The Belting Inheritance Read Online Free PDF Page B

how to begin telling you why I haven’t written, but I must try. Everyone else in the plane was killed, but I only hurt my leg. I was lucky enough to find some Germans who looked after me, got me German papers. Then when I tried to get away across Germany to France my luck ran out, the Russians got hold of me. I had German papers, and they sent me to a labour camp at a place called Novoruba. Don’t know how long I was there, seven or eight years, or how I lived through it. I think for a time I went a bit crazy.
    Damn it, I didn’t mean to write about all this, but I’ll finish now. They let me out eventually, dumped me in West Germany. I got a job there, then worked my way to Paris, been there for a year doing all sorts of dirty jobs, wondering why I didn’t write to you.
    Now I have, Dearest Mamma, I know about Hugh and I thought it might be better if I stayed dead too. Stupid. It’s a long time, I’m not what I was, but I’d like to come over, see you again. Can I, will you have me? I’m not rich, but you needn’t send fare.
    This is the comic name I’m known by.
     
    Best to Stephen and Miles.
    Rikki Tikki
     
    I looked at the name on the envelope. It was J Stiver, and the address was the Hôtel les deux Pigeons in Paris. I knew what the signature meant, because Lady W had told me during one of our talks. “Tavvi” had been the nearest David could get to pronouncing his name when he was a small child, and his father, who was a devotee of the Jungle Book, had called him Rikki Tikki. I put the letter down and looked at Lady W. Squeezed out of her eyes came two large tears. She used the cliché that was I suppose inevitable for the occasion.
    “It’s like a miracle.”
    “You’ve written to him?”
    “Of course. I told him to hurry over, that he must come – come and live here. I haven’t had a reply yet, no doubt he has things to settle. Then he will come.” She stopped talking, moved her hand aimlessly over the coverlet and said with the faintest of smiles, “There’s not much time.”
    Nonsense, I said, nonsense or ridiculous or something like that. I did not know what to say.
    “We shall never finish the history now. But you and David – ”
    “Of course. But don’t think about it”
    “I want you to understand one thing. David coming back will make no difference, no difference at all, to you.”
    She was talking about the provision she had made for me in her will, which she had insisted on telling me in detail a few months earlier. When she died I was to receive £20,000 from the estate, and was to make my home at Belting for as long as I wished. It was a handsome provision for the boy from Woking, although by this time I really thought of myself as somebody who belonged here in Belting, in the world where I had been placed.
    I left her room a minute or two later, walked along the corridor and met Peterson on the galleried landing that looked down to the entrance hall below. She was carrying, as she so often was, a bundle of washing or laundry. Peterson had never been positively hostile to me, but had made no secret of her belief that it was not possible to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. She greeted me now, however, almost as if I were a fellow conspirator.
    “You’ve seen her, she’s shown you the letter?” I nodded. “Isn’t it a cruel trick?”
    “A trick?”
    “Of course it’s a trick. Who would have the heart to play such a hoax on an old lady, and one in her condition. You saw the letter came from France?” Peterson was a Scot, and in her mind nothing but wickedness was to be found on the other side of the Channel. “He said he’d been there for a year, why couldn’t he have come over before, will you tell me that?”
    It was something I could not tell her, for I had not even considered it. When I read the letter I had not questioned its authenticity. Peterson went on, her moustache trembling with indignation. “It’s a heartless practical joke, and whoever did it