Paradise Lost

Long before my home county became fashionable – after the Freuds had colonized Walberswick but before the county began to feature in the weekend colour supplements – Suffolk only seemed to pique the public consciousness through the work of two local grandes dames of crime writing.

Novels by Ruth Rendell and P. D. James figured prominently on our bookshelves (my mother was a voracious reader of detective fiction), and when I was growing up in the late 1980s and early ’90s, TV adaptations of the Adam Dalgliesh mysteries (P. D. James) and Inspector Wexford series (Ruth Rendell) were compulsory viewing, affording great excitement as we spotted familiar locations. It was Ruth Rendell on whom we were most keen. This was partly because P. D. James was deemed too adult and disturbing for an ado­lescent – I didn’t pick up Devices and Desires until I was in my twenties and it still haunts me – but also because of an indirect link with this local celebrity. Ruth Rendell not only lived at Polstead, where my father drove me every week for flute lessons, she was also a friend of my music teacher. After Mum opened a copy of the coffee-table book Ruth Rendell’s Suffolk, and saw the inscription ‘To Sue, with love, Ruth’, she would insist on driving me to lessons herself – on the off chance, you understand, that she might bump into the writer she admired while I squeaked my way through a Poulenc sonata next door. Mum never did manage to contrive an accidental meeting. But these tenuous connections fostered my fascination with books whose landscapes can be walked and whose locations are tangible. Better still, they put me on to the fifteen books that Ruth Rendell wrote under the pseudonym of Barbara Vine and which follow in the tradi­tion of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca. They are certainly psychological thrillers but, as with Rebecca, that description fails to reflect the com­plexity, vivid characterization and fine prose style of the writing, at its very best in A Fatal Inversion (1987). In her preparatory notes for Rebecca, du Maurier wrote: ‘a tragedy is looming very close and Crash! Bang! – something happens’. With A Fatal Inversion that Crash! Bang! comes right at the start. In the sly opening paragraph, we come across a body lying

on a small square of carpet in the middle of the gun-room floor. Alec Chipstead looked around for something to put over it. He unhooked a raincoat from one of the pegs and, covering the body, reflected too late that he would never wear that again. ‘Extraordinary how painful these things can be,’ said the vet. ‘You’ll get another dog, I suppose?’

From this clever conceit, the Chipsteads make a gruesome discov­ery in the grounds of their country house, Wyvis Hall. Burying their old dog in the pet cemetery in ‘resin-scented earth’ studded with monuments green with lichen, they uncover ‘what looked like the bones, the fan splay of metatarsals, of a very small foot’. After the bodies of a baby and a young woman are exhumed from the animal graveyard, the narrative shifts from the present day (1986) to ten years earlier, when a group of young people are living at Wyvis Hall as a commune named ‘Ecalpemos’ – ‘Some Place’ in reverse, hence the ‘fatal inversion’ of the title. Adam has inherited the house from a great-uncle and decamps there with his best friend, Rufus, for the university holidays. Wyvis Hall has the fatal romantic allure of du Maurier’s Manderley or L. P. Hartley’s Brandham Hall, and it is wor­thy of inclusion in Pevsner:

It had been built in the late eighteenth century, two storeys high, shallow slate roof, red brick, seven windows set in ashlar [over] six below and the front door set centrally under a portico and pillared porch.

Looking back, Rufus recalls, ‘it had seemed to float on a raft of golden mist’. This being the summer of the 1976 heatwave, their plans to travel to Greece are abandoned, ‘the weather being perfect . . . as if it were southern Europe where you woke up each morning to sun­shine and unclouded skies’. They drift through the summer in a haze of hashish smoke and Great Uncle Hilberd’s claret, dragging faded quilts on to the terrace where they lounge ‘as it might be on some Damascus rooftop’. To fund their existence, they sell the family silver in the antique shops of Sudbury and Long Melford – ‘fish knives and forks this time and a filigree sweet basket and two sauce-boats [because] Rufus said no one would use those things, they were quite useless’. Into the debauched idyll of Ecalpemos enters Zosie, a childlike, light-fingered waif with yellow eyes ‘like an Abyssinian cat’ and the face of an Arthur Rackham fairy. Later come Shiva and Vivien, the latter another rootless waif, hoping to travel to India but seeking an earnest ‘East Anglian kibbutz’ in the interim. Vine moves us back and forth in time, between that heady sum­mer and the present day, as the police close in on the former occupants of Wyvis Hall. But which woman is it lying in the woodland grave? And whose baby? There are clues, there are cunning little indications throughout as to their identities, but it isn’t until the very last line, with the lives of the protagonists now in ruins, that we know for sure. A Fatal Inversion is fiendishly clever and deeply unsettling. So far, so much psychological thriller; but it is the quality of the writing and sheer power of Vine’s imagination that elevate A Fatal Inversion beyond the genre. Whenever Adam thinks of the things that had happened at Ecalpemos,

when association started an entering procedure – at, for instance, the sound of a Greek or Spanish place-name, the taste of rasp­berries, the sight of candles out of doors – he had taught himself to touch an escape key, rather like that on the computers he sold.

Rufus’s confidence, his ‘upper-middle class drawl’, have helped him to get ‘the whole business . . . under tight control’. He is now a successful Harley Street gynaecologist with a beautiful wife – yet also a high-functioning alcoholic with an ‘abyss’ in his marriage that is bridged with ‘darlings’. Shiva’s longing to be accepted sees him assume a pivotal role in the tragedy. Ten years on, having dropped out of university and suffered a breakdown, he nevertheless ‘would have liked Adam or Rufus to get in touch with him’ after the Wyvis Hall bodies are reported in the national press. ‘Their indifference, their treating him of no account, caused him a pain he thought he had long got over.’ Rereading the book, retracing the tensions that develop in Ecalpemos, I am reminded of how real these characters are. I met people like Adam, Rufus, Shiva and Vivien in my university hall of residence, while fragile Zosie, with ‘a copy of Honey magazine and a half-eaten chocolate bar’ in her backpack, might have been a model in one of the magazines I read and idolized in my youth. Perhaps it was that quality – the glamour, the eroticism of Ecalpemos – that was most alluring to my teenage self. I was longing to live in London, where things actually happened. So the appearance of beautiful people, on the page and on screen, made sleepy, unfashion­able Suffolk seem suddenly sexy, even though I knew very well that the heatwave would end, and the rain would start to fall ‘as on that last day, the day of the expulsion from paradise’.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 84 © Flora Watkins 2024