by Ruth Rendell
As it was clenching and turning now. Alone in his office in Pimlico, he dialed Rufus’s Wimpole Street number. He didn’t need to look it up, he knew it by heart. Rufus, when he came to the phone, sounded distant and preoccupied. How he, Adam, had longed and longed to phone Rufus during that year, but had never dared, had never been prepared to risk the receiver being put down without a word spoken! Besides, he had always had that irrational fear that the Verne-Smith and Fletcher phones were bugged, that the police were waiting patiently for this very thing to happen, for them to get in touch.
Adam had no such notions now. Patient they might be, but they would never have waited ten years. He and Rufus arranged, without discussion, to meet at six. Adam went down the passage to the lavatory and threw up with violent painful spasms, leaning against the wall afterward and gasping for breath.
12
ON HER SKIN WAS a fine tracery of bluish marks, like the downy feathers of a little bird a cat has plucked. They were all over the tops of her thighs and the iliac crest and faintly on the flat stomach. More than feathers, they looked like silk where, through stretching, the weft has been compressed to expose the warp. One day they would fade and bleach white, but that had not yet happened and they would never go away entirely. Rufus had twice made love to Zosie before he saw the marks, once in the back of the van and once in the bed in the Centaur Room (erstwhile scene of placid slumbrous nights enjoyed by Lewis and Beryl Verne-Smith), but it was not until the third night that he actually looked at her naked body. She lay waiting for him like a sacrificial victim, and though she was silent her whole attitude, supine, receptive, patient, uttered to him: I will do anything you want, I am yours—or not, I know I must pay for my board and lodging and for sanctuary and this is one way I know how to do that.
It was scarcely provocative. Rufus, however, did not much care about this, but about what the marks signified he did, and as he stood there he thought about what involvement might mean and about his future career and the risks he was taking—had indeed already taken—and instead of getting into bed with Zosie he took a pillow from the bed and one of the blankets he had long discarded and dumped on the floor, and departed for the terrace.
That was before she stole the silver bracelet, for that was what she had done a few days before Shiva and Vivien came. While they were in the back of the shop in Friar Street selling the fish knives and the sauceboats Zosie had helped herself to the bracelet from a display table of jewelry. Because she looked somewhat disreputable in the pillowcase, she had bought jeans and a T-shirt with the tenner she nicked out of Adam’s pocket, taken the bracelet to a dealer in Gainsborough Street, and sold it for forty pounds.
Of course it was all of a piece, all understandable. Rufus had watched it, wondering what Zosie would do next. It had been a case history for him and he had even thought of writing it up. The pattern of the stealing had been so interesting, not meaningless kleptomania any of it, but calculated thieving of salable goods or edible items. The food had been produced so proudly to be stowed in the back of Goblander as any henchman of Robin Hood might have robbed for the poor.
Until the incident of the little boy, of course. And that, or something very like it, might have been predicted. Well, something very like it had happened.
A woman of mystery, he had called her. Zosie as woman was an almost laughable concept. She was a child. And yet of course she was not; she was in some ways older than any of them. She had done and known more. Adam would have said—and did say—that she had suffered. They had tried to ask her about her life, who she was, where she came from, where she was going.
“Are you a student?” Vivien had wanted to know.
The other three were, so why not Zosie?
And she replied with absurd naïveté, with what sounded like disingenuousness but was not, was simply Zosie’s way: “I’m just a person.”
Vivien had persisted: “Do you have a job?” She was wearing, as Adam put it, her “social worker’s hat.”
“I don’t have a job and I’m not a student.” Zosie added after a pause for thought, “I was at school.”
“We were all at school,” said Shiva. “In this modern world you have to go to school. It’s compulsory.” He smiled with pleasure because he had amused the others.
“What do you want to do then, Zosie?”
“Well,” she said, and she sighed a little. “Well, I don’t want to do anything. I’d quite like to live here forever, in this house, and just never do anything ever. But what I will do is marry a rich man and maybe he’ll buy this house, Adam. Maybe he’ll buy it off you for me. Would you like that?”
