The Heirloom Read online

  ‘Those instructions that Mr Grant left you… they don’t constitute a legal will. And apart from that, there’s nothing in writing which says this chair belongs to me.’

  ‘There’s nothing in writing which says it belongs to anybody.’

  ‘What are you trying to pull here?’ I shouted. ‘I’ve got all this junk here, cluttering up my driveway, and you’re trying to tell me you won’t clear it away?’

  ‘That’s precisely it,’ said Mr Eckstein, in his Brooks Brothers voice. ‘But I’m willing to send you a cheque to cover the expenses of removal and disposal.’

  ‘I’ll sue,’ I retorted.

  ‘Whom will you sue?’ asked Mr Eckstein smoothly. ‘Mr Grant? Or his business, which is going to be wound up? And what for? For an unwelcome gift? An embarrassment of free antiques? You’d be laughed out of court, even if you could find a lawyer to take your case.’

  ‘I’ll dump the stuff on your doorstep,’ I threatened.

  ‘Well,’ said Mr Eckstein, ‘you can try.’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean? That’s not a threat, is it?’

  ‘I don’t know. What do you think?’

  ‘I think you’re just another oily sardine with a licence to practise law.’

  I banged the phone down, and sat on the bed with my arms folded, simmering. Sara was watching me in the mirror, and she combed her hair slower and slower and finally laid her comb down.

  ‘That didn’t sound very promising,’ she said.

  ‘Grant’s dead,’ I told her. ‘That was his attorney on the phone. It seems like he crashed on the Santa Ana Freeway on the way home. The van caught fire, and he couldn’t get out.’

  ‘Ricky, that’s awful,’ she said.

  ‘It’s more than awful. Grant’s lawyer said he won’t take the chair back. Apparently Grant left him a letter saying that he shouldn’t accept it back no matter what. Not even if we went around there and pointed a sawn-off shotgun at him.’

  Sara frowned. ‘He was that serious about it?’

  I stood up, and went to the bedroom window. ‘You bet,’ I told her. ‘If you ask me, Grant had been having as much trouble with that chair as we had last night. He was just driving around, looking for some sucker to dump it on.’

  I let out a breath. ‘It was just my luck that the first sucker in line was me.’

  ‘Can’t you just drive the chair back to Santa Barbara and leave it on his attorney’s doorstep?’ asked Sara.

  ‘That’s one way. The other way is simply to take it out into the yard, chop it up, and burn it. Of course, I could always put it in the shop window, and try to sell it.’

  ‘But that might mean that whatever – well, whatever spirit this chair has inside of it – that might mean that you’ll pass it on to somebody else. And you wouldn’t want to do that, would you?’

  ‘I don’t know. I think I’d rather do anything than keep it here. I mean that, Sara. That chair is definitely hexed.’

  I heard a rustling, scurrying noise which made me look towards the window again. At first, I couldn’t quite believe what I was seeing. Then I stepped closer and peered out over the slope of the side garden, and what I saw there made me feel as if I’d stuck my fingers into an electric plug. A thrill of sheer fright, and unreality.

  ‘What is it?’ asked Sara, standing up. ‘Ricky – what’s out there?’

  ‘Fall,’ I said, in a hushed voice. ‘Sara, it’s fall.’

  All around the house, whirling down from the eucalyptus trees, flew showers of dead leaves, brown and curled-up and twisted. Even the leaves of the bougainvillaea had turned brown, and the carefully-nurtured grass along the side of the driveway seemed to have shrivelled and dried. The leaves were blown into drifts by the morning breeze, and the drifts rippled as if they had a life of their own.

  The whole garden was withering, and it wasn’t at all difficult for either of us to guess why.

  3

  Returnings

  We walked out into the morning, into the yard, and we held hands with the bewildered innocence of children. The leaves still blew from the branches of the eucalyptus trees around the house, and our feet rustled through them like the feet of ghosts walking through a dried-up memory.

  It was always quiet out here in Rancho Santa Fe, but today the air seemed especially cold and especially still.

  We went as far as the picket-fence, and there we saw how pervasive the influence of old man Jessop’s chair had turned out to be. Even the leaves of the nearby lemon trees were curling up, and the lemons themselves had turned green with mould.

