A Fatal Inversion Page 4

  She had made some preparations for their dinner, but she didn’t object to going out. She never did. It wasn’t yet five-thirty but not too early, in Rufus’s opinion, for a drink. He looked forward to this drink, the first of the day, with a sensuous desire. Any white spirit would do for him, he wasn’t fussy, and he poured himself a stiff vodka, some of that Polish stuff they had brought back from their Black Sea summer holiday. It flooded his head, charged it with recklessness, and brought—he could feel it happening—a warm flush to his face.

  “We’ll go out and drink a lot and get pissed,” he said.

  He gave her his golden ferocious grin. She knew that grin; it meant something had happened, but she wasn’t going to ask what. Let him tell her if he liked. There was a lot of underlying violence in Rufus, and not all that underlying either, a lionlike aggression in times of stress that took the form of a whooping destructive merriment. She didn’t mind that, though sometimes she had a prevision that one day when he was a rheumy old lion and she a worn-out weary lioness she might mind it very much.

  “Go and put on something beautiful,” he said at seven after he had had two overt vodkas, and poured, as was his habit, a single large secret one, and had taken her to bed.

  Marigold disappeared into the bathroom. Rufus, sleek with love and ardent spirits, thought with wonder about how he had actually imagined for all of ten minutes that the house they talked about in the Standard might be Wyvis Hall. It amused him for a moment to speculate about the others, if they, too, had seen the paragraph and whether they had been astonished and afraid. The five of them, he repeated their names silently: Adam, himself, Shiva, Vivien, and—Zosie.

  They would be more discomposed than he. Discomposed, he thought, a word entirely different in meaning (as Adam himself might have pointed out) from its near homophone, decomposed. There was no point in dwelling on that. He and Adam had been at the same school, though he was a bit older. From the day they had all parted, diverging from Ecalpemos out into the world, he had never seen Adam again but he knew all about him, knew for instance that he had become a partner in a company selling computers that called itself Verne-Smith-Duchini. And old man Verne-Smith and his wife he knew, they lived no more than a mile away, but them he avoided out of simple antipathy. What had the Indian’s surname been? He had heard it but not often, it was a strange one and it escaped him. Manresa? No, that was a town in Spain and a street in Chelsea. Malgudi? A place in the novels of R. K. Narayan that Marigold read. Anyway, it was something of that sort. Vivien had been called Goldman, not particularly euphonious or attractive, that. And Zosie? What was Zosie’s name?

  He got out of bed and put his clothes on, the same clothes but a clean shirt. Marigold was running a bath, stepping into the water. She always made a great splashing. Secrecy was a necessary ingredient of Rufus’s life. Even if the things he kept from his wife—had once kept from parents, brother, girlfriends—were very minor, he had to have them, had if need be, to create them. The photograph was one of these. All these years he had had it and kept it for safety’s and secrecy’s sake inside a boring medical book. Not one of those books on healthy vaginas and wombs which Marigold might easily have looked into but a work on the nasty bacilli which may infest the human reproductive organs after a bungled or septic abortion. Rufus had not looked at the picture for years.

  It was still there, though, and looking at it gave him a shock. If it was possible to be surprised by a shock, Rufus was surprised. He had thought he could look at a picture of Wyvis Hall, a photograph he had taken himself with a cheap camera Zosie had stolen, with equanimity and even a rueful amusement, but it appeared he could not. It made him feel chilled and sober as if the love and vodka had never been.

  “I will get pissed tonight, by God,” he said aloud. “And why not?”

  The house stood remote in the middle of nowhere, on the side of a river valley, embowered in trees of many kinds. Woodland, Rufus thought, a woodland grave. It had been built in the late eighteenth century, two stories high, shallow slate roof, red brick, seven windows set in ashlar along the upper floor, six below, and the front door set centrally under a portico and pillared porch. A chimney at each end. Outbuildings, the stable block. In front a broad sweep of gravel, and this side of it, just in the picture, a rolling lawn with a cedar set in it, a huge black ungainly tree that lurched like a galleon at sea when the wind blew. To take the photograph he must have stood on the edge of the wood, under the beech hedge which bounded it perhaps. The sun looked very bright, but when had it not been bright that summer?

