A Fatal Inversion

by Ruth Rendell

  “Will the parent or person in charge of a small boy aged about three dressed in a white shirt, blue shorts, and blue sandals, please come to …”

  And there had followed directions to some manager’s office where the child could be claimed. Rufus could remember perfectly where he had been when he heard the message, by some trick of memory—so arbitrarily selective, so lacking in respect for the recall one most needed—photographed forever and printed on some wall of the mind. On one side of a bank of shelves packed with cosmetics he had been and the black and silver Mary Quant packaging he could see now. Zosie was on the other side of it, hidden from him but no more than six feet away. He heard the message about the lost boy and immediately turned to find Zosie, but she was gone; she, too, was lost.

  He looked for her. The place was very crowded. The curious thing was that though Zosie was beautiful she was not very memorable, she was not unusual to look at. Thousands of young girls looked like her—or superficially like her, they looked like her from a distance. They all wore jeans and T-shirts and sandals and no makeup and had hair that was very long or very short.

  She knew where the van was as well as he did. She knew the time—or did she? Of course she didn’t possess a watch. But he didn’t care, he wasn’t going to wait for her past ten past four. They were due to pick Vivien up at four-thirty. If Zosie got left behind in London, she would find her way back. Home is where you go to when you have nowhere else to go. Home is the only port in a storm.

  Rufus sat in the van, smoking. He saw Zosie coming toward him along the aisle between parked cars, the metal glittering, the tarmac surface quivering with heat distortion, her shadow and that of the little boy black, short, dancing. He was fair-haired, blue-eyed, bewildered. He had a white shirt on and blue shorts and blue sandals, and he was holding Zosie’s hand.

  “Open the door, Rufus, quick. He can come in the back with me. Let’s get away quickly.”

  Rufus wasn’t often frightened. He prided himself on being easy, laid-back, cucumber-cool. But he was frightened then, fear hit him in the pit of the stomach, it was as physical as that. He jumped out, he slammed the van door.

  “Are you mad?”

  He knew she was. It wasn’t a real question.

  “Take him back. How did you get hold of him? No, never mind. I don’t care. Just take him back. Put him inside the doors and leave him, anything.”

  “I want him, Rufus. He’s called Andrew. He said he was called Andrew. He was saying Andrew wants Mummy so I walked in and I said here’s Mummy, Andrew, whatever happened to you? I said, and come on, let’s go. They didn’t stop me, they didn’t ask anything, and he just came. Look, he likes me. We can take him back to Ecalpemos and he can live with us.”

  From the first Rufus had been always aware of his future career, that he must keep his hands clean. That, at any rate, he must appear to have clean hands. It ruled him, that principle, it kept him from the worst excesses. Shiva had it, too, but Shiva was a loser; Shiva, through not being ruthless enough, would go down. Rufus had nightmares about doing something or something happening to wreck his qualifying and prevent forever what might come after qualifying. They were nightmares, but he had them in the daytime when fully conscious.

  “Take him back!”

  The child, up till then stunned perhaps by events, began to cry. Rufus picked him up and held him up on his shoulders. His heart was in his mouth, he literally had that feeling of choking, of imminent nausea and throwing up. But he ran across the tarmac with the child in his arms, the child who by then was screaming, ran under some sort of covered way and in through glass double doors and into the first shop he came to, a shoe shop, where he thrust the little boy into the arms of an assistant and shouted: “He’s the lost boy, he’s called Andrew. There was a message …”

  Between them they nearly dropped the boy. His screams shattered the air. Rufus turned and fled. He jumped into the van, aware that he was swearing aloud, muttering every obscenity he could think of, spitting out at Zosie that he would kill her, that she was criminally insane. She was crying, lying back on the seat with her head hanging back and weeping. He brought the van out as fast as he could, his heart knocking, his hands shaking. To think of it now even started his heart going. He brought the illicit drink, the one on the table by him, up to his mouth. The vodka had warmed and sweetened. But then, nothing compared to the first taste of it.

