A Fatal Inversion (30 page)

That August, on the seventeenth, Rufus had had his twenty-third birthday. Ten years ago and two months. But that twenty-third birthday had been the first he had not looked forward to with pleasure at being a year older. He had thought how much better pleased he would have been to be twenty-two.

“Another year older and deeper in debt,” Adam said, quoting something no doubt, on the birthday morning. And that was true too. There was scarcely a tenner left out of the pawnbroker’s money.

It was hotter than ever the night they went out to celebrate his birthday, first in the Chinese restaurant in Sudbury, then in the pubs, where Rufus remembered he had given up wine for that night and drunk brandy. The tipple for heroes, Adam had said, quoting someone else. He had sold to the man called Evans or Owens a Flora Danica wall plate to raise money for this spree and Rufus was grateful. Together they had gone to Hadleigh, to the shop, and now Rufus, with a sense of chill, remembered the old man saying: “Settled in at Wyvis Hall then, have you?”

And Adam had replied with some enthusiasm that he was happy there, that he intended to go on living there. Had Adam forgotten that? Had he forgotten the old man going on to say—and he had not been so old, he had been a spry and vigorous sixty-odd—that he must come down again in the next week or two: “Try and twist your arm around that cabinet I’ve got my eye on.”

The cabinet in the dining room with the curve pattern in the veneer that he called “flame-fronted.” Adam hadn’t wanted to sell and didn’t want to sell now.

“I’d make it three hundred, you know, and don’t tell me that’s not a tempting offer.”

It hadn’t tempted Adam. Why hadn’t it? What was there about possessing all that old furniture that meant so much to him? The lord of the manor syndrome, thought Rufus, it probably wasn’t all that uncommon. Rather than sell Owens or Evans an old cupboard he never looked at from one week to the next, he preferred to do that stupid, terrible thing that brought retribution down on all of them, and out of which in any case he never made a penny.

He hadn’t done it for money, of course, he had done it for Zosie because he was in thrall to Zosie. The idea of the money had come from Shiva. Ten thousand pounds. It didn’t seem so much today, but things had changed a lot and he had changed and his circumstances. It was fairy gold anyway, at the end of an impossible rainbow, while Evans’s or Owens’s three hundred pounds would have been notes pressed into the hand.

A lively little man with an undercurrent of Welsh in his voice that a lifetime of living in Suffolk hadn’t got rid of. He had walked around the house as if he had some sort of right to buy, as if their poverty and his comparative affluence and expertise gave him the right to what he wanted. And in the shop he held the Royal Copenhagen plate in his hands and looked at it and then at them as if he wanted to possess it yet despised them for selling it.

It may be crazy but I’m going to go there, Rufus thought, I’m going to go down there. There are things I have to know. Thank God it’s Saturday.

And thank God, too, for a woman who did not probe, who was not apparently sensitive to his moods or any more aware of apprehensiveness in him than she was of his inner sighs of relief. He could have an affair or a nervous breakdown and she would be none the wiser. That he would himself have to pay for this by a lifetime of being misunderstood, he judged a fair bargain.

It took him a little while, though, to think up a convincing lie. He had a private patient rushed in as an emergency to a hospital in Colchester, he told Marigold. Of course he did not especially want to go down there and visit her, but he thought he should. He would have been surprised if Marigold had asked any questions, yet at the same time it seemed to him faintly odd that she didn’t. It would have been natural for a wife only three years married to demur at being left alone all day on a Saturday.

Nor did she say how she would herself spend it. She was wearing her new Edina Ronay sweater and Rufus noticed how long she had let her hair grow. It tumbled down over her shoulders, beautiful thick shiny blond hair, and she had washed it when first she got up. She appeared neither glad nor sorry he was going to Colchester. Certainly she was not relieved. But still Rufus thought, suppose if I had been here she had said to me that she was going to her mother’s, or to someone’s coffee morning, or made any excuse for going out, I would have thought nothing of it, I would have accepted. She won’t have to say that now. It may even be a source of satisfaction to her that because I shan’t be here she won’t have to go out.