  A little further away, however, the trees were still thriving, and the eucalyptus we could see waving in the distance were quite healthy.

  I reached over the fence and tugged one of the rotten lemons off the tree. I squeezed it in my hand and it ran between my fingers like dust. Sara stood a little way away, watching me, her hands clasped around herself as if she were cold.

  ‘Ricky,’ she said, ‘we just have to get that chair out of the house.’

  I brushed the dust from my hands and nodded. ‘I’ll put it in the station-wagon and drive it along to the dam at Lake Hodges. A hundred-foot drop into the reservoir race should sort it out.’

  ‘I’ll come with you,’ she said. ‘Just let me get Jonathan ready.’

  While Sara went upstairs to wake Jonathan up and dress him in his chequered cowboy shirt and his denim dungarees, I went along to the library, tapping the key in the palm of my hand with all the nervousness of a jailer in a madhouse. I stood outside the library door for over a minute before I plucked up the nerve to push the key into the lock and turn it. Then I nudged the door with the heel of my hand so that it swung open.

  The chair was still there, in the centre of the room, illuminated by a single beam of sunlight which fell across the carpet from the half-drawn drapes. Its mahogany gleamed as dark and rich as before. The man-serpent’s face, with its crown of twisted vipers, still smiled at me with lips of wood, still mocked me with eyes that could never see. I walked into the room, and stood looking at the chair with a tight-chested feeling that was nothing short of controlled terror.

  I had been frightened before. Once, in a car crash, when I thought I was certainly going to die. Once in New York, when I was rousted on Tenth Avenue by three young punks with knives and a car antenna.

  But the fear I had felt before had always been immediate – a surge of hyped-up adrenalin and self-protective instincts. Whereas the fear I felt when I stood in the presence of old man Jessop’s chair was something else. It was a slow-burning dread that seemed to freeze me rather than jolt me into action. It was a dark, ancient certainty that whatever I did to help myself, this chair was going to overwhelm me.

  I remembered reading about the way two hundred aeroplane passengers behaved in Saudi Arabia when their aircraft caught fire and they had absolutely no way to escape. They sat where they were, paralysed. And the same thing happened when thirty gamblers were trapped by a fire in a club in England. They stayed at their tables, screaming but unable to move, while the flames roasted them orange.

  Looking at that chair, I suddenly wished that I had never read anything gruesome or frightening in my life. Because that chair seemed to stir up in my mind the very worst fears I could think of. It made me feel so damned weak.

  I circled around it. After the last time, when the arms had writhed in my hands like snakes, I wasn’t at all sure that I wanted to pick it up. I touched the cresting-rail quickly with my fingertips, and nothing happened, but I still didn’t feel particularly inclined to lift it.

  I thought for a moment. Then I left the library, went outside to the garage, and took down a coil of nylon rope, which I usually used for tying chairs and bureaux on to my roofrack. I went back into the house, loosening the rope as I walked, and returned to the library.

  The chair was still there. It hadn’t moved. Or, at least, it didn’t appear to have moved. There was something about the way the sunlight was illuminating th
e man-serpent’s face which gave me a disturbing suspicion that it had altered its angle slightly.

  I licked my lips. I shouldn’t let the goddamned thing start getting to me. It was a chair, right? A spooky chair, admittedly, but a chair and nothing more.

  Working quickly, I threaded the nylon rope under the arms of the chair and pulled it tight. Then, twisting the rope around my hand, I started to drag the chair across the library carpet, and out through the door.

  By the time I was halfway down the corridor to the kitchen, I was gasping for breath, and smothered in sweat. That chair was so incredibly heavy that I could scarcely move it. Each time I took a fresh grip on the rope and pulled, I felt as if the ball-and-claw feet were actually digging in, like a tug-o’-war, and resisting me. Where the chair had passed, the carpet had been roughed up into two deep tracks.

  As I reached the back door, Sara came downstairs with Jonathan. Her face was white and strained, but she managed a quick smile.

  Jonathan said, ‘Hi, Daddy. What are you doing?’

  ‘What does it look like I’m doing? I’m pulling this damned chair out of the house.’

  ‘Ricky,’ Sara admonished me.

  I stopped pulling for a while, and wiped my forehead with the back of my arm.

