A Fatal Inversion

by Ruth Rendell

  He had to exert himself not to drop his head into his hands.

  “While you were down there in the summer of 1976—when would that have been exactly?”

  “From the eighteenth of June for about a week,” said Adam.

  “You didn’t happen to see a young woman about, I suppose? Pushing a baby in a pram, for example? A girl might have taken a child for a walk down the entrance drive.”

  “It’s a private road.”

  “Well, yes, Mr. Verne-Smith, but the village people do use it occasionally. That sort of rule is more honored in the breach than the observance, don’t you find?”

  Adam shook his head. The idea of people having walked up and down the drift without his knowledge made him feel almost faint.

  “You never saw a girl in the vicinity while you were there?” He waited for Adam’s denial. “You won’t mind my asking, I’m sure. It was a long time ago. You never had a girl staying with you there?”

  “Absolutely not.” Adam was astonished at the vehemence with which he could lie.

  Vivien came into his mind—inevitably. He saw her in her bright blue dress, the bodice embroidered with crude birds and flowers in red and gold. She had been a squatter. London was full of squatters in the mid-seventies.

  “I believe people might have used the house in my absence. When I went back in 1977 there were—well, signs that people had been in, sort of camped there.”

  They were keen on that. They wanted to know more. Yet even as he invented, describing a broken window in the washhouse, the paper wrappings nibbled by mice, a few missing ornaments, he sensed their disbelief. He sensed that they were simply interested in hearing what he would come up with next, that they were patiently paying out the rope, yards and yards of it, with which he would ultimately hang himself.

  But it was over. They were going. They had not asked him where else he had been that summer and he had not had to invent a Greek holiday or involve others in an alibi. As he slowly eased himself from his chair, getting up ponderously as if he were prematurely arthritic, as he was poised there, supporting himself by his forearms pressing the arms of the chair, Winder said: “Is there anything else you would like to tell us?”

  It was uttered with the utmost casualness, lightly thrown away. But Adam found the question deeply disconcerting. It sounded sinister and deliberate.

  He said again, “I don’t think so,” reflecting what an absurd rejoinder this is, this squeamish, cautious substitute for “no.”

  He opened the front door for Winder and Stretton, and Winder thanked him for his help, adding as if this were an afterthought, a tiny minor matter, something so unimportant that it had nearly gone out of his head, that perhaps in the next few days Adam would not mind going into his local police station and there make a statement to the effect of what he had just told them. They were Suffolk police, but “liaising” of course with the crime squad, and if Adam were to ask for CID or better still for Sergeant Fuller …

  Anne had come out into the hall and was listening to what they said. She looked disdainful but at the same time quite upset.

  “Sergeant Fuller would take the statement from you,” Winder said. “Anytime will do, at your convenience, but let’s say before the weekend, shall we?”

  “It’s a funny thing,” said Stretton, prolonging their departure. “It’s a funny thing how people—the public, that is—how they think that just because a crime was committed a long time ago, I mean, say, ten years ago, it’s less important than if it had been committed, well, yesterday. But that’s not so at all. I mean, that’s not the way the police look at it.”

  “No,” said Winder in a preoccupied way. “No, you’re right, it’s not. We’ll say good night, then. Good night, Mrs. Verne-Smith.”

  After he closed the door Adam felt a little like he had that day when he came home with the gun in the golf bag and found his father in the front garden. He longed to be alone but he should not have married if he felt like that. One of the objectives of marriage was to have an ally.

  “Just what is all this?” Anne said.

  “It’s nothing to do with me. They think squatters got into Wyvis Hall and lived there without my knowing.”

  “Why did that man want a statement from you then?”

  Adam did not answer her. He looked up Rufus’s phone number once more. If she comes up behind me and touches me, he thought, if she says any more, I’ll kill her. And then he thought how that phrase, which was the general routine threat of the harassed person, was banned to him forever, because to those others it was fantasy while to him it was real.

