by Ruth Rendell
Rufus told himself to keep calm; he at least was not one of those people, he wasn’t the sort to jump when the phone rang. But he did, this morning he did. His receptionist was very selective about which calls to put through to him while he was with a patient, but if Adam were to plead urgency …
Adam couldn’t stand on his own feet, he couldn’t hold out alone, never had been able to. He needed constant support and then kicked you in the teeth. He had no patience either. What must he be like with this daughter of his? Rufus could not imagine, could only see Adam as he had been at nineteen, humping the portable crib up the stairs at Ecalpemos and never bestowing a glance inside it, Adam who had loved Zosie, who said he wanted to live there forever with her in their Garden of Eden, but who when she began crying had shouted at her: “Shut up or I’ll kill you!”
Rufus held himself still, told himself to be cool and calm, to be optimistic, but he was not totally under control. He got hold of the wrong notes for Mrs. Hitchens and was about to tell her that her symptoms were menopausal, when he looked up and saw he was addressing a girl of no more than twenty-eight.
It was just before one when Adam phoned, and by then Rufus had given him up for the day.
“I’m sorry, but I had to tell them I went to Greece with you. If I wasn’t at Wyvis Hall, they wanted to know where I was and who with. I had to say; I couldn’t just invent someone.”
“Thanks very much,” said Rufus.
“The ironical part is that after I’d made the statement I rang up my father and asked him exactly what he had said about me to the police and he’d never mentioned me being in Greece.”
“Ironical is what you call it, is it?” Rufus’s nurse was going off to lunch. He waited till she closed the door behind her.
“You’ve involved me in this quite unnecessarily. Why the fuck didn’t you phone your father first?”
“I didn’t think of it, that’s why. And why shouldn’t you be involved anyway? I don’t see why I should carry the whole burden of this alone.”
“You shot her, that’s why. You fired the bloody gun.”
Rufus crashed down the receiver. The blood was pounding in his head. He sat down and made himself breathe deeply, regularly. He began telling himself that the worst that could happen would be for the police to ask him to confirm that he was with Adam Verne-Smith in Greece during July and August 1976. As far as he could see, they couldn’t prove he hadn’t been. The passport he had had then had expired and been renewed, but even if they asked to see the old one and he showed it to them, as often as not passport control officers did not bother to stamp the passports of other Europeans.
“A little place called Ecalpemos,” he could say if they asked him precisely where he had been. “It’s very small and obscure. You won’t find it on your map.”
Of course he wouldn’t say anything so risky. The really worrying thing was that Adam was unreliable, Adam would crack. If he had blurted out Rufus’s name the minute they had asked him to name a traveling companion, what might he not say if they became actually suspicious? Suppose, for instance, they told him the antiques dealer with the Welsh name or the coypu man or the farmer from Pytle Farm were all prepared to swear that Adam and a group of friends had been living at Wyvis Hall with two girls among them? Suppose the refuse collectors had seen them? True, they had always taken their rubbish—wine bottles mostly—up to the top of the drift on whenever it was, Tuesdays or Wednesdays, because Hilbert had done so, Adam said, but one of those men might remember collecting it week after week. What would Adam say if the police confronted him with that? As likely as not he would break down and confess everything. The best thing would have been to have refused to answer when asked where he had been. He had a right to refuse, everyone had. Rufus, who would have liked to do that, realized that now he couldn’t, for this would incriminate Adam and therefore, by association, all of them.
Since he had started permitting himself to think about her, he thought about her all the time. She came into his dreams, entering in strange guises, once in a nurse’s uniform of blue dress and white cap to tell him Abigail was dead. She, Zosie, had taken the greatest care of Abigail, had watched over her and sat by her bed and loved her, but nevertheless she had died. She had turned her face into the pillow and died. Out of that dream he awoke fighting, flailing at the air. Anne said: “You’re ill, you’re sick. For God’s sake go to the doctor.”