  ‘I’m just trying to get this real heavy chair into the yard,’ I corrected myself. ‘I’m going to load it on to the wagon, and then we’re going to take it for a ride.’

  Jonathan ran his finger down the cascade of carved wood at the side of the chair, and looked thoughtful.

  ‘Jonathan,’ I warned him, ‘I don’t want you to touch it, all right? I’d rather you didn’t touch it.’

  ‘It’s all right,’ Jonathan told me, in an unusually flat voice.

  ‘It’s not all right,’ I retorted. ‘I don’t want you to touch it, and that means don’t touch it. You got me?’

  He looked up at me, and smiled. ‘Yes, Daddy.’

  Sara had brought out a bag of Pepperidge Farm cookies and a carton of milk so that Jonathan could eat his breakfast in the car. After a short struggle with the rope and a couple of sharp kicks, I managed to drag the chair over the back step, and along by the side of the house to the front driveway, its feet scraping and bumping on the quarry-tile path.

  Jonathan, following me, looked up at the trees and said, ‘What’s happened? All the leaves have fallen. Mommy, it’s just like New England!’

  Sara put her arm around him, and smiled. She didn’t tell him what had happened. There wasn’t any way that she could.

  The rest of the furniture that Mr Grant had left on our driveway was still standing there, drifted up with dead leaves. It looked disturbingly like a collection of tombstones in a cemetery, the kind you might put up to mark an antique dealer’s last resting place. A long-case clock, tall and silent. A bow-fronted bureau. A leather-topped writing-desk.

  I pulled the chair as close to the tailgate of my wagon as I could. As I searched for my keys in my tight jeans pocket, Sara lifted her head and said, ‘Is that the telephone?’

  I listened. At first I couldn’t hear anything, but then I picked up the muffled brrrnnggg-brrmnggg-brrmnggg of the phone in my library.

  ‘I’ll answer it,’ said Sara. ‘You just get that thing on to the wagon. And make sure you tie it down.’

  I opened up the tailgate, pushed aside some old brass castors which I had picked up in a junk store on Morena Boulevard in the hope of repairing an early American bed, and tugged the chair right up to the wagon’s rear bumper as if it were a disobedient dog. In the morning sunlight, it had lost nothing of its dark charisma. It was like a black hole which drew everything towards it and let nothing escape. Jonathan raised his hand as if he wanted to run his fingers down the contours of the tumbling, hell-bent people who formed the central splat of the chair’s back, but I said, ‘Ah!’ in that sharp warning way that parents do.

  ‘It won’t hurt me,’ protested Jonathan.

  ‘Never mind,’ I told him. ‘Just keep your hands off.’

  I went round to the back of the chair, planning to heave its back legs off the ground and tilt it into the back of the wagon. But at that moment the front living-room window opened and Sara called out, ‘Ricky? It’s Bill Everett, from the store. He wants to know what time you’re coming in.’

  ‘What time is it now?’ I called back.

  ‘The clock in here says a quarter of nine.’

  ‘Well, tell him eleven o’clock. That should give us all the time we need.’

  There was a pause, and then Sara leaned out of the window again. ‘He says he wants a word.’

  ‘Tell him I’m busy.’

  ‘I already did. He says he still wants a word.’

  ‘Okay,’ I sighed.

  I lashed the nylon rope which held the chair to the Malibu’s rear bumper. Then I said to Jonathan, ‘Listen – I have to talk to somebody on the phone. Why don’t you go feed Sheraton until I’m through?’

  ‘Can’t I stay here and look after the chair for you?’ Jonathan asked me.

  ‘No, you can’t. Now, Sheraton’s hungry. Go give him some Gravy Train, and a dish of water.’

  ‘But Daddy–’

  ‘Will you go do what you’re damned well told to do?’ I snapped at him. ‘And make sure you leave this chair alone. Don’t touch it. Don’t go near it. And that’s an order.’

  ‘Okay,’ he said, turning away with flushed cheeks.

