by Ruth Rendell
Vivien thought she hadn’t come down because she was too upset at parting from the baby. She said she would go up and talk to her and offer her some of her Bach rescue remedy and when Adam said no, not to do that, she was asleep, she said: “Will it be all right if I stay on a bit, Adam, just till I find myself a job?”
“You’ve got a job,” Shiva said. “Why don’t you just go ahead and take the one you’ve got?”
“I’ve told you why. It wouldn’t be right. I should be deceiving him. Mrs. Ryemark might come to the house with her baby and I should be acting a lie even if I wasn’t telling one.”
“Life is too short to be so circumspect.”
“How do you know it is, Adam? You’re no older than me, you’re not as old, so how do you know better? I think life’s too long to do anything that we know is wrong before we begin.”
She had been so earnest, yet so meek, too, never aggressive but talking in that soft low serious voice, humorless, utterly sincere. He saw her as one of those incubi that appear along life’s route, clinging, insinuating, almost impossible to shake off.
“You can’t stay here,” he said, surly, short, looking down at the plate of food she had cooked.
She was terribly taken aback. This was not what she expected. “I mean for only a week or two.”
“I am staying here alone with Zosie and that’s final.”
She looked at him, her hand going up to her mouth.
“Okay, so you think I’m ungrateful. I’m not. Thanks very much for all you’ve done. But it’s over, right? The party’s over, the summer’s over. Shiva’s going and Rufus is going and I’m afraid you’ll have to too. Now excuse me, will you?”
He just made it to the bathroom. He held his head over the lavatory pan and was repeatedly sick. Mal au coeur was what the French called feeling sick and that was about right, that was how he felt, sick at heart. In the Pincushion Room Zosie slept, lying on her back, breathing regularly. He thought, suppose she isn’t asleep, suppose she’s in a coma? But he had to trust Rufus, he would trust him.
In the Deathbed Room where the newly ironed blue dress hung on a hanger from the wardrobe door handle, he unhooked the picture from the wall and with the dusty paper backing outward and the painted scene turned against his chest, he took it downstairs and outside into the garden. He was going to make a fire.
The site for it was just this side of the fruit garden wall. Adam had never before made a bonfire, but he thought paraffin might assist him and he found some in a can in the stables. The gale had blown dead branches and twigs down from the big trees. He went around gathering them up, looking with dismay at his wrecked garden. His lost Eden. The picture he threw into the flames without removing it from its frame. There was nothing subtle or ominous about its burning. A sheet of fire leaped from the shellac on the frame and engulfed glass and picture in seconds. The portable crib burned less easily. No doubt it was purposely made from some nonflammable material.
Later on, because he could not bear to think of sleeping—or even just remaining—in the same place with it, he took the drawer and its contents into the Room of Astonishment. He couldn’t even remember why they had called it that, for there was nothing astonishing in there except a staircase that wound up into the loft from a closet The room was on the opposite side of the passage from the Deathbed Room but north facing and always rather dark. No one went in there.
He did not immediately get into bed beside the still heavily sleeping Zosie. His fire was still burning. He had lit it too close to the wall of the fruit garden and the smoke had blackened the bricks. That much could be seen from the window in the lasting glow from the fire. The night was dark, gusts of wind rising from time to time, moving black branches against a faintly paler sky. Earlier, before they separated for the night, he had said to Rufus that a kind of poetic justice would have been for the flames to spread to the house and set it on fire. At this point there would have been a rightness about the destruction of Ecalpemos.
A light moved on the lawn. It was someone with a torch. Adam saw that it was Shiva going up to look at the fire and obscurely he resented this, seeing it as interference. But he did nothing, only watched, saw Shiva take hold of a dead branch and poke at the fire, sending cascades of sparks into the air like fireworks.
Lili had left Shiva a note. It wasn’t that sort of note, the sort he dreaded when first he saw the white square held firm on the table by a small vase with two chrysanthemums in it, but the customary line or two she sometimes wrote to remind him she had gone to her Bengali lesson.