He got up and at two in the morning was driving down Highgate West Hill. He took the turn into Merton Lane and left the car halfway down, carrying with him Hilbert’s shotgun which, after taking careful thought about this, he had wrapped up first in strips of rag, then in part of an old brown curtain that in the past had been used for covering up furniture while he painted a wall. Secured with string, this made an innocuous-looking package. At least it no longer looked like a gun. The rags, he reasoned, would disguise the identity of the gun but not protect it.
There was no one around. It was dark but there were streetlamps on all night. He walked down to the ponds, where he lost his nerve. If he merely put the gun into the shallow water it would soon be found and he did not dare throw it so that it fell in the center. He could imagine the splash. There were too many houses and apartments around there. He went back home again. Anne was sitting up in bed with the light on.
“Where have you been?”
“Not to the doctor,” said Adam.
Next morning, which was Saturday, he drove around until he found, north of the North Circular Road, a huge used car dump, a mountain range of broken, torn, rusted, disintegrating metal. It looked abandoned, was quite unattended. All the piled, dumped vehicles were far beyond rescue, rejuvenation. All that could happen to them would be either that they were simply left there, an eyesore, an awful detritus, forever, or that individually they were picked up and crushed flat or by means of some marvelous machine that could do such things, compressed into a small cuboid block of metal.
Adam walked in among the metal mountains, where there was no vegetation and the ground was hard and dusty. On either side of the central walkway rose hills in which the strata were blue and red and cream with here and there outcroppings of black rubber and slivers of glass and spars of chrome. There was an all-pervading smell of motor oil, which contains a high proportion of metal filings, a bitter, unnatural odor.
He poked the gun through the broken rear window of what had once been a Lancia Beta saloon. It was unlikely that it would be found there and if it were, the finder was most unlikely to take it to the police. But probably, when the time came, it would be crushed up in the compressor along with the metal shell that now housed it.
Walking back to the car, he found it impossible to remember why he had ever brought the gun away from Ecalpemos in the first place. Why had they not buried it in the Little Wood along with the lady’s gun, the four-ten? Had he actually thought the time might come when he would use it again?
He had not known anything about cleaning or oiling guns, but on the twelfth of August he had gone into the gun room and taken this one down from the wall, “broken” it, and begun his cleaning operations. After all, cleaning was cleaning. There was presumably only one way you could do it. Zosie came in and watched him.
“Today is the glorious twelfth,” he said.
“I don’t know what that means.”
“It’s what they call the day grouse shooting begins. It’s the twelfth of August, which is today, and it’s called the glorious twelfth.”
“I wouldn’t know a grouse if I saw one,” Zosie said.
“There aren’t any here. I don’t think there are any south of Yorkshire. I’m not planning to shoot grouse anyway. I might shoot pheasants or pigeons or something. Or a hare. I expect Vivien could cook jugged hare.”
Rufus said you couldn’t shoot pheasants before October the first.
“You mean there are secret gamekeepers hiding in the wood to stop me?”
“You’re right. No one would know,” said Rufus, and
he laughed.
But Vivien had been appalled at the prospect of his attempting to shoot a hare. She made more fuss about it than Mary Gage had about the coypu man. So Adam promised to confine himself to birds and did actually succeed in shooting a couple of pigeons, which they ate, though the purple-brown flesh was tough. But it taught him to like the feel of the twelve-bore in his hands, and after that he took it out every day, aiming at squirrels or pigeons or sometimes at a hole in a tree trunk. He could imagine himself becoming an English country gentleman, a landed squire, living here with Zosie. In a couple of weeks time Vivien would be gone and Shiva with her. A further week would see Rufus’s departure. Adam could hardly wait. All that worried him was money. What were he and Zosie going to live on? They had nothing.
“We shall have to get jobs,” he told her as they lay at dusk on the bed in the Pincushion Room. The windows were open and the sky, just after sunset, was a soft rich violet-pink, not clear but covered with innumerable tiny flecks of cloud as if overspread with flamingo feathers. “We shall both have to work.”
“I can’t do anything,” said Zosie. “What could I do?”
“Can you type?”
