A Fatal Inversion

by Ruth Rendell

  But Rufus had lain there, not touching Adam, just smiling. He had languidly stretched one arm out and in doing so knocked over the wine bottle. It had fallen too slowly to break, but the wine had flowed out and made a dark stain like blood on the white bedspread. The tips of his outflung fingers just touched Adam’s bare shoulder and Adam had lain still, aware of that warm faintly tingling pressure, but happily, even serenely aware, trying for some unknown reason to count the stars. The last thing he remembered Rufus say was uttered on a murmuring chuckle.

  “The Greek verb ‘to rub’!”

  And then Rufus was asleep, his head turned onto the muscle of his upper arm, the fingers that had been on Adam’s shoulder retracting as they relaxed. Adam slept, too, very soon afterward, and awoke shivering with cold at dawn as one does after sleeping uncovered in the open air. He had, and was going to have, the worst hangover of his life, but even in the throes of it he was aware of a sense of relief that they were staying there, they were not going to Greece. The sky was a clear pale dome, covered in the east by a flock of tiny clouds that were already turned to pink by the sun that was still concealed, that had not yet risen. The garden was no longer silent but noisy with birdsong, with twittering, cheeping, cooing sounds, and with the true clear notes of the blackbird and thrush. Adam got to his feet, and throwing one of the quilts over Rufus, went into the house.

  Two things happened the next day. Or one of those things happened. He wasn’t sure of remembering the date of the other thing. It might have been on the Saturday. The coypu control man must have come on a weekday, though, and it was with that hangover that Adam associated his coming.

  Now when he and Anne had people to stay they ran around after their guests making sure they were comfortable. One or both of them got up early to make breakfast in good time. They made inquiries as to whether the beds were all right and the water hot. It was what their parents had done when they had guests. But a different system had prevailed at Wyvis Hall, or rather no system had prevailed at all. Everyone fended for themselves. That was the way Adam wanted it and had in fact been vociferous on the subject, vowing that neither now nor in the future would he ever give in to those bourgeois values and customs.

  So he did nothing for Mary or Rufus that morning, did not even seek them out, scarcely knew whether Rufus was still asleep on the terrace or back in bed with Mary, and when he found further sleep impossible because of his shivering body and pounding head, he sat in the kitchen making instant coffee for himself but took none up to them. He had already taken two aspirin about half an hour before and now he took four more. The table he sat at was circular and made of pine or what Hilbert and Adam’s father had called deal. Adam was thinking about this interesting word that used to be simply another term for pine but which originally meant a certain size of plank, from the Low German dele, when there came a loud knocking on the back door. It gave him a shock in his fragile state. He crept to the door and opened it, blinking at the bright light. Outside stood a man, middle-aged, with thinning dark hair and a black moustache, wearing jeans and a lightweight jacket in pale blue plastic. He said his name was Pearson, he was from control and would it be all right for him to take a look around the lake?

  “What control?” said Adam.

  “New here, are you? I used to see a Mr. Smith.”

  Adam said he was dead. Was “coypu” an acronym? The man looked at him as if he were mad.

  Adam gave up. “Look all you want,” he said.

  “Right, and I’ll take a shuftee around the wood while I’m about it. That field next to you’s down to sugar beet this year. Your coypu is crazy for sugar beet.”

  They aren’t mine, Adam wanted to say but desisted. In Hilbert’s dictionary he found coypu defined as a South American aquatic rodent, Myo coypus, somewhat smaller than a beaver. He liked the Latin name so much that he made up a sort of rhyme about it and chanted this as he went back upstairs:

  Flittermus, ottermus,

  Myopotamus…

  From the window of the Pincushion Room he watched the man pottering about the edge of the lake. In one hand he held a sack, in the other what might have been metal traps, or not that at all but some kind of implement. How could coypu have gotten into a Suffolk pond? Must be an escape from a zoo, he thought, just as mink could be from fur farms. Going down again in search of more coffee, he met Mary coming up the stairs wearing Rufus’s jeans and a dirty shirt with Louisiana State University printed on it. Mary looked the nearest to ugly he had ever seen her. She gave him a sullen glare and said in a very distant way did he know there was some awful peasant trespassing around the lake?

