“Serial killers.”
“White slavery.”
“Or it’s like, you know, Henry James.”
“I don’t think people die of consumption any more.”
“They do in the Third World.”
“Yeah, well, the UK has socialised medicine.”
Valentina said, “Mom and Dad won’t like it.”
“No,” said Julia. She ran her fingers across the dining-room table and discovered a bunch of crumbs. She went into the kitchen, moistened a washcloth and wiped the table.
Valentina said, “What happens if we don’t accept?”
“I don’t know. I’m sure it says in the letter somewhere.” Julia paused. “You can’t seriously be thinking about not accepting? This is totally what we’ve been waiting for.”
“What’s that, sweetie?” Edie stood squinting at them from the archway between the living room and the hallway. Her hair was mussed and she had a generally crumpled aspect. Her cheeks were very pink, as though someone had pinched them.
Julia said, “We got a letter.” Valentina scooped it off the side table and brought it to her mother. Edie looked at the return address and said, “I can’t possibly deal with this before I’ve had my coffee.” Valentina went to pour her a cup. Edie said, “Julia, go wake up your dad.”
“Um…”
“Tell him I said so.”
Julia bounded down the hall. Valentina heard her shrieking “Dad-deeeeeeee” as she opened their parents’ bedroom door.
Jack Poole had once been handsome, in a corn-fed, college-athlete sort of way. His black hair now had a sumptuous grey streak. He wore it longer than the other guys at the bank. He was quite tall and towered over his petite wife and daughters. The years had coarsened his features and thickened his waistline. Jack wore suits so much of his waking life that on the weekends he liked to be slovenly. At the moment he was wearing an ancient maroon bathrobe and a splitting, enormous pair of sheepskin slippers.
“Fee, fi, fo, fum,” Jack said. This was an old joke, the rest of it lost in the mists of the twins’ earliest childhood. It meant,
“It’s Elspeth,” said Edie. “She’s not just leaving it to them, she’s prying them away from us.”
“Say what?” Jack held out his hand and Edie put part of the letter into it. They sat next to each other, reading.
“Vindictive bitch,” Jack said, without much emotion or surprise. Julia and Valentina sat down at the table and watched their parents.
Edie looked up at Valentina. “If you don’t accept, most of it goes to charity,” she said. The twins wondered how much of their conversation she had overheard. Edie was reading a codicil of the will. It instructed someone named Robert Fanshaw to remove all personal papers from the flat, including diaries, letters and photographs, and bequeathed these papers to him. Edie wondered who this Robert person was, that her sister had made him custodian of all their history.
Jack put the letter from Elspeth on the table. He sat back in his chair and looked at his wife. Edie held the will at arm’s length and scowled at it, rereading.
Edie was sitting very straight in her chair; the twins each leaned forward, elbows on the table, chins in hands, Valentina listing sideways as Julia said, “But we never met her; why would she leave us anything? Why not you?”
Edie regarded them silently as Jack sat down in his chair. Julia said, “How come you never took us to London?”
“I did,” Edie replied. “We went to London when you were four months old. You met your grandmother, who died later that year, and you met Elspeth.”
“We did? You did?”
Edie got up and walked down the hall to her bedroom. She disappeared for a few minutes. Valentina said, “Did you go too, Daddy?”
“No,” said Jack. “I wasn’t too popular over there then.”
“Oh.”
Edie came back holding two American passports. She handed one to Valentina and the other to Julia. They opened the passports, stared at themselves.
The twins laid the passports on the table and looked at Edie. Edie’s heart beat fast.
Edie glanced at Jack. “I don’t know,” she said. “You’d have to ask her.”
Jack said, “Your mother doesn’t want to talk about it.” He gathered the papers that were strewn across the table into a stack, tapped the bottom of the stack against the table to align it and handed it to Julia. He stood up. “What’s for breakfast?”
“Pancakes,” said Valentina. They all stood, all tried to segue into the normal Saturday-morning routine. Edie poured herself more coffee and steadied the cup with two hands as she drank it.
That night the twins lay in Julia’s bed, facing each other. Valentina’s bed was rumpled but unused. Their feet were touching. The twins smelled faintly of sea kelp and something sweet; they were trying out a new body lotion. They could hear the settling noises their house made in the night. Their bedroom was dimly illuminated by the blue Hanukkah lights they had strung around the wrought-iron headboards of their beds.
Julia opened her eyes and saw that Valentina was staring at her. “Hey, Mouse.”
Valentina whispered, “I’m afraid.”
“I know.”
“Aren’t you?”
“No.”
Valentina closed her eyes.
“It’ll be great, Mouse. We’ll have our own apartment, we won’t have to work, at least for a while; we can do whatever we want. It’s, like, total freedom, you know?”
“Total freedom to do what, exactly?”
Julia shifted onto her back.
“I thought we were going back to college. You promised.”
“We’ll go to college in London.”
“But that’s a year from now.”
Julia didn’t answer. Valentina stared into Julia’s ear. In the semi-dark it was like a little mysterious tunnel that led into Julia’s brain.
Julia said, “It’s only for a year. If we don’t like it we’ll sell it and come back.”
Valentina was silent.
After a while Julia took her hand, interlaced their fingers. “We’ve got to prepare. We don’t want to be like those dumb Americans who go to Europe and only eat at McDonald’s and speak English real loud instead of the local language.”
“But they speak English in England.”