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Inheritance: A Novel - Softcover

Toynton, Evelyn

 
9781590519219: Inheritance: A Novel
Softcover
ISBN 10: 1590519213 ISBN 13: 9781590519219
Verlag: Other Press, 2019

Inhaltsangabe

In this luminous novel about romance and illusion—and what's left of love when they're stripped away—an American Anglophile is drawn into the lives of a disintegrating aristocratic family.

After the sudden death of her husband, Annie Devereaux flees to England, site of the nostalgic fantasies her father spun for her before he deserted the family. A chance encounter in London leads Annie to cancel her return to New York and move in with Julian, the disaffected, moody son of Helena Denby, a famous British geneticist. As their relationship progresses, Annie meets Julian's sisters Isabel and Sasha, each of them fragile in her own way, and becomes infatuated with visions of their idyllic childhood in England's West Country. But the more she uncovers about Julian's past, the more he explodes into rage and violence. Finally tearing herself away, Annie winds up adrift in London, rescued from her loneliness only when she and Isabel form an unexpected bond.

Slowly, with Isabel as her reluctant guide, Annie learns of the emotional devastation that Helena's warped arrogance, her monstrous will to dominate, inflicted on her children. The family who once embodied Annie's idealized conception of England is actually caught in a nightmare of betrayal and guilt that spirals inexorably into tragedy.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Evelyn Toynton’s most recent book was Jackson Pollock, published by Yale University Press in 2012. Her novel Modern Art was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and was translated into Russian; Other Press published her second novel, The Oriental Wife, which has been optioned for a film and published in a Greek translation. Her essays, articles, and reviews have appeared in Harper’s, The Atlantic, American Scholar, London Review of Books, Times Literary Supplement, Salmagundi, and Prospect, among others, and have been reprinted in several anthologies, including Rereadings; Mentors, Muses & Monsters; and Table Talk from the Threepenny Review.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

