A Fatal Inversion Read online

  He never had seen any of them again. There had been no need to pretend, to turn aside. Briefly, starting his fifth year in medical school something over thirteen months later, he had wondered if Shiva Manjusri would be one of the incoming freshmen. But no, his intuition had been accurate. At any rate Shiva’s face was not among the several brown faces. As for the others, avoiding them had presented no problems.

  Would they get in touch with him now?

  No contingency plans had been made for this eventuality. So long as there was no hunt for a missing girl they had felt themselves reasonably safe. Their minds had not reached out to the terror of what had in fact happened. None of them had been the kind of people who could have imagined devotion to a pet animal or according to it funerary rites. It was Shiva who had proposed the site. They had congratulated him on his ingenuity.

  Ten years …

  An ovarian cyst, nothing to get upset about, Rufus told Ms. Beauchamp. She was thirty-two, an editor with a distinguished publishing house, married to an investigative journalist. As yet they had no children, but she wanted four, she told Rufus.

  “No reason why you shouldn’t.” He had another glance at her notes. “In fact, a peculiarity about this condition is that it seldom if ever occurs in a woman who’s had a baby.”

  “My God,” she said, putting her coat on, “and there was I, making my husband’s life a misery, sure I’d got the dreaded C.”

  They all thought they’d got the dreaded C, poor things. You couldn’t blame them. Rufus took her forty pounds off her by the reception desk, having set in motion the arrangements by which she would be admitted to a fashionable West End clinic, Rufus, her surgery and her hospitalization ultimately paid for by some provident association to which she and her husband subscribed. Rufus shook hands. He walked back to his consulting room, dying for a cigarette.

  This was unlike him. He could usually get through quite easily until after lunch. He thought, I know what my idea of heaven would be, if by heaven we mean a place of bliss in which to pass eternity: a sanctuary where one might chain-smoke without impairment of breathing, destruction of the lungs, or damage to the heart, light each fresh cigarette from the glowing butt of its predecessor, and drink ice-free but hundred-proof chilled vodka laced with two drops of angostura and a gill of newly opened Perrier endlessly, with increasing euphoria, until a peak of joy and ease was reached but without any subsequent nausea or pain or dehydration or oblivion… .

  Sitting alone, he lit his cigarette, the first of the day, and there came that faint swimming in the head, a tautening of the gut. He closed his eyes. If it comes to light that I was in that house with Adam and the others, he thought with cold clarity, if someone tells the papers, or the police and then the papers, that I was there during the summer of 1976, living there, it will be all up with me. I will lose my practice and my reputation and everything that I have and can look forward to, if not my liberty. And without the rest I won’t care about my liberty. It would be bad enough if I were a GP or an expert in some other branch of medicine, an orthopedic surgeon, for instance, or an ear, nose, and throat man, but I am a gynecologist, and it is the bones of a young woman and a baby that have been found there… . What worried woman would come to me? What Mrs. Strawson or Ms. Beauchamp? What GP would send her to me?

  If I were innocent, thought Rufus, I know very well what I would do. I would pick up the phone and phone my solicitor and ask to come and see him and get his advice. He might advise me to make a statement to the police, which I would, of course, do under his guidance. But I shall not do this because I am not innocent. I shall sit here and wait and sweat it out and look the facts in the face, trying to anticipate the worst that can happen.

  5

  WHEN HE SAID he did not know the date of Adam’s return, Lewis Verne-Smith had not lied to the police. It would have been very unusual for him to have known a fact like that about his son’s life and movements. If not exactly estranged, they were not close. Lewis was inclined to say he had “no time for” Adam. He believed his son disliked him and this he thought outrageous. Sometimes he thought about Adam when he was a child and what a dear little boy he had been, affectionate and not troublesome.

  “They undergo a complete change when they grow up,” he said to Beryl. “Adam, for instance, he might not be the same person.”

  He had decided to find out when Adam was coming back and drive to Heathrow and meet the plane. Adam lived as far away from the parental home as was possible while still living in North London. Without saying anything to his wife, Lewis drove to Muswell Hill and checked that Adam’s car was in its garage. It was. This meant they must have had a hired car to take them to the airport or have gone by tube. Adam’s own car was bigger and newer than Lewis’s and very clean and well polished, all of which Lewis disliked.

