The Inheritance (3 page)

The whole time the investigation
into his disappearance was going on, Kate managed to keep it a secret from her
father and sister.  The story even made the local news, but when her father
asked if she knew this guy she said no, even though she felt as if a cavernous
hole had opened up inside her.  She couldn’t bear to talk about Steven to her
father.  She’d found it impossible while he was alive and the thought of
talking about Steven now when he was most likely dead just filled her with
dread.  What good would it do anyway?  It was eight years since he’d vanished. 
He wasn’t coming back.

Sitting underneath the tree, Kate felt
tears prick her eyes.  She blinked them back furiously.  Emma would never know
about Steven, what Kate had felt for him, no one would.  She would never
understand that Kate had once had hopes and dreams, which were never realised. 
Now all she had to dream for was that one day the farm would be hers and she’d
be able to make it into an even more profitable business.  She wiped her eyes
with the back of her hand and stood up.  Lunch was over.  It was time to get
back to work.

Emma was perched on a hay bale in
the barn.  Green rolling hills that she’d known all her life banked up in the
distance.  She watched her sister, barely able to disguise her irritation. 
Kate was sitting on another hay bale a few feet away, attempting to untangle
her hair with her fingers.  It was a permanent mess.  Emma had the same slender
figure, blue eyes and blonde curly hair as her sister, but her hair was always
styled neatly.  Why don’t you just cut it all off and start again? Emma wanted
to say.  Kate looked up at her with a disapproving expression on her face. 

‘I don’t see why you can’t just
stay here and wait until you’ve decided what you want to do with your life,’
she said. 

‘But you would say that, wouldn’t
you?  You’ve always wanted to stay exactly where you are now, stuck on this
farm,’ Emma said.  ‘And anyway it’s all decided now.  I’m leaving.’

 ‘Yes and the reason you want to
leave is because you’re so restless.  Take your clothes for instance.  You’re
updating your look every five seconds.’

‘Well at least I have good taste in
clothes,’ Emma said.  ‘Look at you, Kate.  How long have you had those ripped
jeans?  No, don’t tell me, you got them when you were fifteen and you’ve worn them
ever since.’

‘I wear them to work on the farm. 
I couldn’t exactly wear a little black dress to muck out the cowshed, could I?’

‘But those jeans… you never wear
anything else.’

‘Maybe that’s because I bother to
work for a living instead of sponging off Dad like you.’

‘Go on; take the moral high ground
like you always do.  But you’re talking crap.  You know I have a job at the
pub.’

‘Yes and you work there… how often
is it?  Oh yeah, once in a blue moon.’

‘Well I’m off to London soon so
that’s irrelevant.  But at least I’ve been to university.’ Emma couldn’t help
feeling smug as she watched Kate’s face turn red.

‘You know why I haven’t,’ she said
quietly and sprang up from the hay bale, dusting herself down  ‘And as much as
I’d like to stick around and argue the toss about why you should damn well leave
Dad alone and not blackmail him like this, I have work to do.’  She strode off
out of the barn.

Emma rolled her eyes and flopped
back onto the hay bales, staring up at the ancient roof of the barn.  She and
Kate had never got on well and their relationship was rapidly deteriorating. 
It was one of the many reasons why Emma wanted to leave.  But to leave the farm
and be fully independent, she needed her share of the inheritance.  Kate
thought she was lazy and couldn’t understand why she refused to get a job.  It
was easier said than done in Cornwall though.  To live the life she’d always
wanted she needed funds, a generous sum of money.  It wasn’t simply that she
was lazy: Cornwall was limited in terms of professions and Emma just couldn’t
see herself leaving Cornwall and getting a job far away, working for years to
get the sort of money she’d need when she could easily have it now.  The
frustrating thing was that her inheritance of £100,000 would provide for her
needs, but her father had been refusing to let her have it.  She was meant to
wait until she was twenty five to have it, but that would mean another three
years.  And I can’t wait another three years, she thought to herself.  I’ll go
mad.

She knew that the way she was
forcing him to give in was underhand to say the least.  But she could see her
life stretching interminably before her, the weeks and years rolling by and her
never leaving this place.  I had to do it; I have to go she thought, feeling a
tight pain in her chest as if she was physically trapped.  She rooted around in
her pocket for her mobile phone and checked the screen.  Still no reception. 
Bloody countryside!  She was trying to organise a night out to her favourite
club with her friends.  Emma sighed and stood up, brushing herself down.  She’d
just have to ring Natalie on the landline.