He got himself some food from the fridge, tried to watch television. There was nothing about Wyvis Hall on television but there never had been since that first time. If he wanted an evening paper he would have to walk the length of the street to get it and he did not much care for the idea of that. He had not looked at his face in a mirror since he reached home but now he did and saw that his face was cut on his right cheekbone, a dried trickle of blood running down from the punctured skin.
Lili would be home by nine. He decided to meet her. The presence of the graffiti made him decide that, though he was by no means sure how he would be received, whether or not she had rejected him. The idea dismayed him, and if he had not clenched his hands and set his teeth, panic would have taken hold of him. He turned the television on again and made himself watch a quiz show. At about a quarter to nine he went out into the hall and picked up the letter to Sabine Schnitzler. There was no stamp on it. Shiva had a stamp in his wallet, he had several, eighteens and thirteens. Neither would be sufficient for a letter to Switzerland, but two thirteens would be enough. He stuck two thirteen-pence stamps on the envelope and thought, suppose she is writing to her mother to ask if she can come to her when she has left me, I should be carrying, so to speak, my own death warrant to the executioner. But he took the letter with him just the same and mailed it on the way to Lili’s friend’s house which was on Third Avenue.
He had timed it so that she was just coming down the steps from the front door. Salwar and kamiz she was again wearing this evening with her brown tweed winter coat over the pink silk trousers. In the dark the pallor of her skin did not show. If she took his arm, he thought, he would know all was well. She did take it, but lifelessly, and he knew nothing. They walked along in silence and there were no flying stones, no catcalls, no other people even.
The graffiti on his mind as they turned into Fifth Avenue, Shiva nevertheless decided not to point out the spray-paint letters to Lili. Approaching from this direction she might not see them. Of course she would see them tomorrow, but things were different in daylight. They came up to the gate and Lili wasn’t looking to her left and didn’t see them. In the distance Shiva heard someone make a whooping sound and then the noise of a tin can being kicked began. He hustled Lili quickly into the house and drew across both bolts on the front door.
As they were getting ready for bed he forced himself to ask her if she had forgiven him.
“I don’t see that it’s for me to forgive you things you didn’t do to me,” she said quite reasonably.
“All right then. Can you forget?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I haven’t forgotten,” and that was all she would say.
Shiva lay in bed beside her—at least tonight she had not stayed up till goodness knows when, saying she wasn’t tired—and thought what a fool he was to talk of forgetting when things had not really begun yet, when the gathering forces were only just starting the work of retribution. She would not be allowed to forget, he thought.
The sound of running feet awakened him. Feet came running down from the Forest Road end of Fifth Avenue, pounding on the sidewalk—two pairs of feet, he thought, but there were no vocal sounds. And that was odd, for those people never moderated their voices or restrained their words because it was the early hours and others were sleeping. The footsteps slackened, it seemed outside his own house, and it came to him that they might be writing more words on the fence. But then his
letterbox, the box on the front door, gave a double metallic snap and he knew that they, whoever they were, had put something through it. Not something disgusting, he hoped. He heard feet stamping and the gate banged. Once before a parcel had come in this fashion and though he had never opened it, from the feel and the smell he guessed it was full of viscera, the insides of a chicken probably.
The feet that stamped kicked at a tin can. The clanging the can made, not merely kicked but kicked from one side of the street across to the other, woke Lili. She sat up and held him. Shiva put a bedlamp on. Even in his fear he was happy that it was to him she turned instinctively, holding onto his arm, looking up into his face.
“Something came through the door,” he said. “I’ll go down.”
“Don’t go down.”
The sound of the rolling can went on and on, growing fainter but still audible. They had left the window open a little way at the top and the curtains quivered.
“I suppose the morning will do,” he said. “It won’t go away, will it?”