  An obscure feeling that he ought to have a key to this house made him resentful. It was something he found hard to understand, though, of course, it must be accepted, this escape of children from the parental bonds so that they could have secrets from you and hiding places you couldn’t penetrate, that they were adults and possessed houses and cars which you had had no hand in choosing or buying, that they could lock up those houses as they locked up their thoughts.

  He made his way around the side of the house, peering in at the windows, noting that some dishes, though washed, had been left on the drainboard. There were dead flowers in a vase half full of green water. Lewis held simultaneously two opposing views of his son, one that he was a feckless, idle, good-for-nothing layabout and the other that he was a hard, ruthless, astute and already well-off businessman. When the former view of Adam predominated, Lewis felt easier, happier, more justified.

  On the way it had occurred to him that he might find the police at Adam’s. It would not have surprised him as he walked clockwise around the house to have met a policeman proceeding in the opposite direction. However, there was no one around, not even the neighbors. Lewis stood on the front lawn, looking up at the bedroom windows.

  It was a very nice house, bigger than Lewis’s own and in a more attractive neighborhood, a neo-Georgian double-fronted detached house, altogether superior to the kind of thing most married men of twenty-nine could afford to live in. Adam could afford it because of the money he got from the sale of Wyvis Hall and later from the sale of the London house he bought with the money from the sale of Wyvis Hall. If things had happened differently, he, Lewis, would be living in a house like this or in a flat in Central London with a cottage in the country as well. And Adam would have what was proper for someone of his age and standing in the world, a terraced cottage in North Finchley or maybe Crouch End, first rung on the slow ladder of upward mobility. Lewis thought bitterly that as it was, the only possible next step up for Adam would be Highgate Village… .

  He drove home and this time he felt able to phone the travel agent friend of Adam’s without fear of a rebuff. And the man was very pleasant, reminding him that they had met at Adam’s wedding. He had no objection to telling him when Adam and Anne were returning: next Tuesday on the Iberia Air Lines flight from Tenerife that got in at 1:30 P.M.

  After he had hung up, Lewis considered informing the police; he thought this might be his duty, but on the other hand he did not want the police actually to be there when Adam arrived. He told his wife (and himself) that he was going to meet Adam in order to break the news gently to him that these awful discoveries had been made at Wyvis Hall and that foul play might have taken place while he, Adam, was actually its owner.

  “Aren’t you getting things out of proportion?” said Beryl.

  “How so?”

  “There hasn’t been anything said about foul play yet.”

  But even as she said this, as Lewis later rather dramatically told her, the Standard was on the streets announcing that police were treating the case as murder. It was only a few lines, it was tucked away, all very low key, but the word murder was there to be seen and read.

  As he se
t off for the airport, Lewis remembered that he had told Adam from the first that only trouble could come from a person of his youth and inexperience inheriting a big house and land of the dimensions of Wyvis Hall. And he was right, for trouble had come, if rather tardily. Ten years it had taken, more than ten years. In some ways it seemed longer than that to Lewis and in others only yesterday. On the other hand, he could not remember a time when it had not been taken for granted the Hall would one day be his own.

  The Verne-Smiths were minor gentry. Lewis’s grandfather had been a parson in a Suffolk village, with nothing but his stipend to live on, and the father of seven children. Two of them had died young, one of Lewis’s aunts had married and gone to America, the other two had remained spinsters, living as many unmarried women in the country used to, in tiny cottages in the middle of a village, busy in a mouselike way about parochial matters, having no youth, earning nothing, buried alive. The remaining brothers, his father and his Uncle Hilbert, were much younger. His father also took holy orders while Hilbert, practicing as a solicitor in Ipswich, took care of himself by marrying a rich woman.

  The Berelands were wealthy landowners. If a son or daughter married and no suitable home was in the offing, a house would be made available. Lilian Bereland brought Wyvis Hall with her, not as a grace and favor dwelling to revert to her family on her or her husband’s death but hers to do absolutely as she liked with. Of course, in her father’s estimation, it was not much of a house, a warren of smallish rooms was how he saw it, and set in a damp situation on the side of a river valley. There was not much sale for that kind of thing at the time of Hilbert’s marriage.

