A Fatal Inversion (7 page)

That house! How differently did it appear to him from the Berelands’ assessment! To him it was grand and spacious. In the drawing room a pair of pink marble pillars supported the embrasure of the windows. The staircase curved up prettily to a gallery. There was a library that Uncle Hilbert used as his study and, even more awe-inspiring, a gun room with stuffed animals and shotguns on the walls. But the interior meant less—though it was not always to be so—than the grounds, the lake, the woods. The place took on a magical quality for Lewis, who had toward it something of that feeling of the Grand Meaulnes for his lost domain. He used to long for his vacations and grow deeply depressed when they drew to an end. It was a glorious victory when he managed to persuade the grown-ups to let him stay on after his parents had gone back to Manchester.

Aunt Lilian had never had any children and she died in 1960, when she was only fifty-five. Uncle Hilbert took the loss of his wife very hard and the only company he seemed to want was Lewis’s. It was about this time that he started telling Lewis Wyvis Hall would be his one day.

He also informed Lewis’s parents, who got into the habit of saying things like “when all this is yours” and “when you come into your property.” Uncle Hilbert, however, was only just sixty, very hale and hearty, still very much in practice as a solicitor, and Lewis could not imagine stepping into his shoes, nor did he in those days think it very nice to anticipate such things. But he went down to Suffolk very often, much more often perhaps than he would have had Wyvis Hall been destined to pass back to the Berelands or on to one of those cousins in the United States.

His feeling for the place underwent many changes. In the nature of things, meadow, grove, and stream no longer appeared to him appareled in celestial light, the glory and the freshness of a dream. He was growing up. He began to see the grounds as a
possession,
the gardens as something to impress others, the orchard and walled fruit garden as places that would produce delicious food. Although he intended to live in the house for at least part of the time, he saw it, too, as salable and the value or price of it (however you liked to put it) going up every year. The pines in the wood where Uncle Hilbert’s hunt terrier Blaze was the last creature laid to rest he saw as a useful and lucrative crop. He noticed the pieces with which Wyvis Hall was furnished, took books out of the public library on antiques and porcelain and measured the remembered articles against illustrations, catching his breath sometimes at mounting values. Another thing he did was picture himself and his wife in the drawing room receiving dinner guests. The address on his writing paper would simply be: Wyvis Hall, Nunes-by-Ipswich, Suffolk. It was one of Lewis’s ambitions to have an address in which the name of the street might be left out without causing inconvenience to the post office. The house and grounds were marked on the ordnance survey map for that part of Suffolk, and Lewis, when he was feeling low, would get it out and look at it to cheer himself up.

By the 1960s he had married and had two children, a son and a daughter. When his son was born he thought it would be nice, a nice gesture, to name him after Hilbert.

“An old family name,” he told his wife, though this was not true at all, his uncle’s being thus christened having been an isolated instance of the use of Hilbert. There had been a fashion in the late nineteenth century for Germanic names, and his uncle, born in 1902, had caught the tail end of it.

“I don’t like that at all,” his wife had said. “People will think it’s really Gilbert or Albert. I don’t want him teased, poor baby.”

“He will be called by his surname at his public school,” said Lewis, who though poor had grand ideas as befitted the future owner of Wyvis Hall and its acres. So he won, or appeared to win, that battle and the child was christened Hilbert John Adam.

Lewis had written to Uncle Hilbert and told him of his intention to name his son after him, inviting him to be the child’s godfather. Declining on the grounds that he no longer had any religious faith, Uncle Hilbert sent a silver christening mug, large enough to hold a pint of beer. But the note that accompanied it made no mention of the choice of name and it was rather a cold note. Later on, when Lewis and his wife and the baby went to stay at Wyvis Hall, Hilbert’s only comment on his great-nephew’s name was: “Poor little devil.”

By then, anyway, the baby was always called Adam by everyone.

Lewis, who was no fool, soon saw that in some incomprehensible way he had put his uncle’s back up. He set about rectifying matters, attempting to redress the balance. His uncle’s birthday was noted; he must always have a Christmas present bought and sent in good time. He was invited to London and all sorts of treats were held out to him as to how he would be entertained on such a visit, trips to the theater and concerts, a specially organized tour of “Swinging London,” Carnaby Street, King’s Road, and so on. Lewis knew very well he should not do this, that he was sucking up to someone for the sake of inheriting his property. But he could not help himself, he could not do otherwise.

