A Fatal Inversion (42 page)

“Let’s get on with it.”

The rain had eased up a little. In procession they went up into the pinewood, not yielding to the idea of using the heavy old wooden wheelbarrow that stood in the stables, but carrying the wrapped bodies, Rufus taking Vivien on his shoulders, and Zosie with the baby. Adam and Shiva each carried tools, the heavy spade and a fork, the lighter spade they had used to bury the coypu in the Little Wood being unaccountably missing. Or it had been unaccountable then. Now Rufus knew it had been taken by the gardener who came to Wyvis Hall at dawn and whose footsteps sent Adam to the gun room and the gun, who was in a way responsible for Adam’s using the gun.

Adam woke very early on Friday morning, at about five. Waking had been preceded by a dream in which Hilbert and Lilian, with himself and Bridget and their parents in attendance, were burying the body of their only child in the cemetery in the pinewood. The body could not be seen, for it was sealed up in a tiny coffin of walnut veneered in a flame pattern. Lilian and Hilbert looked less like themselves, or after a time began to look less like themselves than like the parents in the picture. Adam knew he had dreamed this because of what his father had said to him the evening before about Blaze’s funeral. He lay in the dark, wondering if this was the day on which his world would end. He had taken to wondering this every morning.

In the dream Hilbert and Lilian had been doing the digging themselves, having selected the plot next to where Blaze was buried, and they were digging deep. They dug deeper than their own height, so that not even the tops of their heads showed above the brink of the grave. When they had dug, Shiva and Rufus, and then he had taken over from Shiva, they had not been so thorough, and had gone down no more than three feet. If we had dug deeper, thought Adam, if we had dug the statutory six feet down, none of this would have happened… .

But it had been three feet, not six. Even so it took them a long time and the worst part was putting the earth back, seeing the earth trickle into the folds of cloth, the strands of hair. If the grave had only been deep, deep enough for a man as tall as Rufus to stand in and his head not show above ground level. They had been oppressed with fear, and cold and wet, shivering in the rain, wanting to get on with it and get it over. A Monday morning at the end of summer and the end of the world …

Up there you could just hear the traffic, what there was of it, a car or two passing, and once, horse’s hooves. Shiva had cut the turf back carefully before they began digging, cut it out in squares with the spade. He had laid the squares on one side ready for replacement when the grave was filled. Rain, which had been falling intermittently all the time they worked, now came down in a glassy sheet. Yet it was as if the rain were on their side, falling swiftly on the grave to make the grass grow over it.

In the pinewood, among the dense growth of black tree trunks, they took refuge. It was bone-dry in there, dark, scented and close. You could hear the rain but not feel it. Hours seemed to have passed since anyone had spoken, it was as if they had all been stricken dumb, but inside the pinewood Adam spoke to Zosie.

“Are you all right?”

She moved out of the circle of his arm. “Oh, yes.”

They put the turf back and trod on it, pressing it down. The sky was all clouds, the treetops swinging. The cedar was doing its witchlike dance, clapping its branches in their black sleeves, when they came out of the wood and approached the house.

Shiva hung up the fork in the stable where the tools were kept but Adam held on to the spade. He went into the house, into the gun room where the turtle was and the fox came bursting out of the wall, and fetched the four-ten, the lady’s gun, and then he and Zosie went down to the Little Wood and buried it near the spot where they had buried the coypu. He had meant to bury both guns, the lightweight shotgun and the heavier pump action, the one he had used, but when it came to the point he was afraid.

Up in the cemetery he had spoken only to remark on the rain falling, the rain being on their side. But Rufus had said: “We should all go our separate ways as soon as we can. We should pack up now and go.”

“I haven’t got a separate way,” Zosie said.

Alone upstairs with Adam she said it as they bundled up their clothes into bags and Adam put the gun into Hilbert’s golf bag. Zosie wrapped up the belt with studs in her pink T-shirt and put them and the rest of her clothes and the jeans she had made into shorts into her backpack.

“I shall go to my mother.”

“But how will you? Where is your mother?”

She gave him a timid sidelong look, the small frightened cat, the hare that hears a stick break underfoot.

“Here,” she said. “In Nunes?”

“In
Nunes
?”

