A Fatal Inversion (34 page)

“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 have 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.

The heavy sultry day drew into a stuffy evening. Great clouds rose in mountain shapes and the moon sailed among them like a white galleon moving through the straits that divide volcanic islands. The clouds were blown by a warm wind that came in sporadic gusts. In front of the house the cedar flapped its rough black arms like a living creature, like a witch in black skirts, Zosie said. It was the last night of his life on which he had been happy, he thought, the last time he had known joy.

Of course that couldn’t be so. It was an exaggeration. He must have been happy since then, oblivious, euphoric, he must have been, but he couldn’t remember any specific occasion. That particular night he could remember, though, in all its strange details, their homecoming down the drift and the wind blowing the branches that met overhead, Zosie running into the house with the baby in her arms and himself following with the cot. Like young parents, first-time parents bringing their child home from the maternity hospital, and with as little idea of what to do and what life would bring. Only when this had happened in his own life, when Abigail was brought home, he had been at work and Anne’s mother had gone to fetch her.

The baby gave one single sharp cry which Vivien must have heard. Vivien was watering her herb garden, nursing along sad little sprigs of parsley and coriander, but she came into the house and helped Zosie prepare the feeding bottle. Zosie took the baby straight upstairs to their room and pulled a drawer out of the walnut tallboy to make a cot for her. She put a big oblong cushion from the drawing room into it for a mattress and she covered the baby with her own bedclothes and Vivien’s red shawl. She tore up one of the towels to make napkins. Adam could hardly believe it when she said she was going to bathe the baby but she did bathe her in the bathroom washbasin and pinned a clean strip of a towel around her and then put her back into the pink outfit she had been wearing, lamenting that she had nothing fresh to dress her in. The baby cried but not distressfully. Zosie held her in her arms and fed her milk.

Adam went downstairs and fetched glasses of milk for both of them and some of Vivien’s fresh bread with cheese and their own early apples, Beauty of Bath, striped red on wrinkled yellow skins. They sat on the bed and ate the food while the baby slept in her drawer and Adam managed somehow to forget for the time being the awfulness of what they had done, not to think about the misery that must come about through this theft, the anguish and panic. The wind shivered away, blew itself out, and left a purple sky, clear as some dark streaked petal, the clouds in distant ranges. He opened the window onto the ruined, dried-out garden. Shiva was standing by the lake, holding a book in his hand, though it was too dark to read, looking up at the stars. It was early still, no more than ten. They had never been to bed so early. They were parents now, Zosie said, and parents had to go to bed early because their baby would wake them at dawn. She was mad and he knew she was mad but he did not care.

He took her in his arms and made love to her and for the first time—the first and the last, the only—she made love to him, she responded. She was passionate and lascivious, wet and soft, and the warm, crumpled bed smelled of salt flats and fresh-caught fish. Her tongue was a small slippery darting fish but inside her was a warm pool of space that grew and enclosed him in warm weeds and as he drowned caught him up and threw him on the shore. She caught him with a shock that was almost pain, that made him cry out as she did, made him close his eyes and arch his back and sink on her with a sigh and a rattling gasp. She was looking at him when he looked at her, smiling, she was, and surely satisfied.

Or was she? Had she been? How did he know? How does any man ever know? Besides, he knew now that it was the baby, the possession of the baby, that had brought her to this, not he. Already the baby,
her
baby for only the past four or five hours, was more to her than he was. But he made love to her again, he stirred her and himself into excitement again, then and later in the night, in the early hours. He was young, he had thought it was always like that and always would be at all ages. And he had believed, too, that love lasted and he would love her forever.

Adam sat with Anne and Anne’s parents, who were drinking whiskey and coffee. A sickly mixture, he thought, but he hated both anyway. Winder’s questions and sly taunting comments rotated in his head. In the conversation he took no part, keeping silent, bolstering his reputation as “not very talkative.” On these occasions he often wished Abigail would wake up so that he could go upstairs and comfort her, cuddle her. But it was a long time now since she had wakened of her own volition in the evenings but slept undisturbed, in a beautiful noiseless serenity. It had been different with that other baby, who in her sleep made faint whistling sounds and occasionally soft irregular clicks. Was that why Anne’s clicking in her sleep had so enraged him?

The clickings had grown more frequent and there had been a grunting and whimpering before she awakened. And then cries. That crying had been disconcerting, bringing him a feeling of incipient panic, very like what he felt now. At first he had wondered what it was, where he was. And it had been the same the next morning, the sky he saw when he opened his eyes, red as if somewhere a great fire were burning, and it had taken him a moment to realize that this was the dawn.

“I suffer from eosophobia,” he had once said, “an irrational fear of the dawn.”

Zosie went down and got milk for the feeding. She changed the baby’s napkin, she knew how to do that, they had made her do that in the hospital where her own baby was born, even though they knew she was giving it up for adoption. They slept again, all three of them. And outside the world was going mad looking for that baby; outside the charmed circle that enclosed Ecalpemos, outside the invisible walls the shutting spell had erected.