They wanted to know why she was called Zosie, what did it mean, what was it short for? It was for someone named Zosima in a Russian book, she said.
“Do you mean Dostoevski?” said Adam. “Father Zosima’s a man.”
“My mother’s very ignorant, she wouldn’t know. She’d just have liked the sound.”
So Adam wanted to know where Zosie’s mother and father lived but she wouldn’t say, only that she hadn’t a father. Her father had died and her mother remarried. And Zosie sat on the terrace with her knees drawn up to her chin and her arms clasping her knees and darted her eyes this way and that like a nervous animal and Rufus, who admitted to himself he was not usually sensitive or caring, suddenly felt they were all persecuting her and changed the subject to talk about where they should go that night.
A pub presumably it had been or perhaps that drinking club they found in Colchester. A place very different at any rate from where he was now heading to meet Adam, who in other circumstances would have changed from the Victoria onto the Northern Line at Warren Street but had agreed to get off at Oxford Circus and meet him in a pub not far from Langham Place.
Rufus would not have recognized him. But there was simply no one else there that it could have been. The beard had gone—had long gone, Rufus suspected—but this depilation usually makes a man look younger and Adam looked older than he was. He looked careworn and irritable, sitting there with a drink in front of him that might have been gin and tonic but was probably Perrier. Rufus did not remember Adam having such a high-domed forehead, and then he understood, almost grinning at the realization, that it had not been so high ten years before but that in the meantime Adam’s hair had receded.
He walked up to the table and stood there and they looked at each other. To Rufus’s surprise Adam was blushing, his face darkened to a mottled purplish color. Neither of them said hello. Rufus finally said: “Well, well, after all this time,” and then he said, “I’m going to get myself a drink.”
Gin and tonic but not much tonic. This sort of thing inevitably shook one up. Rufus sat down. It was the only vacant chair in the place, which was smoky and hot and full of laughing, chattering people, semi-hysterical at being released from work for another fourteen hours.
“I’d like to dispense with all that how-are-you and what-have-you-been-doing-all-this-time stuff,” said Adam, “if you don’t mind, that is. It’s a mere matter of form, we can’t really want to know.”
Time hadn’t improved him, Rufus thought. The basic rudeness was more than basic now. He shrugged but didn’t say anything, tasting his gin and thinking how the whole of life and its pain and its irritations and its stress were worth that first taste that came just once a day.
“The others haven’t contacted me. I rather expected they would.” Adam moved his glass around, making wet rings on the wood, and then more rings to link up the first ones. “I thought they might be anxious about what I would tell the police. About them, I mean, mentioning their names.”
“And have you mentioned names to the police?”
“No,” said Adam, “no, I haven’t.”
“But they’ve been to you? They’ve questioned you?”
“Yes, but I haven’t mentioned you or anyone.”
“I see.” Rufus did not really see. He felt, though, an overwhelming surge of relief, the kind of surprising relief we feel w
hen we have not known how horribly anxious we have previously been. He found himself really looking at Adam for the first time since he came into the pub, at his tired, reddish, rough skin, and receding hairline and the dark marks under his eyes and the little pulse that jumped at the corner of his mouth. And he had a strange, incongruous feeling of loss, of a ruined past and friendship destroyed and wasted, and rage welled up in him so that he would have liked to sweep the glasses from the table and overturn it and sweep the glasses from the next table and overturn that and make general mayhem. He controlled it as he usually did.
“Why not?” he said.
“I’ve told them I wasn’t there. I mean, they asked me if I had ever lived there and I said no, only stayed there for a week or two.” Adam looked up at Rufus and away. “At the beginning of the time we were actually there. They didn’t ask if I was alone, so I didn’t have to say. They asked if I had a girl with me and I just said no, certainly not.”
Rufus could not stop the start of a grin.
“It’s not funny. Christ, it’s not funny.”
“Everything is funny in a sort of way,” said Rufus.
“Do you want another drink?”
