A Fatal Inversion

by Ruth Rendell

  “He’s not coming back,” said Adam, “to see how I’ve discharged my duties.”

  “He’ll turn in his grave.”

  “No, there’ll just be a small upheaval in his ashes.”

  He told her Great-Uncle Hilbert’s ashes were the contents of an urn-shaped Crown Derby sweets jar that stood on the drawing room mantelpiece. Maybe she believed him, for Rufus had once caught her lifting the lid and looking into the jar at the wood ash Adam had scraped up from the site of the handkerchief man’s last bonfire. Mary was rather difficult but she was also just about the most beautiful girl Rufus had ever come across. It gratified him to be seen in her company. He had always been a bit that way had Rufus, manifestly to be seen to be doing all right for himself, successful, forging ahead, accompanied by the best looking girl possible. Mary was spectacular to look at and her own knowledge that she was made her capricious and difficult and expecting the best of everything. All that was her due because she looked like the young Elizabeth Taylor, had dark brown curly hair nearly to her waist, large dark blue eyes, creamy velvet skin, and a wonderful figure.

  It was June 20 when they went back, all Goblander’s windows open, the weather being perfect the way you expected it to be that summer as if it were southern Europe where you woke up each morning to sunshine and unclouded skies. By that time, as Adam said, you would actually have been shocked if the temperature had dropped or a shower of rain fallen.

  “It makes you think there mightn’t be an awful lot of point in going to Greece,” he said. “I mean this could be the best summer ever and we’d miss it. It’s always like this in Greece.”

  They bought food in Sudbury, quite a lot of food. Adam said the first thing would be to get old Hilbert’s fridge going. Of course, it was his own fridge, but he was still in the habit of speaking as if, as Mary had implied, his great-uncle might return.

  It must have been a strange experience for him, Rufus had thought, knowing he owned all sorts of things but not knowing quite what or where they were. They were the sort of things, too, which the parent generation owned, those old people that Adam, until Rufus laughed at him, had inadvertently called the grown-ups: sheets and blankets and knives and forks and pots and pans and more complicated appurtenances of living that if one ever thought about at all one supposed one would have to get together for oneself eventually. Someone else had got it together for Adam, and there it all was. They found some sheets in a walk-in cupboard, linen ones with “LVS” embroidered on them. The sheets felt a bit damp, so Mary spread them out on the terrace in the sun to dry. They ate out there, too, and drank one of the bottles of wine they had brought.

  It was an amazing amount of wine they got through down at Wyvis Hall, and not only wine. But that first day they had been able to afford only two bottles of Anjou rosé. Later on they went all over the house, assessing what they might be able to sell, finding out just what Adam’s inheritance amounted to. Rufus had been astonished by the quantities of junk in that house, the ornaments and knick-knacks and stuff like vases and candlesticks and ashtrays and glass and brass Hilbert Verne-Smith and his wife had accumulated over the years. Mary got stroppy about it and said it was wrong what they were doing, it was a desecration. But Adam had retorted quite reasonably that it was his now, didn’t she understand that? It was as much his to do as he liked with as the sandals on his feet and the change from that fiver he had in his pocket after buying the rosé. And then Mary said she felt as if Hilbert were there with them as they riffled through chests and drawers and cupboards; she could feel his presence standing behind them, looking over her shoulder.

  By then it was dark, it was nighttime. And at Wyvis Hall, below the woods and above the river, with the nearest road half a mile away and the nearest house twice as far as that, total silence prevailed. The sky was clear, the color of a very dark blue jewel, and on the surface of the lake the stars were mirrored. The house was full of moths because they had left the doors and windows open after they put the lights on. Mary screamed when a bat flew close to her, she said bats got in your hair, a bat had got into the hair of some relative of hers and bitten her scalp. Mary’s scream sounded particularly loud in that dark silence. There was a loud echo in the grounds of Wyvis Hall, Mary’s scream ringing back from off the wood and walls and starry waters, and Rufus, a town dweller who had never spent much time in the countryside, expected alarmed or annoyed people to arrive or the disconnected phone to start shrilling with complaints. Of course nothing happened. They could all have screamed the place down, Mary could have been bitten to death by bats, and no one would have come.

