A Fatal Inversion (21 page)

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 would 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.

Out in the yellow meadow the farmer had begun cutting the barley with a combine. The great lumbering machine wheeled quite close by where the Ecalpemos land ended at the grove of walnuts. The terrace was visible from there and the heaped quilts on it and the people who lay there sunbathing. Had the farmer noticed? Would he remember? Ten years was a long time if you had no special reasons to remember. Adam had too many special reasons for forgetting to be possible.

It must have been the next week or the week after that Shiva and Vivien had come. No, it was St. Swithin’s Day, July 15. St. Swithin’s Day, if thou dost rain, for forty days it shall remain.

… Rufus said it always rained on July fifteenth, but in fact it didn’t that day; there was nothing for the rain to come out of, not even a tiny cloud, not even those pale high strips of cirrus that had lain on the horizon for two or three days past. St. Swithin’s Day, if thou be fair, for forty days shall rain no more. And it had not. For six more weeks the fair weather had continued, the Mediterranean come to England, tropical Suffolk, perpetual sunshine, and on the forty-first day a storm and rain and winds blowing and the summer gone forever… .

She dressed herself in a pillowcase. All she had with her was what she stood up in and a gray sweater and a leather belt with studs on it, so when she washed her shorts and her T-shirt she had to find something else to put on. It was a white linen pillowcase with Aunt Lilian’s monogram LVS in a circle of embroidered leaves. Zosie unpicked the stitches in the middle and a little way down each side and made herself a sort of tunic. Wearing the belt made it more like a dress. Zosie looked beautiful in it; she made it into a new fashion.

It was what she wore when they drove into Sudbury to sell the silver, fish knives, and forks this time and a filigree candy basket and two sauceboats. Rufus said no one would want to use those things, they were quite useless, they would just lie in the bottom of a drawer or stand in a cupboard and no one would look at them for a lifetime or if he put them out, they would go black with tarnish. As it was, all the silver and brass that lay around was badly discolored from lack of attention. Adam did not at all want to sell the silver but neither could he think of anything with which to refute Rufus’s argument. That they were his and a part of Ecalpemos, and the whole that it was, the perfect whole, must be made up of its parts, he did not feel able to say to Rufus. They needed money; they had very nearly nothing.

“If we can’t have booze and a few fags and go out on the razzle when we want,” said Rufus, “there’s no point in being here.”

Adam did not see it that way, though he admitted he liked those things, they were a kind of prerequisite to enjoyment.

Zosie had said no more about drawing the dole. She still slept in the Centaur Room but mostly Rufus did not. He had taken to sleeping out on the terrace all night and usually, around midnight or later. Zosie would creep away alone. As Goblander came up out of the drift into the lane and turned toward the Mill in the Pytle, Zosie got down on the floor and crouched there in the yoga praying position. It was only when they were out on the Sudbury Road that she emerged.

She came with them to sell the silver. The place they chose was an antique shop on Friar Street where the man had been forthcoming twice before and had asked no questions, though Adam suspected that the prices he paid were absurdly low. The shopkeeper stared at Zosie’s pillowcase, which left about eight or nine inches of thigh showing. The mini-skirt had been out of fashion four or five years by then and people had got out of the habit of seeing it. She walked around the shop examining everything. Adam and Rufus went into the back to carry out their transaction, got sixty-five pounds for the silver which made Adam feel sick because he thought just one of the sauceboats must have been worth that alone. Zosie was sitting on a bentwood chair, her hands folded in her lap, waiting for them.

Rufus bought wine, the cheapest stuff, bin ends and from places one would never have thought of as producing wine, like Romania. Zosie had gone off somewhere, saying she would meet them back at the van which was parked in the marketplace under the shadow of Gainsborough. The girl in the wineshop gave them a box to put the bottles in and Rufus’s pack of two hundred Rothman King size. Adam pulled the bundle of notes out of his pocket and paid the girl, controlling his face, not showing to Rufus his misgivings, his dismay, until they were outside.

“He gave me sixty-five for the silver, didn’t he?”

“Sure. Why?”

“I only had fifty-five when I paid for that lot.”

“Come on. You must have miscounted.”

So they set down the box full of bottles and Adam counted again, subtracting thirty-four seventy-two for wine and cigarettes.

“Twenty twenty-eight,” said Adam, “and there ought to be thirty twenty-eight.”

“You dropped a tenner somewhere.”

“I didn’t.”

At this point, as Adam was unnecessarily counting the money again, as they stood in the middle of the sidewalk outside the Town Hall, the missing ten-pound note appeared in front of them in the shape of a new pair of jeans on Zosie, who came rather diffidently toward them from behind the Gainsborough statue. They did not have to say this to each other. They knew. But neither of them felt they could put an accusation into words. They looked at Zosie, at the jeans, which were of the cheapest kind, the poorest quality, and better to be described perhaps as cotton loons, the red T-shirt of the less-than-a-pound reject shop kind, at this new ensemble which was nevertheless infinitely more respectable than Aunt Lilian’s pillowcase.

It brought Adam a good deal of humiliation to understand that Zosie had picked his pocket without his having the least idea of it.

“I had to have some clothes. I felt funny in that pillow thing.”

With that manner of hers that was at once meek and apprehensive she held out to Adam her closed fist. She opened it above his hand and dropped into his palm three screwed-up notes, a twenty-pound note and two tens.

“Where did all this come from?”

She shook her head. “Never mind. It’s for us. You said everyone had to contribute.” Turning her head this way and that, she darted alert glances across the marketplace. She reminded Adam of a hare he had seen sitting up on the edge of the barley field. “Let’s go home now, can we?”

As they passed through Nunes she got down on the floor and stayed there until they were outside the front door of Ecalpemos. He kept the money she gave him, he asked no questions, he had a pretty good idea anyway what had happened, what she had done, and he made a mental resolve not to go near the shop in Friar Street again.