A Rather Lovely Inheritance (24 page)

“Was it more fun in those days?” I persisted. He smiled at me understandingly.

“Yes and no, darling. It helped if your friends were rich or clever—and I think the wealthy were a shade less
gauche
than they are now. And certainly it was a quieter, slower world than this mad noisy one. But there were too many things you couldn’t speak of publicly—abortion, affairs, homosexuality, drug addiction, incest. I wish we could have talked more frankly then, and less frankly now. However, back then the food was not quite so
ersatz
.” He exhaled deeply. “But nothing beats being young,” he admonished, wagging a finger at me playfully again. I asked him about the villa and the Dragonetta.

“Oh, my, yes, of course I remember that car,” he said fondly. “We zipped along in that baby all around the Riviera. Penelope didn’t like driving in London. City traffic gave her a fright. But oh, the picnics! The nights at the seaside! And the parties, darling, the parties! You never knew just
who
you were going to find with
whom
in the backseat when you came out into the car-park at four in the morning!”

He could tell me where she’d bought each gown, and what fabric it was made of, and which gig was the one where they both came down with bronchitis and had to croak their way through a song and the audience never knew that the joke wasn’t deliberate.

“Tell me about Aunt Penelope’s rich guy,” I prodded.

“Belvedere Hanover Wendell the Third. I always thought he was a bit of a clod,” Simon said, “but Penelope seemed to get on with him well enough. Don’t I have a marvelous talent for recalling names? He was a big man in politics, so mercifully he wasn’t around all the time. Had a wife and children, too, so we all had to pretend that Penelope was my date to the big fancy dinner parties in town. But nobody minded, really.We all knew how to stay out of each other’s way.”

“Aunt Penelope certainly was stylish,” I said craftily, pointing to the picture of the two of them cavorting at the piano in the villa. “Where did she get all that great jewelry?” I asked.

But my casual tone didn’t fool him in the least. He was like a cat, alert to the slightest warning of a trap. He knew all about jewelry and inheritance battles—I could tell from his sharp expression. He observed me in amusement, peering at me over the tops of his reading glasses that had slunk down on his nose. “Did you find any of it?” he inquired.

“One lone earring,” I admitted. “I don’t know where the mate is—” But he put his hand on mine and patted me in a fatherly way. His tone was consoling, but slightly reproving.

“Darling, don’t upset yourself over it,” he said.“It really isn’t worth it.”

I paused. “What do you mean?” I asked.

“Paste,” he said sadly.

“Paste?” I asked.

“Paste,” he repeated positively. “All of it.”

“All of it?” I echoed.

“All of it.”

“You mean, she had paste copies of her jewelry?” I asked. I knew that some rich people kept the real stuff in safes while they wore the fakes to parties. But he shook his head again.

“No, darling, all she ever had was paste,” he said. “It was the thing then. Everybody had paste. Some of it was quite lovely, and today it would fetch a decent, but not astounding price in the antique markets, you know, because of the Deco. Everyone’s suddenly mad for Deco, when for years they wouldn’t touch it. Said it was too old-fashioned, the peasants.You can’t get such detail and craft now. But the point is, he never gave her any truly priceless gems. Some peculiar morality of his—only his wife got those. Penelope didn’t care; she was never one for making a big deal about jewelry. She gave most of it away. She was like that. And Belvedere didn’t mind paying for a lot of those gowns.”

My mother had intimated some of this, yet I must have looked surprised.

“I sort of wondered how she could afford the best fashion houses on earth,” I admitted.

He smiled indulgently, then said with a chuckle, “Well, my dear, you don’t think your great-auntie got all those lovely things from being a thespian, do you? And her brother Roland got most of her parents’ money. Boys usually did in those days. That horrid Roland. What a gargoyle he was! Some people put energy into a room when they enter it.That was our dear Penelope. Some people just drain the living daylights out of room.That was Roland.The sister—Beryl, your grand-mama—she was somewhere in between. More of a homebody, really. It was Penelope who hauled in the big tuna when the time came.”

“What tuna?” I asked. “Do you mean that the rich guy—?”

“Made a lovely settlement on your great-auntie,” he summed up. “In return, she promised to keep quiet about him.” He winked.

“She didn’t make him—I mean, she didn’t actually . . .” I asked delicately.

