A Fatal Inversion

by Ruth Rendell

  Out in the yellow meadow the farmer had begun cutting the barley with a combine. The great lumbering machine wheeled quite close by where the Ecalpemos land ended at the grove of walnuts. The terrace was visible from there and the heaped quilts on it and the people who lay there sunbathing. Had the farmer noticed? Would he remember? Ten years was a long time if you had no special reasons to remember. Adam had too many special reasons for forgetting to be possible.

  It must have been the next week or the week after that Shiva and Vivien had come. No, it was St. Swithin’s Day, July 15. St. Swithin’s Day, if thou dost rain, for forty days it shall remain.

  … Rufus said it always rained on July fifteenth, but in fact it didn’t that day; there was nothing for the rain to come out of, not even a tiny cloud, not even those pale high strips of cirrus that had lain on the horizon for two or three days past. St. Swithin’s Day, if thou be fair, for forty days shall rain no more. And it had not. For six more weeks the fair weather had continued, the Mediterranean come to England, tropical Suffolk, perpetual sunshine, and on the forty-first day a storm and rain and winds blowing and the summer gone forever… .

  She dressed herself in a pillowcase. All she had with her was what she stood up in and a gray sweater and a leather belt with studs on it, so when she washed her shorts and her T-shirt she had to find something else to put on. It was a white linen pillowcase with Aunt Lilian’s monogram LVS in a circle of embroidered leaves. Zosie unpicked the stitches in the middle and a little way down each side and made herself a sort of tunic. Wearing the belt made it more like a dress. Zosie looked beautiful in it; she made it into a new fashion.

  It was what she wore when they drove into Sudbury to sell the silver, fish knives, and forks this time and a filigree candy basket and two sauceboats. Rufus said no one would want to use those things, they were quite useless, they would just lie in the bottom of a drawer or stand in a cupboard and no one would look at them for a lifetime or if he put them out, they would go black with tarnish. As it was, all the silver and brass that lay around was badly discolored from lack of attention. Adam did not at all want to sell the silver but neither could he think of anything with which to refute Rufus’s argument. That they were his and a part of Ecalpemos, and the whole that it was, the perfect whole, must be made up of its parts, he did not feel able to say to Rufus. They needed money; they had very nearly nothing.

  “If we can’t have booze and a few fags and go out on the razzle when we want,” said Rufus, “there’s no point in being here.”

  Adam did not see it that way, though he admitted he liked those things, they were a kind of prerequisite to enjoyment.

  Zosie had said no more about drawing the dole. She still slept in the Centaur Room but mostly Rufus did not. He had taken to sleeping out on the terrace all night and usually, around midnight or later. Zosie would creep away alone. As Goblander came up out of the drift into the lane and turned toward the Mill in the Pytle, Zosie got down on the floor and crouched there in the yoga praying position. It was only when they were out on the Sudbury Road that she emerged.

  She came with them to sell the silver. The place they chose was an antique shop on Friar Street where the man had been forthcoming twice before and had asked no questions, though Adam suspected that the prices he paid were absurdly low. The shopkeeper stared at Zosie’s pillowcase, which left about eight or nine inches of thigh showing. The mini-skirt had been out of fashion four or five years by then and people had got out of the habit of seeing it. She walked around the shop examining everything. Adam and Rufus went into the back to carry out their transaction, got sixty-five pounds for the silver which made Adam feel sick because he thought just one of the sauceboats must have been worth that alone. Zosie was sitting on a bentwood chair, her hands folded in her lap, waiting for them.

  Rufus bought wine, the cheapest stuff, bin ends and from places one would never have thought of as producing wine, like Romania. Zosie had gone off somewhere, saying she would meet them back at the van which was parked in the marketplace under the shadow of Gainsborough. The girl in the wineshop gave them a box to put the bottles in and Rufus’s pack of two hundred Rothman King size. Adam pulled the bundle of notes out of his pocket and paid the girl, controlling his face, not showing to Rufus his misgivings, his dismay, until they were outside.

