A Fatal Inversion

by Ruth Rendell

  It was a continual source of irritation to Lewis that Adam did not show more respect and deference to Hilbert. The boy was offhand and always trying to be clever. He called his great-uncle by his Christian name with no title and did not jump to his feet when the old man entered the room. Lewis pressed Adam to accompany him on those solicitous weekend visits but Adam nearly always said he was too busy or would be bored. There had in fact been only one occasion during those last years that Lewis could remember, and he was sure Adam had only gone because there had been a promise of some shooting. The visit had been far from successful, for Adam had sulked when offered the four-ten, the so-called “lady’s gun.” Sometimes, since then, Lewis had wondered what would have happened if Adam had obeyed him and been kind and polite to the perverse old man. Would Hilbert have left his property to Bridget perhaps or even to the Law Society?

  It was to be three more years before his uncle died, thus becoming the longest-lived Verne-Smith that anyone had heard of. The daily woman found him dead one morning in the April of 1976. He was lying on the floor outside his bedroom at the top of the back stairs. The cause of death was a cerebral hemorrhage. Adam was nineteen and in his first year at college, though at that time at home for the Easter break. After the cremation, while the few mourners were looking gloomily at the flowers, his uncle’s solicitor, a partner in the Ipswich practice, spoke to Lewis simply to say that he believed he already knew the contents of the will. Secure as he thought in possession, Lewis brushed this aside as being an unsuitable subject for discussion at such a time. The solicitor nodded and went on his way.

  A week later Adam got a letter saying he was the sole beneficiary under the will of his late great-uncle. There was no money, Hilbert having used all he possessed to purchase himself an annuity, but Wyvis Hall and its contents were Adam’s absolutely.

  There were traffic jams all along the North Circular Road, a particularly long one at Stonebridge Park, and another at Hanger Lane. Lewis, sensibly, had allowed himself a lot of time. Adam would be very surprised to see him. He would probably think something had happened to his mother and that Lewis was there as the bearer of bad news. Of course in a way he was, though not of that kind. For a moment or two, as he waited in the line behind a truck full of German furniture and a leased moving van, Lewis returned to speculating as to how and why those bones had gotten into the animal cemetery. Frankly, he did not suppose Adam had had anything directly to do with this at all. What seemed likely to him was that Adam had allowed some undesirable person or persons access to the place and it was these vagrants or hippies—there had been a lot of hippies still around then—who were responsible.

  Adam himself had never shown any interest in Wyvis Hall, as far as he had noticed. That was part of the unfairness of it. He had seen this unlooked-for inheritance simply as a source of lucre. When the letter came, Lewis had nearly opened it himself. The postmark and the old-fashioned and precise direction (Esquire and the name of the house as well as the street number) told him it was from Hilbert’s old firm. And he thought he knew what had happened. They had made a mistake, that was all, and sent it to his son. Or else it might be that Hilbert had left Adam some small memento or keepsake… .

  Adam was lying late in bed. Lewis would never forget that if he forgot all the rest. And he, for his part, was feeling so euphoric that instead of shouting to his son to get up and stir his stumps, he had actually gone in there and put the envelope on Adam’s bedside table. The awful thing was that all this time Lewis had never had any doubts he was himself the new owner of Wyvis Hall.

  It must have been a Saturday or else Lewis for some reason or other had the day off from work. Anyway, he was at home that day, home for lunch, and he and Beryl were actually sitting at the table, talking as it happened about going down soon to take a look at the Hall, when Adam came in. He had very long hair at the time and a beard, Lewis remembered, and looked, as they all did, like some kind of weird prophet. To this day Lewis had a picture in his mind of how his son had looked walking into the dining room (or dining area of the living room really) wearing jeans, of course, jeans with ragged hems, and a collarless tunic garment, tie-dyed, with colored inks. Afterward Lewis wished he had said something scathing, alluding perhaps to the lateness of the hour of Adam’s appearance. Well, he had alluded to Adam’s appearance but in a genial way. He had been feeling cheerful, God help him!