“Threaten him? Blackmail him? Certainly not. It wasn’t her style. But things were cooling off, for her anyway, and he knew she was getting restless, and around that time there was a rash of mistresses who were beginning to get careless and cause scandals.You probably can’t imagine what it meant back then to have a scandal, but believe me, heads rolled, careers tumbled, there were suicides and all kinds of things when a mistress blabbed, either to the wife or if she just let the reporters follow her trail of bread crumbs.

“So Penelope’s fellow decided not to take any chances, and bought her a marvellous apartment in Belgravia and a villa in the South of France, to keep her mouth shut. I hate to be so blunt. Personally, I think a man
ought
to take care of a gal when they’re both getting old. It’s a perfectly civilized thing to do. He never really liked the sun anyway, he was one of those men who went to the beach wearing the same suit and shoes he wore to the office.” Simon shuddered delicately at such a fashion
faux pas
.

I must have still looked surprised. “Why, darling, don’t tell me the apartment and the villa disappeared, too,” he said, faintly alarmed. “Together they were worth millions!”

I had to reassure him that they were in the estate, divided among the heirs. I wasn’t ready yet to tell him we were fighting over the villa.

“Good,” he said briskly. “I hope your legacy gives you a start in life. That’s all any of us ever really needs, if you’ve got a pleasant face and some brains.”

He returned to the photographs. “So let’s see who else you’ve got in here on this lovely trip down Memory Boulevard,” he said. He paused and sighed at the sight of the dapper chauffeur posing in front of the car.

“Oh, Giulio,” he trilled. “What a dreamboat he was! No wonder the girls squabbled over him!”

“What girls?” I asked. Simon had raised the bottle of champagne over the bucket, allowing the melted ice to drip off it while he surveyed what was left inside the bottle.

“Hmmm,” he said,“at this stage, I don’t see the point of corking up so little of it. Do you?” And he poured out the remaining champagne, going back and forth twice, into his glass and mine, so we’d get the same amount of the last of it. “What were we saying, Penny dear?”

“You said some girls fought over this guy,” I reminded him.“What girls?” I thought he was going to tell me about the scullery maid or the butler’s daughter.

He glanced at me in wicked amusement. “My dear,
the
girls.
Les
girls. Penelope and Beryl, of course.”

“What!” I shrieked. I’d had some champagne too, after all. “Did you just say that my great-aunt and my grandmother fancied the chauffeur?”

“Driver, dear, driver,” he said. “Only the
petite bourgeoisie
use the c-word. The answer is, hell yes. They fought tooth and nail over him. For a whole year they didn’t even speak to each other. Then the war came, of course—”

“Wait a minute, wait a minute,” I commanded. “If you don’t start at the beginning I’ll scream.” He grinned.

“You are
so
like her, after all,” he said. “Well, of course, darling. Giulio was an out-of-work actor not unlike yours truly here. Only if I may say so, I worked my little fanny off to make a modest little success of myself, whereas Giulio, being of a rather highly born family in Italy, was not so inclined to fighting it out in the rough-and-tumble streets day after day. We all thought he’d be the next Valentino. Alas, no. He was not the type to push, and an actor must push, you know. He was flat broke when we found him knocking about London, and we took him in and gave him a hot meal and a hot bath. Penelope had her sugar daddy paying for the car, the clothes, the villa, and any staff she cared to hire, so she clapped her hands like a fairy godmother and gave Giulio a job as her driver so that he wouldn’t starve.

“It was a good thing, too, because as I said, Penelope hated driving in London. She was just beastly with start-and-stop traffic and lights and pedestrians, and she’d got into trouble one too many times with the London traffic cops. I mean, honestly, out on the open road she was just fine, but—well, anyway, she needed a good driver, and it was excellent cover once they embarked on their love affair. Nobody knew for years and years, not until her bratty little sister took it into her head to fancy him. Beryl was like that, you know. If you don’t mind my saying so, your grandmother was a bit of a dull gal when it came to improvising a life. All she wanted was whatever her sister had. If Penelope had a pair of gold sandals, why then, Beryl had to have a pair of gold sandals. If Penelope had dancing lessons, Beryl had to have them. Do you know that when Penelope came down with mumps, Beryl sulked for weeks and kept trying to catch them so that everybody would fuss over her, too?”

I couldn’t suppress a giggle at the image of my sensible, stalwart grandmother once being a jealous young girl squabbling and competing with her older sister.

