A Fatal Inversion (8 page)

“Why’s he getting his knickers in a twist anyway if he’s so sure it’s a mistake?”

It was not then but ten minutes afterward when he had spoken to the solicitor and been assured there was no mistake that Lewis began to dislike his son. Adam said: “You can’t expect me to be
sorry
he left the place to me and not to you. Obviously, I think he made the right decision.”

“Can’t you see what an outrage it is?”

Adam was excited. He wanted to go and tell the Fletcher family his good fortune. Lewis was boiling with rage and misery and shock.

“Can I have the car?” said Adam.

“No, you can’t! Now or at any other time, and that’s final!”

Lewis soon formulated a plan whereby they could all share Wyvis Hall. It was not ideal, it was not what he had anticipated, far from it, but it was better than abandoning it to Adam. After all, Adam would be back at college in a week’s time, the will would have to be proved, but by the middle of the summer why shouldn’t he and his wife and Bridget use the Hall regularly at weekends? Adam could have it for his long vacation. He, Lewis, was quite prepared to get the place redecorated at his own expense. It was a family house, after all, no doubt Hilbert had intended Adam to share it with the rest of his family. He and Beryl and Bridget could go there on weekends and they could all be there together for Christmas. What did a boy still at university, with no prospects yet of any sort of career, what did someone like that want with a massive country house?

“I want to sell it,” Adam said. “I want the money.”

“Sell the land,” said Lewis.

“I don’t want to sell the land. It wouldn’t fetch much anyway, agricultural land. And who’s going to want to buy it?” It was plain that Adam had gone into this aspect of things. “No, since you ask …” Clearly, Adam was only reluctantly willing to share his plans with his parents. “Since you ask, I’m going to go down and take a look at it as soon as I can and then I’m going to put it on the market.”

Adam returned to college. That summer Lewis thought perhaps he was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. He made all sorts of wild plans. He would go down to Nunes and take over the house. If necessary he would break in and take possession. The village people would support his cause—didn’t they call him Mr. Lewis? Wasn’t he the rightful heir? Adam would never try to regain the house by force. By this time his fantasies took on the air of medieval barons’ wars. He actually dreamed of himself in a suit of armor opening the big oak front door with a mace in his hand and Adam riding up on a black colorfully caparisoned horse. More practically, he consulted solicitors of his own in an attempt to have the will disputed. They advised him against trying. He had another go at persuasion and wrote Adam long letters to his college begging for compromises. Adam phoned home and asked his mother to stop his father bothering him when he was in the middle of exams. Lewis’s doctor put him on tranquilizers and advised him to go away on holiday.

In the middle of June he suddenly gave up. He washed his hands of Adam and Wyvis Hall and the memory of his Uncle Hilbert. The whole thing disgusted him, he told Beryl, it was beneath his dignity, only he couldn’t help feeling utterly disillusioned with human nature. He wouldn’t go to Wyvis Hall now if Adam invited him, if he went down on his bended knees.

His exams over, Adam came home. He slept one night at home and then went down to Nunes, taking Rufus Fletcher with him. Or, rather, being taken by Rufus, in whose van they went. Lewis refused to show any interest. He practically ignored Adam for whom he now felt a deep distasteful antipathy. A few months before, if anyone had told him you could feel dislike for your own child, a real aversion from your own flesh and blood, he would not have believed them. But that was how he felt. He couldn’t get Adam out of the house fast enough. Two days later he was back. So much for Wyvis Hall. That was how much Adam appreciated the beautiful old house he had had the unheard-of good fortune to inherit at the age of nineteen. He was going to Greece with Rufus Fletcher and Rufus Fletcher’s girlfriend, who was an Honorable, the daughter of some titled person.

“You would think someone with her background would know better,” said Lewis.

“Know better than what?” said Adam.

“Well, a single girl staying in places with a man like that.”

Adam laughed.

“How long will you be away?” said Beryl.

“I don’t know.” They never did know, or if they did, they weren’t saying. Beryl might have saved her breath. “Term starts on October seventeenth.”

“You’re never going to be in Greece for four months!”

“I don’t know. I might be. Greece is quite big.”

