A Fatal Inversion

by Ruth Rendell

  “Zosie said she couldn’t help herself. She didn’t think of what she was doing, not of the dangers anyway. She had to have that baby and she took her. It was the little boy in the department store all over again, only this time Rufus wasn’t there to stop her. There was no one to stop her. She put her hand into the car and pulled out the portable crib and walked off down the street with it. The baby was asleep and she went on sleeping. She was a remarkably quiet, sleepy sort of baby, I suppose, but I don’t know anything about babies.” Shiva looked up at Lili and quickly away again. “The traffic was at a standstill at the lights at North Hill, she said. She went over and down Church Road. She didn’t meet anyone. I suppose the drivers of the cars that were stopped must have seen her, but if anyone saw a girl in a blue checked skirt holding a portable crib they didn’t come forward. She put the crib on the backseat of the van and sat in the passenger seat in the front and in a matter of seconds Adam came back.

  “He got into the driver’s seat. He said to her, ‘That was a bloody waste of effort’ and he started up the car, turned into North Hill and headed for Finchley and the North Circular Road. Zosie looked to her left and down View Road. The car was still outside with its rear door open and she saw the woman coming back down the path.”

  “You mean Adam didn’t know? He didn’t know the baby was there?”

  “He didn’t know until they were right out Enfield way. They were parked at some lights and the baby woke up and started to cry.”

  16

  THE ROAD SIGN POINTING to the garrison recalled to Rufus that girlfriend he had had for a few days or a couple of weeks or whatever it was and whose name was tantalizingly present to him in two alternative forms. Had she been Janet or Janice? It was rather like the way Adam couldn’t remember whether the antiques man had been Evans or Owens. He had turned out to be Evan, so perhaps Rufus’s girlfriend had been Janine or Jeannette even.

  He would never remember. She had had dyed red hair and been rather thinner than he liked a woman to be. He was sure he had never given her his address at Nunes and he had had no phone number for her to wheedle out of him. Certainly he had never brought her back to Ecalpemos. In any case, she would be the least likely person to go to the police with her story of ten years in the past, especially if she were still married to the soldier, perhaps had children by him.

  He associated her somehow with the taking of a taxi home. And with the only time he had ever gone on foot into the village of Nunes, there to meet her in the Fir Tree and for some reason or other read the name over the public bar doorway of the landlord, now certainly changed. But why should he have walked when he had Goblander?

  Janet or Janice (Janine or Jeannette) had come in her own car, or her husband’s, to that last rendezvous they were ever to have, and he had walked there, not greatly enjoying this very nonmacho activity but even then, he remembered, being unwilling to let her know precisely where he lived. Very likely he had been apprehensive of her confessing to her husband in a moment of frankness or guilt and the soldier hunting him down.

  And, of course, yes, that was it—he had not gone to this date in Goblander because Adam and Zosie had gone to London in Goblander. That was the evening they had brought the baby home. He had not been there, he had not seen the homecoming, for he had been with Janet or Janice first of all in the Fir Tree and later in some other pub or restaurant, where they had quarreled nastily over the meal because Rufus had nothing but the tenner which remained of the pawnbroker’s money and he had made it plain he expected her to fork out for the rest of the evening’s drink.

  But they patched things up and made all well again in her double bed with the photograph of the soldier turned face downward on the bedside cabinet. And said good-bye next morning with no regrets, Rufus only hoping there was more relief on his part than on hers. She hadn’t offered to drive him back to Nunes though. In fact she had gone so far as to say she couldn’t afford the petrol, it being something like a twenty-four-mile trip there and back. That was why he took a taxi, of course it was, and when he got back to Ecalpemos he had had to keep the driver waiting with his meter running while he went inside and got the money for the fare off Adam.

  Only he hadn’t gone inside or only just, for Adam had either been in the hall or on the porch. He had started moaning about how badly he had done trying to sell that stuff down on Archway Road. He had gotten less than a hundred quid for the stuffing spoons and the mask jug put together. No one wanted spoons like that, he had been told. What use were they nowadays? The liqueur glasses he hadn’t even been able to sell. Rufus got the four pounds for the taxi out of him with difficulty, but he got it.

