16. THE LEGAL GENTLEMAN

An important man knocks Chantelle's door.

“If he’d got his way and talked me into marrying him then I suppose I’d be about to inherit his fortune,” said Chantelle to her mother.

“Yes, dear, but would it worth it?” asked the older woman. They were in the lounge of their home, both had cups of coffee on their small glass-topped coffee table, and they were mulling over the unusual events of the past couple of days.

“It depends on those keys,” suggested Chantelle.

“The police have no idea whether they’re to do with money, or what else might be in bank vaults. And that Inspector, what was his name, Grim, said most of them belonged to banks all round the world. He said they might never get to see what’s in some of them. But never mind, if they belong to anyone they belong to that revolting woman who, it seems, is definitely his daughter according to the DNA test the police carried out.”

“I felt a bit sorry for her,” sighed Chantelle.

“Why on Earth should you feel like that?” asked her mother.

“Well, he wanted a son. He told me so, more than once, and he only wanted a son to inherit whatever wealth he had. A daughter wouldn’t do, and yet women really ought to have as much right to inherit as men, oughtn’t they?”

“The older you get the more you’ll discover that it’s a c**k-eyed world that we live in,” sighed her mother, “and I meant no rude double-meaning there, so there’s no need for you to be sniggering!”

“Sorry mum,” grinned the daughter, but the expression on her face suggested she was nothing like sorry.

Mother drained her cup and adopted what she thought was a fierce expression, but Chantelle knew it for what it was: the need of a loving women to say something important, to come out with a deeply held belief.

“Your father is a good man, you know that much, but his own grandfather was far from being like that. You see, he was from a different age, before we girls were even allowed to vote in elections, which treated the female sex as if all we could do was wash pots and have babies. Some even thought that reading would turn our minds and end up with us in lunatic asylums!”

“That’s ridiculous!”

“You might think so, but my mum told me that there was a lot of fuss in the Brumpton Advertiser when the bus company employed its first woman as a driver! There were men and even some women who wouldn’t get on the buses she was driving because she was a woman and not capable of steering such a big thing as a bus. My mother didn’t ever drive, you know, never took her test, and when your grandfather died she was lost. She no longer had any independence even if it had only been as a passenger in his old car.”

“How dreadful!”

“Even then it was assumed that women somehow were inferior to men. It was a man’s world back then, and in many ways it still is.”

She sighed as she recalled her own mother after the death of her loving husband, because he had been a kind and warm-hearted man. But he was dead, had passed away in their bed because he‘d gone to sleep one night, peacefully and at ease with life, and passed slowly and painlessly away as he slept. He was quite old by then, in his eighties, and so was her mother.

The old woman had been totally lost. True, she had always done the things that women had traditionally done, the housework, the cleaning and polishing, but she knew nothing about such things as energy bills or dealing with the various authorities that make sure the wheels of the world turn slowly but truly.

She sighed. “I had to help her, Chantelle, I had to fill in forms, register his death, just about everything for her. And it crossed my mind as I did that how cruel the world was, treating us women as though we had very little to do with the important matters in the world. But it’s the way various societies have worked, even from the year dot when the absurd Adam and Eve appeared, she being part of him, somehow magicked from a rib I remember from my Sunday School days. But it was Eve who was tempted by the serpent, and that was no doubt put into the story to excuse men for the way they’ve been to women ever since!”

“So that’s why Mr Spendthrift wanted a son rather than a daughter?”

Her mother nodded. “And it’s why in some societies, you’d probably suggest they’re backwards but in truth they’re not, they’ve got all the advanced technical things that we’ve got, like the internet and mobile phones, but at the same time if a woman gets attacked by a man, sexually I mean, then it’s deemed to be her own fault and she gets punished for it, sometimes quite cruelly.”

“And Mr Spendthrift was old,” sighed Chantelle, “do you think he wanted to do those things to me?”

“Well, he did ask you to marry him, didn’t he?”

Chantelle nodded.

“Just think about it, darling. If you’d become his wife, and I thank the Heavens you didn’t, you’d have been expected to share his bed and nestle up to his old pyjamas smelling of old man, and let him, well, you’ve done sex education at school so you know what I’m getting at.”

“It’s horrible,” shuddered Chantelle, “it was all right talking to him by his garden gate but doing that with him! I know how babies are made and he actually said that’s the only reason he wanted to know me, so that he can have a son!”

They were interrupted by the sound of the front door bell.

“Now who can that be?” queried her mother as though Chantelle would know.

She went to answer the door, and after the rumble of a brief conversation she returned with a strange man, smartly dressed in a grey striped suit, carrying a leather briefcase and smelling of expensive masculine deodorants.

He looked at Chantelle, and smiled.

“Are you the young lady with the name Chantelle who sometimes walks down Durnley Bottoms, what the road that leads past my late client’s house is called?” he asked.

Chantelle nodded.

“I have acted as his family’s solicitor for some years, and I’ve a letter he instructed me to deliver to you before he, er, passed away,” he said gravely, and he carefully opened his briefcase. “I think you might find it to your advantage.”

He carefully pulled an envelope out and slowly handed it to Chantelle.

It was heavier than paper should be, and Chantelle was sure that she could feel the distinctive shape of a key as she curiously felt it with her fingers.

© Peter Rogerson 15.12.19