A Fatal Inversion

by Ruth Rendell

  It was after about half a mile that they found the path. Both of them, Shiva knew, were disconcerted because there was no sign saying Ecalpemos. He suspected Vivien had anticipated a handcrafted wooden sign with the name lettered on it and perhaps a carved flower or pair of acorns. But it must be the place. There were no other houses to be seen in any direction, only huge prairielike fields. A farmhouse called the Mill on the Pytle they had passed ten minutes before. To the left of them was a dense pinewood that looked quite black at that hour with the sky above it reddening as if from a distant fire.

  They turned down the path, wondering and hoping. It was like entering a tunnel after a while, for the trees met overhead, though through the black network of branches you could still see the brilliant sky. This tunnel descended gradually, winding a little, then running straight down. It was the quietest place Shiva had ever been in, silent in a velvety, tactile way so that you felt you might have been stricken with deafness. And there were insects, flies and slow-wheeling transparent winged things with dangling legs, and moths. A dustiness in the air and a dustiness underfoot and a scent of something sweet and something rotten. Not like England, he had thought, not what he had expected a bit. Vivien had not spoken for some minutes and their footsteps on the sandy surface of the path, the dry turf, were soundless.

  The trees parted. Briefly and absurdly, Shiva had the notion that the trees had stepped aside to reveal the house to him. It lay bathed in the afterglow of sunset, its windows turned to flat sheets of gold, a mansion it seemed to him, old and dignified and belonging in an unknown world. The breeze of dusk, the little wind that Shiva had come to learn always raised itself at about this time, fluttered through the bushes, the treetops, a clustering of feather-headed flowers, as if a living thing had passed and ruffled the leaves with its invisible paw.

  It was a gentle nemesis Shiva felt was in pursuit of him, its approach slow and lightfooted, but as sure as that breeze. Whether it was Vivien who had taught him to wait and accept, or if this were an inheritance from fatalistic forebears, he did not know. But he did not specially want an awareness of the true state of things, of the progress the police were making. He would have liked Adam or Rufus to get in touch with him. Their indifference, their treating him as of no account, caused him a pain he thought he had long gotten over. In one respect only he felt glad, he felt relieved, and this was in that he had kept nothing from Lili. To his parents and his grandmother he might have lied when the expediency of lying appealed to him, but to his wife he had told only the truth. His father had died four years before, but his grandmother lived on, she and his mother sharing the Southall house, two widows, though his mother had never adopted the white sari. Abandoning that ambition to read medicine had caused Dilip Manjusri an enduring bitterness and sorrow, so much so that he hardly seemed to notice when his son gave up the pharmacology course as well. Of course by then Shiva had been very ill, had suffered a true mental breakdown that included physical collapse. It was curious, he sometimes thought, how in stories and books someone who had brought about another person’s death recovered from it immediately, was just the same afterward as before, was affected if at all only by the fear of discovery. The reality was very different. Lili understood that and it was this as much as anything that bound him to her. This was what he called his love for her.

  The pharmacy closed early on Wednesdays. Shiva’s bus took him to the top of Fifth Avenue, and he walked home along the sidewalk, beside the parked cars that were like a string of colored beads, past the pub that was called The Boxer and past the grocery, both of which had their windows boarded up. There had been trouble down here the previous Saturday night, starting in The Boxer, when the barman refused to serve a man who was already drunk. The man happened to be Jamaican and the resultant mini-riot ensued, Shiva had heard, when he and his friends accused the barman of racial discrimination. A lot of windows had got broken and by the time the police arrived, someone had got as far as overturning a car. From inside their own house snug in front of the television Lili and Shiva had heard that car go over and Lili had been afraid. But the sound of the police sirens seemed to put an end to all of it, which was far from always being the case.