  Rufus found his heart was beating fast. He even considered fetching his sphygmomanometer and taking his blood pressure, simply out of curiosity. Instead, he turned the photograph face downward. He then picked it up delicately between thumb and forefinger as if he held something highly vulnerable in tweezers. He opened the medical book, placed the photograph inside the chapter on Clostridium welchii, a rod-shaped bacterium which decays the body while it is still alive, and went into his living room. On a windowsill, hidden by the curtain hem, was his secret vodka, still half a glass left.

  But he was already affected by a euphoria that induced courage and recklessness. His heart had steadied. He wondered why he had considered having recourse to a public library when he had a much simpler means at hand of identifying the house in the newspaper paragraph.

  Now that his consciousness was changed, how could he possibly have allowed himself to speculate about its identity, postpone the means of putting his mind at rest and then, ostrichlike, avoid the issue altogether? This was no way to conduct one’s life, as he had always maintained. You do not shirk things, was a first principle, you face up to them. One of the reasons he drank a lot was because it made this possible.

  He took a mouthful of the secret vodka, savoring it, carried it to the door, listened. The water was running out. She would be ten minutes. Rufus picked up the phone and dialed 192. Directory Enquiries were better about answering these days than they had used to be. Something must have given them a shake-up.

  It was a man’s voice that said, “What town?”

  It was odd that he hadn’t thought about that, but immediately it came back to him, the name of the exchange, though Hilbert’s phone had been disconnected.

  “Colchester,” he said.

  Rufus finished his vodka, slid a cigarette out of the packet on the shelf in front of him.

  “Chipstead,” he enunciated carefully, and then he spelled it. “C Charlie, H Harry, I Ivan, P Peter, S sugar, T Tommy, E Edward, A Adam, D David.”

  “A apple,” the voice corrected him.

  “Okay, A apple,” said Rufus, conscious of his Freudian slip. “Wyvis Hall, Nunes, Colchester.”

  He waited, anticipating the usually annoying rejoinder that they had no subscriber of that name on record. In this case it would possibly be that they had the name of the subscriber but …

  The operator interrupted this thought.

  “The number is six-two-six-two-oh-one-three.”

  Rufus put the receiver back, feeling a clutch at his stomach as if a hard hand had made a grab at the muscles.

  4

  THE PICTURE, VERY LIKE the one Rufus Fletcher had taken in the summer of 1976, occupied the screen for about fifteen seconds. The whole item was allowed no more than four times that in the BBC’s Sunday evening news broadcast at 6:30. The other forty-five seconds were taken up by a policeman talking to a reporter about having nothing to say except that there would be an inquest. But Shiva and Lili Manjusri saw the picture and so did Rufus Fletcher. Adam Verne-Smith, unwinding in Puerto de la Cruz, did not, of course, see it. He did not even see an English newspaper. They were expensive to buy and came a day late. He did not want to be reminded of home, and the only paper he even glanced at was the International Herald Tribune, a copy of which Anne found on the beach.

  His father, at home in Edgware, said to his wife: “Good God, Wyvis Hall, as I live and breathe.”

  Beryl Verne-Smith
peered, but the picture immediately vanished.

  “Yes, I suppose it was.”

  The policeman talked, the reporter trying to jog him into revelations and failing. In the background autumnal trees could be seen and a church on the summit of a low hill. Lewis Verne-Smith sat shaking his head, less as a gesture of denial than of a generalized despair at the state of the world. It was not that unpleasant memories were evoked, for these were always with him, his existence was inseparable from that old bitterness, but that a sight of the house, even the glimpse of a photograph, revived the precise feelings he had had—why, it must be getting on for eleven years ago.

  “Ten and a half,” said his wife.

