A Fatal Inversion

by Ruth Rendell

  At Hornsey Old Church he had gone straight on and up Muswell Hill toward Highgate Wood. If on that journey he had passed within sight of Archduke Avenue where he now lived, he did not think he would have considered buying the house. But he had not and there was nothing about his house or the street in which it was situated to remind him of that drive. Only the gray stone tower had reminded him of it and reading of the riots along the route they had taken.

  Adam took a shopping cart and began walking dazedly around the store.

  It had not been their Evan but his younger brother. Their Evan was dead. It seemed to Rufus that his adversaries were being bowled over and swept away in rapid succession, first Bella, now the old antiques dealer.

  “I was always around,” he said to Rufus blandly. “We were partners. Pure chance we never met, it must have been, though the fact is my brother tended to be the one that went around buying while I minded the shop.”

  He drove back to Nunes, absurdly relieved, dying for a drink.

  Of course there was no question of having a drink when he had seventy or eighty miles to drive home. He lit a cigarette. In those people’s place, he thought, in the shoes of the coypu man or the meter reader or the farmer or the post girl, he would have gone to the police and volunteered what information he had. He would have thought it his duty, would even have enjoyed it. For the first time he saw himself and Adam and Shiva and Vivien and Zosie as the local people must have seen them, wild, feckless, curiously dressed or half-naked, driving around too fast in a dirty, dilapidated van, hippies, drug addicts, the kind it was a pleasure to tell the police about. If they remembered. If they made the connection.

  On the Hadleigh side of the village stood the four Hampstead Garden Suburb houses. They seemed far smaller than he remembered. Ten years ago he had not noticed the name of the little curve of road: Fir Close. It was separated from the main road by a half moon of grass on which were planted four or five saplings, sticks without branches that had shed their few leaves. He drew the car in along Fir Close, but found he could not remember on which garage drive he had seen the Vermstroy van, on one of the two center ones, he supposed, but he had no idea which. Nor could he remember what the coypu man looked like. He had only glimpsed him once and that had been when he, Rufus, was lying on the terrace and the coypu man had appeared on the farther shore of the lake, a distance of some two hundred yards.

  “Like a brigand,” Adam had said. “Fierce-looking with a big black moustache.”

  But Adam had a too-vivid imagination. A woman came out of one of the houses and Rufus wound down the window of the car and asked her if she could tell him where it was the pest control people operated from. He could see at once she didn’t know what he meant.

  “We’ve only been here two years,” she said. “The people at the end have got something to do with a hardware firm in Sudbury. It wouldn’t be them? The man next door to us committed suicide but that was years before we came and the widow moved anyway. Did you say a white van? The people at the end had a white van but it was more a mobile caravan.”

  They had no real reason to believe the coypu man had lived there. It was an assumption that had been made on very thin evidence and somehow become part of Ecalpemos mythology. Rufus got to the post office ten minutes before it was due to close until Monday morning.

  Ten years before it had not been there. The post office had been a prefabricated hut which none of them had ever gone into. After all, they had bought no stamps, sent no letters. This was a shop that took up part of the ground floor of a cottage almost opposite the Fir Tree. Rufus had already noted that the present landlord of the Fir Tree was not the same man who had kept it ten years before when he had met Janet or Janice there for the last time. The landlord’s name was printed above the door to the public bar and Rufus knew it was not the same, though he could not remember what the other one was.

  He went into the post office with no story prepared, trusting to inspiration. There was a kind of cubicle with a wire grille behind which a middle-aged man in glasses was intently performing those mysterious tasks with forms and slips of paper and rubber bands postmasters everywhere seem to spend their time at. A youngish woman, stout and smiling, tired-looking, was behind a sweet and newspaper and postcard counter. Rufus picked up a copy of the Daily Mirror. There were no other papers remaining, perhaps there had been no others.

  “Where would you recommend me to get some lunch?”

  She hesitated, looked at the postmaster.

  “I don’t think the Fir Tree, do you, Tom?” The Suffolk accent was strong, a coarse intonation with glottal stops and what Adam had once called a “concavity of vowel sounds.” “No, I wouldn’t recommend that. That’s the best place, the Bear at Sindon.”

  “He doesn’t know where that is,” said Tom in the voice of a retired army officer.

  “It’s a long time since I was around here,” Rufus said quickly. “A good many years. Did you know a Mr. Hilbert Verne-Smith at a place called Wyvis Hall?”

  “Everyone knew him,” she said. “A friend of yours, was he? My uncle helped him out in the garden, used to go down there to see to the garden twice a week year in, year out. But the young fellow who came in for it, the nephew, he didn’t want him, turned him off with just what was owing.”

  Rufus had an immediate picture of an old man with a knotted handkerchief on his head. “Is he dead?”

  “Mr. Verne-Smith? He died a good ten or eleven years back, didn’t he? I said the nephew came in for it.”

  “I meant your uncle.”

  “Dead? No, he’s over to Walnut Tree on account of needing a bit of care but he’s as fit as a fiddle really.”

  Seeing Rufus’s puzzlement, Tom said, “Geriatric ward in Sudbury.”