  The parson and his wife and children used to go there for their holidays. Lewis’s father’s parish was on the outskirts of Manchester and the vicarage was Victorian-Byzantine-Gothic soot-blackened yellow bricks with the pseudo-Romanesque windows picked out in red bricks. Black-leaved ilexes grew in the churchyard and a brassy laburnum had flowers on it for one week out of the year. Wyvis Hall was the most beautiful place the seven-year-old Lewis had ever seen and the countryside was glorious. In those days the fields were still small and surrounded by hedges and the lanes ran deep between lush banks. Wild orchids grew in the fens and monkshood and hemp agrimony on the borders of the little streams where there were caddis flies and water boatmen and dragonflies in gold velvet or silver armor. Clouded Yellow butterflies abounded and Small Coppers and Blues and once the little boy saw a Purple Emperor. A pair of spotted woodpeckers nested in what was known as the Little Wood below the lake, and when the nuts were ripe on the copper cob trees, a nuthatch came up quite close to the house.

  That house! How differently did it appear to him from the Berelands’ assessment! To him it was grand and spacious. In the drawing room a pair of pink marble pillars supported the embrasure of the windows. The staircase curved up prettily to a gallery. There was a library that Uncle Hilbert used as his study and, even more awe-inspiring, a gun room with stuffed animals and shotguns on the walls. But the interior meant less—though it was not always to be so—than the grounds, the lake, the woods. The place took on a magical quality for Lewis, who had toward it something of that feeling of the Grand Meaulnes for his lost domain. He used to long for his vacations and grow deeply depressed when they drew to an end. It was a glorious victory when he managed to persuade the grown-ups to let him stay on after his parents had gone back to Manchester.

  Aunt Lilian had never had any children and she died in 1960, when she was only fifty-five. Uncle Hilbert took the loss of his wife very hard and the only company he seemed to want was Lewis’s. It was about this time that he started telling Lewis Wyvis Hall would be his one day.

  He also informed Lewis’s parents, who got into the habit of saying things like “when all this is yours” and “when you come into your property.” Uncle Hilbert, however, was only just sixty, very hale and hearty, still very much in practice as a solicitor, and Lewis could not imagine stepping into his shoes, nor did he in those days think it very nice to anticipate such things. But he went down to Suffolk very often, much more often perhaps than he would have had Wyvis Hall been destined to pass back to the Berelands or on to one of those cousins in the United States.

  His feeling for the place underwent many changes. In the nature of things, meadow, grove, and stream no longer appeared to him appareled in celestial light, the glory and the freshness of a dream. He was growing up. He began to see the grounds as a possession, the gardens as something to impress others, the orchard and walled fruit garden as places that would produce delicious food. Although he intended to live in the house for at least part of the time, he saw it, too, as salable and the value or price of it (however you liked to put it) going up every year. The pines in the wood where Uncle Hilbert’s hunt terrier Blaze was the last creature laid to rest he saw as a useful and lucrative crop. He noticed the pieces with which Wyvis Hall was furnished, took books out of the public library on antiques and porcelain and measured the remembered articles against illustrations, catching his breath sometimes at mounting values. Another thing he did was picture himself and his wife in the drawing room receiving dinner guests. The address on his writing paper would simply be: Wyvis Hall, Nunes-by-Ipswich, Suffolk. It was one of Lewis’s ambitions to have an address in which the name of the street might be left out without causing inconvenience to the post office. The house and grounds were marked on the ordnance survey map for that part of Suffolk, and Lewis, when he was feeling low, would get it out and look at it to cheer himself up.

  By the 1960s he had married and had two children, a son and a daughter. When his son was born he thought it would be nice, a nice gesture, to name him after Hilbert.

  “An old family name,” he told his wife, though this was not true at all, his uncle’s being thus christened having been an isolated instance of the use of Hilbert. There had been a fashion in the late nineteenth century for Germanic names, and his uncle, born in 1902, had caught the tail end of it.