  They had driven a long way in silence—silence but for the sound of Zosie’s sobbing. He should have known then, he should have been warned. The marks on her body he had seen, the blue and therefore recent stretch marks. He had seen her look at the picture and now she had tried to steal a child. What had happened to her own baby? He did not ask, he did not speak at all. They were late collecting Vivien and, incredibly now, he was more concerned about the delay than about Zosie and what she had done or what she might do. Indeed, he had not thought at all about what she might do.

  The traffic was building up because it was close to rush hour. He drove along Aylmer Road, down Archway Road and into North Hill, with a whole lot of stopping at lights that gave him the chance to turn around and tell Zosie to shut up, to control herself. There was no one following them. Of course there wasn’t. What had he expected? Police cars? Posses of policemen brandishing truncheons? The conclusion reached had probably been that he, Rufus, had found the child wandering after his second abandonment and carried him in to safety.

  Zosie turned her face into Goblander’s threadbare upholstery and drew her legs up into the fetal position. She had stopped crying. Rufus turned into View Road, seeing ahead of him Vivien waiting, seated on a garden wall, her bright blue dress incongruous among all the greens and grays, the hard whiteness of the light and faded lawns.

  She got in beside him, gave Zosie a glance, and looked discreetly away.

  “How did you make out?”

  “It was his sister I saw, not his wife. His wife’s dead. She died when the child was born, she had an embolism or something.”

  “Unusual,” said Rufus, “but it still does happen.” He started driving back toward North Circular Road.

  Zosie put her head up. “What’s an embolism?”

  “A bubble of air in a vein, and if it touches the heart or the brain you die. Is that right, Rufus?”

  “More or less,” he said. Already, even at that time, he disliked discussing these esoteric matters with lay people. “Did you get the job or don’t you know?”

  “They’re going to let me know. The sister was interviewing some more people before she goes back to America. She lives in America. They’ve got a nanny now for Nicola—that’s the baby—and the other little girl, Naomi, but she’s leaving, she’s getting married.”

  Zosie said, “How old is the little baby?”

  “She’s nine months old.”

  “What is she like? Is she lovely?”

  “Yes, of course. Beautiful.” Vivien hesitated. She lightly touched Rufus’s arm. “Do you know, I think I’ve done something silly. She said she’d write to me and I told her my address was Ecalpemos, Nunes, Suffolk. It isn’t really called that, is it?”

  “It’s Wyvis Hall,” said Rufus, laughing. “You’ll have to phone them and set them right.”

  “Or just wait and phone in a couple of weeks time. She said she’d let me know in about two weeks.”

  Recalling this, Rufus thought that at least the presence of a Miss Vivien Goldman at Wyvis Hall in July 1976 could not be traced through the post office. No officious clerk with a superlative memory would be around to remember an envelope. Nor had that pretty postwoman ever brought a letter from Robin Tatian to the front door and left it in the box at the top of the drift. Such a letter had been written, addressed to Ecalpemos, and perhaps eventually returned to its sender, marked “unknown.”

  Only Adam had received letters while there: that demand to pay the rates, and on the last day an electric bill. Sometimes, though, Rufus had lifted the lid off the big wooden mailbox that was u
p near the road on the pinewood side and looked inside. He had done so that day on their return from London and found lying there, a dead leaf on top of it, a copy of the Nunes parish magazine.

  Halfway down the drift they met Adam and Shiva coming up, off to view the animal cemetery which Shiva must have just discovered. He parked Goblander and it was then that Zosie showed him what else she had stolen—a small, mass-produced camera. They all got out and followed the others up to the pinewood, Vivien scolding Zosie in a mild motherly way, reproaching her for being “a little thief.” Rufus could remember Zosie’s sulky face and the way she took dancing steps and fluttered her hands. He could remember the slanting rays of the sun penetrating the wood, and the muted tuneless twitter of birds going to roost.

  “Do you want another drink?” said Marigold.

