A Fatal Inversion (12 page)

As it turned out he didn’t make the phone call until the evening and they found a phone booth outside a pub in one of the villages, for Great-Uncle Hilbert’s phone had been disconnected. But once they were indoors again they resumed exploring, found a genuine butler’s pantry with a lot of silver in it packed away in canteens and boxes and green baize, and opening the next door, came into the gun room.

Adam, as a child, had been strictly forbidden ever to go in there. Anyway, the door was usually kept locked. Presumably, in pre-Hilbert days, during Bereland squirearchy, it had contained an armory of weapons, for all four walls were hung with gun racks. However, only two types of firearms remained, both shotguns. There was a row of hooks for hanging up jackets and waterproofs.

A glass case on the windowsill contained a fat stuffed trout, another, on the circular table, a turtle—this certainly not of English provenance. The front half of a fox, paws and all, its rear end replaced by a shield-shaped slab of polished wood, appeared to be leaping out of the wall just below the picture rail, in the manner of a circus dog emerging from a paper hoop.

“Those aren’t the sort of things you shoot, though, are they?” Rufus had asked.

“You most definitely don’t shoot foxes.”

Adam said this in such a snooty lord-of-the-manor way that Rufus yelled with laughter. He took one of the guns, the twelve-bore, from the wall and Adam had another go at him, this time for pointing it in his direction.

“It’s not loaded, for God’s sake.”

“Never mind. You don’t point guns at people.” It appeared then that Adam had actually been out shooting the last time he was there. He had been only fifteen and had been given the four-ten, the so-called lady’s gun.

Since then he had often recalled what Adam said next, had taken the gun from him and remarked that it was a pump action shotgun.

“What does that mean?”

“You don’t have to keep re-loading. It’s got a repeating action. You don’t have to put a cartridge in each time before you fire.”

And Rufus, who didn’t mind appearing ingenuous in this area, said, “I thought all firearms worked like that.”

One of the drawers in the pine cabinet was stacked with cartridges, red ones and blue ones which Adam said indicated the size of the shot they contained.

“That’s amazing, me inheriting a couple of guns as well. We might even get some shooting.”

“Not in June, squire. Even I know that.”

Was that the first hint, no more than a joke really, that they might stay at Wyvis Hall, that they might
live
there? And Adam had said: “I didn’t mean now.”

“I thought you were going to sell the place.”

Adam didn’t say any more. They went back down the garden and after that out to a couple of pubs, where they drank a lot and Rufus had to drive back to Wyvis Hall with one eye closed on account of getting double vision. They slept it off, not getting up till around eleven next morning, Rufus in the principal guest room, Adam at the other end of the house in what he christened the Pincushion Room because it had a picture on the wall of St. Sebastian stuck full of arrows. Rufus looked out the window and saw a man trimming the grass around one of the rosebeds with a pair of long-handled shears.

He was elderly, bald, very thin, wearing a striped shirt of the kind that have detachable collars. It was the sound of his clipping that had woken Rufus up. The sun was blazing down and there wasn’t a spot of shade anywhere till you came to the wood below the lake. Rufus, who hadn’t much appreciation of nature usually, nevertheless found himself gazing in something like wonderment at all the roses, yellow and pink and apricot and dark red, a hedge of white ones, a cascade of peach-red that covered a pergola. The man with the shears laid them down on the grass, took a handkerchief from his pocket, made a knot in each of its four corners, and placed this improvised sun hat on his head.

Rufus had never seen anyone do that before, though he had seen it in pictures on seaside postcards. He was entranced. He put on his shorts and his sandals and went down. By the time he got outside, Adam was already there, telling the man in the handkerchief hat that he didn’t want him to come anymore, he was going to sell the house.

“This old garden’ll go to rack and ruin then. I been coming down here watering most nights.”

“That’s not my problem,” said Adam. “The people who buy it will have to handle that.”

“It do seem a wicked shame.” The gardener opened his shears and wiped the grass clipping off the blades with his forefinger. “But it’s not my place to argue. Mr. Verne-Smith paid me up till the end of April, so that’s seven weeks you owe me—let’s say six and a half to be fair.”

