllic village under a cloud of conflict and rancour.

‘She lost the house because of her own shitty behaviour. Rory’s letter of wishes made that very clear. She’s no one to blame but herself. As for challenging the will,’ he drained his wineglass, throwing the burgundy liquid down his throat angrily, like a man trying to put out a fire, ‘she hasn’t a snowball’s chance in hell. Forget her.’

In her relief that Brett was happy, and that they were going to stay here, Angela had forgotten Tati. She’d sleep-walked through the last two days in a blind stupor of contentment, helping Mrs Worsley sew name tapes into Logan’s uniform and ordering expensive lingerie online to surprise Brett, who was always trying to get her into negligees and stockings, usually with no success.

‘Jason can take Logan to school,’ Brett said now, refusing to release Angela. Slipping one hand beneath her kimono he cupped her left breast, simultaneously kissing her ear and neck as he dragged her back beneath the covers.

‘He can’t,’ Angela protested half-heartedly, her lips finding her husband’s as she kissed him back. ‘Not on the first day. She’ll be nervous.’

‘Logan?’ laughed Brett. ‘Nervous? Please. She’ll be eating those poor teachers alive. That kid’s got more confidence than Muhammad Ali on steroids.’

It was true. Logan took after her father in that regard, as in every other.

‘I have to take her, darling.’ Angela smiled. ‘Jase can pick her up this afternoon. The school’s only down the lane, I’ll be back by nine.’

‘Just make sure you are,’ said Brett, his voice thick with desire as he reluctantly released her. ‘I don’t like being kept waiting.’

‘I don’t like being kept waiting.’

Tatiana Flint-Hamilton’s cut-glass voice ricocheted off the walls of St Hilda’s school office like a shower of diamond-tipped bullets. It was three o’clock in the afternoon on the first day back after half-term. With only half an hour until the bell went, the school office was calm and quiet for the first time all day. Or rather it was until Tati walked in.

‘How long is he going to be?’

‘Mr Bingley’s exceptionally busy this afternoon,’ said the school secretary tersely. It had been a long and trying day. The last thing she needed was attitude from Fittlescombe’s self-appointed Lady Muck.