A Fatal Inversion

by Ruth Rendell

  “Dead and never called me Mother,” it had probably been.

  That was the reason they named it the Deathbed Room.

  On into the Room Without a Name they had passed and through to the room it communicated with, the Room of Astonishment, so called because it had a cupboard in it with a little staircase inside that wound its way up into the loft. They considered the salability of a washstand, a swinging mirror, a flowered pottery basin and jug, and then as they descended by the back stairs, the plates in dull red and dark blue and gold glaze that hung on the wall there and might, from the hieroglyphs on their backs, possibly be Chinese and perhaps valuable.

  Next day they had taken the mirror and the pottery and the porcelain to Long Melford because there were more antique shops in Long Melford than anywhere else they had seen, but twenty pounds was all they got for the lot. When people came to join the commune, Adam thought, they would have to pay, they would have to contribute. And how were any suitable people going to know about it when he had no phone, or no phone that worked, and Mary Gage had probably forgotten all about this Bella?

  There, of course, he had been wrong. All the time he and Rufus were living it up, driving about the countryside in Goblander, driving to London once to buy marijuana from the dealer Rufus knew in Notting Hill, drinking and smoking (as he had put it) Hilbert’s furniture away, all that time Vivien and her boyfriend Shiva were making arrangements to join Ecalpemos. And they were expecting, of course, a well-run settlement, a sort of East Anglian kibbutz, where the members had appointed duties, where vegetarianism prevailed and brown rice had an almost holy significance, and discussions on mystical or occult or philosophic subjects went on long into the night.

  But first Zosie had come.

  Rufus, driving back from London with the hashish his dealer swore was genuine Indian charas and a package of best Colombian, picked her off the street—“a piece of property that is found ownerless.” And she had slept with Rufus in the Centaur Room, it being taken for granted she would share his bed, though Adam did not think her wishes had been consulted. Rufus was a bit of a centaur himself, a big roan stallion, and she was a little cat-eyed waif.

  It must have been a day or two afterward that she had seen the picture. Exploring the house on the following day or the day after that, she had ventured into the Deathbed Room. She had gone in and looked at that picture and come running down the stairs crying, with her hands up to her face and the tears pouring.

  “Why did you let me go in there? Why didn’t you tell me what was in there?”

  Just for a moment, standing by the window, dropping the edge of the curtain he had lifted and turning back toward the crib, Adam saw the picture again, saw it with an awful clarity on the darkness before his eyes.

  The painting was destroyed. He had burned it himself on the fire he had made against the fruit garden wall and it might be that no copies of it existed, yet in his mind’s eye it recreated itself, the child forever stilled, its face a waxen mask, the old doctor haggard with sorrow and lack of sleep, the mirror no breath had misted held in his hand, the parents in each other’s arms.

  9

  BECAUSE HE WAS without a qualification Shiva was not permitted to dispense. Kishan, with his pharmacology degree, did that, and Mira, Kishan’s wife, helped out at particularly busy times. Shiva served in the shop and arranged the displays and kept a check on the stock and sometimes recommended remedies for coughs and spots. Kishan really needed a second assistant, but he couldn’t afford one if he was going to continue paying Shiva a decent wage with small annual increases. Although Shiva didn’t want to lose him, Kishan was an altruistic man and was always trying to persuade Shiva to go back to college and finish his courses so that he could set up as a pharmacist himself, not just work for one. Shiva knew he would never go back now; it would all be too fraught with memories and bitterness. Besides, he did not dislike the shop, the warmth of it and the delicious scents, the feeling of doing positive good when he was able to persuade someone of the virtues of vitamin C, the brief pleasure he took in selling a pretty girl a pretty shade of lipstick. He accepted. He did not expect to be fulfilled or enjoy job satisfaction or be happy.

  Once he had been all those things. At school in the far west of London he had got three good A Levels and gone on to study pharmacology. This brought his father an almost delirious joy. Shiva’s father was an uneducated though not an illiterate man, who had brought his wife and his widowed mother to this country some twenty years before. For some time he had worked for a tailor and his wife as a machinist but having a business sense and some foresight had observed the beginnings of the trend toward Indian-made clothes. Even he could not have imagined how immensely popular dresses and skirts and tops of embroidered Indian cotton would become or how the humble import business he started would make him if not a rich, at least a very comfortably-off man. It was in this comparative affluence that Shiva and his brother and sisters grew up, their home a big semidetached house in Southall. Shiva’s elder brother, though he had won a scholarship to the City of London School, had not lived up to his early promise and had embarked on a career in a High Street bank. It was on Shiva therefore that his father pinned his hopes and ambitions. Shiva had just completed his first year at a college of technology, where he had done very well, so well in fact that two of the lecturers there had privately told him—well, not exactly that he was wasting his time, but that he was mentally equipped for higher things. Both believed that he would be better suited to study medicine.

