by Ruth Rendell
“I shall have to sell the Gainsborough next,” Adam said.
Of course it turned out not to be a Gainsborough, in spite of what Evans or Owens had said. Having secured the tables and the glasses, he had peered at the dark discolored oil of an elderly cleric in a shovel hat and opined that this was the work of “our local genius.” Asked to explain, he said he meant Gainsborough who had been born in Sudbury. Hadn’t they seen the statue of him in the market place where he stood with his palette, apparently painting the pub and King’s the grocer’s?
They took the painting to Sudbury to get an expert opinion and there the signature at the bottom of the canvas was pointed out to them, that of one C. Prebble. So they took it back to Wyvis Hall and hung it up again and then they lay out on the terrace in the sun, eating rump steak and potato crisps and drinking Hirondelle rosé. They used Hilbert’s wineglasses because none of them could tolerate drinking from plastic or paper cups, but they ate off paper plates of which they had bought a hundred. It must have been that day or the next, Adam thought, that he or one of them, surely he, had first suggested the commune idea. But not then, not yet. He had brought with him reading that was expected of him during this vacation, works on sociology and on linguistics and some on where these two studies converged, but these were not the sort of books one much wanted to read under the hot sun and the influence of wine. Instead, he read Hilbert’s books, notably selections from a shelf of classic pornography, not in any way hidden, the books not concealed under plain covers, but there on display for anyone to find. Adam rather admired his great-uncle for this. There was Guillaume Apollinaire and Henry Miller, Pisanus Fraxi and My Secret Life, Frank Harris’s My Life and Loves, and a dozen others. That afternoon Adam, knowing it was not the wisest thing to be doing in his celibate situation, lay on the terrace reading Fanny Hill.
Rufus and Mary lay quite near him on a candlewick bedspread Rufus had found in one of the spare bedrooms. They had been for some ten minutes locked in a close embrace, the length of their bodies pressed together. Sweat was running down Rufus’s back, between his rather sharp shoulder blades. In spite of being so fair, his skin had taken on quite a deep tan in the few days they had been there. Adam had tried not to look but now he could not help looking. What he had feared would happen was happening now, though the feeling he had was not of being in any way rejected, nor was it embarrassment. It was simply a breathless, increasing, pulse-hammering sexual longing.
The two of them slid a little apart, Rufus rolling onto his back so that his pronounced erection showed, like a great clenched fist under his black trunks. He kept his head turned toward Mary, though, as between parted lips they licked the tips of each other’s tongues. Adam found Rufus’s great endowment as disturbing as Mary’s naked breasts, which lay round and creamy, soft and passive yet with hard, pointed nipples, between the open sides of her blouse. He turned his head away, pressed forehead and eyes hard down into the covers of Fanny Hill. After a while he heard the others move, heard Rufus take a great slurp of wine before they padded barefoot into the house and up the stairs to the Centaur Room.
When Adam was about eight his father had told him masturbating gave you scurvy. Saying scurvy was caused by a lack of vitamin C was just a blind, spread around by doctors and nutritionists, who ought to know better. Most of the people you saw with false teeth had masturbated when young, it was a well-known fact, only there was a conspiracy between dentists and what Lewis called the “vitamin C lobby” to keep it secret. It was in their interests to make work for the dental profession and sell vitamin C, not to let it get about that simply by keeping their hands where they ought to be young people could have healthy teeth and gums for life. Later on Adam wondered if his father had made all this up or if he really believed it himself. It was not a theory to be come across elsewhere. But the curious thing was that the idea had somehow and much against his will taken root in his consciousness. He did not believe it, he ridiculed it—to his sister, for instance—but it partially attained the effect Lewis aimed at. If Adam ever got as far as masturbating, and naturally he sometimes did, he always had the feeling afterward that his teeth were loose. His jaw would ache and once, when he cleaned his teeth that night, he found blood on his toothbrush.
So he had no recourse to masturbation that afternoon but went back into the lake instead, where it was cold enough to supply one of the well-known Victorian antidotes to sexual desire.