With all these minutiae of reactions he felt he could not concern himself now. The abyss between them that they bridged with “darlings” widened a little more, that was all. By ten he was on the motorway whose approach road was only a quarter of a mile from where he lived.

The yellow-brick pile by Colchester station that might have been a hospital or a children’s home or some sort of institution for the mentally handicapped was gone and a high fence put up around the site. It was there, on this spot, just beyond the bridge, that he had picked up Zosie. For the first time Rufus was really aware of the difference between himself now and the Rufus of those days, a lifetime seeming to separate them, not a mere ten years. That clapped-out van, the drugs under the backseat, his hair long and shaggy, a stubble growth on his chin, naked to the waist, nicotine-stained hands, a predatory way with women. He felt a hundred years older, he usually did feel old for his age. The Mercedes glided smoothly, purring as it did its automatic gearshift. He put up his hand to his face involuntarily, felt the smoothness of the skin, and felt, too, the deep indentation that now ran from nostril to jaw.

Nunes might have changed but he didn’t know, he couldn’t be sure. He had no eye for things like that. That house might be new, that one extended. What altered it most was the season, the grayness of October, the leaves falling and the leaves that had already fallen, a sodden mat of them everywhere. A sign on a pole had been planted outside the church, asking for donations for repairs to the roof. He drove past the Fir Tree and the phone booth to which he had taken Vivien to make her call to Robin Tatian. There had been a police car parked by the phone booth, the particolored green and white kind they called a panda car, and if not exactly alarmed, they had both been made wary by the sight of it. Of course its presence there had nothing to do with any of them, but they had both thought of Zosie, who must be classified as a missing person, and of the things she had stolen.

But he had parked Goblander behind the police car, which was in any case without driver or passenger, and Vivien had gone into the phone booth, this very phone booth, to say the phone was damaged and not working. So he had driven on and found another booth outside a cottage converted for use as doctors’ offices and waiting rooms. There had been a plaque on the gatepost, Rufus remembered, and here it was, still the same, though doubtless some of the GPs in the group had gone and others come. There, on the grass verge, now glistening with water and scattered with shed leaves but then dry springy turf, he had sat and waited for Vivien because it was too hot to stay inside the van. And people had come by and looked at him, two women and a bunch of children and a dog. Rufus was glad now that he had never succumbed to the prevailing fashion of the time and painted Goblander with moons and stars and flowers and hieroglyphs.

He slowed, pulled in, and consulted his road map, though he had no need to. He wanted to appear to passers-by as a man consulting a road map. But there were no passers-by. It was desolate October and here in the country everyone ate lunch at noon, everyone was indoors. He lifted his eyes to the red phone booth, the length of brick wall hung with ivy.

Vivien had come out and given him back what remained of his change, down to the two pence pieces. She was always meticulous about money, overconscientious. And she had told him that Robin Tatian had himself been at home, had answered the phone. Yes, of course she could have the job, he had written to her. Hadn’t she had his letter? Vivien wouldn’t tell lies, even of the whitest kind, and confessed she had inadvertently given him the wrong address. Rufus had not asked if at this point she had given him the correct one. There had been no reason to ask, no need then for prudence or caution, any more than Adam thought he had needed those things when Evans or Owens asked him if he was settling in at Wyvis Hall. But Robin Tatian might even now, he thought, be reading in his newspaper about the prospective identification and seeing the name Wyvis Hall and the name Nunes, remember that his children’s former nanny …

“I’ll stay for a year,” she had said. “By then I’ll have enough to get me to India and once I’m there—well, if I starve in India, I won’t be alone, will I? The thing I dread is that I may get too fond of the children.”

“The children?”

“The Tatian children, Michele and Nicola. I may get to love them, in a way I hope I will, but then it will be such a wrench to part.”

“It’s just a job surely?” Rufus had no special feeling for children, had not had then or now. “You’ll look on it simply as work, won’t you?”

She gave him a strange look.

“You think it’s that easy?”

He misunderstood her. “I didn’t say it was easy. It’s badly paid bloody hard work but it’s your choice presumably.”

“That’s not what I meant, Rufus. I’m afraid I shall naturally come to love those little girls because I’m a woman with a woman’s feelings and I’m afraid, too, that they may come to love me and be even more upset than I when we have to be separated. I’m afraid that if that happens I may not have the strength to go. Have you ever thought what a nanny’s life must be? A succession of bereavements, joy succeeded by loss.”

