A Fatal Inversion

by Ruth Rendell

  Nunes might have changed but he didn’t know, he couldn’t be sure. He had no eye for things like that. That house might be new, that one extended. What altered it most was the season, the grayness of October, the leaves falling and the leaves that had already fallen, a sodden mat of them everywhere. A sign on a pole had been planted outside the church, asking for donations for repairs to the roof. He drove past the Fir Tree and the phone booth to which he had taken Vivien to make her call to Robin Tatian. There had been a police car parked by the phone booth, the particolored green and white kind they called a panda car, and if not exactly alarmed, they had both been made wary by the sight of it. Of course its presence there had nothing to do with any of them, but they had both thought of Zosie, who must be classified as a missing person, and of the things she had stolen.

  But he had parked Goblander behind the police car, which was in any case without driver or passenger, and Vivien had gone into the phone booth, this very phone booth, to say the phone was damaged and not working. So he had driven on and found another booth outside a cottage converted for use as doctors’ offices and waiting rooms. There had been a plaque on the gatepost, Rufus remembered, and here it was, still the same, though doubtless some of the GPs in the group had gone and others come. There, on the grass verge, now glistening with water and scattered with shed leaves but then dry springy turf, he had sat and waited for Vivien because it was too hot to stay inside the van. And people had come by and looked at him, two women and a bunch of children and a dog. Rufus was glad now that he had never succumbed to the prevailing fashion of the time and painted Goblander with moons and stars and flowers and hieroglyphs.

  He slowed, pulled in, and consulted his road map, though he had no need to. He wanted to appear to passers-by as a man consulting a road map. But there were no passers-by. It was desolate October and here in the country everyone ate lunch at noon, everyone was indoors. He lifted his eyes to the red phone booth, the length of brick wall hung with ivy.

  Vivien had come out and given him back what remained of his change, down to the two pence pieces. She was always meticulous about money, overconscientious. And she had told him that Robin Tatian had himself been at home, had answered the phone. Yes, of course she could have the job, he had written to her. Hadn’t she had his letter? Vivien wouldn’t tell lies, even of the whitest kind, and confessed she had inadvertently given him the wrong address. Rufus had not asked if at this point she had given him the correct one. There had been no reason to ask, no need then for prudence or caution, any more than Adam thought he had needed those things when Evans or Owens asked him if he was settling in at Wyvis Hall. But Robin Tatian might even now, he thought, be reading in his newspaper about the prospective identification and seeing the name Wyvis Hall and the name Nunes, remember that his children’s former nanny …

  “I’ll stay for a year,” she had said. “By then I’ll have enough to get me to India and once I’m there—well, if I starve in India, I won’t be alone, will I? The thing I dread is that I may get too fond of the children.”

  “The children?”

  “The Tatian children, Michele and Nicola. I may get to love them, in a way I hope I will, but then it will be such a wrench to part.”

  “It’s just a job surely?” Rufus had no special feeling for children, had not had then or now. “You’ll look on it simply as work, won’t you?”

  She gave him a strange look.

  “You think it’s that easy?”

  He misunderstood her. “I didn’t say it was easy. It’s badly paid bloody hard work but it’s your choice presumably.”

  “That’s not what I meant, Rufus. I’m afraid I shall naturally come to love those little girls because I’m a woman with a woman’s feelings and I’m afraid, too, that they may come to love me and be even more upset than I when we have to be separated. I’m afraid that if that happens I may not have the strength to go. Have you ever thought what a nanny’s life must be? A succession of bereavements, joy succeeded by loss.”

  “You exaggerate,” he said.

  He had never liked her. She was a tiresome woman, uncomfortable to be with. He could not remember her ever laughing, and her smiles were not occasioned by wit or amusement but by wonder at some remarkable sight, a bird or a flower or a sunset. Well, those ambitions of hers had come to nothing, broken, lost, destroyed. The trouble was that he could easily have imagined her sitting at the feet of some dirty emaciated fakir or with a begging bowl or robed as a nun. Things do not work out as we expect them to, though they had for him.

