The Inheritance (14 page)

Steven looked uncomfortable. 
‘Maybe just give me the name of your father’s farm.  I’m sure I can look it up
sometime.’

Emma was disappointed for Kate’s
sake.  She’d thought that Steven would at least want to stay in contact with
her so that he could contact Kate more easily.  But he obviously didn’t want to
risk it.  His life was still in danger after all and potentially Kate’s too.  She
didn’t blame him for wanting to take things slowly and so she quickly scribbled
the name of the farm on a piece of paper and handed it to him.  Then she stood up
putting her coat on and picked up her bag.

‘OK.  Well I’ll head off.   It was
great to meet you.  Hopefully you’ll be able to see Kate again someday.’

Steven smiled at her.  ‘Yes, I hope so
too.’

The bedsit felt very cold and
lonely when Emma arrived back.  She switched the light on and the tiny room was
filled with a soft, slightly orange glow.  But it didn’t feel any more homely. 
Emma dumped her things.  All she wanted was to go to sleep.  Even the thought
of cleaning her teeth felt like too much, but she knew if she didn’t her mouth
would be furry and disgusting the next day.  It didn’t take her long to get
ready though and soon she was lying in bed, trying to ignore the lumpy mattress
beneath her.

Now she was finally able to rest however,
Emma’s mind refused to settle.  She thought about the past couple of months. 
Her departure from the house she’d shared with Natalie had been hard.  Since
Emma had first announced that she’d have to find a job, they’d barely spoken.  Emma
had had to sell the vast majority of her possessions, especially her clothes. 
She wouldn’t exactly have had room for them in a bedsit.  But it had been
difficult having to sort through all her beautiful things.  She felt as though
she were letting go of an old friend, betraying them so she could move on with
her life. 

Her final conversation with Natalie
came back to her as she lay still in the darkness.

‘I’m not expecting anything from
you, Natalie,’ Emma had said in a hurt voice.  She’d been scouring the internet
and adverts in the local papers for jobs constantly that day.  Natalie had come
in from town, her arms full with shopping bags.  A dark scowl had spread across
her face as she saw Emma sitting on the sofa with newspapers on her lap and a
pen in her hand, circling possible jobs to apply for.

‘Good, because you’re not getting
anything!’ she’d replied.  ‘I want you out of here as soon as possible.  I’m
fed up with seeing you wandering about the house all day looking like a lost
sheep.  It’s pissing me off!  Just hurry up and get ready to leave.  You have
two weeks.’

Emma felt a hot, angry flush spread
across her cheeks.

‘You are unbelievable!’ she shouted
standing up.  ‘You’re such a stuck up cow!  When I had money you were perfectly
happy to spend time with me, but now that I’ve lost everything, that’s it – you
no longer care.  I can’t believe how shallow and snobbish you are.  To be worth
anything to you, people have to be rolling in it.  You obviously hate the sight
of me.  Well quite honestly the feeling’s mutual.  Don’t worry; I’ll be gone very
soon.  I don’t care if I have to sleep in a ditch; I’d rather be anywhere than
in the same room as you!’

‘Two weeks.’ Natalie’s face was
stony.  Furious, Emma had rushed out of the room.

After that she barely saw Natalie
and when she did, she tried to avoid talking to her for very long.  She could
do without being insulted again and was now desperate to leave.  But although
she had many interviews, a week before the day she had to leave she still
hadn’t found a job or a place to move to.  She was getting desperate.  Then as
she came down the stairs one day she had seen a small booklet lying innocuously
on the carpet like a meek saviour.  It was full of adverts for jobs.  One was
for a job as a waitress at a restaurant here in Clapham.  She applied, shortly
after had an interview and was pleasantly surprised when she got the job. 

So what’s wrong with you, Emma? she
asked herself now as she gazed into the darkness.  Things could be much worse
for you.  You’ve got a job, a place to live and you’re gradually beginning to
pay off your debts.  She reflected on the fact that her employers treated her
well, even letting her have a meal or two there.  And yet it wasn’t enough. 
She was lonely.  There was a gaping hole inside her where she craved human
affection.  Although Kate didn’t know that Steven was alive and well, Emma
envied her because she had his unconditional love.  Even though he’d
disappeared, Kate still had that love to cling on to. 

Who, aside from her father and Kate
who probably hated her now, did Emma have to love and be loved by?  She yearned
for a relationship with someone and bitterly regretted the meaningless sex she’d
had with Tom.  She did want a physical relationship with someone.  What normal
person didn’t?  But it would have been so much better if she’d really cared
about Tom.  Maybe if she’d just taken the time to talk to him, she could have
struck up a friendship with him.  In the short while she’d been with him he’d
seemed like a nice enough guy… But there were many things she regretted.

