A Fatal Inversion

by Ruth Rendell

  “They don’t spoil you, darling Zosie, they’re not ugly. They’re sweet, I think they’re lovely.”

  A shiver ran down the length of her. Her nipples were erect from the shiver, not from desire. He longed and longed for her to desire him as he desired her, for he suspected that she never did at all, but why this should be he could not understand, and thought it must only be necessary for him to be more expert and more inventive, to achieve a longer performance. It never occurred to him that she might be suffering from a post-childbirth frigidity, he did not know of such things. It had been a case of hopeless misunderstanding, Adam now thought. Not once, that July and August, had he ever attributed Zosie’s unhappiness to her separation from her baby or supposed that her sometimes strange behavior might be a form of postnatal psychosis. Because she slept with him and let him make love to her whenever he wanted to—which was at least once a day and often two or three times—he assumed that she wanted it. And she was not passive, she was not limp and dry, but she moved and moaned and writhed her limbs, and those hot nights the sweat lay on her in drops like glass beads and rolled off her pear-shaped breasts and down her thighs over the feather scars. How was he to have known anyway? How was any man ever to know? It was a dark wood, that place of woman’s response. How was any man to know what was real and what they pretended to for their own ends, though God knew what those ends might be.

  Has any woman ever come with me? Adam thought. I don’t know. I am married but even so I don’t know. I know only what they have said. And Zosie did not even say. She wept sometimes and sometimes she laughed in a mad sort of way and sometimes she squeezed me in-out, in-out, and drew up her legs and bounced her buttocks—and I never knew it was all payment, it was all to make me let her stay. As if I could have sent her away! But I didn’t know anything, I didn’t understand anything. She said to me, “If only I’d known you lived here and you’d want me to live here with you, I needn’t have given up my baby, I could have kept my baby. Why don’t things happen in the right order, Adam?”

  “What would we do with a baby here, Zosie?” he had said. “It would be a terrible nuisance and we wouldn’t be able to go out.”

  When Abigail was born he had been present at the birth and he had felt as much her mother as Anne was. Abigail had come out in a rush and the midwife had lifted her up in triumph to gasping, smiling Anne, and Adam who was weeping, down whose face the tears were coursing. Later on Anne had reproached him for that, saying she thought the Verne-Smiths (you bloody Verne-Smiths) didn’t know the meaning of emotion, yet here he was crying because he’d seen a baby born. It was impossible to explain that he had wept for joy and for the delight of loving once again and for becoming a parent, which to him was a miracle. Later, too, when he saw the child clean and dressed and in Anne’s arms, nuzzling at the breast, he remembered Zosie and for the first time he bled for her.

  Having a baby when you were very young and then having that baby taken away from you might drive you over the edge, might make you mad for a little while, a kleptomaniac and a visionary, might make you see ghosts. He had never been afraid for Zosie, he thought, only afraid of her, of what she might do. His fear that she might steal something in one of those shops had made him leave her in Goblander and thus left the way open for her to commit something far worse than simple theft… .

  It was nearly a month before that when she and Rufus and Vivien went to London and she had stolen a camera. In the evening they had all gone up to the animal cemetery for the first time, Vivien admonishing her for being a thief, telling her the camera should go back and Zosie sulky and giggling by turns. She must have stolen a film too or Rufus had bought a film, for he took pictures of the cemetery and then one of the house. He stood on the grass in front of the cedar tree as the breeze of dusk blew and swayed its branches and took a picture of the house. Then Zosie posed on the terrace like Juliet and he posed on the lawn below like Romeo and Rufus took more pictures. What had happened to those photographs? Rufus might have them still, but if there was danger Rufus would destroy them.

  Was that the night the temperature dropped so low? Adam thought he could recall that happening on the last or nearly the last night of July. It was getting dark and Zosie was at the end of the passage, having come up by the back stairs, when she saw Hilbert ahead of her and the little dog Blaze with him, running around his legs and jumping up at him. Only it was an old man she saw and a puppy, which did not quite fit the facts. It was all made less believable by her mentioning the dog only after they had all seen its grave in the animal cemetery.

  The night was cold and they were glad of the heat from the kitchen range. This was the end of the fine weather, they all thought that, but it came back next day, it came back for nearly all the month of August, as hot as ever. That cold night, enveloped in her gray sweater, Zosie asked him if she could have a kitten of her own and he had said yes, but later, when the others had gone and they were alone, a cat and a dog and a lamb and a pony, too, for all he cared.

  “I wasn’t allowed to have them at home. Anyway, I wouldn’t have, I wouldn’t have dared. Cliff kills animals.”

  “Who’s Cliff?” he said.

  “My stepfather.” She sat close to him, hugging him as a child might. Her face was buried in his neck, her lips touching his skin.

  “He kills little things, he has no mercy.”

  “You mean he hunts and shoots?”

  “He hunts them down, yes. He hasn’t hunted me, though, has he? Perhaps he doesn’t know where to begin, he doesn’t have a scent.” And she laughed, nuzzling his neck, nuzzling like a child at the breast.