  “He gave me sixty-five for the silver, didn’t he?”

  “Sure. Why?”

  “I only had fifty-five when I paid for that lot.”

  “Come on. You must have miscounted.”

  So they set down the box full of bottles and Adam counted again, subtracting thirty-four seventy-two for wine and cigarettes.

  “Twenty twenty-eight,” said Adam, “and there ought to be thirty twenty-eight.”

  “You dropped a tenner somewhere.”

  “I didn’t.”

  At this point, as Adam was unnecessarily counting the money again, as they stood in the middle of the sidewalk outside the Town Hall, the missing ten-pound note appeared in front of them in the shape of a new pair of jeans on Zosie, who came rather diffidently toward them from behind the Gainsborough statue. They did not have to say this to each other. They knew. But neither of them felt they could put an accusation into words. They looked at Zosie, at the jeans, which were of the cheapest kind, the poorest quality, and better to be described perhaps as cotton loons, the red T-shirt of the less-than-a-pound reject shop kind, at this new ensemble which was nevertheless infinitely more respectable than Aunt Lilian’s pillowcase.

  It brought Adam a good deal of humiliation to understand that Zosie had picked his pocket without his having the least idea of it.

  “I had to have some clothes. I felt funny in that pillow thing.”

  With that manner of hers that was at once meek and apprehensive she held out to Adam her closed fist. She opened it above his hand and dropped into his palm three screwed-up notes, a twenty-pound note and two tens.

  “Where did all this come from?”

  She shook her head. “Never mind. It’s for us. You said everyone had to contribute.” Turning her head this way and that, she darted alert glances across the marketplace. She reminded Adam of a hare he had seen sitting up on the edge of the barley field. “Let’s go home now, can we?”

  As they passed through Nunes she got down on the floor and stayed there until they were outside the front door of Ecalpemos. He kept the money she gave him, he asked no questions, he had a pretty good idea anyway what had happened, what she had done, and he made a mental resolve not to go near the shop in Friar Street again.

  That also was the day Zosie saw the picture in the Deathbed Room. Rufus had opened a bottle of thick dark red wine, bull’s blood stuff that Adam knew would give him a headache. But he took a glass and so did Zosie and they were drinking it at the kitchen table when Zosie said it was all right now, wasn’t it, she could stay on now? Adam said yes but he said it rather unwillingly because the afternoon’s happenings had shaken him and he had a feeling Zosie might bring trouble down on them all. On the other hand, he was beginning to realize, to his own discomfort, that more than anything in the world he wanted her to stay. It was almost that if she left, Ecalpemos would lose its point and he would no longer want to be there. The curious yearning, the breathless hungry feeling that was never to be fully satisfied even when he had made limitless love to her, that had begun. When she asked him if she could stay, the request pierced him with real pain, it made him wince.

  “Can I go and explore the house? Can I go and look at everything?”

  He would have offered to go with her but he was afraid to trespass on Rufus’s territory. He looked at Rufus after Zosie had gone upstairs and Rufus grinned, smoke curling out from between his teeth.

  “It’s all yours if you want it,” Rufus said.

  “I rather thought … ”

  “A brief aberration. A two-night stand.” Rufus refilled his glass. He always drank twice as much as anyone else twice as fast. “Zosie is a woman of m
ystery. You’ll have noticed I’ve been sleeping on the terrace this past couple of nights. Why don’t you take her into Pincushion and let me have Centaur back again?”

  Before he could answer—what could he have answered though? That she was not his slave, his creature?—Zosie came back saying she had seen an old man at the top of the stairs, a little thin old man with gold-rimmed glasses and a bald head. Rufus had laughed and Adam hadn’t taken any of it very seriously, for she had been in the study looking at photographs. It was different when, half an hour later, she rushed in with the tears fountaining from her eyes.

  “Why did you let me go in there? Why did you let me see it?”

  It took a while to elicit from her what she meant. Rufus pushed a glass of wine across the table to her.

