Chapter 7 Nina

Chapter 7

?Nina

The house finally comes into view as we reach the midpoint of the steep stone steps. Anderssen's Opening.

"This was all just headland before the house was erected. The house's private beach was only accessible from the sea but they carved a staircase into the rock, just like this one, so it canbe reached from the house," James huffs back to me as we climb, one arm stretching down in the direction of the sea far below us.

"They cut into the rock?" I ask and watch the back of James's head nod.

He catches his breath and continues. "Yes, the whole property structure is grafted into the rock. As far as I can see from the planning permits, a geological survey was done by a British company. There's a cave system under us, so the lower level of the property might not have required much excavation given the existing spaces. But I can send you the original subsurface geomatic findings if you're interested." He pauses, momentarily, turning back to me with an amused smile. "If you're concerned it might all fall into the sea in the night, be assured that your father oversaw construction."

The least of my concerns is anything my father built falling into the sea.

"He was here, though? During construction?" I ask a little too fast off the back of James's last comment, forcing him to snatch another hastily labored breath before answering.

"Perhaps not for the entirety of the project, but yes, he would have needed to sign off the individual stages of construction in person."

I let that sink in. James reapplies himself to the steep staircase, and we continue our ascent.

The gardens pool out around us as we ascend, tightly grouped split levels of manicured tropical plant life, bright florid flowering monsters vying for space with spiky hardier vegetation accompanying us on our climb. James huffs on ahead as I note the blooms, looking for signs from him, signs of him.

"Two hundred and thirty steps up to the property from the gatehouse," James says, chuckling, then splutters a cough as his breath catches. "I imagine deliveries were problematic," he continues, breathless. "If I recall correctly, there are even more down to the beach, but the view is truly breathtaking there—so the time passes quicker." In the heat I am finding this hard and I am ten years James's junior, and a regular runner. "Not far now," he sighs, head dipped with exertion, and that is when I catch sight of it above us.

The clean glass and steel of it bobs into view overhead, each step up revealing centimeters, meters of it to me. It is not a sprawling millionaire's mansion but a tightly contained series of glass boxes: modern, minimal, and perfectly formed. It is by no means big but I know its size is deceptive, seemingly a bungalow from our approaching angle. I have to remind myself of what James has told me, that the building goes down also, into the rock, with rooms looking directly out of the sheer cliff face below us.

We reach the top and James gives an expansive grunt. "Here she is. Three thousand square feet of prime real estate built into the rock of the British Virgin Islands. And she's all yours."

All mine.

The edges of the glass-and-steel building glint and glimmer in the sunlight. Blue sky and passing clouds reflect from its immaculate surface.

Everything about this house is diametrically opposed to my father's townhouse back in London—its dim rooms, restrained pomp, original moldings. And yet I see as plain as day that the house in front of me is entirely my father. The clarity of the lines, the purpose, the simplicity and synergy with the natural world around it. An emotion I had not anticipated shifts deep inside me: loss, profound loss. I feel my eyes fill and I quickly tear them from the building.

At the summit, James has collapsed into a sympathetically placed bench at the crest of the stone staircase and is invested in checking his phone while he recovers his breath—and dignity. I move past him, tacitly acknowledging that, perhaps, we both need a moment.

I head along the terrace that wraps around the entire property, my need overtaking me, then I stop dead in my tracks as the front, or rather the back, of the property reveals itself.

The terrace drops to three separate levels. On one, the gleaming blue-green of an immaculate infinity pool, around it thickly cushioned loungers. As if pulled by the tide, my eyes flow across the sweep of the architecture, everything positioned perfectly to direct the eye to the view: the vast expanse of the calm, crystal-clear Caribbean Sea that stretches out beneath, beyond, and around us.

My gaze finds the beach steps James mentioned and I follow their line down the cliff face, through the palms, to a small cove. Down there, my beach: through the foliage, I see the outline of loungers, a hammock, and pink-white sand.

Maybe he built this house for me. I let my thoughts roll and revel for a moment before shaking myself back to reality. He did not build this house for me; it was finished long ago and I was never made aware of it. My eyes prickle again, because I am tired, and I miss him, and I want to lie down.

I hear James rise behind me and I pull myself together. There will be time to cry and sleep later.

James draws level with me and takes in the view too. "I've seen a lot of properties on the islands but this is up there. Beautiful. Not the highest price tag, obviously, and certainly not the most ostentatious. But efficient luxury, as they say. Perfectly made. Everything you need. No more, no less."

He points down to the next terrace level, and I see the large glass windows built into the rock face, and through them, into the indoor pool glowing like a jewel in the dimness of the lower level. "If it rains," he says with a smile.

He indicates for us to head back to the entrance with a grand gesture. "Shall we?"

—

Inside the house the temperature drops, pleasingly. "Fully integrated air-conditioning throughout. Integrated speakers, entertainment systems, lighting. A smart system with voice activation for pretty much everything. There's no phone signal inside the property due to the concrete, so the integration is a practical choice rather than a flourish.

"What's your favorite song?" he asks me, and I look at him blankly for a moment before I can make sense of the question. And for some reason Dad's favorite song, the last song the university quartet played at the end of his memorial service—a joke of sorts—springs to mind.

"?‘Always Look on the Bright Side of Life,'?" I say, with perhaps a humorous lack of humor.