  “Oh, I see. Yes.”

  “He never went back,” the woman said. “Never set foot on the land again. It as good as broke his heart. Except for just the once, once he went back, to pick up the tools that was his own, his old spade and his dibber, and he went down there five one morning so as not to disturb folks and took a look at that garden—his garden, like he called it—and it was gone to rack and ruin, all burned up and the weeds gone mad and grass like a meadow. Mind you, it was that hot summer we had, whenever it was, 1976.”

  “So as not to disturb folks,” Rufus repeated in his own mind. He understood now whose the footsteps were that Adam had heard very early on that last morning. And Goblander had been outside and Vivien’s wash on the line. He was in a geriatric ward, the old gardener, but fit as a fiddle really.

  “The Bear at Sindon you said?”

  She began giving him elaborate confused instructions for finding his way there. Rufus looked at her face while she bent over the counter, drawing maps with her forefinger on the cover of the Radio Times. There was something familiar there, something that recalled a red bicycle to him, a waving hand, solid legs pumping pedals up the steep drift… . He could think of no way to ask her if she was that post girl who had brought the demand for rates to their door and then the electricity bill and without asking he could never be certain.

  There was no question of going to Sindon to find some lunch. He had no appetite. And he felt that he had accomplished nothing. He had complicated matters. Driving past Pytle Farm he thought, the farmer may already have been to the police. They would certainly have been to him when the inquiry began. “So as not to disturb folks”—the phrase ran through his head. It made him appear in his own eyes naïve, as if he could reasonably have supposed for a moment that they could have lived down there for two and a half months and no one know.

  Down here.

  He stopped at the top of the drift. A sign on a post, lettering on a piece of oak, bore the name Wyvis Hall and under this: Private Road. It came to Rufus quite suddenly that not the Evans, father and son, nor the woman at Fir Close, nor the postmaster or the woman who might or might not have been that post girl, had mentioned the animal cemetery to him or what had been found in it or said a word a
bout police. He wondered why this should have been but came up with no answer.

  Simple fear prevented him from turning down the drift and driving to the house. Not normally imaginative, he pictured curiously a reception committee down there, the owners of the house—Chipstead, were they called?—police of course, the real post girl, eighteen still, the meter reader, the farmer, the coypu man… .

  After a little while he began the drive home. Rain had started to fall as on that last day, the day of the expulsion from paradise. It was the same sort of rain, the kind that comes in spurts, wind-driven. And dismal rain had continued to fall in the ensuing days after he was back home, keeping him indoors, lying low and staying silent with his parents and his brother, waiting always for something to happen.

  Just as now, he read the papers carefully every day, read everything about the baby, his tension mounting when the papers said the police had a clue, a shaming relief flooding him when it seemed they were further than ever from finding the truth. He used to wake in the night and wonder if he would ever go back to medical school, if he would be free to go back. He had done nothing really, he had only been there, but he never tried to deceive himself into believing he had no share in the collective guilt, the collective responsibility. It never crossed his mind, though, to break the undertaking they had all given and attempt to see the others. He didn’t want to see them; he wanted to be rid of them for good.

  There had been some sort of old school reunion around that time but he hadn’t gone. He avoided Highgate from then on, sometimes making quite elaborate detours to keep clear of Archway Road and North Hill and the Highgate police station on the corner of Church Road.

  Adam and Zosie had driven along the Muswell Hill Road where it winds and dips up and down between Queens Wood and Highgate Wood and up to the lights at the crossroads where Archway Road runs northward and becomes the Al. There he turned right and started looking for somewhere to park Goblander. This would not have been possible in Archway Road itself. Adam had not been there since he left school some thirteen months before but the little antique and secondhand and junk shops were here as he remembered them and he even saw in a window a sign inviting customers to bring their silver to sell.

  He had turned left into Church Road. Any of those side roads would have done, he had thought since, but he had had to choose Church Road and that in spite of what Zosie said.

  “That’s a police station on the corner. You’re not going to leave it outside a police station!”

  “Why not? We’re not doing anything illegal.”

  God help him… .

  “Drive a bit farther up,” she said.

  So he had taken Goblander to the other side of the junction with Talbot Road. He didn’t want Zosie coming with him. Ideally, he would have liked her to sit in the van and wait for him. At that time he had the beginnings of an awareness that what he would really like would be to keep her utterly to himself, shut her away for his exclusive society, an Albertine to his Marcel.

  She looked up at him, large clear golden eyes, childlike and innocent.

  “Do you know what? That’s View Road over there. On the other side of what’s-it-called, North Hill.” She had been studying Rufus’s street atlas. “That’s where Vivien’s going to be a nanny. We took her there, Woof-woof and me.”

  “Oh, yes?” he said, not interested.

  That was it, he hadn’t been interested. He was glad Vivien was going, he would be glad to see the back of her and Shiva, but where she was going he didn’t care about.

  “I’ll be about half an hour,” he said. “Maybe a bit more. Say three-quarters of an hour.”

  She nodded, back at her map reading. He got out of Goblander, carrying the wineshop box with the liqueur glasses in it and the mask jug and the stuffing spoons. That was when he heard the first of the thunder, a long way off, like muffled drums.

