A Fatal Inversion (31 page)

And she had said, “Go on then.
You
know. I’ve never been here before.”

But, “If I was going to, I should have turned down the Seven Sisters Road.”

So he had driven on and changed his whole future. If he had turned left, Zosie and he would have married and been living together at Ecalpemos still. Why not? And the turf in the cemetery would have lain undisturbed and the guns still been hanging in the gun room, Abigail unborn but other children born to him, and he would not have been a murderer in daily expectation of arrest.

Adam reached the shopping precinct and managed at last to park the car. He thought he had put Anne’s shopping list into his pocket but he couldn’t find it. He would have to do his best from memory, but it seemed that all his memory could
do
for him at the moment was dig into the documents of the past. Later Anne’s parents were coming to them for supper. It would be the first time since the previous Christmas, so they could hardly get out of it. Then there had been a family gathering with his own parents among the company and his sister and Anne’s sister. They had been summoned to arrive in time for a present-giving ceremony before lunch. Anne’s father had given her mother a mask jug. She collected Victorian porcelain. Anne’s father knew nothing about antiques and boasted of this, saying that the woman in the shop had vouched for its authenticity and value—well, he could vouch for that by what he had had to pay. The jug was of pale cream and yellow china, its spout a face in profile with hair depicted in gold as flowing back around its rim.

“That’s called a mask jug,” Adam’s father had said. “You can see why. It’s on account of the spout being in the form of a mask.”

Everyone already knew this. They could see. But his father went on instructing them, taking the jug from Anne’s mother’s hands and holding it up to the light, swinging it around and tipping it upside down until Adam was in a sweat that he would drop it. It was only the second mask jug he had ever seen in his life.

“My old uncle, the one that had this rather splendid house in Suffolk, a mansion really, he had one of these jugs. White it was, white picked out in gold.” He remembered then that Adam must have inherited the jug along with the other contents of Wyvis Hall. “What became of it, I wonder? Got it over at your place, have you? Or did you sell it along with all that other priceless stuff?”

“I don’t know,” Adam muttered. “I don’t remember.”

But he did, only too well. Back at that time he was in the habit of escaping from or canceling Ecalpemos thoughts. So good was he at this that on that Christmas Day, even if he had tried, he would have had difficulty in recalling the shape or coloring of the jug. Now there was no such difficulty. He could see it: about twelve inches high, a high white glaze, the spout or lip a smiling Silenus face with flowing locks lightly gilded, and on the almost spherical body of the jug a fernleaf pattern in gold. Zosie had wrapped it in tissue they found lining a drawer and then in newspaper. Whenever they went anywhere she bought a newspaper to see if her mother had told the police yet and there was a hunt on for her. There was quite a pile of newspapers mounting up. They used more sheets to wrap the stuffing spoons and the thimble-sized glasses etched with a Greek key design.

Vivien found a cardboard box to put the things in. It was one of Rufus’s from the wineshop. Rufus had considered coming with them, Adam remembered. What had stopped him? He had a date with that girl, the married one, that was it. It would be his last chance to see her before her husband came back.

“He is doing a wicked thing, I think,” Adam overheard Shiva say to Vivien. “Like your King David.”

“Rufus didn’t send her old man into the forefront of the battle,” Adam said. “He’s only gone on a gunnery course.”

“How would Rufus feel if he got killed?”

“Bloody awful, I should imagine, only the chance is a bit remote, don’t you think?”

So Rufus had stayed behind, though his date wasn’t till eight-thirty. Things would have worked out differently if he had come. If he had stayed at home past eight o’clock they might well have worked out differently. There had never been any idea of Vivien or Shiva accompanying them. Shiva meant to go on one of his nature walks and Vivien always baked bread on Mondays. She was setting out her things just as they were leaving—scales, a big earthenware bowl, a measuring jug, a large bag of wholemeal flour, a lump of yeast. She poured flour into the bowl, started cutting up the yeast to drop it into warm water and just in time saw Zosie’s ring stuck on the underside of the lump. That little ring of plaited gold strands was always lying around getting caught up on dough, scooped into vegetable peelings, threatened with being washed down the sink.

