A Fatal Inversion Page 7

  He had turned on her and said with cold savagery, “For fuck’s sake, stop kicking me, will you?”

  He expected his father to rise and say something about that being no way to speak to one’s wife or not in front of the child; he was capable of that. But he had said nothing, only looked subdued, and Adam realized why. His own terrible fear and anger had communicated itself to his father and shown him what the better part of valor was: keeping silent. Having put the cat among the pigeons, made mischief in his special way, he was lying low now and waiting. The old bastard. Adam only wished Uncle Hilbert had left him Wyvis Hall and then there would have been no Ecalpemos, no Zosie, and no deaths. And Adam couldn’t see he would have been much worse off. He and Anne would be living in a house like this one rather than that neo-Georgian palace. Children, after all, he thought, looking at Abigail, were happy wherever they were, so long as they were loved… .

  His parents had not asked him what sort of holiday he had had or how the flight had been. The conversation was exclusively on the subject of the discovery at Wyvis Hall. Adam did not know whether to be glad or sorry he had not obtained an English newspaper while away. If he had, the shock would have been less, but on the other hand, his holiday would have been spoiled. He would have liked very much to be alone. Of course he knew there was no possibility of this, now or when he returned home, for when you were married, you never could be alone. Presumably that was the point. What was he going to tell Anne? How much was he going to tell her? He didn’t know. None of it, if he could help it.

  They sat at the table in the dining area to eat an absurdly early high tea. Lewis asked him if he could remember the day when he heard he had inherited Wyvis Hall and had walked in here and astounded them with his news.

  “He had a beard then, Anne.” Lewis’s subdued air had changed to one of high good humor. “You wouldn’t have recognized him, he looked like John the Baptist.”

  Adam could remember very well but he wasn’t going to say so.

  “What a funny thing,” said Lewis. “We had ham salad that day too. What a coincidence! Oh, yes, I’ve been meaning to ask you, who was it looked after Wyvis Hall while you were in Greece?”

  Adam could eat nothing. That other time, he remembered, it was his father who hadn’t been able to eat. He didn’t know what Lewis meant about someone looking after the house, but no doubt he, Adam, at the time had concocted some tale to keep his father quiet, to keep him away even.

  “Someone from the village, you said,” Lewis persisted.

  “How can I remember that far back?”

  “The police will want to know. It may be of vital importance.”

  “Aren’t you going to eat your meat, dear?” said Beryl.

  Abigail, who had been put upstairs in one of the bedrooms to sleep, set up a wailing sound. Adam was on his feet at once.

  “I think we should go.”

  They had to wait until his father was ready. Adam would have preferred to phone for a hire car but Lewis wouldn’t hear of it. Anne sat in the front in the passenger seat while Adam was in the back with Abigail. If his father could have found out what flight they were coming on, the police certainly could. It was possible they might be waiting for him. They would wish to interview every former owner or occupant of Wyvis Hall. He looked again at the newspaper account of the adjourned inquest that his father had saved for him. It would be owners and occupants of Wyvis Hall between nine and twelve years before that they would wish to interview, and those were Great-Uncle Hilbert, who was dead, himself, and Ivan Langan, to whom he had sold the house. As for other occupants, how would they know who else had lived there?

  It was ironical that ten days before he had seen Shiva at Heathrow. The encounter he now saw as an omen, a shadow cast by a coming event. What would that event be? Adam did not want at this point to speculate; it made him feel sick. He turned the newspaper over so that he could not see that headline and those paragraphs. In high spirits, his father was talking about the immense advances made in forensic science in recent years.

