A Rather Lovely Inheritance Read online

  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,” sh
e 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.

  “When you see Jeremy, do be sure to ask after his mother—you know, your Aunt Sheila.”

  “Okay,” I said.“I’d better get going on this.” Now that I’d adjusted to the idea of returning to the hotel to tell everybody that I must take time off for my personal affairs, this, oddly enough, cheered me immensely. I’ve never really had an important, grown-up, financial reason for time off, since as a freelance consultant I’m usually too busy trying to drum up more work so I can make sure that I’m not “off ” for the rest of my life.

  “Sweet dreams,” my father said tenderly.

  “Break a leg,” my mother added in her own tart version of affection. She thinks that if you work in film you use the same lingo as in theatre. And with that, the pair of them rang off.

  Chapter Two

  THE SUN WAS SHINING BRIGHTLY AS I CLAMBERED DOWN THE STEPS of the castle. Several of the production vans had already left, but I flagged down the sound truck and hitched a ride back to the hotel. It took all my concentration just to stay in my seat and not get bounced out of it each time the driver shifted gears, with a bone-jolting lurch of the clutch, as he struggled up hills or careened around a corner on the narrow back-roads. His radio was blaring sports scores and loud commercials in French the whole way, so conversation was not only unnecessary but impossible. That was fine with me. I needed to mull things over.

  Every time I get off the phone with my folks, my own life seems a tad more unreal to me. Perhaps it’s because my parents are so sure of everything they do, so utterly convinced of the authenticity of their existence. I don’t see how I can ever match that. In photos they grin confidently, always arm-in-arm. In their youth they were tall, slim and trim, Mom with the same copper-colored hair I have, and Dad with his delicate light skin and brown hair, and the brown eyes that I inherited. Nowadays my parents are a little bit heavier, but not much, and more gray-haired, with crinkly lines around the eyes and mouth, but with that radiant look of people who’ve done what they wanted with their lives.

  As for girls like me, we just toddle off into modest careers that we choose because we like the work, not because we want to make money. So I went to art school, and after graduation I freelanced as a historical researcher for authors and academics, but that wasn’t enough to live on. Mercifully my friend Erik, who’d become a theatre production designer, hired me to help him authenticate the sets, props, backgrounds and costumes of the historical time periods in the plays, and then movies, that he worked on.

  This may sound faintly glamorous, but in reality it simply requires me to research, paint and generally help create fake versions of the decor, doodads and bibelots of dead rich people. I spend most of my days in silent solitude, working from my tiny apartment in New York City, where the sun makes a brief morning appearance, then vanishes; where the kitchen has just enough room for a mouse to cook in, and actually is now beset with strange rustlings in the walls at night which indicate that mice have returned after a mysterious interlude when even they had gone off in search of a better life.

  I myself rarely abandon the Manhattan rat race when I go out to do my research, shuffling around dusty old libraries full of books and photographs, and museum archives and used-furniture shops, scurrying through the dark underground hallways, vaults and lairs where most historical artifacts are kept. No matter the time period, I’m looking to find out what they wore, how they did their hair, and what chairs they sat in.

  When I’ve completed my research I present it to Erik, at the occasional lunch-or-cup-of-coffee meeting that keeps my social skills relatively intact.

  My friends ask me how I can bear to work alone, with nobody to talk to for days on end. But somewhere along the way the modern world lost its charm for me, and fortunately my job provides me with a legitimate way to spend whole weeks, even months, dreaming of living in someone else’s more elegant past, where I would ponder life’s verities whilst wearing exquisite ball gowns to fabulous parties and drinking champagne on a balcony with a man who loves me.

  I don’t really think of it as the past, but more as a sort of secret future.With remarkably thickheaded perseverance I harbor a steadfast hope that I might one day defy the odds and the gods, and use the past as a key to open the door of a more intelligent parallel universe. The only trouble with this sort of thinking is that whole years of your life can go by unnoticed. I’d always assumed that my personal life would automatically blossom alongside my professional development, never dreaming that one could feel slightly mummified by one’s own career.

