by Ruth Rendell
It was true what Lili had said. He had been making a bid for Adam’s attention. In all the time he had been at Ecalpemos he had never felt more left out than in that hour or so before Adam came into the kitchen with the portable crib. The facts about the snatching of the baby he had had to get secondhand from Vivien or pick up himself from the conversation. No one had explained anything to him, still less consulted him. He had gotten hold of the paper Adam and Zosie brought back from Sudbury and sat at the table reading it, making himself conversant with the facts. And Adam had come in and asked where Rufus was. Or had he asked that? Had he spoken at all? Adam was always going around asking where Rufus was, so it might be that he was remembering wrongly and Adam had said nothing, had not even glanced at him as he passed through the kitchen on his way to the back door with the baby in the portable crib.
“It had started to rain,” he had said to Lili, “and Vivien had gone out onto the terrace to bring the quilts in. The terrace had been like a great bed covered with quilts from end to end. She was out there and Rufus was in the study listening to the radio and drinking gin.”
“What did Adam say?”
“When I suggested the ransom? First he said we couldn’t do it and then he said he didn’t know and then how would we do it. He put the crib on the floor and sat down at the table. I thought they’d trace a phone call and anyway we didn’t have the number and we couldn’t very well ask directory inquiries for it. So I said send a letter, cut words out of this newspaper and stick them on paper. Adam said we mustn’t ask very much. I mean not some huge sum. He said we should ask ten thousand pounds because any ordinary middle-class people could raise ten thousand pounds if they had to.”
“I don’t suppose we’re middle-class then, are we?” said Lili.
“Adam took the kiddy upstairs again. We cut the newspaper up, sitting in our bedroom, Vivien’s and mine. The Deathbed Room, Adam called it, because of this picture on the wall of a dead child and its parents crying. When we’d done the ransom note, Adam took the picture down and said he was going to take it out of the frame and bum it. But he didn’t. Not then, not till later on.
“We’d decided to post the note in London but we couldn’t do that till the next day. Adam said he’d get Rufus to post it since Rufus was going back to London anyway, and he was sure Rufus would do it, it was the kind of thing that would tickle him. I’m only quoting, Lili, that was what he said. But he couldn’t tell him then because Rufus had gone out, he’d gone off to the pub in Goblander on his own.
“Vivien was standing in front of the stove drying herself. Her dress was wet but the other one, the blue, that was wet too, still out on the line. Adam told her he was going to take the baby back that night.
“What happened after that was rather strange. Vivien didn’t seem to know Rufus had gone out. She went up to have a bath and when she came down I was there alone—as usual—and Adam and Zosie were off together somewhere, in their room maybe. I didn’t exactly tell Vivien that Adam and Rufus had gone out together to take the baby back, but I let her think it. She asked me if that’s where they were, you see, and I said that’s what I understood, though the ransom note was in my pocket all the time and the kiddy was upstairs. I don’t know what I thought would happen when the baby cried, but I didn’t think of it. You don’t when you’re not used to babies.”
“I suppose not,” said Lili.
“Vivien sat sorting out her flower remedies and she went to bed early. We all did—except Rufus. You see, we’d lived outside in the sun and warmth all the time we’d been there and suddenly there was no sun and no warmth anymore. We didn’t know what to do with ourselves. The baby didn’t cry, or if it did we didn’t hear it. Zosie came down to the kitchen for some milk just as I was thinking of going to bed. She was just like a young mother, she was changed, happy and practical and looking tired. I lay awake for a long time and so did Vivien. We talked and she kept saying how relieved she was they’d taken the kiddy back. She wanted to know where they had taken her, what plans they had made. They would be sure to have taken her somewhere safe, wouldn’t they? Did I think they would have thought of phoning the parents to let them know? All that sort of thing. She went on and on and then, somewhere around midnight or later, we heard Goblander come back.