“You exaggerate,” he said.

He had never liked her. She was a tiresome woman, uncomfortable to be with. He could not remember her ever laughing, and her smiles were not occasioned by wit or amusement but by wonder at some remarkable sight, a bird or a flower or a sunset. Well, those ambitions of hers had come to nothing, broken, lost, destroyed. The trouble was that he could easily have imagined her sitting at the feet of some dirty emaciated fakir or with a begging bowl or robed as a nun. Things do not work out as we expect them to, though they had for him.

If he was going to Hadleigh, he had better get on with it. Hadleigh, as he remembered it, more or less closed down after lunch on Saturdays. No one went shopping, and half the shops closed. He drove past the post office and the Hampstead Garden Suburb houses, postponing inquiries there till later. What he hoped for was that the shop kept by Evans or Owens, a shop whose position on High Street he could perfectly remember, would be gone and replaced by a hair-dresser’s perhaps or a florist. And the florist would tell him the old man had died and left no children to take over the business.

They seemed to stretch before his mind’s eye in a procession, those people who might remember the company at Wyvis Hall, and as soon as one was discounted—as in the case of Bella—another rose up to take her place, just as threatening, just as dangerous. He had seen something like that in a play, a line of dangerous people, kings perhaps, whose numbers were endless, but he couldn’t remember what the play was. Adam, no doubt, would know. Bella was gone but now he remembered the men from the council’s refuse department who emptied each week the dustbins they took up to the top of the drift. Someone must have come down to read meters, too, even if they had never been admitted to the house… .

Hadleigh was changed, seemed more cared for, made more consciously ancient, preserved, precious. There were traffic lights at the approach to the town that he couldn’t remember from before. He drove in, over the river bridge. Down there on the right it had been, past the wineshop but before you reached the butcher, a low shop you went down a couple of steps to reach… .

And still was.

He parked the car on the opposite side, outside the vet’s, crossed the street, and walked a little way along. Outside the shop he paused and looked in through clouded windowpanes at polished furniture within, elegant, sparse, a porcelain leopard, brown spotted golden glaze, lazing in the center of a circular mahogany table, and behind it, standing there and talking to a customer, a brisk-looking very young man, a mere boy.

Rufus went down the steps and into the shop. The woman was leaving, hastened her leave-taking when she saw him. Rufus said: “I see you’ve changed hands. There used to be someone called Evans or Owens …”

“Mr. Evan, that’s right, not Evans. That’s my father. What made you think we’d changed hands? I mean, it doesn’t matter, but I’d be curious to know.”

Before Rufus could reply, Evan himself had come into the shop from a door at the back and was standing there spry and slightly smiling, looking not a day older than he had ten years before.

15

THE RIOTS OF THE NIGHT
before dominated the morning paper. Two of the eastern suburbs. It had begun when police went into a house in Whiteman Road to arrest a man suspected of robbery with violence and in the scuffle a woman had been knocked unconscious. The inhabitants of the house were black and one of the policemen was Indian and this had contributed to the outbreak of violence. A photograph showed the name of the street which was itself an irony. Down the road in Walthamstow they had overturned cars in Forest Road. Nearly every window for half a mile had been broken and a fire started down one of the side streets.

Anne, who liked to go shopping near there on a Saturday morning, was afraid to go near the place, so Adam went alone. But in places the damage was so bad that whole areas of street had been closed and the traffic diverted and Adam found himself in Hornsey, passing Hornsey Old Church, a route he had always consciously avoided, for this was the way he had come into London with Zosie.

This time, of course, he was driving in thick traffic in the opposite direction and it was the church itself that alerted him to where he was, the church that looked as if it might be Victorian Gothic but was in fact a single medieval tower. It was a key in his memory that immediately gave access to the file of those last days. Here, with the church ahead of him on his left, he had nearly turned left and headed down to Holloway, Islington, the outskirts of the City. Zosie had the street atlas on her lap and he had said, “I don’t know why I’m going so far west. It might be better to go down to Holloway.”