by Ruth Rendell
The heavy sultry day drew into a stuffy evening. Great clouds rose in mountain shapes and the moon sailed among them like a white galleon moving through the straits that divide volcanic islands. The clouds were blown by a warm wind that came in sporadic gusts. In front of the house the cedar flapped its rough black arms like a living creature, like a witch in black skirts, Zosie said. It was the last night of his life on which he had been happy, he thought, the last time he had known joy.
Of course that couldn’t be so. It was an exaggeration. He must have been happy since then, oblivious, euphoric, he must have been, but he couldn’t remember any specific occasion. That particular night he could remember, though, in all its strange details, their homecoming down the drift and the wind blowing the branches that met overhead, Zosie running into the house with the baby in her arms and himself following with the cot. Like young parents, first-time parents bringing their child home from the maternity hospital, and with as little idea of what to do and what life would bring. Only when this had happened in his own life, when Abigail was brought home, he had been at work and Anne’s mother had gone to fetch her.
The baby gave one single sharp cry which Vivien must have heard. Vivien was watering her herb garden, nursing along sad little sprigs of parsley and coriander, but she came into the house and helped Zosie prepare the feeding bottle. Zosie took the baby straight upstairs to their room and pulled a drawer out of the walnut tallboy to make a cot for her. She put a big oblong cushion from the drawing room into it for a mattress and she covered the baby with her own bedclothes and Vivien’s red shawl. She tore up one of the towels to make napkins. Adam could hardly believe it when she said she was going to bathe the baby but she did bathe her in the bathroom washbasin and pinned a clean strip of a towel around her and then put her back into the pink outfit she had been wearing, lamenting that she had nothing fresh to dress her in. The baby cried but not distressfully. Zosie held her in her arms and fed her milk.
Adam went downstairs and fetched glasses of milk for both of them and some of Vivien’s fresh bread with cheese and their own early apples, Beauty of Bath, striped red on wrinkled yellow skins. They sat on the bed and ate the food while the baby slept in her drawer and Adam managed somehow to forget for the time being the awfulness of what they had done, not to think about the misery that must come about through this theft, the anguish and panic. The wind shivered away, blew itself out, and left a purple sky, clear as some dark streaked petal, the clouds in distant ranges. He opened the window onto the ruined, dried-out garden. Shiva was standing by the lake, holding a book in his hand, though it was too dark to read, looking up at the stars. It was early still, no more than ten. They had never been to bed so early. They were parents now, Zosie said, and parents had to go to bed early because their baby would wake them at dawn. She was mad and he knew she was mad but he did not care.
He took her in his arms and made love to her and for the first time—the first and the last, the only—she made love to him, she responded. She was passionate and lascivious, wet and soft, and the warm, crumpled bed smelled of salt flats and fresh-caught fish. Her tongue was a small slippery darting fish but inside her was a warm pool of space that grew and enclosed him in warm weeds and as he drowned caught him up and threw him on the shore. She caught him with a shock that was almost pain, that made him cry out as she did, made him close his eyes and arch his back and sink on her with a sigh and a rattling gasp. She was looking at him when he looked at her, smiling, she was, and surely satisfied.
Or was she? Had she been? How did he know? How does any man ever know? Besides, he knew now that it was the baby, the possession of the baby, that had brought her to this, not he. Already the baby, her baby for only the past four or five hours, was more to her than he was. But he made love to her again, he stirred her and himself into excitement again, then and later in the night, in the early hours. He was young, he had thought it was always like that and always would be at all ages. And he had believed, too, that love lasted and he would love her forever.
Adam sat with Anne and Anne’s parents, who were drinking whiskey and coffee. A sickly mixture, he thought, but he hated both anyway. Winder’s questions and sly taunting comments rotated in his head. In the conversation he took no part, keeping silent, bolstering his reputation as “not very talkative.” On these occasions he often wished Abigail would wake up so that he could go upstairs and comfort her, cuddle her. But it was a long time now since she had wakened of her own volition in the evenings but slept undisturbed, in a beautiful noiseless serenity. It had been different with that other baby, who in her sleep made faint whistling sounds and occasionally soft irregular clicks. Was that why Anne’s clicking in her sleep had so enraged him?
