A Fatal Inversion

by Ruth Rendell

  Adam nodded. He pushed his empty glass away.

  “Do you want the other half?”

  “You can’t say that about spirits,” Adam protested. “I mean, about beer you can but not about spirits. The other half of what would it be?”

  Rufus laughed. “Still the same old Verne-Smith. Remember the Greek verb ‘to rub’? I’ll remember that to my dying day.”

  “Yes, so you said before.”

  “That doesn’t make it less true.”

  “No. No, it doesn’t. I don’t really want another drink.”

  “I should have expected you to be—well, euphoric, to say the least. Aren’t you even relieved to be off the hook? I mean, you have realized, haven’t you? This is the end of it. It’s over. No punishment. This time society fails to take revenge?”

  “Oh, I’ve realized. I’ve gotten away with it.” Adam picked up their glasses. “I’ll get you a drink, I ought to. I just never seem to think of it, that’s all.”

  Rufus watched him make his way to the bar. What sort of curious nature would it be that never thought about drinking or that others might wish to drink? It seemed to him that Adam didn’t know about Shiva, that he had not made the connection between the man burned to death in Walthamstow and the man they had known at Ecalpemos. There was perhaps no point in enlightening him. It might lead, Rufus thought with a hint of recoil, to quasi-philosophical speculations on the nature of retribution or even God not being mocked. No, he would say nothing.

  Vodka and tonic was put down before him. Adam had bought himself something that looked suspiciously like neat Perrier.

  “We drank a hell of a lot of wine at Ecalpemos,” said Rufus. “Muck most of it. Plonk. It apparently did us no harm.”

  Adam looked up and said in an aggressive way, “Isak Dinesen said that life is no more than a process for turning healthy young puppies into mangy old dogs and man but an exquisite instrument for converting the red wine of Shiraz into urine.”

  Rufus gave a bark of laughter. “What brought that up, for God’s sake?”

  Adam muttered something about random access, so Rufus didn’t pursue it but started talking about his plans to move, about a house far beyond their means really that Marigold had found in Flask Walk but which he supposed they would stretch themselves to the limit to buy. But euphoria was making Rufus enthusiastic and even expansive. He had been on what he called a high for five days now, doing his best to keep up there on it, too, because somewhere inside him a little tiny nasty voice was whispering that once he came down he would have to think about his wife, and his wife’s friend’s husband, and whether he was buying an astronomically priced house to please or even to buy his wife. So he said fulsomely to Adam: “We mustn’t lose touch again. I mean, the point is we don’t have to lose touch again. We can all meet up now. I’ll get Marigold to give your wife a ring, shall I?”

  At one point Adam had felt like explaining. He had felt like opening his heart to Rufus but the moment had passed or all that breezy insensitivity had made it impossible. So he nodded and said okay and because he didn’t know what else to do, stuck out his hand and shook hands with Rufus. Rufus offered him a lift but Adam said no thanks, he would get the tube.

  Marigold could call Anne, he thought as he walked toward Tottenham Court Road, and be told what would put an end to any possible cozy get-togethers: that Adam and Anne were no longer together. She had left him, or rather, had asked him to leave so that she might remain in Abigail’s home with Abigail. It was the only possible way, anyone could see that. Adam was on his way to get the Northern Line up to Edgware, where his parents lived.

  It was that remark of Rufus’s about no punishment, about society not taking revenge, that had finished him. It was an irony, he thought, that all through the anxiety it had been his removal from Abigail that had worried him, never her removal from him. There was no doubt that they would be given joint custody and he would get to take her out on Sundays… .

  21

  A CLEARING IN THE PINEWOOD was how you would have described it now, the turf as smooth and level as a croquet lawn. Meg Chipstead, standing on the green ride and looking at it from a little distance away—she still did not care to go too close—thought not for the first time that perhaps they should replace the monuments. It seemed a pity that something that was historic really, an interesting rural curiosity, should be destroyed because of that one horrifying act. The gravestones had been placed in two neat stacks in the stables: Pinto, Blaze, Sal, Alexander, and all. Of course she would have no idea where to re-site them, except in the case of Blaze. That could never be forgotten.

  Meg called out, “Sam, Sam!” and the little dog, the Jack Russell, Fred’s replacement, came running out of the deciduous wood. No dog would venture in among the pine trees—at least Fred never had. There was no point really in putting the gravestones back now that they had decided to leave the place. Let the new owners replace them if they chose. Meg and Alec had decided they must tell all to those new owners, whoever they might be. They would find out anyway.

  It was May and the bluebells were out. Drifts of them gleamed between the trees like ground mist, like shreds of sky. The beech leaves were a pure pale green, each an unfolding cocoon of silk. A breeze moved the shafts of sunshine, or seemed to do so, making fluttering dapple patterns on the fallen leaves of last autumn. Last autumn … Whenever Meg thought of that she knew there was no use saying the place was beautiful and they would regret selling. She could never forget those days of disinterment and investigation, the spoliation of sanctuary and peace. They had made up their minds to go and would keep to this resolution.

  She began to walk back to the house, the little dog running through the brakes of bramble, the uncurling green fern, chasing a squirrel across the drift. Meg called him, “Sam, Sam!” because she could hear a vehicle coming down. It would be the people with an order to view, the prospective buyers. A Range Rover in an olive green color, darker than the new leaves, came into sight under the arch of branches and lumbered down the tracks.

  Meg waved to show they were expected, to show they had come to the right place, and got in return a hand raised in a salute. This unfamiliar presence started Sam off barking.