  As soon as they got home Anne started getting Abigail to bed. Their bags humped upstairs and put into the bedroom, Adam looked Rufus Fletcher up in the phone book. He was in there twice, at a Wimpole Street number and again at an address in Mill Hill: Rufus H. Fletcher, M.B., MRCP. All these years then, or for some of them, Rufus had been living three or four miles from him. He couldn’t look Shiva up because he could not remember his surname. Women marry and change their names, he thought, there was no point in pursuing that one. Of course he could look up Robin Tatian but where, really, would that get him? He was reaching for the blue directory when Anne came back with Abigail in her arms, so Adam took her and carried her back to bed himself and tucked her in and kissed her. She was almost asleep. He wondered if Rufus had children, and if so, did he worry about them coming to terrible harm the way he himself worried. Was his whole life affected by what had happened at Ecalpemos? Adam might have escaped the file memories for years, suppressed them and jerked violently away from them, but he had never been able to pretend he was unscathed by those events. Sometimes he felt that he was the person he was because of them and acted the way he did because of their effects.

  He sat by Abigail’s crib, not wanting to remember but knowing that now he must. There was nothing in his house to remind him of Ecalpemos. Everything that was left, everything he and Rufus hadn’t sold, had gone to Ivan Langan with the house. For a song, too, because he had not been able to bear the thought of going back, meeting a valuer, walking around the house, picking things off shelves and out of cupboards. Only once had he returned after they all left and that had been bad enough, like a dream—no, like stepping into the set and scenario of some frightening film, a Hitchcock movie perhaps. He asked the taxi he had taken to let him off at the top of the drift and he had walked to the house. It was almost a year since he had been there and in that time nothing had been done, nothing had been touched. From the pinewood he simply averted his eyes—till later.

  The drift was thickly overgrown, a dank tunnel out of whose bushy sides the tendrils of brambles and briar roses caught at his clothes. One of these whipped back at him, and as he caught at it a thorn drove into the fleshy pad of his finger. That thorn had been there, festering, for months. A dull cool summer it had been, as different as could be from the year before. No golden light bathed the red brick of the house. It no longer looked mellow. Beautiful, yes, but severe somehow, and to Adam’s heightened awareness, reproachful. He found himself encouraging, fostering, the scenario illusion. Only thus, only by pretending unreality, pretending this was a part he acted, could he go on, cross the wild shaggy grass, go past the black-branched cedar tree, arrive at the porch set in its four Doric columns and insert his key into the lock.

  In the film there would have been something terrible awaiting him. A dead thing hanging in a noose over the stairs. There was nothing, of course, only a faint smell compounded of dust and dry mold. Ecalpemos. He no longer called it that. It was Wyvis Hall once more, his house but bringing him no pleasure, no deep, excited, almost sick joy. He breathed deeply, walked through the rooms, went upstairs, being the actor in the film. In a few moments the other participant in the sequence they were shooting would come, the real estate agent from Sudbury.

  While they had been there the previous year there had been hardly any visitors. It was as if the magic house in the wood had had an invisible fence set around it or—what did they call it?—a shutting spell. The clear air, Constable’s unique Suffolk light, had in fact been impenetrable, a barrier that held off intruders as a sheet of glass might have. This was all fantasy, of course, for one or two people had come, Evans or Owens from Hadleigh, the exterminator they called the coypu man, a meter reader, the man who wanted to do the garden and whom he had turned away with a lie. But for the most part they had been undisturbed in their magic island, or resort, that was closed to others but which they could leave when they pleased. Coming and going—there had been too much
of that. Things would have been very different if they had stayed put.

  The doorbell rang. It made him jump—inevitably. But it was just a bell that rang, it did not buzz or chime. He let in the real estate agent and took him through the house, into the drawing room and the dining room, upstairs to the Pincushion Room, the Centaur Room, the Room of Astonishment, the Deathbed Room, the Room Without a Name, and then back down the back stairs to that jumble of kitchens and scullery and wash house and coal store, most of it a nineteenth-century addition. What a lot of this sort of thing the Victorians had needed!

  It was all quite tidy and clean, as Vivien had left it. But he could not say Vivien’s name then, he could not even think it, only look about him fearfully, clenching his hands.