One  
  
I had come to England, that May of 1986, expecting lofty and exalted feelings, but everywhere I went I kept picking up distress signals, thin vibrations of pain: a blotchy-faced girl shredding a Kleenex with both hands on the 73 bus, a dark birdlike man hunched over his soup in the shabby café near the South Kensington Tube station. And every morning, when I opened my eyes in my crummy hotel in Bloomsbury, all the mismatched bits of furniture bristled at me with silent malice. Then I’d tell them to fuck off, though not loud enough for them to hear. On my eighth day in London, I woke to the smell of mildew: one door of the lopsided wardrobe had swung open during the night. I slammed it shut and padded to the window, peering through the net curtains to check out the street. Sometimes I’d stand for an hour, one leg snaked around the other,  watching the people below. That morning it was drizzling, they were putting up umbrellas, tugging at their collars, tossing cigarettes into the gutter as they headed for the Tube. I couldn’t pick out faces very well, but even from the third floor I could spot the luckless ones, trudging along with their heads down, communing with the sidewalk. A squat bald man barreled impatiently ahead, knocking his briefcase against a woman’s bare legs. Ordinary, trivial rudeness. You’d have to be half nuts to get riled about a thing like that when it wasn’t even happening to you. But there I was, heart pounding. Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life . . . there was no answer to that, nobody had ever found an answer.
Time was running out. There were only a few days left to find the romance of England, in which I’d placed so much faith; so far it had eluded me even among the swans and turrets and purple irises of St. James’s Park. It was just past nine o’clock. I made my way to the damp bathroom down the hall, where I brushed my teeth and splashed cold water on my face; back in my room, shivering by the tepid radiator, I dressed quickly in my good black suit and high heels, as though I had somewhere important to get to. In front of the cracked mirror of the wardrobe, I applied lipstick, blush, the new greeny-gold eyeliner in a pot that I had bought on the last day of my old life and never worn. Then I went down the shabby steps and onto streets newly washed with rain; in the first square I came to, the leaves on the trees were blurry with sunlit water. A tremulous, born-again feeling. I realized I was hungry, and climbed the majestic steps of the Hotel Russell.
A boy who looked no more than fifteen, in a maroon uniform whose matching hat tied under his
chin with gold braid, emerged from behind a speckled marble pillar and asked if he could help. I’d like some breakfast, I told him. “Certainly, madam,” he said, in a grave adult voice, though it squeaked. “I’ll go see if we have a table available. Would you care to take a seat while you’re waiting?” He gestured to a deep alcove at the left of the staircase, where a small round table with a vase of gold and crimson flowers sat between two identical plushy armchairs.
One chair was occupied by a bony old man in a clerical collar, with a rough-coated white terrier at his feet. As I seated myself opposite, he turned toward me, and I saw that the left side of his face had collapsed, his eye half-sliding onto his cheek. Very slowly, he lifted a trembling hand from the arm of his chair, then lowered it again. Men in suits and gleaming shoes walked past. A few minutes later my teenaged guide reappeared to inform me in the same grave voice that my table was ready. When I stood up the man opposite lifted his hand again, higher this time, so that I almost thought he was going to pronounce a blessing.
I ate a large plate of eggs and sausages and fried tomatoes in a cavernous room crowded with chandeliers.
After that I had a burst of determination; I got out my guidebook, with its little foldout maps, and made my way on foot to the National Portrait Gallery, where I tried to sort out which wigged and powdered man was which; I revisited the van Dycks next door; I wandered down the Mall and up Whitehall, and circled the thunderous-looking statues on plinths in Waterloo Place. Then I remembered that I hadn’t yet been to Keats’s house, and went looking for a 24 bus.
When I was eleven, my father had sat on my bed and told me the story of Keats’s life in a voice husky with tears. At fifteen I had read Keats’s letters in bed, under a pile of blankets, in a house my mother could no longer afford to heat, and believed that I could have saved him somehow. In college I’d kept on my desk a postcard of his grave that I’d found in an old library book.
I’d expected his house to be silent, like a shrine, but a straggly party of Russians was being ushered around by a stocky female with a harsh angry voice. I lingered on the ground floor, by the case with Fanny Brawne’s engagement ring, waiting for them to go upstairs, but even when they did, I could still hear her booming away. The bony woman at the ticket desk told me that the Russians had gone to lay a wreath on Marx’s grave in Highgate; now the guide was killing time before delivering them for their scheduled appointment at the Consulate. “She’s come here before, she doesn’t know anything about Keats,” she burst out resentfully. “I think she just lectures them about the evils of the class system.” I liked how fierce she sounded, like a dog growling; I wished I could go on talking to her—I hadn’t heard my own voice much that week—but I couldn’t think of anything helpful to say.
Upstairs the guide’s guttural consonants followed me as I peered at the portraits, the death mask, the tiny bed he might or might not have slept in, trying to feel his presence in those white antiseptic rooms. Finally I gave up and took myself for a walk on the heath, where no nightingales sang, and one of my heels sank into a dog turd hidden in a clump of tiny purple flowers. But at least I hadn’t picked up any signals of anguish from the Russians.
I had just made my way back to South End Green and turned onto Constantine Road when an unshaven man with half his teeth missing accosted me and asked if I could spare a couple of quid. “I could say it was for food, darlin’, but I’m not going to lie to you.” He winked at me. “I’m an alcoholic, see, I can’t help it, it’s a disease.”
All I had in my wallet, apart from a twenty-pound note and a day’s travelcard, was a five-pence bit and a few pennies—that and the ticket that allowed for free entry to Keats’s house for a year, which he might not find very useful. So I handed over the change, apologizing: “I’d give you more, honest, but this is all I have on me.”
“What about the note, then?” And when I said I wasn’t going to give him twenty pounds he thrust his face at mine. “What’s twenty quid to you compared to me? Eh?”
“Sorry.” I closed my bag and walked away, but he followed behind, muttering just loud enough for me to hear, “Fuckin’ Yank, we don’t want you here, go back where you came from, foreign cunt,” all the time breathing heavily, quickening his pace when I did. After a minute I was short of breath too—pant puff, pant puff: our breaths had synchronized—and hampered by my high heels, so that I could only trot in short steps. Across the street a woman was talking to her dog, a fat dachshund on a leash, without taking any notice of us. I wondered if I should shout for help, but I still hoped he was...

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Verlag
Other Press
Erscheinungsdatum
2019
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1590519213
ISBN 13 
9781590519219
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
272
Kontakt zum Hersteller
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