She shook her head. He felt her hair rub silkily against the sensitive skin in the hollow of his elbow.
“You could work in a shop.”
“I’m bad at counting up,” she said. “I’d get it wrong. I’m best at stealing really. I can’t do honest things. I told you I should have to marry a rich man. Do you know what my mother calls me? Well, called me. She called me Lady Muck because I’m idle but I like nice things. Why doesn’t my mother come and look for me, Adam?”
“She doesn’t know where you are.”
“No, but she hasn’t tried to find out, has she? I’m so young, Adam, you’d think she’d be concerned, wouldn’t you? Why doesn’t she love me?”
“I love you,” said Adam.
“You love screwing me.”
“Yes, I do, yes. But I do love you, Zosie. I adore you. I love you—with all my heart. Don’t you believe me? Say you believe me.”
“I don’t know. It’s too soon. If you’re still saying it in a year.”
“I’ll still be saying it in fifty years.”
She turned to him with trembling lips, in tears that seemed to him shed from no understandable cause. He made love to her in the pink light that muted to purple, to dark. It was warm and humid and he tasted on her skin the salt of sweat and the salt of tears. Afterward she sat up and said, “I won’t hide myself on the floor when next we go out in Goblander.”
He smiled and held her, pleased by this sign of rational behavior.
“We must think about working next. We must think about money.”
“Do you know at school they were always reading out that bit from the Bible at prayers about the birds of the air not sowing or reaping but your heavenly father feeding them just the same. Only he doesn’t, does he? Birds die and so do people and he doesn’t do anything. I don’t understand that.”
“Nobody understands that, my sweetheart,” said Adam.
One evening, in a pub in Colchester, Rufus picked up a girl who was the wife of a serving soldier. The soldier was away somewhere in training. Someone had told Rufus that Colchester was unique among English towns in having at the same time a port, a garrison, and a university, and it was perhaps in consequence of this that it had the highest rate of venereal disease in the country. He repeated this to the girl because it amused him. Later on they went back to the girl’s house in married quarters. Now he was uncertain of what her name had been, Janet or perhaps Janice.
There was no uncertainty in his mind, though, as to whether he had ever taken her back to Ecalpemos. He hadn’t. They had met on half a dozen more occasions but he had always spent the night at her place. Rufus had not been averse to the others knowing where he had been and what he had been up to. His amour propre, his machismo, had suffered through his being seen to lack a woman while the other men (less attractive to or successful with women than he was, he thought) had girlfriends. Adam had seemed relieved, was even congratulatory. Rufus guessed he felt guilty about Zosie, as if he had stolen her from Rufus instead of, as was truly the case, Rufus himself voluntarily relinquishing her. But Shiva had been shocked. One good thing about that, Rufus remembered, was the effect it had of stopping Shiva constantly asking him about his chances of getting into medical school. Instead, Shiva settled down at last and applied to every teaching hospital they could jointly think of, consulting the public library in Sudbury for the required addresses. From time to time he eyed Rufus as one might eye the Antichrist if one were so unfortunate as to see him.
That August, on the seventeenth, Rufus had had his twenty-third birthday. Ten years ago and two months. But that twenty-third birthday had been the first he had not looked forward to with pleasure at being a year older. He had thought how much better pleased he would have been to be twenty-two.
“Another year older and deeper in debt,” Adam said, quoting something no doubt, on the birthday morning. And that was true too. There was scarcely a tenner left out of the pawnbroker’s money.
It was hotter than ever the night they went out to celebrate his birthday, first in the Chinese restaurant in Sudbury, then in the pubs, where Rufus remembered he had given up wine for that night and drunk brandy. The tipple for heroes, Adam had said, quoting someone else. He had sold to the man called Evans or Owens a Flora Danica wall plate to raise money for this spree and Rufus was grateful. Together they had gone to Hadleigh, to the shop, and now Rufus, with a sense of chill, remembered the old man saying: “Settled in at Wyvis Hall then, have you?”
