A Fatal Inversion (16 page)

It was through Bella, of course, that Vivien found them and with her the Indian, Shiva, whose other name Adam could not remember.

Mary was the only one of them, as far as he knew, who had ever walked to the village and walked around in the village when she got there. It would not matter what any inhabitant of Nunes told the police about Mary, for she had departed soon after that. And if people remembered her, they would not have known where she came from. She had gone to the village—as Vivien had later gone—to use the public phone booth outside the Fir Tree. Probably she went into the Fir Tree or the village shop to get change for those calls. She had been phoning people who might go to Greece with her or drive her there or, failing that, pay her air fare, and eventually she succeeded in getting a loan from an aunt and an offer of a place in a minibus from an old schoolfellow and her boyfriend.

The day before she left he thought of a new name for his house. For some days he had been mulling this over, trying to come up with something more interesting than Wyvis Hall. Myopotamus Manor, which had occurred to him, was just a joke. He began anagraming, twisting letters around, keeping in mind where they
had
been going, where Mary was still going… .

Ecalpemos.

He asked the others what they thought Ecalpemos was.

“A Greek island,” said Mary.

“Not an island,” said Rufus. “More like a mountain. A volcano.”

“Or a resort on the Costa Brava.”

“You just made it up,” said Rufus lazily. “It does sound rather like a community. Oneida, Walden, Ecalpemos.”

“It doesn’t sound in the least like Oneida or Walden. I know what it is, it’s like Erewhon that’s ‘nowhere’ backward.”

Adam was surprised at Mary’s perspicacity but annoyed that she was leaving. He didn’t like her much but he wanted her to stay. He was finding he resented people who did not care for Wyvis Hall as much as he did.

“You don’t know the difference between an anagram and an inversion, do you?” he said. “Bloody illiteracy always puts my back up. Why talk about it if you don’t know?”

“Hey-hey,” said Rufus. “I’m the one that quarrels with her, remember?”

“Erewhon is an anagram of ‘nowhere.’ Ecalpemos is ‘someplace’ inverted.”

“Well, well, very clever. Don’t you find ‘someplace’ has too much of an American flavor?”

“I don’t give a sod about that,” said Adam. “It’s not being called ‘someplace’ anyway, it’s going to be Ecalpemos.”

Which thereafter it always was.

The next day was the 30th of June, a Wednesday. Mary wanted Rufus to drive her all the way back to London, but he said Colchester was his limit and she could get a train from there. There was a certain rapprochement though as Mary came down with her things in the backpack Rufus had lent her and wearing jeans and a pair of sandals for the first time for days.

“I actually adored it,” she said to Adam, “only I’d promised myself I’d go to Greece these holidays and I absolutely can’t not go now.”

“That’s okay. Ecalpemos will still be here next year.”

“I did wonder if you’d like me to send cards to your parents and Rufus’s from Athens. I mean ones you’d write here and I’d take them with me.”

“By a quite exceptional oversight,” said Rufus, “I don’t just happen to have any picture postcards of the Acropolis about me at present.”

“It was just a thought,” Mary said sulkily. “It didn’t have to be cards, it could have been a letter.”

“If mine got a letter from me,” said Rufus, “they’d think I was dying or in jail.”

It amounted to the same thing for him. And why bother to write anyway? What was there to say? Mary had some vague idea that Adam’s parents might suspect he was down here and come to see him. But Adam couldn’t see why they should. If only he had acceded to that suggestion of hers! The ironical thing was that all the time, in a stack in Hilbert’s desk, secured by a rubber band, were fifty or so old postcards collected by Hilbert and Lilian presumably on early travels and among them were two of Greece, one of Mount Lycabettos and the other the very view Rufus had spoken of so scathingly.

But they hadn’t known that then, and if they had could not have known how much one day such postcards would have supported the story Adam was beginning to think he would tell. Always supposing their parents had kept the postcards, which, considering their rarity value, they might well have done. Mary’s offer had been rejected without their thinking twice about it, and she and Adam had said good-bye in a cool, offhand sort of way and Rufus had driven her off to the station in Goblander.

