Simon Tolkien - The Inheritance

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 matinee, 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.”