A Fatal Inversion

by Ruth Rendell

  But things had not gone that way. It had been a glorious sunny day and he had wakened up in the morning rather early for him in those days. About nine. His father was on holiday, though he and his mother were not going away anywhere, in spite of what the doctor had advised, but staying at home and “going out for days.” Or that was what they said. They hadn’t been out for any days since Adam had been at home.

  June 18 it was, a Friday. The date was stamped indelibly on his memory calendar, more than just stamped, etched in. He thought he would get up and go to Suffolk and take a look at his house. His generation—perhaps all generations at that age—hated making plans, making arrangements ahead. Adam had viewed with near incredulity his mother’s preparations in the past for going on holiday, the way everything in the house seemed to get washed, the way she and his father wore their worst clothes for days beforehand because the best ones were packed, the phone calls she made, the notes she left for tradesmen. He liked to do things spontaneously, be up and off on the spur of the moment.

  His father wouldn’t let him have the car. It might be needed if they went out for the day. Adam said all right, not to worry, he would manage without, but this didn’t seem to please Lewis either. He would have liked, Adam knew, to have lived in a time when a father could forbid his son to do things and the son would obey. Or rather, to have the rules of that former period prevailing now. Adam didn’t say where he planned to go, though he thought his father guessed, but got on his bicycle and cycled over to Rufus’s.

  He couldn’t remember what he had done with his bike when he got to the Fletchers’, left it there, and collected it the next day perhaps, but he could remember most of the rest of it. What he had worn, for instance. Jeans cut off thigh-high to make shorts and a T-shirt he had made out of an old man’s vest he had bought for twenty p in a sale under the arches at Charing Cross Station and dyed green and yellow. His hair was tied back with a piece of tinsel string he had found in the Christmas decorations box. Those were the days before people dyed their hair bright colors, the days of henna. Adam had put henna on his hair and that and the sun had turned it reddish-gold. His beard, though, was black and rather curly. He must have looked a sight but he didn’t think so then. His legs were bare and he was wearing Indian leather sandals, the kind you had to soak in water before you first put them on. It showed what the weather was and how they had started taking daily sunshine for granted in that he hadn’t got any sort of jacket or sweater with him even though he expected to be away overnight.

  The Fletchers had a swimming pool. It was supposed to be a teardrop shape or shaped like a comma. This summer was the first anyone had made much use of the pool. Rufus was sitting on the blue-tiled rim of it with his feet dangling in the water. He was three years older than Adam and though they had been at the same school, Highgate, they had not been friends then. It was Rufus’s younger brother Julius who had been in the same form as Adam, a rather dull, pompous boy, a sort of phony intellectual, and they had never had much to do with each other. Adam and Rufus had met as members of the same squash club.

  That was what they seemed to have in common, that and Rufus’s brother and Adam knowing each other already, but after a while Adam got to see things he admired in Rufus, his toughness, the way he’d got himself organized and in hand, the way he knew where he was going and yet still could be amusing and casual. Of course he had got to know him a good deal better at Ecalpemos… .

  Rufus was very laid back and Adam liked that. He also liked Rufus’s occasional sensitivity which didn’t seem to go with the other aspects of his personality. And Rufus was wild, too, the way medical students had a reputation for being. Adam thought of himself and Rufus as being wild and laid back at the same time, equally like that, young adventurers with all the world before them and all the time they wanted to do what they liked with.

  Rufus said, Hi, and come for a swim, so Adam took off his shorts and went into the water in his black nylon underpants. They would have swum naked, only Rufus’s father had discovered them doing this and made a fuss out of all proportion to the offense, if offense it was.

  “I reckoned I might go and take a look at my inheritance,” Adam said, checking that the key to Wyvis Hall was safe in the pocket of his shorts.

  “Now, d’you mean?”

  “Yes. I guess so. Why not?”

  “Want me to drive you?”

  Rufus had an old Morris Minor van that he had bought third or fourth hand, but it went all right. It got you from A to B in one piece, as Adam’s father remarked sneeringly of it.

