Chapter V · The Heir

Marian was standing on a chair when they knocked.

The curtain had come away from its rail during the night, and the morning light showed every fracture in the window behind it. She had decided against taking it down. Glass was falling from buildings all over London; this pane could wait behind a curtain until somebody had time to mend it. From the chair she could see the terrace gate and, beyond it, the upper surface of a Moving Way. People passed at a pace that made her think of a procession, though none appeared willing to be in one.

“Someone for you,” Leda called from below.

“Everyone is for the house.”

“These asked for your full name.”

Marian pushed the last ring into place. She had a pin between her lips and could not answer. Two visitors stood outside the gate with a guard a few steps behind them. The guard had turned away to look at the route down to the terrace. It was the man without a weapon who frightened her: he held a narrow case against his chest, and when he looked up she recognised the patient attention of somebody who expected to be admitted.

She climbed down. The chair wobbled under her last step, and she remembered again that she had meant to repair it. On the floor above, someone was dragging a basin across the landing. They had taken in three people whose rooms had been damaged near the eastern stages. One had slept in her bed. Marian had spent the night in an armchair, discovering how often a house could make a noise without falling down.

Leda Fenn waited by the stair. She wore her outdoor boots with the laces hanging loose. They had shared the house for six years, which was long enough for Marian to know that an unwelcome visitor made Leda prepare to leave even when she had nowhere to go.

“Do you know them?”

“No.”

“Then let them explain from there.”

The civil-register clerk introduced himself as Tomas Ede. His companion said that she knew the district and could take a message if Marian preferred. The guard remained outside the gate. Ede asked whether he was speaking to Marian Vale, then gave her age: thirty-four. She felt the absurd urge to correct him. Her birthday had been last month. A number she had lately begun concealing in jokes sounded improper in a stranger’s mouth.

“What is this about?”

“A request from the succession examiner. Not a summons.”

“Whose succession?”

He glanced towards the terrace before answering. “Graham’s.”

Marian looked past him at the people on the Way. A woman carried an empty cage. Two men supported a third between them. None slowed to look at the gate. For a moment the name seemed to have entered the conversation by mistake, a word carried over from another receiver.

“My mother used to mention a connection,” she said. “She never suggested it was useful.”

“We are not yet suggesting that either.” Ede had apparently been instructed about this sentence. He said it carefully, then looked relieved when she let him finish. “The office has received a family return. It places your name first among several possible successors. We have questions about the entries. You may decline to answer them here.”

Leda folded her arms. “And elsewhere?”

“That would be for the examiner to explain. I have no authority to require it.” He put the case on the gatepost and showed them the written request. There was no grand seal above Marian’s name. Someone had added, in a smaller hand, identity inquiry only. The qualification reassured her less than it should have. It meant somebody had found it necessary.

She opened the gate. The guard moved to follow, but the district guide shook her head. Marian noticed the small obedience and felt a gratitude quite out of proportion to it. She took the visitors into the former schoolroom. Ede looked at the high cupboards and the long table before choosing a chair. The table bore small cuts where generations of pupils had tested the points of compasses. Her aunt had forbidden anyone to plane them away.

The house had belonged to a banker before it became a school. Marian’s mother had taught here; Marian had learned to read beside the very cupboard Ede was using for his case. The school had closed when lessons moved to district halls. Her family’s remaining settlement paid for the lease, and Leda’s repairs business paid for most of the things that went wrong inside it. Marian had always thought of that arrangement as modest. The visitors made her see how much space surrounded the people who could afford modesty.

“Should I ask for someone to advise me?” she said.

“Yes,” Ede answered at once.

She almost disliked him for making the danger sound real. “I don’t have anyone for this.”

“You can ask the office to wait while you find someone.”

Leda took the chair beside hers. “Then we will begin by listening.” She pulled the empty breakfast dishes out of the way but left the bread on the table. Ede waited until she had finished. He asked whether Marian wished her companion to remain, and for the first time since the gate she could answer a question without wondering what answering would do.

“Yes.”

He opened the case. It contained a fold-out return, copies of civil entries and a sheet of questions. No document accepting an inheritance was enclosed. Marian saw that absence only because he pointed it out. Then he laid the family record across the compass marks, and the room in which she had learned to write became the place where strangers explained what her name might own.

Her mother was there in a column of small type.

Marian had expected Graham to be at the head of the page, with the rest of them descending from him like water from a reservoir. Instead his name stood to one side. The line that reached her crossed to other relatives, disappeared onto a supplementary sheet and returned among names she had never heard. Her mother’s was unmistakable. Beside it were the references for a birth, a marriage and a death, each accurate, none enough.

