A Fatal Inversion

by Ruth Rendell

  The eyes of each of them held the other’s for no more than a matter of seconds, an instant of time in which Adam felt his own features screw into a scowl, prohibiting, repelling, brought on by terror, while the smile on Shiva’s face shrank and cooled and died away. Adam turned his head sharply. He pushed through the crowd, gained a freer space, hastened, almost running. There were too many people for running to be possible. He reached the bank where there was a line and stood there breathing fast, momentarily closing his eyes, wondering what he would do, what he could possibly do or say if Shiva were to pursue him, declare himself, touch him even. Adam thought he might actually faint or be sick if Shiva were to touch him.

  He had come to the bank because it had occurred to him, while bound for Heathrow in a taxi, that though in possession of traveler’s checks and credit cards, he had no actual pesetas in cash. In Tenerife there would be another taxi driver to pay and at the hotel a porter to tip. Adam turned over to the bank cashier half of what he had in his wallet, two ten-pound notes, and asked, in a voice so cracked that he had to clear his throat and cough to make it audible, for these to be converted into Spanish currency. When his money had been given to him he had to turn around to give way to the next person in the line, there was nothing else to do. With a considerable effort of will he forced himself to lift His head and look ahead, down the long length of the arrivals area, at the milling host of travelers. He began to walk back. The crowd had cleared a little, to swell again no doubt in a minute or two when the planeload arriving from Rome came through. He could make out several dark-skinned people, men and women of African, West Indian, and Indian origin. Adam had not always been a racist, but he was one now. He thought how remarkable it was that these people could afford to travel around Europe.

  “Europe, mark you,” as he had said to Anne when first they got there and in answer to his scathing comment she had suggested that the black people might have been going home or arriving from lands of their own or ancestral origin. “This is Terminal Two,” he said. “You don’t go to Jamaica or Calcutta from here.”

  “I suppose we should be pleased,” she said. “It says something for their living standards.”

  “Hah,” said Adam.

  He started looking for Shiva. His eye lighted on an Indian man who was evidently an airport employee, for he wore overalls and carried some kind of cleaning equipment. Could it have been this man he had previously seen? Or even the sleekly dressed businessman, passing him now, on whose luggage label was the name D. K. Patel? One Indian, Adam thought, looks very much like another. No doubt, to them, one white man looked very like another, but this was an aspect of things Adam felt to be far less significant. The important thing was that it might not have been Shiva he had glimpsed so briefly among the faces of the crowd. It might be that his mind, in general so prudently policed, had been allowed to get a little out of hand, to run amok as a result of the previous night’s dreams, of his anxiety over Abigail, of the sight of that baggage label, and had thus become receptive to fears and fancies. Recognition there had seemed to be on the Indian’s part, but could he, Adam, not have been mistaken there? These people were often ingratiating and a scowl evoked in them a smile of hope, of defensiveness.

  Shiva would not have smiled at him, Adam now thought, for he would surely have been as eager to avoid a meeting as Adam was. They had done different things at Ecalpemos, he and Shiva—indeed all five of them had had different roles to play—but the actions they had taken, the dreadful and irrevocable steps, would have lived equally in the memory of each. Ten years afterward they were not of a sort to raise a smile. And in some ways it might have been said that Shiva had been closer to the heart and core of it, though only in some ways.

  “If I were he,” Adam found himself saying not quite aloud though his lips moved, “I would have gone back to India. Give me half a chance.” He bit his lips to still them. Had Shiva been born here or in Delhi? He could not remember. I won’t think of him or any of them, he said inwardly, silently. I will switch off.

  How could he hope to enjoy his vacation with something like that on his mind? And he intended to enjoy his vacation. Not least among the blessings it would confer was sharing their bedroom with Abigail, whose crib would be (he would see to that) on his side of their bed so that he could keep his eye on her asleep through the long watches of the night. Now he could see Anne standing waiting for him outside the entrance to the departure halls. She had obeyed him and avoided food but, strangely, this made him feel more irritable toward her. She had taken Abigail out of the stroller and was holding her in that fashion which is possible to women because they have well-defined hips and the sight of which therefore angered Adam. Abigail sat on Anne’s right hip with legs astride, her body snuggled into Anne’s arm.