“Of course I want another drink. I haven’t changed that much. It’s gin with something in it. I don’t care what they put in it, it doesn’t matter.”
Adam came back with just one glass, Rufus’s. He must be an uncomfortable sort of man to live with, Rufus thought.
“I suppose you’re married?”
“Yes. And you?”
“Yes.” They weren’t going to talk about this sort of thing, all this was among the private life history to be avoided, and Rufus was a little surprised when Adam said: “I’ve got a daughter.”
“Have you? I can’t imagine you with kids.”
“Thanks very much,” said Adam, looking displeased. Two frown lines appeared between his eyes and then his whole forehead corrugated. He seemed to be holding his breath. Exhaling, he said in a rush, “I’ve more or less undertaken to go into my local police station sometime before the weekend and make a statement and sign it. Well, not more or less. I’ve said I would.”
“If you’ve already answered their questions, that’s not such an ordeal, is it?”
Like a peevish schoolboy Adam said, “It’s all very well for you. You haven’t got to perjure yourself, because that’s what it amounts to. It’s one thing talking to a couple of blokes in your own living room and another thing signing sworn statements. I’ve managed to keep you out of it—so far.”
Rufus didn’t believe in altruism. “It wouldn’t help you to mention us, come on. If you stick to what you’ve already said, they’ll accept it. Why wouldn’t they? They’ve come to you only because you’re one of the past owners of the place. Whoever you sold the place to is coming in for the same.”
“I hope you’re bloody right,” said Adam, but he looked a little less wretched. “Do you think I ought to get in touch with Shiva Whatshisname?”
“What was his name? I’ve been trying to remember. You’re afraid he might go to the police and make a voluntary statement? I don’t think he would do that.”
An unasked question lay between them. Rufus was not fanciful, he liked to boast that he had no imagination, but he was aware, just for a moment, of something very strange happening. It was as if a third had come and sat down at the table, an invisible being on an invisible chair, bringing with her the scent of herself, dry and salty and young, and laying on his arm a finger like a moth alighting. He actually brushed at his sleeve. There was no one there, of course, there was no room for anything to be there. He looked at Adam.
“Women get married and change their names. That’s the difficulty.”
“She isn’t in the phone book,” said Adam, and it was as if the words were being wrenched out of him on hooks. Someone laughed nearby and Rufus missed whatever else it was he said.
“Why don’t you just go ahead and make that statement. You’ll probably feel a good deal of relief once you’ve done that.”
“You reckon it will be cathartic, do you?”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know if you’ve ever thought about this, but there were a lot of people who knew we were living there or must have guessed we were.”
“Not a lot.”
“There was the gardener and there was the antiques man from Hadleigh.”
“Yes, what was his name?”
“Evans, Owens, one of those Welsh names. He was quite old, though, and he may be dead by now. There was the pest control that we called the coypu man and there was the post girl that came with the rates that time, and came”—Adam hesitated—“on that last day too.”
“And the farmer, come to that. Presumably he lived or lives at Pytle Farm.”
“In detective stories,” said Adam, “people in our sort of situation go around murdering possible witnesses.”
“I don’t think I’ve ever read a detective story.”
“And there are Mary Gage and Bella. And didn’t you come back in a taxi one day? There’s the taxi driver. He was young. He won’t be dead. The post girl looked about eighteen.”
“Mary Gage married someone and went to Brazil.” Rufus had meant to say something about their collective guilt, and now he thought he would. “I expect, in the eyes of the law, we’d all be guilty, you know. I mean we were all there. Not to be guilty one of us would have had to go rushing off to the police.”
“Like Vivien,” said Adam very quietly.
“Well, Vivien wasn’t guilty of anything, that’s for sure. When you’ve made that statement, give me a ring and tell me, at Wimpole Street, would you, Adam?”
It was the first use of a Christian name. Adam’s face had a rigid look. He compounded the détente.
“Your wife knows nothing of all this, Rufus?”
Rufus shook his head. “And yours?”
“No.”