By the time they got up there were four wet napkins in the bucket Zosie had brought up from the kitchen. Vivien washed them because she had to wash her own blue dress. She looked at the baby and talked to it and held out one finger which the baby got hold of in its own tiny pale fingers, but she asked no questions, desisting as a very caring, kind mother might. And even then he had not thought what this meant, what Vivien’s acceptance meant.

They had no newspapers and if they had the radio on, no one ever listened to the news. If Vivien, going about her work, had heard talk of a missing baby, would she have made the connection? She and Rufus accepted that the baby was Zosie’s, concluded presumably that she had had the adoption order set aside now that she had a home of her own and a man of her own.

He was only a little bit afraid, that day. When the car with the lamp on its roof came down the drift—albeit a yellow lamp and not a blue one—he thought for a moment it was the police. It was only Rufus returning and without enough money to pay the cab fare. And he was strangely intimidated too by the weather. It seemed crazy to say the weather frightened him but it did because it was different. Overnight it had grown cold, the temperature falling from over ninety degrees—they still thought in Fahrenheit then—to less than sixty. And he could not help seeing it as an omen of a change in their fortunes, as an end of the good times and the beginning of an encroachment of disaster.

What else had they done that day? Nothing much. When he looked back on it he remembered Zosie as inseparable from the baby, cuddling the baby and feeding it and changing it, and himself as restless and nervous, glad of the night coming, of being able to go to bed early. The baby woke up and cried and he thought, Oh, God, what a drag, is this what my life’s going to be?

The new cold made him bad-tempered. The morning was dull and stormy and Zosie cuddled the baby and talked to the baby and suddenly he knew the baby would have to go back. Of course she would. How had he ever believed they could keep a kidnapped baby and not be found out?

He considered reasoning with Zosie, a pointless task at the best of times. He couldn’t just grab the baby and take her to London on his own. The help of the others might be enlisted, except that the others didn’t know.

They were soon to find out. Once Shiva gave him the lead, handed him the opportunity, he wasn’t going to stay silent. Not even for Zosie’s sake. Besides, it wouldn’t be for Zosie’s sake in the end, it would be better for Zosie to relinquish the baby—or he thought so, he couldn’t see further than the moment, the cold, increasingly alarming present.

It was Shiva who asked.

“Whose baby is it, Zosie? Is it yours?”

Vivien smiled and nodded. Rufus wasn’t there, he was lying hopefully out on the terrace where once the sun had shone. Shiva sat at the kitchen table, looking from one girl to the other. Now Adam had his chance and he took it.

“She isn’t Zosie’s,” he said. “She’s someone else’s baby.”

“She’s mine,” Zosie said.

“Only,” said Adam, pedantic to the last, “in the sense that she’s presently in your possession.”

Shiva said, “I don’t understand what you mean.”

Zosie, who had been heating milk in a saucepan, stepped away from the stove, her shoulders hunched, her eyes the eyes of the mouse in the corner, its back to the wall. The baby was in Vivien’s arms. She and Zosie had been, as it were, joint priestesses of some maternal mysteries, performing together the rites of an ancient cult, and Vivien had smilingly confirmed Zosie’s motherhood in a way that excluded males. But in all this she had been deceived and at Adam’s denial she sprang back, clutching the baby tightly to her, her face a mask of shock. Adam had a feeling that anyone else, at this revelation, might actually have dropped the baby but Vivien held onto it the more firmly as if by the mere utterance of certain words, it was placed in danger and required her special protection.

He spoke steadily, without emotion. “She’s a baby Zosie took out of a car when we were in London. She kidnapped her, if you like.”

“I don’t believe it,” Shiva said in a slow wondering voice.

“Of course you do. You know people take babies, women do when they’ve lost their own. It’s a well-known fact.”

“She just took a baby out of a car? Didn’t anyone see her do this?”

“Obviously not. Look, we’ve been through all this. I’m sick of it. I know it was wrong and terrible and all that, I know that. I’m not feeble-minded. I know the baby’s got to go back, and the sooner the better, as far as I’m concerned.”

Vivien spoke. She still held the baby. She wouldn’t relinquish the baby. “It was a wicked thing to do, an evil thing. I think you are feeble-minded, both of you, that’s just what you are. This baby has to go back to her parents now, immediately. You have to drive back to London now with her and give her back.”

“I quite agree,” Adam said wearily.

“Do you know who her parents are? I suppose you don’t. You took her out of someone’s car, you say? You’re mad completely, you’re sick in your minds.”

“Oh, shut up.”

“Rufus will have to know about this. Rufus should be in on it.”

It must have been the first time Vivien had ever made an overture of any kind to Rufus. Still carrying the baby, she put her head out of the window and called him.