  “I shall have to get in touch with the police. No two ways about it, I shall have to get in touch with them.”

  “Not this evening surely?” said Beryl, who wanted to watch Mastermind.

  Lewis said nothing. The room in which they were sitting underwent the curious shrinking process to which it was subject whenever he was reminded of Wyvis Hall or his uncle Hilbert or even if the county of Suffolk were mentioned. Suddenly it grew small and poky. The brick side wall of his neighbor’s house seemed to have moved itself four or five feet farther toward the dividing fence, so that it loomed offensively. Lewis got up and pulled the curtains across with a pettish jerk of his hands.

  “Shouldn’t you wait until Adam gets back?” Beryl said.

  “Why? What would that be in aid of?”

  Beryl meant that Adam had been among the previous owners of Wyvis Hall while her husband had not, but she knew better than to point this out.

  “There is no one living knows that lovely place better than I.”

  “That’s true.”

  “I shan’t wait till Adam returns,” Lewis said in that manner that had once led his daughter to call him the Frog Footman, “but I shall wait until tomorrow.”

  Men and women do not usually put their baser feelings and intentions into words, not even in the deep recesses of their own minds. So Lewis did not say, even to himself, when he was privately considering trying to get hold of his son in Tenerife, that he disliked Adam and would have been pleased to spoil his holiday. Instead, he rationalized his thoughts and justified himself. Adam probably—indeed, almost certainly—knew nothing about the find in the pinewood, but Adam had once owned the house and thus taken on a responsibility. He could not shed that responsibility just because he had sold the place. Lewis would have agreed with Oscar Wilde that our past is what we are. We cannot rid ourselves of it. Therefore it was Adam’s duty to come home and face the music, even though this might be no more than a short blast on a tin whistle.

  But he had no precise idea where Adam was and he did not think Adam’s travel agent (a personal friend of the young Verne-Smiths) would tell him. Some excuse would be made for not telling him. Lewis’s bark, anyway, was always worse than his bite. He had virtually no bite, as he had once overheard Adam say to Bridget, and heard it with helpless chagrin.

  “A bloody good thing or our childhood would have been a misery instead of just a bore.”

  Lewis walked into his local police station in Edgware on Monday morning. They seemed surprised to see him but not astonished. The Suffolk police had begun hunting up previous owners of Wyvis Hall and they had been alerted that a Verne-Smith lived in their area. There were, after all, only two in the London phone directory.

  This might be a bonus. He was asked to wait and then shown into a room where a detective sergeant prepared to take a statement from him. With busy pomposity Lewis dictated it to a typist and would have gone on and on had he not been diplomatically restrained.

  “Wyvis Hall, Nunes, Suffolk, and the twenty acres of land surrounding it were the property, through his marriage, of my uncle Hilbert Verne-Smith. They came into the possession of my son Hilbert John Adam Verne-Smith under my uncle’s will, bypassing myself, though my son was no more than nineteen at the time of my uncle’s death. Being an undergraduate at the time, my son naturally never considered actually residing in the house. He was in agreement with my suggestion that the property be sold, and before he returned to college in the autumn of 1976, he took my advice and placed house and lands in the hands of a real estate agent.

  “Country properties were not selling well at the time. Forty-five thousand pounds was the asking price, and I was not surprised that the sale, so to speak, hung fire. However, in the spring of 1977 an offer was made which my son accepted. This sale later fell through and it was not until the following August that Wyvis Hall was finally sold to a Mr. and Mrs. Langan for the much improved figure of fifty-one thousand nine hundred ninety-five pounds.

  “As far as I know, my son’s personal acquaintance with Wyvis Hall was confined to my uncle’s lifetime when I, my wife, and son and daughter frequently stayed with him. After my uncle’s death in April 1976 he visited Wyvis Hall on perhaps two, or at the most three, separate occasions simply for the purpose of looking it over and reaching a decision about the disposal of furniture and effects.

  “I suppose it is possible that squatters or other vagrants took possession of the house between the time of my uncle’s death and the sale of the property. Certainly my son never rented it or allowed anyone to occupy it on either a temporary or permanent basis.