  Of course he told his father. What should he do? Should he apply to medical schools? Probably that meant he would have to wait a year, always supposing he were accepted. His father, overwhelmed at the prospect of having a doctor for a son, was certain he would be accepted. And why not have a year off if that were necessary? There was money enough to keep him. It was all very pleasant to contemplate and think of at his leisure. Not entirely at his leisure either, for it would not have occurred to Shiva to live at home and do nothing. The business could always do with the temporary help of an extra pair of hands.

  Another source of Shiva’s happiness was his relationship with Vivien Goldman. Of her he said nothing at home, his parents were progressive and though his grandmother might wring her hands, predicting curses and disaster, they would not have considered arranging marriages for their children. Just the same, they took it for granted they would marry among their own people. They probably took it for granted, Shiva thought, that their children would not even get to know members of the opposite sex who were English.

  Vivien was Jewish. To Shiva’s way of thinking she was only half Jewish because her father had been gentile, but Vivien said it was having a Jewish mother that made you a Jew. Not that she had seen her mother for many years, having been brought up in children’s homes until she was eighteen. Shiva had met her at a party given by a fellow student who lived in a squat near the river at Hammersmith where Vivien was also living. He had not at first been specially attracted by her, indeed he had been somewhat daunted, but she had singled him out and talked to him. She had talked to him about Indian philosophy and Indian mysticism, subjects on which Shiva was not well informed, and confided in him how she intended to go to India to learn from a certain guru and sit at his feet. After the party Shiva had gone home with Vivien, not to make love but to talk and sleep and talk again.

  Vivien was the only person Shiva had ever met whose aim in life was to find out what she was doing in this world, what the meaning of life was and to learn how to be good. To this end she had lived for a while on a kibbutz and in a commune in California and been a disciple of Bhagwan and attended hundreds of lectures and read hundreds of books. Shiva (whose mother described him as “education mad”) asked her why she didn’t go to college and study philosophy but Vivien despised formal education. After she left school and at the same time the children’s home, she lived for a while on the dole, but coming to believe that this was wrong, went out cleaning apartments and in between
the kibbutz and Bhagwan had been a children’s nanny.

  She was a small, dark girl with long hair she wore in braids or wound tightly around her head. Shiva had never known her to wear trousers or any garments of a masculine cast. Vivien wore robes rather than dresses, and sometimes she hung around her neck the Star of David and sometimes the Christian cross. Alone in the world and without ties, she seemed to have a hundred friends but no close ones and Shiva, when at last they made love, was only her second lover.

  He parted from her with no thought of seeing her again until he returned to college in September. If he returned there. They would write to each other. The Hammersmith squat had no phone and Shiva would not have liked Vivien to phone him at home. He could imagine the scenes his grandmother would make if she found out he had an English girlfriend, and what praying there would be, what threats of retribution, and not made in vain either, for his mother was not so progressive as to fail in her deference to her mother-in-law and the old lady’s opinions carried great weight in the house in Southall. So Shiva wrote to Vivien and received her letters which he told his parents were from a friend of his at college, a boy whose family was from Benares.

  Then the letter came with the suggestion that Shiva might like to join Vivien in a community at Ecalpemos, wherever that might be, just for a trial period to see what it was like. She understood he would have to go back to college in September. But she might remain. It all depended on whether a center for meditation might be established there.

  Would he have to go back to college, though? Shiva asked himself. Perhaps not, not if he changed his mind about the pharmacology course and decided to try for medical school instead. In that case he would not be able to start until a year from October and in the interim might have to take his A Level in math. But he could study just as easily at Ecalpemos as in Southall and perhaps more easily. A house with gardens and land in the country, in Suffolk, Vivien had written.

  Shiva, though far more deferential to his parents than any European contemporary would be, holding them in far greater esteem, nevertheless had no compunction about lying to them. He reasoned this way. If he told them he was going to spend two months in a center for meditation with an English girl who had no parents to speak of and was partly Jewish, they would be very unhappy indeed and would worry, whereas if he said what in fact he did say, that he would be attending a summer school designed as a preparatory course for those contemplating a medical career they would be happy and gratified. Really there was no choice about it. That such a summer school did not and could not exist need be no obstacle since his father was ignorant about these things and trusted Shiva’s word and opinions. He even gave them the address: Ecalpemos, Nunes, Suffolk, for he knew that nothing short of the death of one of them would induce the others to get in touch with him.

  Shiva’s father told him to help himself to a selection from the best of the Indian cotton shirts so that he might look smart during his stay. Shiva knew he would have no need of new shirts, so he took a dress instead. No Indian woman had ever worn dresses like these—with low square necks and big sleeves and high waists and floor-length skirts—or ever would, but this bright turquoise blue one embroidered on the bodice in scarlet and gold might have been made for small, pretty Vivien. It would be the first present he had ever given her.

  The squat was in a row of condemned houses in a street very close to the river off Fulham Palace Road. It was all gone now, Shiva had heard, the derelict cottages replaced by hygienic local authority housing and a day center for the handicapped. When Vivien had been living there the row had been awaiting demolition and scheduled unfit for human occupation, but squatters had come just the same and knocked out openings in the communicating walls so that entering at number one, you could walk all the way through to number nine without going out into the street. Shiva walked through, stepping over people asleep on mattresses on the floor. No one in that squat except Vivien ever got up before midday. It was shabby rather than dirty and it smelled of the river.