He put the light out. He felt the tenseness slowly go out of her, knowing that as soon as she relaxed she would sleep. Her back just touched his back and he was pleased because she did not flinch away. The deep silence that had succeeded the clatter came into the room and filled it with peace and filled Shiva’s head, too, bringing the beginnings of sleep, the first hesitant waverings on the edge of unconsciousness.
It was the smell that brought him back from the brink and into total wakefulness. Because he was confused he thought for a moment that he was smelling the contents of the parcel. And in a way, of course, he was.
A crackling sound ripped through the house, a mindless chattering. Shiva got out of bed, smelling the burning which was strong enough to make him cough, to choke him, sucking the oxygen out of the air. He ran across the room and threw the door open and saw the whole hall on fire, a pit of fire down there, the flames strong and thrusting and greedy, as if fire were eating the house.
He gave a cry that was lost in the roaring of the fire. The flames came to climb the stairs and eat the banisters. Through it he could not see the door to the living room, which they had left open and through which the fire had burst and driven. A cascade of sparks broke over the burning staircase. Shiva retreated into the bedroom, slamming the door behind him, covering his mouth with clamped hands,
Whimpering, crying out, calling to Lili, he threw up the window sash and as he did so a great tongue of flame shot up from the burning bay below him. It seared his face and he backed, his hands up, as the long, curling, crackling flames licked into the room.
He turned blindly back to the bed and picked up the sobbing Lili in his arms.
19
THE SOMBER PHOTOGRAPH of the blackened house, the account of the preceding fire and the search for arsonists, served only to remind Adam of that last night at Ecalpemos. He recalled how he had half-hoped, half-dreaded, his own house catching fire. It was an Indian man and his wife who had lived in that little terraced box on Walthamstow Street and they were both dead, the man dying in an attempt to save his wife, she surviving for an hour or two after the ambulance reached the hospital. A deliberate racist act, some policeman said on television. Adam did not catch the name of the couple or bother to read about them in the newspaper.
He fancied that during the previous night he had heard the sirens of fire engines. But would such vehicles be permitted to have sirens on at that hour? He didn’t know. Perhaps he had imagined it, just as, ten years ago, he had imagined the sound of footfalls circling the house on that last night, or had dreamed of them.
Sometimes he thought that it was then he lost the ability to sleep soundly. His sleeping since had always been light, precarious. The footsteps passed beneath his window, went on, stopped, continued toward the corner of the house where the Centaur Room was and Rufus slept and went on to the stables. The sky was lightening, with dawn not sunrise. A bird cried, it could not have been called a song.
What had he feared? That they had tracked the kidnappers of the baby here? If so, what he did was foolhardy in the extreme. But he had not known what he was doing, he was overwhelmed and conquered by his instinct for self-preservation. He ran downstairs and into the gun room and took Hilbert’s shotgun down off the wall. He loaded the gun and stepped into the dining room, approached the window, hiding behind the curtain.
There was no one there. He went into the hall and listened. The birds had begun their chorus, the twitterings of autumn, not spring birdsong. But there was no other sound. He opened the front door and went outside, the gun cocked. He must have been mad. Suppose it had been the police out there, for who else would have come searching for Catherine Ryemark?
Ecalpemos lay gray and barren in the gray morning. It was rather cold, the air having a chilly, humid feel, and he could smell stale woodsmoke. Still carrying the gun, he went to look at the site of his fire. It was dead, a sprawl of gray ash with the blackened metal frame of the portable crib balanced on a half-burned branch. He was aware of an awful silence, the deep silence of the countryside at dawn which the sound of birds does not seem to mitigate, as if the birdsong were something else, were on a different level of perception.
