A Fatal Inversion by Ruth Rendell Read Free Book Online Page B

this was Wyvis Hall and the pinewood and the animal cemetery?
    To photograph the house for the news last night the cameraman must have stood just where he had stood himself, on the edge of the lawn with his back to the cedar tree. A popular mass-produced camera he had used but quite a good one. One thing about Zosie’s pilfering; she never stole rubbish. He had taken a picture of her after that and one of the animal cemetery.
    “Why is the grass always so short up here?” Adam had asked.
    “Rabbits, I expect.”
    “Why can’t bloody rabbits come and eat my lawns?”
    Adam always referred to “my lawns,” “my house,” “my furniture.” It had got up Rufus’s nose a bit, though Adam had a perfect right to do this. It was his, all of it, and it went to his head rather. Nineteen-year-olds seldom inherit country mansions, after all.
    It must have been sometime in August when I took those pictures, Rufus thought, and a couple of weeks later it was all over. Coincidentally, as the community and their lives together broke up, so did the weather. It was raining intermittently all the time they were in the cemetery, the pines bowing and shivering in the wind. Sometimes they had had to stop and take shelter under the closely planted trees.
    If the weather had held and it had still been hot and dry, would they have dug deeper? Probably not. In spite of the rain, the earth was still hard as iron. A sheet of rain had come down then, a hard, gusty shower, while they were laying the squares of turf back in place, and Adam had said something about the rain making the grass grow quickly, the rain being on their side.
    “We should all go our separate ways as soon as we can,” Rufus had said. “We should pack up now and go.”
    The spade and the fork they had hung up among the other tools in the stables. They had packed and Adam had locked up the house. At some point Rufus himself had taken the things out of the fridge and left the door open to defrost it. Adam closed the front door and stood there for a moment as if he could not wrench himself away.
    So much of its beauty had been stripped from it by the whipping winds. And by the neglect of the long hot summer. A sudden gust of rain dashed against the red bricks that were already stained in patches by water. The house that when he first saw it had seemed to float on a raft of golden mist now lay in a wilderness, amid ragged grass and straggling bushes and trees dead from the heat. Dirty gray clouds tumbled across the sky above the slate roof, now the only thing that shone, glazed with rain.
    But Rufus admitted to himself that the beauties of nature and architecture had never meant much to him. It was the heat and sunshine and privacy he liked. And now he longed only to get away. They all got into Goblander and he drove away up the drift, Adam next to him, the others in the back. The drift had become a tunnel of overgrowth that dripped water onto the roof of the van. None of them allowed their eyes to turn toward the pinewood. At the top they came out into uncompromising bright gray light, the bleak hedgeless lane, the flat meadows where here and there stunted trees squatted like old men in cloaks. Adam’s simile, not mine, thought Rufus with a grimace.
    No one asked where he was taking them. No one spoke. Adam had Hilbert’s old golf bag stuck between his legs and Rufus guessed the gun was inside it. They must have gone a good two miles before they met another car. Rufus overtook a bus going to Colchester and dropped the two in the back so that they could catch it. He took Adam on to Sudbury for him to catch a train there and at that point they parted. Adam got down from Goblander and said, “For ever and forever farewell, Rufus.”
    Which was probably a quotation from something, though Rufus did not know what and thought fastidiously that it was in bad taste, histrionic, though just like Adam.
    “Take care,” said Rufus, and not looking back any more than he had done when