A Fatal Inversion by Ruth Rendell

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