~Inheritance, by Jenny Éclair ~
This tale encompassing 4 generations begins with the inauspicious marriage of in the 1930s of aristocratic but skint Teddy Carmichael (the younger son of a younger son) and Margaret (Peggy) Oppenheimer, a wealthy American. Despite having three children in quick succession, the marriage flounders early, and when their eldest, golden child Ivor dies young, a broken hearted Peggy leaves her husband, family, and England, returning forever to America. She even leaves the house in Cornwall she bought and decorated, Kittiwake, to fall into dereliction.
The two remaining children, Natasha and Benedict, do the best they can growing up mostly in boarding schools, largely abandoned by their mother, and saddled with a shiftless father who gambles away all his/their money. Natasha marries Hugo Berrington who is suitably in the same social circles, but with a known mean streak and more than a touch of sadism, while Benedict, a rather wild but sweet natured young man, eventually inherits Kittiwake.
The most enjoyable element of the book is hearing Jenny Éclair’s indomitable and unmistakable voice coming through every sentence. Her particular way of putting things and painting the scene makes the reader almost hear her gravelly voice and see the impish grin. Éclair always takes a certain glee in describing the unpalatable, and in this novel, she revels in this when depicting Annabel (Bel), Natasha’s daughter. At dinner, with Bel’s own twenty-something year old sons, she renders grimace-worthy descriptions:
“[…] the kitchen is humming with noise and chatter and a slight whiff of BO. Jamie can be terribly shower shy.
Tonight her sons resemble giant toddlers with beards; both are wearing jogging bottoms, although neither has been dogging in years. The fleece-lined trousers – bottle green for Ed, navy for Jamie – resemble the first pull-up trousers she dressed them in for nursery. Zipless and buttonless, so they could manage trips to the bathroom more easily. […]
The idea of her unshaven, out-of-shape sons sitting in a church pew, wearing tracksuit bottoms and T-shirts with rude words on them makes her want to weep. […]
Jamie has a filthy baseball hat perched on top of his unwashed hair, while Ed is wearing what is commonly known as a wife-beater, which means that every time he reaches for something on the other side of the table, his gingery underarm hair brushes over the salad.
‘Ed, why don’t you ask someone to pass you the salt?’ she snaps.
‘Because I can reach it,’ he responds, lifting one buttock off his chair to squeak out a fart.”
p72
Éclair’s novel is full of the British class distinctions, from Bel wincing at Maisie’s (her son’s girlfriend’s) way of eating – cutting up her food then stabbing at it one handed with a fork – to Bel’s birth mother, Southend Serena’s realisation that the entitled crowd at Kittiwake are as alien to her as foreigners.
She began to realise that her background was as exotic and mysterious to society types as theirs was to her. OK, she’d never tasted lobster before, but how many of them had eaten jellied eels or pie and mash?” p152.
p152
With great class disdain, Hugo Berrington refers to Serena as a “filthy little scrubber”. Bel herself, however, had been educated in private schools by her adoptive parents, Hugo and Natasha, and wonders what Natasha would make of Maisie, “a girl from a broken home on an actual South London estate, a girl who cannot pronounce her aitches and mispronounces ‘ask’ on purpose because she thinks it makes her sound more street, when it fact it makes her sound ridiculous”
p199-200
Éclair can be scathing about a Maisie, mercilessly depicting her as pouting constantly, “whenever she passes any remotely shiny surface, her face automatically turns into what looked like a sexed-up guppy, she lowers her lids and purses her lips, whatever time of day it is and whatever she’d meant to be doing”; flushing wet wipes down the toilet resulting in clogged pipes; dressing immodestly enough to “expose her genital shaving rash. A rash induced by using Bel’s leg-stubble razor, no doubt”; highlighting Maisie’s “slightly nasal Croyden whine”.
All that said, Eclair deals with Maisie’s character generously enough, at the end.
Éclair also has a liking for juxtaposing the profound with the mundane, the poignant with the prosaic:
“It was one of the reasons why one had a mantelpiece: to display one’s invitations.
p159
[…] Natasha […] props the invitation safely between her silver candlesticks on the side board in her sitting room. She doesn’t have a mantelpiece in the cottage – there are so many things she used to have that she doesn’t have anymore: a mantelpiece, a husband, a mother and a father, two brothers, a car, a daily cleaning lady, a television, a garage… The list grows longer and longer until she’s too hungry to think anymore and she decides she will walk to the local market to buy some ripe tomatoes, big ones, and slice them for her lunch and eat them in her courtyard with plenty of salt and black pepper, and then she will spend the afternoon thinking about what she should give her son to celebrate his fiftieth birthday
p165
Eclair’s writings are always humorous, and each one becomes better and better, more controlled and as a result, even funnier. This is the best of her books so far.
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