The Belting Inheritance Read Online Free PDF

and the desks we sat in were no better than those I had been accustomed to in the state school at Woking. The school was not particularly progressive, to use a current word, but after the first eighteen months I found no pressure exerted to force me into a pattern of conformity. Indeed, six years of this school had turned me into a slightly old-fashioned aesthete. I idolised Oscar Wilde, Beerbohm and Rossetti, and admired Appollinaire, Cocteau and Alfred Jarry. I had read a great deal of poetry but very few novels, I knew a lot about some specialised periods of history and had won a History scholarship to the right college (that is, the family college) at Oxford. I had half a dozen friends at school who joined me in forming a society which we called the Æsthetes’ Group, but I need mention only one of them, and even he does not come into the story. His name was Sullivan. Looking back on myself at the age of eighteen, I should say that I was intelligent, romantic, and unusually self-contained in my approach to life and people. When I left school and came back to Belting, I did not ask friends to come and stay. I had done so once, and the friend thought that the Pam Moor and Lady W were both like something out of Great Expectations. The experiment was not repeated.
    When I went back this July, at the end of my schooldays, one thing was different. I had had a letter from Uncle Miles during my last week, and he told me that Lady W was dying. She had cancer of the stomach, and it was likely that she would live for weeks rather than months. Typically, she had insisted that I should not be told until my exams were over. “The old thing’s delighted about the schol,” Uncle Miles had written in his emphatic but erratic hand. “Nothing could have pleased her more.”
    So coming home to Belting this time was different. When I went to see Lady W I was shocked by the change in her appearance, even though Uncle Miles had prepared me for it. She was in the big four-poster bed that she always occupied, with her face at first in shadow, but when she turned on the bedside light I saw her white hair lying on the pillow like strands of dingy wool. There were other things to shock me, the way the flesh round her great dark eyes seemed to have been eaten away, the isolation of the nose that was now like a bit of carved wood sticking up out of her face, the smell that pervaded the room, but the thing that touched me most was the change in her hair. Just for a moment then I understood, as it is difficult for young people to understand, the life she had lived these last few years, a life that must have been devastating in its disappointments for a proud woman like her. I had always been grateful, although at times my gratitude had been tempered by a feeling that I was no more than a surrogate for her lost sons, but at that moment I think I loved her.
    She leaned out of bed and grasped my hand with her own, that was thin as good china.
    “Have they told you, Christopher? Has that fool Miles told you?”
    I could not think what she was talking about, except her illness. I stammered something.
    “You came straight up to see me?”
    “Of course.”
    “Then you don’t know. I’ve heard from him, Christopher.” I gaped at her. She said impatiently, “From David.”
    For a moment I thought that illness had affected her mind. Then she groped behind her pillow and brought out a letter written on thin blue paper, in a thin blue envelope. I looked at the envelope. It was addressed to her, and the postmark was Paris.
    “Read it, read it.” She closed her eyes.
    The letter was a single sheet with writing on both sides. I looked for the signature and found it, “Rikki Tikki” with three crosses for kisses beneath it. The handwriting was thin and straggly, sloping down from left to right on the page. I read the letter.
     
    Ma chère maman,
    Read the signature first, I’m afraid you won’t recognise the writing on the envelope.
    I don’t know