  He opened the door to the gun room and showed the real estate agent the interior. There was a table in there and a Windsor chair. The floor was of black and red quarry tiles and there were racks on the walls for the guns but these, of course, had gone, Hilbert’s two shotguns had gone, one buried in the Little Wood, the other in his bedroom at home in Edgware, zipped up in an old golf bag under the bed.

  The real estate agent suggested an asking price and took some measurements and then a photograph, standing on the edge of the lawn that had become a meadow, where Rufus had stood and taken photographs a year before. It was windy, and the cedar which he had likened to a galleon and Zosie to a witch, danced witchlike, its branches arms and leaping legs and flying skirts.

  The car went off up the drift as many times Goblander had gone. Adam had given his only key to the real estate agent. He closed the front door behind him and started to walk. He had forgotten all about arranging for a taxi to pick him up or looking up bus times or anything like that. Presumably, the real estate agent would have given him a lift somewhere. It was too late now. Cold water drops fell on his head from the leafy roof of the tunnel. In the deciduous wood a pheasant uttered its rattling call. He emptied his mind, he walked like an automaton up onto the green ride, seeing at the end of it the cameo of stacked meadows, segments of wood, a church tower. He was holding his breath.

  His head he was keeping averted, looking in the direction of the drift, at the wall of cluster pines with their black needles and their green cones. He knew the distance from the ride, thirty paces. When he turned his head he kept his eyes closed, let out his breath, opened his eyes, looked and heard himself give a little whimpering sigh. It was the sound a man might make when in physical pain but trying not to show it, suppressing complaint.

  There was nothing to see, nothing to show. The place was as it had always been, a downland in miniature, a terrain of small green hills on which little dolmens had been raised, pink granite, white marble, a slab or two of gray stone. Wooden crosses. “By what eternal streams, Pinto …” Each in their narrow cells forever laid were Alexander, Sal, Monty, Ranger, Blaze. And to the right of Blaze the green turf lay undisturbed, very slightly irregular as the whole area was, a reticulation of tiny-leaved plants, minuscule flowers, netted into the grass, a small pit here filled with pine needles, a shallow rut there with a sandy bottom. Rabbits had mown the lawn here more effectively than any piece of machinery. Their droppings lay scattered about like handfuls of raisins.

  Adam found he was holding both hands clamped over his mouth. He turned and ran, along the ride, up the drift, not looking back.

  Anne, waiting downstairs for him with coffee and sandwiches on a tray, wanted to talk about the find at Wyvis Hall. He found himself unexpectedly touched by her simple assumption, the way she absolutely took it for granted, that he was innocent. Adam didn’t want anything to eat. He was thinking of Hilbert’s shotgun that he still had but which he should perhaps not keep much longer.

  “You’ve never told me any of this,” Anne began. “When you got the solicitor’s letter saying you’d inherited the place it must have come as a terrific shock. I mean, didn’t you have a clue?”

  “I thought my father would come in for it. Everyone did.”

  “Why do you think he left it to you like that?”

  “Not because he liked me. He hardly took any notice of me. He didn’t like children, and when I got older I stopped going. I hadn’t been near the place for four years. My parents went.”

  “Then I just don’t understand.”

  “Look, he was an unpleasant old man.” Adam looked hard at her. “My father is an unpleasant old man, and I daresay I shall be. Verne-Smiths are.” She didn’t say anything. “I think it happened this way. He saw through the toadying, of course he did. My father was just a blatant sycophant. He thought to himself, right, you’ve called the boy Hilbert to please me, to make me like him, so I damn well will like him, I’ll like him more than you and leave him the place over your head.”

  “Do people really behave like that?”

  “Some do.” Adam thought. “Frankly, if it were me, I would. I might.”

  “Do you want some more coffee? No? I suppose you whizzed straight down there and had a look at your property?”

  “No, I didn’t as a matter of fact. I hadn’t time, I had to go back to the university. Anyway, I was going to sell it, I wasn’t all starry-eyed about my lovely house, you know.”