  Would the taxi man remember? He had been young, no older than Rufus himself. It had been a mistake to let him drive down the drift, for some reason he had felt that at the time, but there had been no help for it. He would hardly have consented to wait at the top for his money.

  Of course he would have had dozens of fares that week, many of them in rural places too. There would be nothing specially memorable about driving down the winding lane through the wood to Ecalpemos. Unless he had heard the child cry …

  No, that was impossible. Rufus himself had not heard it until the departing taxi was almost lost to sight. And young he might have been and even observant, but he would not be able to identify Rufus after ten years or Adam, come to that, who had stood there holding out the money and looking in the expression current at the time “spaced out.” Rufus had even thought he might have been smoking dope, only he couldn’t have been because they hadn’t been able to afford any more.

  “Are you okay?” he had said as the taxi went off up through the hedge tunnel. “Or is it merely a king-size hangover?” (How we judge others by ourselves.)

  Adam didn’t answer. They walked down to the front door which stood open. It was then, for the first time, he heard the baby’s crying. It greeted them plaintively, as unlikely a sound in that house at that time as a lion’s roar. Or perhaps not, perhaps not …

  “Christ,” said Adam.

  “I take it that this means Zosie has brought her child here.”

  “You said that in a glacial voice,” said Adam. “That’s what novelists would call it, ‘glacial.’”

  “Only very bad novelists.” The crying stopped. “I suppose one will have children of one’s own one day and be obliged to put up with that sort of thing, but I do rather draw the line at now. However, it’s your house.”

  Adam didn’t say anything and then he said, “Later on I’d like to explain about that. Well, I wouldn’t like to but I’ll have to.”

  Stiff and haughty Rufus had been. “Not on my account.”

  “How did you know Zosie had had a baby, anyway?”

  “How do you think?” said Rufus. “It’s my business to know things like that or it soon will be.”

  It must have been the middle of the afternoon before he saw the baby. Adam, very nervous and jumpy, had been telling him about his attempts at selling the spoons, when Zosie came out onto the terrace with a swathed bundle in her arms. Zosie had been at Ecalpemos nearly two months and the baby had presumably been born about a month before she came. That was how he had reasoned that afternoon. Not much of its face showed between the folds of Vivien’s dark red shawl in which it was wrapped but enough to tell him it was very young, very tiny, three months old or so. Vivien followed Zosie, carrying a feeding bottle and one of Lilian Verne-Smith’s embroidered towels, with Shiva bringing up the rear, looking mystified, out of his depth. Quite a retinue. Of course they all (except Adam) thought the baby was Zosie’s. What else could they have supposed? And what amnesia, or even aphasia, was Adam subject to that he did not realize what Vivien’s innocent approval implied? But perhaps that did not especially matter, for a kidnapped child is a kidnapped child.

  For the time being, Adam thought he was done with the police. Or the police were done with him. He had answered their questions and made that statement. Of course he could imagine they might com
e to his house again, this time to arrest him, that idea was with him always, constantly haunting him, but never imagined he might receive a phone call from them.

  He was at home and the evening paper which he had bought but not read lay on the arm of the chair beside him. He did not feel himself equal to looking through it, to searching for the small item of news which might, in plain print, reveal the identity of the adult bones found in the grave. Some extra sense of fingerspitzengefühl told him it would be there and while he knew that if it were not there, that he had another twelve or even twenty-four hours to wait for it, he would feel relief, he still could not bring himself to look. His parents-in-law were coming, he could not remember for what reason Anne had invited them, but he resisted the notion of having more to conceal, more company from whom to conceal it, a greater load to bear and still to present a casual, relaxed appearance.