  Anne was sitting in the armchair reading, but she was watching him with half an eye. Adam learned Rufus’s number and repeated it over and over to himself. He put the phone book back and thought how much he longed to talk to someone who knew, to one of them. It seemed to him that he had soldiered on, bearing this alone through eons of time. Ten years in fact, but most intensely for five days.

  “I thought I heard Abigail,” he said.

  “Did you? I didn’t.”

  “I’ll just go up and look.”

  Anne’s face wore that peevish exasperated expression that always signified he was being too concerned a parent. In the hall Adam looked at his watch and the digits told him nine fifty-six. A bit late to make a phone call but perhaps not too late. Five to ten at Ecalpemos had been the start of the evening, the infancy of the young night. And he and Rufus, like sultans, had reclined on quilts and smoked hashish, the pungent trails of smoke rising into the dark air and mingling with the scents of the summer night. For ever and forever farewell, Rufus. And whether we shall meet again I know not, let us therefore our everlasting farewells take… .

  In his bedroom he lifted the receiver and put his forefinger to the nine button on the phone. Rufus’s exchange was nine five nine. Adam knew he was being hysterical, a bit mad, those policemen had sent him over the edge, but he did not just want to talk to Rufus, he longed for Rufus. He wanted, at that moment, to hold Rufus in his arms and possess Rufus’s body with his body, and be lost in him as he had once wanted to lose himself in Zosie.

  He was trembling. He dialed the number very quickly before his nerve could fail. If a woman answered he would put the phone down. He was holding his breath. The phone was answered and Rufus gave the number. It was the same languid drawl, very cool, very Rufus.

  “This is Adam Verne-Smith.”

  “Ah,” said Rufus.

  Now that he had done it he did not know what to say.

  “I rather expected to hear from you,” Rufus said. “Sometime or other.”

  “I have to talk to you.”

  “Not now.” The voice was stony, remote.

  “No, all right. Not now. Tomorrow? Thursday? We could meet.” Adam would know the minute Anne picked up the receiver downstairs; he would hear the click and have the sense of a door opening somewhere along the line, yet knowing this perfectly well he was nevertheless afraid he might already have missed hearing and sensing it and all the time Anne had been listening, was even now attending to this rather sinister exchange between him and Rufus. “Hold on,” he said, and he went to the head of the stairs, looked down, of course could see nothing, and had to come right up to the living room door and look in to make sure she was still reading. She looked up and stared back at him, unsmiling. Adam returned to the phone and Rufus. “Some policemen have been here.”

  “Christ.”

  “I didn’t mention you—or anyone. I said I’d never lived there.”

  “Where do you work?” said Rufus. “I mean, where’s your office or whatever?”

  “Sort of Victoria, Pimlico.”

  “Call me tomorrow in Wimpole Street. We might have a drink.”

  “All right.”

  Rufus replaced his receiver first. But Adam found he did not much mind, it wasn’t a rejection and it didn’t hurt. It was strange how Rufus’s tone had changed while he, Adam, was downstairs checking up on Anne. In those thirty seconds
he had become the old Rufus again, his best friend, once very nearly his lover, his partner in crime, his Cassius. Suppose this were to pass away, all of it, suppose by a miracle they were to escape, would it be possible to be friends with Rufus again?

  He found he was trembling at the thought of it and he got up from where he had been sitting on the bed and went into Abigail’s room. Standing by her side, looking down, he thought how unlikely it was he would sleep that night, how he must anticipate lying wakeful for hour upon hour.

  And then he really looked at the crib, looked into it in the light that came in here from the landing, and saw his daughter lying face downward, utterly still, her face buried in the small flat pillow. His breath caught and held, he stared. He lowered the side of the crib. There was no movement at all; she wasn’t breathing, there was no delicate rise and fall of the frail shape. The sheet and blanket and down quilt lay motionless on her small, rigid body.

