A Fatal Inversion (29 page)

Thinking about those last weeks, the weeks of August, Rufus recalled for the first time that he had never redeemed that neck chain. Probably it was still there. It might by now be worth five hundred pounds. His parents were both dead, had died within a year of each other four and five years ago. They had not been young, approaching forty, when he and his brother were born. If his mother had missed the neck chain, she had never said.

The money he handed over to Adam and Vivien with the proviso that some of it be spent on wine. Meanwhile, Zosie kept her ring. After a day or two the black streaking reappeared and she was always taking the ring off to wash her hands. The ring was often to be found on the edge of the kitchen sink or in the bathroom or lying anywhere around the kitchen, jumbled up with utensils.

Rufus tried to remember when it was that Adam, and Zosie with him, had gone to London to sell the stuffing spoons, the liqueur glasses, and the mask jug. Not then, not until nearly the end of August, for Adam had been reluctant to go to London at all on account of his neurotic fear that he would encounter one or other of his parents. Rufus told him he was like those antipodeans who, when one of their neighbors is off on holiday to London, tell him to say hello to their cousin or friend, should they meet these people in the street. But the fact that there were about nine million people in London, that he was going to Highgate and his parents lived in Edgware, had little effect on Adam’s fear. He wanted to go, he needed the money, but he kept putting it off. Rufus did not allow himself to indulge in what his father had used to call “jobbing backward.” It was useless to regret and say, if only he had never gone.

Much later in August, nearly at the end of the month, the London trip with all its consequences had taken place.

He was jumpy and nervous, he didn’t trust Adam. Adam was one of those people who go to pieces under stress. In an emergency they are useless. Look at what happened on that last morning when the post girl came. Adam had already been in a panic over footsteps he imagined he had heard circling the house in the early hours and had actually stalked that invisible nonexistent intruder with a shotgun cocked. And the gun had come readily to his hands again when they saw the red flash of the bicycle, heard the letterbox make its double rap sound. He panicked. Hysteria bubbled up in him and erupted.

Rufus told himself to keep calm; he at least was not one of those people, he wasn’t the sort to jump when the phone rang. But he did, this morning he did. His receptionist was very selective about which calls to put through to him while he was with a patient, but if Adam were to plead urgency …

Adam couldn’t stand on his own feet, he couldn’t hold out alone, never had been able to. He needed constant support and then kicked you in the teeth. He had no patience either. What must he be like with this daughter of his? Rufus could not imagine, could only see Adam as he had been at nineteen, humping the portable crib up the stairs at Ecalpemos and never bestowing a glance inside it, Adam who had loved Zosie, who said he wanted to live there forever with her in their Garden of Eden, but who when she began crying had shouted at her: “Shut up or I’ll kill you!”

Rufus held himself still, told himself to be cool and calm, to be optimistic, but he was not totally under control. He got hold of the wrong notes for Mrs. Hitchens and was about to tell her that her symptoms were menopausal, when he looked up and saw he was addressing a girl of no more than twenty-eight.

It was just before one when Adam phoned, and by then Rufus had given him up for the day.

“I’m sorry, but I had to tell them I went to Greece with you. If I wasn’t at Wyvis Hall, they wanted to know where I was and who with. I had to say; I couldn’t just invent someone.”

“Thanks very much,” said Rufus.

“The ironical part is that after I’d made the statement I rang up my father and asked him exactly what he had said about me to the police and he’d never mentioned me being in Greece.”

“Ironical is what you call it, is it?” Rufus’s nurse was going off to lunch. He waited till she closed the door behind her.

“You’ve involved me in this quite unnecessarily. Why the fuck didn’t you phone your father first?”

“I didn’t think of it, that’s why. And why shouldn’t you be involved anyway? I don’t see why I should carry the whole burden of this alone.”

“You shot her, that’s why. You fired the bloody gun.”

Rufus crashed down the receiver. The blood was pounding in his head. He sat down and made himself breathe deeply, regularly. He began telling himself that the worst that could happen would be for the police to ask him to confirm that he was with Adam Verne-Smith in Greece during July and August 1976. As far as he could see, they couldn’t prove he hadn’t been. The passport he had had then had expired and been renewed, but even if they asked to see the old one and he showed it to them, as often as not passport control officers did not bother to stamp the passports of other Europeans.