  That was part of the trouble, that was how it was that events were set in motion. If Wyvis Hall had been less isolated, less silent …

  Rufus had come a long way since the Goblander days, and the car he got into to drive himself to the hospital he attended two mornings a week was a BMW not yet a year old. At the garage where he bought petrol they offered him a complementary sherry glass because he had bought more than thirty liters. Rufus refused. He already had two of the things clinking about on the backseat. But the sight of the glass took him back into the past again, the past which he believed he had exorcised but was now fetched back in fragments and longer scenarios by every possible association. He had sat in that locked room talking, therapist and patient both, had talked it out over and over. To the site of his trauma he had returned and relived it. He might just as well not have bothered, for it was there still, it would be there forever, unless one day they found how to cut memory out of the brain with a scalpel.

  On the backseat the two sherry glasses clinked as Rufus took a left turn rather too sharply. What they had eventually decided to sell before they went to bed that night (or the following morning really) were Great-Uncle Hilbert’s dozen Waterford sherry glasses. As Adam said, none of them drank sherry and he didn’t know anyone under fifty who did. Having wandered all over the house, they had ended up in the dining room, where the cabinet full of glass was. In another cupboard they found half a bottle of whiskey and a dribble of brandy in the bottom of a Courvoisier bottle. There had been something extraordinarily delightful and exhilarating about sitting at that big oval mahogany table drinking whiskey at two o’clock in the morning. The moon had come up and laid a greenish iridescence on the surface of the lake. It was so bright it made the stars disappear. They had to close the window because of the insects. Then they turned out the lights, the great brass chandelier with its false candles, and the moon’s lemony radiance lay as still as cloths draped over the shining wood. Adam set the twelve sherry glasses that were cut in a Greek key pattern around their rims in the middle of the moonlight and said he would put them in a box tomorrow and try to sell them in Sudbury to the man who had the antique shop in Gainsborough Street that they had passed.

  There had been a kind of innocence about them at that stage, Rufus thought. On one level they were just marking time, spending a few days in the country at a friend’s house. On another they felt (as Mary put it) like burglars, prowling around the house, discovering treasures, half-expecting the true owner to return and surprise them.

  “Suppose old Hilbert’s face were to appear at the window now,” Adam had said as they went up the back stairs to bed.

  There was a window at the top, on the landing, but outside there was only the blue jewel night. They had all slept heavily, the sleep if not of the just, of the innocent and artless. None of them doubted that they would eventually get to Greece. In those early days, that last week of June, it was merely a matter of raising enough money. Not that this had been easy. The Sudbury man was not forthcoming, he had been suspicious, wanting all sorts of information about them and the glasses.

  “He thinks you’ve nicked them, doesn’t he?” said Mary, who hadn’t come in but stayed outside in Goblander. “And of course he would. I mean, just look at you!”

  Adam’s cut-off jeans with the fringed hems, she meant, and his yellow and red headband that Adam insisted on calling a fillet, as
if it were a bit of fish. And their long hair and bare feet.

  “You reckon I should put on one of Hilbert’s suits, do you?” Adam said.

  He never did that. Instead, they drove into Hadleigh and found an antique-shop man who offered to drive to Wyvis Hall and give Adam a valuation for some of the furniture, the chandeliers, and the ornaments. Two days later he actually came, an oldish man, at least sixty, and valued two of the cabinets as worth five hundred pounds apiece. When Adam heard that, he didn’t want to sell, he was sure they must therefore be worth far more. The man bought a brass lantern and two little tables with the surfaces carved with flowers and fruit, and the sherry glasses, giving Adam one hundred and fifty pounds for the lot.