From that day to this Adam had never set eyes on Mary Gage and had hardly ever thought of her. If she had come into his mind, he had operated his canceling switch as he did when any of the denizens of Ecalpemos strayed into his thoughts. Once, not long ago, an old film called
National Velvet
had been on television and when the young Elizabeth Taylor appeared on the screen, he had at once been sharply reminded of Mary—and had exited, not with the escape key but the switch on the set.

He and Rufus had talked about money later that day. What could they sell next? Even to Adam’s ignorant eye the Victorian water colors of moorland or mountain streams, mounted on gold paper and framed in gilt, were valueless. There was a strange picture in one of the bedrooms of a centaurlike creature, a horse with the torso and head of a man, presenting itself at a forge to be shod, where it was eyed with fearful fascination by the smith and a crowd of onlookers. When they cut away the paper at the back of the frame, it proved to be a Boecklin but a print cut from a magazine, the original being in Budapest. They called the room where it hung the Centaur Room. Another strange picture hung in Hilbert’s room, one that Adam had never allowed himself to think about. Since the birth of Abigail it would have been torture. And, besides, the picture no longer existed, having been burned by Adam himself, destroyed on that pyre with certain other things.

A large gloomy bedroom had been the setting of it, hung with draperies, not the kind of thing you would expect a child to sleep in, but it was a little child that lay on the bed, white and still, the elderly man, evidently a doctor, who had seemingly just lifted a mirror from the parted lips, turning to the young father and imparting the news of death, while the mother in a transport of grief clung to her husband, her head buried in his shoulder. Adam confronted this remembered picture now with a kind of stoicism. He forced himself to see it and recall those things that were connected with it. How extraordinary it seemed that he and Rufus had stood in front of that picture and
laughed
at it! To remember this now brought him an actual physical pain in the deeps of his body, in his intestines. He and Rufus had stood there drinking wine. Rufus had the last bottle of wine in his left hand and a glassful in his right. They were walking around the house speculating as to what they should sell and had paused here in this far from gloomy room, this warm, sunny, charming room, and laughed at that gloomy picture, at its sentimental naiveté. In fact, he had even made some appropriately sophisticated comment.

“Dead and never called me Mother,” it had probably been.

That was the reason they named it the Deathbed Room.

On into the Room Without a Name they had passed and through to the room it communicated with, the Room of Astonishment, so called because it had a cupboard in it with a little staircase inside that wound its way up into the loft. They considered the salability of a washstand, a swinging mirror, a flowered pottery basin and jug, and then as they descended by the back stairs, the plates in dull red and dark blue and gold glaze that hung on the wall there and might, from the hieroglyphs on their backs, possibly be Chinese and perhaps valuable.

Next day they had taken the mirror and the pottery and the porcelain to Long Melford because there were more antique shops in Long Melford than anywhere else they had seen, but twenty pounds was all they got for the lot. When people came to join the commune, Adam thought, they would have to pay, they would have to contribute. And how were any suitable people going to know about it when he had no phone, or no phone that worked, and Mary Gage had probably forgotten all about this Bella?

There, of course, he had been wrong. All the time he and Rufus were living it up, driving about the countryside in Goblander, driving to London once to buy marijuana from the dealer Rufus knew in Notting Hill, drinking and smoking (as he had put it) Hilbert’s furniture away, all that time Vivien and her boyfriend Shiva were making arrangements to join Ecalpemos. And they were expecting, of course, a well-run settlement, a sort of East Anglian kibbutz, where the members had appointed duties, where vegetarianism prevailed and brown rice had an almost holy significance, and discussions on mystical or occult or philosophic subjects went on long into the night.

But first Zosie had come.

Rufus, driving back from London with the hashish his dealer swore was genuine Indian
charas
and a package of best Colombian, picked her off the street—“a piece of property that is found ownerless.” And she had slept with Rufus in the Centaur Room, it being taken for granted she would share his bed, though Adam did not think her wishes had been consulted. Rufus was a bit of a centaur himself, a big roan stallion, and she was a little cat-eyed waif.

It must have been a day or two afterward that she had seen the picture. Exploring the house on the following day or the day after that, she had ventured into the Deathbed Room. She had gone in and looked at that picture and come running down the stairs crying, with her hands up to her face and the tears pouring.

