"All right," I said and watched her bend to the papers again. She appeared to read for a few moments; I almost wanted to laugh, she seemed so unconcerned. She looked up again after a few seconds and just sat there, looking out through the open velvet curtains at the back lawn.
She sat like that for a full two minutes, unmoving, face unreadable. I smiled; I wanted to weep, to laugh. Eventually I said softly, "Mum?"
"Hmm?" She turned to me, a hesitant smile on her tin face.
I held the will up from where it lay on the desk. "This is dad's will." I managed a smile. "Don't you want to know what it says?"
She looked confused, then embarrassed, and put her hand to her mouth. "Oh, of course. Yes. What does it say? Let's see."
I pulled my seat over alongside hers.
The good lawyer Blawke opined that the will was perfectly legal; under Scottish law, a hand-written will did not have to be witnessed. He even came out and looked at it personally, which made two visits in one week. Truly our cup of honour ranneth over.
"Yes," the lawyer Blawke said, reading the will as he sat in the front lounge. "Well, I can't see anything wrong with it." He looked unhappy. "Unarguably his writing…»
He studied it again.
"Yes," he nodded, finally. "I actually warned him against doing this, some time ago, but he seems to have got away with it." The heron-like lawyer seemed sad that the will was litigation-proof. He smiled weakly, and mum offered to re-fill his whisky glass.
The will — expressed with a brevity and a lack of ambiguity the best lawyers would have been proud of, and the rest alarmed at — left the house, grounds and so on to mum, along with a two-fifths share in both the residue of dad's savings and any money made after his death. Lewis, James and I had one-fifth shares each. There were specified amounts to an almost archetypal spread of right-on causes: CND, Amnesty International and Greenpeace. Ten grand each. Ten grand! I was initially stunned, fleetingly annoyed, then ashamed, and later vaguely impressed. Mum just sighed, like she'd been expecting something like that.
I confess to having experienced a sensation of relief on discovering I had not been written out of dad's will; I wouldn't have blamed him. I think and hope that that feeling was engendered more by a desire to feel I'd still been loved — despite everything — than by avarice. I didn't think there would be all that much to go round after those donations, anyway.
Dad's agent, his accountant and the lawyer Blawke worked it out between them (though I checked their figures later). The good lawyer summoned us all to his office a fortnight after dad's death. Only James wouldn't come. Lewis flew up specially.
It had all, indeed, been just about as simple as it had looked. Blawke told us the sums involved and I was pleasantly surprised. The donations to right-onnery seemed much more in proportion now; I can only claim that I had spent (what at least seemed like) so long living on bread and cottage cheese and fish suppers in Glasgow — measuring my money in pennies and reluctantly-parted-with pounds — that I had an excuse for not being able to imagine that the thirty K dad had salved his conscience with when he'd written the will had actually been quite a small part of the modest fortune he'd built up over the years.
Dad had left over a quarter of a million pounds, after the government had taken its cut.
My share came to well over forty thousand smackeroos. The likelihood was that for the next few years at least, I'd bank about fifteen grand per annum, which might or might not tail off, abruptly or gradually, depending on how well dad's stories held up against the tests of time… not to mention the likes of Thomas the Tank Engine, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and whatever other delights the future of the children's fiction market held.
Anyway, suddenly I was, if not quite within range of the mountains of Rich, certainly well into the foothills of Comfortable. It entirely made up for the discovery, a few days earlier, that the estimate I had made of my chances of passing my final exams had been considerably more accurate than any of the conclusions I had drawn in the course of them. I had distinguished myself by failing, a result the department prided itself on happening only rarely.
My initial reaction had been to cut my losses on the honours front and see if I could take an MA instead; a re-sit would mean a whole extra year at university. But that sentiment had only lasted for a day. In the turmoil of feelings and fortunes dad's death had produced, the prospect of another year's study, with the framework and time scale that would provide — especially if I applied myself, as I thought I would now be able to — seemed suddenly a relief rather than a chore.
At any rate I still had a little time to decide what to do, and the money would make the choice easier. A return to Glasgow need not now also mean a return to the joys of sharing a flat with Gav, Aunt Janice, and their sonically extrovert passions.
We stood, the three of us, mum, Lewis and I, on the pavement outside the Main Street offices of the lawyer Blawke, in Gallanach.
I was still thinking, Forty grand? and trying not to look too stunned. Mum was slowly putting on her black leather gloves.
Lewis and I looked at each other.
Lewis wasn't doing too badly himself, down in London, but he too had looked pretty surprised when Blawke told us the sums that were heading our way. Mum hadn't really shown any reaction — she'd just thanked the good lawyer politely and asked after his wife and family.
"Fancy a drink?" Lewis said to me. I nodded. I felt slightly faint. "Mum?" Lewis said.
She looked round at him, small and neat in her dark blue coat. It was a bright, warm day and I could see the silver in her dark brown hair. She looked so delicate. I felt like I was in my early teens again, mum seemingly getting shorter and shorter with each season that passed.
"What?" she said. I found myself sniffing the air; I was downwind, but all I could smell was Pear's soap and Lewis's Aramis. Mum seemed to have stopped wearing perfume.
"I think a drink, to steady our nerves," Lewis said to her.
"Aye," mum said, looking thoughtful. She gave a thin wee smile and nodded at us. "Aye, he'd have liked that."
And so we went to the Lounge of the Steam Packet Hotel, looking out over the tourist-crowded pier and the packed car park. The water was bright amongst the hulls of the moored yachts, and the Mull ferry was a black shape in the distance, heading away.
We drank vintage champagne and fifteen-year-old malt. I suspected dad would have approved.
Lewis had to head back to London that night. Mum and I had been busy for a week, tidying up all the loose ends an unexpected death leaves, especially when the deceased is somebody as socially and professionally entangled as dad.
Then mum had gardened while I'd sorted through less urgent papers — printing out everything on the disks, searching out all the of the stuff on stories, and sending it — or copies — to dad's literary executor, his editor in London. I had become modestly PC-computerate (Ashley had given me a grounding in the basics, though PCs were not really her field). I'd even learned how to change the toner cartridge in the photocopier without making a mess.
On one of the earliest computer disks dad had used, dated shortly after he'd finally joined the computer age and bought the Compaq, in 1986, I found copies of some of Rory's poems; dad must have been putting them onto the system from the drafts Rory had left. I printed those out. It didn't look like dad had been very impressed with the poems, or he'd presumably have transcribed them all onto the computer (they weren't on the hard disk or backed up onto another floppy either — another indication my father had regarded them as relatively unimportant), but at least I again had something Rory had written. I was still hoping more of Rory's papers would surface somewhere.