It was odd what Zosie did then, though not perhaps so odd when you knew Zosie. She put the ring on her little finger and put her arms around Vivien’s neck, hugging her. Vivien held her, having little regard for her floury hands which made mealy marks on the back of Zosie’s pale blue T-shirt.

“What’s the matter, lovely?”

“I don’t know, I feel so funny sometimes, as if I’m not anyone, as if I’m a shadow or a dead petal that’s dropped off and someone will sweep me away. When I put my ring on I feel a bit more real, I get to be the person who wears the ring.”

Adam hated her to talk like that. He felt bereft because she had gone into Vivien’s arms and not his. “The usual tradition about rings,” he said, “is that they make the wearer invisible, they don’t
reveal
them.”

She seemed to shrivel. She edged away from Vivien, drawing her arms back, pulling in her fingers like an animal retracting its claws.

“I’m not invisible, am I?” She looked from Adam to Vivien and back at Adam, her eyes vague and strange. “You can see me, can’t you? Say you can see me.”

“Don’t be a fool,” Adam said roughly. “Of course we can see you.”

Vivien spoke his name warningly.

“Zosie, love …,” he said.

“Am I your love?”

It embarrassed him being spoken to like that in front of Vivien. It was almost as if they were in the presence of his mother. “You know you are.”

“If I went away, would you tell the police? Would you look for me?”

She harped on that always.

“If you’d only tell me where your bloody mother lives, we could go there and find her and find out the truth of it.”

“I will one day, I really will.”

“In the meantime,” he said, “we’re supposed to be going to London. It’s past one now and if we don’t get on with it, it’ll be too late.”

“I’m coming,” she said. “I’m coming.”

He could see that tiny ring on her tiny finger now, the plaited gold. “It must be a child’s ring,” he said to her, “it must have been made for a child.”

“It was. It was made for me when I was little. I wore it on one of my big fingers then.”

The idea of her having big fingers made him laugh. She took off the ring and showed him a Z engraved inside.

“So you really are called that. I did wonder.”

She sat beside him with both arms around his neck and her head on his shoulder and it was beautiful (If we find each other that’s beautiful, if not it can’t be helped) only he wasn’t a good enough driver to contend with distractions like that. Her right arm she left along the back of his seat, her hand resting against his neck, the other with the ring on in her lap. It really was a lap because she had a skirt on, the first time he had ever seen her in one. It was a wraparound thing, white with pale blue checks. Perhaps it wasn’t a skirt at all but a curtain she had found somewhere. She looked older dressed like that and less like a pretty boy. He had made love to her only two hours before, but seeing her like that, her brown polished thighs showing where the hems of the curtain parted, feeling her fingers in his hair, made him want to drive into one of those fields and carry her to a hedge bank where the wild clematis was in bloom and the tall weed flowers gone to seed.

It was hot, oppressively hot, but not as it had been. This heat was humid, making you sweat as soon as you went out into it, causing breathlessness. There was air all around you but you wanted air, you gasped for it. The horizon was lost in a foggy blueness. It did not need a meteorologist to forecast that the long-enduring fine dry weather was drawing to its end. They had all the windows of Goblander open but the heat was still thick and enveloping. Adam knew she had fallen asleep when he felt her hand drop. How she must trust him, he thought. There was no one he could think of he would let drive and go to sleep beside them.

He drove on down the A12 and still she slept, breathing with a gentle childlike rhythm. For a while he thought about words, about two words no one could spell, desiccated and iridescent, even the good spellers could not spell them, and then his mind had drifted back to Zosie and he wondered as he often did if she loved him, if she really loved him, and if his lovemaking gave her pleasure. Did she enjoy it or was her response an act put on for some secret purpose? How could one know? Adam wondered if it was possible she played this game
because she wanted him to go on loving her
even though she might feel no love for him.

