A Fatal Inversion (6 page)

To photograph the house for the news last night the cameraman must have stood just where he had stood himself, on the edge of the lawn with his back to the cedar tree. A popular mass-produced camera he had used but quite a good one. One thing about Zosie’s pilfering; she never stole rubbish. He had taken a picture of her after that and one of the animal cemetery.

“Why is the grass always so short up here?” Adam had asked.

“Rabbits, I expect.”

“Why can’t bloody rabbits come and eat my lawns?”

Adam always referred to “my lawns,” “my house,” “my furniture.” It had got up Rufus’s nose a bit, though Adam had a perfect right to do this. It was his, all of it, and it went to his head rather. Nineteen-year-olds seldom inherit country mansions, after all.

It must have been sometime in August when I took those pictures, Rufus thought, and a couple of weeks later it was all over. Coincidentally, as the community and their lives together broke up, so did the weather. It was raining intermittently all the time they were in the cemetery, the pines bowing and shivering in the wind. Sometimes they had had to stop and take shelter under the closely planted trees.

If the weather had held and it had still been hot and dry, would they have dug deeper? Probably not. In spite of the rain, the earth was still hard as iron. A sheet of rain had come down then, a hard, gusty shower, while they were laying the squares of turf back in place, and Adam had said something about the rain making the grass grow quickly, the rain being on their side.

“We should all go our separate ways as soon as we can,” Rufus had said. “We should pack up now and go.”

The spade and the fork they had hung up among the other tools in the stables. They had packed and Adam had locked up the house. At some point Rufus himself had taken the things out of the fridge and left the door open to defrost it. Adam closed the front door and stood there for a moment as if he could not wrench himself away.

So much of its beauty had been stripped from it by the whipping winds. And by the neglect of the long hot summer. A sudden gust of rain dashed against the red bricks that were already stained in patches by water. The house that when he first saw it had seemed to float on a raft of golden mist now lay in a wilderness, amid ragged grass and straggling bushes and trees dead from the heat. Dirty gray clouds tumbled across the sky above the slate roof, now the only thing that shone, glazed with rain.

But Rufus admitted to himself that the beauties of nature and architecture had never meant much to him. It was the heat and sunshine and privacy he liked. And now he longed only to get away. They all got into Goblander and he drove away up the drift, Adam next to him, the others in the back. The drift had become a tunnel of overgrowth that dripped water onto the roof of the van. None of them allowed their eyes to turn toward the pinewood. At the top they came out into uncompromising bright gray light, the bleak hedgeless lane, the flat meadows where here and there stunted trees squatted like old men in cloaks. Adam’s simile, not mine, thought Rufus with a grimace.

No one asked where he was taking them. No one spoke. Adam had Hilbert’s old golf bag stuck between his legs and Rufus guessed the gun was inside it. They must have gone a good two miles before they met another car. Rufus overtook a bus going to Colchester and dropped the two in the back so that they could catch it. He took Adam on to Sudbury for him to catch a train there and at that point they parted. Adam got down from Goblander and said, “For ever and forever farewell, Rufus.”

Which was probably a quotation from something, though Rufus did not know what and thought fastidiously that it was in bad taste, histrionic, though just like Adam.

“Take care,” said Rufus, and not looking back any more than he had done when they returned from the cemetery, drove off around the town he had gotten to know so well, over the Stour bridge, into Essex, heading for Halstead and Dunmow and Ongar and London.

He never had seen any of them again. There had been no need to pretend, to turn aside. Briefly, starting his fifth year in medical school something over thirteen months later, he had wondered if Shiva Manjusri would be one of the incoming freshmen. But no, his intuition had been accurate. At any rate Shiva’s face was not among the several brown faces. As for the others, avoiding them had presented no problems.

Would they get in touch with him now?

No contingency plans had been made for this eventuality. So long as there was no hunt for a missing girl they had felt themselves reasonably safe. Their minds had not reached out to the terror of what had in fact happened. None of them had been the kind of people who could have imagined devotion to a pet animal or according to it funerary rites. It was Shiva who had proposed the site. They had congratulated him on his ingenuity.

Ten years …

An ovarian cyst, nothing to get upset about, Rufus told Ms. Beauchamp. She was thirty-two, an editor with a distinguished publishing house, married to an investigative journalist. As yet they had no children, but she wanted four, she told Rufus.