“But of course, Giulio wasn’t in love with Beryl. He called her an infant, which didn’t go down well,” Simon explained. “However, being a macho sort of male, he couldn’t help being flattered by her attention, and that was all the encouragement she needed to keep it up. Honestly, it was ridiculous after awhile. So Penelope turned the tables on Beryl by flirting with that fellow that Beryl was engaged to and finally married—”

“You mean Grandpa Nigel,” I said. This was matching what my mother told me.

“Yes, I do,” Simon said, nodding gravely.“To show Beryl how silly she was being, Penelope pretended to fall for your gramps, but he took it rather seriously and the whole thing got out of hand. Then, as I said before you so rudely interrupted me ages ago, the war broke out, and everything went topsy-turvy.”

“Why?” I asked. “What happened?”

“Giulio got called up by the Italian army to go and fight with Mussolini,” Simon whispered, shuddering as if it had happened just yesterday. “Oh, the scenes! The intrigues! Should he go back to Italy? Should he stay in London and sign up with the Brits, and possibly shame his parents? He was their only child who survived—three other infants died at birth or from illness. Well, while he was deciding, Beryl made up his mind for him.”

“Grandma? How?” I breathed, spellbound.

“She blabbed to an English soldier and inadvertently reported him as an enemy alien,” Simon announced. “Revenge, darling. Sisters can be like that, you know. They seethe inside and then one day, bang! They take the first opportunity. Poor Giulio, he wasn’t a fascist, but what could he do? He
had
to leave England before they interned him in some awful jail. But Penelope surprised us all.We knew she adored him, we knew they were lovers, but what we didn’t know was that she really, truly loved the boy and was willing to go to Italy with him, can you imagine, when every British citizen was scurrying out of Italy on every last train, plane or hay-cart?”

“What happened to them in Italy?” I asked.“When was this? What year?”

“Oh, 1940. For a few weeks she seemed to just vanish. We were frantic, nobody knew where she was, alive or dead. Because”—here he paused triumphantly and significantly—“she drove into Italy in that car, my dear. That selfsame car. And when the time came, she drove herself right back out of there. How, I don’t know. I heard it was all pretty dicey. Giulio had to go into the Italian army. But his parents died before the war was over. They were old, and the stress, I’m sure, was too much for them. Giulio was reported missing in action, and it broke them, just broke them. Then Penelope got word he’d been killed. She was ready; he’d told her what to do if he died. She took the child back to London for the rest of the war.”

I nearly dropped my teeth. “Child?” I said as calmly as possible. “Did Aunt Penelope have a child?”

Simon looked taken aback. “Good God, of course not. She was much too careful for that sort of thing,” he said primly. “No, no. Giulio had a ten-year-old son by an American woman he’d met in Italy, long before he met Penelope. The American gal fell in love with him as only rich Americans can, and she had his baby. But then she didn’t want it. She acted like those people who go on vacation and buy a cat, but when it’s time to return home they simply sail off leaving the pet tied to a fence to starve. She wanted to give it to an orphanage. Giulio, of course, wouldn’t hear of it—family pride and all. So he kept it.

“He adored the child, who lived mostly with Giulio’s parents in Italy but came to visit at Penelope’s house on the Riviera in the summertime. A beautiful boy he was, with lovely dark hair and blue eyes. Oh dear, what was his name? It will come. I used to bring him little chocolates, too, you’d think I’d remember. Getting old is a dreadful thing, my dear, try not to do it if you can possibly avoid it. I mean, the scientists must have come up with something in their wretched test tubes by now, mustn’t they? But for codgers like me, old age is the only way to go, considering there’s only one other, and fatal, alternative—”

His teasing tone was meant to distract me, I knew, but I hung on with all my might to this story. “You were saying—the child’s name was—?” I persisted.

He snapped his fingers.“Domenico,” he said briskly.“That’s it. Everyone just naturally assumed he was a war orphan when Penelope brought him to London. She positively doted on him. Bought him a darling rocking-horse for Christmas, dressed him in good wool coats in the winter, made sure he got plenty of Italian food so he wouldn’t forget his papa. Ah, me,” Simon sighed, and this time there was no theatricality to the brightness in his eyes. “The war made heroes and fools of us all,” he said. He fell silent, remembering.