Of course he continued to take his family to Wyvis Hall regularly for their summer holidays. He had a daughter as well now whom he had been tempted to call Lilian but had seen the unwisdom of this in time and named her Bridget. His wife would have liked to go to Cornwall sometimes or even to Majorca but Lewis said it was out of the question, they couldn’t afford it. Perhaps what he really meant was that they couldn’t afford not to go to Nunes. By 1970 you couldn’t buy a derelict cottage in the Nunes neighborhood for less than 4,000 pounds, and Wyvis Hall would fetch five times that.

One day, soon after he had retired from his legal practice, Hilbert told Lewis he had made a will that was “very much to your advantage.” He smiled in a benevolent sort of way when he said this. They were sitting out on the terrace on the low wall of which stood, in pairs, stone figures from classical mythology of a rather embarrassing kind. Under the drawing room window
agapanthus afrianus,
the blue lily, was in full flower. Hilbert and Lewis and Beryl sat in old-fashioned deck chairs with striped canvas seats. Hilbert leaned toward Lewis when he told him about the will and gave him a pat on the knee. Lewis said something about being very grateful.

“I finally made up my mind when you named the boy after me,” said Hilbert.

Lewis said more grateful things and about naming his son Hilbert being only proper and suitable under the circumstances.

“
In
the circumstances,” said Hilbert.

He was in the habit of correcting minor errors of grammar or usage. Adam must have got it from him, Lewis sometimes thought, or perhaps (he much later and very bitterly thought) a similar pedantry in Adam was among the things Hilbert liked about him.

Lewis did not like being corrected, but he had to take it and with a smile. It wouldn’t go on forever. The Verne-Smiths were not long livers. Lewis’s father had died at sixty and his grandfather at sixty-two. His three aunts were all dead at under seventy. Hilbert would be seventy the following year and Lewis said to his wife that his uncle was beginning to look very frail. He began “running down” to Suffolk at weekends by himself, and that Christmas he had his wife accompany him for four days, taking all the Christmas food with them. The woman who came in to clean and the old boy who saw to the garden had been instructed to call him “Mr.” Lewis and he felt very much the heir. His uncle hadn’t much money, he supposed, but there would be a little, enough to put central heating in, say, and have the place redecorated. Lewis hadn’t made up his mind whether to sell Wyvis Hall after he had smartened it up a bit and with the proceeds buy a bigger and better London house and a country cottage or to keep the Hall and sell off some of the land for agriculture. According to his estimate, the result of perusing real estate agents’ windows in Ipswich and Sudbury, Wyvis Hall by the end of 1972 was worth about 23,000 pounds.

It was a continual source of irritation to Lewis that Adam did not show more respect and deference to Hilbert. The boy was offhand and always trying to be clever. He called his great-uncle by his Christian name with no title and did not jump to his feet when the old man entered the room. Lewis pressed Adam to accompany him on those solicitous weekend visits but Adam nearly always said he was too busy or would be bored. There had in fact been only one occasion during those last years that Lewis could remember, and he was sure Adam had only gone because there had been a promise of some shooting. The visit had been far from successful, for Adam had sulked when offered the four-ten, the so-called “lady’s gun.” Sometimes, since then, Lewis had wondered what would have happened if Adam had obeyed him and been kind and polite to the perverse old man. Would Hilbert have left his property to Bridget perhaps or even to the Law Society?

It was to be three more years before his uncle died, thus becoming the longest-lived Verne-Smith that anyone had heard of. The daily woman found him dead one morning in the April of 1976. He was lying on the floor outside his bedroom at the top of the back stairs. The cause of death was a cerebral hemorrhage. Adam was nineteen and in his first year at college, though at that time at home for the Easter break. After the cremation, while the few mourners were looking gloomily at the flowers, his uncle’s solicitor, a partner in the Ipswich practice, spoke to Lewis simply to say that he believed he already knew the contents of the will. Secure as he thought in possession, Lewis brushed this aside as being an unsuitable subject for discussion at such a time. The solicitor nodded and went on his way.