“No reason why you shouldn’t.” He had another glance at her notes. “In fact, a peculiarity about this condition is that it seldom if ever occurs in a woman who’s had a baby.”

“My God,” she said, putting her coat on, “and there was I, making my husband’s life a misery, sure I’d got the dreaded C.”

They all thought they’d got the dreaded C, poor things. You couldn’t blame them. Rufus took her forty pounds off her by the reception desk, having set in motion the arrangements by which she would be admitted to a fashionable West End clinic, Rufus, her surgery and her hospitalization ultimately paid for by some provident association to which she and her husband subscribed. Rufus shook hands. He walked back to his consulting room, dying for a cigarette.

This was unlike him. He could usually get through quite easily until after lunch. He thought, I know what my idea of heaven would be, if by heaven we mean a place of bliss in which to pass eternity: a sanctuary where one might chain-smoke without impairment of breathing, destruction of the lungs, or damage to the heart, light each fresh cigarette from the glowing butt of its predecessor, and drink ice-free but hundred-proof chilled vodka laced with two drops of angostura and a gill of newly opened Perrier endlessly, with increasing euphoria, until a peak of joy and ease was reached but without any subsequent nausea or pain or dehydration or oblivion… .

Sitting alone, he lit his cigarette, the first of the day, and there came that faint swimming in the head, a tautening of the gut. He closed his eyes. If it comes to light that I was in that house with Adam and the others, he thought with cold clarity, if someone tells the papers, or the police and then the papers, that I was there during the summer of 1976, living there, it will be all up with me. I will lose my practice and my reputation and everything that I have and can look forward to, if not my liberty. And without the rest I won’t care about my liberty. It would be bad enough if I were a GP or an expert in some other branch of medicine, an orthopedic surgeon, for instance, or an ear, nose, and throat man, but I am a
gynecologist,
and it is the bones of a young woman and a baby that have been found there… . What worried woman would come to me? What Mrs. Strawson or Ms. Beauchamp? What GP would send her to me?

If I were innocent, thought Rufus, I know very well what I would do. I would pick up the phone and phone my solicitor and ask to come and see him and get his advice. He might advise me to make a statement to the police, which I would, of course, do under his guidance. But I shall not do this because I am not innocent. I shall sit here and wait and sweat it out and look the facts in the face, trying to anticipate the worst that can happen.

5

WHEN HE SAID
he did not know the date of Adam’s return, Lewis Verne-Smith had not lied to the police. It would have been very unusual for him to have known a fact like that about his son’s life and movements. If not exactly estranged, they were not close. Lewis was inclined to say he had “no time for” Adam. He believed his son disliked him and this he thought outrageous. Sometimes he thought about Adam when he was a child and what a dear little boy he had been, affectionate and not troublesome.

“They undergo a complete change when they grow up,” he said to Beryl. “Adam, for instance, he might not be the same person.”

He had decided to find out when Adam was coming back and drive to Heathrow and meet the plane. Adam lived as far away from the parental home as was possible while still living in North London. Without saying anything to his wife, Lewis drove to Muswell Hill and checked that Adam’s car was in its garage. It was. This meant they must have had a hired car to take them to the airport or have gone by tube. Adam’s own car was bigger and newer than Lewis’s and very clean and well polished, all of which Lewis disliked.

An obscure feeling that he ought to have a key to this house made him resentful. It was something he found hard to understand, though, of course, it must be accepted, this escape of children from the parental bonds so that they could have secrets from you and hiding places you couldn’t penetrate, that they were adults and possessed houses and cars which you had had no hand in choosing or buying, that they could lock up those houses as they locked up their thoughts.

He made his way around the side of the house, peering in at the windows, noting that some dishes, though washed, had been left on the drainboard. There were dead flowers in a vase half full of green water. Lewis held simultaneously two opposing views of his son, one that he was a feckless, idle, good-for-nothing layabout and the other that he was a hard, ruthless, astute and already well-off businessman. When the former view of Adam predominated, Lewis felt easier, happier, more justified.

On the way it had occurred to him that he might find the police at Adam’s. It would not have surprised him as he walked clockwise around the house to have met a policeman proceeding in the opposite direction. However, there was no one around, not even the neighbors. Lewis stood on the front lawn, looking up at the bedroom windows.

