A Fatal Inversion (11 page)

Someone had been looking after the garden, you could see that. Flower beds had been weeded, dead heads removed, the borders of the willow-fringed lake shorn and trimmed, the lawns recently mown. As they walked along one of the stone-flagged paths and came to the gate in the flint wall they saw a neat pile of mowings waiting apparently to be composted.

The walled garden, too, had been carefully maintained. Inside the netted fruit cage Adam saw the bright ripe vermilion gleam of strawberries nestling among their triform leaves, raspberries yet green on the canes. All along the facing wall espaliered trees, their trunks dark and shiny and twisted and knobbed, bore among a rough dull foliage fruit turning gold. Nectarines, Adam remembered, and peaches too. Weren’t there greengages somewhere that scarcely ever fruited but when they did were splendid? Red and white currants here in rows, berries like glass beads, gooseberries with a ripeness the color of rust on their green cheeks.

They each took a handful of strawberries. They walked to the lake, where there were two pairs of ducks, mallards with feathers as if painted in iridescent green, and from which a heron rose on gaunt wings, its legs dangling. Adam looked back at the house, at the honeysuckle that curtained the back of it in yellow and pink, at the martins, sharp-pinioned, that wheeled in and out from the eaves. He was in a state of tremulous excitement. He seemed only to be able to breathe shallowly. It was curiously sexual, this feeling, exactly the way he had once or twice felt with a girl he was mad to make love to and who he thought would let him but was not quite sure, not absolutely sure. The slightest thing would turn his fortune, snatch it, send him home frustrated, bitter, in a sick rage. He felt like that now. If only he could breathe properly! And here was the finest country air, transparent, sparkling sun, the distant low hills and soft basking meadows half-hidden by the blue haze of noon.

“You’re actually going to sell this place?”

Rufus lit a cigarette, offered him one. Adam shook his head.

“What else can I do?”

What choice did he have? He couldn’t live there, he couldn’t keep it up. Adam lay in bed beside Anne, his mind repeating what he had said to Rufus on that wonderful day in June.

“What else can I do?”

Of course he should have said I don’t have a choice. Come on, I’m hungry, let’s go get some lunch and then we’ll find a real estate agent. But they had bought food on their way coming through Halstead, the 1976 version of take-out, a couple of meat pies, apples, Coke, and they had had lunch lying in the grass by the lake. The magical quality of the place crept on them there like a spell, the warmth and the sunshine and the scents of the garden and the tranquil silence. But it was more than that. There was an indefinable ingredient, a kind of excitement. It had something to do with history and the past, that excitement, and something to do with potential as well, with what Orwell or somebody had said, that every man really knew in his heart the finest place to be was the countryside on a summer’s day. I was happy, Adam thought, that’s what it was.

The Garden of Eden. Shiva had called it that but in his mouth it had not been the hackneyed expression it would have been if an English person had so referred to it. He was drawing an interesting image from the mythology of another culture and it had seemed to him fresh and new. Adam had merely shrugged. The Garden of Eden was the way certain people would describe any charming landscape. Yet the phrase had remained with him, particularly in its darker aspect, the way it appears to most of those who are bound by the puritan ethic, not as a haven to live in and enjoy but as a paradise to be expelled from. It was almost as if a necessary condition of being in this paradise were the commission of some frightful sin or crime that must result in expulsion from it. On the day they had gone, when the summer was over and the skies gray and a wind blowing, he had thought of that image. Their departure had something in it of the bowed and wretched mien of Adam and Eve in the many “expulsion” paintings he had later seen, and by then the Garden itself had a ruined look, paradise destroyed.

He got out of bed to pee. He and Anne had a bathroom opening out of their bedroom but Adam, when he got up in the night, usually went to the other one that was on the far side of the landing. This was because his reason for getting up at all was to see if Abigail was all right. But he had used their bathroom and was back in bed again before he realized that he had forgotten to look at his daughter. His anxiety for her had been displaced by a greater worry—was that possible?