Adam looked rather shattered. “I didn’t actually ask you to come.”

“True, but I come, didn’t I? I done the work and I’ll want paying. Fair’s fair. Look at the place. You can’t deny I done the work.”

Adam couldn’t. He didn’t try. In the cagey, suspicious way he sometimes spoke he said: “How much in fact would it be?”

“I come twice a week at a pound a time, so that’s thirteen, say, and then there’s all the times I’ve come with me cans. Fifteen I reckon would cover it.”

It was ludicrously less than Rufus had expected. For all that labor it was ridiculous. But this was the country, this was horticulture, and they ordered things differently there. He and Adam went into the house, where they managed to scrounge up fifteen quid between the two of them, leaving them with just enough to cover the petrol for Goblander to get home on.

Adam paid the man and he went off on a bicycle, still wearing the knotted handkerchief on his head. It was only after he had gone that they realized they had never asked his name or where he lived.

“You could have kept him on for two quid a week. It’s nothing.”

“I haven’t got two quid a week. I’m skint.”

And it was lack of money that stopped them going away. He, Rufus, could have gotten just about enough together for the gasoline en route and maybe his own food. If Adam had had an equal amount they would have managed. In another year, at almost any other time, Adam would have touched his father or more probably his mother for a loan, but in June 1976 his father was barely speaking to him, and his mother would have been scared to go against her husband. Of course if Adam had invited his parents to make themselves at home at Wyvis Hall, use it as a hotel while he was away, they would have lent him any amount, but that was the last thing Adam would have done. He did ask his sister for money. Bridget had been one of those teenagers who work all through their school vacations in restaurants or shops, or cleaning houses, and she always had cash. But she would not lend him any. She was saving up to go skiing the next January, and she knew there wasn’t much chance of Adam repaying a loan by then.

It was ironical that Adam, who was the owner of that big house and all that land and the contents of the house, nevertheless went down to Nunes the second time with less than a fiver in his pocket. And that was everything he had. Instead of Greece they went to Wyvis Hall because Adam was broke and Mary was close to broke and because that first time it had been so beautiful and peaceful and
private
there that you could hardly see what advantages Greece would have had over it. They had intended to stay a week. Rufus had suggested to Adam that he sell something out of the house, a piece of china or some silver. There were almost more antique and second-hand shops in some of those villages than there were houses. He had counted six in the place where they had gone to the pub. They talked about it on the way down in Goblander.

It was funny how good Adam had been at naming things, the rooms in the house, the house itself even, or at naming the idea of it, the concept, Ecalpemos. Goblander was not just an anagram on “old banger,” it really expressed the way that decrepit old van had of gobbling up petrol as it chugged through the countryside making awful noises because it needed a new silencer.

“You’ll never even get near Greece in this,” said Mary. “It’ll just collapse and give up the ghost somewhere in France. I’m warning you.”

Her father was a life peer who had held some sort of office under a Labour government. It must have been the boarding school she had been to that determined her voice—affected, sharp, shrill. She found fault a lot. The car was wrong, his clothes were wrong or funny or somehow unsuitable, he smoked too much, he was too fond of wine, and his whole lifestyle left much to be desired. She started on Rufus for making that shameful suggestion about selling what she called the family silver. How dreadful! What a desecration! He ought to have a feeling of reverence for the beautiful things his great-uncle had entrusted to him.

“He’s not coming back,” said Adam, “to see how I’ve discharged my duties.”

“He’ll turn in his grave.”

“No, there’ll just be a small upheaval in his ashes.”

He told her Great-Uncle Hilbert’s ashes were the contents of an urn-shaped Crown Derby sweets jar that stood on the drawing room mantelpiece. Maybe she believed him, for Rufus had once caught her lifting the lid and looking into the jar at the wood ash Adam had scraped up from the site of the handkerchief man’s last bonfire. Mary was rather difficult but she was also just about the most beautiful girl Rufus had ever come across. It gratified him to be seen in her company. He had always been a bit that way had Rufus, manifestly to be seen to be doing all right for himself, successful, forging ahead, accompanied by the best looking girl possible. Mary was spectacular to look at and her own knowledge that she was made her capricious and difficult and expecting the best of everything. All that was her due because she looked like the young Elizabeth Taylor, had dark brown curly hair nearly to her waist, large dark blue eyes, creamy velvet skin, and a wonderful figure.