“They moved here from Ipswich a week before I came.”

“Zosie, were you on your way to Nunes when Rufus picked you up?”

“Yes, of course. I did say to him to go to Nunes, though I didn’t want to. I was scared. I knew they didn’t want me. Well, they couldn’t have. Look how they never searched for me.”

Adam had had that feeling of faintness again that came from terror slipping out of control. He put his hand up to his head, pressing on the bone with cold fingertips. There was a cough, a knock, and Shiva came in. He was carrying Vivien’s carpet bag.

“What am I to do with this?”

“I don’t know. God knows.”

“Can Rufus take me to my mother?” said Zosie.

Adam knew it was impossible. He tried to explain why. Their future safety lay in its not being known they knew one another or had been here. But Zosie would be bound to come out with it. Where would she say she had been? But even as he explained to her he felt that the responsibility for her should be his. Was he to abandon her? Where would she go? She had nowhere and no one. She had less than Vivien, who at least had had the squat and then the job with Tatian… .

Adam went downstairs, Shiva following him. He filled a glass with water and drank it, hoping it would stop his being sick. His stomach was empty and felt hollow but he knew that would not prevent him from vomiting.

Rufus sat at the table, his things ready, the van keys in front of him. He had emptied the fridge, packed the food into a box, switched the fridge off, and left the door open. Someone had washed and dried up the breakfast things. Shiva, presumably. And Shiva had put Vivien’s flower remedies into the carpet bag. No one had eaten anything since breakfast. It would be a long time before any of them could eat, Adam thought.

He said, “Rufus, listen, what are we going to do about Tatian? He’ll expect Vivien to come today. When she doesn’t turn up he’s going to wonder, isn’t he? I mean, he’s not just going to accept she’s changed her mind.”

“He’s not going to tell the police either,” said Rufus.

“He might tell them.” Shiva had been a sick yellow color since the morning. He looked as if he were recovering from an illness or about to succumb to one. “It’s his friends whose baby has disappeared. If Vivien doesn’t come, they may connect her with that.”

Adam sat down opposite Rufus. He felt weak, drained of all strength. The rain lashed the windows on a sudden gust and the start it made him give brought a sob up into his throat.

“Steady,” said Rufus, quite kindly for him.

“I’m all right. I’ll be all right.”

“Sure you will. We’re going to have to phone Tatian.”

“Oh, God, no!”

“I’ll do it,” Rufus said quickly. “What else can we do? We’re going to have to tell him Vivien’s been taken ill or something like that. He knows where she lives, you see.”

“He knows where she lives?”

“She told him Ecalpemos, Nunes, Suffolk. He’s going to remember that when she doesn’t come, and because the police will have interviewed him and asked him to let them know anything odd that has happened or does happen, he’s going to tell them about her. And they’ll be down here at every house. There aren’t many houses in Nunes, so it won’t take them long to find this one.”

“That’s what I said,” said Shiva. “I said they’d question him.”

Rufus’s eyebrows went up. “So you did.”

“Who’s going to do the phoning?”

“Not you,” said Adam. “You’ve got an accent. You sound Indian—or Welsh. He might be suspicious.”

“Oh, I’ll do it,” said Rufus.

“And would you—I mean is it at all realistic to think of Zosie going home? She wants to go home to her parents in Nunes.”

“In
Nunes
?”

“Yes, I know. She thought you might drive her home. I’ve told her it’s impossible, but what alternative is there?”

She had provided it herself, coming quietly into the room and standing on the threshold wearing Vivien’s blue dress.

The instant he heard Abigail, Adam got out of bed, went into her room and picked her up. He prepared orange juice for her, changed her napkin, loving to do these things, wondering how many more mornings he would be there to do them.

The paper came. He heard it fall on the doormat and the letterbox give a double slam. Like when the post girl brought the rates bill that time and then the electricity bill. The red flash of the bicycle past the window, the slam-slam of the letterbox.

Abigail sitting in the crook of his arm, he picked up the paper, stomach clutching, heart making it apparent to him that he possessed a heart in there in the cage of his ribs, sensations he had every morning now. He opened the paper and scanned the pages. Nothing, still nothing. There had been nothing since Sunday.