The clickings had grown more frequent and there had been a grunting and whimpering before she awakened. And then cries. That crying had been disconcerting, bringing him a feeling of incipient panic, very like what he felt now. At first he had wondered what it was, where he was. And it had been the same the next morning, the sky he saw when he opened his eyes, red as if somewhere a great fire were burning, and it had taken him a moment to realize that this was the dawn.
“I suffer from eosophobia,” he had once said, “an irrational fear of the dawn.”
Zosie went down and got milk for the feeding. She changed the baby’s napkin, she knew how to do that, they had made her do that in the hospital where her own baby was born, even though they knew she was giving it up for adoption. They slept again, all three of them. And outside the world was going mad looking for that baby; outside the charmed circle that enclosed Ecalpemos, outside the invisible walls the shutting spell had erected.
By the time they got up there were four wet napkins in the bucket Zosie had brought up from the kitchen. Vivien washed them because she had to wash her own blue dress. She looked at the baby and talked to it and held out one finger which the baby got hold of in its own tiny pale fingers, but she asked no questions, desisting as a very caring, kind mother might. And even then he had not thought what this meant, what Vivien’s acceptance meant.
They had no newspapers and if they had the radio on, no one ever listened to the news. If Vivien, going about her work, had heard talk of a missing baby, would she have made the connection? She and Rufus accepted that the baby was Zosie’s, concluded presumably that she had had the adoption order set aside now that she had a home of her own and a man of her own.
He was only a little bit afraid, that day. When the car with the lamp on its roof came down the drift—albeit a yellow lamp and not a blue one—he thought for a moment it was the police. It was only Rufus returning and without enough money to pay the cab fare. And he was strangely intimidated too by the weather. It seemed crazy to say the weather frightened him but it did because it was different. Overnight it had grown cold, the temperature falling from over ninety degrees—they still thought in Fahrenheit then—to less than sixty. And he could not help seeing it as an omen of a change in their fortunes, as an end of the good times and the beginning of an encroachment of disaster.
What else had they done that day? Nothing much. When he looked back on it he remembered Zosie as inseparable from the baby, cuddling the baby and feeding it and changing it, and himself as restless and nervous, glad of the night coming, of being able to go to bed early. The baby woke up and cried and he thought, Oh, God, what a drag, is this what my life’s going to be?
The new cold made him bad-tempered. The morning was dull and stormy and Zosie cuddled the baby and talked to the baby and suddenly he knew the baby would have to go back. Of course she would. How had he ever believed they could keep a kidnapped baby and not be found out?
He considered reasoning with Zosie, a pointless task at the best of times. He couldn’t just grab the baby and take her to London on his own. The help of the others might be enlisted, except that the others didn’t know.
They were soon to find out. Once Shiva gave him the lead, handed him the opportunity, he wasn’t going to sta
y silent. Not even for Zosie’s sake. Besides, it wouldn’t be for Zosie’s sake in the end, it would be better for Zosie to relinquish the baby—or he thought so, he couldn’t see further than the moment, the cold, increasingly alarming present.
It was Shiva who asked.
“Whose baby is it, Zosie? Is it yours?”
Vivien smiled and nodded. Rufus wasn’t there, he was lying hopefully out on the terrace where once the sun had shone. Shiva sat at the kitchen table, looking from one girl to the other. Now Adam had his chance and he took it.
“She isn’t Zosie’s,” he said. “She’s someone else’s baby.”
“She’s mine,” Zosie said.
“Only,” said Adam, pedantic to the last, “in the sense that she’s presently in your possession.”
Shiva said, “I don’t understand what you mean.”