  If he was going to Hadleigh, he had better get on with it. Hadleigh, as he remembered it, more or less closed down after lunch on Saturdays. No one went shopping, and half the shops closed. He drove past the post office and the Hampstead Garden Suburb houses, postponing inquiries there till later. What he hoped for was that the shop kept by Evans or Owens, a shop whose position on High Street he could perfectly remember, would be gone and replaced by a hair-dresser’s perhaps or a florist. And the florist would tell him the old man had died and left no children to take over the business.

  They seemed to stretch before his mind’s eye in a procession, those people who might remember the company at Wyvis Hall, and as soon as one was discounted—as in the case of Bella—another rose up to take her place, just as threatening, just as dangerous. He had seen something like that in a play, a line of dangerous people, kings perhaps, whose numbers were endless, but he couldn’t remember what the play was. Adam, no doubt, would know. Bella was gone but now he remembered the men from the council’s refuse department who emptied each week the dustbins they took up to the top of the drift. Someone must have come down to read meters, too, even if they had never been admitted to the house… .

  Hadleigh was changed, seemed more cared for, made more consciously ancient, preserved, precious. There were traffic lights at the approach to the town that he couldn’t remember from before. He drove in, over the river bridge. Down there on the right it had been, past the wineshop but before you reached the butcher, a low shop you went down a couple of steps to reach… .

  And still was.

  He parked the car on the opposite side, outside the vet’s, crossed the street, and walked a little way along. Outside the shop he paused and looked in through clouded windowpanes at polished furniture within, elegant, sparse, a porcelain leopard, brown spotted golden glaze, lazing in the center of a circular mahogany table, and behind it, standing there and talking to a customer, a brisk-looking very young man, a mere boy.

  Rufus went down the steps and into the shop. The woman was leaving, hastened her leave-taking when she saw him. Rufus said: “I see you’ve changed hands. There used to be someone called Evans or Owens …”

  “Mr. Evan, that’s right, not Evans. That’s my father. What made you think we’d changed hands? I mean, it doesn’t matter, but I’d be curious to know.”

  Before Rufus could reply, Evan himself had come into the shop from a door at the back and was standing there spry and slightly smiling, looking not a day older than he had ten years before.

  15

  THE RIOTS OF THE NIGHT before dominated the morning paper. Two of the eastern suburbs. It had begun when police went into a house in Whiteman Road to arrest a man suspected of robbery with violence and in the scuffle a woman had been knocked unconscious. The inhabitants of the house were black and one of the policemen was Indian and this had contributed to the outbreak of violence. A photograph showed the name of the street which was itself an irony. Down the road in Walthamstow they had overturned cars in Forest Road. Nearly every window for half a mile had been broken and a fire started down one of the side streets.

  Anne, who liked to go shopping near there on a Saturday morning, was afraid to go near the place, so Adam went alone. But in places the damage was so bad that whole areas of street had been closed and the traffic diverted and Adam found himself in Hornsey, passing Hornsey Old Church, a route he had always consciously avoided, for this was the way he had
come into London with Zosie.

  This time, of course, he was driving in thick traffic in the opposite direction and it was the church itself that alerted him to where he was, the church that looked as if it might be Victorian Gothic but was in fact a single medieval tower. It was a key in his memory that immediately gave access to the file of those last days. Here, with the church ahead of him on his left, he had nearly turned left and headed down to Holloway, Islington, the outskirts of the City. Zosie had the street atlas on her lap and he had said, “I don’t know why I’m going so far west. It might be better to go down to Holloway.”

  And she had said, “Go on then. You know. I’ve never been here before.”

  But, “If I was going to, I should have turned down the Seven Sisters Road.”

  So he had driven on and changed his whole future. If he had turned left, Zosie and he would have married and been living together at Ecalpemos still. Why not? And the turf in the cemetery would have lain undisturbed and the guns still been hanging in the gun room, Abigail unborn but other children born to him, and he would not have been a murderer in daily expectation of arrest.