He had driven into London along Forest Road, through Walthamstow and Tottenham. There was a smell of oil and soot and stagnant water. By this time Zosie was awake, staring out of the window, saying she had never been here before in these ugly northeastern suburbs. Riots had been unheard of in those days, apart from the old troubles in Notting Hill and the occasional fracas at a soccer match. Zosie had the street atlas open on her lap and she wanted to know where all the reservoirs were (she called them lakes) and the parks and open spaces she could see on the area plans when everything outside was just buildings in a gray heat haze.

At Hornsey Old Church he had gone straight on and up Muswell Hill toward Highgate Wood. If on that journey he had passed within sight of Archduke Avenue where he now lived, he did not think he would have considered buying the house. But he had not and there was nothing about his house or the street in which it was situated to remind him of that drive. Only the gray stone tower had reminded him of it and reading of the riots along the route they had taken.

Adam took a shopping cart and began walking dazedly around the store.

It had not been their Evan but his younger brother. Their Evan was dead. It seemed to Rufus that his adversaries were being bowled over and swept away in rapid succession, first Bella, now the old antiques dealer.

“I was always around,” he said to Rufus blandly. “We were partners. Pure chance we never met, it must have been, though the fact is my brother tended to be the one that went around buying while I minded the shop.”

He drove back to Nunes, absurdly relieved, dying for a drink.

Of course there was no question of having a drink when he had seventy or eighty miles to drive home. He lit a cigarette. In those people’s place, he thought, in the shoes of the coypu man or the meter reader or the farmer or the post girl, he would have gone to the police and volunteered what information he had. He would have thought it his duty, would even have
enjoyed
it. For the first time he saw himself and Adam and Shiva and Vivien and Zosie as the local people must have seen them, wild, feckless, curiously dressed or half-naked, driving around too fast in a dirty, dilapidated van, hippies, drug addicts, the kind it was a pleasure to tell the police about. If they remembered. If they made the connection.

On the Hadleigh side of the village stood the four Hampstead Garden Suburb houses. They seemed far smaller than he remembered. Ten years ago he had not noticed the name of the little curve of road: Fir Close. It was separated from the main road by a half moon of grass on which were planted four or five saplings, sticks without branches that had shed their few leaves. He drew the car in along Fir Close, but found he could not remember on which garage drive he had seen the Vermstroy van, on one of the two center ones, he supposed, but he had no idea which. Nor could he remember what the coypu man looked like. He had only glimpsed him once and that had been when he, Rufus, was lying on the terrace and the coypu man had appeared on the farther shore of the lake, a distance of some two hundred yards.

“Like a brigand,” Adam had said. “Fierce-looking with a big black moustache.”

But Adam had a too-vivid imagination. A woman came out of one of the houses and Rufus wound down the window of the car and asked her if she could tell him where it was the pest control people operated from. He could see at once she didn’t know what he meant.

“We’ve only been here two years,” she said. “The people at the end have got something to do with a hardware firm in Sudbury. It wouldn’t be them? The man next door to us committed suicide but that was years before we came and the widow moved anyway. Did you say a white van? The people at the end had a white van but it was more a mobile caravan.”

They had no real reason to believe the coypu man had lived there. It was an assumption that had been made on very thin evidence and somehow become part of Ecalpemos mythology. Rufus got to the post office ten minutes before it was due to close until Monday morning.

Ten years before it had not been there. The post office had been a prefabricated hut which none of them had ever gone into. After all, they had bought no stamps, sent no letters. This was a shop that took up part of the ground floor of a cottage almost opposite the Fir Tree. Rufus had already noted that the present landlord of the Fir Tree was not the same man who had kept it ten years before when he had met Janet or Janice there for the last time. The landlord’s name was printed above the door to the public bar and Rufus knew it was not the same, though he could not remember what the other one was.

He went into the post office with no story prepared, trusting to inspiration. There was a kind of cubicle with a wire grille behind which a middle-aged man in glasses was intently performing those mysterious tasks with forms and slips of paper and rubber bands postmasters everywhere seem to spend their time at. A youngish woman, stout and smiling, tired-looking, was behind a sweet and newspaper and postcard counter. Rufus picked up a copy of the
Daily Mirror.
There were no other papers remaining, perhaps there had been no others.