A Fatal Inversion (27 page)

“You weren’t to blame,” said Lili. “It was nothing to do with you. It was only that you happened to be there.”

“No, it was more than that. I should have left anyway. When I saw the way things were going, I should have left. Instead, I actually persuaded Vivien to stay on. When she heard she had got the job with Robin Tatian she thought of going back to London, back to the squat. Things hadn’t worked out at Ecalpemos the way she had expected them to. Nobody did anything but her, you see. They didn’t pull their weight and they took what she did for granted—like you take what Mother does for granted. You can stay on, Shiva, she said. It doesn’t mean you have to go because I do. I knew then that whatever there had been between us was over. Do you mind me talking like this, Lili?”

She shook her head, looking at him with a fleeting smile.

“I didn’t think you minded. You’ve no cause. It was never much of a love affair we had, more a friendship. We slept in the same bed at Ecalpemos, but we never touched. I believe Vivien was coming to believe there wasn’t room in her life for the distractions of sex, and in a funny sort of way there wasn’t time. I used to wake up sometimes in the night and see her sitting in a corner of the room with a lamp on but shaded, reading the Gita. That made me feel strange, her doing that when I was the Indian and I hadn’t even read it.

“I persuaded her to stay on. The others—well, the others were very distant from me. I’ll be frank. I was in awe of them, I was even a bit afraid of them. Not Zosie, I don’t mean Zosie, I mean the men. I’ve said Vivien was like a mother to Zosie and Adam but she was like my mother, too, I’ll confess it. I felt she was a protection, a sort of shield between me and them. I said to her please to stay just till she went to her job, not to desert me, and she said all right, she wouldn’t. I don’t think she wanted to but she was practicing what she preached, you see, she was being good.

“After she said that she thanked me for being Indian. We’d never even talked about Hinduism, I don’t know anything about it anyway, but she said that for her purposes it was enough my just being Indian, it pointed the way for her. I’ve never really known what she meant.”

He fell silent. Lili waited, looking at him, and then she picked up the book she had been reading. She turned a page and stared at the text but he did not think she was really reading it. Shiva went out into the hall and looked up Adam’s name in the blue phone directory and then Rufus’s in the pink one. It was not so much that he was afraid to phone either or both of them as that he did not know what he would say. What was there to say? Don’t mention my name, don’t say I was ever there. They would either say or not say and nothing he begged of them would make a difference.

Closing the pink directory, he switched off the light. They were economical with electricity on Fifth Avenue. He looked out of the little window and across the half-lit street. The people opposite were moving out. They had been one of the last white families left in this particular section of Fifth Avenue, a young couple with two children. The For Sale sign had stood there for months and months but at last the house had sold. For five thousand less than was asked, Lili had told him, and five thousand was a big percentage of the kind of prices they could ask down here. All day the moving van had stood outside, but it was gone now. No one had moved in and the windows were without curtains. If the new occupants didn’t move in fast, thought Shiva, squatters would come or else all those windows would be broken.

The two lines of parked cars were strung up over the hill, colorless in the sodium light, their roofs glittering, the pub lights orange, as if fires burned behind the leaded stained glass, but not a soul to be seen. There was something sinister and menacing about urban emptiness. A street of houses should have people in it but it was a measure of the kind of society they lived in, Shiva thought, that he was glad when the street was empty of people, he was relieved, he was thankful for the safety that came with the absence of his fellow men.

Living beings are without number: I vow to row them to the other shore.

Defilements are without number: I vow to remove them from myself.

The teachings are immeasurable: I vow to study and practice them.

The way is very long. I vow to arrive at the end.

He did not know where it came from, some Hindu or Buddhist writings presumably. They were all like that, all posing for the devotee impossible goals. That passage Vivien had copied out and the sheet of paper it was written on lay on the table in their room underneath the painting of the dead child, its parents, and the doctor. It was there all the time they were, the paper weighted down with Vivien’s bottle of sandalwood oil. He remembered it now because for six weeks, the duration of their stay, he had seen and read it every day.