  “He isn’t trespassing.” Adam started singing “Flittermus, ottermus” to the tune of the Austrian hymn.

  “You mean hippopotamus.”

  Adam said he didn’t, he meant myopotamus, which in turn meant coypu, that were presumably now in the process of being exterminated, whereupon Mary burst into shouts of anger and distress, calling him a cruel beast and an enemy of ecology.

  “There can’t be anything ecological about preserving South American rodents in Suffolk,” Adam protested, but by then Mary was tearing off downstairs, bent on tackling the coypu controller herself.

  Adam took a look out of the window of the bedroom that had been Hilbert’s. The van, which had “Vermstroy Pest Control Ltd., Ipswich and Nunes,” painted on its side, was turning around on the open area in front of the garage. As Mary came running out of the front door it moved off up the drift toward the wood. It made him laugh to see her standing there, shaking her fist at the departing van. He had begun to feel better, the aspirin and coffee were doing their work.

  Rufus was still lying asleep on the terrace, though at some point he must have awakened, for he was shaded from the sun by Hilbert’s old black umbrella which he had opened and propped there to shelter his head and face. Adam sat down beside him, wondering if he would have to pay the coypu man.

  “I could sell those guns,” he said when Rufus woke up.

  “Or more directly, dismiss the coypu man, keep the guns, and shoot the coypu yourself.”

  That was all very well but there were going to be a lot of things to pay. Rates, for instance. Adam found himself not at all sure what rates were for, but he knew that people who owned houses did pay them. And there would be bills for electricity and water. The guns could be sold and more of the furniture. Unless … unless he could rent rooms out to people, or better still, gather a group of people here who all paid their way, start a commune, in fact.

  This was the first thought he had ever had of the commune; it was at that moment it first came to him, out on the terrace sitting beside Rufus under Hilbert’s umbrella, while the Vermstroy man hunted his quarry along the woodland streams and Mary pursued him with cries of protest.

  Adam, among his computers, reflected on the coypu man, whose bill he had later paid, but whom he had never seen again. Would the coypu man remember? And if he did, would he be able to declare categorically to the police that Adam and Rufus and Mary had actually been living there? It must have been on or about June 25, before the others had come. From the lake the coypu man would have seen Rufus sleeping under the umbrella on the terrace and no doubt also seen Mary and probably spoken to her—have practically been assaulted by her.

  He was about fifty or rather more. Very likely he was still alive. Vermstroy operated from Ipswich but it also operated from Nunes. The coypu man lived in Nunes. Later on, on a rare trip through the village in Goblander, Adam had seen that van parked in the driveway of one of those big Hampstead Garden Suburb houses.

  Of course it was possible the van was parked there only because the man was inside destroying coypu or moles or rats or woodworm, but somehow Adam didn’t think so. He recalled the way it had been parked, its nose halfway inside the open garage.

  The man had been in the wood and had perhaps seen the animal cemetery. Adam could not know if he had but it was quite possible. He would know that there were people living
at Wyvis Hall. If nothing else, the appearance of the terrace, arranged like a huge bed, would have told him that. Evans or Owens, the furniture man, who had come twice to the house, had been at least sixty then. He was hardly a danger. The gardener who had worn a knotted handkerchief on his head, whoever he might have been, had had no means of knowing then or later that Adam intended to live there. The visitor whose footsteps he had heard circling the house that last dawn they had ever spent there, if indeed he had heard them and not, in his state of panic, imagined them—that man or woman would have had no evidence for thinking anyone lived there but for the presence of Goblander on the drive.

  But the coypu man was different. The coypu man could not be dismissed or the danger of him glossed over. Hope lay only in the possibility, the fairly strong possibility, that he was one of those who do not push themselves forward into police investigations unless directly called upon.