A week later Adam got a letter saying he was the sole beneficiary under the will of his late great-uncle. There was no money, Hilbert having used all he possessed to purchase himself an annuity, but Wyvis Hall and its contents were Adam’s absolutely.

There were traffic jams all along the North Circular Road, a particularly long one at Stonebridge Park, and another at Hanger Lane. Lewis, sensibly, had allowed himself a lot of time. Adam would be very surprised to see him. He would probably think something had happened to his mother and that Lewis was there as the bearer of bad news. Of course in a way he was, though not of that kind. For a moment or two, as he waited in the line behind a truck full of German furniture and a leased moving van, Lewis returned to speculating as to how and why those bones had gotten into the animal cemetery. Frankly, he did not suppose Adam had had anything directly to do with this at all. What seemed likely to him was that Adam had allowed some undesirable person or persons access to the place and it was these vagrants or hippies—there had been a lot of hippies still around then—who were responsible.

Adam himself had never shown any interest in Wyvis Hall, as far as he had noticed. That was part of the unfairness of it. He had seen this unlooked-for inheritance simply as a source of lucre. When the letter came, Lewis had nearly opened it himself. The postmark and the old-fashioned and precise direction (Esquire and the name of the house as well as the street number) told him it was from Hilbert’s old firm. And he thought he knew what had happened. They had made a mistake, that was all, and sent it to his son. Or else it might be that Hilbert had left Adam some small memento or keepsake… .

Adam was lying late in bed. Lewis would never forget that if he forgot all the rest. And he, for his part, was feeling so euphoric that instead of shouting to his son to get up and stir his stumps, he had actually gone in there and put the envelope on Adam’s bedside table. The awful thing was that all this time Lewis had never had any doubts he was himself the new owner of Wyvis Hall.

It must have been a Saturday or else Lewis for some reason or other had the day off from work. Anyway, he was at home that day, home for lunch, and he and Beryl were actually sitting at the table, talking as it happened about going down soon to take a look at the Hall, when Adam came in. He had very long hair at the time and a beard, Lewis remembered, and looked, as they all did, like some kind of weird prophet. To this day Lewis had a picture in his mind of how his son had looked walking into the dining room (or dining area of the living room really) wearing jeans, of course, jeans with ragged hems, and a collarless tunic garment, tie-dyed, with colored inks. Afterward Lewis wished he had said something scathing, alluding perhaps to the lateness of the hour of Adam’s appearance. Well, he had alluded to Adam’s appearance but in a genial way. He had been feeling cheerful, God help him!

“Just in time for the locusts and honey!”

Adam said, “Something rather fantastic, old Hilbert’s left me his house.”

“Yes, very funny,” Lewis had said. “What
has
he left you? His desk? You always said you liked that.”

“No kidding, he’s left me his house. Whatsitsname Hall. Unbelievable, isn’t it? It was quite a shock. You can see the letter if you like.”

Lewis snatched the letter. He had begun to tremble. There it was in black and white: “…the property known as Wyvis Hall at Nunes in the county of Suffolk, the lands pertaining thereto …” but it must be a mistake.

“They’ve mistaken you for me, my boy,” Lewis said grimly.

Adam smiled. “I doubt that.”

“You
doubt it? You know nothing about it. Of course Wyvis Hall is mine, it’s always been a matter of fact it would be mine. This is a simple mixup, a confusion of names, though I must say it amounts to criminal carelessness.”

“You could phone them,” said Beryl.

“I shall. I shall phone them immediately I’ve finished my lunch.”

But he was not able to finish his lunch. He couldn’t eat another mouthful. Adam ate. He ate his way through bread and butter and ham and pickles and drank a half-pint of milk. Lewis went into the hall and phoned Hilbert’s solicitors. The one he wanted was still out to lunch. Adam got up from the table and said he thought he might go over to Rufus’s.

“You’re not going anywhere,” said Lewis. “I forbid you to leave this house.”

“You what?” said Adam, looking at him and grinning.

Beryl said, “Just wait a few minutes, Adam, till we’ve got this cleared up.”