  “Shut up,” said Meg. “Come on, race you to the house.”

  She threw a stick to speed him on his way. Of course he was off in a streak of white and tan, boomeranging back to her with the stick in his mouth. This time he forgot the stick and went to yap at the people who were getting out of the car in front of the house. Meg came jogging down over the lawn, under the branches of the cedar tree. The front door opened and Alec came out, holding out his hand.

  But what a lot of them there were! Meg was rather appalled. The old woman who lived in a shoe, she thought as from the rear doors of the Range Rover one child after another appeared. A stream of children, little steps, as her mother would have said. In fact there were five and the young woman, the wife, was pregnant. She looked a lot younger than her husband, close to twenty. He was tallish with gray curly hair, thin, a bit worn, as well he might be.

  She hadn’t quite caught their name on the phone, Lathom or Heysham or Patience or something, and she wasn’t to learn it now, only to have her hand shaken and told, what a lovely house, really he had had no idea!

  Rob, his wife called him. She was a little plump woman, in perhaps her sixth month of pregnancy. Her hair was streaked in rose pink and blond and she was still young enough to wear the fantastic loops and frizzes into which it had been tortured. The two older children, the girls, couldn’t be hers. The elder of them was at least fifteen.

  “Rob, we can leave this lot outside, can’t we?” she said. “It’s a lovely day. I mean, they could have a little look around the garden if Mr. and Mrs. Chipstead wouldn’t mind.”

  “Oh, please,” said Meg. “Whatever they like. I expect it would be boring for them inside anyway.” She said to the children, the smaller ones staring at her, “Only you will be careful of the lake, won’
t you? You won’t go near the lake?”

  “I’ll just take the baby in with me, if that’s all right.” A flicker of some indefinable emotion seemed to cross her face. “I don’t like leaving him, not just yet.”

  The “baby” was a big boy of about eighteen months, able to walk but not steadily. His mother yanked him on to her hip, shaking her head when her husband tried to take him from her. They went into the house, where after the outer brightness, the gentle breezy warmth, it seemed as if a dark chill met them.

  But this sensation lasted only a moment and the house unfolded itself in all its eighteenth-century elegance. They walked through the drawing room, where the pink marble was admired and the fireplace, and on into Alec’s study that was more a library. The Chipsteads had had the room entirely lined with bookshelves and stuck to oak and leather for the furnishings. Meg was proud of the views across the garden from this room, the flint walls of the kitchen garden, the green slope down to the lake, where kingcups were in bloom and yellow flags. The two girls and the two little boys were squatting down at the water’s edge trying to persuade a duck to approach them.

  Their father tapped on the window and when the elder girl looked up, shook his head in an admonitory way. If they did decide to buy Wyvis Hall, he said to Alec, something would have to be done about that lake, fence it in perhaps.

  “Or teach them to swim,” said his wife. “And I could learn, too, in case I fell in.”

  He gave her an indulgent smile, tender, somehow sexual. It made Meg feel slightly embarrassed. To cover the faint confusion this glimpse into their private life had brought her, she asked him if they planned to move permanently to the country.

  “Oh, no, we should keep our London house. My company is there. I shouldn’t fancy three hours commuting a day, though I know people do it.”

  On the stairs she handed the boy over to her husband, stood for a moment, getting her breath. She laid her hand on the swollen belly.

  “It does lurch about so. It gave poor Dan an awful great kick just now. No wonder he wanted to go to you.”

  The master bedroom, the pink room, the lilac room, and the en suite bathrooms. Alec and Meg had had two new bathrooms put in soon after they came there. Just one for a house that size was ridiculous. An eye was kept on the children from the window of the turquoise room (green carpet, peacock feather wallpaper, green and blue striped duvet) and their father called out to the baby: “Take the little ones up into the wood, Nicola.”

  “And pick some bluebells if you like,” said Meg.

  “How kind of you! You are nice.” Dimpled hands were pushed through the pink and yellow confection of hair, not very clean hands either, Meg noticed with surprise. The finger with the gold wedding ring on it was all streaked with black. They all stared at her when she said, “There’s a staircase in that closet that goes up to the loft.”

  “Absolutely true,” said Alec. “There is.”

  Meg opened the closet door. “More convenient than a trapdoor and a ladder. But how did you know?”

  “My wife spent some time in this part of the world before we were married. You’ve never been in this house before though, have you, Viv?”

  She looked with a kind of nervous wonderment, it seemed to Meg, at the pretty green silk curtains, the Klimt reproductions. “Not this house, no.”

  “Would you like some tea, shall I make a cup of tea? I think we have some lemonade for the children.”

  “Thank you very much but no, we must get back. Our nanny comes back from holiday today, thank God. We like the house. Actually we saw it advertised in the East Anglian Daily Times, we take it, my company has an office in Ipswich, but I suppose we shall have to go through the agent? I don’t mind telling you we like the house very much.”

  “We love it,” his wife said.

  The children came running across the grass from the wood with fistfuls of bluebells. The smaller boy gave a bunch to his mother.

  “And we ought to tell you,” she said, “we do know about all those grisly things up in the wood.” She smiled, holding out her arms, her swollen body swinging under the full loose skirt, childlike no longer but powerful suddenly, a ruling force. “And we don’t mind a bit.”

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  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  copyright © 1987 by Kingsmarkham Enterprises Ltd.

  cover design by Jaya Miceli

  ISBN: 978-1-4532-1483-1

  This edition published in 2011 by Open Road Integrated Media

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