  That had been well before the motorway, the M25, was built. You went to Suffolk by the A12 through Chelmsford or took the country route. This was what Lewis had always called the route that went by narrower winding roads through Ongar and Dunmow, Braintree and Halstead to Sudbury, and that was the way he had driven them when they all went out to visit old Hilbert. Adam did for Rufus what Lewis would have called “navigating.” It maddened Adam, his misuse of this word, which couldn’t of course be applied to guiding anyone on land, coming as it did from the Latin navigare and thence from navis, feminine, a ship, and agere, to drive or guide. Adam loved words, was fascinated by them, their meanings, and what you could do with them, with anagrams and palindromes and rhetorical terms and etymology. One of the subjects in the mixed B.A. curriculum he was taking at the university was linguistics… . “Directing” Rufus was what he was doing, he told himself. They had talked about words during that drive, well, place names really, with particular reference to the villages that were called Roding after the river, High Roding, Berners Roding, Margaret Roding, and Rufus told him they were pronounced Roothing from the old Danish, which Adam hadn’t known before.

  It was a beautiful drive and the countryside looked wonderful, a kind of sparkling shimmering green in the heat and sunshine. The sky was huge, a pale bright cloudless blue, and the white surface of the road ahead rippled in the heat mirages that made it look like little waves. The farmers were haymaking, cutting the tall feathery grass and its dense admixture of wild flowers. The windows of the van were wide open and they had the radio on, not playing rock, which they both hated, but Mozart, one of the better known of the piano concertos.

  In spite of all the times he had been there, Adam missed the turnoff that was the drift leading down to Wyvis Hall. It was somewhere along the lane between Nunes and Hadleigh, but so much vegetation had grown up that spring that everything looked different. They drove about a mile farther, right up to the group of buildings called the Mill in the Pytle, and Rufus, turning the van around, asked what a pytle was. Adam said he would look it up. He told Rufus to drive a bit more slowly and this time he spotted the six-foot-wide gap in the hedge on the right-hand side, almost hidden by cow parsley growing up and elderflowers hanging down, the wooden box on legs with its hinged lid into which Hilbert’s mail and newspapers and milk had been delivered. As a little boy, Adam had sometimes been sent up here in the morning to fetch the letters and the paper, carrying with him a wicker bottle basket for the milk. There was no other sign that this was Wyvis Hall.

  “Why’s it called a drift?” said Rufus, lighting another cigarette. He had chain-smoked all the way down and Adam had had one or two to keep him company, though he didn’t really like putting something lighted into his mouth. That was the trouble for him with dope. He liked the effects of it but didn’t like having to smoke it.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know why it’s called a drift.”

  “You can look it up when you look up ‘pytle,’” said Rufus.

  On either side the drift was thick with cow parsley, its powdery white heads coming to an end of their long blooming. It had a sweetish scent, like icing sugar, like childhood birthday cakes, that mingled with the winy perfume of the elders. All the trees were in full leaf but the oaks and beeches had not long so been, so that their foliage was still a fresh bright color and the lime trees were hung with pale yellow-green dangling flowers. The pinewood look
ed just the same as ever, it always did, it was always dark and dense with very narrow passages through it that would surely allow nothing bigger than a fox to weave its way through. Imperceptibly the trees must have grown, yet they seemed to Adam no different from when he was a child coming up to fetch the milk and when, on sunless mornings, he had felt a kind of menace from the wood. Even then he had not liked to look into it too much but had kept his eyes on the ground or straight ahead of him because the wood was the kind of place you saw in storybook illustrations or even in your dreams and out of which things were liable to come creeping.

  At the foot of the slope, through the thinning trees, a field maple, alders with their feet in the stream, a late-blooming chestnut, that dramatic lawn adornment, the cedar, the house came into view. Things, buildings, stretches of land, are said to look smaller when we grow up. And this seems only natural, just what one would expect. After all, the top of the table that was once on a line with our chin now reaches only to our thighs. Wyvis Hall, logically, should have looked smaller to Adam but it did not, it looked much larger. This must have been because it was his now, he owned it. It was his and it seemed a palace.