James gives a little chuckle. "Ah, excellent choice," he mutters then raises his voice in a declamatory fashion to say, "Bathsheba, play ‘Always Look on the Bright Side of Life.'?"

I feel my eyebrows shoot up. Bathsheba was our cat when I was growing up. And biblically, of course, the lover of King David, who, having seen her bathe, lusted after her, killed her husband, and married her. Then God struck down their firstborn as a kind of bizarre punishment. The sins of the father and all that. I just liked the name.

The music kicks in, flooding the house with jaunty tragicomic joy, and it takes a lot of facial energy not to let a smile break across my face.

Instead I give James a nod of appreciation.

"Yes. Fitting."

—

James gives me the tour. The biometric door system is explained and my own hand scanned into the central control panel. So far, so bizarre. But again, very like Dad, and a modern house deserves a modern security system. I see the logic in it, even if something about it sends a shiver down my spine.

The house is everything I might have expected from the outside.

Vast sweeps of marble counter. Cool tiles underfoot. Perfect, immaculate, but somehow anonymous, a blank canvas.

A state-of-the-art, chef-grade kitchen—an odd inclusion given my father could at best boil an egg, perhaps at a push bake some asparagus. I struggle to imagine him here, apron on, amid all of this.

"It's immaculate," I comment. "Who has been maintaining it?"

James smiles as if he himself has chipped in with some hoovering. "Your father hired through various companies. But we had the house deep-cleaned ourselves, and stocked, prior to your arrival. Again, as specified in the will, with funds set aside."

"The will specified the type of food that should be here for me?"

James nods. I immediately head to the fridge and open it.

A shudder in my chest as I see what is inside. Familiar brands stare back at me. Our usuals. This could be our fridge back home. Driscoll's strawberries, Alpine yogurt, Red Leicester, Ploughman's Chutney, all our favorites are there.

For a second, my father is alive again, he is here, in this house. I half expect his warm hand to land reassuringly on my shoulder and welcome me home. But it does not. Because this is not my home.

I am lucky my back is turned to James as I quickly wipe away my tears and close the fridge door.

James is looking away when I turn back. Of course he is, ever the professional, he's done all this before.

The kitchen gives way to a large open-plan sitting room, a sunken area with custom seating built in. Contemporary art hangs from the bright-white, gallery-style walls.

I study the artworks that he must have chosen, that must have spoken to him in some profound way, and try to guess what he saw in them. But their abstract starkness rebuffs any attempt at connection.

I try to work out if all of this—the minimalism, the money, the cool clean lines and empty brutalism—was in truth the kind of thing my father actually liked instead of our warm, book-littered home. I think of his wind farms, cold and silent and monolithic off the coast of Britain. Was that him, really?

The paintings stare back down at me, impassive, their tone understated, blurred shapes, endlessly open to interpretation. But then isn't that a sign in itself? What he is showing me here is something different.

I vow, there and then, that I will find him in all this: I will grind out the meaning of this inheritance even if it kills me. After all, it's not like I have anything better to do: I am not expected anywhere else.

"It's all cataloged in your beneficiary pack," James pipes up, then points to the giant giclée prints hung high on the wall above us. "Those pieces are Pamela Rosenkranz, and the triptych we saw back in the lobby was Bacon." I pull my eyes away from the gleaming photographic prints of stark empty rooms above me—a liquid submerged pink room, a brilliant white room—to look back at James.

"He has a Bacon?" I blurt, certain I have misheard.

"Well, you have a Bacon. Though it is an early Bacon," he adds. "He was still a furniture designer back then, of course. His work was still all very light and jolly. But it's a Bacon nonetheless."

I open my mouth to ask the question that every fiber of my being now wants to know— how the hell could my father possibly have afforded all this —but the words do not make it out of me. Instead my lips open and close soundlessly, a little guppy fish caught in a strong current, because I guess I know.

My father must have been paid a lot more for his work than I ever could have imagined. I am sure there will be a trail of deposits in whatever bank accounts are listed in the pack James has provided. I look down at it in my hands, and I want to tear it open and pore over it on the floor in front of him, but thankfully I still have the strength of mind not to do so. I can wait another hour or so.

There I was all these years thinking my father did what he did for the love of it, for the pioneering legacy building of it—but no. They must have paid him an absolute fortune.

And the truth is, he kept that from me.

Of course we never wanted for anything, but he kept all this—this immense wealth, this potentially ethically questionable hoard—from me. He must have been a genius for hire. A genius who, it seems, had little issue with lying to his daughter.

There is a trail here to follow, and my father is finally leading me to an answer.

"Should you decide to part with any of the art collection, now or in the future, we'd be happy to assist at Mitfield & Booth," James says with an admirable level of disinterest.

I give a nod of acknowledgment as my gaze moves on to the enormous wall-to-wall glass doors across the front of the room. Outside is the immense curve of the island's coast, the tops of the palm trees beneath us, the cove with its perfect crescent of sand, and out into the shallows, the graduating greens of the island waters dropping out into the deep hue of the Caribbean Sea—the sun twinkling across it, glittering everything.

James moves behind me. Momentarily unnerved by his proximity, I spin, my shoes squeaking on the marble. He looks surprised by my nerves but recovers quickly, giving an airy gesture toward the staircase. "If you're ready I can show you downstairs?"