Ede asked for documents. Marian brought the shallow tin from her bedroom cupboard. Inside were certificates, her mother’s watch and the blue ribbon that had tied a bunch of flowers on the last morning of the school. She had never decided why she kept the ribbon. Now she removed it before setting the tin on the table, unwilling to have its presence interpreted by people who knew what papers were worth.

The questions were ordinary. Her mother’s earlier surname. An address before this one. Whether a death had been entered in the same district as the burial. Marian answered readily until Ede reached her father. Then she corrected his pronunciation of the name with an anger that made Leda look at her.

“I’m sorry,” Ede said, and repeated it correctly. He was neither offended nor conspicuously forgiving. He made a note and continued. Marian found she could breathe again. If he had treated her anger as evidence of incapacity, she might have refused the rest merely to find out whether refusal remained possible.

The family return was maintained by an office she had never heard of. It included people abroad, branches marked extinct and one disputed marriage so far back that everyone concerned had been dead before her grandmother was born. Ede did not ask her to settle those matters. He wanted to know whether the last few entries led to the woman sitting opposite him. That was a small question beside the one he had brought to her gate, but she understood why it came first.

“How much?” Leda asked.

Ede stopped turning a page.

“The estate,” Leda said. “You have not told us what it is.”

“I cannot give you a settled figure.”

“An unsettled one would help.”

He opened a list of principal holdings. Marian saw water undertakings, power concessions, municipal land, transport companies whose names were familiar from charges she paid without thinking. The list continued onto other sheets. A person could have mistaken it for an inventory of the city, except that the city included the voices upstairs, the pin she had dropped by the chair, Leda’s hand resting on the table. Those things had no column.

“Those are assets administered through the estate,” Ede said. “Not a statement that each passes to you. The examiner was quite specific.”

Marian found the company that held their lease. For years she had disliked its letters. The charge for a replacement drain had been entered twice; she and Leda had spent a winter proving that the same pipe could not be replaced on two different landings. She laid a finger beside the name and felt, before she could examine it, an exhilarating possibility: no more letters. No need to ask anyone whether her mother’s cupboard could remain where it was.

Leda saw what she had found. “You could stop them selling the terrace.” She said it softly, as though they were already alone. Marian did not move her finger. The sale had been proposed, withdrawn and proposed again. Somewhere beneath the shock, a part of her had begun furnishing a future in which she would never have to leave this room. It was astonishing how quickly a fortune became a solution to one’s own window.

“Is that what accepting would let me do?” she asked.

“Possibly. Not today, simply by speaking.” Ede looked towards the window. “There would be applications. Disputed powers. Existing obligations.”

“But eventually I might tell them.”

“Yes.”

She withdrew her hand. He could have explained everything as a burden and she might have accepted his explanation. Instead he had allowed her to see that it offered relief, influence and a freedom she had not expected to possess. She was grateful, and immediately mistrustful of the gratitude.

The district guide came back from the passage. Someone in the receiving office wished to speak to Ede. He asked to use their wall receiver, then listened with his pencil motionless above the return. Marian watched his face. It did not change, but he stopped standing like a visitor. After the call he read the message strip twice before bringing it to the table.

“Additional evidence has been lodged. Concerning the distinction between private succession and assets held for public uses.” He set the strip beside the holdings. “I have been instructed not to describe the whole estate as your inheritance.”

“Were you going to?”

“No.” He glanced at the list under her hand. “But I see that the paper may have done it for me.”

The message named the ninth schedule and said that its present effect remained under examination. A copy of the relevant material would follow. Marian read the instruction with a small, shameful disappointment. The prospect of keeping the terrace had taken root before she knew the shape of the thing being offered. She had lost nothing she owned. Nevertheless, something had been taken away.

Leda reached for the bread. “That seems sensible,” she said, more loudly than necessary.

A shout came from the terrace. Not a threatening shout; someone calling to someone else, followed by a question. Marian looked through the gap in the curtain. Four people had stopped beside the gate. One pointed at the guard, then up towards the house. Until that moment she had been able to think of the inquiry as something happening around her table. Ede followed her gaze. “We can finish the remaining questions another time.”

“How will that help?” she asked. The question had escaped before she could make it courteous. She saw that he had no answer. Upstairs, the basin scraped across the landing again.

The first person to call her Heir was a neighbour who had borrowed their ladder.