  He shook his head. She turned off the television, picked up his empty glass, touched his shoulder in a vaguely caressing way as she went from the room. Rufus retrieved his secret drink, wondering if she knew about it, if she had known all the time, but tactfully did not say. Once or twice he had forgotten to remove and wash the secret drink glass, but it had been gone next day.

  The phone began to ring.

  Rufus picked up the receiver, said hello. A voice he would not have known, just a young woman’s ordinary voice, said, “Rufus, this is Mary Passant, Mary Gage that was.”

  13

  THE GESTALT PRAYER ON the kitchen wall was a daily reminder to Shiva that Rufus and Adam were not in this world to live up to his expectations. They did nothing, they seldom got up before noon. They used drugs and Rufus drank excessively. Shiva had looked forward to discussions on the nature of existence, the future of the world, varieties of religious experience and other aspects of moral philosophy, but Rufus and Adam, though obviously mentally equipped to hold views on these subjects, talked only of trivia, of food and drink, of places they had been to and films they had seen, of people they knew, and they engaged in incomprehensible, presumably witty, repartee.

  Shiva had difficulty in finding ways to pass the time. He worked at his math. He helped Vivien in the kitchen, though feeling rather resentful that the other men never did though they came from a less patriarchal culture than his own. He tried to engage Rufus in conversations about medicine and the medical profession, the various medical schools and his chances of getting into one of them, but Rufus was not very forthcoming. Though perfectly kind and pleasant, he seemed curiously indifferent to the subject, acting on the amazing assumption that anyone could get into medical school if he or she wanted to.

  One of the ways in which he filled up his time was by exploring the place, though he seldom went out on the roads. He could have roads at home. He walked the fields, where strictly he should not have been, but he did not know this. In these days of mechanized agriculture there was no one to warn him off. Sometimes he walked through the high yellowing barley and wheat but he was too lithe and lightfooted to harm the growing crops. The names of plants and trees were quite unknown to him, he literally could not tell a dandelion from a dogrose, but perhaps they were all the more wonderful to him for this reason, for their mysteriousness. He followed the course of the little river, looking at the weed like green hair that streamed beneath the surface, and sometimes seeing dragonflies skim the water. Once he saw a kingfisher that was the color of Vivien’s dress but more jewellike, more glowing, as if a light burned inside the bird’s bright blue feathers. Overhead the sky was always blue, occasionally covered by a reticulation of thin, fuzzy cirrus, but more often cloudless, and every day the sun renewed itself, hot, powerful, seemingly permanent.

  It was after he and Vivien had been at Ecalpemos for about two weeks that he found the cemetery in the pinewood. Vivien and Zosie had gone to London with Rufus for Vivien to have her interview at the architect’s house in Highgate. Adam was lying on the terrace reading a nineteenth-century dirty book which had been his great-uncle’s. It was late afternoon or early evening, though the sun seemed as hot as at noon, and Shiva remembered he had promised Vivien to fetch in some kindling so that she could light the kitchen stove and bake some bread.

  Really it was too hot to consider heating up a stove that would make the place even hotter, but Shiva fetched from the stable block the shallow flat basket Vivien said was called a trug and set off. He walked up the long almost totally enclosed tunnel that the drift had become, remembering a fallen tree that lay on the northern border of the wood.

  At first all the trees were of the deciduous kind, oaks and ashes and beeches and limes. All the coniferous ones were at the top near the road. The scent which grew stronger as he got to the top of the slope reminded him of a certain kind of bath essence. Putting two and two together but still with a sense of serendipity, Shiva concluded that the pine which was the bath essence perfume was the same as, or similar to, these trees, and he looked at them with new eyes. They were of a very dark green, nearly black, their needles borne in dense, round clusters. Among the clusters grew long, pointed cones of a pale fresh green, but the cones that lay on the ground, on a brown blanket of millions and millions of fallen needles, were also brown and with a shiny look as if each one of them had been hewn from a block of wood, carved in a pineapple design and polished. The pines grew thickly, close together and in symmetrical rows, so that the wood, to Shiva’s fanciful imagination, looked like some ancient pillared hall, overtopped by a roof of somewhat forbidding darkness.