  One of the few nights that had been when he could hold her close without the heat stifling them, without the sweat rolling off their locked bodies… .

  Entering the house rather later than usual, Adam went straight upstairs. He could hear the sounds of Abigail being bathed, the splashing and the shrieks. The bathroom door was ajar. He called out to Anne but did not put his head into the doorway lest the enchanting sight of Abigail with her floating dolphins and her duck and her inflatable fish seduce him from his task. He went into the spare bedroom where he kept the shotgun, Hilbert’s twelve-bore. It seemed to him imprudent in the extreme to keep that gun in the house a moment longer. The arrival of the police with a search warrant would not in the least have surprised him.

  The shotgun was still in the golf bag in which he had fetched it away from Ecalpemos. Would it still work? Or would it have to be cleaned and oiled first? Carrying it downstairs past that bathroom from which issued those sounds of innocent hilarity, he thought for the first time of using the gun on himself, of the peace that would ensue and an end to the torments of anxiety. Tired with all these, from these would I be gone / Save that to die I leave my love alone. There was Abigail to think of… .

  Several times these past few days there had come to him a thought that was deeply distressing. Zosie could have had her baby back, she could have fetched it and lived there with him, all of them could have lived on at Ecalpemos the happy paradise that was someplace spelled backward, for it was by no means too late for her to have said no to the making of an adoption order, only she had not known it and he had not known it then.

  Adam lifted up the lid of his car trunk and put the gun inside, concealing it under the plastic sheet he kept there for covering the windshield in icy weather.

  14

  MARY GAGE WAS INTO her second marriage, she told Rufus, and although she did not quite say so, he gathered it was no more successful than the first. She had read the papers on her return to London on a flying visit. Five days more and she would be gone again, back to Rio, but she had felt somehow, what with one thing and another, that she ought to phone him. Of course she did not really suppose that the discovery in the grave in the animal cemetery had any connection with Adam and him… .

  “I don’t remember any animal cemetery,” she said.

  Marigold came through the room on her way to have her bath. She looked
at her husband, her eyebrows up. Rufus covered the mouthpiece with his hand.

  “Mary Passant,” he said.

  Of course Marigold didn’t know who that was but that he had spoken the name so openly would allay any possible suspicions on her part. And later he would explain. He would be the frank, honest husband who trusted and expected trust in his turn and who therefore could tell his wife this was a former girlfriend, calling him up because she happened to be home on holiday for ten days.

  “Who were you talking to?” Mary Gage said.

  “My wife.”

  Marigold must have heard that reply, too, before she closed the door.

  Mary gave a little sigh. “So you don’t know anything about it? Well, how could you?”

  “How indeed? Adam and I didn’t stay long after you left.”

  “So that girl Bella never found anyone to make up a commune with you?”

  “What a memory you have, Mary,” Rufus said in his light, bantering way, though he had felt a brief sensation of coldness, almost a shiver. After ten years she had remembered Bella’s name. It was a tremendous relief to hear her say: “Oh, I only remember because someone told me yesterday that she had died. She died of some awful thing and she was only thirty.”

  Rufus felt quite buoyant and euphoric suddenly. Bella was dead so Bella could never be found by the police, could never tell them how she had sent Shiva and Vivien to Ecalpemos on July 15, 1976.

  “When exactly do you go back?” he said.

  “In five days time—well, four really. I mean Tuesday, and I’ll be making an early start.”

  The earlier the better, he thought. There was no reason to think she would speak to the police unless they sought her out, and how could they?

  “Do you know, we haven’t actually spoken since that day you drove me into Colchester and I got the train to London.”

  “That’s right,” said Rufus. He resigned himself to a chat. From upstairs he could hear Marigold’s bath water beginning to run out down the plug hole. He reached for the secret drink and sipped it. It tasted stale, warm, and sickly.

  “Are you drinking?” she said. “My God, it doesn’t sound as if you’ve changed much.”

  One minute more and they had run out of things to say. He wished her a good trip quite cordially and said good-bye. Really he should be happy she had phoned. It was good news she had brought—the best. Vivien’s origins now remained lost in obscurity. Rufus lit a cigarette, his last of the day, and drew a deep lungful of smoke. If Adam could not remember Shiva’s surname, all the better. What he could not remember he could not tell the police. He would not mention Zosie at all if he had any sense, poor little doomed, mouselike Zosie. It was strange how when one thought of her it was often to compare her to some small, pretty animal whose vulnerability is great and life expectancy short. As a hare one thought of her in her alert listening aspect, a mouse when her eyes grew round and large, or a little cat that sleeps yet never really relaxes. She had been so frightened and so desperate… . Rufus went up to bed, Mary Gage almost forgotten, his thoughts at Ecalpemos.