  When the phone rang he was alone in the room, for Anne was preparing Abigail for bed and had not yet brought her down to him. He thought it was Rufus phoning, he was convinced it must be. Rufus was phoning to tell him he had spoken to the police and confirmed the details of the Greek trip and they had seemed completely satisfied, had perhaps even told him it was unlikely he would hear any more from them …?

  He picked up the receiver. It was the policeman called Winder. Adam went cold, his throat contracting.

  “Oh, Mr. Verne-Smith, just a few small further inquiries. I won’t keep you.”

  His voice sounded as if he had a bad cold. “That’s all right,” he said while thinking what a stupid and meaningless rejoinder this was.

  “I wonder if you can remember. It’s a long time ago.”

  “What?” said Adam.

  “While you were living at Wyvis Hall in the summer of 1976 …”

  “I told you I never lived there,” Adam said. “I stayed there. I stayed there for a week.”

  “Well, live, stay, it’s all a manner of speaking. What I wanted to ask you was: Can you recall ever being called on by some pest control people called Vermstroy?”

  This was it then. The coypu man had remembered. He had remembered the encounter at the back door and the sight of Rufus on the terrace and Mary Gage’s pursuit of his van and her shouted remonstrances.

  “No,” he said, “no, I don’t remember.”

  Holding his breath, he waited for Winder to tell him they now had proof he had not been there alone, that another man had been there and a girl, when he had assured them no girl was ever there. What could he do but deny it? He would always deny it, he would never admit.

  And Winder persisted, though not yet taking the tack Adam expected.

  “A biggish dark man with a moustache? You’ve no recollection? We understand he used to destroy vermin for your—grandfather, was it? Uncle?”

  “My great-uncle.”

  “Oh, yes. Your great-uncle. Rats and moles, too, I believe. Oh, and those peculiar things—what are they called?”

  Adam knew he wanted him to tell him but he wouldn’t be caught like that.

  “Nevermind. It doesn’t matter. Well, Mr. Verne-Smith, if you can’t help us, you can’t, and that’s all it amounts to. You’ll be glad to hear that in any case our inquiries are almost complete. Sorry to have held you up. Good night.”

  Adam sat holding the receiver in his hand, listening to the dial tone that droned from it. After a moment or two he put it back.

  They must be thinking the girl the coypu man had seen was Vivien. He imagined the coypu man voluntarily going to them with his information.

  “He asked me if it was an acro-something and I said, no, it’s a rat, isn’t it? And there was this fellow lying asleep out on a sort of terrace along the back and a girl that came chasing after the van. End of June, July, somewhere around then …”

  Perhaps he had come at other times, later times. Who knew? And there had been the bill, paid to an Ipswich address. Up into the wood he had gone and there, no doubt, had come upon the animal cemetery which he could testify had at that time been untouched, undisturbed. Possibly, too, he had returned in September and seen the newly dug grave, the squares of turf replaced. Flittermus, ottermus, myopotamus … How young I was, thought Adam, how carefree, how frivolous, to invent these artless rhymes. Was I the same person?

  Adam knew he should phone Rufus and tell him what had happened but he lacked the will and the vigor to do this. It had been a shock, that phone call from Winder, and it had debilitated him, a shock almost as great as what he had felt when his father came to meet him at Heathrow or as on that evening when he and Zosie were driving back to Suffolk from Highgate.

  He allowed the memory of it to flow back into his mind. The heat of the evening first, the unbreathable thick air, his hands slippery on the wheel, the droplets of sweat gleaming on Zosie’s forehead and upper lip, sweat gumming his body and his clothes to the car seat. He thought of it, feeling everything that had happened before, remembering, avoiding for a moment the recollection of that shocking sound that had broken into tranquility and disrupted a world.

  It nearly made him bang into the back of the car in front of them. The cry was a sudden wail with no murmur or whisper to herald it. The van was in low gear, the clutch half out, and the shock made him let the clutch in and jam his foot on the accelerator. It was lucky for them the amber light had come on with the red and the man in the car in front was one of those quick ones at a getaway.