  There was a loud roar from the engine of our sound van as the driver heroically steered us onto the main seaside road in Cannes.The Boulevard de la Croisette was mercifully flat and, though full of traffic, less hair-raising. Having been jostled out of my reverie, I resolved to focus on living in the present instead of brooding about the past. Our schedule had been inhumanly tight, with no breaks for sightseeing, devised by a line producer with the personality of a student crossing-guard. But now I squinted in the sunlight and shaded my eyes for a better look.

  On one side of the boulevard were the grand, glamorous old-fashioned hotels with their beautiful French windows, built by kings and tycoons for their vacations and mistresses in centuries long gone. On the other side were the beach, the sea, and the famed “Croisette” walkway itself. Despite the town’s present-day hurdy-gurdy atmosphere, there was still something elegant here, left over from another era.You could even see it in the way the dapper French traffic cops waved you on, vigorous and proud, intent on keeping the flow of life moving at a snappy pace, and the yachts chugging by in the deep blue sea.

  We’d arrived here a few days after the famed Cannes Film Festival had ended. But I noticed that even though the actresses and movie moguls had flown away, largely replaced by elderly French ladies out walking their dogs, still, the stylish Croisette was sprinkled with glamorous young women languidly sunbathing in cushioned lounge chairs with old-fashioned blue-and-white-striped umbrellas, or strolling along the promenade in their gilded high-heeled sandals, skimpy chiffon dresses and sparkling jewelry.

  Clutching my bulging, battered leather portfolio of scripts and notes, craning my neck to peer out the dusty window, I reflected that surely, if there was any place on earth where elegance could still be found, it was here on the Côte d’Azur—where those beautiful French doors are still flung open by begowned women and their lovers, gazing out at the sensuous Mediterranean on a warm summer’s night.

  Naturally, being an incurably hopeful romantic fool, I had imagined that I, too, would be staying at one of these glamorous belle epoque hotels with balconies and balustrades and potted-palm dining rooms, but instead, our “affordable” hotel, located way down a side street off the main boulevard, is one in a boring chain that prides itself on identical rooms so that no matter where in the world you stay, if you wake in the middle of the night you can always stagger in the same direction for the toilet.We might just as well be in Akron, in our dimly lit rooms of uninspired gray-and-brown, which feel—and smell—like the inside of a refrigerator.

  When our sputtering van pulled up to the front door of the hotel and the sound guys began to noisily unload their equipment, I jumped out and went inside, passing through the lobby, where the newest wave of conventioneers, selling everything from dental supplies to beauty-parlor accessories to computer software, were all lined up with their suitcases waiting to check in
.There must have been at least fifty of them arriving this afternoon.

  I spotted Erik on his way into the conference room that had become our film crew’s private cafeteria. I had my portfolio under my arm to show him some of my initial sketches, notes and samples for Lucrezia,A Woman of Intrigue. Pentathlon Productions is producing two bio-pics back-to-back. Since we don’t usually shoot at authentic locations, Bruce depends on Erik’s beautiful sets to conjure up mood and time period; and because Erik relies on my research, I’m known as the History Lady, whom directors tolerate having around mostly because I keep Erik calm. Erik is supremely motivated and well-connected, able to get a lot of good people and materials for less money than someone else might, which makes directors clamor for him.

  He was surveying the chow line and crowded tables when I asked him if we could squeeze in a meeting over lunch about the Lucrezia Borgia set, so I could leave the shoot ahead of schedule and go to London for the reading of Great-Aunt Penelope’s will.

  Erik furrowed his bushy blond eyebrows as he stood there listening to me. He looks like a big shaggy wolfhound, six feet two and large-bellied, with a full head of floppy white-blond hair and a scruffy beard that’s inexplicably darker brown, shot with only a few silver strands.

  “What!” he shouted. He waved to the prop-master, who’d just arrived. “Timmy, come here. You’ve got to hear this with your own ears.” Timothy, Erik’s longtime companion, is thin, trim, wiry and dark-haired. Now he trotted over to us, looking intrigued.

  “An heiress!” Erik told him in a stage whisper. “Our little Penny Nichols has turned out to be a bona fide heiress.”

  Sheri, the line producer, sidled over to eavesdrop, which she considers part of her job. I could tell that she heard what we just said, because she wore a studied look of feigned nonchalance. If she had her way, I wouldn’t be on the set at all. I’d overheard her complaining to Bruce about having “extraneous people” around.