A Fatal Inversion (36 page)

Adam agreed really but he knew that if he was to accomplish the child’s return he must seem not to agree. He pushed angrily past Vivien. Rufus was nowhere about, probably he was up in the Centaur Room. Because she had been awakened at dawn and after that had dozed only briefly, Zosie was sleepy and yawning, putting her fists into her eyes as children do. It was no more than five but it was as if dusk had come and the rooms had a gloomy, almost wintry look, though stuffy and close. They had closed all the windows on account of the threatening storm and Adam went around opening them again.

Upstairs in Pincushion he found Zosie lying fast asleep, stretched out on the bed, and close beside her, not in the portable crib but on the mattress, the baby Catherine Ryemark lay also sleeping in the crook of her arm. Adam bent over and kissed Zosie softly on the forehead. It was done almost as if he intended to wake her, as if he would in this way prevent himself from betraying her. But she did not wake. His kiss had an effect of assisting him in his purpose, for it disturbed her enough to make her whimper quietly, turn herself toward the wall and withdraw her arm from under the baby’s head.

Adam picked up the baby, put her into the portable crib and carried the crib along the passage toward the Centaur Room. None of them had ever been into the others’ rooms. How odd that was! It had almost been prudish of them, an old-fashioned and unexpected respect for privacy. Adam did not know whether he should knock or not, but he needed to speak to Rufus to ask if he could borrow Goblander to take the baby back to London. Preferably, would Rufus himself drive him and the baby to London? Holding the portable crib, he stood indecisively outside the door. Then he did knock but there was no reply. He opened the door and looked inside. The room was empty, the bedclothes tossed back on to the floor and the windows wide open.

Adam looked at the reproduction of the Boecklin painting,
The Centaur at the Forge,
and noticed for the first time that among the crowd of curious bystanders eyeing the man-horse who had come to be shod was a woman holding a baby in her arms. He turned away. He would have to find Rufus and quickly. It would be just like Rufus to have gone off to the pub.

He went back along the passage, thinking about where they would take the baby. The best way would be to leave it on the steps of a church or some public building. Provided the storm did not come, of course. Well, they would have to take care to leave it under cover.

The house was darker at this hour than he could ever remember having known it, though of course he had been here in the winter and it must have been darker then. A momentary uneasy feeling came to him that it was here, at the top of the back stairs, that Zosie had seen Hilbert’s ghost, or said she had seen it. Of course there was nothing and no one, only Vivien throwing open the door of the Deathbed Room and starting on him again.

“Okay, the baby goes back tonight,” he said. “But don’t keep at me. I have to think of ways.”

Where had she disappeared to? How was it he had gone into the kitchen alone and found Shiva there, sitting at the round deal table, reading with great concentration the story of the stealing of Catherine Ryemark? He could not remember, any more than now as he said perfunctory good-byes to his parents-in-law, preparing to explain to Anne his silence and his “rudeness,” he could not remember where Rufus had been. Not out in Goblander, for from a side window of the kitchen he could see the van parked on the drive. In the drawing room perhaps with what he called his Happy Hour drink and the secret drink, too, that he thought (through the only naive chink in his armor) no one knew about.

Shiva looked up and at the portable crib and then he quite simply told Adam about this idea of his. He smiled as he spoke, looking roguish.

“We couldn’t do that,” Adam had said.

“Why not? You have the name, the address, everything. It will take a load off their minds, be a relief.”

“I don’t know,” he had said. “I don’t know.”

But he did.

Abigail awoke crying just as he was getting into bed. He got up and comforted her, changed her diaper, fetched her orange juice in a bottle which Anne said was wrong, encouraging bad habits. It would be bad for her teeth, but she had only four. All the time he was thinking that the occasions on which he would perform these simple paternal tasks were numbered, could perhaps be counted on the fingers of one hand. As he laid her down again he seemed to see the baby Catherine’s face instead of hers, a face that was more infantile, more feeble and vulnerable, the eyes glazed and not quite in focus. He twisted his head away, closed his eyes. When he opened them again it was his own child he saw who looked gravely at him and then favored him with a radiant smile.