Zosie, who had been heating milk in a saucepan, stepped away from the stove, her shoulders hunched, her eyes the eyes of the mouse in the corner, its back to the wall. The baby was in Vivien’s arms. She and Zosie had been, as it were, joint priestesses of some maternal mysteries, performing together the rites of an ancient cult, and Vivien had smilingly confirmed Zosie’s motherhood in a way that excluded males. But in all this she had been deceived and at Adam’s denial she sprang back, clutching the baby tightly to her, her face a mask of shock. Adam had a feeling that anyone else, at this revelation, might actually have dropped the baby but Vivien held onto it the more firmly as if by the mere utterance of certain words, it was placed in danger and required her special protection.
He spoke steadily, without emotion. “She’s a baby Zosie took out of a car when we were in London. She kidnapped her, if you like.”
“I don’t believe it,” Shiva said in a slow wondering voice.
“Of course you do. You know people take babies, women do when they’ve lost their own. It’s a well-known fact.”
“She just took a baby out of a car? Didn’t anyone see her do this?”
“Obviously not. Look, we’ve been through all this. I’m sick of it. I know it was wrong and terrible and all that, I know that. I’m not feeble-minded. I know the baby’s got to go back, and the sooner the better, as far as I’m concerned.”
Vivien spoke. She still held the baby. She wouldn’t relinquish the baby. “It was a wicked thing to do, an evil thing. I think you are feeble-minded, both of you, that’s just what you are. This baby has to go back to her parents now, immediately. You have to drive back to London now with her and give her back.”
“I quite agree,” Adam said wearily.
“Do you know who her parents are? I suppose you don’t. You took her out of someone’s car, you say? You’re mad completely, you’re sick in your minds.”
“Oh, shut up.”
“Rufus will have to know about this. Rufus should be in on it.”
It must have been the first time Vivien had ever made an overture of any kind to Rufus. Still carrying the baby, she put her head out of the window and called him.
“Rufus, would you come in here, please?”
Zosie had filled the bottle and was holding it under the cold tap to cool it. She dried the bottle on a cloth and came to Vivien, lifting up her arms. For a moment it seemed as if Vivien would hold onto the baby, for she briefly raised her left arm to shelter its face and head from Zosie.
“She’s a human being you’ve stolen,” she said in a wondering voice. “A person, not an animal or a toy. Do you realize that? Do you think?”
The baby broke into wails at the sight of food held tantalizingly a yard from her. Vivien said: “I thought she was yours, I thought this was your own child you’d somehow got back.”
“Please give her to me, Vivien.”
Cigarette in mouth, Rufus walked in just as the changeover was taking place, Vivien putting the baby into Zosie’s arms while turning her head sharply away. Shiva had begun to laugh, not wildly, but softly, ruefully, while shaking his head. Rufus said:
“What’s going on?”
“Zosie’s stolen this baby out of someone’s car. She just took it yesterday afternoon. She’s mad, of course. Presumably she thinks she can get away with kidnapping. I know you thought it was hers, we all thought it was hers, but it’s not, it’s someone else’s. They don’t even know whose baby it is, they don’t even know who the parents are.”
“Oh, yes, we do. It’s Tatian’s, it’s that man’s you’re going to work for.”
Vivien looked at Adam. She put her hands up to her face which had gone as pale as the cream cotton of her dress. The baby in Zosie’s arms sucked away at the nipple, its miniature hands, pink as shells, holding on to the bottle. Vivien took a step toward Zosie, in a threatening way, it seemed to Adam, and he half-rose, but she was only looking at the baby, staring into the baby’s face.
“Are you saying you think this baby is Nicola Tatian? Is that what you thought? Nicola’s nine months old, she’s big, she crawls around. I ought to know, I’ve seen her. God knows who this is, God only knows. What made you think you’d taken Robin Tatian’s child?”
Zosie didn’t speak. She doesn’t care, Adam thought, she doesn’t care whose it is, it’s hers now, that’s the way she thinks.
“It was in a car outside his house. Zosie naturally thought it was his.”
