Simon Tolkien - The Inheritance

Upstairs, Jeanne cried a little as she washed away the traces of her husband from her body. Sometimes the marks he left couldn’t be removed so easily, and inside she always ached with a dull pain that never quite went away. But over the years she had learnt to live with Ritter’s petty cruelties. She knew that showing fear or anxiety enraged him, and so she had grown a mask for her emotions that she rarely let slip. She had worked out how to survive, and she would no doubt have passively grown old that way if Silas Cade hadn’t made her realise there was an alternative.

At first she had only felt a dull sense of kinship toward the colonel’s elder son. He was her husband’s public victim; she suffered in private. At dinner she always said very little, keeping her head modestly bent down over her plate while her husband made bad jokes about Silas’s sexuality. In truth, she herself suspected that Silas was homosexual. He never seemed to look at her, and anyway it was none of her business. Life was something to be survived. She wasn’t looking for friends.

Then one day she was in the laundry washing her husband’s clothes. It was hot and steamy, and Jeanne pulled up the white sleeves of her blouse almost to her shoulders. The laundry was a place she could be alone, and she felt no risk that anyone might come in and see the red marks on the inside of her forearms that her husband had left the night before. The work was hard, and she didn’t hear Silas walking in the corridor outside or see him as he stood in the doorway watching her.

Afterward, Silas was amazed that he had spoken to Ritter’s wife. It was so unlike him. Women scared him. He thought about them all the time, but he never had the courage to approach them. He was almost painfully aware of his own physical shortcomings, and his rejection by his mother after Stephen’s birth had wreaked havoc on his inner sexuality. Her death had sealed him up complete with his damaged personality, and Ritter’s jibes in the years that followed had found their mark partly because Silas half believed them himself. His sexual experience was limited to a single night two years earlier, when he had got very drunk and visited a prostitute in Oxford. The result had been disastrous, and Silas had concentrated all his mental energy for weeks afterward on expunging the memory of his failure in that dingy third-floor bedroom overlooking the canal. He was still frightened that he would come face-to-face with the woman somewhere in the city, although it hadn’t happened yet.

The marks on Jeanne’s arms were what gave Silas the courage to cross the threshold of the laundry and speak to her. He’d asked her what they were, even though he already knew the answer. If Ritter was a sadist at the dinner table, there was no reason why he should change his spots when he took his wife upstairs to bed.

Jeanne flushed and did not answer. Instead she pulled her blouse down to her wrists and turned away, and perhaps that would have been an end of it if her husband had not come calling. He’d lost a cufflink and wanted his wife to find it for him. Silas was still close enough to Jeanne to feel her aversion, the way she physically shrank away from her husband’s voice, and instinctively he reached out and pulled her back against the wall. A moment later Ritter was in the room, blinking against the steam. Silas sensed the sergeant on the other side of the open door. He felt the weight of the man, and he strengthened his hold on the sergeant’s wife. Silas had never before been so frightened or felt so alive. Jeanne’s heart was beating hard against his chest as she leant into him. It was as if their bodies had made a decision for them, and now they were powerless to stop the ongoing course of events.

After Ritter left, Jeanne emptied the clothes from the laundry baskets onto the stone floor and then pulled off her own to add to the heap. Her nakedness inflamed Silas, not only because he thought her beautiful but also because of her defiance. Then and afterward, the thought of Ritter was never far from either of their minds when they made love. They were settling scores with passion.

At first they were happy. Ritter was often away on business, and the Professor never left the manor house. His health had deteriorated since he had broken with his younger son, and there was a grove of trees near the west wall of the grounds where Silas and Jeanne felt safe from detection. It was invisible both from the professor’s study and from the manuscript gallery on the second floor.

Jeanne lay on the floor of pine needles and unwound the mane of her rich auburn hair so that it fell across her lover’s knees. Looking dreamily up through the treetops toward the sun, she told him the story of her past. She’d kept her family dead and buried deep inside herself all the years she’d been married to Ritter, but now they came to life again. Her father had been the local postman, and in the years before the war she and her younger brother would walk out with him into the countryside beyond Caen after his rounds were over for the day. They took straw baskets and picked blackberries in the hedgerows, and Jeanne looked for the wild woodland flowers to take home to her mother, who wouldn’t be separated from her kitchen. She always kept one back for her father to wear in the buttonhole of his green tweed jacket.

Philippe, her brother, was ten years old and still he couldn’t read or write. But he made up for it by his innate kindliness. If you asked him to fetch the coal, he would do it again and again until you had to order him to stop. He had curly black hair and was a little overweight. Everyone loved him and wanted to protect him. Except that when it mattered, they didn’t. After the Germans came, they built a house for backward children on the coast, and one morning, when Jeanne’s father was out at work, the nurses came and took Philippe away. There were other children in the truck, and there was no real time to say goodbye. Jeanne never saw her brother again, and after that day her father stopped taking her out into the countryside. Instead he began to drink too much red wine in the evenings and took to singing patriotic songs out of key. He swore to Jeanne and her mother almost every day that he would protect them from the Nazi bastards, but in the end, when the British came, he hadn’t been able to save himself, let alone anyone else. He’d been caught in the cross fire just like so many others.

Jeanne wept when she thought of her father and her mother and Philippe and everything she had lost. All the emotions that she had kept battened down since she left France thirteen years before rose to the surface and burst through the floodgates of her self-control. She emptied herself onto Silas, and it wasn’t long before he began to feel suffocated by her. All his life he had learnt the virtues of self-restraint. To show your heart only meant more hurt from adopted parents or bastards like Ritter. And the truth was that Silas couldn’t have exposed himself to another human being even if he had wanted to. He had long since locked himself up and thrown away the key. He couldn’t provide Jeanne with the emotional response she craved, and so she began to make him angry. But he took care not to show her what he felt. He wanted her, and besides, he was frightened of Ritter. Silas tried not to think of what the fat man would do to him if he ever discovered the truth.

But sometimes he didn’t succeed. There was one day that Silas would never forget as long as he lived. It was the summer after his mother died, and he had gone into his father’s study, as he sometimes did, early in the morning when he was sure that no one was around. The professor never got up before ten, and Silas thought that Ritter was away on business. He sat at his father’s desk and idly opened the drawers one by one. Ritter found him with several letters in his hand. Silas didn’t have time to replace them in the drawer from which he’d taken them. The sergeant had done that, keeping hold of Silas’s wrist as he did so. And then he’d squeezed. Lightly at first, and then harder and harder still. Silas hadn’t tried to struggle. It was as if the pressure of Ritter’s thumb had paralysed him. It felt like the sergeant was exploring him in some horribly intimate way. Silas remembered how Ritter had looked down at him from above. There was a look of rapt concentration on his face, and then, just before the end, the tip of Ritter’s tongue had come out, flicking round the corners of his big mouth.