And Adam had replied with some enthusiasm that he was happy there, that he intended to go on living there. Had Adam forgotten that? Had he forgotten the old man going on to say—and he had not been so old, he had been a spry and vigorous sixty-odd—that he must come down again in the next week or two: “Try and twist your arm around that cabinet I’ve got my eye on.”
The cabinet in the dining room with the curve pattern in the veneer that he called “flame-fronted.” Adam hadn’t wanted to sell and didn’t want to sell now.
“I’d make it three hundred, you know, and don’t tell me that’s not a tempting offer.”
It hadn’t tempted Adam. Why hadn’t it? What was there about possessing all that old furniture that meant so much to him? The lord of the manor syndrome, thought Rufus, it probably wasn’t all that uncommon. Rather than sell Owens or Evans an old cupboard he never looked at from one week to the next, he preferred to do that stupid, terrible thing that brought retribution down on all of them, and out of which in any case he never made a penny.
He hadn’t done it for money, of course, he had done it for Zosie because he was in thrall to Zosie. The idea of the money had come from Shiva. Ten thousand pounds. It didn’t seem so much today, but things had changed a lot and he had changed and his circumstances. It was fairy gold anyway, at the end of an impossible rainbow, while Evans’s or Owens’s three hundred pounds would have been notes pressed into the hand.
A lively little man with an undercurrent of Welsh in his voice that a lifetime of living in Suffolk hadn’t got rid of. He had walked around the house as if he had some sort of right to buy, as if their poverty and his comparative affluence and expertise gave him the right to what he wanted. And in the shop he held the Royal Copenhagen plate in his hands and looked at it and then at them as if he wanted to possess it yet despised them for selling it.
It may be crazy but I’m going to go there, Rufus thought, I’m going to go down there. There are things I have to know. Thank God it’s Saturday.
And thank God, too, for a woman who did not probe, who was not apparently sensitive to his moods or any more aware of apprehensiveness in him than she was of his inner sighs of relief. He could have an affair or a nervous breakdown and she would be none the wiser. That he would himself have to pay for this by a lifetime of being misunderstood, he judged a fair bargain.
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br /> It took him a little while, though, to think up a convincing lie. He had a private patient rushed in as an emergency to a hospital in Colchester, he told Marigold. Of course he did not especially want to go down there and visit her, but he thought he should. He would have been surprised if Marigold had asked any questions, yet at the same time it seemed to him faintly odd that she didn’t. It would have been natural for a wife only three years married to demur at being left alone all day on a Saturday.
Nor did she say how she would herself spend it. She was wearing her new Edina Ronay sweater and Rufus noticed how long she had let her hair grow. It tumbled down over her shoulders, beautiful thick shiny blond hair, and she had washed it when first she got up. She appeared neither glad nor sorry he was going to Colchester. Certainly she was not relieved. But still Rufus thought, suppose if I had been here she had said to me that she was going to her mother’s, or to someone’s coffee morning, or made any excuse for going out, I would have thought nothing of it, I would have accepted. She won’t have to say that now. It may even be a source of satisfaction to her that because I shan’t be here she won’t have to go out.
With all these minutiae of reactions he felt he could not concern himself now. The abyss between them that they bridged with “darlings” widened a little more, that was all. By ten he was on the motorway whose approach road was only a quarter of a mile from where he lived.
The yellow-brick pile by Colchester station that might have been a hospital or a children’s home or some sort of institution for the mentally handicapped was gone and a high fence put up around the site. It was there, on this spot, just beyond the bridge, that he had picked up Zosie. For the first time Rufus was really aware of the difference between himself now and the Rufus of those days, a lifetime seeming to separate them, not a mere ten years. That clapped-out van, the drugs under the backseat, his hair long and shaggy, a stubble growth on his chin, naked to the waist, nicotine-stained hands, a predatory way with women. He felt a hundred years older, he usually did feel old for his age. The Mercedes glided smoothly, purring as it did its automatic gearshift. He put up his hand to his face involuntarily, felt the smoothness of the skin, and felt, too, the deep indentation that now ran from nostril to jaw.