  Adam reached the shopping precinct and managed at last to park the car. He thought he had put Anne’s shopping list into his pocket but he couldn’t find it. He would have to do his best from memory, but it seemed that all his memory could do for him at the moment was dig into the documents of the past. Later Anne’s parents were coming to them for supper. It would be the first time since the previous Christmas, so they could hardly get out of it. Then there had been a family gathering with his own parents among the company and his sister and Anne’s sister. They had been summoned to arrive in time for a present-giving ceremony before lunch. Anne’s father had given her mother a mask jug. She collected Victorian porcelain. Anne’s father knew nothing about antiques and boasted of this, saying that the woman in the shop had vouched for its authenticity and value—well, he could vouch for that by what he had had to pay. The jug was of pale cream and yellow china, its spout a face in profile with hair depicted in gold as flowing back around its rim.

  “That’s called a mask jug,” Adam’s father had said. “You can see why. It’s on account of the spout being in the form of a mask.”

  Everyone already knew this. They could see. But his father went on instructing them, taking the jug from Anne’s mother’s hands and holding it up to the light, swinging it around and tipping it upside down until Adam was in a sweat that he would drop it. It was only the second mask jug he had ever seen in his life.

  “My old uncle, the one that had this rather splendid house in Suffolk, a mansion really, he had one of these jugs. White it was, white picked out in gold.” He remembered then that Adam must have inherited the jug along with the other contents of Wyvis Hall. “What became of it, I wonder? Got it over at your place, have you? Or did you sell it along with all that other priceless stuff?”

  “I don’t know,” Adam muttered. “I don’t remember.”

  But he did, only too well. Back at that time he was in the habit of escaping from or canceling Ecalpemos thoughts. So good was he at this that on that Christmas Day, even if he had tried, he would have had difficulty in recalling the shape or coloring of the jug. Now there was no such difficulty. He could see it: about twelve inches high, a high white glaze, the spout or lip a smiling Silenus face with flowing locks lightly gilded, and on the almost spherical body of the jug a fernleaf pattern in gold. Zosie had wrapped it in tissue they found lining a drawer and then in newspaper. Whenever they went anywhere she bought a newspaper to see if her mother had told the police yet and there was a hunt on for her. There was quite a pile of newspapers mounting up. They used more sheets to wrap the stuffing spoons and the thimble-sized glasses etched with a Greek key design.

  Vivien found a cardboard box to put the things in. It was one of Rufus’s from the wineshop. Rufus had considered coming with them, Adam remembered. What had stopped him? He had a date with that girl, the married one, that was it. It would be his last chance to see her before her husband came back.

  “He is doing a wicked thing, I think,” Adam overheard Shiva say to Vivien. “Like your King David.”

  “Rufus didn’t send her old man into the forefront of the battle,” Adam said. “He’s only gone on a gunnery course.”

  “How would Rufus feel if he got killed?”

  “Bloody awful, I should imagine, only the chance is a bit remote, don’t you think?”

  So Rufus had stayed behind, though his date wasn’t till eight-thirty. Things would have worked out differently if he had come. If he had stayed at home past eight o’clock they might well have worked out differently. There had never been any idea of Vivien or Shiva accompanying them. Shiva meant to go on one of his nature walks and Vivien always baked bread on Mondays. She was setting out her things just as they were leaving—scales, a big earthenware bowl, a measuring jug, a large bag of wholemeal flour, a lump of yeast. She poured flour into the bowl, started cutting up the yeast to drop it into warm water and just in time saw Zosie’s ring stuck on the underside of the lump. That little ring of plaited gold strands was always lying around getting caught up on dough, scooped into vegetable peelings, threatened with being washed down the sink.

  It was odd what Zosie did then, though not perhaps so odd when you knew Zosie. She put the ring on her little finger and put her arms around Vivien’s neck, hugging her. Vivien held her, having little regard for her floury hands which made mealy marks on the back of Zosie’s pale blue T-shirt.

  “What’s the matter, lovely?”

