Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand (8 page)

“I can say very little,” he finally offered. “Let us say only that, in the broadest sense possible, the leaving of any specific assets away from a spouse may become an issue of loyalty for some couples.” He grimaced in conspiratorial fashion and the Major caught the faintest echo of Marjorie’s shrill voice ringing off the plain panelling of the office.

“My sister-in-law…?” he began. Mortimer held up a palm to stop him.

“I cannot make any comment on client discussions or enter into any suppositions, however hypothetical,” he said. “I can only say how sorry it makes me when my hands are so tied that I cannot even warn a good client that he should perhaps consider altering his own will.”

“Everyone knows that gun is mine,” said the Major. He was hurt and angry to the point of feeling faint. “It should have been mine in the first place, you know – oldest son and all that. Not that I ever begrudged Bertie his share, only he never was a shooting man.”

“Well, I think you should have a friendly chat with Marjorie about it,” said Mortimer. “I’m sure she would want to work out something. Perhaps we should hold off finalising the executor position until this is sorted out?”

“I know my duty,” said the Major. “I will do as my brother asked of me regardless of this matter.”

“Yes, I’m sure,” said Mortimer. “Only it might be considered a conflict of interest were you to intend any claim against the estate.”

“You mean go to court?” said the Major. “I wouldn’t dream of dragging the Pettigrew name so low.”

“I never thought you would,” said Mortimer. “It would have been terribly awkward having to represent one side of the family against the other. Not at all in the Tewkesbury and Teale tradition.” He smiled, and the Major had the suspicion that Mortimer would love to represent Marjorie against him and would use every scrap of prior knowledge about the family to win.

“It is unthinkable,” he said.

“Well, that’s settled, then,” said Mortimer. “Just have a chat with Marjorie, will you? That way, we know there’s no conflict of interest on your part. I must get the probate filed soon, so if you could get back to me…”

“And if she doesn’t agree to give me the gun?” said the Major.

“Then, in the interest of expediting probate, I would advise you to decline the executor position.”

“I can’t do that,” said the Major. “It’s my duty to Bertie.”

“I know, I know,” said Mortimer. “You and I are men of duty, men of honour. But we live in a different world today, my dear Major, and I would be remiss as a solicitor if I did not then advise Marjorie to challenge your fitness to serve.” In an attempt to sound delicate, he squeezed the words out of his mouth like the last of the toothpaste from the tube. His face wore the glazed expression of someone calculating how much of a smile to deliver. “We need to avoid even the semblance of any dishonourable intentions. There are liability issues, you understand?”

“Apparently, I understand nothing,” said the Major.

“Just talk to Marjorie and call me as soon as you can,” said Mortimer, rising from his chair and holding out his hand. The Major also stood up. He wished he had worn a suit now, instead of this ridiculous black sweater. It would have been more difficult for Mortimer to dismiss him like a schoolboy.

“This should not have happened this way,” said the Major. “The Tewkesbury firm has represented my family’s interests for generations…”

“And it is our privilege to do so,” said Mortimer, as if the Major had complimented him. “We may have to be a bit more bound by the rule book these days, but you can be sure that Tewkesbury and Teale will always try to do their best for you.” The Major thought that perhaps after this was all settled he would do as he should have done in the first place and find himself another solicitor.

Stepping out of the office into the square he was momentarily blinded. The fog had been pushed back from the sea, and the stucco fronts of the villas were drying to pale tones in the afternoon sunshine. He felt the sudden warmth relax his face. He breathed in and the salt water in the air seemed to wash away the smell of furniture wax and avarice that was Mortimer Teale’s office.

T
o tell Mortimer that he had never begrudged Bertie the gun had been a damn lie. Sitting on the seafront, his back pressed against the wooden slats of a park bench, the Major turned his face up to the sun. The sweater absorbed heat as efficiently as a black plastic bin liner, and it was pleasant to sit tucked away in the lee of the fishermen’s black-tarred net-drying sheds, listening to the waves breaking themselves to pieces on the shingle.