Vivien had been alone in the world, brought up in a children’s home. Shiva could remember her saying that her mother had had so many children, there had not been time or room for her. She was taken into care because her mother had been ill and could not cope with her large family. When she recovered and indeed settled down somewhat, marrying the man she had been living with, somehow Vivien and one of her brothers also in care were forgotten. Neither of them ever went home again, and one day Vivien found out that she had been truly abandoned, for a whole year before her mother and the rest of the family had moved away to quite a distant part of the country.

This account Vivien had given in a not at all self-pitying way but speculating as to how many siblings she might actually by then have. Zosie had been there and had listened with a kind of staring intensity, her elbows on the table and her little pale face held in the cup of her hands.

“My mother’s abandoned me too,” she said.

That was before she had told Vivien about the baby. She was still the mystery girl, come out of nowhere.

“My mother doesn’t know where I am,” she said. “She doesn’t care, does she? She hasn’t tried to find me, she hasn’t looked for me, she hasn’t told the police. I’m missing but she doesn’t care.”

“How do you know?” Rufus said. “It was you ran away from her not she from you. Or so one gathers. How do you know she’s not going mad with worry?”

“We’ve had the radio on every day and there’s been nothing. I bought a paper while we were in London. I’ve looked at papers every time we’ve been in Sudbury and there’s never been a word. She doesn’t care, she’s glad I’ve gone.”

“So what?” said reasonable Rufus. “Isn’t that what you want? I thought you said the last thing you wanted was to go home. You don’t want your mother fussing around you, do you?”

Shiva thought he had understood. Vivien certainly had. Vivien said it was one thing a young girl running away from home and being glad to leave her parents but quite another for her to find out the parents were relieved she’d gone. And Zosie said: “Don’t you see how terrible it is? I’m missing from home and my mother isn’t worried. I might have been murdered. For Christ’s sake, I’m only seventeen.”

She began to cry, tearing sobs. Vivien sat down beside her and put an arm around her, then she turned her around and held her in her arms. It was later that day that Zosie had told Vivien everything—or almost everything. At any rate she had told her about the baby. And things about Adam. Adam had told her he was in love with her, he was mad for her, and by the way he looked at her, devouring her with his eyes, Shiva had no difficulty in believing this. How Zosie felt about this, whether or not she reciprocated, she had not told Vivien, or if she had, Vivien had not repeated what she was told. One thing she had said to Vivien was perhaps significant.

“If I’d known before, I could have kept my baby.”

Vivien had asked her what she meant.

“He wants me to stay here with him. He wants me to live here with him forever. That’s what he says. He’s not going back to London, he’s not going back to university. This is going to be my home for always, he says. I keep thinking, if only I’d known, if only I’d known before I gave up my baby. I could have had my baby here and we could have lived here, all three of us, like a family. And I can’t bear to think of that, how it might have been if only I’d known.”

The few lines about the prospective identification of the bones at Wyvis Hall Adam happened to read while he was waiting to make his statement to the police. He was actually sitting in the police station waiting to be attended to and he took a look at the evening paper which he had just bought. Immediately he imagined that all eyes were on him, that the policemen who stood behind a kind of counter, the two or three other members of the public who were also waiting, all knew exactly the position of that paragraph on the page, knew to what it referred and were measuring the degree of his guilty involvement. He folded up the paper, trying to do this nonchalantly. But his heart had begun to beat painfully as he registered the import of what he had read.

Five minutes afterward he was in a small, bleak office with the man called Sergeant Fuller. Adam, though nervous enough about this interview, had told himself over and over that after all, he had already said everything he intended to say to Stretton and Winder. It was they who were au fait with the case. This Fuller would know nothing about it, he was a mere official whose rank or simply his availability placed him here as the recipient of this statement. He was therefore very taken aback when, having repeated what he had said to Winder and seen it taken down on a typewriter by a policewoman, Fuller said in an idle, conversational sort of way: “In point of fact, just for the record, where were you for the rest of the summer holidays? At home with your people, were you, or did you go off somewhere?”