He came through the gate carrying it, apologised for keeping it so long, and asked whether the officers had brought good news. Marian had not known he possessed the ladder. Leda took it from him without comment. Behind him, a woman held a demand for rent folded into a square. She asked whether the payments would stop now. Marian looked at Ede, who was still inside collecting the civil entries, and hated herself for hoping he would answer.

“I haven’t inherited anything,” she said.

“But they’ve found you.”

“They have asked me questions.”

The woman unfolded the demand. “This came yesterday. They can still send these.”

Marian knew the printed heading. It belonged to the company on the holdings list. The woman’s hands were white with dust, except where the fold had rubbed a clean line across a finger. She was not asking Marian to understand a constitution. She was asking whether she would still have a room when she returned to wherever the dust had come from.

“I will ask what is happening to the charges,” Marian said.

The woman nodded and held out the paper. That was the difficulty with a promise to ask: it could be heard as a promise to answer. Marian took the demand and wrote the woman’s name on its reverse. She had already begun receiving petitions. At the top of the terrace someone shouted that the heir was at home, and three more people turned towards the gate.

Leda brought her inside. “You can’t talk to everyone out there.”

“I know.”

“Do you?” She laid the ladder against the schoolroom wall. “Our upstairs people need the washroom. There is no water in the little cistern. I need someone to watch the door while I find out whether the ground-floor tap is running. That is what I needed from you before the estate arrived.”

Marian sat down too quickly. Leda was angry, but not only at her. The prospect of security for the house had been offered and withdrawn from both of them. For a moment Marian wished the inheritance inquiry had happened somewhere private enough to let her be selfish without a witness.

“I’ll watch it,” she said.

Ede asked to call the examiner. He could complete the identity questions at another address, he said; he could not remove the curiosity gathered outside. Marian stayed beside the receiver while he explained. A different voice answered, a woman’s, close and level despite the noise behind it.

“I am Iona Kest. Mr Ede says you have agreed to answer the questions about your identity. I want to be sure you understand that this does not accept any property or office.”

“Will the people outside understand it?”

“Not because I say it to you.” The examiner let that stand. “I can send the distinction in writing. You may show it. You need not show them your family papers.”

Marian watched the rent demand on the table. “Could I refuse the inquiry?”

“You can decline to assist us. Other people may still bring claims involving your name. That is one reason to have someone advising you who does not work for the estate or this office.”

“And if I accepted?”

“An inheritance? That is not presently the question before you. We have not settled what could pass, or through which powers it would be administered. The return office has a continuity proposal. It is their proposal, not an order from me.”

Ede lifted another message strip. It had arrived while Marian stood at the gate. The request asked permission for a representative to discuss management of her prospective interests. Several offices had apparently discovered that she might have interests before she did.

The examiner continued. “The newly received schedule distinguishes public uses from ordinary private property. You should see the evidence and its qualifications. Mr Ede can bring a complete copy.”

“Does it say I cannot own the waterworks?”

“It may place relevant assets outside ordinary private succession. We must establish its force and coverage. I cannot make that examination disappear by reassuring you.”

“I wasn't asking to be reassured.” Marian had spoken louder than she intended. Ede looked down at his papers. “I don't know what I was asking.”

For the first time Kest was silent long enough to seem present in the room. Then she said, “You do not have to know that immediately.” Behind the words Marian heard a cup being moved and somebody asking for the examiner. “I am sending the copy. Do not let anyone make the absence of an answer look like your consent.”

Leda returned with a jug. The lower tap worked, slowly. Marian took it upstairs while Ede finished the call. On the landing, one of the displaced women was trying to fold a wet blanket away from the bed. She had heard voices from the street and wanted to know whether they would have to leave. Marian said no, then had to repeat it because the woman had begun gathering the rest of her things.

Back in the schoolroom, the long table still held the list of holdings. The absurd scale of it seemed almost restful after the frightened woman upstairs. In the list, a thousand occupied buildings could fit under a company name. No one had to decide where the blankets would go. Marian drew the rent demand towards her and placed it beside the leaseholder’s entry. Then she asked Ede to send for the continuity proposal as well.

The two packets looked much alike when they arrived.

One came from Probate, with the photographed pages and a covering account of how they had been found. The other was delivered by a messenger from the return office. It proposed that Marian nominate that office to safeguard and manage any interest established in her favour. There was a blank for her signature, and several paragraphs explaining why prompt administration would protect her against loss.

Ede left both within reach and went into the passage to speak to the guide. Marian read with Leda beside her. The public-trust clause was less comforting in full than it had sounded over the receiver. It promised examination, separate accounts and services kept in use while ownership was disputed. It did not promise that the people responsible would agree. The return office offered something more immediate: a person to act for her, a place to send the demands, continuity while the larger questions were settled.