“Staying in tents, I suppose. Sleeping on beaches.” Lewis had forgotten to be indifferent and aloof, he couldn’t help it. “And what about that beautiful old house you’ve been unaccountably made responsible for? What about that? Is that to be allowed to go to rack and ruin?”

“It’s not in ruins,” said Adam, looking him in the eye. “I don’t know what
rack
means. I’ve got someone from the village coming in every day to check up that no one tries making a nuisance of themselves. Squatters, I mean. There’s a lot of squatting going on.”

Lewis had known what he meant. He knew who Adam thought the squatters might be. It was a terrible way to speak to your own father.

Up in the short-term parking lot at Terminal Two, Lewis had to drive from floor to floor before he found a slot in which to put the car. He was back in the present now, having exhausted those resentful memories. Adam had gone to Greece the next day and not reappeared until September. Lewis and Beryl, of course, had never gone near Wyvis Hall; they would not have laid themselves open to such humiliation, to the possibility of their way being barred by some yokel, paid by Adam to keep an eye on the place. Where had Adam got the money to pay someone to look in at Wyvis Hall daily?

Lewis asked himself this question as he went down in the lift and crossed the arrivals hall of Terminal Two to await the exodus from Customs. The flight from Tenerife was due in fifteen minutes and he saw that there was a screen on the wall that would show when it landed. People stood around, meeting planes, men who seemed to be the drivers of hired cars carrying placards with the names of people or companies printed on them, families waiting for a returning father, a strange old woman in a red cloak chewing gum. Lewis wondered what visitor from Rome or Amsterdam or the Canaries was going to have the misfortune to stay with her.

Perhaps he should have told the police that there had been someone going into Wyvis Hall every day during those months of summer. Certainly it would not have been a respectable person, such as Hilbert’s gardener or cleaner, but most likely some unemployed derelict Adam had met in a pub. This person might easily be the perpetrator of the crime that led to that appalling interment. And by association Adam would be involved in it too.

There did not appear to be any police in the crowd. No policemen had been sent to intercept Adam, unless of course they were in plainclothes—those two that looked like businessmen, for instance. They were probably detectives. Who else would be waiting at the arrivals barrier at Heathrow at this hour?

Lewis began to feel excited. Suppose Adam were to be arrested before he even reached his father? He imagined himself driving a tearful Anne and Abigail back to Beryl, then finding Adam a good lawyer. Adam would have to admit he had been in the wrong, had been extremely negligent, criminally careless really, in allowing any Tom, Dick, and Harry access to Wyvis Hall. He might not wish to reveal names to the police but he would have to. Pressure would be put on him. Eventually, he would come to confess that if his father had inherited the Hall as he had rightfully expected to do, none of this would have happened.

The arrival of Flight IB 640 from Tenerife came up on the screen. By this time Lewis was off into a fantasy in which a girl Adam had gotten pregnant had been abandoned by him with their child at Wyvis Hall, where she had later been murdered by a sinister caretaker. The first arrivals were coming out of Customs now: two middle-aged couples, a crowd of kids who looked like students, a family with four children and Grandma, a man who looked as if he had been drinking on the plane, his collar undone and his tie hanging. The detectives who were not detectives after all stepped forward to meet him, one of them shaking hands, the other slapping him on the back. A woman came out wheeling a big tartan suitcase, and behind her was Adam, pushing valises in a cart, Anne beside him looking brown and tired, pushing the empty stroller, Abigail asleep on her shoulder.

Adam’s face, when he saw his father, was a study in some unpleasant emotion, not so much anxiety as exasperation.

6

THE WONDERFUL THING
about the human mind, Adam thought, is the way it copes when the worst happens. Beyond that worst happening you think there can be nothing, the unimaginable has taken place, and on the other side is death, destruction, the end. But the worst happens and you reel from it, you stagger, the shock is enormous, and then you begin to recover. You rally, you stand up and face it.
You get used to it.
An hour maybe and you are making contingency plans. For what had happened was not the worst, you realized that. The worst was yet to come, was perhaps always yet to come, never would actually come, because if it did, you would know it, that would be reality, and there would be nothing then but to kill yourself. Quickly.