  It occurred to him that the cones might make better kindling than fallen wood and he began picking them up and putting them into his basket. But as he gathered them it seemed to him that there were always finer cones lying deeper in the wood, and he gradually made his way farther and farther in, soon finding that he had to squeeze between the pine branches, so closely had the trees been planted. It was dry, silent, and rather stuffy in there. It was very still. The wood was not very large—he knew this from having seen the whole of it spread out when returning one afternoon from Hadleigh in Rufus’s van—so there was no possibility of his getting lost. What he had also seen from this hilltop if not quite aerial view was that a sandy ride bisected the wood, running from north to south, a provision supposedly for getting logs out. Very soon, Shiva thought, he must reach this ride, and after struggling on for another fifty yards or so, gathering cones as he went, he saw light gleaming ahead and a thinning of the trees. Above his head a bird’s nest hung from a branch, a nest shaped like a little basket, but Shiva did not see the goldcrests, a pair of tiny, twittering yellow birds, until he had reached the ride and come out into the open.

  As soon as he emerged from the densely ranked pine trees he saw that the ride going southward must lead uninterruptedly to the open area of grass that divided the pines from the deciduous wood. He would go out that way and avoid the awkwardness of groping through a maze of wooden columns and stiff sharp branches. He looked around him. On the opposite side of the ride, a little way to the right, the straight line of pines was broken, or, rather, indented, the trees there forming three sides of an open square. This square space was turfed as the verges of the ride were, but instead of smooth as were those verges, raised into a dozen or perhaps fifteen shallow tumuli. The effect was of a range of little green hills, a midget country viewed from a midget aircraft, or of molehills the grass had grown over. The whole place, however, was scattered with what seemed to be monuments. Carrying his basket of cones, Shiva came closer.

  It was a graveyard that he was looking at. The monuments were mostly of wood, gray as stone or greened over with a patina of lichen, and some had fallen over and lay on their sides. Here and there was a headstone of marble, pink, mottled gray, white, and on this last Shiva read engraved the single name Alexander and the dates 1901-1909. On another monument was a verse he found incomprehensible but the simpler tributes touched him. He was moved by Gone from us after three short years and By what eternal streams, Pinto… . The dead who lay here had known such short lives, the oldest being a certain Blaze, who had died in 1957
at the age of fifteen. Shiva had little doubt he had come upon a children’s graveyard. These were the dead offspring of the Verne-Smith family lying in their ancestral burying place. The earliest date was 1867, the latest excepting that of Blaze’s death, 1912. Infant mortality during those years in England he knew to have been quite high and he felt his heart wrenched by the thought of these losses, by that of the little three-year-old, by Alexander, who had died at the age of eight. But as he walked away along the ride it cheered him up to realize he now had something to tell the others, for the first time he would be able to impart to them a piece of interesting information. Adam, he was sure, knew nothing about it. Adam had told him he had never been into the pinewood.

  Enjoying in anticipation, however, the element of surprise, Shiva told Adam only that he had something interesting to show him. He said the same to the others whom he and Adam met in Goblander as they were returning up the drift. Later he was greatly relieved that he had not announced his discovery of children’s graves. It would have been hard to live that down.

  Vivien didn’t know either. He and she came from very different backgrounds but they were closer to each other than either was to Rufus or Adam. As for Zosie, she merely stood staring, holding one fist up against her mouth. The two Englishmen had behind them a long tradition, a mythology rather, which Shiva knew he would never understand, which his father would not have understood for all his vaunted love of England and admiration of English ways.

  Adam laughed when Vivien reacted as Shiva had—well, not as Shiva had, far more impulsively than that, with a cry of pain for bereaved parents and bygone suffering.

  “They are dogs and cats,” Adam said. “I suppose there may be a goat or a parrot there as well, but it’s mostly dogs and cats.”

  “How can you know?”

  “I just know,” Adam said, and Rufus nodded. He just knew too. “People like the Berelands—they were my great-aunt’s family—they were the sort to have animal cemeteries.”