Silence locked them within itself. Rufus experienced a great quiet, while aware that the hubbub around them was still there, was if anything more intense. Adam was looking at him. The memory came, quite unsought, of that evening at Ecalpemos, while Mary Gage was still there, after she had left the terrace to go to bed, and Rufus had meant to make love to Adam. He would have laughed in derision if anyone had suggested he might have homosexual or even bisexual feelings, but that night he had wanted Adam. Because he loved him. It had been as simple as that. An intensity of love for Adam had come to him like a release of heat breaking over the body, and the only natural thing to do with it seemed to be to make love to its object, to turn to Adam and take him in his arms. Rufus had never done that with any man and he had not done it with Adam that night because he was drunk, and with his mind full of muzzy love and amused tenderness, he had fallen asleep.
He got up and pushed his chair back.
“Soldier on,” said Rufus with a faint smile.
It was likely enough he would never hear another word about it. Rufus realized as he went to find his car that he had said nothing about the shotgun, the twelve-bore. Adam would speak to him again once he had made that statement and there would be time enough to ask about it then. Who was it that had suggested those guns be sold? Shiva, he thought, or perhaps Vivien. No, not Vivien, she had reacted to the very existence of the guns as anyone else might to an instrument of torture in the house, a genuine medieval rack or wheel. Mary Gage’s dismay at the presence of the coypu man had been nothing to Vivien’s distress at the guns and the purpose for which they had been used. You might have expected therefore that she would be glad to see them sold, but not a bit of it, as she would not have dreamed of profiting from such a sale. Shiva it was who had taken the lady’s gun down from the wall and said to Adam: “I expect this is quite valuable. You could sell this and the other one instead of your beautiful family silver.”
“I don’t want to sell them. I’m going to use them.”
“What, shoot birds?”
“Birds, hares—why not? Meat�
��s expensive.”
“Please give me advance warning of when you’re going to do that and I’ll go out somewhere for the day,” said Vivien.
She was the kind of person Rufus found ridiculous, had done then and did now. With her to Ecalpemos she had brought a medicine chest full of remedies, mysterious and very nearly occult, for every known disease. Some of the plants and flowers that formed their ingredients had to be picked at certain stages of the moon for perfect efficacy. Rufus adjudged all that with incredulous contempt, with the disgust of the orthodox medical practitioner. Vivien also had among her baggage something called a “rescue remedy” of which she urged people to accept a few drops if they ever received anything in the nature of a shock, if they got an insect bite, for instance, or a minor burn. She was a devotee, too, of many alternative therapies—charlatanism, Rufus called them—iridology and reflexology and aromatherapy. She meditated, she was a sort of Hindu of the kind, Rufus thought, that takes the shortcut to enlightenment. On the whole she did not talk of it much, she did not inflict all this on the rest of them too overtly, he had to admit that, but it was so much a part of her, it was her, that she carried with her an ambience of it wherever she went and all the time.
If it had been left to him, he would not have let her stay. She and Shiva would have been asked to go if not the moment they arrived, certainly on the following day. Rufus liked people to be amusing and wild and rather “way out,” or he had done then, and Vivien was none of these things. Shiva was quite abysmally none of these things. But before Adam could have been brought around to this way of thinking, Vivien had consolidated her position, had done this the very next morning, by taking over the management of Ecalpemos. Rufus had not thought they needed a cook or a cleaner, an herb grower and homemaker. When the sun shone and there was wine and marijuana, who needed all that? Adam, apparently, thought very differently. Subtly Adam was becoming a householder who wanted a clean, polished house and his money saved by the food being cooked at home. And then—although Rufus had not realized this before, had not dreamed of it, and viewed this revelation with wonder and an amount of distaste—Adam and Zosie both, it seemed, wanted a mother and found their mother in Vivien. Like brother and sister, albeit by then an incestuous pair, they came to Vivien’s apron strings for comfort or giggled together in rebellion against her, while Shiva, an awkward elder brother, watched with anxious wistful smiles, rubbing his hands, longing himself to be accepted and not knowing how to go about attaining this.