  I went inside the house and impatiently picked up the phone. It was Bill Everett, my assistant, a moustachioed lunkhead from the University of California at Santa Cruz whose idea of an antique was a ’62 Chevy. But he was willing, and eager to learn, and he had a certain surfing-bum appeal about him which attracted those fastidious upper-class ladies who liked to browse through the store. I often caught them eyeing Bill through the handles of a Royal Worcester vase, and unconsciously licking their ice-pink lips. It must have been something to do with his tangled blond hair, which looked as if it had been dried by the sun; or maybe that sloping Neanderthal forehead which looked as if it contained just enough primitive instincts to keep a rampant lady happy, but very little else.

  Compared with Bill, I looked too much like a half-Italian smartass, all university degree and shirts by Cerruti. A kind of suave Petrocelli. Italians never think I look like a half-Italian smartass, mind you. They always think I look like a Southern California smartass. But Italians only accept you as a brother if you have spaghetti hanging from your ears, and your pockets crammed full of Chianti bottles, and you drive a Fiat Mirafiori with O Sole Mio going at full blast on the stereo. My father would hate me for saying that, but he was the same. ‘Without opera,’ he used to proclaim, ‘the whole world would suffocate.’ Opera, for Christ’s sake. Pizza. I was still grumbling to myself when I said, ‘Yes, Bill. What’s going on?’

  ‘I had some British guy in this morning. He says he has one or two things to sell. But he’s also interested in that japanned cabinet.’

  ‘Really?’ The japanned cabinet was priced at $135,000, and a few cents. It was late eighteenth-century English, with a beautifully carved stand and surmount. I’d bought it from one of the retired movie actors who shuffled around Rancho Santa Fe, living out their retirement on memories, golf, and cameo appearances in Charlie’s Angels.

  ‘He said he could call back. But he’d like to know when. And since you didn’t show up at your regular time this morning, I thought I’d check.’

  ‘Okay. Tell him eleven. I should be able to get into the village by then.’

  There was a pause. Then Bill said, ‘Is everything all right?’

  I glanced towards the window. ‘Sure. Everything’s fine. Why do you ask?’

  ‘I don’t know. Sara sounded kind of spooked. You know what I mean?’

  ‘I don’t think I do, no.’

  ‘All right;’ said Bill, ‘I’m sorry I brought it up. As long as everything’s okay.’

  ‘Yes. Everything’s okay.’

  I put down th
e phone, and went back outside into the morning sunshine. The chair was right where I’d left it, lashed to the back of the wagon, and there was Sara in her pink dress, waiting for me amongst the crisp leaves of our own unnatural autumn. But also, like figures in a Norman Rockwell painting, there was Jonathan, running across the driveway, and there was Sheraton, our golden Labrador and guard dog, bouncing and bounding around the car.

  ‘Sheraton!’ I shouted. ‘Heel!’

  Sheraton, as usual, ignored me. I swear to God that if ever I’d tried to climb over the fencing around our house, instead of driving in through the front gate, that dog would have torn my legs off.

  ‘Sheraton!’ I repeated.

  The dog finally stopped leaping up and down, and stood not far away from the wagon’s tailgate, panting and wagging his tail. But as I came closer, he retreated towards the chair; and when I was only a few feet away, he actually jumped up on to the seat and sat there, staring at me with his great lolloping head on one side, and his tongue hanging out. I took a few paces towards him, trying to look like an Angry Master.

  ‘Sheraton, you’d better get off that chair,’ I cautioned him.

  He let out a low, rattling growl. I stopped, and stayed where I was, because for some reason that growl reminded me far too much of the animal breathing I had heard in my library last night.

  ‘Sheraton,’ I told the dog, more apprehensively. ‘Sheraton, I want you to move your ass off that chair. I mean it.’

  Sheraton growled again.

  ‘Ricky?’ asked Sara. ‘What’s wrong with him? He usually does what he’s told.’

  Jonathan cried, ‘Sherry! Come on, boy!’ in that high, piping voice of his, but Sheraton ignored him. Trust me to christen a dog after a goddamned sideboard.

  ‘Sheraton,’ I said, in my real this-is-it tone – the tone that Jonathan always recognises as a final and absolute signal that it’s time to go to bed. ‘Sheraton, get off that chair.’

  Sheraton stared at me for one second more, and then suddenly he yelped out loud in pain, and twisted his body first one way and then the other. Then he was off that chair like a bat out of hell, and running across the lawn towards the back of the house as fast as I’d ever seen him.