  How horrified his father would have been if he could have seen this! He had loved England with the innocent worship of the immigrant who has made good, who has found the mother country indeed to be the land of milk and honey so many of his compatriots had warned him it was not. In many ways it was fortunate he died when he did. There had been rioting before that but he was too ill to realize. London had been a cleaner place then, too, Shiva fancied, not all this litter lying around the streets, cans in the gutter waiting to be kicked to make that characteristic night sound of a city street, a hollow empty meaningless clatter:

  Was there more packaging than there had been ten years ago? Or more eating in the streets? More children around who were never told not to throw wrappers on the ground? Suddenly a memory came very sharply to him. He could almost hear that drawling upper middle-class voice, Rufus Fletcher’s: “These days breaking into most people’s houses is easier than opening a packet of biscuits.”

  In the kitchen at Ecalpemos, Vivien in her peacock blue dress with a large bowl of strawberries in her arms, Rufus naked but for ragged shorts, stabbing at the cellophane covering on a custard creams pack with a pair of scissors. The tough transparent stuff split open with quite a loud crack, with an explosion almost, and the biscuits tumbled out onto the table and the tiled floor, breaking and scattering crumbs.

  And Zosie sitting on the edge of the table, picking one up and putting it whole into her mouth and someone saying—Adam? Rufus? He couldn’t remember—but saying: “Zosie is the same color as those biscuits, matte, smooth, and lightly baked.”

  Dark Shiva was more conscious of the color of his skin when he was at Ecalpemos than perhaps he had ever been before Though not more than he had been since. He should have said, “And I suppose I’m the color of a gingernut.”

  Lili worked all day on Wednesdays and she had just an hour off at lunchtime but she made a point of coming home specially to get his lunch for him and be a proper Indian wife. She wore the kamiz and salwar, her neck and shoulders covered by a dupatta in very much the same shade as the blue dress he had given Vivien. It dismayed him to see her dress like this; it embarrassed him. Her ancestors were not from the Punjab—why did she wear the] costume of Punjabi women? To be not an Indian but all India, he knew that. Their notions about this were diametrically opposed. Assimilation was the only answer, in his view. Would all those European Jews have died if they had assimilated, if the Diaspora had not set itself apart and exclusive? If Shiva had a dream it would be that the world might become like the ideal in a popular song he remembered from his childhood in which it was advocated that all races be blended in a melting pot. Shiva did not care about what was lost thereby, the kamizes and saris, the festivals and phylacteries, the tongues and the traditions. They could all go if the gas chambers and the burning cars went with them.

  “I’ll be going straight to my Bengali lesson after work,” Lili said.

  “I know. I’ll walk over and meet you.”

  “Oh, why? You needn’t.”

  “I’ll walk up and meet you,” Shiva said.

  Two stressful sounds met Adam as he let himself into his own house, as he pushed open the front door: Abigail’s crying and the phone ringing. The crying came from the living room, the door to which, on the left, stood ajar, the ringing from the phone that was on a table at the foot of the staircase straight ahead of him. Adam, seemingly without thought, instinctively perhaps, went to the phone and picked up the receiver. Immediately, before he even said hello, he thought with a pang that caught him in the chest: I went to the phone first, I put her second, I went to the phone first. It was the police.

  Anne came running downstairs and into the living room. A voice was saying to Adam that he was Detective Inspector Someone-or-other and could he come to see him to “clear a
few matters up.” Abigail’s crying stopped quite abruptly.

  “What matters?” Adam asked because he knew an innocent person would ask that.

  “I’ll explain all that when we meet, Mr. Verne-Smith.” Adam asked when he wanted to come. “I’m sure you’ll agree there’s no time like the present, so shall we say half an hour?”

  “All right.”

  Anne came out with Abigail in her arms and Adam kissed his child and took her from Anne. In the way babies can, Abigail looked as if she had never cried in her life, would not have known how to cry. She had a glorious angelic smile and her cheek against Adam’s own felt cool and fat and satiny like a new-picked plum. “My God,” Adam said, “I came into the house and heard the phone ringing and her crying and I went to the phone first. What sort of a father does that make me?”