He wasn’t interested in the post. He didn’t receive many letters at home anyway. Bills would come and the occasional postcard and junk mail. This morning it was Anne who fetched the letters, wordlessly, cold-faced, putting the envelope down by his plate.

He was giving Abigail her breakfast and it was ten minutes before he opened it.

Rufus was shaking hands with Mrs. Shaw who was still enthusing over the success of her hormone replacement therapy when the special messenger arrived. His name was scrawled on the envelope and Rufus, though he hadn’t seen it for ten years, recognized the handwriting as Adam’s. It took all the nerve he had and all the resources to continue making amiable rejoinders, but he did continue, a paralyzed smile stuck on his face like a mask he had put on, and at last she was paying up and going and he could take the envelope—and its contents, whatever they might be—back into his room. With ten minutes to spare before the next patient.

You do not put off things because they threaten you, because you are afraid. It was a rule of life he had made his since before Ecalpemos. He opened the envelope with a paper knife, making himself breathe regularly. When he saw it was newsprint inside, he quailed but he unfolded it. Scrawled across the top of the sheet by a hand that had trembled were the words:
The Coypu Man.

Instead of coming over to speak to him, Rufus had gone first to the bar. He saw Adam sitting in the corner and he raised his hand to him, went to the bar, and now approached, carrying two glasses. It was almost a week later. There was an intimacy in Rufus’s manner that showed itself in the absence of any greeting or formal inquiries, and an extreme casualness too.

“I can drink them both if you don’t want one,” he said,

“Oh, I don’t mind having a drink,” said Adam.

Rufus lifted his glass. “Absent friends!”

That seemed to Adam in atrocious bad taste. He did not echo it. He said, “Most of it was in our own heads, wasn’t it? There was never much in the papers, little paragraphs, a line here and there. Of course there was that bit on television while I was still away but nothing more. I suppose the police had an idea of the truth from the first. They never really suspected us or my great-uncle or Langan. They knew from the first it was the coypu man.”

Rufus was looking strangely at him. “But it wasn’t.”

Shaking his head as if he were shaking off a delusion, Adam said, “I don’t mean that. I mean all that questioning of me wasn’t to find out about me but about the coypu man. Only I saw it back to front.” He muttered softly, “My guilt made me see it back to front.”

He looked terrible, Rufus thought, aware that he himself was looking particularly well. Only that morning a Mrs. Llewellyn (polyps and a partial prolapse) had told him he looked too young to be a consultant on Wimpole Street. Adam was gaunt and hollow-eyed, gray-skinned. And he couldn’t keep still. Instead of relaxing now that all was over, he was fiddling with his glass, making those interlocking wet rings.

Rufus took the clipping from the
East Anglian Daily Times
out of his wallet, unfolded it, and laid it on the table. His glance picked out a few salient words, words he knew by heart anyway:

“Zoe Jane Seagrove …” “…infant daughter …” “…stepfather Clifford William Pearson, died November 1976. An inquest verdict was recorded of suicide while the balance of his mind was disturbed. A police spokesman said that the Wyvis Hall case is closed and no further inquiries will be made.”

“Do you want this back?”

“I shouldn’t think so. I don’t know who sent it to me, but it must have been someone who knew I’d—be interested is a bit of an understatement, isn’t it? I suppose it was Shiva. There was nothing more, just the cutting in an envelope.” Rufus said nothing, knowing it couldn’t have been Shiva, suddenly averse to guessing who it might have been. “What do you think made her mother sure it was Zosie in that grave?” Adam said.

“The ring surely. She put her ring on the baby’s hand.”

“Yes.”

“There would have been pellets of shot too mixed up with the gravel. Even if they had found it by sifting the gravel, those woods must be full of shot. Or perhaps they think Pearson shot her.”

Adam said in a low voice, “She said to me once, ‘He kills little things, he has no mercy.’ All the time she must have known the man we called the coypu man was her stepfather. She must have been afraid he would come back and find her, hurt her as he had threatened to, put her mother against her. Had he been her—lover? The father of her child?”

“Who knows?” Rufus said dismissively. “It’s an interesting thing that the story didn’t even make the national papers, it got no further than a provincial daily. It wasn’t important enough.”