  He found Vivien in her room, sitting cross-legged and meditating. She turned on him her bright-eyed gaze but gave no other sign of greeting and he did not interrupt her. He sat down among the mats and cushions that furnished the place in a vaguely oriental way that was quite unlike the solid three-piece suites and carved wood and etched brass of his own home. There was a rack of essential oils in tiny vials on the windowsill and the case in which Vivien kept her Bach flower remedies. A reflexology chart hung on one wall and the chart of Vivien’s own horoscope underneath it. Her book collection he found daunting, the Bible, the Koran, the Gita, the Imitation of Christ, the Tibetan Book of the Dead. The I Ching lay open on a cushion, what looked like slips of straw beside it, as if before he came she had cast to know what her fate would be at Ecalpemos… .

  Since then he had sometimes wondered what the I Ching had told her. Not, surely, anything like an accurate forecast or she would hardly have gone. It was impossibly cryptic, anyway; it could be made to mean anything. He sat and waited, not minding, not impatient, but beginning to feel soothed and at peace as one did in Vivien’s presence. Twenty minutes went by and then she got up. Her bag was packed but she opened it again and put the flower remedies in and a big dark red shawl in case it got cold in the evenings. The bag was a carryall made of carpet with padded cloth handles, for Vivien wore no leather or any animal material, not even wool.

  “What time is the train?” Shiva asked.

  “I don’t know. If we go to the station, a train will come. They always do.”

  He thought it quite amusing that Vivien should have to teach him this serene fatalism. “Are you in a great hurry, Shiva?” she said. “Have you got some pressing business at Ecalpemos that will vanish or be lost if you aren’t there by nightfall?”

  It was just a tradition, an accepted way of life, that you made haste, you rushed busily, irrespective of what you had to do when the end was reached. His parents were as much afflicted by it as English people.

  “We have time,” Vivien often said. “We’re young. It’s when we’re eighty and we haven’t much time left, then we’ll have to rush.”

  He gave her the turquoise blue dress and immediately she put it on, for she had no understanding of the concept of keeping something for best. What would “best” be? All days were alike to her and all places for her to look at, not where others would look at her.

  It was a gray and cream striped Moroccan cotton robe she had been wearing. She folded it carefully and laid it beside the I Ching.

  “I won’t need that now. I’ve got another dress with me.”

  Shiva found her amazing. What other woman would go off for perhaps months with only two dresses?

  “You can always collect it,” he said, “if you have to come back to London for an interview.”

  She had applied for a job as a children’s nanny before Bella told her about Ecalpemos. But Shiva could tell that though calm and unhurried, she was excited by the prospect before her. The job might be disregarded if Ecalpemos turned out to be what she was always seeking, a real community of dedicated people, all with ideas similar to hers, people that she might teach and who might teach her something. He watched her write a note to someone else in the squat, ending it: “Love and peace, Vivien.”

  Traveling with her was a placid, restful experience. They missed the fast Inter-city train because Vivien refused to run for it and got into a slow train instead that took fifteen minutes longer to get there, stopping at half a dozen stations on the way. The blue dress was very conspicuous, the embroidery on the bodice and low-cut neckline glistening like real jewelry. Vivien looked beautiful and exotic but a little bizarre too. Outside Colchester station, off the grass verge, she had picked a yellow flower of a very common sort, though Shiva did not know what sort, and stuck it in her hair. Perhaps because of the way she looked—and the way he looked, too, come to that, a lithe, small-boned, dark-skinned Oriental—it was a while before a motorist stopped to give them a lift. Vivie
n had given no thought to the proximity or otherwise of Nunes to Colchester but they learned at the station that it was twelve miles away. There were buses but these were infrequent and the last one had gone. The car driver who picked them up said he would go into the village of Nunes but no farther.

  Shiva had seldom been out into the English countryside and it was with wonder and a certain amount of curiosity that he looked at the wide fields of yellowing wheat and barley across which exaggeratedly long shadows lay. It was the driver who told him they were wheat and barley; they might have been sesame and sainfoin, for all he knew. There was no wind. There were no animals in the meadows, which surprised him, for he had expected herds of fat black and white cattle. They passed not a single walker or cyclist and met few other cars. The houses which he thought would be the dwellings of the poor, ramshackle and mean, were for the most part large and prosperous-looking, set in gardens full of flowers.

  It had been mid-July. The sun was on the point of setting but the sky was still a dense blue and quite cloudless. Vivien had found out from Bella precisely where Ecalpemos was and when she saw the first of the landmarks she had been told about, Nunes church, flint-walled with a square tower and narrow pointed spire, set on a grassy mound, she said they would get out and continue on foot. They walked along quite slowly, watching the sun go down and as it vanished below the dark wooded horizon, saw the sky warm at once to gold and gradually flush rosy-pink.