A Rather Lovely Inheritance (2 page)

I don’t really mind the sudsing up of history, except for the one big lie: that the past was no different from the present. In our movies, the Heroine of History acts just like a modern, twenty-first-century gal, flaunting ancient taboos without ever fearing being stoned to death or burned at the stake. Our scripts contain the modern lingo of therapy, such as “our relationship isn’t going anywhere” and “you know how bad she is at parenting” and “you really are distancing yourself from your family.”At the same time, some favorite quasi-anachronistic words are liberally sprinkled about for atmosphere, especially “myriad” and “forsooth” and “betoken.”The characters say “hear me now” and “mark this” a lot.

Of course, we at Pentathlon Productions know that aside from providing the quaint details of costume, sets and furniture, it’s our duty to ignore the facts of history whenever they get in the way of modern fantasia.Which is practically all the time. Bruce just keeps admonishing us to
Share the fantasy
.

Bruce had now talked Larima into sharing the fantasy by taking one more shot at the dialogue. We all fell silent, holding our breath, and this time, miraculously, the wind died down, the speedboats didn’t swing by us, and Larima delivered a genuine sob with the dialogue that worked beautifully.

“That’s it,” Bruce said cheerfully.“Lunch.” But somehow it felt like midnight, since we’d been shooting since dawn because of the tight restrictions for the use of the castle.

Erik, the man who keeps hiring me for these jobs and insisting that I accompany him on the set even though nobody’s really sure what I do, turned to me at this point and said teasingly,“Penny Nichols! You’d better go call your mama now.”

There is just so much dignity you can have with a name like mine. Nobody calls me Penelope, because sooner or later they realize how hilarious it is to call me Penny Nichols. I went off shamefacedly and climbed into the sound van, ducking around the crew, who were already dragging cables and microphones to pack in it. I found my phone and sat on some cool stone steps where I’d have privacy. I wondered whether my parents had returned to Connecticut from their winter migration in Florida. I decided to try them in Connecticut first. At the time I had no idea what I was getting into, because, if you knew my parents, you’d understand why I wasn’t the type of girl to expect any kind of “start in life” as my English relatives call it. And this is how my mother put it to me on that “fateful” day:

“Hallo Penny, is that you, dear?” she asked.“You sound so far away. I am
so
sorry to disturb you at work, but I’m afraid I must ask you an awfully big favor,” she said briskly. She’s lived in America since she was eighteen, but she’s never lost her English accent, nor that vague aplomb with which she delivers the banal and the most devastating of news alike.

“Because the doctor said your father and I are both too sick to travel,” she continued. “Can you hear me, darling?” she added as the line began to crackle with static.

“Yes. Did you say sick? Both of you? With what?” I shouted so she could hear me.

“Do calm down, darling. It’s just a wretched flu. We both had a temperature of one hundred two the day before yesterday, but it’s down now and I honestly believe that we’re over the worst of it. Normally I wouldn’t dream of bothering you about it—you
will
over-react sometimes,” she said in a familiar reproving tone, which indicates that my reaction is too emotional for the daughter of an Englishwoman.

I sighed. It is practically impossible to have a conversation with my mother without rapidly plunging into Alice-in-Wonderland territory. At some point in your life (right about when you turn thirty, as I did last year) you realize that your parents have begun the slow slide toward senility and you mustn’t encourage them to lapse any sooner than necessary.

“You said you needed a favor, right?” I called out helpfully, just as the line cleared.

“Yes, it’s got to do with the inheritance, you see, and they all said I simply
had
to reach you tonight about the will,” she said.

“Are you and Dad writing a will?” I asked.

“Not
our
will. Don’t be silly. It’s not
us
who are dead!” she said, insulted and slightly exasperated.We will never grow old, is what she means.

“Well, then, who died?” I fairly shouted.

“Your Great-Aunt Penelope,” my mother said.

“Oh,” I said with a pang of regret. I’d met her only once, but she’d been kind to me.

My mother said, “You were named for Aunt Penelope, you know. She liked that.”