  “I don’t like that at all,” his wife had said. “People will think it’s really Gilbert or Albert. I don’t want him teased, poor baby.”

  “He will be called by his surname at his public school,” said Lewis, who though poor had grand ideas as befitted the future owner of Wyvis Hall and its acres. So he won, or appeared to win, that battle and the child was christened Hilbert John Adam.

  Lewis had written to Uncle Hilbert and told him of his intention to name his son after him, inviting him to be the child’s godfather. Declining on the grounds that he no longer had any religious faith, Uncle Hilbert sent a silver christening mug, large enough to hold a pint of beer. But the note that accompanied it made no mention of the choice of name and it was rather a cold note. Later on, when Lewis and his wife and the baby went to stay at Wyvis Hall, Hilbert’s only comment on his great-nephew’s name was: “Poor little devil.”

  By then, anyway, the baby was always called Adam by everyone.

  Lewis, who was no fool, soon saw that in some incomprehensible way he had put his uncle’s back up. He set about rectifying matters, attempting to redress the balance. His uncle’s birthday was noted; he must always have a Christmas present bought and sent in good time. He was invited to London and all sorts of treats were held out to him as to how he would be entertained on such a visit, trips to the theater and concerts, a specially organized tour of “Swinging London,” Carnaby Street, King’s Road, and so on. Lewis knew very well he should not do this, that he was sucking up to someone for the sake of inheriting his property. But he could not help himself, he could not do otherwise.

  Of course he continued to take his family to Wyvis Hall regularly for their summer holidays. He had a daughter as well now whom he had been tempted to call Lilian but had seen the unwisdom of this in time and named her Bridget. His wife would have liked to go to Cornwall sometimes or even to Majorca but Lewis said it was out of the question, they couldn’t afford it. Perhaps what he really meant was that they couldn’t afford not to go to Nunes
. By 1970 you couldn’t buy a derelict cottage in the Nunes neighborhood for less than 4,000 pounds, and Wyvis Hall would fetch five times that.

  One day, soon after he had retired from his legal practice, Hilbert told Lewis he had made a will that was “very much to your advantage.” He smiled in a benevolent sort of way when he said this. They were sitting out on the terrace on the low wall of which stood, in pairs, stone figures from classical mythology of a rather embarrassing kind. Under the drawing room window agapanthus afrianus, the blue lily, was in full flower. Hilbert and Lewis and Beryl sat in old-fashioned deck chairs with striped canvas seats. Hilbert leaned toward Lewis when he told him about the will and gave him a pat on the knee. Lewis said something about being very grateful.

  “I finally made up my mind when you named the boy after me,” said Hilbert.

  Lewis said more grateful things and about naming his son Hilbert being only proper and suitable under the circumstances.

  “In the circumstances,” said Hilbert.

  He was in the habit of correcting minor errors of grammar or usage. Adam must have got it from him, Lewis sometimes thought, or perhaps (he much later and very bitterly thought) a similar pedantry in Adam was among the things Hilbert liked about him.

  Lewis did not like being corrected, but he had to take it and with a smile. It wouldn’t go on forever. The Verne-Smiths were not long livers. Lewis’s father had died at sixty and his grandfather at sixty-two. His three aunts were all dead at under seventy. Hilbert would be seventy the following year and Lewis said to his wife that his uncle was beginning to look very frail. He began “running down” to Suffolk at weekends by himself, and that Christmas he had his wife accompany him for four days, taking all the Christmas food with them. The woman who came in to clean and the old boy who saw to the garden had been instructed to call him “Mr.” Lewis and he felt very much the heir. His uncle hadn’t much money, he supposed, but there would be a little, enough to put central heating in, say, and have the place redecorated. Lewis hadn’t made up his mind whether to sell Wyvis Hall after he had smartened it up a bit and with the proceeds buy a bigger and better London house and a country cottage or to keep the Hall and sell off some of the land for agriculture. According to his estimate, the result of perusing real estate agents’ windows in Ipswich and Sudbury, Wyvis Hall by the end of 1972 was worth about 23,000 pounds.