  Rufus could not remember the man’s name, only that he had been the second visitor to Wyvis Hall, the gardener being the first. Would he remember? If still alive, he would be in his seventies by now. He had a confused impression of coming into the dining room while the man was there and hearing him rather grudgingly assess the value of the glass cabinet. The man had said good morning and Rufus had said hello and had returned to the task he and Mary were embarked on, covering the flagstones of the terrace with quilts from the bedrooms. The terrace faced south and got the full sun, so it was too hot to be out there by day but in the evenings and at night it was wonderful. They fetched a lightly padded patchwork quilt from the Centaur Room, a pink candlewick from the Room Without a Name, two of white cotton from the Room of Astonishment, and a bedspread of heavy yellow satin they found in a cupboard in the Pincushion Room. Mary arranged some pillows out there and cushions from the drawing room and by the time they were finished the antiques man had gone.

  Leaving them with a hundred and fifty pounds.

  So that evening they went out to spend some of it. Had they been noticed and noted as they drove through the village of Nunes? Rufus had always heard that nothing can go on in a village without the gossips knowing. Perhaps this would apply if they had walked along that village street or sat on the green or drunk in the local pub, but they had not. For some reason they had not much liked the look of this pub called the Fir Tree, and though he had slowed a bit as they came to it, but had not stopped. Adam had seldom been to the village, and only once on foot, but he could remember the layout of it with surprising clarity.

  A church that stood upon a grassy hill and to which you mounted by a flight of steep stone stairs. An avenue of yew trees. Behind it one of those screens of elms, all dead even by then of Dutch elm disease. A village street of houses and cottages, a garage, a grocer, but not a single antique shop. The green an isosceles triangle without a tree on it, but trees around the pub, the same kind as in Adam’s pinewood, Rufus supposed, or very like, which the licensee or the brewery had probably thought its name required.

  There was the inevitable council estate, the houses painted pale green, blue, pink, as in some child’s drawing, and then, around a bend in the lane where you might have expected open fields, half a dozen houses of nineteen fifties or sixties provenance, lavishly appointed, glamorously gardened, with big garages and big cars outside them.

  “Hampstead Garden Suburb comes to Suffolk,” Adam had said.

  Later on they had seen the coypu man’s van parked on the front driveway of one of those houses. And they had had a discussion about it, speculating as to whether he actually lived there or was there to kill something, rats, moles, any sort of infestation. Snobbish Rufus had not thought it possible for someone like that to live there, but why not, after all? There was money to be made out of the destruction of pests in a country place.

  Rufus had an outpatients’ clinic and then a ward round, in the afternoon a very frightened woman to see in Wimpole Street, a woman who needed his kind reassurance, his urbane ways, the proffered cigarette, the support. His first cigarette of the day he smoked while he waited, extinguishing it two minutes before she was shown in, and he had to tell her that her cervical smear had shown precancerous signs.

  Who would reassure him? Comfort him? No one, he thought, and despised himself for what was to him an unnatural need. The police would not necessarily assume that the bones in the graveyard were of people who had lived at Wyvis Hall, nor that those who had brought about their deaths had lived there. But it was likely. It was most probable. The existence of the cemetery was not generally known, and on the lane side of the pinewood the trees were separated from the grass verge by a close-boarded fence.

  They would ask a lot of questions in the village. They would make inquiries at Pytle Farm and the house called the Mill on the Pytle. By some means they would discover all the people who were likely to have called at Wyvis Hall in the capacity of tradesmen or service operatives: dustmen, meter readers, gardeners, antiques dealers perhaps—why not?—the coypu man. Adam would be questioned, was possibly being questioned at this moment. Unless he had changed a lot he would not make a good impression.

  Had the time come to forget the promise they had made each other, the guarantee they had given never to meet or speak? Rufus reached for the blue phone directory and turned to the Vs, to Verne-Smith-Duchini, and had actually begun to dial when his patient was announced.

  He put the receiver back and created, forcing his lips to perform, a wide smile.