  “It’s only a picture,” Adam said. “It’s not a photograph, it’s just a sentimental Victorian painting.”

  But Rufus only looked at her and looked away, nodding a little, as if he had received confirmation of something he suspected or almost knew for sure. Zosie dried her eyes and felt better after a while and Adam said she need never go in there again, there was no reason for her to go in there, and soon perhaps other people would come and use the room. He had not of course known how soon this was to happen.

  Some of those who steal, steal love, the psychiatrists say. Those who have inside their lives an empty space need to fill it with love if they can, and if they cannot, with things. And they need to please others in order that others may give them love. Those who need love with the hunger the rest of mankind keeps for food, for the necessaries of life, give their bodies simply and without reflection for a return of love, would give their soul if they knew how, are reduced to thievery of the basest kind and of the basest things because this is the easiest way. Adam knew none of that then but he did think Zosie might be a little mad. “Disturbed” was the word he used to himself. He thought she might be “schizoid” (the fashionable expression) for she seemed to have no idea at all of reality.

  “Flittermus, ottermus/Myopotamus,” Adam said to Zosie, expecting her to correct the last word to “hippopotamus” as Mary Gage had. But she only nodded and pushed at the poor corpse with the toe of her sandal.

  “It’s a coypu.”

  He was surprised she knew but he did not want to tell her how the creature had probably died, he didn’t want hysterics. Let her think it had met a natural death.

  “Some of those things,” she said, “they give them pellets with cyanide in and then you mustn’t let the carrion crows get them. They give moles worms with cyanide. Isn’t that hateful?”

  Adam was pretty sure the coypu man hadn’t had poison with him, only traps, yet how then had this large, coarse-pelted animal died? “We ought to bury it.”

  They had been in the fruit cage, gathering more raspberries, had walked back along the farther shore of the lake eating raspberries, the red juice staining their fingers. Rufus saw their red hands and said, “You didn’t touch the thing, did you? You could get leptospirosis.” A rat was a rat as far as he was concerned, irrespective of size or variety. They put on gardening gloves they found in the stable block and took down a spade from the wall where a primitive tool rack had been made by knocking long nails into the boards. There were two spades, Adam remembered, this one and a bigger one with a slightly rounded blade; it was this bigger one which they had used later on when they dug the grave… .

  But on the evening of the fifteenth of July, a Thursday evening, Adam had used the smaller lightweight spade and dug a shallow pit in the Little Wood. He lifted the body of the coypu in and they put back the earth and trod it down hard. The grass and weeds would soon grow and cover it, he said to Zosie, but they had not. It was too dry and hot for that.

  Side by side at the kitchen sink they washed their hands, hygiene-conscious Rufus standing over them. He wouldn’t give them any wine until he was satisfied their hands were clean and pure once more. It was the bin-end hock and the Romanian chianti they drank that night. Adam had made little hashish cakes with flour and sugar and an egg and the charas. Somehow he had expected Zosie to refuse to have anything to do with them but she had eaten two of them greedily, as if starving for a change of consciousness.

  They were all on the terrace, stupid with hashish and wine, silent, lying on the quilts and watching the sky change from blue to gold and gold to rose as the sun set, when Shiva and Vivien came. A breeze ruffled the garden as always at this time, as if it were an invisible creature that passed over the grass and between the rose trees, swayed the leafy ropes that hung from the willows, blew the reeds, and set them shivering. Adam lay on the white quilt and Zosie only a yard away from him on the yellow and they looked into each other’s dazed faces, eye to eye, and Adam’s hand moved to the edge of the white spread and Zosie’s to the ruffled border of the yellow satin, but their fingers did not quite meet. Rufus lay sprawled on his back, an outflung hand grasping the almost empty fourth bottle of wine. And it was thus that they were found by Shiva and Vivien walking around the house in search of signs of life.