  Because of Zosie’s theft and subsequent sale of the silver bracelet, they had felt unable to carry out any more of their dealings in silver and ornaments in any of the Sudbury shops. Adam believed, and perhaps accurately, that the two relevant shopkeepers had risen up in their wrath and alerted all the others so that now the whole antiques and secondhand dealers’ fraternity of the town was lying in wait to trap them when next they appeared with goods to dispose of. And if this were so, would their description and reputation for dishonesty not also have spread to Long Melford, to Lavenham, to Colchester even?

  In the back of a long, deep drawer in the kitchen cabinet Vivien had found two large, heavy spoons. They had been in a section of the drawer at the back, the front divisions containing carving knives, a fork, and a sharpening stone. Rufus had once seen a pair like them on the table at the regimental reunion dinner to which his father had taken him.

  “They’re stuffing spoons,” he said. “For hoiking the stuffing out of chickens and whatever.”

  Adam said they looked old, they looked valuable. “Isn’t that a Georgian bead pattern?”

  The trouble was that they were afraid to hawk them around any of the local towns, just as they were afraid to hawk the dozen liqueur glasses, the two hexagonal salvers, and the mask jug, all scheduled to be disposed of next. Money was getting very short. Zosie said she would steal food for them, she would steal bottles of wine, but Adam stopped her. He was afraid she would be caught and he would lose her.

  “I could sell my ring,” she said.

  She wore it on the little finger of her left hand. Zosie’s fingers were very small and delicate and Rufus frankly doubted if the ring would fit anyone but a child. It was of gold, of several strands of gold, fine as wire, and plaited together in an intricate braid. Zosie had only recently taken to wearing it. For the first weeks from her arrival it had lain in her backpack along with the sweater and the boots and the studded belt. It used to turn her skin black, she said, there was something about her skin that when she wore gold made a black streaky deposit. She kept studying her hand to see if this was happening again, but so far it did not seem to be.

  “I don’t want you to sell your ring,” Adam said, putting his arm around her.

  Shiva had a look at it. “Besides, who would it fit? An Indian girl perhaps. The English mostly have thick fingers. And I don’t think you would get much money for it, gold or no gold.”

  That made Adam cross. “I should think it would fetch at least fifty pounds, but I don’t want her to sell it. I hate the idea of her selling it. There are other ways of getting money. It may be that we’ll have to take some stuff to London. Somewhere like Archway Road is full of places offering good prices for silver.”

  They were a commune in only one way but that perhaps not an insignificant one. What they had they shared. Of course this mostly meant that what Adam had they shared, but at this point Rufus contributed something. He pawned his gold neck chain. Strictly speaking, it was not his but his mother’s. Rufus rather fancied himself in a shirt open to the waist with the gold chain and pendant hanging against his deeply tanned chest. His mother never wore it so he helped himself. He said nothing to the others about pawning the chain. Indeed, he did not know if you could still pawn things, or if the practice had become obsolete. He went to Colchester to the pawnshop on Priory Street, doubting the validity or significance of the three brass balls, but it was all right, there was no difficulty, pawning still flourished apparently, and the pawnbroker gave him a hundred pounds for the chain.

  Thinking about those last weeks, the weeks of August, Rufus recalled for the first time that he had never redeemed that neck chain. Probably it was still there. It might by now be worth five hundred pounds. His parents were both dead, had died within a year of each other four and five years ago. They had not been young, approaching forty, when he and his brother were born. If his mother had missed the neck chain, she had never said.

  The money he handed over to Adam and Vivien with the proviso that some of it be spent on wine. Meanwhile, Zosie kept her ring. After a day or two the black streaking reappeared and she was always taking the ring off to wash her hands. The ring was often to be found on the edge of the kitchen sink or in the bathroom or lying anywhere around the kitchen, jumbled up with utensils.

  Rufus tried to remember when it was that Adam, and Zosie with him, had gone to London to sell the stuffing spoons, the liqueur glasses, and the mask jug. Not then, not until nearly the end of August, for Adam had been reluctant to go to London at all on account of his neurotic fear that he would encounter one or other of his parents. Rufus told him he was like those antipodeans who, when one of their neighbors is off on holiday to London, tell him to say hello to their cousin or friend, should they meet these people in the street. But the fact that there were about nine million people in London, that he was going to Highgate and his parents lived in Edgware, had littl
e effect on Adam’s fear. He wanted to go, he needed the money, but he kept putting it off. Rufus did not allow himself to indulge in what his father had used to call “jobbing backward.” It was useless to regret and say, if only he had never gone.

  Much later in August, nearly at the end of the month, the London trip with all its consequences had taken place.

  He was jumpy and nervous, he didn’t trust Adam. Adam was one of those people who go to pieces under stress. In an emergency they are useless. Look at what happened on that last morning when the post girl came. Adam had already been in a panic over footsteps he imagined he had heard circling the house in the early hours and had actually stalked that invisible nonexistent intruder with a shotgun cocked. And the gun had come readily to his hands again when they saw the red flash of the bicycle, heard the letterbox make its double rap sound. He panicked. Hysteria bubbled up in him and erupted.