Wading out of the lake, his legs muddy up to the knees, Adam sat on the bank among the bulrushes and the great pale leathery hosta leaves and looked at the house with its canopy of roses and honeysuckle, the martins’ nests under the eaves, the long terrace with Zeus in his various avatars and his loves disporting themselves along the flint wall. Some brightly colored butterflies, orange and yellow and black and white—his father would have known their names—sunned themselves on the mellow rosy brickwork, spreading their wings flat in the heat. The sky above the glittering slate roof was as blue as the curious lilies that had just begun to come out under the dining room window, trumpet flowers set like the seed head of a dandelion but as blue as—the sky.
There would be things just as beautiful in Greece, and it would be as hot or hotter. But it would not be his. He would not be proprietor of all he surveyed there. It was a revelation to him how important this was, how much it meant. He had never previously thought of himself as acquisitive or even as particularly materialistic. The truth was though that until now he had never possessed anything much, so how could he know? It gave him a good feeling, it was satisfying just to think, as he walked up the stairs, these floors are mine, this carved wood, these moulded ceilings. And when he came into the Pincushion Room and rested his elbows on the window ledge, he would look out the window at the garden bright with midsummer sun or bathed in moonlight and think, all this is mine, that garden, that fruit cage within the flint walls, that lake, the Little Wood, as far as I can see on either side of me and in front of the house and behind, all that is mine… .
He was beginning to think he could not bear to sell it.
It was a long time since Adam had had a dream about Zosie. Rufus, yes, and Shiva sometimes, and Shiva with Vivien, but it was a year since Zosie had come into his sleep and materialized before him.
Things happened as they must have happened, only in fact it was Rufus who had picked her up and brought her back to Wyvis Hall. Stopping on the way to exact his pound of flesh, of course. No, that was unfair. He would have done the same—in those days. In his dream it was he who was driving home to Nunes from Colchester, not Goblander though, but the car he had now, the Granada. She was waiting where in life she had waited, outside the station, near where the road forked, going in one direction to Bures, in the other to Sudbury. There had been a great Victorian pile of a hospital there then, maybe still was unless they had demolished it, its chimney concealed inside a mock campanile.
Small and delicate, fine boned, pale brown skin, beige really—pale brown wispy very short hair, fey-faced with a small tip-tilted nose and golden eyes like a cat. Someone had said she was like an Abyssinian cat and so she was. Very young, a child, only she was not that. Jeans and a T-shirt but you never noticed what Zosie wore. What was it they called that term in rhetoric? Zeugma or syllepsis? She stood there wearing a backpack and a face of woe.
He drew up ahead of her. She came running up to the van and climbed in beside him. It was a hot night but she was shivering. He asked her where she wanted to go.
“Anywhere,” she said.
“Anywhere?”
“I don’t know where I am, so how can I say where I want to go?”
“You came here on the train, didn’t you?”
She started laughing and through her laughter her teeth chattered.
“I came out of there.” She turned around and pointed back at the Victorian building with the campanile chimney.
“What is it?” he said.
“Don’t you know? It’s a bin. A funny farm. It’s what
my gran calls a lunatic asylum.”
Adam woke up. He lay thinking of Zosie. Had she been a bit mad? Perhaps but temporarily and for a well-attested reason. And of course there was no question of her having escaped from a mental hospital or of ever having been in one. He shook the dream off him. Rufus had called her a waif and Adam had immediately ridiculed this word, said it was a romantic novelist’s word, so they had looked it up in Hilbert’s Shorter Oxford Dictionary and found illuminating things. “Something waving or flapping.” “Something borne or driven by the wind.” “A person who is without home or friends; one who lives uncared-for; an outcast; an unowned or neglected child.”
“That’s the one I meant,” said Rufus.
And then Adam had read aloud the first definition: “A piece of property which is found ownerless and which, if unclaimed within a fixed period after due notice given, falls to the lord of the manor.”
Well, eventually, it was true that Zosie had fallen to him. The waif who was ownerless and unclaimed had fallen to the lord of the manor. A father himself now, he thought of those parents of hers, her mother and stepfather, who had lost her and apparently had never searched, had never even declared their loss, been glad to be rid of her.