  Goblander shot forward. He stamped on the brake and she bounced out of her seat, nearly hitting her head on the windshield.

  “For Christ’s sake,” he said.

  “Please don’t be angry. You mustn’t be angry.”

  He looked into the back and saw the crib, no head or face, but a tiny hand upraised. He could see it now, that starfish hand. The truth didn’t occur to him then, what she had done didn’t occur to him. As all the others were later on to believe, he believed it must be Zosie’s own child. In his case, of course, the delusion was brief. But momentarily, as he pulled in to the side of the road and stopped the van, he had some sort of idea that during the bare forty minutes he was away Zosie had somehow repossessed herself of her own baby.

  She gave him her fearful look, her mouse look, eyes bright and round and desperate, darting to him and darting away. Her lips were pursed into a little mouse mouth. She got down from the van as if she were running away from him, as if she were going to run and scream for help. But all she did was open the doors at the back and pull the portable crib out. She came back with the baby in her arms. It looked very small, too small to be crying so loudly.

  Zosie spoke confident words but spoke them nervously. “What a bit of luck that this was in the crib with her.” She was holding a feeding bottle half full of milk. “Otherwise we might have had to go into a shop and buy one. I expect I can manage all the rest of the stuff we’ll have to have.”

  Adam, closing his eyes, thought this must be what people mean when they said they felt faint.

  “What do you mean luck?” he said. “What do you mean, in the cot with her?”

  “I took the cot as well. When I took her, I took her cot too. She was in it. In the back of Mr. Tatian’s car.”

  That told him everything. Or he thought it did. “Zosie, we have to take it back. We have to turn around and take it back where you found it.”

  “‘Her.’ She’s a girl. Her name’s Nicola. Vivien said she was called Nicola.”

  “Okay, now we turn around and take her back where you found her.”

  Zosie started crying. She and the baby sat in the front seat and cried noisily, Zosie’s tears falling on to the baby’s face. Adam couldn’t bear to see her cry. It killed him. Oh, God, and he had left her behind in the van because he was afraid of her stealing things in shops. How much better would that have been than the theft she had actually indulged in!

  “We must take it—her—back. Her parents’ll be doing their nuts. You can imagine. Zosie, please don’t cry. Please don’t, I can’t bear it. Zosie, you can hav
e a baby of your own. You and I, we’ll have a baby.”

  It embarrassed him now to remember it, his pleadings, his promises. He had come close to tears himself. They were children themselves, their combined ages no more than thirty-six, and life in its most awful aspects had attacked them and they could not fight it off. He had felt as if it tore him apart. He loved her, he longed for her happiness, yet he was almost hysterical with fear.

  “I won’t give her up,” Zosie screamed at him. “If you turn around, I’ll throw myself out of the van. I’ll jump out and throw myself under a truck.”

  “Zosie …”

  “I want her, I love her. I took her and I won’t give her up.” She was nearly ugly in the ferocity of her expression, her snarling mother-tiger face. “I want her to love me, don’t you see? If I look after her, she’ll have to love me, I’ll be first with her. Don’t you know what it means to want to be first with someone?”

  “I love you,” he said, levels in his mind falling away, down, down to a bottomless pit. “You’re first with me.” His voice strangled, he croaked the words out. “I’ll love you forever, I’ll never change, I promise, Zosie, but please, please, for God’s sake …”

  How had it happened that he had given in, had fallen in with what she wanted, and had driven on? He no longer knew, he was not the boy he had been then. Since then a hardness, a tired indifference, had encrusted his character. Perhaps it was not her pleadings that had won him but fear of returning, of the reception awaiting anyone who came back with their story—with what story? So he had started the van and gone on, driving slowly on the inside lane because his hands were shaking. Zosie lay back, spent, and the baby lay in her lap, on the skirt that was a blue checked curtain, sucking at the bottle nipple, later relinquishing it and falling asleep. Zosie’s face was beautiful and curiously matured in its maternal placidity, her tears dried on her cheeks in little drifts of salt.