  The next day or the day after perhaps, when they had talked a lot about the commune project, Mary had come up with Bella’s name. It had been more roundabout than that but that was basically it. She and Rufus and Adam himself had all been putting forward the names of people they knew who might want to be part of a commune, likely people of the right sort of age and the right sort of temperament. Mary herself was quite keen, stipulating though that she would stay only if Rufus did not. Since his sly suggestions of Thursday midnight, she had been unremittingly at war with him, though they still ostensibly shared a bed. In fact, Rufus had taken mostly to sleeping outdoors. He had no intention, he said, of being part of a permanent commune, he had his medical degree to get, but he might think of coming there for his holidays. He upset Mary further by saying he thought Adam’s sister Bridget very attractive and it would be an inducement to him if she became one of the members.

  Adam didn’t want his sister, they didn’t get on all that well. He could think of two of his fellow students who might be suitable but they, too, had degree courses to finish and Adam was beginning to think very seriously of not returning to college. The peculiar mixed course he was doing he had always had doubts about. The linguistics part he knew already, the English he could pick up on his own, and the sociology bored him. What was the good of a B.A. from that tinpot redbrick place anyway? He might as well be at a polytechnic. If he wanted a degree, he could just as well get one at the technical college in Ipswich… .

  Rufus put up two or three names, one being of someone they had both been at school with. You wanted at least one person who had been in a commune before, Mary said, and perhaps you ought to advertise along those lines. In Time Out, say.

  “Or Gay News,” said Rufus. “‘Tribade seeks fellow travelers’ help out of the closet.’”

  “I do just wonder,” Mary said, “why you go on and on and on about it. Could it just be you’ve got a closet of your own, d’you think?”

  Rufus started laughing at that and said all the doors in his life were strictly never kept closed. “Open house and bring your friends.”

  “It’s a mystery to me you’ve got any.”

  Adam hadn’t liked the idea of advertising. Besides, money was short. Before they got onto the subject of the commune they had been discussing which item of Hilbert’s former property they should sell next. One of the big cabinets, Rufus said, and no nonsense about it, get Evans or Owens back, but Adam could see his house being stripped bare. If people came and put money into the commune …

  “There’s a girl I know of called Bella something,” said Mary. “I don’t know her. It’s my friend Linda that knows her. She used to be one of that Rajneesh lot, she always lives in communes, and Linda told me she was looking for somewhere. I mean I could find out more about this Bella.”

  It was through Bella, of course, that Vivien found them and with her the Indian, Shiva, whose other name Adam could not remember.

  Mary was the only one of them, as far as he knew, who had ever walked to the village and walked around in the village when she got there. It would not matter what any inhabitant of Nunes told the police about Mary, for she had departed soon after that. And if people remembered her, they would not have known where she came from. She had gone to the village—as Vivien had later gone—to use the public phone booth outside the Fir Tree. Probably she went into the Fir Tree or the village shop to get change for those calls. She had been phoning people who might go to Greece with her or drive her there or, failing that, pay her air fare, and eventually she succeeded in getting a loan from an aunt and an offer of a place in a minibus from an old schoolfellow and her boyfriend.

  The day before she left he thought of a new name for his house. For some days he had been mulling this over, trying to come up with something more interesting than Wyvis Hall. Myopotamus Manor, which had occurred to him, was just a joke. He began anagraming, twisting letters around, keeping in mind where they had been going, where Mary was still going… .

  Ecalpemos.

  He asked the others what they thought Ecalpemos was.

  “A Greek island,” said Mary.

  “Not an island,” said Rufus. “More like a mountain. A volcano.”

  “Or a resort on the Costa Brava.”

  “You just made it up,” said Rufus lazily. “It does sound rather like a community. Oneida, Walden, Ecalpemos.”

  “It doesn’t sound in the least like Oneida or Walden. I know what it is, it’s like Erewhon that’s ‘nowhere’ backward.”

  Adam was surprised at Mary’s perspicacity but annoyed that she was leaving. He didn’t like her much but he wanted her to stay. He was finding he resented people who did not care for Wyvis Hall as much as he did.

  “You don’t know the difference between an anagram and an inversion, do you?” he said. “Bloody illiteracy always puts my back up. Why talk about it if you don’t know?”

  “Hey-hey,” said Rufus. “I’m the one that quarrels with her, remember?”

  “Erewhon is an anagram of ‘nowhere.’ Ecalpemos is ‘someplace’ inverted.”

  “Well, well, very clever. Don’t you find ‘someplace’ has too much of an American flavor?”