In the suburban dark that is not dark he lay listening to Anne’s steady breathing and the soft clicks that came irregularly. They no longer annoyed him. It was rather as if these sounds were visited upon him as a kind of retribution because he had agreed to Shiva’s suggestion. All sorts of fanciful ideas came to one in the night. At this hour it was quite possible to believe the dead child’s spirit made those soft delicate clicks through the medium of Anne’s slightly parted lips. Or, more readily if one understood about guilt and fear, that Anne never made them at all, that there were no sounds, they did not exist, but that his fevered imagination recreated them from that night ten years ago when at last the rain came and the air grew cold. When he lay listening to the rain fall and abate and fall again and then to the baby’s breathing, the occasional just audible click, the whimper which seemed a threat of crying that never came.

He remembered but he did not dream. He knew he would not sleep. It was raining now, the sluggish drizzle of winter. He could just hear the whispering patter of it. That night they had forgotten to shut the window and one of the things they found in the morning was water lying on the broad oak sill.

One of the things.

The Sunday paper came early and he got up and went down to fetch it, praying please, please, please, touching wooden surfaces all the way, banisters, the front door, the architrave of the front door. Abigail cried out but for once he left it to Anne to go to her.

The page where the news was. His hands trembled. When he saw the paragraph, homing on to the headline, he couldn’t look. He closed his eyes. Opening them, he stared, not understanding what he read, thinking anxiety must have broken his mind. The bones from the grave at Wyvis Hall had been identified as those of a Nunes girl and her infant daughter, the identification having been made by a Mrs. Rita Pearson of Felixstowe.

That was all.

17

THE POLICE MUST HAVE
come for him, Shiva thought, when the two men came into the shop just before closing time on Monday and one of them held out his warrant card on the palm of his hand. He, too, had seen the paragraph in the paper, indeed had known of this piece of news since the previous morning, when Lili herself had pointed it out to him, tucked away inside the
Sunday Express.
It had not stopped him sleeping, for he was no longer anxious. He was resigned. Lili had withdrawn herself from him; it had been too much for her, as she had warned him it might be. If he said too much, it might destroy her feeling for him and he had said too much. There had been nothing else for them to talk about, they had talked about it all the time, and he had told her the ultimate which tipped him over the edge of her love.

But it was not for him that the police had come. They wanted the pharmacist. They wanted to talk to him about a tip-off (Shiva guessed) they had had that Kishan had been buying suspect-source drugs, repackaging them, and selling them at the current retail price. Shiva suspected he had been but he did not intervene, turning the sign inside the glass door to Closed, saying good night and going home.

Home where Lili would be—would she?—waiting for him with eyes no longer tender, with no more reassurance and practical comfort. He had received the last of that last night before he told her.

“You weren’t to blame,” she had said. “You just happened to be there. Unless you mean you should have told the police off your own bat.”

“I don’t mean that. It isn’t that. I was to blame. If I hadn’t put up this idea of mine to Adam, he would have taken the baby back then and there. As soon as he found Rufus he would have taken her back to London and if he had taken her back she might not have died.”

“Would he have taken her back?”

“Oh, yes, he was ready to do that. He was going to get into the van and do that—but I stopped him.”

Lili said nothing, but a change came over her face. Without actually moving she seemed to shrink from him. It was as if her spirit, her soul, her mind, or whatever you called it, receded more deeply inside her. She was wearing a dress of Indian cotton, embroidered and with bits of mirrorwork, not unlike the one he had given Vivien from his father’s warehouse. Did Lili know Indian women never wore clothes like that? He found himself wondering about it with supreme irrelevance. She put her hand up to her face and rubbed her pale Austrian cheek.

“When you told me about this before you didn’t tell me that.”

“No.”

“Did you really do that, Shiva?”

“It seemed a harmless thing. I swear I thought it couldn’t do any harm. It wasn’t hurting anyone, I thought, it wouldn’t even make them more anxious. At least the parents would know the baby was alive. I didn’t suggest it for myself, Lili, I was going to leave there almost immediately. When Vivien was due to go I was going too. I wanted to get home. I thought there might be some replies from the medical schools I’d applied to. I swear to you, it wasn’t for myself. Adam needed money and I thought this was a way of getting money.”