Meredith.  Emma regretted not
finding out more about her.  She hadn’t thought of her mother for a while, but
now a fleeting memory of her face passed through her mind.  She grasped the
memory and held onto it.  Meredith had had long blonde, slightly messy hair and
blue eyes.  Emma could remember that at least.  And dungarees.  Her mother had
worn baggy dungarees.  But that was pretty much it.  About the only other thing
she remembered was that Meredith had died when she was five.

Meredith had hit her head on the unforgiving
stone mantelpiece.  That was what had killed her.  But how had it happened?  The
version Emma’s father had told her when she was thirteen was that he and
Meredith had been arguing.  He said that often when they argued, she would
become violent and that on the night she died she had been very angry and
physically abusive towards him.  According to him, Meredith had been raining
blows down on him.  To defend himself he’d pushed her roughly away and she
fell, hitting her head on the corner of the mantelpiece.

And I’m supposed to believe that? 
Emma thought bitterly as she lay in the dark staring blankly into the gloom. 
Deep down part of her knew it was probably the truth.  She knew her father well
enough to concede that he was not a violent man.  Although he had been firm
with her and Kate and wouldn’t hesitate to tell them when they’d crossed the
line, he’d always forgiven them and had never been violent towards either of
them.  She could still recall the day he’d talked to her about Meredith and how
before she died their marriage had been struggling.  Emma and her father had
been sitting together perched on a gate overlooking one of the large fields on
the farm.

‘You see, Emma, your mother and I
didn’t always get on well,’ he’d said.

‘You mean you didn’t love her,’
Emma had said in a small voice.

He had sighed deeply.  Emma remembered
even now her feeling that he seemed to have an invisible, heavy burden to bear
that only he could carry.

‘I did love her, but it wasn’t
enough,’ he said finally.  ‘Your mother, Meredith, always wanted more than I
could give.  We never had enough money for her to do what she wanted to do. 
She was unhappy.  And I, I will admit, didn’t always listen to her.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because I have always found it hard
to talk about feelings and emotions.   But it was also because we wanted
different things.  Your mother wanted a different life to the one we had
together here on the farm.’

‘But didn’t she want to be with us?’

‘Your mother loved you and Kate
very much…’

‘But she didn’t love you.’

‘No.’

Even now, lying in the bedsit years
later, Emma could still hear the sound of her father’s voice breaking as he
tried to rein his emotions in.  She recalled her own harsh words, spoken like a
typical immature teenager.

‘So you punished her by pushing her
away.  Literally.’

And with those words she had jumped
off the gate and rushed away from her father before he could say anything
else.  Emma reflected that since then the two of them had barely spoken of
Meredith together.  It was also from that point on that her relationship with
her father had started to deteriorate.  Years of mutual resentment had
followed, mostly on Emma’s part, although since she’d taken her inheritance she
knew her father wanted nothing more to do with her.

Not long before she’d had this
conversation with her father, Emma had found out that he’d lied to the police. 
She had just assumed that he had confessed and the police had let him off.  But
it was not so.  The argument she’d had with Kate one day, when Kate had told
her what had happened with the police, still reverberated in her mind.

‘You didn’t care about Meredith,
you didn’t love her like I did, like I do,’ Emma had fumed.  ‘That’s why it
doesn’t bother you that she’s gone.’

‘Oh that’s rich coming from you. 
We all know that you’ll never love Dad as much as you adore your ideal of
Meredith.  Well guess what?  That’s all it is, an ideal.  You didn’t know her;
you just paint this unreal picture of her in your mind.  You don’t understand
that Dad lied to the police for our sake, so that we wouldn’t be on our own.’

‘What do you mean, Dad lied to the
police?’

‘You didn’t know?  Oh.’

‘No I didn’t know.  What about? 
What did he say?’

Kate had looked guilty, as though
she knew she’d made a big mistake in blurting out that their father had lied to
the police.

‘You have to tell me, Kate.’

Kate didn’t speak for a moment and
when she began she spoke quietly.

‘You know that Dad was defending
himself when he pushed Meredith away.’

Emma said nothing.

‘Well, whether you believe it or
not, he was.  She fell badly and hit her head on the corner of the
mantelpiece.  Dad told the police that she fell, but he didn’t tell them that
he pushed her.’

‘Why not?’ Emma demanded.

‘To protect you and me.  He knew
that if he told the police there’d been a struggle, he may be accused of murder
or manslaughter and that you and I would end up in care, with no parents to
look after us.’  She paused.  ‘I think he did the right thing.’

‘Well if he had told the truth, at
least Meredith would have had justice!’ Emma snapped.   ‘And while we’re
revealing secrets here, tell me why we can never call her “Mum”?’