  The room was silent, warm, expectant of the most appalling disaster. Adam cried out, a yell of terror, and snatched up Abigail in his arms. Very much alive, she burst into screams of fright. Anne came running upstairs. The light was put on, was painfully bright, making Abigail sob and cry the more, poking fists into her eyes.

  “What the hell are you doing to her?”

  Adam gasped. “I thought she was dead.”

  “You’re mad. You’re insane, you ought to see someone. Give her to me.”

  Without a word he handed her over. Instead of his wife and child, he seemed for a moment to see Zosie standing there with the baby in her arms. He could have married Zosie, he thought. She had wanted to marry a rich man and in her eyes then he had been rich, the lord of Ecalpemos. Avoiding such thoughts, he had never considered it till now, but was it he she had had in mind when she talked of her career? And had he thrown her away through simply failing to recognize this?

  Exiled from Abigail’s room, he went downstairs again, aware of his aloneness, appreciating this rare solitude. Anne he had deeply offended, but he was indifferent to this. It meant, anyway, that she would not pursue him with questions. He indulged in fantasizing briefly, in a dream of her leaving him, walking out on him and Abigail. He would have to get a nanny, of course, but he could afford that. Someone like Vivien perhaps …

  All roads led back to Ecalpemos. Whatever he thought of brought him back into the Ecalpemos file which Undo and Quit keys only briefly expelled from his mind’s screen. Or he had lost the knack of escape.

  He was dozing in the armchair but he was awake, he wasn’t dreaming. Zosie was coming across the garden and his hands were red, but with raspberry juice, not blood.

  11

  THE GARDEN WAS BEGINNING to get a dried-up look, the grass not growing much but the sun bleaching the green out of it. And in the full heat of the day the flowers hung down their heads. Even the leaves on the bushes and small trees drooped when the sun was at its hottest. But inside the walled garden the fruit swelled and ripened, maturing to un-English reds and golds. The strawberries were over but the raspberries were at their peak, the height of their season, fat juicy crimson fruit the size of rosebuds and safe from birds on their canes inside the cage, currants growing alongside them, black, red, and the ones they called white which were really golden, and gooseberries with purple-flushed hairy cheeks that had overripened and split open. All along the old weathered wall of agate-colored flints the nectarines had turned from green to yellow to orange and on some a rosy blush was appearing. Distantly, beyond the screen of walnut trees and hazels—for Adam had left open the arched green door in the wall—could be seen a yellow field of barley, almost ready to cut.

  He was inside the cage eating raspberries. It was around noon and very hot, the sky cloudless and the sun high. Adam looked up and saw Zosie appear in the doorway, look around her until she saw him, then pull the door to behind her. This was her second day at Ecalpemos. She wore her jeans, which she had cut off a good six inches above the knees and frayed the hems, a white cotton vest he thought might have been Hilbert’s, and a pair of pink espadrilles through which her toes had made holes. Her exposed skin, of which there was a good deal, was a uniform pale biscuit color and her hair was this color, too, and her eyebrows and her lips. Her eyes themselves were a little darker, the color, he thought, as she approached the cage, of milkless tea. A good tea, Earl Grey perhaps. She looked at him gravely and then she smiled, showing small, very white teeth. Adam thought he had never seen such a small girl with such long legs. There was a slight but attractive disproportion here, so that for a moment Zosie seemed less like a real girl than some artist’s impression of an ideal, the legs longer, the neck more fragile and attenuated, the waist extravagantly narrower than could have been in nature.

  She came into the cage, carefully attending to the various hookings and pinnings necessary for closing the wire door.

  “Have some raspberries,” Adam said.

  She nodded. “Thanks,” but she didn’t pick any fruit.

  “Adam,” she said, “would it be all right for me to stay on for a while?”