Shiva’s had been a nervous giggling and had ceased now, though the shaking of the head continued. But it was simple raucous laughter Rufus gave vent to, peals of laughter that shook him so that he had to sit down at the table and bury his face in his arms.
“Put the radio on,” said Vivien. “Keep it on till we get some news. There’s bound to be something on the news. You’re useless, aren’t you?” she said fiercely to Rufus. “You’d think anything was funny. You’d think murder was funny.”
“Maybe I would,” he said, throwing back his head. “Maybe I would.”
But he did not when the time came.
Shiva put the radio on and rock music thrummed out. Almost at the same time, as if the radio had started it or the music had provoked it, thunder rolled out of the distance, a sound like a load of stones being rattled out into a pit of stones. And then the music stopped and a man’s voice began announcing the news bulletin.
His father-in-law was talking about Wyvis Hall. Adam, lost in his reverie, his hearing shuttered, had missed whatever it was that triggered this off. He sensed, though, that it might be some news item his father-in-law had read or heard but which had escaped him, something fresh that the media had just got hold of, and while one part of him burned to know what it was, the rest cringed from it, would have given anything not to know it, covering eyes and blocking ears. Nor did he want to answer the questions that were now being put to him about his ownership of the place, what sort of a house it was, what was the extent of the grounds, what kind of people lived in the neighborhood.
He did answer, though, in an abstracted kind of way, thinking all the while that he had only to inquire what made him ask for Anne’s father to revert to whatever had begun it. Those lines in the evening paper he was afraid to look at, perhaps, or even something on television. But he did not ask. Instead, he found himself saying abruptly that it was an unpleasant subject, it was something he didn’t want to talk about. Anne was looking at him with those suspicious, narrowed eyes that seemed a habitual expression with her nowadays. And suddenly Adam thought, my marriage won’t survive this, we shall split up over this. In a way it would be the least of evils. If the sole result of all this were to be the breakup of his marriage, he would have got out of it lightly. But it could not be the sole result, not now, not with the coypu man appearing on the scene and saying his piece.
Adam remembered lightning, a bright flash of it, flaring in the kitchen. It was only then that they realized how dark it had become. It had given them an illusion of nighttime but it wasn’t night, it wasn’t even evening but three in the afternoon. He had gone to the window and looked out on a gray and purple sky, where the clouds were mountain ranges
capped with snow. Like the Himalayas, warm and close in the foothills, clear and icy on those distant peaks. A tree of lightning grew out of the blue horizon, branches forking through the cumulus, and the thunder cracked this time, a sound like gunfire.
He listened to the voice coming out of the radio, they all listened, even Rufus. “The missing Highgate baby” was the way the voice referred to the child in Zosie’s arms, not by name. Zosie rubbed the baby’s back, cuddling it against her shoulder. For a few seconds she held her head on one side, listening to the words which the announcer delivered in ominous tones, but not as if it had any application to her personally, and with no more interest than she might have given to news of an earthquake taking place on the other side of the world.
She had torn up another towel and was changing the baby’s diaper. Shiva recoiled from this with wrinkled nose and downturned mouth.
“I’d like to go to Sudbury, please, and buy her some clothes. She ought to have another outfit and underclothes and things. She ought to have real napkins.”
Adam wondered what it was this reminded him of. He closed his eyes. Of his sister, yes, of Bridget when she was a child of seven or eight, and had for a few days become obsessed by a birthday doll.
“You’re not going to Sudbury,” Vivien said. “You’re going to London to take that baby back.”
She was Mother, she was in charge, hers was the voice of authority. Only it no longer worked so effectively. And Rufus surely had been Father. Why do we need these roles, Adam had wondered then and wondered now, why do we cast ourselves in them?
“A small local difficulty,” said Rufus, “is that we don’t yet know who it belongs to.”
“It’ll have been in the papers. It’ll have been in this morning’s paper.” Adam was beginning to see what he must do. “I’ll take Zosie into Sudbury and buy a paper and find out whose it is.”