Kate shrugged.  ‘No one’s stopping
you.  But for myself, I never thought of her as my mum, as being someone who
cared about me.  All the memories I have left of her are bad.  She was always
trying to get me on her side against Dad, even though I was a child.  There was
no genuine warmth with her.  Maybe my memory is doing her an injustice.  But
that’s just the way I feel.  So if you don’t mind, I’ll keep calling her
Meredith.’

The ironic thing was that Emma had done
the same.  Although she rarely spoke about her mother to anyone, even in her
thoughts she named her “Meredith” rather than “Mum”.  She couldn’t put her
finger on why that was.  Maybe it had something to do with not really knowing
her mother.  Although she’d seen photos of her, she could barely remember what
Meredith had looked like, let alone a remembrance of a relationship with her.  Feeling
a sob catch in her throat she wiped her eyes with the back of her hand.  So
much in her life was a mess, from the very beginning.  How was she supposed to
fix things in the present when her whole life’s history was so tangled and
complicated?  Miserable, she turned over in bed to face the wall and lay that
way, crying quietly until exhausted she fell asleep.

Emma was working hard at the
restaurant, harder than she’d worked for a long time.  So when her boss called
her into his office a couple of weeks after she’d met Steven, she assumed it
was for a talk about how things were going for her.

‘Sit down, Emma,’ he said.

She sat down.  Her boss’s
expression was unreadable.  Emma began to wonder.

‘I’ll get straight to the point. 
Emma, you’re a hard worker and you do a good job, but things are tough
financially just now.  As a business we’re finding things difficult.  I have to
make some hard decisions and cutbacks to how much we’re spending.  Amongst
other things this means cutting back on the number of staff we employ.  I’m
afraid that as you’re the newest on the team you will have to be the first to
leave.  I’m sorry but I have to let you go.’

Emma’s mouth fell open.

‘Oh,’ was all she could say.  Then,
‘How much longer will I have here?’

‘A month.’ To be fair to him, he did
look apologetic as he went on. ‘Don’t worry, I’ll write you a good reference. 
You’ve worked really hard.  You deserve a good position somewhere.’

But I don’t deserve to work here,
Emma thought.  She pursed her lips tightly to stop herself bursting into tears
and nodded.  Her boss stood up and she did the same.  He leaned across the desk
extending his hand.  She shook it.

‘I wish you all the best, Emma.’

‘Thank you.’

Emma walked out of his office with
her head held high.  She refused to go to pieces here in front of everyone, but
spent the rest of the day in a daze.  She still managed to do her job – she
thought she did it pretty well given the circumstances – yet everything felt
unreal.  Soon she wouldn’t be working here anymore.  What on earth was she
going to do for money?  The other staff looked at her sympathetically; did they
already know she’d lost her job?  It felt so unfair to Emma that it was her
that was being made redundant, even though she knew that her boss was right.  She
had to go first as she’d joined last, but that knowledge didn’t make her feel
any better.

******

When she wasn’t working out the remainder
of her time at the restaurant, Emma searched feverishly in the paper and
everywhere else she could, scouring the ads for jobs, looking for anything that
she could do to earn some money.  She no longer cared what sort of job it was
as long as it paid enough for her to stay in the bedsit.  She didn’t want to
consider her only other option.  And she didn’t think it was much of an option
anyway.  She knew her father would never allow her back, so she may as well
stop dreaming.  She needed to pay her own way in the world, she could see that
now.

The weeks went by in a bit of a
blur and her final evening at the restaurant approached.  Emma had nothing. 
She’d applied for numerous jobs but hadn’t heard back from any of them.  Before
she knew it, it was her last day.  That evening she wore her smile as if it had
been surgically stitched to her face.  She wasn’t going to let anyone know her
predicament.

‘Are you all right, Emma?’ Carly
asked as they prepared the tables for the first customers.  She was another
waitress at Henderson’s but she’d been there a while longer than Emma.

‘Yes, I’m fine.  Why do you ask?’

‘Well, you seem a little wound up
and it is your last day…’

‘Oh, I hope I don’t look too down?’

‘No you don’t.  Don’t worry.  You’ve
got a lot on your plate; it’s bound to pull your nerves to shreds.  I know I’d
be just the same.’

Emma nodded.  She made a mental
note to herself to try harder to keep her emotional feelings under lock and
key.  She wanted her last evening at Henderson’s to go well and didn’t want to
go out on a bum note.  She’d enjoyed working in the restaurant, the other staff
members were friendly and it was a homely place.  But maybe she’d grown too
attached to it.   It seemed to her that whenever she allowed herself to relax
and let down her guard a little, something bad always happened, as though she
were a child only allowed to play with its new toy for a short while before it
was confiscated.