  “Just in time for the locusts and honey!”

  Adam said, “Something rather fantastic, old Hilbert’s left me his house.”

  “Yes, very funny,” Lewis had said. “What has he left you? His desk? You always said you liked that.”

  “No kidding, he’s left me his house. Whatsitsname Hall. Unbelievable, isn’t it? It was quite a shock. You can see the letter if you like.”

  Lewis snatched the letter. He had begun to tremble. There it was in black and white: “…the property known as Wyvis Hall at Nunes in the county of Suffolk, the lands pertaining thereto …” but it must be a mistake.

  “They’ve mistaken you for me, my boy,” Lewis said grimly.

  Adam smiled. “I doubt that.”

  “You doubt it? You know nothing about it. Of course Wyvis Hall is mine, it’s always been a matter of fact it would be mine. This is a simple mixup, a confusion of names, though I must say it amounts to criminal carelessness.”

  “You could phone them,” said Beryl.

  “I shall. I shall phone them immediately I’ve finished my lunch.”

  But he was not able to finish his lunch. He couldn’t eat another mouthful. Adam ate. He ate his way through bread and butter and ham and pickles and drank a half-pint of milk. Lewis went into the hall and phoned Hilbert’s solicitors. The one he wanted was still out to lunch. Adam got up from the table and said he thought he might go over to Rufus’s.

  “You’re not going anywhere,” said Lewis. “I forbid you to leave this house.”

  “You what?” said Adam, looking at him and grinning.

  Beryl said, “Just wait a few minutes, Adam, till we’ve got this cleared up.”

  “Why’s he getting his knickers in a twist anyway if he’s so sure it’s a mistake?”

  It was not then but ten minutes afterward when he had spoken to the solicitor and been assured there was no mistake that Lewis began to dislike his son. Adam said: “You can’t expect me to be sorry he left the place to me and not to you. Obviously, I think he made the right decision.”

  “Can’t you see what an outrage it is?”

  Adam was excited. He wanted to go and tell the Fletcher family his good fortune. Lewis was boiling with rage and misery and shock.

  “Can I have the car?” said Adam.

  “No, you can’t! Now or at any other time, and that’s final!”

  Lewis soon formulated a plan whereby they could all share Wyvis Hall. It was not ideal, it was not what he had anticipated, far from it, but it was better than abandoning it to Adam. After all, Adam would be back at college in a week’s time, the will would have to be proved, but by the middle of the summer why shouldn’t he and his wife and Bridget use the Hall regularly at weekends? Adam could have it for his long vacation. He, Lewis, was quite prepared to get the place redecorated at his own expense. It was a family house, after all, no doubt Hilbert had intended Adam to share it with the rest of his family. He and Beryl and Bridget could go there on weekends and they could all be there together for Christmas. What did a boy still at university, with no prospects yet of any sort of career, what did someone like that want with a massive country house?

  “I want to sell it,” Adam said. “I want the money.”

  “Sell the land,” said Lewis.

  “I don’t want to sell the land. It wouldn’t fetch much anyway, agricultural land. And who’s going to want to buy it?” It was plain that Adam had gone into this aspect of things. “No, since you ask …” Clearly, Adam was only reluctantly willing to share his plans with his parents. “Since you ask, I’m going to go down and take a look
at it as soon as I can and then I’m going to put it on the market.”

  Adam returned to college. That summer Lewis thought perhaps he was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. He made all sorts of wild plans. He would go down to Nunes and take over the house. If necessary he would break in and take possession. The village people would support his cause—didn’t they call him Mr. Lewis? Wasn’t he the rightful heir? Adam would never try to regain the house by force. By this time his fantasies took on the air of medieval barons’ wars. He actually dreamed of himself in a suit of armor opening the big oak front door with a mace in his hand and Adam riding up on a black colorfully caparisoned horse. More practically, he consulted solicitors of his own in an attempt to have the will disputed. They advised him against trying. He had another go at persuasion and wrote Adam long letters to his college begging for compromises. Adam phoned home and asked his mother to stop his father bothering him when he was in the middle of exams. Lewis’s doctor put him on tranquilizers and advised him to go away on holiday.

