A Fatal Inversion

by Ruth Rendell

  “I don’t see why,” said Zosie, “seeing that I’m not taking her back.”

  Adam put his arms around her. He put his arms around her and the baby, the baby was between them, keeping them apart. For more reasons than one, he wanted to be rid of the baby.

  Shiva, who had been silent, who had seemed to be listening intently only as might someone whose grasp of the English language was imperfect but who needed to understand every word, now said slowly: “Do you realize it’s fortunate it wasn’t Mr. Tatian’s baby you took? You would have been found by now if you had, the police would have found you.”

  They all looked at him. It was the first mention of the police.

  “Because they will want to know about everyone connected with the Tatian family. Mr. Tatian would have said he had this new nurse for his children coming on Thursday but he didn’t know much about her, it was his sister-in-law who had interviewed her. He would have said there was something odd about her address, she had given him a false address. There was no such place as Ecalpemos but it might be true that she lived at Nunes in Suffolk. What do you think they would have done then? They would have been here by now, they would have found us, they would have called at every house here.”

  “Congratulations,” said Rufus. “One of these days you will make a great detective, a credit to the force.”

  A flush came into Shiva’s olive face. “It’s true, though, isn’t it?”

  “My guardian angel was looking after me,” Zosie said.

  “How about this baby’s mother’s guardian angel? He was on leave, was he?”

  “I thought you were on my side, Rufus.”

  The radio was playing music, rock, not very loud. Rufus turned it off. He lit a cigarette.

  “Did you now?” he said. He was looking at Zosie in a speculative kind of way and yet as if he found her an astonishing creature. “I’ll tell you whose side I’m on. Rufus’s. And that goes for always.”

  Adam had an uneasy feeling that the grown-ups had come. He looked at Rufus, needing him, needing him for guidance, for direction. And what Rufus said next struck him like a blow under the ribs. He felt the blood run into his face and the skin grow hot.

  “Frankly, this is no place for me. Not any longer. It’s time for me to quit.” He smiled at Adam but not pleasantly, without camaraderie. “So if you’ll excuse me, I’ll be on my bike in the morning.”

  Adam had to maintain a cool manner. He had to put up his eyebrows and shrug.

  “As you like. It’s your decision.”

  “Right. But I’m afraid I shall have to deprive you of the van.” He said “the van” and not “Goblander” and this twisted a knife in Adam. “So if you want to buy newspapers and baby clothes, I suggest you run into Sudbury now while the going is good.”

  Very laid back was Rufus, cool as a cucumber and with a cutting edge to his voice. He didn’t have to put it into words. It was plain what he was thinking: I am a medical student at a great teaching hospital with a future before me. And I am good, I am going to be good, I am going to be a success. I have two years still before I qualify. I have far to go up the ladder but up it I am going and be damned to the lot of you. The last thing I mean to do is jeopardize my career for a crazy girl with kleptomania—the kind of kleptomania that has babies not things as its object.

  From goodness knows where, Rufus produced a big square bottle of gin Adam didn’t know he had, poured himself a generous measure, and drank it down neat. He didn’t say any more but went off through the house, carrying his bottle. As soon as he was gone Zosie started telling them about the little boy she had tried to abduct from some shopping center when she and Rufus and Vivien were all in London together. It was the first Adam had heard of this and it turned him cold. The baby would have to be returned. Rufus could go, he would soon be going anyway, and all Adam really wanted was to be alone with Zosie. Without the baby.

  Sometime later on, if he could divert her, if she would go to sleep, say, he might be able to take the baby back. And what would that do to their relationship? What would keeping the baby do to it?

  The empty portable crib was on the backseat of Goblander. Zosie sat holding the baby, wrapped in Vivien’s shawl. Her childlike hand on which the plaited ring gleamed stroked back the cobweb-fine hair, touched the round satiny cheeks. Her face was rapt and her guardian angel sheltered her with his wings. She no longer reminded him of his sister but of girls he had seen in paintings, Renaissance madonnas whose ardent faces and shining eyes had nothing to do with piety.

  Like a small ill-treated animal begins to trust the first human being who is kind to it, the first who does not kick it or desert it, she trusted him. She wasn’t afraid to leave the baby in his care. He supposed he should be flattered and in a way he was. It pleased him, it meant that later on he could do what he had to do. But first he left her with the baby, and bought the Daily Telegraph. The missing baby story was big on the front page and the name was there. The child who slept in the portable crib on the backseat of Goblander was called Catherine, her surname was Ryemark and her parents whose guardian angel had been on leave lived on the other side of Highgate, in the area called the Miltons.

  Her arms full of packages, a shopping bag hooked on one arm, Zosie came back, came dancing back in spite of her burdens. The shopping she had done must have made a big hole in the mask jug and spoons money.

  “Catherine,” said Zosie when he told her. “I like Catherine better than Nicola.”

  The baby seemed to smile at her. It was very quiet, placid, staring. The large blue eyes were calm and mild, not wandering but fixed on Zosie’s face. Adam read aloud a minute description of the portable crib, cream with a white and cream checked lining, the linen white with a pink blanket and a pastel-colored patchwork quilt. He wondered why all the people passing by did not look into the van and see the crib and rush off to denounce him.

  A few drops of rain had fallen, widely separated, each the size of a large coin. They watched the sparse rain with surprise, almost with curiosity. It was so long since they had seen it, it came as a phenomenon.

  “It says here she’s fourteen weeks old,” Adam said as they began the drive back.

  “Doesn’t that seem tiny? You can’t imagine being fourteen weeks old.” Zosie sat in the back with Catherine. She had taken her out of the crib and held her in her arms. “My baby was a little girl. I haven’t told you that before, have I? The funny thing is I feel just the same about her as I did about my own little girl, just the same, no different. Do you know, Adam, it won’t be long before we forget she’s not our own baby.”

  Adam didn’t say anything. He would have liked more information than the newspaper gave, but he did not like the sound of a “nationwide hunt” for Catherine Ryemark. There was nothing in the story about motorists stopping to let a young girl in a blue top and blue and white checked skirt holding a portable crib go across the pedestrian crossing at North Hill. Perhaps no one had seen her.

  At Ecalpemos Vivien was waiting for them, standing under the front porch waiting. The rain had never really come, though the sky was still a rolling mass of cloud and the thunder growled distantly. A wind had risen, swaying and shivering the trees. She began telling them before they got in the door how the baby must go back, how they must not even bring her in but take her home at once.

  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 po
rtable 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 o
ne 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.