Her final evening did go well
however and when the restaurant closed that night, some of the staff asked Emma
if she’d like to come out for a drink.  She was tempted to refuse.  Tiredness
was overwhelming her and an ominous feeling hung over her like a stormy sky, as
though her nightmare of losing everything was about to come true.  But she agreed,
deciding that going out would help take her mind off things.  Emma and her
friends didn’t have to go far to find a bar – there were loads sprinkled around
the area like confetti.  Soon she, Carly and a couple of blokes who worked as
waiters were ensconced in a secluded corner of the nearest pub to Henderson’s.     

‘So what are you gonna do now then,
Emma?’ Nick, one of the waiters, asked her.       

‘I wish I knew,’ Emma replied
glumly.  She sighed.  ‘I’ve searched everywhere for a job but there’s nothing
out there; no one wants to take me on.’

‘You’ve just got to hang in there,’
Carly said squeezing her arm.  ‘Something will come up.’

‘Yeah, I’m sure you’re right,’ Emma
replied, though nothing could be further from the truth.  But what more could
she say?  She didn’t want to burden her friends with her problems.

‘Well I for one think any employer
would be privileged to have you, Emma,’ Jason said.  He was the other waiter
from Henderson’s.

‘Absolutely,’ Carly added.

‘Thanks guys.  You’re the best,’
Emma said, feeling a lump in her throat.  I must not cry, I must not cry, she
told herself.  She took a long slug from her beer glass.  She felt like
drowning her sorrows tonight.  Who knew when she’d be able to afford to buy a
few beers in a pub again?  The four of them talked for a while longer, but by midnight
their eyes were drooping.  Staying out late after working hard all evening isn’t
a great idea, Emma thought, rubbing her tired eyes.

‘I think we should call it a night,
guys,’ she said, slurring her words a little.

‘All right.  Well it’s been a
pleasure working with you, Emma,’ Carly said putting her arm around her and
squeezing her tight.  ‘We must stay in touch.’

‘Definitely,’ Emma replied.

‘Yeah, we’ll really miss you,’
Jason said, Nick nodding his agreement.

In spite of her best efforts not to
cry, Emma felt a hot tear slide down her cheek.  She nodded mutely as Carly
patted her back.

‘Come on, Emma, you’ll set us all
off,’ she said.

Emma laughed tearfully.  ‘Well I
wouldn’t want to do that.   Especially as it would prove that sometimes boys do
cry!’

‘Oh not us,’ Nick said smirking.

‘Of course not.’ Carly rolled her
eyes.

They stumbled out of the pub
together.  They weren’t far from Emma’s bedsit but it was past midnight now and
she didn’t fancy walking home alone in the dark.   Hailing a taxi she said her
final goodbyes to her friends and headed off.

******

‘Can’t you just give me a little
longer?’ Emma asked her landlord.  It was a few weeks since she’d left
Henderson’s.  They were talking in the hallway outside her bedsit.  Emma had a
heavy feeling inside as though someone had dropped a large weight in her
stomach.

‘No.  I’m sorry, Emma, not this
time.  You’ve missed your payment and that’s it.  Three times now you’ve told
me you’ll pay me, but I’ve had nothing from you.  You’re not the only one with
bills to pay, you know.  I’m a working man, I need the income,’ her landlord
told her.

And just like that Emma lost
everything.   She had until the end of the day to vacate her room.  The
landlord had given her the address of a local hostel where she might be able to
stay.  As she was sitting surrounded by her belongings in plastic bags, Emma
wondered how it had all gone so wrong for her.  That she, who had seemed to
have everything less than a year ago, now had nothing.   It was humiliating to
say the least, but also depressing because what did it say about her as a person? 
She was unable to manage her finances, she was a spendthrift, she couldn’t hold
down a job and no one wanted to employ her.  There was nothing about herself
that she could be proud of.

She felt her lower lip begin to
tremble.  Tears were threatening to spill down her cheeks, but now was not the
time to cry.  She stood up, picking up the few plastic bags which contained
everything she owned, and walked out of the room.  She shut the door behind her
and stood still for a moment at the top of the stairs looking down.  What if I
just throw myself down the stairs? she thought to herself.  She knew that no
one would care if she was gone.   But I might just fall badly without killing
myself, or worse still survive but be paralysed.  No, she hadn’t thought
suicide through properly.  For the moment she’d just have to put up with her
lot.  I suppose I deserve it anyway, she thought bleakly and began to descend
the stairs. 

Emma had just enough money for the bus
to the hostel and thankfully the bus stop was a short walk away.  As she was
waiting for the bus a few minutes later, she thought of Reg.  She’d barely
thought of him at all since she’d arrived in London, but now she remembered his
kindness to her on the train.  She also remembered him giving her his contact card,
just as the Chinese couple had given her theirs.  She’d neglected all of them. 
But hadn’t Reg said to call him if she ever needed a friendly chat?  Maybe she
would.  Boy, did she need a friend now.