  In the middle of June he suddenly gave up. He washed his hands of Adam and Wyvis Hall and the memory of his Uncle Hilbert. The whole thing disgusted him, he told Beryl, it was beneath his dignity, only he couldn’t help feeling utterly disillusioned with human nature. He wouldn’t go to Wyvis Hall now if Adam invited him, if he went down on his bended knees.

  His exams over, Adam came home. He slept one night at home and then went down to Nunes, taking Rufus Fletcher with him. Or, rather, being taken by Rufus, in whose van they went. Lewis refused to show any interest. He practically ignored Adam for whom he now felt a deep distasteful antipathy. A few months before, if anyone had told him you could feel dislike for your own child, a real aversion from your own flesh and blood, he would not have believed them. But that was how he felt. He couldn’t get Adam out of the house fast enough. Two days later he was back. So much for Wyvis Hall. That was how much Adam appreciated the beautiful old house he had had the unheard-of good fortune to inherit at the age of nineteen. He was going to Greece with Rufus Fletcher and Rufus Fletcher’s girlfriend, who was an Honorable, the daughter of some titled person.

  “You would think someone with her background would know better,” said Lewis.

  “Know better than what?” said Adam.

  “Well, a single girl staying in places with a man like that.”

  Adam laughed.

  “How long will you be away?” said Beryl.

  “I don’t know.” They never did know, or if they did, they weren’t saying. Beryl might have saved her breath. “Term starts on October seventeenth.”

  “You’re never going to be in Greece for four months!”

  “I don’t know. I might be. Greece is quite big.”

  “Staying in tents, I suppose. Sleeping on beaches.” Lewis had forgotten to be indifferent and aloof, he couldn’t help it. “And what about that beautiful old house you’ve been unaccountably made responsible for? What about that? Is that to be allowed to go to rack and ruin?”

  “It’s not in ruins,” said Adam, looking him in the eye. “I don’t know what rack means. I’ve got someone from the village coming in every day to check up that no one tries making a nuisance of themselves. Squatters, I mean. There’s a lot of squatting going on.”

  Lewis had known what he meant. He knew who Adam thought the squatters might be. It was a terrible way to speak to your own father.

  Up in the short-term parking lot at Terminal Two, Lewis had to drive from floor to floor before he found a slot in which to put the car. He was back in the present now, having exhausted those resentful memories. Adam had gone to Greece the next day and not reappeared until September. Lewis and Beryl, of course, had never gone near Wyvis Hall; they would not have laid themselves open to such humiliation, to the possibility of their way being barred by some yokel, paid by Adam to keep an eye on the place. Where had Adam got the money to pay someone to look in at Wyvis Hall daily?

  Lewis asked himself this question as he went down in the lift and crossed the arrivals hall of Terminal Two to await the exodus from Customs. The flight from Tenerife was due in fifteen minutes and he saw that there was a screen on the wall that would show when it landed. People stood around, meeting planes, men who seemed to be the drivers of hired cars carrying placards with the names of people or companies printed on them, families waiting for a returning father, a strange old woman in a red cloak chewing gum. Lewis wondered what visitor from Rome or Amsterdam or the Canaries was going to have the misfortune to stay with her.

  Perhaps he should have told the police that there had been someone going into Wyvis Hall every day during those months of summer. Certainly it would not have been a respectable person, such as Hilbert’s gardener or cleaner, but most likely some unemployed derelict Adam had met in a pub. This person might easily be the perpetrator of the crime that led to that appalling interment. And by association Adam would be involved in it too.

  There did not appear to be any police in the crowd. No policemen had been sent to intercept Adam, unless of course they were in plainclothes—those two that looked like businessmen, for instance. They were probably detectives. Who else would be waiting at the arrivals barrier at Heathrow at this hour?