  “I don’t give a sod about that,” said Adam. “It’s not being called ‘someplace’ anyway, it’s going to be Ecalpemos.”

  Which thereafter it always was.

  The next day was the 30th of June, a Wednesday. Mary wanted Rufus to drive her all the way back to London, but he said Colchester was his limit and she could get a train from there. There was a certain rapprochement though as Mary came down with her things in the backpack Rufus had lent her and wearing jeans and a pair of sandals for the first time for days.

  “I actually adored it,” she said to Adam, “only I’d promised myself I’d go to Greece these holidays and I absolutely can’t not go now.”

  “That’s okay. Ecalpemos will still be here next year.”

  “I did wonder if you’d like me to send cards to your parents and Rufus’s from Athens. I mean ones you’d write here and I’d take them with me.”

  “By a quite exceptional oversight,” said Rufus, “I don’t just happen to have any picture postcards of the Acropolis about me at present.”

  “It was just a thought,” Mary said sulkily. “It didn’t have to be cards, it could have been a letter.”

  “If mine got a letter from me,” said Rufus, “they’d think I was dying or in jail.”

  It amounted to the same thing for him. And why bother to write anyway? What was there to say? Mary had some vague idea that Adam’s parents might suspect he was down here and come to see him. But Adam couldn’t see why they should. If only he had acceded to that suggestion of hers! The ironical thing was that all the time, in a stack in Hilbert’s desk, secured by a rubber band, were fifty or so old postcards collected by Hilbert and Lilian presumably on early travels and among them were two of Greece, one of Mount Lycabettos and the other the very view Rufus had spoken of so scathingly.

  But they hadn’t known that then, and if they had could not have known how much one day such postc
ards would have supported the story Adam was beginning to think he would tell. Always supposing their parents had kept the postcards, which, considering their rarity value, they might well have done. Mary’s offer had been rejected without their thinking twice about it, and she and Adam had said good-bye in a cool, offhand sort of way and Rufus had driven her off to the station in Goblander.

  From that day to this Adam had never set eyes on Mary Gage and had hardly ever thought of her. If she had come into his mind, he had operated his canceling switch as he did when any of the denizens of Ecalpemos strayed into his thoughts. Once, not long ago, an old film called National Velvet had been on television and when the young Elizabeth Taylor appeared on the screen, he had at once been sharply reminded of Mary—and had exited, not with the escape key but the switch on the set.

  He and Rufus had talked about money later that day. What could they sell next? Even to Adam’s ignorant eye the Victorian water colors of moorland or mountain streams, mounted on gold paper and framed in gilt, were valueless. There was a strange picture in one of the bedrooms of a centaurlike creature, a horse with the torso and head of a man, presenting itself at a forge to be shod, where it was eyed with fearful fascination by the smith and a crowd of onlookers. When they cut away the paper at the back of the frame, it proved to be a Boecklin but a print cut from a magazine, the original being in Budapest. They called the room where it hung the Centaur Room. Another strange picture hung in Hilbert’s room, one that Adam had never allowed himself to think about. Since the birth of Abigail it would have been torture. And, besides, the picture no longer existed, having been burned by Adam himself, destroyed on that pyre with certain other things.

  A large gloomy bedroom had been the setting of it, hung with draperies, not the kind of thing you would expect a child to sleep in, but it was a little child that lay on the bed, white and still, the elderly man, evidently a doctor, who had seemingly just lifted a mirror from the parted lips, turning to the young father and imparting the news of death, while the mother in a transport of grief clung to her husband, her head buried in his shoulder. Adam confronted this remembered picture now with a kind of stoicism. He forced himself to see it and recall those things that were connected with it. How extraordinary it seemed that he and Rufus had stood in front of that picture and laughed at it! To remember this now brought him an actual physical pain in the deeps of his body, in his intestines. He and Rufus had stood there drinking wine. Rufus had the last bottle of wine in his left hand and a glassful in his right. They were walking around the house speculating as to what they should sell and had paused here in this far from gloomy room, this warm, sunny, charming room, and laughed at that gloomy picture, at its sentimental naiveté. In fact, he had even made some appropriately sophisticated comment.