“You were always trying to get in with those two. You would have done anything to make them like you. But they despised you really.”

“I don’t know. Maybe. They are the sort of Englishmen who always think themselves superior to someone like me. They can’t help it, it’s ingrained.”

Walking along to the bus stop, he found he was nodding to himself. Adam had seen him at Heathrow but had deliberately not seen him. Of course that could be explained away. They had made a pact not to recognize each other and that was before this business began in the newspapers. (Shiva thought of it as “this business in the newspapers,” though he knew very well there was a reality, a series of physical happenings, behind the printed lines.) But he sensed that the pact not to communicate had since been broken and Adam and Rufus were following events together. He imagined one of them phoning the other, their meeting, their perhaps daily colloquies. But neither of them had been in touch with him. Manjusri was an uncommon name, he and his family were the only ones in the London phone book. They could easily have found him. But they thought him insignificant, of no account, an unnecessary third he would have been, at their conferences. Shiva felt very alone and an end to his isolation would not come when he reached home.

It was true what Lili had said. He had been making a bid for Adam’s attention. In all the time he had been at Ecalpemos he had never felt more left out than in that hour or so before Adam came into the kitchen with the portable crib. The facts about the snatching of the baby he had had to get secondhand from Vivien or pick up himself from the conversation. No one had explained anything to him, still less consulted him. He had gotten hold of the paper Adam and Zosie brought back from Sudbury and sat at the table reading it, making himself conversant with the facts. And Adam had come in and asked where Rufus was. Or had he asked that? Had he spoken at all? Adam was always going around asking where Rufus was, so it might be that he was remembering wrongly and Adam had said nothing, had not even glanced at him as he passed through the kitchen on his way to the back door with the baby in the portable crib.

“It had started to rain,” he had said to Lili, “and Vivien had gone out onto the terrace to bring the quilts in. The terrace had been like a great bed covered with quilts from end to end. She was out there and Rufus was in the study listening to the radio and drinking gin.”

“What did Adam say?”

“When I suggested the ransom? First he said we couldn’t do it and then he said he didn’t know and then how would we do it. He put the crib on the floor and sat down at the table. I thought they’d trace a phone call and anyway we didn’t have the number and we couldn’t very well ask directory inquiries for it. So I said send a letter, cut words out of this newspaper and stick them on paper. Adam said we mustn’t ask very much. I mean not some huge sum. He said we should ask ten thousand pounds because any ordinary middle-class people could raise ten thousand pounds if they had to.”

“I don’t suppose we’re middle-class then, are we?” said Lili.

“Adam took the kiddy upstairs again. We cut the newspaper up, sitting in our bedroom, Vivien’s and mine. The Deathbed Room, Adam called it, because of this picture on the wall of a dead child and its parents crying. When we’d done the ransom note, Adam took the picture down and said he was going to take it out of the frame and bum it. But he didn’t. Not then, not till later on.

“We’d decided to post the note in London but we couldn’t do that till the next day. Adam said he’d get Rufus to post it since Rufus was going back to London anyway, and he was sure Rufus would do it, it was the kind of thing that would tickle him. I’m only quoting, Lili, that was what he said. But he couldn’t tell him then because Rufus had gone out, he’d gone off to the pub in Goblander on his own.

“Vivien was standing in front of the stove drying herself. Her dress was wet but the other one, the blue, that was wet too, still out on the line. Adam told her he was going to take the baby back that night.

“What happened after that was rather strange. Vivien didn’t seem to know Rufus had gone out. She went up to have a bath and when she came down I was there alone—as usual—and Adam and Zosie were off together somewhere, in their room maybe. I didn’t exactly tell Vivien that Adam and Rufus had gone out together to take the baby back, but I let her think it. She asked me if that’s where they were, you see, and I said that’s what I understood, though the ransom note was in my pocket all the time and the kiddy was upstairs. I don’t know what I thought would happen when the baby cried, but I didn’t think of it. You don’t when you’re not used to babies.”