  “You never told me,” Lili said to Shiva, “how they came to take the baby. But I suppose that’s something you don’t really know.”

  It was not she who had started on the subject but he. Traffic was diverted down Fifth Avenue away from Forest Road and he stood watching the streams of it, comforted because his street was a safe place and off the beaten, broken, dangerous track. All the glass down here was intact and last night it had been peaceful and even the exodus from The Boxer orderly. And then, abruptly, not knowing why really, he had turned away and come to Lili in her pink sari and Marks and Spencer cardigan, and said he wanted to talk about that time, about Ecalpemos.

  He shook his head. “I know all right. My goodness, I know. But I didn’t at first, not on the first day.

  “You see, when they came home we thought the baby was Zosie’s baby. It sounds a bit crazy, you’ll say, but we knew Zosie had had a baby and we knew she wished she’d kept it and when they came back with a baby, we just took it for granted it was hers. That is, Vivien and I did. Rufus wasn’t there. He was with that woman who was deceiving her soldier husband. A fine thing that, wasn’t it? Rufus was a bad person, through and through, I don’t think he had a redeeming feature.”

  “Never mind Rufus, Shiva. You mean they just walked in with this baby and you accepted it? Just like that?”

  “You have to understand that Zosie was always mysterious. There were all sorts of things we didn’t know about her and new things were always coming out. When they came home, Vivien and I had finished our evening meal and I was out on the terrace reading and she was doing something to her herb garden. She’d cleared a patch and planted this herb garden and she had to water it every night or it would have died. We heard the van come, or I did, and then a bit later I heard a baby crying. Vivien came around the house with her watering can and said what was that. I said it sounded like a baby. Then Zosie appeared. Was there any milk? She wanted it for the baby. She had a feeding bottle in her hand and she was—well, she was absolutely alight with happiness and excitement. That’s why we thought, I’m sure we both thought, that it was her baby.”

  “Did she go to London deliberately to kidnap it?”

  “It wasn’t like that,” Shiva said. “It was more an accident, a chance happening. It was like this—or that’s what they told me. It was about three-thirty when they got up there and Adam parked the van down a turn off the top of Archway Road. The road where he parked was a sort of continuation of the road where Vivien was going to work, but I think that was just coincidence. I went there once, months afterward, it had a sort of fascination for me; dreadful though it all was, I wanted to see for myself. And when I got there I could see it wasn’t all that much of a coincidence. If you wanted to go shopping in Archway Road, that’s where you would park, down one of those side streets up there, that would really be the only place.”

  “So Adam left her in the van. Why didn’t she go with him?”

  “He didn’t want her going in those shops. You can understand why not. He thought she’d take things. ‘Unconsidered trifles’ he called them. He thought she wouldn’t be able to resist ‘nicking’ things—his word. That business in Sudbury was in his mind, you see. Anyway, he took his box of stuff and went off to look for the shop that had the notice in its window about high prices paid for silver. He left Zosie sitting in the van. She said she might walk around a bit. It was too hot to stay in there.

  “She was mad, you know. She had a sort of postnatal insanity. Her thought processes didn’t work like other people’s, she wasn’t rational.”

  “You mean you think most people are rational, Shiva?” He paused, remembering the night before, the noise of it, the shattering of glass that seemed to go on for hours, the shrieks and animal roars that punctuated the continuous cacophony of the sounds of destruction. The loud but dull and meaningless crunch, a reverberating noise of dissolution, that was a car being overturned. Brakes screaming, the pounding of running feet, far off a dull explosion. No, men were not rational.

  “They have some idea of reality,” he said, though doubtfully. “Some notion. Zosie thought of a
baby as a doll she could have to comfort her. But no, that’s not quite it. It was more as though she thought that what she had done was no worse—no different really—from, say, a kid stealing a doll from another kid. And yet it wasn’t as if she didn’t look after the baby. She loved the baby.”

  “Little girls love dolls but they get bored and then they stick them on a shelf.”

  “She didn’t do that. She didn’t neglect the baby. Of course she didn’t really get the chance.”

  “But how did she come to take it in the first place?”

  “Her,” said Shiva. “It was a girl. She went for a walk, you see. She got out to stretch her legs and walked over to the house where Vivien was going to work. She had been there before. I don’t think she had any idea then of stealing Mr. Tatian’s baby, but she knew there was a baby there. The house looked as if there was no one at home. Remember, it was so extremely hot, but all the windows were closed nevertheless. She walked around to the edge of Highgate golf course and then she came back. She hadn’t a watch, you know, but she calculated it was more than half an hour since Adam had gone.

  “This time there were windows open upstairs in Mr. Tatian’s house and she saw a woman come out with one of those things you transport babies in, what do you call them?”

  “A portable crib?”

  “That’s right, a portable crib. Zosie said she didn’t look at her, she didn’t see her, and she can’t have. She put the portable crib on the backseat of the car and she left the car door open, because it was so hot presumably. Anyway, she went back into the house, in by the front door, which she didn’t close behind her. It was as if she’d forgotten something, Zosie said, or gone back to check on something.