  “You were so long,” Anne said, “we thought you had been kidnapped.”

  “Don’t put your words into her mouth.”

  He hated that. “We thought,” “Abigail thinks”—how did she know? Of course he had never told Anne anything about Ecalpemos, only that a legacy from a great-uncle had helped set him up in business, put him where he was today. In the days when he was “in love” with Anne instead of just loving her (as he told himself one inevitably feels toward a wife of three years standing) he had been tempted to pour it all out. There had been a time, a few weeks, perhaps two months in all, when they had been very close. They seemed to think each other’s thoughts and to be shedding into each other’s keeping all their secrets.

  “What wouldn’t you forgive?” she had asked him. They were in bed, in a cottage they had rented in Cornwall for a spring vacation.

  “I don’t know that it’s for me to forgive anything, is it? I mean, I wouldn’t think things you’d done my business.”

  “Heine is supposed to have said on his deathbed, ‘Le bon Dieu me pardonnera. C’est son métier.’”

  She had to translate because his French was so bad. “Okay then, let’s leave it to God, it’s his job. And, Anne, let’s not talk about it. Right?”

  “There’s nothing I wouldn’t forgive you,” she said.

  He took a deep breath, turned over, looked at the ceiling on which the irregular plaster between the dark-stained beams showed strange patterns and silhouettes, a naked woman with arms upraised, the head of a dog, an island shaped like Crete, long and beaky, a skeleton wing.

  “Not—molesting kids?” he said. “Not kidnap? Not murder?”

  She laughed. “We’re talking about things you’re likely to have done, aren’t we?”

  A distance yawned between them now so great as to make their relationship a mockery of what it had been during those days, during that time in Cornwall and a bit before and a bit after. If I had told her, he sometimes thought, when opportunity came and held open that door, if I had told her then we would either have parted for good or else moved toward a real marriage. But it was a long time since he had thought like this, since thinking like this was always handled by the escape key. Irritable shades of it crossed his consciousness now. He would have liked to carry Abigail through passport control, but she was on Anne’s passport and it was in Anne’s arms that she sat as the official looked at her, and at her name written there, and back again at her and smiled.

  If it was Shiva, he thought, at least it was in arrivals that he had seen him, not departures. That meant Shiva was going home—wherever that might be, some ghetto in the north or east, some white no-go place—while he was going away. There was therefore no possibility of his encountering Shiva again. And what harm, after all, could come of this chance sighting, if sighting it had been, if Shiva it had been? It was not as if he had seriously believed Shiva to be dead any more than the rest of them were dead. Nor was it likely that he could hope to pass through life without ever seeing any of them again. Until now there had not been so much as a mention in a newspaper or word-of-mouth news. He had been lucky. He was lucky, for sighting Shiva had made no difference to things, had made them neither better than t
hey had been before nor worse. Life would go on as it had been going on with Anne and Abigail, the business on a gradual ascent, their existence steadily upwardly mobile, exchanging their house next year perhaps for a rather better one, conceiving and bringing into being Aaron their son, the associative procedure retrieving Ecalpemos from among the stored files and the escape key banishing it.

  Life would go on more or less in tranquility, and time, a day or two in Tenerife, would dim the memory of that brown and shining face glimpsed between pale, anxious, stressful faces. Most probably it had not even been Shiva. In the neighborhood where Adam lived he seldom saw any but white people, so naturally he confused one dark-skinned person with another. Wasn’t it natural, too, that whenever he saw an Indian face he should retrieve Shiva from his memory? It had happened before in shops, in post offices. And it hardly mattered anyway, for Shiva was gone now, gone for another ten years… .