  That was just what he had been. Once, that is, he had seen it again after a four-year absence. But he had not guessed he would be and had postponed his visit till the term ended in June. All that term his father had been planning ways and means, trying to overturn the will, looking for compromises, plotting for all Adam knew a frontal assault. What he did know he had gotten from his sister, his ally against their parents if in nothing else.

  “You’d been there for your vacations as a little boy? Did you love it then?”

  “I don’t think so. I can’t remember. I think I’d have preferred the seaside. Kids do.”

  “And did they show you the animal cemetery when you were a child?” Anne persisted.

  “I suppose so. I can’t remember. Do we have to talk about it?”

  In fact, he couldn’t remember ever having heard of it until the day Shiva came in and told them what he had found. Vivien thought it was children buried there. Adam shivered as he remembered that. Well, an Indian would think like that, he wouldn’t be able to understand the way the English went on about animals. Adam had a sudden awful vision of the spade going through that green turf and coming up with a skull on it. Something like that; it must have been like that.

  Was the shot still there, among the bones?

  Later he lay in bed beside Anne, trying to think of a satisfactory yet thoroughly noncommittal story to tell the police. Like most middle-class English people who have never had anything to do with them, Adam thought the police were fools. Anne had fallen asleep almost immediately. She had a habit, when she slept on her back, of making soft sounds in her throat. This was not snoring but a kind of clicking, irregular and sporadic—that was what made it irritating—and liable to start when least expected. Adam had only heard one other make these sounds, and when he first heard Anne make them his memory escape failed and those two nights were startlingly evoked, so disturbingly, in fact, that he had the terrible delusion that Anne was doing it to mock him. Of course that was nonsense. She had never heard of Catherine Ryemark and never would if he had his way.

  Several minutes might pass without a click and then one would come and another would come and another one fifteen seconds after that. It drove Adam mad. Once, in a fit of temper, he had told her she only started doing it after they were married. If he had heard her do that in their single days, he would never have married her. But now, the soft clicks coming with typical irregularity, he listened to them painfully and let his mind slide back ten years to what he must remember, to the truth he must recall if he were going to be able to tell lies. He lay still with his eyes open, staring into the darkness that was only half-darkness because this was London and not Suffolk, where on moonless nights the small hours were black as velvet. Click, pause, click, a long silence. At last it had been cold enou
gh to need a blanket and a quilt, to hold Zosie in his arms without the sweat pouring off them both. For a long time that night, too, he had not slept, had lain thinking, wondering what to do, listening to the delicate sounds like tiny bubbles breaking—and then hearing them no more.

  Adam closed his eyes and turned his head away from Anne. A down-stuffed duvet in a printed cotton cover lay over them. It had been a quilt at Ecalpemos, faded yellow satin, brought in by Vivien from the terrace when the rain began. Quilts were what you lay on to sunbathe that summer, not for warmth on beds, but slung for lounging comfort as it might be on some Damascene rooftop. Night after night they had lain out there in the soft, scented warmth, looking at the stars, or lighting candles stuck in Rufus’s wine bottles, eating and drinking, talking, hoping, and happy. That summer—there had never been another like it, before or since.

  It was the hottest, driest summer any of them had ever known. The previous one, 1975, had been very good, especially the latter part, but that one, the summer of Hilbert’s death and of Ecalpemos, had been glorious from April till September. If it had been gray and raining and chilly, he might have taken one look at Wyvis Hall and turned tail and fled to Crete or Delos or somewhere. Certainly he would have gone down there alone to spy out the land and check on his property. Rufus wouldn’t have wanted to go and he would have had to go down alone by train.

  There were so many ifs and conditions, so many other eventualities that easily might have happened. In the first place, he had approached Rufus only because Rufus had a car. If his father hadn’t been so bloody-minded and had let him use the family car, he would no doubt have gone down alone and come back the next day, having called on some real estate agent in Hadleigh or Sudbury and asked them to sell the house for him, the very one probably that he saw the following year.