There was a generous spirit about nature, he thought. The sun gave its heat and light for free. His spirit by contrast was mean, like a slug shrivelling on the bricks at midday. Here he was, alive and enjoying the autumn sunshine, while Bertie was dead. And yet even now he couldn’t give up the niggling annoyance he had felt all these years that Bertie had been given that gun. Nor could he shake the unworthy thought that Bertie knew and was now paying him back for his resentment.

It had been a midsummer day when his mother called him and Bertie into the dining room, where their father lay wasting away from emphysema in his rented hospital bed. The roses were very lush that year, and perfume from the nodding heads of an old pink damask came in at the open French doors. The carved sideboard still displayed his grandmother’s silver soup tureen and candlesticks, but an oxygen pump took up half the surface. He was still angry at his mother for letting the doctor dictate that his father was too frail to sit up in his wheelchair anymore. Surely there could be only good in wheeling him out to the sunny, sheltered corner of wall on the small terrace overlooking the garden? What did it matter anyway, if his father caught a chill or got tired? Though they cheerfully congratulated his father every day on how well he was doing, outside the sickroom no one pretended that these were anything other than the last days.

The Major was a second lieutenant by then, one year out of officer training, and he had been granted ten days’ special leave from his base. The time had seemed to flow slowly, a quiet eternity of whispers in the dining room and thick sandwiches in the kitchen. As his father, who had sometimes failed to convey warmth but had taught him duty and honour, wheezed through the end of his life, the Major tried not to give in to the emotion that sometimes threatened him. His mother and Bertie often crept away to their rooms to wet pillows with their tears, but he preferred to read aloud at his father’s bedside or help the private nurse in turning his emaciated body. His father, who was not as addled by his disease as everyone assumed, recognised the end. He sent for his two sons and his prized pair of Churchills.

“I want you to have these,” he said. He opened the brass lock and pushed back the well-oiled lid. The guns gleamed in their red velvet beds; the finely chased engraving on the silver action bore no tarnish, no smudge.

“You don’t have to do this now, Father,” he said. But he had been eager; perhaps he had even stepped forward, half-obscuring his younger brother.

“I wish them to go on down through the family,” said his father, looking with anxious eyes. “Yet how could I possibly choose between my two boys and say one of you should have them?” He looked to their mother, who took his hand and patted it gently.

“These guns mean so much to your father,” she said at last. “We want you to each have one, to keep his memory.”

“Given to me by the Maharajah from his own hand,” whispered their father. It was an old story so rubbed with retelling that the edges were blurry. A moment of bravery; an Indian prince honourable enough to reward a British officer’s courageous service in the hours when all around were howling for Britain’s eviction. It was his father’s brush with greatness. The old tray of medals and the uniforms might desiccate in the attic, but the guns were always kept oiled and ready.

“But to break up a pair, Father?” He could not help blurting out the question, though he read its shallowness in his mother’s blanched face.

“You can leave them to each other, to be passed along as a pair to the next generation – keep it in the Pettigrew name, of course.” It was the only act of cowardice he had ever seen from his father.

The guns were not listed as part of the estate, which was passed to his mother for her lifetime use and then to him, as the eldest son. Bertie was provided for out of small family trusts. By the time their mother died some twenty years later, the trusts had eroded to an embarrassing low. However, the house was decrepit too. There was rot in some of the seventeenth-century beams, its traditional Sussex brick-and-tile-hung exterior needed extensive repairs, and their mother owed the local council money. The house still looked substantial and genteel among the smaller thatched cottages in the lane, but it was more of a liability than a grand inheritance, as he had told Bertie. He had offered his brother most of their mother’s jewellery as a gesture. He had also tried to buy his brother out of the gun, both then and several other times over the years when Bertie had seemed hard up. His younger brother had always declined his generous offers.

A gull’s guttural scream jolted the Major. It was waddling along the concrete path, wings spread wide, trying to bully a pigeon away from a hunk of bread roll. The pigeon tried to pick up the bread and flap aside, but the roll was too large. The Major stamped his foot. The gull looked at him with disdain and flapped backward a few feet, while the pigeon, without so much as a glance of gratitude, scooted its bread down the path like a tiddlywink.