  He humped their hand luggage off the baggage cart, passed Anne her handbag, and had recourse to a therapy he sometimes employed for turning away the rage he felt toward her. This was with a false niceness.

  “Come on,” he said, “we’ve time to get you some perfume in the duty-free.”

  3

  EVIL WAS A STUPID WORD. It had the same sort of sense, largely meaningless, amorphous, diffuse, woolly, as applied to “love.” Everyone had a vague idea of what it meant but none could precisely have defined it. It seemed, in a way, to imply something supernatural. These thoughts had been inspired in her husband’s mind by a sentence from a review on the cover of a paperback novel Lili Manjusri had bought at the Salzburg airport. “A brooding cloud of evil,” the commentator had written, “hovers over this dark and magnificent saga from the first page to the astonishing dénouement.” Lili had bought it because it was the only work in English she could find at the bookstall.

  Whenever Shiva considered the word, he saw in his mind’s eye a grinning Mephistopheles with small, curly rams’ horns, capering in a frock coat. Events in his own past he never thought of as evil but rather as mistaken, immensely regrettable, brought about by fear and greed. Shiva thought most of the folly of the world was brought about by fear and greed, and to call this evil, as if it were the result of purposeful calculation and deliberate wrongdoing, was to show ignorance of human psychology. It was in this way that he was thinking when, with Lili by his side and their suitcases on a trolley he would abandon at the tube station entrance, he looked up and met the eyes of Adam Verne-Smith.

  Shiva had no doubt it was Adam he saw. To him Europeans did not specially all look alike. Adam and Rufus Fletcher, for instance, though both white, Caucasian, and of more or less Anglo-Saxon-Celtic-Norse-Norman ancestry, were very dissimilar in appearance, Adam being slight and white-skinned with a lot of bushy (now receding) dark hair, while Rufus was burly and fair, with curiously sharp-pointed features for so fleshy a man. Shiva had seen Rufus some years before, though he was absolutely certain Rufus had either not seen or not recognized him, while he was equally sure Adam knew perfectly well who he was. He began to smile from exactly the motive Adam had attributed to him, a desire to ingratiate and to defend himself, to turn away wrath. He had been born in England, had never seen India, spoke English as his cradle tongue, and had forgotten all the Hindi he had ever learned but he had all the immigrant’s protective reactions and all his self-consciousness. Indeed, he had more, he thought, since the events at Ecalpemos. Things had gotten worse since then. There had been a gradual slow decline in his fortunes, his fate, his happiness, and his prosperity, or prospect of prosperity.

  Adam glared back at him and looked away. Of course he would not want to know me, Shiva thought.

  Lili asked him what he was looking at.

  “A chap I used to know years ago.” Shiva used words like “chap” now and “pal” and “kiddy,” words used by Indians wanting to sound like true Brits, though he would not have done this once.

  “Do you want to go and say hello to him?”

  “Alas and alack, he doesn’t want to know me. I am a poor Indian. He is not the kind of bloke who wishes to know his colored brethren.”

  “Don’t talk like that,” said Lili.

  Shiva smiled sadly and asked why not, but he knew he was being unfair to Adam as well as to himself. Had they not all agreed when they left Ecalpemos and went their separate ways that it was to be as if they had never met, known each other, lived together, but that in future they must be strangers and more than strangers? Adam, no doubt, adhered to this. So, probably, did Rufus and the girl. There was something, some quality, more fatalistic, more resigned, in Shiva. He might deceive others, but he was incapable of deceiving himself, of pretending, of denying thoughts. It would not have occurred to him to attempt forgetfulness by inhibiting memories of Ecalpemos. He remembered it every day.

  “It was at that place I told you about that I knew him,” he said to Lili. “He was one of the group of us there. Well, he was the one, it was his place.”

  “All the better not to know him then,” said Lili.

