A Perfectly Good Family. Lionel ShriverЧитать онлайн книгу.
was grateful for central heating, and had recently installed his own fax.
We dined on grilled skinned chicken thighs, a mound of rice fluffy with a scant tablespoon of butter and steamed broccoli. I had shared this meal before, and variations followed similar nutritional lines. If I asked my little brother what he believed, leaving aside his convictions about architecture which were equally fanatical, his leading catechism would underscore that carbohydrates must be relied upon for caloric mainstay; in place of deity he would exalt dietary fiber. Amid the malign influences in Truman’s universe, fat ranked first. He might not have gone so far as to call obese people evil themselves, but they were at least the devil’s playground. While my father had got worked up over a black woman dying because she was not admitted to white Rex hospital, his second son only displayed similar choler when a documentary asserted that some people were born fat and couldn’t help it. The worst of determinism, in Truman’s mind.
I shouldn’t complain; if the food was plain it was impeccably prepared—six and a half minutes per thigh side on the second notch down on the grill, one cup rice to one-and-a-third cups water less one tablespoon. Truman was precise, and, in spite of his highfalutin’ and ham-handed father, my brother’s worldview was essentially mechanical.
“Before we meet with the lawyer tomorrow,” Truman mentioned, and swallowed, “I thought you and I might talk about—” when he dabbed his mouth casually, his hand trembled “—the house.”
“What about it?”
“Mordecai’s going to want his share in cash.”
“Probably.”
“He’s a philistine. But what about you?”
We would not hear the details of the will until the following afternoon, but my parents had prepared us for their estate being evenly divided among the three heirs. They must have been sorely tempted to disinherit the eldest altogether, but their idea of themselves as fair liberal parents who did not have preferences among their children won the day.
“Have you a clue how much dosh is left—”
“Dosh?” Truman’s eyes narrowed.
“Money. On top of the house?”
“Nope. With the dosh I saw Father mailing off to every Negro-something charity he could find I bet we’re not coming into a windfall. Still, Father’s salary from the Supreme Court must have accumulated to something. If my share of the cash is enough, I’d be willing to buy both you and Mordecai out.”
“Uh-huh.” I picked a tendon from my teeth. “Since Oakwood has gentrified, this place has appreciated by a factor of several times. I doubt you’ll have the resources.” I found myself hoping that he would not. “What’s Plan B?”
“Well, you and I could buy Mordecai out together,” said Truman promptly.
“Uh-huh.”
“And then, little by little, after I finish my degree and get a job, I could pay you off and eventually you’d get your money, I promise. We could even draw up a contract, with some moderate interest …”
“Uh-huh.” I folded my arms. “In any case, you want to be the one who owns Heck-Andrews. At the end of the day.”
“Well.” He shrugged. “Yeah.”
“But it’s my house, too.”
“In a way.”
“Not in a way. Legally, emotionally, historically—I grew up here, they were my parents as well, and it is partly my house.”
“Okay!” He backed off, but he still didn’t appear to accept that I had, much less Mordecai had, any legitimate claim on what he had already, our mother two weeks dead, assumed as his own property. “The main thing is, we should try and keep it in the family. The last thing we want is to have to sell. Right?”
I didn’t answer.
“Right, Corlis?” He was panicking.
It’s chilling how clinical one can be in the midst of grief, but I had given this matter some thought. I did figure Mordecai would want the money, that Truman wouldn’t come into enough liquid assets to buy us both out, and I could conceivably force the house on to the market. Just as Truman’s impulse with Mordecai and the Britannicas was to deny him the prize, I was tempted to take Heck-Andrews from Truman precisely because it was the one possession he most desired.
“I might go in with you.” I tapped my fork on the table. “But not with the understanding that you eventually buy my share. If I’m going to have a half-interest in this property, I’m going to stay interested.”
Truman looked mystified, and paused in his hoovering of rice. “Why? You live in London.”
Averil mumbled, “Ask her why she brought six pairs of jeans.”
“Don’t you?” he pressed.
“And why she packed shorts. And summer dresses. In November.” Averil was talking to her plate.
I tossed my balled napkin at my chicken bones. “As of today I live in Raleigh.”
I’d fled this town with such desperation that the statement wallowed in my ears with sickening fatalism. The Myth of the Eternal Return: there was no getting away, was there? I felt like one of those paddle balls on an elastic string; the further I bounced away, the harder I would land smack back on my staple.
“Where in Raleigh?”
I rolled my eyes. “I’ve been evicted. For now, this is the only place I have to go.”
My brother’s jaw jutted forward, like my father’s. “Don’t you think you might have asked?”
“Asked? Unless Hugh appoints us otherwise tomorrow, I just inherited a third of this place. Why would I need your permission to live in my own house?”
Averil had started clearing the table, pitching silverware on to stacked plates from inches above, crash-crash; then she made quite a project out of bunching all the napkins into a single, furiously tight wad.
“Because other people live in it,” said Truman.
“If this place is so massive,” I reminded him, “that Father wanted to donate half of it to the homeless, it’s obviously big enough for you and me.”
“But I thought you had this great career going. That you had a gallery and you were going to be famous and you’d made your real life in Britain. All that about applying to British immigration for ‘settlement’ … How you liked your new flatmates … And a sidewalk seems like a pavement now.”
“You mean you thought you’d got rid of me.”
“I didn’t—”
It happened again, up-side of the head: I was starting to cry. Averil shot me a quick dirty look, as if tears were cheating. As punishment, she cleared my wine glass.
“What did you mean,” Truman prodded, “you’ve been ‘evicted’?”
When I found the spacious flat in South Ealing I was patching together a living from bootlegging films off the BBC for third-world black-market videos, and part-time messengering in town on a gasping second-hand scooter. At thirty-four, I was wearying of odd jobs and empty pockets for the sake of “my work,” and my attitude toward my higher calling had grown sardonic. However, I’d had just enough encouragement from selling the odd piece privately that I hadn’t, incredibly, given up. The pretension of being an Artist may have made me cringe, and at low-rent parties I never introduced myself as anything but a bohemian ex-pat scavenger. Still, alone with mud, refining a plane or tapering those delicate fingers, I did not want a drink, a fag, a nap, or a chat; sculpting was the single thing I did that was all I wanted to be doing while I was doing it.
What’s more, I savored that my income was illegal. From girlhood I had been