A Fatal Inversion (26 page)

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.”

Vivien said, “And I was thinking what short lives those poor little dead ones had.”

“They were quite long-lived really, weren’t they? Old Blaze lived to be one hundred and five in dog years.”

Zosie’s eyes were swollen as if she had been crying, Shiva had already noticed, and she looked as if she might begin crying again. She spoke in the childlike, ingenuous voice she reverted to when distressed.

“Do you think anyone else will ever be buried there?”

“If by ‘anyone’ you mean any more animals, I shouldn’t think so. I can’t imagine I’d ever keep a pet.”

“Oh, Adam, wouldn’t you? You don’t mean you wouldn’t let anyone else? Couldn’t I have a dog if I wanted one or a kitten?”

Adam put his arm around her but he didn’t give her any answer. Zosie was quite possibly mentally retarded, Shiva thought as they all walked back to the house. He had never known anyone to behave the way she did. Her conduct in coming to Ecalpemos as Rufus’s girlfriend—he had gradually gathered all this—and then removing herself to Adam’s bed profoundly shocked him. A kind of precociously vicious child-whore was how he thought of her. He had never really spoken to her and had they ever found themselves alone together he would not have known what to say.

“She had had a baby,” he said to Lili. “This child had had a baby. It was born before she had her seventeenth birthday.”

“That was very sad, Shiva.” Lili was faintly reproving.

“Well, it was not sad for the baby. The baby was adopted. My goodness, it must be ten now. More than ten. She was a tremendous liar, you know. One day she told Vivien her stepfather was the baby’s father and another time it was a boy at her school or a teacher at her school. Who knows what the truth was? She opened her heart to Vivien. Vivien was like a mother to her and Adam.”

“Do people open their hearts to their mothers? I never do to mine.”

“That was a manner of speaking, Lili. Anyway, she didn’t really open her heart if half of what she said was lies, did she? But it was clear she left school because she was going to have a baby and after it was born she went to live in this place where young girls who were not married lived with their babies until they were adopted. She didn’t go back to live with her mother, though of course she meant to later. She thought she
had
to later because there was no one else till Rufus found her by the roadside.”

“She was sick in her mind,” said Lili. “You always said she was sick in her mind.”

“Some women get sick that way after they’ve had a baby, don’t they?”

Lili looked away. “There’s something called post-partum depression.”

“It wasn’t depression. Zosie wasn’t depressed. She was unhappy, mad with unhappiness. She was broken-hearted. Rufus knew. He was halfway to being a doctor. He should have done something, got her to a doctor. But they encouraged her, Rufus and Adam, they encouraged her to steal. It amused them. It was love she was stealing, a psychiatrist would say.”

With a shrug Lili said, “She had her parents—well, she had her mother. Didn’t she love her?”

“Zosie told Vivien her mother was embarrassed when she got pregnant. Not angry or upset, mark you, but embarrassed. She was afraid of what the people she knew would say.”

“Why didn’t Zosie have an abortion?”

“Vivien said she wouldn’t face up to things. She pretended it wasn’t happening. By the time she told her mother it was too late to do anything. The only thing her mother could think of was having the baby adopted. It was a piece of luck for her—the mother, I mean—that she and her husband were moving just about the time Zosie was due to give birth, so that with luck the old neighbors wouldn’t know and the new ones would never find out. That was why Zosie was supposed to go to this hostel place for single parents after the baby was born.”

“They used to call girls like that unmarried mothers. Did you know? I read it in a novel.”

“Some of them must have been too young to
be
married. Zosie almost was. She had the baby in a hospital in London and she was only there five days and then she came out and went to this place. A week after that she gave up the baby to the adoption people and it went to its new parents.”

“Was it a boy or a girl?”

“I don’t know,” said Shiva. “I didn’t ask and Vivien didn’t say.”

“It seems important.”

“Zosie couldn’t stay on there without the baby. She couldn’t go back to her school. Her mother and stepfather had moved but of course she had their new address. Her mother wasn’t as bad as that. She probably expected Zosie to come home—that is, to the new place. And Zosie went because there was nothing else to do. She had nowhere else to go and no money.”

Shiva stopped and picked up the paper once more. It was a paragraph on an inside page that had started this conversation. This said that new evidence was leading police to believe a positive identification might soon be made of the remains of a young woman and a baby found in the animal cemetery at Wyvis Hall. That was all. Shiva reread it carefully.