It was June 20 when they went back, all Goblander’s windows open, the weather being perfect the way you expected it to be that summer as if it were southern Europe where you woke up each morning to sunshine and unclouded skies. By that time, as Adam said, you would actually have been shocked if the temperature had dropped or a shower of rain fallen.

“It makes you think there mightn’t be an awful lot of point in going to Greece,” he said. “I mean this could be the best summer ever and we’d miss it. It’s always like this in Greece.”

They bought food in Sudbury, quite a lot of food. Adam said the first thing would be to get old Hilbert’s fridge going. Of course, it was his own fridge, but he was still in the habit of speaking as if, as Mary had implied, his great-uncle might return.

It must have been a strange experience for him, Rufus had thought, knowing he owned all sorts of things but not knowing quite what or where they were. They were the sort of things, too, which the parent generation owned, those old people that Adam, until Rufus laughed at him, had inadvertently called the grown-ups: sheets and blankets and knives and forks and pots and pans and more complicated appurtenances of living that if one ever thought about at all one supposed one would have to get together for oneself eventually. Someone else had got it together for Adam, and there it all was. They found some sheets in a walk-in cupboard, linen ones with “LVS” embroidered on them. The sheets felt a bit damp, so Mary spread them out on the terrace in the sun to dry. They ate out there, too, and drank one of the bottles of wine they had brought.

It was an amazing amount of wine they got through down at Wyvis Hall, and not only wine. But that first day they had been able to afford only two bottles of Anjou rosé. Later on they went all over the house, assessing what they might be able to sell, finding out just what Adam’s inheritance amounted to. Rufus had been astonished by the quantities of junk in that house, the ornaments and knick-knacks and stuff like vases and candlesticks and ashtrays and glass and brass Hilbert Verne-Smith and his wife had accumulated over the years. Mary got stroppy about it and said it was wrong what they were doing, it was a desecration. But Adam had retorted quite reasonably that it was
his
now, didn’t she understand that? It was as much his to do as he liked with as the sandals on his feet and the change from that fiver he had in his pocket after buying the rosé. And then Mary said she felt as if Hilbert were there with them as they riffled through chests and drawers and cupboards; she could feel his presence standing behind them, looking over her shoulder.

By then it was dark, it was nighttime. And at Wyvis Hall, below the woods and above the river, with the nearest road half a mile away and the nearest house twice as far as that, total silence prevailed. The sky was clear, the color of a very dark blue jewel, and on the surface of the lake the stars were mirrored. The house was full of moths because they had left the doors and windows open after they put the lights on. Mary screamed when a bat flew close to her, she said bats got in your hair, a bat had got into the hair of some relative of hers and bitten her scalp. Mary’s scream sounded particularly loud in that dark silence. There was a loud echo in the grounds of Wyvis Hall, Mary’s scream ringing back from off the wood and walls and starry waters, and Rufus, a town dweller who had never spent much time in the countryside, expected alarmed or annoyed people to arrive or the disconnected phone to start shrilling with complaints. Of course nothing happened. They could all have screamed the place down, Mary could have been bitten to death by bats, and no one would have come.

That was part of the trouble, that was how it was that events were set in motion. If Wyvis Hall had been less isolated, less silent …

Rufus had come a long way since the Goblander days, and the car he got into to drive himself to the hospital he attended two mornings a week was a BMW not yet a year old. At the garage where he bought petrol they offered him a complementary sherry glass because he had bought more than thirty liters. Rufus refused. He already had two of the things clinking about on the backseat. But the sight of the glass took him back into the past again, the past which he believed he had exorcised but was now fetched back in fragments and longer scenarios by every possible association. He had sat in that locked room talking, therapist and patient both, had talked it out over and over. To the site of his trauma he had returned and relived it. He might just as well not have bothered, for it was there still, it would be there forever, unless one day they found how to cut memory out of the brain with a scalpel.