The Major sighed. He was a man who always tried to do his duty without regard for gratitude or even acknowledgement. Surely he could not have inspired resentment from Bertie all these years?

At no time had the Major allowed himself to feel guilty about being the eldest son. Of course the order in which one was born was random, but so was the fact that he had not been born into a family with a title and vast estates. He had never felt animosity toward those who were born into great social position. Nancy had argued with him about it when they first met. It was the sixties, and she was young and thought love meant living on baked beans and the moral directives of folk music. He had explained to her, very patiently, that keeping one’s name and estate going
was
an act of love.

“If we just keep dividing things up, each generation more people demanding their share of the goodies, it just all vanishes as if it never mattered.”

“It’s about redistributing the wealth,” she had argued.

“No, it’s about the Pettigrew name dying out; about forgetting my father and his father before him. It’s about the selfishness of the current generation destroying the remembrance of the past. No one understands stewardship anymore.”

“You are so adorable when you’re being so damn conservative and uptight!” She laughed. She made him laugh too. She made him sneak off his base to see her. She made him wear improbable shirts and bright socks off duty. Once she called him from a police station after a student protest and he had to show up at the night sergeant’s desk in his full dress uniform. They let her go with just a lecture.

After they were married, there were some years of heartache as children refused to gestate, but then Roger happened at the very last gasp of fertility, and at least, with only one child, there were no arguments over assets. In memory of Nancy’s ideas on generosity, he had dutifully added to his own will a nice little sum of cash for his niece, Jemima. He had also specified that Jemima should receive the second-best china service from his maternal grandmother. Bertie had often hinted that he liked those plates, but the Major had been doubtful of placing vintage Minton, however faded and crazed, in the care of Marjorie. She broke dishes so often that every dinner party at Bertie’s house was served on a different china pattern.

Having an updated will and precise instructions was always a priority for the Major. As a military officer (in harm’s way – as he liked to put it), he had found it a great comfort to open his small iron strongbox, spread out the thick pages of his will, and read over the list of assets and distributions. It read like a list of achievements.

He would just have to be very clear with Marjorie. She was not thinking straight right now. He would have to explain again the exact nature of his own father’s intention. He would have to make things clear to Roger as well. He had no intention of battling to reunite the pair of guns, only to have Roger sell them after his death.

“Ah, there you are, Major,” said a voice. He sat upright and blinked in the strong light. It was Mrs. Ali, holding her large tote bag and a new library book. “I didn’t see you at the car park.”

“Oh, is that the time?” said the Major, looking in horror at his watch. “I completely lost track. My dear lady, I am so horribly embarrassed to have kept you waiting.” Now that he had unconsciously achieved what he would never have dared to deliberately contrive, he was completely at a loss.

“It is not a problem,” she said. “I knew you’d be along eventually and, as the day has turned out so unexpectedly nice, I thought I’d take a brief walk and maybe start my book.”

“I will, of course, pay for the car park.”

“It’s really not necessary.”

“Then will you permit me to at least buy you a cup of tea?” he asked, so quickly that the words pushed and elbowed each other to get out of his mouth. She hesitated so he added: “Unless you’re in a rush to get home, which I quite understand.”

“No, there is no rush,” she said. She looked left and right along the promenade. “Perhaps, if you think the weather will continue to hold, we could walk as far as the kiosk in the gardens?” she said. “If you feel up to it, of course.”

“That would be lovely,” he said, though he had a suspicion that the kiosk served its tea in polystyrene cups with some kind of preserved creamer in those little tubs that were impossible to open.

∗

The promenade, when traversed from east to west as they were doing, formed a scrolling three-dimensional timeline of Hazelbourne-on-Sea’s history. The net-drying sheds and the fishing boats drawn up on the shingle, where the Major had been sitting, were part of the old town, which huddled around small cobbled alleys. Lopsided Tudor shops, their oak beams worn to fossil, contained dusty heaps of cheap merchandise.