“They could deal with the terrace,” Leda said.

“Perhaps.”

“You keep saying that as though uncertainty is a reason to do nothing.” Leda rubbed the damp mark the jug had left on the table. “You were ready to move out last winter rather than answer another of their letters. Now there might be somebody who can answer them for us.”

Marian looked towards the cupboard. Its lower door still bore the dark rectangle where a class list had been pinned. Her mother’s final years had been spent writing to committees that answered matters out of sequence, reopening things she had thought settled. Someone who could make an answer stay answered would have seemed a blessing to her.

The proposed mandate allowed the return office to choose subordinate representatives and respond to claims concerning the extent of Marian’s interest. That included deciding which claims to contest. Marian laid the page beside the public-trust clause. A dispute over whether the terrace’s stores served a public use might become, under this mandate, a threat to her property before she had formed an opinion about it.

“They would be deciding what to defend as mine,” she said.

“Yes. Isn't that what you employ them for?”

“I haven't employed them.”

Leda looked at her, then away. The simple answer had come too easily. Marian touched her wrist. “I want the house too. I wanted it before I asked what happened to the waterworks. That is why I need time to read this.”

“I know you want it.” Leda pulled her hand free gently. “I just don't want wanting it to become something we aren't allowed to say.”

Marian went through the proposal again. Where it asked for agreement, she set a clean sheet across the empty line rather than crossing it out. She was not prepared to appoint the office; she was not prepared to pretend that refusing one proposal disposed of an inheritance. She wrote a reply asking who had authorised the office to approach her, how its representative would be paid and which decisions it could make without consulting her. Then she added that it was not to act in her name meanwhile.

Ede returned. She showed him both the reply and the marked passages. “Will they say I have refused everything?”

“They may. Shall I witness what you have actually sent?”

She nodded. He listed the enclosures and the fact that the appointment remained unsigned. Marian signed her reply, watched the wet letters become her familiar name, and felt a small shock at their ordinariness. They looked no more powerful than the signature beneath her last complaint about the drain.

Outside, more people had reached the gate. Someone was telling them the new owner would speak soon. The guard came to ask whether Marian wished the terrace cleared. He addressed the question to Ede, and Marian answered it before the clerk could turn.

“No. Keep the passage open for the people upstairs. That is all I am asking.”

The guard looked at her as though a wider instruction might follow. None did. He went back to the gate. Marian took Kest’s written distinction and the rent demand with her. Leda followed, but stood half a step behind so that Marian could not retreat into speaking to her.

“I am Marian Vale,” she said. Her voice was swallowed by a conversation near the rail. She waited, then said it again. “The offices are examining a family return. I have answered questions about myself. I have not accepted ownership of the city, and nobody has my authority to say that I have.”

The woman with the rent demand was still there. “Who do we ask, then?”

Marian held up the paper. “I have sent your question to the office that issued this. I don't have their answer.”

“You'll get one.” It was not an accusation. The woman sounded almost satisfied. Marian looked at Ede's case behind her and understood. Even before an inheritance was settled, she had become someone whose request would travel farther than the woman's own. Denying that advantage would not return it to the people waiting at the gate.

“When it comes, I will bring it to you,” she said. “Give Leda somewhere to find you.” It was a smaller promise than the crowd had assembled for. A man at the back asked her about grain. Another wanted the aerial stations reopened. She read them the receiving offices listed in Kest’s notice and heard how thin those names sounded in the open air.

When she came back inside, Ede asked where the examiner could reach her. Marian gave the house address, then the receiver in the former schoolroom. She would consent to a further interview with someone advising her independently. She would not go to the Council House merely to make the succession look settled. Ede wrote the distinction in his own copy and let her read it before closing the case.

Leda put the family certificates back in the tin. She left the watch on the table. It had stopped years ago, and Marian had never had it repaired. From the terrace came another cry of Heir, answered this time by somebody who had heard her statement and was explaining why the word was premature. She could no longer tell whether being defended made her safer.

The visitors left with copies, not the certificates. Marian watched the guard follow them as far as the turn, then remain where he could see the gate. Nobody had asked her whether he should stay. She went to the stair and called up to the displaced women that the visitors were gone, that they could use the schoolroom if they needed more space. One asked whether they could bring the bedding down. She said yes.

Her mother's cupboard stood open. Inside it, a row of hooks once held the children's cups. Marian put the certificate tin on the shelf, set the blue ribbon beside it and kept the key. At the table, the proposed appointment still waited beneath its covering sheet.

She moved it out of the way of the bedding.