“Rufus used to go to pubs that didn’t keep to licensing hours, they’d stay open till one or two sometimes, it was all a fiddle, you know, pretending they were the landlord’s private guests. Rufus didn’t care about it being illegal. Vivien thought Adam was with him, she thought they’d come back from London, and I didn’t contradict her. I wanted to go to sleep and I thought it would all sort itself out in the morning.”
“Well, it did,” said Lili. “And now you blame yourself because if you hadn’t suggested asking for a ransom, they really would have taken the baby to London and been coming back.”
“Yes.”
“I think you’re right to blame yourself,” said Lili.
He had thought she would adjust to it and hold him in her arms but she had not. And later on she had said she did not think she would come to bed but he should go, she wasn’t tired, she would sit up for a while. It had been a very quiet night, humanity and the elements equally silent. Shiva lay in bed in that silence remembering noise, remembering the sounds of Rufus’s return, his running feet slapping on the wet gravel, the front door slamming behind him as he came into the house. Vivien had turned over and sighed and murmured, “Good night, Shiva,” and slept immediately, her breathing gentle and regular. All their nights except one cool one had been warm, moonlit or starry, blue velvet nights, the curtains flung back, the windows open. That night was cold and from time to time rain slapped against the glass… .
A rain so fine that it hung rather than fell, misted Fifth Avenue. Shiva walked along the deserted street. At the Forest Road end all the windows were boarded up after the riots of two nights before, giving the street a strange look as if it were scheduled for demolition. No one spoke to him, no one catcalled him as sometimes happened. But as he passed The Boxer and was crossing the street a stone no larger than a piece of gravel struck him on the cheek. It struck him with a sharp, painful sting and Shiva put up his hand to feel the place.
Another stone, uncannily describing the arc of the first, stung the back of his raised hand. Shiva wheeled around in the misty dark. A door slammed somewhere. The street was empty but he sensed, or imagined, many watching eyes. At least it had happened to him and not to Lili. He stopped outside his own house and stared at the fence.
The graffiti, done with aerosol paint, read: Go Home to Pakistan. Shiva stretched his mouth into a bitter smile. He was remembering forbears of his, his grandfather and his father’s uncles, who had hated the name of Pakistan more than any Walthamstow Jamaican or Irishman could conceive of. Tomorrow he would try to clean that off or maybe spray over it; he would have to think about that. What he disliked was the knowledge it would be there overnight, it marked his house, it located him and Lili as enemy-victims or potential victims.
He went in, closing the door quietly behind him. A letter, waiting to be posted, addressed to his mother-in-law in Salzburg, lay on the shelf where the phone was, where Lili had laid down her gloves. He thought, when women leave their husbands, they go home to their mothers, they write and ask their mothers if they can come home to them. It was nonsense he was thinking, he told himself as he went through the little house to find her.
Adam had not told Rufus about the ransom note that night. This was because he had a half-formed idea that he might be able to get Rufus to post the letter without telling him what it was. Rufus had shown no interest in the parentage of Catherine, had not even glanced at the newspaper as far as Adam knew, and now the paper was not available for him to look at, for after Adam and Shiva had cut the words out they had stuffed the remains of it into the kitchen stove.
Rufus would wonder, though, why Adam had printed the name and address on the envelope and used a disguised, back-sloping pr
inting at that. It was no good hoping Rufus would not bother to look at the envelope. He would be bound to because he was going to have to buy a stamp for it. Neither Shiva nor Adam had any stamps. Adam thought Rufus might not want to be involved, even remotely, in what would be, after all, a criminal act. When he thought of it like that, Adam himself felt quite sick and at the same time he felt it was all unreal and he could not truly be involved in it, not he. On the other hand, they were going to have to hand the baby back sometime, and however they did it, at some risk to themselves, so why not get paid for that risk?