“Why did you let me go in there? Why didn’t you tell me what was in there?”

Just for a moment, standing by the window, dropping the edge of the curtain he had lifted and turning back toward the crib, Adam saw the picture again, saw it with an awful clarity on the darkness before his eyes.

The painting was destroyed. He had burned it himself on the fire he had made against the fruit garden wall and it might be that no copies of it existed, yet in his mind’s eye it recreated itself, the child forever stilled, its face a waxen mask, the old doctor haggard with sorrow and lack of sleep, the mirror no breath had misted held in his hand, the parents in each other’s arms.

9

BECAUSE HE WAS
without a qualification Shiva was not permitted to dispense. Kishan, with his pharmacology degree, did that, and Mira, Kishan’s wife, helped out at particularly busy times. Shiva served in the shop and arranged the displays and kept a check on the stock and sometimes recommended remedies for coughs and spots. Kishan really needed a second assistant, but he couldn’t afford one if he was going to continue paying Shiva a decent wage with small annual increases. Although Shiva didn’t want to lose him, Kishan was an altruistic man and was always trying to persuade Shiva to go back to college and finish his courses so that he could set up as a pharmacist himself, not just work for one. Shiva knew he would never go back now; it would all be too fraught with memories and bitterness. Besides, he did not dislike the shop, the warmth of it and the delicious scents, the feeling of doing positive good when he was able to persuade someone of the virtues of vitamin C, the brief pleasure he took in selling a pretty girl a pretty shade of lipstick. He accepted. He did not expect to be fulfilled or enjoy job satisfaction or be happy.

Once he had been all those things. At school in the far west of London he had got three good A Levels and gone on to study pharmacology. This brought his father an almost delirious joy. Shiva’s father was an uneducated though not an illiterate man, who had brought his wife and his widowed mother to this country some twenty years before. For some time he had worked for a tailor and his wife as a machinist but having a business sense and some foresight had observed the beginnings of the trend toward Indian-made clothes. Even he could not have imagined how immensely popular dresses and skirts and tops of embroidered Indian cotton would become or how the humble import business he started would make him if not a rich, at least a very comfortably-off man. It was in this comparative affluence that Shiva and his brother and sisters grew up, their home a big semidetached house in Southall. Shiva’s elder brother, though he had won a scholarship to the City of London School, had not lived up to his early promise and had embarked on a career in a High Street bank. It was on Shiva therefore that his father pinned his hopes and ambitions. Shiva had just completed his first year at a college of technology, where he had done very well, so well in fact that two of the lecturers there had privately told him—well, not exactly that he was wasting his time, but that he was mentally equipped for higher things. Both believed that he would be better suited to study medicine.

Of course he told his father. What should he do? Should he apply to medical schools? Probably that meant he would have to wait a year, always supposing he were accepted. His father, overwhelmed at the prospect of having a doctor for a son, was certain he would be accepted. And why not have a year off if that were necessary? There was money enough to keep him. It was all very pleasant to contemplate and think of at his leisure. Not entirely at his leisure either, for it would not have occurred to Shiva to live at home and do nothing. The business could always do with the temporary help of an extra pair of hands.

Another source of Shiva’s happiness was his relationship with Vivien Goldman. Of her he said nothing at home, his parents were progressive and though his grandmother might wring her hands, predicting curses and disaster, they would not have considered arranging marriages for their children. Just the same, they took it for granted they would marry among their own people. They probably took it for granted, Shiva thought, that their children would not even get to know members of the opposite sex who were English.

Vivien was Jewish. To Shiva’s way of thinking she was only half Jewish because her father had been gentile, but Vivien said it was having a Jewish mother that made you a Jew. Not that she had seen her mother for many years, having been brought up in children’s homes until she was eighteen. Shiva had met her at a party given by a fellow student who lived in a squat near the river at Hammersmith where Vivien was also living. He had not at first been specially attracted by her, indeed he had been somewhat daunted, but she had singled him out and talked to him. She had talked to him about Indian philosophy and Indian mysticism, subjects on which Shiva was not well informed, and confided in him how she intended to go to India to learn from a certain guru and sit at his feet. After the party Shiva had gone home with Vivien, not to make love but to talk and sleep and talk again.