  8

  THE LAKE WATER WAS clear and cool, not cold. Weeks of sunshine had taken off the chill. Soon after they got up—which was always late, which was lunchtime—he and Rufus went in swimming, keeping their feet off the gravelly or slimy bottom and their arms clear of the blanket weed which was like green hair. The lily leaves lay flat on the surface, their flowers waxen crimson and palest yellow, their stems tough, glutinous, slippery, a tangle of entrails.

  “Reminds me of the duodenum,” said Rufus, yanking out a long slimy stem and lassoing Adam with it, catching his neck in a noose of living rope.

  They grappled together, the way schoolboys do, but they weren’t schoolboys and Adam was suddenly aware of Rufus’s body under the water, his hard muscles and smooth skin, legs briefly intertwined with his. And when Rufus’s arms grabbed him from behind, ostensibly, of course, just to duck him under the surface, he found himself resisting in a way that Rufus recognized as real resistance and let him go. And Rufus knew why, grinning a little as their eyes met. He swam away and Adam swam away and very soon after that they came out of the lake and went back to Mary on the terrace.

  A disturbing experience it had been, exciting and confusing.

  Adam had not known he carried within his mind a directory of the forbidden. Selling what he still thought of—in spite of what he said to Mary—as Hilbert’s things appeared only on the perimeter of it, in an area of doubt. Money they had to have. For the rest of the time they were there, money did not exactly overshadow them but the pressing need for it was always there, it was always in their minds. And Mary’s condemnation was not enough to keep him from succumbing. He had let the dealer from Hadleigh come, a man called Evans or Owens, one of those Welsh names, and sold him a brass lantern and two little carved tables and the sherry glasses. The money he gave them they had meant to use for the Greek trip, but it was more than they expected and they had gone on a shopping then a drinking spree with it. Also Goblander had needed a new exhaust system and they had had that done immediately, not in the local Nunes garage though but at a big impersonal place in Colchester. Rufus had thought Goblander needed a thorough overhaul and the mechanic confirmed this, adding that it would cost him. The bill would be around seventy-five pounds but, as Mary had said, the van wouldn’t get as far as Calais in its present state. Next day they had collected the rejuvenated Goblander, catching one of the rare buses to Colchester and taking all day about it. The cost of the service was nearer eighty-five pounds than seventy-five and they spent a further fifty on food and drink. Drink mostly.

  Adam drank very little these days. It nauseated him and wakened him in the night with a palpitating heart. He had been better able to tolerate it ten years ago but then he had drunk alcohol to be lik
e other people and to impress, not because he liked it. Rufus was different. Rufus had a great capacity and could metabolize (as he put it) large quantities of spirits and larger amounts of wine. It was not unusual for him, unaided, to drink two bottles of wine in as many hours. But he was wrong when he said it had no effect on him. The effects were very apparent, though they were not the common ones of slurred speech and unsteadiness and loss of memory.

  Rufus used to say that if left to themselves most men would live on meat and cake. They might eat fruit and vegetables and dairy products but that was for their health, not because they liked them. It was versions of meat and cake that the three of them bought to store in Hilbert’s—no, his—fridge, and they bought crisps and chocolate bars and a crate full of wines and liquor. He was a sybarite or an Epicurean, Adam thought, relishing words, but Epicurean sounded better, less pejorative.

  No one drank the spirits but Rufus, and Adam suspected that he drank more than he let on about, probably keeping a private bottle somewhere.

  “I don’t see any point in self-denial,” he used to say.

  “My father says being denied things refines the character,” Adam said.

  Rufus grinned, for of course Adam had told him all about Hilbert’s will. “He should know,” he said.

  Adam suspected that these days Rufus might be quite fastidious about wine, a wine snob even, the kind that savors bouquets and talks about nice little domestic burgundies and so forth, but in those days it was rotgut he wanted. So they bought the cheapest obtainable in order to get more of it, Nicolas, and stuff called Hirondelle.