For a long time that night Adam had lain sleepless, listening to the rain, the thunder that grumbled softly like a beast stirring in its sleep, the light breathing of the baby and the uneven clicking in her throat. It was cooler than it had been at any time since they came to Ecalpemos, so they had a couple of those quilts over them as well as the sheet, and for the first time Adam was able to hug Zosie in her sleep, to hold her in his arms and rest his head against her fragile shoulder. It was also the last time, and if he had known that, he would have luxuriated in it more, given himself totally to the joy of it, instead of worrying about Rufus and stamps and printing on an envelope.
Now, ten years afterward, he could not remember what the ransom note had said. It must surely have told those Ryemarks how to contact him or have said how he would contact them. Instructions must have been contained in it, a location proposed for where the money should be taken, a prohibition on calling the police, and so on. But all he could now recall of it was the sum named, the ten thousand pounds.
He and Zosie could have lived on that for two years, he had believed, and naïve as he was, green as he was, he had still, somehow known that this would suffice him, that if he could have her at Ecalpemos for two years, it was the best he could hope for or ask, and then he would return to the real world, sell the house, go back to college. What he had felt was impossible would have been to return home when the others returned, give up the house, become a student again, for somehow he knew that his relationship with Zosie, his love for her, would not survive out there in the harsh light but only here in the dream country of Ecalpemos.
He held Zosie, her back curled against his chest, as if lying down she were seated in his lap, and he held her right hand in his right hand, feeling the gold ring on her little finger. They would be alone here together, everyone else gone and perhaps the baby gone too. They could have a baby of their own if Zosie wanted one—why not? Zosie might be pregnant with his baby already for all he knew. He had done nothing to stop it.
Downstairs the front door slammed. That was Rufus coming in. He heard Rufus mount the stairs and go to the Centaur Room and after a while he was aware that the rain had stopped. The only sound was a steady drip-drip-drip from the guttering on the corner of the house and that, too, slackened, the gaps between the drips growing longer, finally ceasing altogether. A profound silence spread over land and sky, the air washed clean and sharply fragrant, the wind fallen. It was black-dark but the open window showed up dimly as a gray, very faintly luminous rectangle. His legs felt stiff and his left arm ached, but if he turned over he would have to relinquish his hold on Zosie and he could by no means be sure that she, too, would turn and put her arms around him. Was that a test of love? If in your sleep you instinctively turn to embrace the lover, was that a test? He had not come up with an answer but had turned over just the same, though Zosie, he recalled, had not turned with him to hug him in her arms.
For all that, he had slept quite quickly once he was on his right side. The Romans—or was it the Greeks—made their slaves sleep on the right side so as to rest the heart. There was something soothing and reassuring about the black silence that was not broken by any sound from the baby sleeping in the drawer.
An old Morris Minor van stopped at the lights ahead of Rufus. He drew the Mercedes up behind it. The van was the same dark green as Goblander had been, the same age, too, judging by the license plate, so therefore very old by now. Holding up well though, Rufus thought; it had probably been carefully looked after while Goblander would long ago have perished. Things were always going wrong with it even in those days.
Because he expected it to be rickety and uncomfortable—and because, let’s face it, he was very drunk—he hadn’t noticed anything particularly amiss when he came home alone from the pub. It had seemed a bit bumpy coming down the drift but it was always pretty bumpy. He woke up next morning about ten with a dry mouth and banging head, though nothing like the hangover he would have had today after the amount he had drunk. He got dressed and carried out a bundle of his stuff to put in the back of Goblander, intending to leave around lunchtime. By then, he remembered, he’d been looking forward to getting back to London, a better place to be when the weather was gray and wet. The flat tire was a nuisance but no worse than that. By a piece of luck, when he had had that big repair job done back in June, he had replaced the spare tire with a new one. He was standing there, making up his mind to start changing that wheel, when Shiva appeared carrying an envelope.
He came out of the front door holding up an umbrella and he was very formally dressed for any inhabitant of Ecalpemos in gray flannel trousers and gray and white striped shirt and black leather jacket.
“The rain it raineth every day,” Shiva said in a way that sounded a bit like Adam.