Adam wondered if Abigail sometimes woke up and looked for him in the dark, in the empty room, and fretted for a while before she began to cry. He could not bear the idea of it. It was deep night, three or four o’clock. Mark Twain had written somewhere: We are all mad at night. He got out of bed silently, in the dark. So many times he had padded across this bedroom to go to Abigail that he knew it perfectly in the dark, only requiring to hold his hands out before him, and like a blind man feel the beveled corner of the wardrobe, the lacquered wicker of a chair back, the top of the radiator, cold at this hour, the glass sphere of the doorknob.
Outside on the landing he put a light on. Abigail’s door was ajar and he went into the room, bringing a segment of light with him, a triangle that fell short a yard from where she slept. Instead of bending over her, he knelt down and looked at her face through the bars. She opened her eyes, but, like Lady Macbeth’s, their sense was shut. Awake, she never looked at him without smiling. She did not smile now, but her eyelids with those amazing lashes slowly closed and Abigail gave a sigh, wriggled her body, moved her head, and subsided back into deep sleep. Adam knelt beside her, thinking of Zosie and Zosie’s mother and stepfather, who had not bothered to go to the police when their daughter unaccountably vanished. They had felt apparently as if a burden had been lifted from them and why tempt fate by attempting to get her back? But Zosie had been only seventeen. Or so she said, Adam thought. But perhaps she was a year or two older than that or even more. She was such a liar.
You might be able to tell a person’s age after they were dead but often not while they were still alive. For instance, the newspaper had said the skeleton in the cemetery at Wyvis Hall was of a young woman between eighteen and twenty-one years old. Not that that was specially relevant… .
He got up and went to the window, looking out into his garden. A narrow plot of mean suburban proportions compared to the place he had once possessed. Streetlamps were on in the distance, greenish or blobs of orange light. There was no moon, only the perpetual chemical twilight that subsists in suburbs by night. Autumn had laid a misty chill over everything that grew. Plants had become sticks, leaves were rags of wet black plastic, tree branches were bones with arthritic joints. We are all mad at three in the morning.
There had never been another summer like that one. Nineteen eighty-four had been good but not as good as that. The night had been warm, too, not just the daytime, and even after sunset the temperature had not seemed to drop much. They had driven home arguing about which night was Midsummer Night. Mary said it was June 20 because that was the night before the solstice, the longest day, and Rufus said it was the twenty-fourth and he, Adam, said it was the twenty-third because that was the eve of the twenty-fourth, which was Midsummer Day. They were all rather drunk and, by analogy from the argument, Rufus had sung at the top of his voice:
Where the bee fucks
There fuck I… .
There was a rugby player side to Rufus. Mary, often so censorious, was sweetened by drink. Everything Rufus said made her giggle and clutch at him. They shared a cigarette, passing it from mouth to mouth. Lying on the backseat, Adam recited Grantchester, which in those days he knew by heart:
And green and deep
The stream mysterious glides beneath,
Green as a dream and deep as death… .
Back at home they lay out on the terrace on the spread quilts and Rufus said he would sleep there. Gnats came in swarms from the lake to torment them, so they lit incense sticks to keep them away, peppermint and aniseed and sandalwood. Mary had found some oil of citronella in an old-fashioned medicine chest in the Deathbed Room, and they rubbed it on themselves for good measure. Or rubbed it on each other, rather. That was what started it.
All was silent. Sometimes you heard a soft splash as a fish jumped for one of the swarming insects. Or the whispering rattle of a bat’s wing. And occasionally, from the depths of the wood, came less agreeable sounds.
“The noise made by something being murdered by something else,” Rufus had told an acquaintance in one of the pubs.
Rabbit victims of foxes or weasels, Adam supposed it was. The thin pitiful cries were somehow unearthly when they wakened him in the dark small hours. But no cries came to them there on the terrace, the darkness lit by the moon, the bright stars spread like a net across a sky that never lost its blueness, the scented tapers burning between the statuary of the amorous god. Rufus had a bottle of red wine but he was drinking the wine out of one of Hilbert’s brandy glasses.