Had he dreamed those footsteps? It would seem so. He had no inclination to go back to bed but took himself into the gun room and huddled there in the Windsor chair with the gun beside him. He must have dozed off, for he awoke freezing cold in spite of Hilbert’s old shooting coat he had slipped his arms into. From the kitchen he could hear Vivien moving around and singing. Perhaps she always sang when she got up in the mornings. He had in the past been too far away to hear. It was “We Shall Overcome” that she was singing, the hymn of resistance, and the sentiments expressed maddened him, the simplicity of it and the assumptions.
He went upstairs. At last Zosie was awake. At the sight of him she gave an inarticulate cry and burst into tears, clinging to him, sobbing into his shoulder. It was strange and horrifying what had happened to him in those past twenty-four hours. He had lost his love for her. Overnight really it had gone. He had thought his feelings everlasting, profound, a reason for existence, as if he and she were all those things true lovers were supposed to be, one flesh, two halves of the one whole, all in all to each other and the world excluded. Twenty-four hours before he had wanted nothing so much as to live here at Ecalpemos with her, the others gone, the two of them in solitary bliss. She had been all sexuality to him but she had also been his high goddess. He was miserably aware now that it was a poor little frightened girl he held in his arms, an infantile creature, not very bright, not even very pretty.
“Stop crying,” he said. “Please. Try and get yourself together.”
She sobbed and shivered.
“Where’s Catherine?”
“In our room. In the other room. She’s to stay there, you’re to leave her there, Zosie. Listen, we have to take her away from here today, we have to hide her somewhere. Yes, stop, please”—for she had begun to cry out in protest—“Zosie, she’s dead. You know she’s dead. She’s not a baby anymore, she’s not there. It wasn’t our fault but we have to look after ourselves now. You don’t want them to put you in prison, do you? You don’t want us all to go to prison?”
He had meant to say that they would do what they had to do and then they must start to forget, come back here, just the two of them, and start forgetting. But he couldn’t say it because he no longer wanted this. He didn’t want to be here alone with her or anywhere with her. As for the two of them living together, having their own child …
Her face was swollen with tears, almost ugly. She smelled of sweat. He would have liked to shake her till her teeth chattered. It was your fault, he wanted to say to her, you brought all this on us, you with your crazy hunger for babies, your kleptomania, your lies. But he only set her upright on the bed, wiped her face on a corner of the sheet, handed her clothes to her item by item, helping her to dress.
“I’m not meant to have babies, Adam. Wh
y are all my babies taken away from me?”
He was impatient with her.
“It wasn’t yours. You’d no business with it.”
“She. With her. She was a person.” She pulled the gray sweater over her head, pushed her fingers through the fine pale hair. “Where are her things? Her clothes?”
“I burned them. I made a fire and burned everything.”
As he looked again at the photograph, the skeleton of the house, its girders a blackened rib cage, he seemed to hear her wail again, her keening cry, fists clenched and shaken in the air. The shell of the portable crib had looked not unlike the burned bones of that house, reared up on a bed of smoldering ash with a soot-bleared wall behind.
Vivien was in the kitchen in her cream-colored dress, making tea in the big brown teapot Adam could remember his aunt Lilian using. And Shiva and Rufus sat on either side of the table, Rufus slicing up one of Vivien’s smooth round loaves of brown bread topped with poppy seeds. It was like any other morning, any other day, only everything was happening much earlier. And outside, a little thin rain was blown in gusts against the windowpanes. He sat Zosie down at the table and put food in front of her, a mug of tea, a piece of bread with butter and honey. She began picking off the tiny blue poppy seeds and placing them on her tongue. She’s mad, he thought, she’s lost her mind.
Somewhere in the house a chiming began. A clock was striking. Adam started and shuddered. None of Hilbert’s clocks had been set going since they came there.
“What the hell’s that?”
“I wound up the grandfather clock,” Rufus said. “On an impulse.”
“Fuck you,” Adam said, trembling. “Why can’t you mind your own business?”
Ten times the clock struck. Last week he had hardly known there was such a time as ten in the morning. Vivien pushed a mug of tea over to him.