Ever since her birth he had been ultra-anxious without expressing, even to himself alone, his reasons for this. Of course he knew what those reasons were but he had never faced them. Now he did and they did not seem absurd, they seemed like good reasons. He got up again and padded across to Abigail’s room. Suppose, after all, that he had not gone to look and in the morning they had found her stiff and cold, her eyes glazed and unfocused, her lips blue? He shivered, gooseflesh standing on his face and arms. Abigail lay on her side, well tucked in, the teddy bear she was too young for sitting in the corner by her feet. Adam stood watching her, listening to her silent sleep.

7

WITH THE SPECIALIST’S CONTEMPT
for the layman’s ignorance, Rufus read accounts of the inquest in two newspapers. More prominence was given to the evidence of Alec Chipstead than to that of the Home Office pathologist, Dr. Aubrey Helier. The stuff Rufus wanted to know would be beyond the average reader’s comprehension. He should really have gone to that inquest. That could be remedied; he could acquire a transcript of the proceedings or simply a copy of the pathologist’s findings, but he did not dare, he was not prepared to show his hand to that extent.

Instead, he tried to guess what might have been said. He put himself into the pathologist’s shoes and stood in the witness box. He spoke of how he had established the sex of the larger skeleton. A fragment of the uterus remaining perhaps? It was this soft part that often persisted longest.

“Having established that the larger skeleton was that of a female, I set about making an estimate of the subject’s age at the time of her death. It should be explained that between the ages of twelve and thirty the union of the epiphyses of most of the long bones with the shafts takes place and by the age of twenty-four most of the epiphyses have united. In the case of the subject I shall henceforward designate as Subject A, I found that the medial end of the clavicle had not yet fused, though fusion had taken place at the acromion and vertical border scapula. The bones of the arm had for the most part fused but fusion had not yet taken place between the radius and ulna, which would be expected to have occurred by the age of twenty-one. The heads of the metatarsals were fused, which one would expect to be accomplished by nineteen years, but fusion had not taken place in the secondary pelvic centers. The sutures of the skull remained open on their inner aspects… .”

Something like that it must have been. He would not have been able to put a precise age on the skeleton. Between seventeen and twenty-one, say. And the cause of death? Rufus had another look at the paper. The pathologist had said it was at this stage impossible to give an opinion but the report also said the police were treating the case as murder. There was nothing about how the pathologist had reached the conclusion death had taken place some time between 1974 and 1977. Rufus guessed again.

“Certain highly technical factors, intelligible only to the expert and with which I will not take up the time of this inquest, have led me to conclude that Subject A had been dead for more than nine years and less than twelve. Suffice it to say that I reached this estimate on the basis of the preservation of a vestige of the uterus and as a result of obtaining a chemical reaction for blood from periosteum. I should not have expected to obtain such a reaction if more than twelve years had elapsed since death.”

It was only conjecture about that bit of uterus. Rufus wondered if he might have invented that part because he had so much to do with wombs in the course of his own daily life. He knew very little about tests done on blood from bones, only that they could be carried out. Identification of “Subject A” would be a more difficult matter altogether. There was no mention of hair, though Rufus knew hair could persist intact for far more years than those bones had been in the grave, and there was nothing about clothing. Would ten years in the earth have destroyed that cotton shroud? He imagined a policeman with nothing more to go on than a tiny, once brightly embroidered label, a square inch of bloodstained, earth-stained, half-rotted cloth, hawking it around boutiques in Kilburn and West Hendon, narrowing the field, finally coming to an importers’ warehouse down below the Westway… .

But no, she hadn’t been wearing that dress, of course she hadn’t. He asked himself how accurate his memory in fact was, how much time and a desire to repudiate the past had blocked off. He ought to try to remember; he must. There were ways of bringing memories to the surface and he must use them to protect himself. It was imperative, too, to keep cool and not allow things to get out of proportion. Most likely they would proceed no further than they had with the identification of “Subject A,” especially since there was no one (apart from themselves) to miss her and she had never been missed. In the case of a person missing ten years before but who had never been reported missing, what hope was there now of establishing identity?

It might be somewhat different with regard to the other occupant of the grave. Rufus became the pathologist again.

“Now to the remains of the infant I shall call Subject B. Examination of the pelvis usually allows sex to be determined with great confidence in very young children and even in the fetus. I found in Subject B the greater sciatic notch to be wide and shallow and the ischial tuberosities to be everted, the ilia inclined to the vertical and the brim of the pelvis almost circular in outline. The subpubic angle was rounded and somewhat of the order of ninety degrees. I can therefore state with total confidence that Subject B was of the female sex.