“I went to Greece,” Adam said.

“On your own, were you?”

“I don’t see what this has got to do with Wyvis Hall. I wasn’t there and I should have thought that was all that mattered.”

“All that mattered?” said Sergeant Fuller. “That would be a very tall order, don’t you think? All that mattered—whatever that might be.”

Adam was afraid to say he had gone to Greece on his own in case his father had already told the police he had gone with Rufus. Why hadn’t he checked with his father as to exactly what he had told them? He said: “If you’ve finished with me, I do happen to be rather busy… .”

“You have to sign it, Mr. Verne-Smith.”

Adam signed.

“You were going to tell me who you went to Greece with,” said Fuller.

“I went with a friend of mine called Rufus Fletcher. He’s Dr. Fletcher now.”

“Perhaps you’d give me Dr. Fletcher’s address, Mr. Verne-Smith.”

Adam regretted it as soon as he had said it. “He’s in the phone book.”

Fuller said nothing but he looked hard at Adam and Adam knew what he must be thinking. If this man is a friend of yours, how do you know his name is in the phone book? You would surely either remember his phone number or have it written down in a personal directory. Or did you mean he
used to be
a friend of yours but is this no longer and you know he is in the phone book because you had to look up his number in order to phone him and warn him, or discuss this case with him or concoct an alibi? And if this is so, Mr. Verne-Smith, it gives rise to all kinds of interesting possibilities… .

He would have to warn Rufus. They would certainly want to confirm this with Rufus. Adam felt weary of it, he felt slightly stunned, as if he had been struck but not hard enough to knock him out. Usually at this time, returning home, he began to feel an anticipatory joy at the prospect of seeing Abigail, but thinking of the child now only filled him with despair. As for Anne, he understood now, all humbug and self-deception past, that he remained with her solely because of Abigail. He had loved just two people in his life, Zosie and Abigail, and the Zosie he remembered came back to him as nearly as young and small and vulnerable as his daughter.

The bluish-white marks on her body he had at first taken for some peculiarity of her own, what Rufus would have called ideopathic. Zosie’s skin was pastel brown, matte like biscuits, and the little white feather marks were not like scars but in themselves rather beautiful, piquant. Idly, one afternoon he asked her what they were. She was lying on her side, resting on one elbow and cupping her chin in her hand, a characteristic gesture of hers. She was looking at the painting of St. Sebastian facing an archery squad of Roman soldiers.

“I was shot full of arrows,” she said.

“Come on, Zosie, tell me.”

“My skin was stretched and stretched and when the stretching stopped it could never go back to what it used to be. Imagine doing it to a piece of silk, go on.” She jumped off the bed and got hold of the hem of one of the old faded pink silk curtains. She held it in her fists and pulled. There was a splitting sound. “Oh, dear, it’s too old, it’s rotten. I’m young you see, so I didn’t split.”

He said to her Zosie, Zosie, what do you mean?

“Shall I tell you? Shall I tell you now?”

He held out his arms to her and she came into them, nestling close and confidingly, whispering into his shoulder. The curious thing was that it had not meant much to him. To hear now of a girl of just seventeen having a baby and giving it up for adoption, running away from a hostel and sleeping first with one man, then another, while she was still post-parturitive, without any proper medical examination and using no contraceptives would shock him and rouse his indignation. But then he had not seen it like that. About the contraception or lack of it he had not thought at all; it had not crossed his mind. He had not even known in those days that a woman should not be sexually active after childbirth until six weeks have elapsed and she had been given medical clearance. Apart from all that, he had not even given much consideration to the baby or what Zosie’s feelings for it might have been. And he was ashamed now to recall his gross insensitivity. The truth was that at nineteen he had thought of a baby as an encumbrance any single girl would wish to be rid of, either at birth or preferably earlier by abortion. So when she told him that those blue-white feathers were the stretch marks of pregnancy, he had given her the only sort of sympathy he thought she wanted.