  On the stable block, in which nothing had been stabled in Adam’s memory, was a little tower with a running fox weathervane on it and below the small pitched roof a blue clock with hands of gold. The hands had stopped at five to four. Between the block and the house you could just see the walls of the walled garden, flint-built, crossed and coped with brickwork. A mass of flowers covered the house, a pink climbing rose and a creamy clematis. Adam had not known these names but later on Mary Gage had told him. Because the sun shone so brightly the slate roof blazed like a slab of silver.

  Rufus pulled up in front of the porch. The whole area out here was paved and small stonecrops and sedums with white and yellow starry flowers grew up between the stones. In a couple of narrow-mouthed stone vessels grew a conifer and a bay tree. The rose which mantled the house must have put out a thousand flowers and these were at the peak of their blooming, not a petal yet shed, each blossom the pink of a shell within and the pink of coral on its outer side. Adam got out of the van and felt in the pocket of his shorts for the key. He was aware of a profoundly warm, placid, peaceful silence, as if the house were a happy animal asleep in the sun.

  “And this is all yours?” said Rufus.

  “All mine.” Adam was equally cool.

  “I should be so lucky in my avuncular arrangements.”

  Adam unlocked the front door and they went inside. The windows had been closed for nearly three months and the place had a dusty smell that got into your throat and made your eyes smart. It was also very hot, for the drawing room faced due south and the hot sun beat on the glass. Adam went around opening windows. The furniture was all his, too, those cabinets with bulging fronts and curved legs, chairs with buttoned backs, a velvet-covered love seat, a big oval table supported on a wooden base shaped like a vase, mirrors framed in mahogany and mirrors framed in gilt, pale mauve and green water colors and dark portraits in oils. He could not remember noticing any of this before. It had been there but he had not seen it. Nor noticed the pillars of rosy marble that supported the window embrasure, nor the alcoves, glass-fronted, that were filled with china. Only the overall impression was familiar, not the individual pieces. He felt a little sick, engorged with possessions and the pride of ownership. In each room a chandelier hung from the ceiling, of tarnished brass in the dining room, a cascade of prisms in the drawing room, in hall and study Italianate glass tubes twisted snakelike amid false candles. And everywhere the sun streamed or lay in golden pools or rainbow spots or squares made by windows patterned with the shadows of leaves.

  Rufus was among the bookcases in Hilbert’s study. Adam took down Edward Moor’s Suffolk Words and Phrases, couldn’t find “drift” but here was “pytle” or “pightle,” a small meadow. He went back into the drawing room, where he unbolted, unlocked, and threw open the french windows.

  The sun came to him in a warm gust or like a warm veil enveloping him. It whitened the terrace beyond with a clear unbroken glare. All along the terrace, on the low wall that bounded it, stood the statuary his father had once told him had been placed there by whoever inhabited the place before Hilbert and Lilian came. They represented, in some kind of fine-grained gray stone, the loves of Zeus. He remembered them all right. As a child he had studied them with fascination, inquiring what the bull was doing to the lady, and receiving from his parents no very satisfying answer. Hilbert he had been too much in awe of to ask. They had come from Italy. Some cousin of Lilian’s two or three times removed had found them in Florence while there on her honeymoon and had had them shipped home. There was Zeus as Amphitryon with Alcmene; Zeus coming to Danae in a shower of gold (difficult in stone, this one); snatching Europa; swan-shaped, wooing Leda; standing before the hapless Semele in all his destructive glory, and in half a dozen other metamorphoses.

  Someone had been looking after the garden, you could see that. Flower beds had been weeded, dead heads removed, the borders of the willow-fringed lake shorn and trimmed, the lawns recently mown. As they walked along one of the stone-flagged paths and came to the gate in the flint wall they saw a neat pile of mowings waiting apparently to be composted.