I still can’t get used to my name. There’s no good reason for my crazy parents to have named me Penny Nichols. All right, the last name comes from my father’s family. His dad was an American GI who got stationed in Paris and married a pretty French girl, my Grandmother Aimeé. I never met either of them; my paternal grandfather died rather young of a heart attack, leaving my dad, Georges, a teenager with a wistful and abiding affection for all things American. He managed to pick up a degree in American literature while working as a chef and taking care of his mother. She died when he was twenty, so he came to New York, where he cooked in fine restaurants. There he met my mother, Nancy Laidley. She’d left what she called her “stodgy relations” in England for art school and a career as a freelance children’s-book illustrator. They fell smack-dab in love as soon as they “clapped eyes on each other.”

But really, there’s no excuse for my first name, not even my mother’s airy explanation that they wanted to get some of her own family into my name. My English grandmother was called Beryl, and my mother defensively claims that she
knew
I would not be happy with that.

Mom didn’t give me her own name because she said it would be tiresome to have another Nancy around. She didn’t have any sisters, just a stuffy older brother named Peter. So that left Great-Aunt Penelope, my grandmother’s sister who never married, and they all thought it would be cute to call me Penny. Little Penny Nichols, that’s me.

Actually the name may strike you as familiar, if you were the kind of kid who liked to read children’s detective stories. Because not only did my parents give me this ridiculous name, they also took it into their heads to invent Penny Nichols, Girl Detective—a picture-book character supposedly based on me.

She was a spunky little sleuth who went around snooping for her friends and neighbors, solving scientific puzzles and natural phenomena as if they were murder mysteries and crimes and kidnappings, by using deduction and logic, certainly, but also memory and intuition and instinct. She carried a magnifying glass, and she had copper-colored hair like mine, which she wore in pigtails.

My mother drew the pictures, and my father, with his literature degree burning a hole in his pocket, wrote the stories. What started out as their little “extra pocket-money” project to supplement their incomes became a modestly successful series of books about the adventures of Penny Nichols, Girl Detective.

Sure.What did they care if they doomed me for life? My fictional counterpart didn’t have to face real people in school like I did. It was a huge embarrassment to me because by the time they wrote those books I was already on the brink of becoming a teenager.Yet there I was, Penny Nichols, kiddie detective, heroine of picture books. Ugh.

Of course, the royalties, Mom always reminded me, paid my tuition and would “come to” me in that far-off future when she and Dad were “gone.” But time did not stand still circa my parents’ era with its milder, 1970s cost of living. So, on my twenty-first birthday, after they presented me with a nice diamond-pendant necklace, my father gently explained that as far as a legacy went, there was the modest house in Connecticut where I grew up; the tiny retirement bungalow in Florida where my parents winter around the pool happily drinking gin-and-tonics; the dwindling royalties; and a few unexciting investments to pay for my wedding and “a rainy day” . . . but that was it. I barely listened; I didn’t want to think of my parents being “gone,” ever.

“You do remember going to meet dear Aunt Penelope that summer, don’t you, darling?” my mother was saying encouragingly. “Because, evidently, she remembered you.”

“Yes, but I was just a kid then,” I said. I was nine years old when my parents took me abroad, to be looked over by my English grand-parents at their pretty stone country house in Cornwall, where the sea was freezing cold even in July. It was our only visit overseas; Mother didn’t like going back to see them in England, only to be told how silly Americans were and how foolish she was to choose to live among them. So our relatives were more mythological than real to me, like people in a history book.

“We got the sad news about Aunt Penelope from your cousin Jeremy,” my mother was saying.“It was a positively stunning conversation. You remember Jeremy, don’t you, darling?”

Unexpectedly I felt a sudden warm tide, a distinct physical sense of absurd happiness at the mention of my cousin. I’d met Jeremy that same summer in Cornwall, when he and his folks showed up for a week at Grandmother Beryl’s house by the sea. I was nine and he was thirteen; old enough to admire and embarrass each other. Which we did. I remember that the day he arrived, his folks made him wear his good blue suit instead of jeans like everybody else. I could see that there was some strain between his parents and mine and that he, too, had the coolness of a boy who knew he was richer than me.