“The age of Subject B I estimate to have been more than four weeks and less than twelve. The skeleton in toto measured twenty-two and a half inches. The anterior fontanelle was open. There was no appearance of ossification in the humeral head, though the cuboid was ossified… .”

Rufus was getting into unknown terrain here. He had very little idea of how the baby’s age could have been estimated. By the fusion of joints, certainly, it need hardly matter to him which ones. How old had the baby been anyway? Very young, without teeth. “A primary deciduous dentition had not yet commenced” was no doubt how the pathologist would have put it. But what of Subject A’s teeth?

That was primarily how dead bodies were identified, by their teeth. On the other hand, if the particular person had never been missed or reported missing, their existence scarcely recorded in the great reference log of National Insurance and medical cards, passports and driver’s licenses, if the chance of their even being named seemed thin, what obscure dentist was going to rise up suddenly producing the relevant chart?

A certain assumption might of course be made.

“There is considerable danger here of drawing the conclusion that because the two sets of bones were found in conjunction and on the same date, they must have met their deaths at the same time. Although this is probably so, I am able to offer no evidence in proof of it. Nor have I come upon any factor to prove the truth of another assumption which may be made: to wit, that Subject A was the mother of Subject B. Experience and probability point to this being so but that is all.

“I am unable to state with any certainty the length of time which has elapsed since the death of Subject B or offer any suggestion as to the cause of death.”

That was something which could never be established after this lapse of time. Unfortunate in a way, Rufus thought. It would be an ironical stroke if investigations into the affair resulted not in the discovery of those happenings in which they had been guilty but only of those where they had been blameless.

The inquest had been adjourned. No doubt they were still digging up the little graveyard. Rufus was not squeamish, he had not been one of those medical students who became nauseated at his first sight of surgery, but, curiously enough, he did not much like to think of all those odd little bones, so alien to him, so unidentifiable, being dug up and sorted out and sifted through in case there should be a human fibula among them or a vertebra. Rufus did not even know if animal bones shared the same names as those of humans. Did dogs have fibulas? He was surprised to find himself shuddering.

If there was no shot in or among the human remains, in the cavities of the skull for instance, would it be possible to find it in the soil, among the sand and gravel and pine needles? Bird shot it would have been or somewhat larger. Rufus had seen it only while eating partridge which had been winged instead of shot in the head, and had nearly broken one of his teeth on the tiny ball of lead. He imagined gravel being sifted, all the particles, the minute stones, being picked over by some policeman whose job it was to do that, the tiny flints laid in one tray, the wood fragments in another, and then, in a third, the shot.

He could remember so much, he had clear pictures of whole days spent at Ecalpemos, whole conversations recorded that could be rerun in his head. Why was it then that he couldn’t remember where she had been shot? In the heart or the head or the spine? His mind blanked over that, and there was a complete loss of recall. When he tried and saw the sky covered with rushing clouds, the lawn that had become a hayfield, the cedar’s wheeling branches, the gun leveled, there would come an explosion in his memory like the firing of that shotgun, a redness in front of his eyes with splintered edges, then blackout.

The gun he could remember, both guns. And the gun room and the first time he went in there with Adam. They had eaten their lunch down by the lake. Two pork pies and a can of Coke each but not the apples which were imported Granny Smiths and bruised, and anyway they had strawberries. They must have each eaten about a pound of strawberries, for they kept going back to the fruit cage for more. Sometime during the afternoon they decided not to go back but to stay there overnight. That meant there was no hurry, they could have lain out there in the sun till the pubs opened. But Adam had this idea of phoning his mother to tell her he wouldn’t be back that night. Rufus wouldn’t have bothered, he came and went as he pleased, and anyway didn’t believe parents should be pandered to in this way. Of course it wasn’t quite pandering with Adam. He didn’t want to get on worse terms with his mother, whom he hoped to get a loan from for his holiday in Greece, nor did he want the kind of thing that might have happened, his mother phoning hospitals or getting the police because they could have had an accident in Goblander.