  “My son is at present on holiday in Tenerife with his wife and daughter. I cannot say precisely when I expect him to return, though I should suppose in about a week from now.”

  It was all very small and quiet and low key. The snippet in Rufus’s Monday morning newspaper measured just an inch in depth. It answered the question he had asked himself and told him that the bones of a very young child had been found as well as those of a young woman. This was not a shock. How could it be otherwise, since this was Wyvis Hall and the pinewood and the animal cemetery?

  To photograph the house for the news last night the cameraman must have stood just where he had stood himself, on the edge of the lawn with his back to the cedar tree. A popular mass-produced camera he had used but quite a good one. One thing about Zosie’s pilfering; she never stole rubbish. He had taken a picture of her after that and one of the animal cemetery.

  “Why is the grass always so short up here?” Adam had asked.

  “Rabbits, I expect.”

  “Why can’t bloody rabbits come and eat my lawns?”

  Adam always referred to “my lawns,” “my house,” “my furniture.” It had got up Rufus’s nose a bit, though Adam had a perfect right to do this. It was his, all of it, and it went to his head rather. Nineteen-year-olds seldom inherit country mansions, after all.

  It must have been sometime in August when I took those pictures, Rufus thought, and a couple of weeks later it was all over. Coincidentally, as the community and their lives together broke up, so did the weather. It was raining intermittently all the time they were in the cemetery, the pines bowing and shivering in the wind. Sometimes they had had to stop and take shelter under the closely planted trees.

  If the weather had held and it had still been hot and dry, would they have dug deeper? Probably not. In spite of the rain, the earth was still hard as iron. A sheet of rain had come down then, a hard, gusty shower, while they were laying the squares of turf back in place, and Adam had said something about the rain making the grass grow quickly, the rain being on their side.

  “We should all go our separate ways as soon as we can,” Rufus had said. “We should pack up now and go.”

  The spade and the fork they had hung up among the other tools in the stables. They had packed and Adam had locked up the house. At some point Rufus himself had taken the things out of the fridge and left the door open to defrost it. Adam closed the front door and stood there for a moment as if he could not wrench himself away.

  So much of its beauty had been stripped from it by the whipping winds. And by the neglect of the long hot summer. A sudden gust of rain dashed against the red bricks that were already stained in patches by water. The house that when he first saw it ha
d seemed to float on a raft of golden mist now lay in a wilderness, amid ragged grass and straggling bushes and trees dead from the heat. Dirty gray clouds tumbled across the sky above the slate roof, now the only thing that shone, glazed with rain.

  But Rufus admitted to himself that the beauties of nature and architecture had never meant much to him. It was the heat and sunshine and privacy he liked. And now he longed only to get away. They all got into Goblander and he drove away up the drift, Adam next to him, the others in the back. The drift had become a tunnel of overgrowth that dripped water onto the roof of the van. None of them allowed their eyes to turn toward the pinewood. At the top they came out into uncompromising bright gray light, the bleak hedgeless lane, the flat meadows where here and there stunted trees squatted like old men in cloaks. Adam’s simile, not mine, thought Rufus with a grimace.

  No one asked where he was taking them. No one spoke. Adam had Hilbert’s old golf bag stuck between his legs and Rufus guessed the gun was inside it. They must have gone a good two miles before they met another car. Rufus overtook a bus going to Colchester and dropped the two in the back so that they could catch it. He took Adam on to Sudbury for him to catch a train there and at that point they parted. Adam got down from Goblander and said, “For ever and forever farewell, Rufus.”

  Which was probably a quotation from something, though Rufus did not know what and thought fastidiously that it was in bad taste, histrionic, though just like Adam.

  “Take care,” said Rufus, and not looking back any more than he had done when they returned from the cemetery, drove off around the town he had gotten to know so well, over the Stour bridge, into Essex, heading for Halstead and Dunmow and Ongar and London.