  On the lawn below the Loves of Zeus they stood and Adam thought he saw disapproval in their faces. It was Chinese people who were called inscrutable, but Adam wondered if perhaps this did not apply even more to Indians. The Indian’s expression was curious and watchful. There were murmurs of Mary Gage’s name and of Bella’s, and the girl said she would have phoned first to ask if they could come, she had looked him up in the phone book, but all she got was a strange beeping.

  The Indian said his name was Shiva and gave his surname, which Adam had since forgotten, if indeed it had ever registered with him.

  “And this is Vivien Goldman.”

  The real trouble, at the time, was that he was in no fit condition to speak at all, still less talk about terms and conditions. Stupefied with wine and hashish, poisoned with these things really, he could hardly stand, hardly cope with the banging in his head. Rufus, of course, was indifferent. Having elevated himself onto his elbows and said hi, he had lain down again and lit a fresh cigarette, Zosie crouched on the yellow quilt, her hare look back again.

  Adam took them into the house. He was unsure now what he could in fact recall of that night and what came later. Small, dark Vivien, with her long hair braided and coiled around her head—had he observed and absorbed that on this evening? She had been wearing the blue dress that one thought of as inseparable from her, as if she were an exotic bird, as if it were her natural plumage. From the first, from that evening, he had been aware of her disappointment. As they walked through the house and up the back stairs, she looked about her warily, ruefully, at the furniture, the pictures, the carpets, because she had expected rush matting and earthenware pots and earnest folk meditating or pounding up herbs.

  Why hadn’t he summoned up the strength to tell them this place was more a hotel than a commune? He wanted to be paid. They could camp out for tonight in one of the outbuildings, but tomorrow they must go unless they could pay their way. In fact, he was sure he had never mentioned money. Poisoned by drink, born without a taste or capacity for liquor, he staggered up the stairs ahead of them, showed them into the Deathbed Room, muttered in a thick, slurred voice he was ashamed of even at the time that they would find a kettle and tea and coffee in the kitchen, wine if they wanted it. After that his memory blanked. The last thing of that night he could recall was Vivien opening the big cylindrical carpet bag she carried and his seeing for the first time all those Bach flower remedies and little bottles of homeopathic pills and herbal stuff. Or was he manufacturing a memory out of what he knew had come later?

  The Indian was so neat and clean. “Dapper” was the word, thought word-loving Adam. Someone, a downtrodden mother or sister probably, had ironed creases down the fronts of his jeans. His crisp starched shirt was the color of the blue lilies that grew outside the dining room window.

  “What a beautiful house this is,” he said very politely. “It is quite a privilege to be here.”

  Ha
d that been next day or the day after? It was on the morning, Adam thought, when the postwoman appeared with the letter for him. He had just gotten up, for it was hardly morning, it was past noon, and was sitting in the kitchen, much hung over, feeling as if he were recovering from some long, debilitating illness, when something red and shiny flashed past the window. It was the postwoman’s bicycle but he had not known this immediately. The letterbox on the front door made a double rap sound, something he had heard every now and again years before, when Hilbert was alive, but not since.

  What she had brought was a demand for the half year’s rates. And at that hour it must have been the second post. Rufus had seen her, Rufus was outside and had seen her and she had seen him. No doubt she had also seen Goblander.

  “Some young rustic beauty,” Rufus had said. “A milkmaid on a bike.”

  The box at the top of the lane was supposed to be for the post. Perhaps she hadn’t known that, or perhaps she was sticking dutifully to the rules. Shiva had said in his sententious way: “They are obliged by the law of the land to bring your mail up to the door.”

  Eventually he had paid those rates. Deeply humiliated but with no other course before him, he had borrowed the money from his father, who had required its return plus all the accumulated interest as soon as Adam had sold Wyvis Hall. That year Adam couldn’t bear to think of, from the time when he had returned home with the gun in the golf bag to the return to Ecalpemos and his meeting there with the real estate agent. For months the hue and cry over Catherine Ryemark had gone on. Back at college, at any rate, he had not been obliged to see newspapers. But in the ‘Christmas and Easter breaks, at home, each time the phone rang, each time the front doorbell rang, his stomach clenched and turned… .