The Inheritance by Simon Tolkien Page B

guests, the cream of university society, unaware of her adopted son only a few yards away on the other side of the window. And Stephen would be upstairs, sleeping in his nursery, surrounded by a hundred furry animals. John Cade’s brow always creased with momentary irritation when his wife left to check on her little soldier, as she insisted on calling her younger son. But the professor swallowed his annoyance. The boy made his wife happy, and her happiness increased her beauty. John Cade never seemed to get tired of looking at his wife, and in Silas’s memory she never changed. She was always young and lovely, right up until the day she died.
    It was Christmas Eve, and 1951 was almost at an end. Soon the country would have a new queen, and Clara Cade had promised her fourteen-year-old younger son a new five-speed bicycle for Christmas. When it didn’t arrive, she took her husband’s car and drove into Oxford to collect it herself. Silas had watched her departure from the same bedroom window where he was standing now. She was wearing a heavy black fur coat and a hat with a veil, and she’d come down the front steps almost at a run, half tripping at the bottom on her high heels. The snow had been falling for most of the night,and after she drove away, Silas had gone down into the courtyard and stood in her footprints.
    She never came back. Clara’s own car was in the garage being serviced, and she was unused to the heavy Rolls-Royce. On the way back from Oxford, she lost control halfway down a steep hill, and the car swerved off the road at high speed, hitting a telegraph pole. Clara Cade flew through the windscreen and died instantly, or at least that’s what the police told her husband. Silas wasn’t so sure. He pictured his mother revisiting the scenes of her life, her blood seeping away into the snow. Perhaps Silas needed the consolation that she had regretted her treatment of him for a moment or two at the last.
    He had visited the scene of the crash with his father the following day. It was still snowing, and the fields were white and silent. It was as if his mother had never been there at all. She seemed to leave no mark on the world.
    Silas remembered when the police came. He didn’t know why, but he had known what had happened as soon as the black cars had drawn up in front of the house and the men in uniform started getting out. The car doors had shut one after the other like reports from a gun, and Silas had watched as his father came out through the french windows of his study, bareheaded into the snow. Moments later he had sagged at the legs, held up between two policemen, and it was then that Silas had noticed the bicycle in the back of the police van, just before his father did. Stephen’s present had survived its purchaser’s death intact, and there it was, bright and gleaming, ready for Christmas.
    The sight had enraged John Cade. He had pulled himself free of the policemen’s hands, crossed to the van, and seized the bicycle. Then, holding it half above his head, Cade had gone almost at a run up the steps of his house, into the drawing room where Stephen was lying on the floor by the fire reading a book. The Christmas tree was big and full of lights behind him. Clara and her younger son had spent the day before decorating it with coloured globes and swans and silver trumpets until it was perfect, and now Stephen wanted to be near it all the time. His childhood was almost over, and the tree’s magic kept its end suspended for a little while longer.
    Cade stood in the doorway watching his son for a moment, and then, using all his strength, he threw the bicycle at the tree. Silas, standing behindhis father in the hall, watched the Christmas decorations crash to the floor all around his brother, shattering into thousands of tiny pieces, meaningless shards of brightly coloured glass.
    Two weeks after the funeral, Stephen was sent away to join Silas at his boarding school in the west of England, and