Legacy. James Steel

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      ‘Alexander, this is your father.’

      The upper-class growl was slurred by drink.

      His father’s use of Alex’s full name was a danger signal. He was in a fighting mood, when the frustrations in his life boiled over and he picked fights with those closest to him to displace his anger.

      It was three o’clock in the afternoon. Alex was at his desk in his family’s house in Fulham. He did a quick mental calculation: it was after lunchtime so his father must be drunk. He could picture him now, wearing his old tweed suit, sitting in his worn armchair in the drawing room of Akerley, the family house in Herefordshire, where he lived alone, looking out of the big bay window over the parkland.

      Sir Nicholas Devereux was an ex-cavalry officer and an alcoholic. The Devereux had been loyal servants of the Crown since Guy D’Evreux had fought for the Conqueror at Hastings. There had been one of the family serving in the Household Division every year since Waterloo — until Alex left without a son to replace him. Membership of the family might have its privileges but it came with its burdens as well.

      Alex knew where his father’s problems stemmed from: the source of all known evil — his grandmother. She was an intelligent, strong-minded woman trapped by social convention in the role of an aristocratic adornment. Her talents had turned sour and she took to displacing her personal disappointments on others, dismembering their characters with a cold sadism. Her acidic remarks had been fired at her son from the end of the long dining-room table for years, and had knocked his confidence to bits, driving him to drink and then to taking out his frustration violently on his wife. She had told Alex later that the first time he had beaten her had been on their wedding night.

      Alex sometimes wondered if he was next in line for this legacy. Whether he would simply repeat the pattern of negative behaviour, transmitted down through the generations in a cycle of anger and destruction. The Devereux might be an ancient, landed family but the poison and the privilege seemed to go hand in hand.

      However, it was one thing to understand his father’s problems, another entirely to deal with them. Alex’s upbringing had been a painful one, surrounded by the conflict between the Devereux’s supposed noble grandeur and wealth, and the crappy reality of the life around him — his father’s drinking bouts and his attacks on Alex’s mother. He remembered the fear that gripped him and his younger sister, Georgina, when the fights erupted. The two of them used to run off to a barn to hide until they guessed that their father had passed out. They had avoided those conflicts but George hadn’t got away from the problem entirely. Anorexia had forced her to leave Wycombe Abbey and she was now married to a similarly vain, flashy man, Rory, a barrister who drank too much.

      Alex and George’s mother had struggled valiantly to keep their dysfunctional home together, until stomach cancer had overwhelmed her when Alex was in his early teens. Things had started to go downhill soon afterwards. The electricity had been cut off regularly, and he remembered overhearing the shouting matches between his father and suppliers in the courtyard when they turned up at the house demanding payment.

      The most humiliating episode for Alex had been when he was summoned to a meeting with his housemaster at boarding school, who explained in the kindliest tones that he was going to have to leave because his fees hadn’t been paid. Alex had gone home for a week until another field had been sold off to pay the bill. He had burned with shame as he had walked into breakfast on his first day back amid the other boys’ taunts and jeers.

      Despite all this, Alex had been brought up to be loyal and dutiful. Wellington was an army school and had drilled the service ethic into him — although he couldn’t help seeing the irony of its motto: ‘Sons of heroes.’ His father had insisted that Alex follow him into the Blues and Royals straight from Wellington, without going to university: ‘You don’t need any of that leftie claptrap.’

      His father’s reputation and his own lack of a degree had been key factors in Alex not being promoted from major to colonel. He had thus faced the prospect of becoming that stock figure of quiet ridicule in English society: the passed-over major. A Tim-Nice-But-Dim, a try-hard who had never made it. Traditionally they were to be found in retirement in the provinces, living off their pensions, running village fêtes or gymkhanas.

      His upbringing had left Alex with a brittle pride. This touchiness would not let him face the ignominy of hanging around the regiment to complete sixteen years’ service before picking up his pension, so he had left and joined the world of private military companies. He was a romantic and hated the idea of joining his former colleagues in the usual safe jobs they went on to — insurance broking or estate agency — and so he had turned to becoming the original freelancer.

      His father had objected virulently, spitting out the word ‘mercenary’ with contempt. In response Alex was quietly and bitterly angry at him for having ruined his chance of serving his country as he’d hoped. An intense suppressed tension had existed between them ever since.

      ‘Hello, Dad,’ Alex said now in a controlled voice. He tried above all things not to lose his temper. His father was pathetic but he was still his father.

      ‘So, have you fixed that roof of yours then?’

      The roof in the family home in Bradbourne Road was leaking. His father had a sixth sense for picking out the things that were bothering Alex most and challenging him on them. ‘Keeping you on your toes’, he called it.

      Alex had been back in London a month now since his contract in Angola had ended. He had effectively put himself out of a job by finishing off the bandits who had plagued the Lucapa diamond mine since the end of the civil war.

      Money was the other main issue chiselling away at Alex’s heart. He had no new assignments lined up and his usual contacts in the defence business had not been able to pass on even the hint of a new project. It usually took several months to get a contract sorted out and he was not sure how he was going to pay the bills and fix his leaking roof in the meantime.

      Lists of figures would drift through his head at night. There was the exorbitant estimate to redo the roof, which, combined with all the other repairs to his crumbling home, was over six figures, and his neighbours were threatening legal action if he didn’t get on with it. He had also recently received letters from another firm of lawyers, threatening him over his father’s debts. The old man had obviously lost control of Akerley entirely, although Alex still didn’t know the full extent of the problem.

      He took a deep breath and tried to fend off his father’s jab. ‘Well, I’m working on it. I’ve got some quotes—’

      ‘Working on it! What does that mean?’

      ‘It means I’m not there yet but I will be.’

      ‘Working on it, Alex, always working on it,’ Sir Nicholas chuckled with derision. ‘You see, you need to be a bit more bloody decisive, like me.’

      ‘Hmm,’ Alex muttered.

      ‘Now look, the dry rot is getting very bad in the north wing here, lot of the roof timbers are about to go. Seeing as you’re just back from Africa and flush with funds I expect that you can fork out a bit to help keep the place running.’

      ‘Dad, I need to get Bradbourne sorted out first.’

      ‘Bugger Bradbourne, child! What about looking after your alma mater!’ This was a well-worn argument. His father knew that the family pile was no longer sustainable since he had sold off most of the farmland around it, but had made it his cantankerous cause célèbre to die in the house he was born in.

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