“A little place called Ecalpemos,” he could say if they asked him precisely where he had been. “It’s very small and obscure. You won’t find it on your map.”

Of course he wouldn’t say anything so risky. The really worrying thing was that Adam was unreliable, Adam would crack. If he had blurted out Rufus’s name the minute they had asked him to name a traveling companion, what might he not say if they became actually suspicious? Suppose, for instance, they told him the antiques dealer with the Welsh name or the coypu man or the farmer from Pytle Farm were all prepared to swear that Adam and a group of friends had been living at Wyvis Hall with two girls among them? Suppose the refuse collectors had seen them? True, they had always taken their rubbish—wine bottles mostly—up to the top of the drift on whenever it was, Tuesdays or Wednesdays, because Hilbert had done so, Adam said, but one of those men might remember collecting it week after week. What would Adam say if the police confronted him with that? As likely as not he would break down and confess everything. The best thing would have been to have refused to answer when asked where he had been. He had a right to refuse, everyone had. Rufus, who would have liked to do that, realized that now he couldn’t, for this would incriminate Adam and therefore, by association, all of them.

Since he had started permitting himself to think about her, he thought about her all the time. She came into his dreams, entering in strange guises, once in a nurse’s uniform of blue dress and white cap to tell him Abigail was dead. She, Zosie, had taken the greatest care of Abigail, had watched over her and sat by her bed and loved her, but nevertheless she had died. She had turned her face into the pillow and died. Out of that dream he awoke fighting, flailing at the air. Anne said: “You’re ill, you’re sick. For God’s sake go to the doctor.”

He got up and at two in the morning was driving down Highgate West Hill. He took the turn into Merton Lane and left the car halfway down, carrying with him Hilbert’s shotgun which, after taking careful thought about this, he had wrapped up first in strips of rag, then in part of an old brown curtain that in the past had been used for covering up furniture while he painted a wall. Secured with string, this made an innocuous-looking package. At least it no longer looked like a gun. The rags, he reasoned, would disguise the identity of the gun but not protect it.

There was no one around. It was dark but there were streetlamps on all night. He walked down to the ponds, where he lost his nerve. If he merely put the gun into the shallow water it would soon be found and he did not dare throw it so that it fell in the center. He could imagine the splash. There were too many houses and apartments around there. He went back home again. Anne was sitting up in bed with the light on.

“Where have you been?”

“Not to the doctor,” said Adam.

Next morning, which was Saturday, he drove around until he found, north of the North Circular Road, a huge used car dump, a mountain range of broken, torn, rusted, disintegrating metal. It looked abandoned, was quite unattended. All the piled, dumped vehicles were far beyond rescue, rejuvenation. All that could happen to them would be either that they were simply left there, an eyesore, an awful detritus, forever, or that individually they were picked up and crushed flat or by means of some marvelous machine that could do such things, compressed into a small cuboid block of metal.

Adam walked in among the metal mountains, where there was no vegetation and the ground was hard and dusty. On either side of the central walkway rose hills in which the strata were blue and red and cream with here and there outcroppings of black rubber and slivers of glass and spars of chrome. There was an all-pervading smell of motor oil, which contains a high proportion of metal filings, a bitter, unnatural odor.

He poked the gun through the broken rear window of what had once been a Lancia Beta saloon. It was unlikely that it would be found there and if it were, the finder was most unlikely to take it to the police. But probably, when the time came, it would be crushed up in the compressor along with the metal shell that now housed it.

Walking back to the car, he found it impossible to remember why he had ever brought the gun away from Ecalpemos in the first place. Why had they not buried it in the Little Wood along with the lady’s gun, the four-ten? Had he actually thought the time might come when he would
use
it again?

He had not known anything about cleaning or oiling guns, but on the twelfth of August he had gone into the gun room and taken this one down from the wall, “broken” it, and begun his cleaning operations. After all, cleaning was cleaning. There was presumably only one way you could do it. Zosie came in and watched him.

“Today is the glorious twelfth,” he said.

“I don’t know what that means.”

“It’s what they call the day grouse shooting begins. It’s the twelfth of August, which is today, and it’s called the glorious twelfth.”

“I wouldn’t know a grouse if I saw one,” Zosie said.

“There aren’t any here. I don’t think there are any south of Yorkshire. I’m not planning to shoot grouse anyway. I might shoot pheasants or pigeons or something. Or a hare. I expect Vivien could cook jugged hare.”

