“What’s your favorite song?” he asks me, and I look at him blankly for a moment before I can make sense of the question. And for some reason Dad’s favorite song, the last song the university quartet played at the end of his memorial service—a joke of sorts—springs to mind.
“ ‘Always Look on the Bright Side of Life,’ ” I say, with perhaps a humorous lack of humor.
James gives a little chuckle. “Ah, excellent choice,” he mutters then raises his voice in a declamatory fashion to say, “Bathsheba, play ‘Always Look on the Bright Side of Life.’ ”
I feel my eyebrows shoot up. Bathsheba was our cat when I was growing up. And biblically, of course, the lover of King David, who, having seen her bathe, lusted after her, killed her husband, and married her. Then God struck down their firstborn as a kind of bizarre punishment. The sins of the father and all that. I just liked the name.
The music kicks in, flooding the house with jaunty tragicomic joy, and it takes a lot of facial energy not to let a smile break across my face.
Instead I give James a nod of appreciation.
“Yes. Fitting.”
—
JAMES GIVES ME THE TOUR. The biometric door system is explained and my own hand scanned into the central control panel. So far, so bizarre. But again, very like Dad, and a modern house deserves a modern security system. I see the logic in it, even if something about it sends a shiver down my spine.
The house is everything I might have expected from the outside.
Vast sweeps of marble counter. Cool tiles underfoot. Perfect, immaculate, but somehow anonymous, a blank canvas.
A state-of-the-art, chef-grade kitchen—an odd inclusion given my father could at best boil an egg, perhaps at a push bake some asparagus. I struggle to imagine him here, apron on, amid all of this.
“It’s immaculate,” I comment. “Who has been maintaining it?”
James smiles as if he himself has chipped in with some hoovering. “Your father hired through various companies. But we had the house deep-cleaned ourselves, and stocked, prior to your arrival. Again, as specified in the will, with funds set aside.”
“The will specified the type of food that should be here for me?”
James nods. I immediately head to the fridge and open it.
A shudder in my chest as I see what is inside. Familiar brands stare back at me. Our usuals. This could be our fridge back home. Driscoll’s strawberries, Alpine yogurt, Red Leicester, Ploughman’s Chutney, all our favorites are there.
For a second, my father is alive again, he is here, in this house. I half expect his warm hand to land reassuringly on my shoulder and welcome me home. But it does not. Because this is not my home.
I am lucky my back is turned to James as I quickly wipe away my tears and close the fridge door.
James is looking away when I turn back. Of course he is, ever the professional, he’s done all this before.
The kitchen gives way to a large open-plan sitting room, a sunken area with custom seating built in. Contemporary art hangs from the bright-white, gallery-style walls.
I study the artworks that he must have chosen, that must have spoken to him in some profound way, and try to guess what he saw in them. But their abstract starkness rebuffs any attempt at connection.
I try to work out if all of this—the minimalism, the money, the cool clean lines and empty brutalism—was in truth the kind of thing my father actually liked instead of our warm, book-littered home. I think of his wind farms, cold and silent and monolithic off the coast of Britain. Was that him, really?
The paintings stare back down at me, impassive, their tone understated, blurred shapes, endlessly open to interpretation. But then isn’t that a sign in itself? What he is showing me here is something different.
I vow, there and then, that I will find him in all this: I will grind out the meaning of this inheritance even if it kills me. After all, it’s not like I have anything better to do: I am not expected anywhere else.
“It’s all cataloged in your beneficiary pack,” James pipes up, then points to the giant giclée prints hung high on the wall above us. “Those pieces are Pamela Rosenkranz, and the triptych we saw back in the lobby was Bacon.” I pull my eyes away from the gleaming photographic prints of stark empty rooms above me—a liquid submerged pink room, a brilliant white room—to look back at James.
“He has a Bacon?” I blurt, certain I have misheard.
“Well, you have a Bacon. Though it is an early Bacon,” he adds. “He was still a furniture designer back then, of course. His work was still all very light and jolly. But it’s a Bacon nonetheless.”
I open my mouth to ask the question that every fiber of my being now wants to know—how the hell could my father possibly have afforded all this —but the words do not make it out of me. Instead my lips open and close soundlessly, a little guppy fish caught in a strong current, because I guess I know.
My father must have been paid a lot more for his work than I ever could have imagined. I am sure there will be a trail of deposits in whatever bank accounts are listed in the pack James has provided. I look down at it in my hands, and I want to tear it open and pore over it on the floor in front of him, but thankfully I still have the strength of mind not to do so. I can wait another hour or so.