“We’re not going to Greece, are we?” Adam said.
“I shouldn’t think so for a moment,” said Rufus, whose speech grew more precise when he was drunk. “Why would we do that?”
“If you remember, it was our intention.”
“I want to go to Greece,” said Mary, but smilingly and rather sleepily.
“No, you don’t, my sweetheart. You want to stay here and rub some of that disgusting stuff all over Adam.”
Rufus was setting it up. Adam didn’t immediately realize this but after a little while he did. Rufus was always a sensation seeker, wanting new experiences, new indulgences. He would have made a good bad Roman emperor. Adam had put out his hand for the citronella but Rufus stopped him.
“No, let her do it.”
Adam had a shirt on, the kind that buttons up, not a T-shirt, but now he began to take it off, having an idea of what might be about to happen. The mixture of gin and wine he had drunk hammered in his head, distorting reality, opening limitless possibilities, showing him a fantasy world that rocked and shimmered. But all he could say was, “We’ll save Greece for another year. We won’t go to Greece this time… .”
Mary’s fingers moved lightly across his back. Rufus had propped himself up on one elbow, watching. He leaned across Adam to light a cigarette from one of the incense sticks and he smiled, letting the smoke trickle out between his teeth. Mary told Adam to turn around and face her, she would do his chest. It was a bit like having someone rub you with suntan lotion, yet it wasn’t like that at all—how could it be in the dark? What it was like was being anointed by some slave girl. Rufus threw his cigarette away and from behind her laid his hand lightly on Mary’s bare shoulder. She was wearing a halter top thing that tied around the back of her neck.
All the time, right up till then and a little beyond, Mary hadn’t known what was going on. Rufus, of course, had always known; Rufus had instigated the whole thing, and then, at this point, Adam realized it. The realization resulted in a leap of desire that was brought about as much by Rufus, by the recollection of their slippery buoyant contact beneath the water, as by the sight of Mary as Rufus untied the knot on her neck and slid the halter top down with his hands.
This movement, as Rufus had no doubt intende
d, sent Mary toppling forward into Adam’s arms, her breasts lightly slapping into his chest in a way that would have been blissful if it had been allowed to continue, but Mary, drunk as she was, had sprung aside, actually sprung to her feet, and rather late in the day hugged her arms across her chest.
“Now what’s the bloody matter?” drawled Rufus.
“I’m not doing tribadism, that’s what’s the matter.”
“Troilism,” sighed Adam, “not tribadism.” He might be drunk and bursting with frustration, but words came first with him. An etymologist he was to the bitter end. “The confusion arises from that ‘tri’ which isn’t Latin though but part of the derivation from the Greek verb ‘to rub.’ A tribade is a Lesbian, whereas a troilist …”
“Jesus,” said Rufus, “I don’t believe it.” He rolled about on the quilts, roaring with laughter. “Pray continue,” he said, “with your most interesting lecture on rubbing. If we can’t do it, at least we can hear about it.”
“You bastard,” said Mary. “You perverted sod.”
“Please, it was only a game. A midsummer night’s game.”
“It’s not bloody Midsummer Night,” she roared at him. “How many times do I have to tell you?”
She stalked off into the house. Rufus went on laughing, hiccuping with laughter. He lay on his back, pouring red wine down his throat.
“You’re crazy, Verne-Smith, did you know that? I set you up a mini-orgy, a nice little threesome, and the minute it rocks a bit, nothing a mite of persuasion wouldn’t put right, you start giving an address on the Greek verb ‘to rub.’ You slay me, you really do. I shall remember that to my dying day, I shall remember it all my life.”
“You won’t,” said Adam. “I bet you don’t.”
“Do you reckon she’s really a closet tribade?” After that he often called Mary the closet tribade. She was right when she said he could be a bastard, he really could.
“How about going for another swim?” said Rufus, and he turned, his mouth all dabbled with wine, to look into Adam’s eyes. And Adam had looked into his, the wind singing in his head, the incense tapers smoldering, scenting the warm dark air. “Why not?”