  The walled garden, too, had been carefully maintained. Inside the netted fruit cage Adam saw the bright ripe vermilion gleam of strawberries nestling among their triform leaves, raspberries yet green on the canes. All along the facing wall espaliered trees, their trunks dark and shiny and twisted and knobbed, bore among a rough dull foliage fruit turning gold. Nectarines, Adam remembered, and peaches too. Weren’t there greengages somewhere that scarcely ever fruited but when they did were splendid? Red and white currants here in rows, berries like glass beads, gooseberries with a ripeness the color of rust on their green cheeks.

  They each took a handful of strawberries. They walked to the lake, where there were two pairs of ducks, mallards with feathers as if painted in iridescent green, and from which a heron rose on gaunt wings, its legs dangling. Adam looked back at the house, at the honeysuckle that curtained the back of it in yellow and pink, at the martins, sharp-pinioned, that wheeled in and out from the eaves. He was in a state of tremulous excitement. He seemed only to be able to breathe shallowly. It was curiously sexual, this feeling, exactly the way he had once or twice felt with a girl he was mad to make love to and who he thought would let him but was not quite sure, not absolutely sure. The slightest thing would turn his fortune, snatch it, send him home frustrated, bitter, in a sick rage. He felt like that now. If only he could breathe properly! And here was the finest country air, transparent, sparkling sun, the distant low hills and soft basking meadows half-hidden by the blue haze of noon.

  “You’re actually going to sell this place?”

  Rufus lit a cigarette, offered him one. Adam shook his head.

  “What else can I do?”

  What choice did he have? He couldn’t live there, he couldn’t keep it up. Adam lay in bed beside Anne, his mind repeating what he had said to Rufus on that wonderful day in June.

  “What else can I do?”

  Of course he should have said I don’t have a choice. Come on, I’m hungry, let’s go get some lunch and then we’ll find a real estate agent. But they had bought food on their way coming through Halstead, the 1976 version of take-out, a couple of meat pies, apples, Coke, and they had had lunch lying in the grass by the lake. The magical quality of the place crept on them there like a spell, the warmth and the sunshine and the scents of the garden and the tranquil silence. But it was more than that. There was an indefinable ingredient, a kind of excitement. It had something to do with history and the past, that excitement, and something to do with potential as well, with what Orwell or somebody had said, that every man really knew in his heart the finest place to be was the countryside on a summer’s day. I was happy, Adam thought, that’s what it was.

  The Garden of Eden. Shiva had called it that but i
n his mouth it had not been the hackneyed expression it would have been if an English person had so referred to it. He was drawing an interesting image from the mythology of another culture and it had seemed to him fresh and new. Adam had merely shrugged. The Garden of Eden was the way certain people would describe any charming landscape. Yet the phrase had remained with him, particularly in its darker aspect, the way it appears to most of those who are bound by the puritan ethic, not as a haven to live in and enjoy but as a paradise to be expelled from. It was almost as if a necessary condition of being in this paradise were the commission of some frightful sin or crime that must result in expulsion from it. On the day they had gone, when the summer was over and the skies gray and a wind blowing, he had thought of that image. Their departure had something in it of the bowed and wretched mien of Adam and Eve in the many “expulsion” paintings he had later seen, and by then the Garden itself had a ruined look, paradise destroyed.

  He got out of bed to pee. He and Anne had a bathroom opening out of their bedroom but Adam, when he got up in the night, usually went to the other one that was on the far side of the landing. This was because his reason for getting up at all was to see if Abigail was all right. But he had used their bathroom and was back in bed again before he realized that he had forgotten to look at his daughter. His anxiety for her had been displaced by a greater worry—was that possible?

  Ever since her birth he had been ultra-anxious without expressing, even to himself alone, his reasons for this. Of course he knew what those reasons were but he had never faced them. Now he did and they did not seem absurd, they seemed like good reasons. He got up again and padded across to Abigail’s room. Suppose, after all, that he had not gone to look and in the morning they had found her stiff and cold, her eyes glazed and unfocused, her lips blue? He shivered, gooseflesh standing on his face and arms. Abigail lay on her side, well tucked in, the teddy bear she was too young for sitting in the corner by her feet. Adam stood watching her, listening to her silent sleep.