  Had Anne only known it, he was confiding in her, was opening his heart to his wife, and this might have been the beginning of a greater confidence, an abandonment of his self into her keeping, but she did not know it, she saw his outburst simply as another symptom of neurotic self-absorption. It exasperated her.

  “But there was nothing wrong with her. She was only frustrated because she had thrown her teddy out and couldn’t reach it.”

  Adam shrugged. He held Abigail pressed against him. Suppose they were to take him away and he were not to see her again for years, for ten years, say? Of course that was nonsense, it must be nonsense, he was getting hysterical with worry. The fact was that he was terribly tired. To break into an area of memory that has been deliberately buried and turfed over for a decade was an exhausting process. It was his own thoughts that had worn him out, this once-buried thing that now obsessed him. He wished he could drink, he wished drinking could do something for him.

  “Would you get me a small whiskey with water in it?”

  Anne looked at him in surprise.

  “A lot of water.” He apologized. “I can’t get it without putting her down.”

  He sat in a chair with Abigail in his lap. Taking off his watch, he held it to her ear and then he remembered—for her face registered nothing—that it was his new watch, the one with the battery, and which therefore did not tick. Instead, he gave her an ornament from the mantelpiece, a small china cat. Abigail put its head into her mouth. Adam felt sick with love for her, he felt as if his love for her were being pulled out of him with tongs, and he knew beyond a doubt, it was laughable even to consider a doubt, that he had never loved anyone before. Not even Zosie.

  His drink was brought. Anne took the china cat away from Abigail and gave her a rattle which had just been washed and which smelled of the stuff with which her bottle and other utensils were disinfected. Adam said: “The police want to come and see me. Something about that house my great-uncle left me.”

  “When?”

  “What do you mean when?”

  “When do they want to come and see you?”

  “Now.” He looked at the watch which did not tick. “Well, in twenty minutes or so.”

  “I see. What’s it all about, Adam? I mean, you’re not going to get into some sort of trouble, are you?”

  Sometimes he felt tremendously distanced from her. She was less than the intermediary that produced Abigail from his seed. Worse than that, he felt he didn’t know her at all, she was just a woman who had come over for something. Collecting for a charity perhaps. Canvassing for a political party or a religious sect. He did not know her, she was a stranger, even her face was unfamiliar, not an attractive face or a loved one, not a face he could ever have kissed.

  “I can’t tell them very much,” he said. “It isn’t as if I ever lived there. Well, I stayed there for a couple of weeks, and then I went off to Greece.”

  “But you had someone come in to look after it, didn’t you?”

  “Actually no. I told my father that at the time to stop him from saying I was letting the place go to ruin. How could I have afforded to pay anyone to go in there? I was broke. I had to sell some of Hilbert’s furniture in order to get to Greece.”

  “It was the bones of a girl they found and a baby.”

  “I know what they found,” said Adam, and holding Abigail’s round strong plump body, he closed his eyes.

  Those two girls, the barmaid and her friend, that he and Rufus had picked up and brought to Ecalpemos for the night, would they go to the police? Hardly. One of them had been married, her husband away on a selling trip. A discreditable drunken spree ending in messy sex was scarcely a memory she would want to revive. That must have been very late in June, the twenty-ninth or thirtieth, a Wednesday anyway. And a few days later, the beginning of the following week Zosie had come and then Vivien and the Indian. Adam thought he would tell the police he had left Wyvis Hall for Greece the first weekend in July and then if by any remote chance those two girls had talked to them, it would still appear all right.

  The Indian wouldn’t go to the police. Perhaps he wasn’t even in this country any longer. Maybe when Adam saw him he had been going abroad somewhere, possibly even to take a job and live there. Adam could still remember the slight feeling of dismay he had had when the Indian had come that night, had walked around the side of the house with Vivien a little way behind him, stood on the grass below the terrace wall (between Zeus with Danae and Zeus with Europa) and looked up at him and Rufus and Zosie and the inevitable wine bottles on the terrace.

