The Belting Inheritance Read Free

say, “How shall we tell him? How can we ever tell him?” While they were brooding on this, I heard about the crash on the radio.
    To be orphaned at the age of twelve sounds a terrible thing, and seen objectively it is terrible, but at the time I hardly took it in. Everything happened in such a whirl that I was conscious of excitement more than grief. No doubt this wouldn’t have been the case if our family circle had been a close one, but I had seen my father very little since I was four years old, so that my memories of him were rather those one has of a stranger who brings occasional presents than of a father who has emotional contact with his son. My relationship with my mother was much deeper, but she was a woman who thought of tenderness as softness. She looked after me in the most exemplary way, making sure that I went to school neat and tidy, putting me to bed when I had a cold, helping me with homework, but she flinched always from close emotion. This was part of her character as a proud, independent woman. Her mother had died when she was a girl, and I am sure she would have felt it inexcusable softness to forgive her father. When he was ill during the war she never visited him, and although she went to the funeral she told me afterwards that she hardly spoke to any other members of the family. She did not want me to grow up with that kind of softness in me. That would seem to a psychiatrist a superficial way of looking at it, but it is deep enough for me.
    Even so, the gap left in my life was enormous, and if I had gone on living in Woking and going to the same school no doubt this would have been borne in on me, but I soon understood that my way of life was to be changed. It seems to me to have been within hours of my learning of my parents’ deaths, and certainly it must have been within a
day or two, that I was visited by Lady Wainwright. I can remember as well as though it were yesterday being told by Mrs Parker that there were some people to see me, and going in to the Parkers’ untidy and rather dirty sitting-room. There sat a formidable-looking old lady dressed in what I remember as dark blue velvet, and wearing a tall hat with a black feather in it. A little baldish red-faced man was also in the room, but I had no eyes for him, but only for the old woman. I knew instinctively that this was the old bitch, Lady W, and before she could tell me so I blurted out her name.
    She had taken one of the hard chairs, while Uncle Miles – for he was the little red-faced man – sat in one of Mrs Parker’s easy chairs. When I mentioned her name she jerked up her head. Her face was fierce as that of a hook-nosed bird, her voice sharp as though words were some hard substance at which she pecked.
    “How did you know who I am? Did your mother show you my photograph?”
    “No.” I did not know what to say next. I could not tell her how I knew.
    She paused, looked at me with that fierce gaze, and said it did not matter. “I was very fond of your mother, did you know that?”
    “No,” I said again, staring in fascination at her hat.
    “She was my niece, you knew that, I suppose. I am your great-aunt.” I managed a nod. “But she would have nothing to do with me. That was very stupid.”
    “Mamma,” Uncle Miles said warningly, and I almost burst out laughing, it seemed to me so funny that this little bald man should say “Mamma” in that tone of voice.
    “I don’t believe in sentiment,” Lady Wainwright said, and it might almost have been my mother speaking. “You know that your mother and father are dead, and you are old enough to understand what that means.”
    “He’s an intelligent boy, his school says so.” That was Uncle Miles again, and again Lady Wainwright took no notice.
    “Your grandfather, my brother-in-law Jonathan, is dead, so it devolves upon me to look after you. At least, I feel it to be my duty. You would live at Belting. Have you heard of Belting? It is my home, and it is a beautiful