  She bought their tickets. Adam had been right, it was in an East London near ghetto that Shiva lived. Lili tucked the two slips of green cardboard into a fold of her sari. She was only half Indian, her mother being a Viennese woman who had come to England as an au pair and married a doctor from Darjeeling, a surgical registrar in a Bradford hospital. When Lili grew up and the doctor died, her mother went home and settled in Salzburg selling Glockenturm beer mugs in a souvenir shop. It was there that they went each summer, during Shiva’s holidays, their fares paid by Sabine Schnitzler who, having reverted to her maiden name and largely to her native tongue, sometimes wore a surprised, even bewildered look at being surrounded, as she put it, by “all those Indians.” For Lili, whose skin was nearly as white as Adam Verne-Smith’s, was more Indian than true Indians, wore the sari, grew her curly brown Austrian hair down to her waist, and took language lessons from a Bengali neighbor of theirs. In her voice were hints of the singsong tone, Welsh in its rhythms, so characteristic of the Indian speaking English. Shiva thought he should be grateful for all this, though he was not. How would he have felt, he sometimes asked himself, if he had married a woman who set herself against his ethnic origins?

  He had told Lili about Ecalpemos before they married. It would not have been in his nature, nor would he have been inclined, to do otherwise… . But he had not gone into details, giving only the bare outline, the facts, and Lili had asked few questions. He bore in mind that the time might come when he would have to tell her everything.

  “It wasn’t your fault,” she had finally said.

  “It’s true that they never consulted me. If I had given my advice, it would have been ignored.”

  “Well, then.”

  He began haltingly to explain but stopped himself. He could tell the truth but not all the truth. Openness did not demand that he tell her he had suggested it.

  “You should try to forget,” she said.

  “I suppose I feel that would be wrong. I ought never to forget about the kiddy.”

  And it was perhaps inevitable that he should see the death of his own child, his and Lili’s, as retribution, as a just punishment. Yet he was not a Christian to look at things in this light. He was not really a Hindu either. His parents had neglected this aspect of his upbringing, having largely abandoned their religion but for a few outer forms before he was born. Some lingering race memory remained though, some pervading conviction common to all Orientals, that this life was but one of many on the great wheel of existence and that reincarnation as someone better endowed or worse (in his case surely worse) awaited him. He saw himself returning as a beggar with limbs deliberately deformed whining for alms on the seafront at Bombay. The incongruity was that at the same time he was convinced of retribution in this world. He saw the death of his son, a placenta previa child who died during Lili’s labor, as direct vengeance, though he could not have said who was exacting it.

  Crossing the hospital cou
rtyard that divided the maternity wing from the general wards and administration building, hearing over and over in his head the words they had gently but coldly told him, the announcement of his son’s death, leaving Lili asleep, carefully sedated, he had lifted his eyes and seen Rufus Fletcher. Rufus was wearing a white coat and had a stethoscope hanging around his neck. He was walking very rapidly, far faster than Shiva was going in the opposite direction, from a building with long windows and white-uniformed men and girls behind them that looked like a lab, toward the main block. He turned his head to look at Shiva, cast on him an indifferent glance, and turned away. Rufus had simply not known who he was, Shiva was sure of that, had not recognized him as one of the other two male members of the little community in which they had all lived in such close contiguity for something like two months. Shiva was astonished to find that Rufus had in fact finished his studies and become a doctor. Of course he had known Rufus had this in mind, was three years through his time at medical school, had already considerable knowledge and nous—who could forget that?—but somehow he had imagined that the same fate would have overtaken the others as had overtaken him, a deathly stultifying, an inhibition on all that was ambitious and of ascendant character, a remorseful withdrawing into the shade. Only if they did not show their faces, only if they kept their heads low and lived in obscure corners could they hope to pass at least in physical safety through life. So he had thought. But the others evidently had not, or Rufus had not, walking jauntily and with swinging stride across the road, his stethoscope bobbing up and down, letting himself into the main hospital block, Shiva later saw, by a door marked Private, which he slammed behind him with a fine disregard for the notices exhorting all to silence.