She walked back across the fields
towards the farmhouse, stopping along the way to lean against a gate, and gaze
out across the endless fields.  There was no denying the beauty of this farm,
the lushly green hills, the trees and blue sky.  It was spring and everything
was lovely.  Emma breathed in the soft clean air.  In the distance she caught
sight of her father on his tractor trundling along.  She raised her hand to
wave at him, and then dropped it.  She didn’t want another argument with him, especially
not after the other night.  Turning away from the field, she began to walk
along the rutted track towards the farmhouse.  As a child she’d loved this
walk, with the trees on either side of the track meeting each other in the
middle and forming a green canopy, a roof made of leaves.  Now she found it
almost claustrophobic.

She couldn’t explain even to
herself why she felt so penned in here.  Emma knew that many people would do
anything to live in a place that was so free of people and houses, cars, noise,
everything that went with urban living.  She only knew that for her, life on
this farm was a straightjacket, hemming her in. 

Approaching the farmhouse, she
paused for a moment to gaze at the building which she sometimes felt had become
her prison.  The house was late Victorian.  It was rectangular in shape, with
two storeys.  The original sash windows were still in place and the roof was
tiled with Cornish slate, parts of it spattered with moss.  The house had a
quaint, old-fashioned look to it.  Tendrils of ivy clung to the light grey
Cornish stone bricks, especially around the windows and front door.  Kate said
the ivy made the house look romantic.  Emma thought it looked as though the ivy
was trying to strangle the house.  Just as the house is trying to strangle me,
she thought.

She sighed and went inside.  Just
then the phone rang.  She picked it up.

‘Hello?’

‘Hey girly, you ready to party?’ It
was her friend Natalie.

‘You bet.’ Emma smiled.

‘Good because someone needs to
rescue you from that dreary old farm.  And today that someone is me.  I’ll come
in my limo and we’ll get to you for seven pm, OK?’

‘Limo?’

‘Em, don’t be dense.  I’m joking. 
I’ll be in a taxi, see you at seven.’

‘Fantastic.  I’ll see you then. 
Bye.’

‘Em, wait.  Have you talked to your
dad again?’

‘Yes.’ Emma said.  ‘I did what you
suggested.  I gave him the ultimatum.’ 

‘Good.  About time too.  You must
tell me all about it.  See you later.’

‘See you.’  Emma put the phone
down.  Her guilty feeling returned.  She shook her head as if to clear her bad
thoughts away and quickly climbed the stairs.

The sun was streaming through the
window when Emma reached her bedroom.  She loved this room – it was the one
place in the entire farm that she could truly call hers.  Years ago her father
had succumbed and let her decorate it the way she wanted.  It had evolved over
the years.  It’d morphed from a candy-coloured little girl’s room that was so
saccharine you could almost taste sugar when you were inside it, into a trendy
teenager’s room with its walls covered in posters that she’d refused to remove
for years even after they were peeling away from the wall.  Now it was
tastefully decorated with soft muted colours of pale cornflower blue and stone
and a light-coloured buff carpet.  Beautiful pine furniture that Emma had
rescued from a friend who was going to throw it out lined the walls. 

She switched on her music – her
choice was Alanis Morissette ‘You Oughta Know’ which Emma thought was quite apt
for how she was feeling – turned it up loud and went to have a shower, ignoring
the calls from her sister somewhere downstairs to turn it down.  Kate was such
a killjoy; it was as if she’d been born miserable.  Emma began singing along to
the music as she scrubbed herself in the shower.  There was a hammering on the
bathroom door.

‘Emma!’  It was her father. 
‘Emma!  Get out of the bathroom now and turn your music off.  Your sister’s
trying to make an important phone call and you’re drowning her out.’

‘Hang on.  I’ve got soap all over
me; I need to rinse myself off.  Why can’t you turn it off yourself?’

‘It’s your music.  You turn it
off.  Honestly, Emma, when will you grow up?  You’re not thirteen anymore. 
Hurry up.’

By the time Emma emerged from the
shower, her father had disappeared.  There was no sign of her sister either. 
So why the urgency in turning my music off?  she wondered.  They’d obviously
gone back to their tedious jobs.  Of course, they didn’t see their work on the
farm that way – they both loved it.  Kate and her father were constantly trying
to persuade her to help out on the farm.  They would tell her she’d enjoy the
work once she got stuck into it.  But Emma wasn’t convinced. 

