CHAPTER FOUR
Mark Leverton had folowed his father into the family practice almost without thinking. His grandfather, Manny Leverton, had started his smal solicitor’s practice – ‘Wil s and probate a speciality’ – in modest offices at the eastern end of West End Lane soon after the Second World War. In due course, a brother had joined him, and a nephew, and then his own son Francis, and the modest offices had spread down West End Lane to engulf a corner site on the Finchley Road, red brick with a handsome but sober white portal, and a business which now encompassed advice on civil partnership and inheritance-tax planning. Manny’s photograph – black-and-white, the subject dressed in a three-piece suit with a watch chain –
hung above the reception desk. There were twelve partners in the offices above, nine of them Levertons. Mark, who had idly, as a teenager, thought that he might do something creative in the media, found himself going from school to law col ege in a single seamless movement, propel ed by his purposeful family, and was now in possession of an office of his own, sandwiched between two cousins, with a large modern desk adorned, among other things, with a photograph of a wife and two little sons, whom he was delighted to have but could not quite – again – recal having stirred himself much to acquire.
His father, Francis, had decided early on that Mark should specialize in that area of the law on which the firm had first concentrated: wil s and probate. The boy might not be blazingly ambitious, but he was clever enough, and thorough, and his amiable manner would be invaluable in an area prone to intense disputatiousness among the clients. Mark would not mind detail, or shouting, or repetition. Mark would be good at reasoning and smoothing without identifying too much with any particular cause or person. Mark was the man, Francis considered, best able to deal with warring and divided families.
‘Tel them,’ Francis said to Mark when Mark joined Leverton’s, ‘tel them to assume nothing. That’s the golden rule for inheritance, especial y.
Assume nothing.’
He gave Mark a quotation from Andrew Carnegie, careful y written out in copperplate, which Mark had framed and hung on his office wal . It was headed ‘The Carnegie Conjecture’: ‘The parent who leaves his son enormous wealth general y deadens the talents and energies of the son, and tempts him to lead a less useful and less worthy life than he otherwise would.’
Mark’s father Francis believed in Andrew Carnegie.
‘Establishing yourself is difficult,’ he told Mark. ‘It ought to be difficult. It won’t satisfy you if it isn’t difficult. You’ve got to cal people who don’t want to talk to you. You’ve got to get on with it when you’ve got a hangover and you’re bored stiff. Work delivers more than money ever wil – you remember that when you’re talking to people scrapping over a few thousand quid.’
Mark did remember it. He remembered too a study on happiness he’d read which concluded that Masai herdsmen and people on the Fortune 400 list were about as happy as each other. He remembered it when Richie Rossiter – whom his mother thought the world of – came to see him out of the blue and was very clear about making a wil that superseded any wil that he, or he and Mrs Rossiter, had previously made. He did not think that Richie Rossiter was in the habit of precision about any area of life that didn’t concern music, but on that occasion he had been both decided and wel prepared. The wil had been drawn up as he had requested, he had come into the office to sign it, and the document had then been filed, along with twenty years of Rossiter papers, against such time – ‘Shan’t need this for decades, Mark’ – as Richie should die.
And now, only a year later, he was dead. Suddenly, unexpectedly, fel ed by a heart attack that rumour was saying was probably genetical y accountable. Richie Rossiter was dead, the Rossiter files had been opened, and Mark Leverton had, in his diary for that Wednesday, an eleven o’clock appointment with Richie Rossiter’s widow.
Tamsin said that she would go with her mother to see Mr Leverton.
Chrissie looked round the table. You couldn’t real y cal it a breakfast table since there was no social coherence to it, and everybody was eating and drinking different things, some of them – like the pizza crusts on Amy’s plate – not conventional y appropriate to breakfast.
Chrissie said, ‘I hoped you’d al come.’
‘To the solicitor’s?’ Amy said, as if an outing to a slaughterhouse was being suggested.
‘Actual y,’ Dil y said, ‘I’m a bit busy—’
Chrissie leaned forward.
‘We should do this together. We should do al these things that concern Dad together.’
Dil y’s mobile was lying on the table next to a banana skin. She gave it a little spin.
‘Actual y—’
‘She’s seeing Craig,’ Amy announced to the table.
‘Not til tonight,’ Tamsin said.
Amy leaned forward too.
‘But there’s so much to do before tonight,’ Amy said with exaggerated breathlessness. ‘Isn’t there, Dil ? Al the waxing and stuff. Al the hair straightening. Al the—’
Dil y picked up the banana skin and threw it at her sister.
‘Shut up!’
Amy ducked.
‘We don’t say shut up in this house—’
The banana skin hit the wal and slid down to lodge limply in the radiator.
‘Be quiet!’ Chrissie said loudly.
They al looked at her.
‘It won’t take long,’ Chrissie said. ‘It’s merely a formality. I know exactly what’s in that wil because Dad and I agreed it together. But it would be nice if we could al four go together to see Mr Leverton and hear him tel us, even if I know what he’l say.’
Amy squirmed.
‘Why?’
‘Because it’s a kind of little ceremony,’ Chrissie said. ‘Because it’s a formal ritual thing we do together for Dad.’
Dil y picked up her phone and peered closely at it.
‘Sorry, Mum.’
‘You’re pathetic,’ Tamsin said.
‘I just can’t,’ Dil y said, her hair fal ing in curtains round her face and phone. ‘I just can’t do any more.’
‘Usual y you can’t bear to be left out,’ Chrissie said.
‘Craig isn’t usual y,’ Amy said.
Chrissie looked at her.
‘What about you?’
‘Sorry,’ Amy said.
‘It’l take half an hour—’
Amy put her hands flat on the table and pushed herself to her feet.
‘Sorry,’ she said again, ‘but I don’t want to think about wil s. I don’t want to think about money and stuff. It just seems – kind of grotesque.’
‘ Grotesque?’ Tamsin said.
Amy picked the banana skin off the radiator and dropped it on the table.
She said, ‘Doesn’t matter—’
‘It does matter,’ Chrissie said. ‘What do you mean, that hearing what’s in the wil is grotesque?’
‘Wel ,’ Amy said, shuffling, ‘sort of wrong, then.’
‘ Wrong?’ Tamsin said, with the same emphasis.
‘Yes,’ Amy said, ‘because it isn’t just us. Is it?’
Chrissie put her head in her hands.
‘What isn’t just us?’
‘Wel ,’ Amy said, ‘this wil . It’s for us. It’s what Dad wanted for us. But – wel , he had a whole sort of life before us and what – what about them?’
Tamsin threw her head back and stared at the ceiling.