It was a very nice house, bigger than Lewis’s own and in a more attractive neighborhood, a neo-Georgian double-fronted detached house, altogether superior to the kind of thing most married men of twenty-nine could afford to live in. Adam could afford it because of the money he got from the sale of Wyvis Hall and later from the sale of the London house he bought with the money from the sale of Wyvis Hall. If things had happened differently, he, Lewis, would be living in a house like this or in a flat in Central London with a cottage in the country as well. And Adam would have what was proper for someone of his age and standing in the world, a terraced cottage in North Finchley or maybe Crouch End, first rung on the slow ladder of upward mobility. Lewis thought bitterly that as it was, the only possible next step up for Adam would be Highgate Village… .

He drove home and this time he felt able to phone the travel agent friend of Adam’s without fear of a rebuff. And the man was very pleasant, reminding him that they had met at Adam’s wedding. He had no objection to telling him when Adam and Anne were returning: next Tuesday on the Iberia Air Lines flight from Tenerife that got in at 1:30 P.M.

After he had hung up, Lewis considered informing the police; he thought this might be his duty, but on the other hand he did not want the police actually to be there when Adam arrived. He told his wife (and himself) that he was going to meet Adam in order to break the news gently to him that these awful discoveries had been made at Wyvis Hall and that foul play might have taken place while he, Adam, was actually its owner.

“Aren’t you getting things out of proportion?” said Beryl.

“How so?”

“There hasn’t been anything said about foul play yet.”

But even as she said this, as Lewis later rather dramatically told her, the
Standard
was on the streets announcing that police were treating the case as murder. It was only a few lines, it was tucked away, all very low key, but the word
murder
was there to be seen and read.

As he set off for the airport, Lewis remembered that he had told Adam from the first that only trouble could come from a person of his youth and inexperience inheriting a big house and land of the dimensions of Wyvis Hall. And he was right, for trouble had come, if rather tardily. Ten years it had taken, more than ten years. In some ways it seemed longer than that to Lewis and in others only yesterday. On the other hand, he could not remember a time when it had not been taken for granted the Hall would one day be his own.

The Verne-Smiths were minor gentry. Lewis’s grandfather had been a parson in a Suffolk village, with nothing but his stipend to live on, and the father of seven children. Two of them had died young, one of Lewis’s aunts had married and gone to America, the other two had remained spinsters, living as many unmarried women in the country used to, in tiny cottages in the middle of a village, busy in a mouselike way about parochial matters, having no youth, earning nothing, buried alive. The remaining brothers, his father and his Uncle Hilbert, were much younger. His father also took holy orders while Hilbert, practicing as a solicitor in Ipswich, took care of himself by marrying a rich woman.

The Berelands were wealthy landowners. If a son or daughter married and no suitable home was in the offing, a house would be made available. Lilian Bereland brought Wyvis Hall with her, not as a grace and favor dwelling to revert to her family on her or her husband’s death but hers to do absolutely as she liked with. Of course, in her father’s estimation, it was not much of a house, a warren of smallish rooms was how he saw it, and set in a damp situation on the side of a river valley. There was not much sale for that kind of thing at the time of Hilbert’s marriage.

The parson and his wife and children used to go there for their holidays. Lewis’s father’s parish was on the outskirts of Manchester and the vicarage was Victorian-Byzantine-Gothic soot-blackened yellow bricks with the pseudo-Romanesque windows picked out in red bricks. Black-leaved ilexes grew in the churchyard and a brassy laburnum had flowers on it for one week out of the year. Wyvis Hall was the most beautiful place the seven-year-old Lewis had ever seen and the countryside was glorious. In those days the fields were still small and surrounded by hedges and the lanes ran deep between lush banks. Wild orchids grew in the fens and monkshood and hemp agrimony on the borders of the little streams where there were caddis flies and water boatmen and dragonflies in gold velvet or silver armor. Clouded Yellow butterflies abounded and Small Coppers and Blues and once the little boy saw a Purple Emperor. A pair of spotted woodpeckers nested in what was known as the Little Wood below the lake, and when the nuts were ripe on the copper cob trees, a nuthatch came up quite close to the house.