  Adam had never before spoken to an Indian. Well, that wasn’t quite right, for of course he had spoken to Indian post office clerks and supermarket assistants and ticket collectors but he had never been on social terms with one. He had never had a conversation with an Indian, for the Indian students at his college, of whom there were in any case not many, kept to themselves. This one looked as if he might be—well, there was no word for it these days, but what old Hilbert might have called a killjoy or a wet blanket. Adam sensed at once a disapproval at the mess on the terrace, the air of indolence, the atmosphere perhaps of debauch. The girl on the other hand who announced herself as Vivien seemed only smiling and friendly. She climbed up the steps at once and accepted the glass of wine Rufus offered her.

  Had they spoken much to the Indian that night? Already Adam had been drunk, tired, and feeble the way drink always made him even then. And Rufus had been as he always was, alive and alert, unaffected one might think until one knew him well. His eyes had gone speculatively to Vivien, summing her up, the level of attractiveness she might have on the scale he kept in his mind, the precise relationship she might be having with Shiva. To Adam that relationship was obvious from the first and he had never even asked them if they would prefer to sleep apart but took them up to Hilbert’s room as a matter of course, to the room where the painting of the dead child and its parents and the doctor hung on the wall facing the bed.

  Next day Shiva had asked if he called it the Deathbed Room because his great-uncle had died there. He was the sort of person who is very bound up with family and relatives. Adam knew Hilbert had not died there but outside the door at the top of the back stairs, though perhaps his body had lain in the room to await the arrival of undertakers. Anyway, they all came to believe it, to accept that it was Hilbert’s death chamber, along with the other absurdities of Ecalpemos.

  Zosie used sometimes to say she saw Hilbert’s ghost up there and a ghostly little dog at his heels. The extraordinary thing was that she described Hilbert very much as he had been, a small, spare man with a round face and thin gray hair and gold-rimmed bifocals. She must have looked into one of the photograph albums in the study. And Adam did not think she had ever mentioned the little dog until after Shiva had been up in the pinewood and found the animal cemetery and Blaze’s grave… .

  The smell of the whiskey made him shiver a little. He took a sip of it and as he set the glass down heard a car draw up outside. The police had come. He shook his head at Anne and went himself to let them in, carrying Abigail in his arms, as if their hard hearts might be softened by the sight of a father with his child.


  10

  ONE OF RUFUS’S PATIENTS had a drug-addicted daughter. Mrs. Harding came for her check-up and her smear and then she would tell him the latest on Marilyn. Last time it had been the Methadone overdose Marilyn had taken, believing thus to get herself off heroin the sooner. Now Marilyn, though experiencing a precarious cure, was afraid she might have become a carrier of AIDS through using infected needles. Rufus, smoking a companionable cigarette with Mrs. Harding, urged her to make Marilyn have a test done.

  While commiserating with her he found himself wondering what she would think if she knew of his own less than innocent past in this connection. It was of course long over. Rufus had not smoked cannabis or eaten hashish or swallowed “acid”—with heroin he had never experimented—since the expulsion from Ecalpemos. An addictive personality he might have, did have, but he knew where to stop. Rufus stopped at the rationed cigarettes and the half glass of vodka behind the curtain. He got up and opened the door for Mrs. Harding and she said, thank you so much, you don’t know how marvelous it is just to talk… .

  The stuff he used, he thought, had all come from the same dealer, an American who had originally come to England to escape the Vietnam draft and who lived in Notting Hill. Rufus wanted supplies before all the money ran out, the money Adam got from selling plates and a mirror and then, at his instigation, a set of silver fruit knives and forks. Whoever ate fruit with a knife and fork? The shopkeeper seemed to feel the same, which was why they hadn’t got all that much for them. But what they did get Rufus took with him to Notting Hill, going up from Nunes in Goblander around lunchtime on—when would it have been—July the first or second?