Now that he was able to, he assembled what had happened and laid the facts before himself. They had dug up those bones at Wyvis Hall and had decided it was murder they were investigating. Bones, skeletons, bodies, do not bury themselves. Those were the facts, as far as he knew them up to this moment. He would know more, much more, in the days to come. What was certain was that he could no longer use the escape key. It was defunct. The passages it canceled had, in any case, as in certain programs, not been lost but stored on some limbo disc from whence they must now be retrieved.

Adam sat in his parents’ house, drinking tea. There must be a total retrieval now, the one good thing about which was that it might banish his dreams. He was aware of a slight feeling of sickness and of cold, an absence of hunger, though he had been feeling quite hungry when he got off the plane.

Anne sat next to him on his mother’s cretonne-covered settee and Abigail lay on a plaid rug on the floor, kicking with her legs and punching with her arms. His mother kept poking toys at her which she did not want. A passage from a novel by John O’Hara came back to Adam. He had memorized it years ago in the Ecalpemos epoch:
The safest way to live is first, inherit money, second be born without a taste for liquor, third, have a legitimate job that keeps you busy, fourth, marry a wife who will cooperate in your sexual peculiarities, fifth, join some big church, sixth, don’t live too long.
Apart from the last one, which he hadn’t gotten to yet, and the penultimate one, which seemed to apply in America more than here (here he had joined the golf club) he had complied with all the rest. Or his nature and luck had complied for him. Nemesis had still come down like a wolf on the fold.

He had not wanted to come back here. But there had been no spirit in him, the shock of what his father told him had been too great.

“Something that will interest you, Adam, something to make you sit up. They’ve dug up a lot of human bones at my old uncle’s house… .”

By the time he had rallied and got himself together and was thinking of things to say to the police, it was too late and they were heading north. Anne was furious. When Lewis said to come back with him and eat there, Adam had got a kick on the ankle from Anne and another kick when he hadn’t replied.

He had turned on her and said with cold savagery, “For fuck’s sake, stop kicking me, will you?”

He expected his father to rise and say something about that being no way to speak to one’s wife or not in front of the child; he was capable of that. But he had said nothing, only looked subdued, and Adam realized why. His own terrible fear and anger had communicated itself to his father and shown him what the better part of valor was: keeping silent. Having put the cat among the pigeons, made mischief in his special way, he was lying low now and waiting. The old bastard. Adam only wished Uncle Hilbert
had
left him Wyvis Hall and then there would have been no Ecalpemos, no Zosie, and no deaths. And Adam couldn’t see he would have been much worse off. He and Anne would be living in a house like this one rather than that neo-Georgian palace. Children, after all, he thought, looking at Abigail, were happy wherever they were, so long as they were loved… .

His parents had not asked him what sort of holiday he had had or how the flight had been. The conversation was exclusively on the subject of the discovery at Wyvis Hall. Adam did not know whether to be glad or sorry he had not obtained an English newspaper while away. If he had, the shock would have been less, but on the other hand, his holiday would have been spoiled. He would have liked very much to be alone. Of course he knew there was no possibility of this, now or when he returned home, for when you were married, you never could be alone. Presumably that was the point. What was he going to tell Anne? How much was he going to tell her? He didn’t know. None of it, if he could help it.

They sat at the table in the dining area to eat an absurdly early high tea. Lewis asked him if he could remember the day when he heard he had inherited Wyvis Hall and had walked in here and astounded them with his news.

“He had a beard then, Anne.” Lewis’s subdued air had changed to one of high good humor. “You wouldn’t have recognized him, he looked like John the Baptist.”

Adam could remember very well but he wasn’t going to say so.

“What a funny thing,” said Lewis. “We had ham salad that day too. What a coincidence! Oh, yes, I’ve been meaning to ask you, who was it looked after Wyvis Hall while you were in Greece?”

Adam could eat nothing. That other time, he remembered, it was his father who hadn’t been able to eat. He didn’t know what Lewis meant about someone looking after the house, but no doubt he, Adam, at the time had concocted some tale to keep his father quiet, to keep him away even.