Rufus said you couldn’t shoot pheasants before October the first.

“You mean there are secret gamekeepers hiding in the wood to stop me?”

“You’re right. No one would know,” said Rufus, and he laughed.

But Vivien had been appalled at the prospect of his attempting to shoot a hare. She made more fuss about it than Mary Gage had about the coypu man. So Adam promised to confine himself to birds and did actually succeed in shooting a couple of pigeons, which they ate, though the purple-brown flesh was tough. But it taught him to like the feel of the twelve-bore in his hands, and after that he took it out every day, aiming at squirrels or pigeons or sometimes at a hole in a tree trunk. He could imagine himself becoming an English country gentleman, a landed squire, living here with Zosie. In a couple of weeks time Vivien would be gone and Shiva with her. A further week would see Rufus’s departure. Adam could hardly wait. All that worried him was money. What were he and Zosie going to live on? They had nothing.

“We shall have to get jobs,” he told her as they lay at dusk on the bed in the Pincushion Room. The windows were open and the sky, just after sunset, was a soft rich violet-pink, not clear but covered with innumerable tiny flecks of cloud as if overspread with flamingo feathers. “We shall both have to work.”

“I can’t do anything,” said Zosie. “What could I do?”

“Can you type?”

She shook her head. He felt her hair rub silkily against the sensitive skin in the hollow of his elbow.

“You could work in a shop.”

“I’m bad at counting up,” she said. “I’d get it wrong. I’m best at stealing really. I can’t do honest things. I told you I should have to marry a rich man. Do you know what my mother calls me? Well,
called
me. She called me Lady Muck because I’m idle but I like nice things. Why doesn’t my mother come and look for me, Adam?”

“She doesn’t know where you are.”

“No, but she hasn’t tried to find out, has she? I’m so young, Adam, you’d think she’d be
concerned,
wouldn’t you? Why doesn’t she love me?”

“I love you,” said Adam.

“You love screwing me.”

“Yes, I do, yes. But I do love you, Zosie. I adore you. I love you—with all my heart. Don’t you believe me? Say you believe me.”

“I don’t know. It’s too soon. If you’re still saying it in a year.”

“I’ll still be saying it in fifty years.”

She turned to him with trembling lips, in tears that seemed to him shed from no understandable cause. He made love to her in the pink light that muted to purple, to dark. It was warm and humid and he tasted on her skin the salt of sweat and the salt of tears. Afterward she sat up and said, “I won’t hide myself on the floor when next we go out in Goblander.”

He smiled and held her, pleased by this sign of rational behavior.

“We must think about working next. We must think about money.”

“Do you know at school they were always reading out that bit from the Bible at prayers about the birds of the air not sowing or reaping but your heavenly father feeding them just the same. Only he doesn’t, does he? Birds die and so do people and he doesn’t do anything. I don’t understand that.”

“Nobody understands that, my sweetheart,” said Adam.

One evening, in a pub in Colchester, Rufus picked up a girl who was the wife of a serving soldier. The soldier was away somewhere in training. Someone had told Rufus that Colchester was unique among English towns in having at the same time a port, a garrison, and a university, and it was perhaps in consequence of this that it had the highest rate of venereal disease in the country. He repeated this to the girl because it amused him. Later on they went back to the girl’s house in married quarters. Now he was uncertain of what her name had been, Janet or perhaps Janice.

There was no uncertainty in his mind, though, as to whether he had ever taken her back to Ecalpemos. He hadn’t. They had met on half a dozen more occasions but he had always spent the night at her place. Rufus had not been averse to the others knowing where he had been and what he had been up to. His amour propre, his machismo, had suffered through his being seen to lack a woman while the other men (less attractive to or successful with women than he was, he thought) had girlfriends. Adam had seemed relieved, was even congratulatory. Rufus guessed he felt guilty about Zosie, as if he had stolen her from Rufus instead of, as was truly the case, Rufus himself voluntarily relinquishing her. But Shiva had been shocked. One good thing about that, Rufus remembered, was the effect it had of stopping Shiva constantly asking him about his chances of getting into medical school. Instead, Shiva settled down at last and applied to every teaching hospital they could jointly think of, consulting the public library in Sudbury for the required addresses. From time to time he eyed Rufus as one might eye the Antichrist if one were so unfortunate as to see him.