  “I don’t know, I feel so funny sometimes, as if I’m not anyone, as if I’m a shadow or a dead petal that’s dropped off and someone will sweep me away. When I put my ring on I feel a bit more real, I get to be the person who wears the ring.”

  Adam hated her to talk like that. He felt bereft because she had gone into Vivien’s arms and not his. “The usual tradition about rings,” he said, “is that they make the wearer invisible, they don’t reveal them.”

  She seemed to shrivel. She edged away from Vivien, drawing her arms back, pulling in her fingers like an animal retracting its claws.

  “I’m not invisible, am I?” She looked from Adam to Vivien and back at Adam, her eyes vague and strange. “You can see me, can’t you? Say you can see me.”

  “Don’t be a fool,” Adam said roughly. “Of course we can see you.”

  Vivien spoke his name warningly.

  “Zosie, love …,” he said.

  “Am I your love?”

  It embarrassed him being spoken to like that in front of Vivien. It was almost as if they were in the presence of his mother. “You know you are.”

  “If I went away, would you tell the police? Would you look for me?”

  She harped on that always.

  “If you’d only tell me where your bloody mother lives, we could go there and find her and find out the truth of it.”

  “I will one day, I really will.”

  “In the meantime,” he said, “we’re supposed to be going to London. It’s past one now and if we don’t get on with it, it’ll be too late.”

  “I’m coming,” she said. “I’m coming.”

  He could see that tiny ring on her tiny finger now, the plaited gold. “It must be a child’s ring,” he said to her, “it must have been made for a child.”

  “It was. It was made for me when I was little. I wore it on one of my big fingers then.”

  The idea of her having big fingers made him laugh. She took off the ring and showed him a Z engraved inside.

  “So you really are called that. I did wonder.”

  She sat beside him with both arms around his neck and her head on his shoulder and it was beautiful (If we find each other that’s beautiful, if not it can’t be helped) only he wasn’t a good enough driver to contend with distractions like that. Her right arm she left along the back of his seat, her hand resting against his neck, the other with the ring on in her lap. It really was
a lap because she had a skirt on, the first time he had ever seen her in one. It was a wraparound thing, white with pale blue checks. Perhaps it wasn’t a skirt at all but a curtain she had found somewhere. She looked older dressed like that and less like a pretty boy. He had made love to her only two hours before, but seeing her like that, her brown polished thighs showing where the hems of the curtain parted, feeling her fingers in his hair, made him want to drive into one of those fields and carry her to a hedge bank where the wild clematis was in bloom and the tall weed flowers gone to seed.

  It was hot, oppressively hot, but not as it had been. This heat was humid, making you sweat as soon as you went out into it, causing breathlessness. There was air all around you but you wanted air, you gasped for it. The horizon was lost in a foggy blueness. It did not need a meteorologist to forecast that the long-enduring fine dry weather was drawing to its end. They had all the windows of Goblander open but the heat was still thick and enveloping. Adam knew she had fallen asleep when he felt her hand drop. How she must trust him, he thought. There was no one he could think of he would let drive and go to sleep beside them.

  He drove on down the A12 and still she slept, breathing with a gentle childlike rhythm. For a while he thought about words, about two words no one could spell, desiccated and iridescent, even the good spellers could not spell them, and then his mind had drifted back to Zosie and he wondered as he often did if she loved him, if she really loved him, and if his lovemaking gave her pleasure. Did she enjoy it or was her response an act put on for some secret purpose? How could one know? Adam wondered if it was possible she played this game because she wanted him to go on loving her even though she might feel no love for him.

  He had driven into London along Forest Road, through Walthamstow and Tottenham. There was a smell of oil and soot and stagnant water. By this time Zosie was awake, staring out of the window, saying she had never been here before in these ugly northeastern suburbs. Riots had been unheard of in those days, apart from the old troubles in Notting Hill and the occasional fracas at a soccer match. Zosie had the street atlas open on her lap and she wanted to know where all the reservoirs were (she called them lakes) and the parks and open spaces she could see on the area plans when everything outside was just buildings in a gray heat haze.