  Lewis began to feel excited. Suppose Adam were to be arrested before he even reached his father? He imagined himself driving a tearful Anne and Abigail back to Beryl, then finding Adam a good lawyer. Adam would have to admit he had been in the wrong, had been extremely negligent, criminally careless really, in allowing any Tom, Dick, and Harry access to Wyvis Hall. He might not wish to reveal names to the police but he would have to. Pressure would be put on him. Eventually, he would come to confess that if his father had inherited the Hall as he had rightfully expected to do, none of this would have happened.

  The arrival of Flight IB 640 from Tenerife came up on the screen. By this time Lewis was off into a fantasy in which a girl Adam had gotten pregnant had been abandoned by him with their child at Wyvis Hall, where she had later been murdered by a sinister caretaker. The first arrivals were coming out of Customs now: two middle-aged couples, a crowd of kids who looked like students, a family with four children and Grandma, a man who looked as if he had been drinking on the plane, his collar undone and his tie hanging. The detectives who were not detectives after all stepped forward to meet him, one of them shaking hands, the other slapping him on the back. A woman came out wheeling a big tartan suitcase, and behind her was Adam, pushing valises in a cart, Anne beside him looking brown and tired, pushing the empty stroller, Abigail asleep on her shoulder.

  Adam’s face, when he saw his father, was a study in some unpleasant emotion, not so much anxiety as exasperation.

  6

  THE WONDERFUL THING about the human mind, Adam thought, is the way it copes when the worst happens. Beyond that worst happening you think there can be nothing, the unimaginable has taken place, and on the other side is death, destruction, the end. But the worst happens and you reel from it, you stagger, the shock is enormous, and then you begin to recover. You rally, you stand up and face it. You get used to it. An hour maybe and you are making contingency plans. For what had happened was not the worst, you realized that. The worst was yet to come, was perhaps always yet to come, never would actually come, because if it did, you would know it, that would be reality, and there would be nothing then but to kill yourself. Quickly.

  Now that he was able to, he assembled what had happened and laid the facts before himself. They had dug up those bones at Wyvis Hall and had decided it was murder they were investigating. Bones, skeletons, bodies, do not bury themselves. Those were the facts, as far as he knew them up to this moment. He would know more, much more, in the days to come. What was certain was that he could no longer use the escape key. It was defunct. The passages it canceled had, in any case, as in certain programs, not been lost but stored on some limbo disc from whence they must now be retrieved.

  Adam sat in his parents’ house, drinking tea. There must be a total ret
rieval now, the one good thing about which was that it might banish his dreams. He was aware of a slight feeling of sickness and of cold, an absence of hunger, though he had been feeling quite hungry when he got off the plane.

  Anne sat next to him on his mother’s cretonne-covered settee and Abigail lay on a plaid rug on the floor, kicking with her legs and punching with her arms. His mother kept poking toys at her which she did not want. A passage from a novel by John O’Hara came back to Adam. He had memorized it years ago in the Ecalpemos epoch: The safest way to live is first, inherit money, second be born without a taste for liquor, third, have a legitimate job that keeps you busy, fourth, marry a wife who will cooperate in your sexual peculiarities, fifth, join some big church, sixth, don’t live too long. Apart from the last one, which he hadn’t gotten to yet, and the penultimate one, which seemed to apply in America more than here (here he had joined the golf club) he had complied with all the rest. Or his nature and luck had complied for him. Nemesis had still come down like a wolf on the fold.

  He had not wanted to come back here. But there had been no spirit in him, the shock of what his father told him had been too great.

  “Something that will interest you, Adam, something to make you sit up. They’ve dug up a lot of human bones at my old uncle’s house… .”

  By the time he had rallied and got himself together and was thinking of things to say to the police, it was too late and they were heading north. Anne was furious. When Lewis said to come back with him and eat there, Adam had got a kick on the ankle from Anne and another kick when he hadn’t replied.