The umbrella had a gold band around the handle and was probably Hilbert’s as was the gray Pringle sweater Rufus had found in a drawer and pulled on over his T-shirt. He took the envelope, read the printing.
“What’s this?”
The rain had started to come down quite heavily and Shiva held the umbrella over Rufus. “Adam wants you to post it for him when you get to London.”
“Does he now? What is it, some sort of ransom note?”
Now, that had been guesswork on Rufus’s part and even as he said it he did not really believe the envelope could actually contain a demand for money. He could not believe this of Adam. His disbelief was founded not on moral grounds but on simple incredulity that anyone he knew as well as he knew Adam would do anything so foolhardy. He was not even sure that he believed the account he had been given of the stealing of the baby. There was more to it than he had been told, or less to it. A very strong instinct for self-preservation was sending him home that day to a safer environment, but at the same time he had never accepted that he or any of them were in very great danger. Games were being played, that was all, and games of which he was largely ignorant and wished to remain so. If he had been aware of the whole truth, he would not have slept the previous night, but he had in fact slept soundly. If he had known what had actually happened and what Adam and Shiva were up to, he would not have waited till the morning but have gone the night before. Or tried to.
“You’ve a flat tire,” Shiva said.
“Yes, I know.”
“I will give you a hand.”
“Not dressed like that you won’t,” said Rufus. “Who are Mr. and Mrs. Ryemark and why has someone printed this address?”
So Shiva explained. He was careful to explain that the ransom idea had been his own, and he seemed proud of it. Rufus said:
“Come back into the house.”
They went into the drawing room because Vivien was in the kitchen. She had the radio on and a burst of music and then a man’s voice were just audible.
“What’s in this letter?”
“Adam is asking for ten thousand pounds. The mother is to bring it to Liverpool Street Station, one hundred yards along platform twelve. One hour later she’ll find the baby in the station mothers’ room.”
“I don’t believe it!”
“No one will be hurt, Rufus. Adam won’t hurt the baby if they don’t pay. And when they pay, why is it worse than ordinary stealing? I don’t see why it’s different from Zosie stealing that silver bracelet or that camera. Except there’s more money involved.”
“I’ll have nothing to do with it,” said Rufus. “And if you take my advice,
you won’t either. What are you thinking of? You want to do medicine as a profession, don’t you, yet you’d get yourself into this shit?”
“I’m not going to take any of the money, Rufus.”
“For Christ’s sake, there won’t be any money. There’ll be a policewoman with a suitcase full of paper and another one to go and get the baby.”
“If that’s what you think, Rufus, you’d better tell Adam. But I can tell you he’s sold on the idea.”
“I shan’t tell him anything,” Rufus said. “I shall change the tire on my car and get myself out of it.”
But he had got no farther than the front door when Adam came down, wild-eyed, his face working, white as a sheet, and from upstairs came a long, keening wail.
SIDS, Rufus very well knew, ranks after congenital abnormality as the most usual cause of death in very young babies. Generally it affects infants from two weeks to one year old, but its peak incidence is between two and four months. All classes are affected by it, though there is a statistical relationship to poor home conditions and a degree of neglect or mere inattention. About 1200 babies in Britain die of SIDS every year.
This much he had known then while he was still a student but he had never seen a case. Catherine Ryemark was the first and because of her, when he saw another as a house officer in a hospital in the East End of London two years afterward, he was able to diagnose at once. But his hand had trembled and his mouth gone dry.
That day, that first time, he had gone up the stairs two at a time and run into the Pincushion Room and snatched the child out of the cradle Zosie had made for her in a drawer. Zosie was sitting naked on the bed rocking from side to side, an unearthly unhuman sound issuing from her closed lips, a thin, catlike wail. The baby felt cool but not cold, her face waxen but not blue, her blue eyes clear and staring but empty of their vital force. Rufus tipped her upside down and began compressing her chest with his thumb. He gave her kisses of life, his mouth over her cold, pearly lips.