Still, he wasn’t above climbing trees, and devising codes and hiding places for messages, when we were pretending to be Secret Agents, sneaking around reporting on the movements of the adults. I was a little afraid of his father, who was quick to blame Jeremy if one of us took a spill or broke something. Uncle Peter was my mother’s brother, and he never quite forgave her for leaving England permanently. But, as I recall, he seemed to disapprove of everyone, especially his own son; as if, despite Jeremy’s impeccable manners he was a delinquent-in-the-making unless quickly pounced upon by his dad for the slightest breach of good behavior. Even at uneventful moments there was tension between Jeremy and his father, so Jeremy learned to use good manners as a secret weapon. Uncle Peter died ten years ago.

“Jeremy is a lawyer now,” my mother informed me. “A very good one. His firm specializes in international law, I think,” she added in that vague tone of hers, “but anyway he says one of us should fly to London right away, to be there for the reading of the will.Your father and I can’t possibly do it because of this beastly flu, and you’re already in Europe. By the way, there was no funeral or burial ceremony to attend. She wanted it that way.”

“Mother,” I said sternly, “are you serious? Fly to London? I’m working here, remember?” Honestly, for someone who was part of a groundbreaking wave of women who entered the workplace when it was a feminist thing to do, my mother still refuses to believe that I have an actual career. She wants to keep thinking of me as a girl, not a full-grown woman, because that might make her become the very thing she dreads, a woman of
un certain âge
.

There was a click and, to my relief, my father entered the conversation as if he knew exactly what was going on. “Hello, my Pen-nee,” he said in that affectionate French pronunciation he always uses when he says my ridiculous name. “I was making the coffee and your mother sneaked off to call you. Have you heard? Your great-aunt has left your mother and you some-zing in her will, so we want to give you power of attorney to handle it for her.”

“Why, yes, that’s what I’ve been
saying
all along!” my mother exclaimed, and she truly believed she’d been just that clear and precise. “It was Jeremy’s idea; I wanted to give him that power-of-attorney thing, but there are complicated reasons that he thought it should be you. He’ll explain it all. I can’t imagine what Aunt Penelope’s left me, but it’s going to be all yours someday anyway, so you might as well handle it from the start.”

“Sorry for the short notice, Pen-nee, but these things happen quickly, and we would have taken care of it ourselves, until we came down with
la grippe
,” my father said. I heard him sniffle a little, and it occurred to me that they actually had been a bit ill; it wasn’t just one of their hermit excuses to avoid traveling to London to face down the in-laws.

“All right,” I said. “When do I need to be there?”

“We already booked you on a flight to London from Nice at seven p.m. your time,” my father said. “Jeremy reserved you a hotel room in London for an overnight, because the reading of the will is at nine o’clock sharp the next morning. Is that okay?”

“Wow. Well, I guess I can get everything done by then . . .” I said, working out my schedule and wondering how, exactly, I would pull this off.We’d finished shooting the tricky interior scenes of
Josephine, Queen of the Romantics
and moved on to the exterior location shots, where they don’t need me as much.Tomorrow would be the last day of the shoot anyway. Once my boss, Erik, threw a perfunctory fit, I figured he’d be intrigued enough about the will to give me permission to leave early. It meant that he’d have to squeeze in a meeting with me on his lunch break today about our next project,
Lucrezia, A Woman of Intrigue
. So I’ll owe him a favor.

“It’s all paid for. Let’s see, oh dear, where did I put all that information—ah, here it is ...” my mother murmured. I could hear her shuffling papers. And then, in spite of her daffy air, she reeled off all the flight numbers, addresses and directions with perfect aplomb. That’s the thing about her. The vague, scatterbrained act is just a way of not having to be pinned down into what she calls the “achingly boring” parlance of life. Underneath it all is the shrewd business-woman who counts up all the receipts and handles all the accounting and investing.

“Now, when they read the will, don’t act disappointed if it isn’t much,” she warned, as if still teaching me how to behave among the English. “Aunt Penelope was a rather reckless flapper in her day, and she didn’t have any children of her own to put money aside for, so she probably didn’t save much. Perhaps a small investment and some nice costume jewelry. She never worked a day in her life, you know—except for that little singing and dancing she tried—so I’m sure she lived off her savings and whatever her parents gave her.Why, Penelope was ninety years old, and she wasn’t thrifty like my mother.” I heard my father mutter something about the phone call becoming expensive. My mother spoke quickly now.