Turning her music off, she threw
open her wardrobe door and searched for something suitable to wear tonight. 
She tossed garment after garment over her shoulder on to the floor.  How is it
that I can have so many clothes, yet nothing to wear? she grumbled to herself
and thought glumly how it’d been a long time since she’d been to a proper
shopping centre. 

But she still managed to be ready
by five to seven that evening and lingered in the hallway, checking her makeup
in the large gilt mirror on the wall.  It’d been Meredith’s purchase and Emma’s
father had always hated it.  For that reason, Emma suspected.  The sound of the
taxi’s horn in the farmyard jolted her and she rushed outside, slamming the
front door behind her so that its knocker rattled.  Her heels almost caught in
the gravel as she made her way to the waiting taxi.

‘Glad you could make it,’ Natalie
said as she climbed in.

‘Well they can’t stop me doing
every last thing I want to,’ Emma replied pulling a face.

They sat in silence for a moment as
the taxi pulled out of the driveway and on to the mostly gravel track that led
from the farmhouse to the nearest road.  Emma knew that Kate and her father
thought she was extravagant by going out so much, but technically Emma paid the
largest part for her trips out.  They were funded by her occasional work in the
bar at the local pub. 

‘Why do you let Kate get to you?’
Natalie asked suddenly.  Emma was surprised at the question and didn’t say
anything for a moment as she pondered her response.

‘I don’t know exactly,’ she said
finally.  ‘But it’s difficult not to when she’s always on at me to help more on
the farm.  And Dad’s as bad.  They just expect me to be the same as them, to
want to run the farm for the rest of my life.’  She paused and gazed out of the
window at the beautiful golden sunset, brooding.  ‘I can’t think of anything
I’d rather do less.’

‘So tell me – he’s letting you have
the inheritance then?’

‘Yes.’

‘And?  Aren’t you pleased?’

‘I am, but I also feel guilty for… you
know, blackmailing him.’

‘Oh come on, you were just laying
down the law, telling him how it was going to be.  How it has to be.  You
weren’t blackmailing him, just educating him and at the same time getting
what’s owing to you.’

Emma nodded.  ‘You’re right of
course.  That’s the way I’ve got to think of it.’  But the niggling feeling
that she’d done wrong still remained in her mind.

‘Anyway I’ve found us a wonderful
house in Clapham.  You’re going to love it.  It’ll be perfect for us.’

‘Sounds great.’

‘Oh it is.  It needs some work done
on it, but give it a few weeks and I reckon we’ll be able to move in.’

‘Excellent. You know how desperate
I am to get away.  This is just the new start I need.’

Natalie beamed at her as the taxi
finally reached the road and sped away towards the town.

******

Emma stared at her reflection in
the mirror.  Her face with its bleary eyes, messy hair and greasy skin stared
back at her.  It’d been a couple of weeks since she’d last been out late and
the night had taken its toll on her.  It was midday.  She’d slept through the
calls of her father asking her to feed the dogs and of her sister yelling up
the stairs to tell her she really needed a hand with cleaning out the cattle
shed.  The conversation she’d had two days ago with her father came back to her
as she stood under the shower and washed off the previous evening’s dirt. 

‘I’m fed up with being here, Dad,’
she’d said.  ‘I don’t like it, there’s nothing for me here.  I don’t want to be
incarcerated with you and Kate for the rest of my life.’

‘Incarcerated?’ Kate scoffed. 
She’d burst in to the room as Emma delivered her ultimatum.  ‘Oh come on,
Emma.  Don’t you think you’re being just a little bit melodramatic?’

Emma had felt her face redden with
anger.  ‘No I’m not.  You want me to be exactly like you and Dad, happy to have
no life here on the farm.  Well I’m not happy with that.’

They’d argued like this for some
time; Emma couldn’t remember exactly what had been said.  She had a vague
recollection of their father standing between her and Kate when the
conversation was getting particularly volatile.  But she did remember feeling a
sense of satisfaction that her father and Kate couldn’t stop her from leaving
now.  Now her satisfaction had turned into unease about what she’d said, and
even a little regret.  She didn’t really wish her father ill… But it was too
late for regret now, she’d gone too far.  She had to look forward; there was no
room for looking back.