  He thought, well, you’re Rufus’s girlfriend, aren’t you? If he says so, I suppose you can stay. He didn’t say this aloud, though; he didn’t know why. There was something mysterious about her, something odd. Last night, when they all went out to the pubs in Stoke-by-Nayland, she had insisted on crouching on the floor of the van until they were beyond Nunes village. He was disturbingly attracted by her and very confused by this, partly because she was Rufus’s and partly because he had an uneasy feeling she might be very young indeed, she might only be about fourteen. On the other hand, there were times like now, when she remained quite still—she had sat down cross-legged on the ground—and she had fixed on him unblinking eyes that her face became hard and she looked in her early twenties.

  “I really meant,” he said, “for people to sort of pay their way. I want to get a commune going with people contributing.”

  “Well, I haven’t got any money,” Zosie said.

  “No.”

  “I expect I could sign on.”

  The expression was not familiar to Adam, who had never worked for his living or really known anyone who had lost his job and drew unemployment benefits. He looked at Zosie and put his eyebrows up.

  “I could sign on and get the dole and give you some.”

  “Could you?” Perhaps he could do that too. If he didn’t go back to college. It would be a way of living. If she stayed, he thought, she might still be here after Rufus went… .

  “There are other ways of getting money. I can always get money.”

  He could see the outline of her small round breasts through the white cotton, and the nipples, soft and meek, not erect, but evident enough.

  “I wouldn’t want you doing that.”

  She wrinkled up her nose, a gesture of puzzlement with her where another girl might have cocked her head on to one side.

  “Doing what? Oh, I see.” She laughed in the funny breathy way she had without smiling. “I didn’t mean that. I suppose I would do that though, it wouldn’t bother me. I expect you’d call it that when I let Woof-woof fuck me to get a bed for the night.”

  Adam came as near to being shocked as was possible with him. At the same time he was pleased, exhilarated almost.

  “What did you mean then?”

  “About getting money?” She looked away. She picked a raspberry and then another, put the fruit into her mouth, tasting it as if she had never tried such a thing before. And she said, “I’ve never actually picked fruit and eaten it like this. It’s sort of always been bought in shops.”

  “What did you mean about getting money?”

  “I don’t think I want to say. You’ll see.”

  “Zosie,” he said, “where did you come from when Rufus picked you up? I mean, did you come on the train from somewhere?” He disliked asking questions of this sort; it made him like his parents. They always wanted to know where one had been and where one was going and what time one wou
ld be home. But something impelled him to ask these things of Zosie. He wanted to know about her, he had to know. “Had you just got off the London train?”

  She shook her head. “Suppose I said I came out of the booby hatch.”

  “The what?”

  “The laughing house, the bin.”

  “Did you?”

  “Suppose I said I escaped and they’re out looking for me? Psychiatric nurses in white coats that drive around in white vans? Why d’you think I don’t want anyone seeing me when we go out of here? Why d’you think I get down on the floor when we’re in Woof-woof’s van?”

  “Okay, you don’t have to tell me.”

  So they had picked a couple of pounds of raspberries and filled the bowl Adam had brought out with him and eaten them for lunch on the terrace with a bottle of wine. Zosie had also eaten an incredible amount of bread and cheese and chocolate cake and drunk about a pint of milk. Sometimes she would eat like that, enormously, ravenously, and at others she seemed indifferent to food. Wine did not seem to affect her, she could drink it as she drank milk.

  Everything changed with the coming of Zosie. Simultaneously with her arrival, or perhaps because of her arrival, Ecalpemos itself underwent a change for Adam. Whereas before he had simply liked it very much and been proud to own it but nevertheless looked upon it as a source of plunder, a kind of lucrative treasure chest, he began now to love it, to learn the house and grounds, to value it and to want desperately at whatever cost to keep it for himself. An instance of this change took place the very next day when, to Rufus’s mirth, he set about watering the garden, using cans filled from the lake and humped a hundred yards across the lawn that seemed to sizzle in the sun. Zosie helped him. But they must have done something wrong, watered while the sun was still hot probably, for all the plants in the flower beds had scarred and blistered leaves next day.