A Fatal Inversion (35 page)

“Rufus, would you come in here, please?”

Zosie had filled the bottle and was holding it under the cold tap to cool it. She dried the bottle on a cloth and came to Vivien, lifting up her arms. For a moment it seemed as if Vivien would hold onto the baby, for she briefly raised her left arm to shelter its face and head from Zosie.

“She’s a human being you’ve stolen,” she said in a wondering voice. “A
person,
not an animal or a toy. Do you realize that? Do you
think
?”

The baby broke into wails at the sight of food held tantalizingly a yard from her. Vivien said: “I thought she was yours, I thought this was your own child you’d somehow got back.”

“Please give her to me, Vivien.”

Cigarette in mouth, Rufus walked in just as the changeover was taking place, Vivien putting the baby into Zosie’s arms while turning her head sharply away. Shiva had begun to laugh, not wildly, but softly, ruefully, while shaking his head. Rufus said:

“What’s going on?”

“Zosie’s stolen this baby out of someone’s car. She just took it yesterday afternoon. She’s mad, of course. Presumably she thinks she can get away with kidnapping. I know you thought it was hers, we all thought it was hers, but it’s not, it’s someone else’s. They don’t even know whose baby it is, they don’t even know who the parents are.”

“Oh, yes, we do. It’s Tatian’s, it’s that man’s you’re going to work for.”

Vivien looked at Adam. She put her hands up to her face which had gone as pale as the cream cotton of her dress. The baby in Zosie’s arms sucked away at the nipple, its miniature hands, pink as shells, holding on to the bottle. Vivien took a step toward Zosie, in a threatening way, it seemed to Adam, and he half-rose, but she was only looking at the baby, staring into the baby’s face.

“Are you saying you think this baby is Nicola Tatian? Is that what you thought? Nicola’s
nine months old,
she’s big, she crawls around. I ought to know, I’ve seen her. God knows who this is, God only knows. What made you think you’d taken Robin Tatian’s child?”

Zosie didn’t speak. She doesn’t care, Adam thought, she doesn’t care whose it is, it’s hers now, that’s the way she thinks.

“It was in a car outside his house. Zosie naturally thought it was his.”

Shiva’s had been a nervous giggling and had ceased now, though the shaking of the head continued. But it was simple raucous laughter Rufus gave vent to, peals of laughter that shook him so that he had to sit down at the table and bury his face in his arms.

“Put the radio on,” said Vivien. “Keep it on till we get some news. There’s bound to be something on the news. You’re useless, aren’t you?” she said fiercely to Rufus. “You’d think anything was funny. You’d think murder was funny.”

“Maybe I would,” he said, throwing back his head. “Maybe I would.”

But he did not when the time came.

Shiva put the radio on and rock music thrummed out. Almost at the same time, as if the radio had started it or the music had provoked it, thunder rolled out of the distance, a sound like a load of stones being rattled out into a pit of stones. And then the music stopped and a man’s voice began announcing the news bulletin.

His father-in-law was talking about Wyvis Hall. Adam, lost in his reverie, his hearing shuttered, had missed whatever it was that triggered this off. He sensed, though, that it might be some news item his father-in-law had read or heard but which had escaped him, something fresh that the media had just got hold of, and while one part of him burned to know what it was, the rest cringed from it, would have given anything not to know it, covering eyes and blocking ears. Nor did he want to answer the questions that were now being put to him about his ownership of the place, what sort of a house it was, what was the extent of the grounds, what kind of people lived in the neighborhood.

He did answer, though, in an abstracted kind of way, thinking all the while that he had only to inquire what made him ask for Anne’s father to revert to whatever had begun it. Those lines in the evening paper he was afraid to look at, perhaps, or even something on television. But he did not ask. Instead, he found himself saying abruptly that it was an unpleasant subject, it was something he didn’t want to talk about. Anne was looking at him with those suspicious, narrowed eyes that seemed a habitual expression with her nowadays. And suddenly Adam thought, my marriage won’t survive this, we shall split up over this. In a way it would be the least of evils. If the sole result of all this were to be the breakup of his marriage, he would have got out of it lightly. But it could not be the sole result, not now, not with the coypu man appearing on the scene and saying his piece.

Adam remembered lightning, a bright flash of it, flaring in the kitchen. It was only then that they realized how dark it had become. It had given them an illusion of nighttime but it wasn’t night, it wasn’t even evening but three in the afternoon. He had gone to the window and looked out on a gray and purple sky, where the clouds were mountain ranges capped with snow. Like the Himalayas, warm and close in the foothills, clear and icy on those distant peaks. A tree of lightning grew out of the blue horizon, branches forking through the cumulus, and the thunder cracked this time, a sound like gunfire.

He listened to the voice coming out of the radio, they all listened, even Rufus. “The missing Highgate baby” was the way the voice referred to the child in Zosie’s arms, not by name. Zosie rubbed the baby’s back, cuddling it against her shoulder. For a few seconds she held her head on one side, listening to the words which the announcer delivered in ominous tones, but not as if it had any application to her personally, and with no more interest than she might have given to news of an earthquake taking place on the other side of the world.

She had torn up another towel and was changing the baby’s diaper. Shiva recoiled from this with wrinkled nose and downturned mouth.

“I’d like to go to Sudbury, please, and buy her some clothes. She ought to have another outfit and underclothes and things. She ought to have real napkins.”

Adam wondered what it was this reminded him of. He closed his eyes. Of his sister, yes, of Bridget when she was a child of seven or eight, and had for a few days become obsessed by a birthday doll.

“You’re not going to Sudbury,” Vivien said. “You’re going to London to take that baby back.”

She was Mother, she was in charge, hers was the voice of authority. Only it no longer worked so effectively. And Rufus surely had been Father. Why do we need these roles, Adam had wondered then and wondered now, why do we cast ourselves in them?

“A small local difficulty,” said Rufus, “is that we don’t yet know who it belongs to.”

“It’ll have been in the papers. It’ll have been in this morning’s paper.” Adam was beginning to see what he must do. “I’ll take Zosie into Sudbury and buy a paper and find out whose it is.”

“I don’t see why,” said Zosie, “seeing that I’m not taking her back.”

Adam put his arms around her. He put his arms around her and the baby, the baby was between them, keeping them apart. For more reasons than one, he wanted to be rid of the baby.

Shiva, who had been silent, who had seemed to be listening intently only as might someone whose grasp of the English language was imperfect but who needed to understand every word, now said slowly: “Do you realize it’s fortunate it wasn’t Mr. Tatian’s baby you took? You would have been found by now if you had, the police would have found you.”

They all looked at him. It was the first mention of the police.

“Because they will want to know about everyone connected with the Tatian family. Mr. Tatian would have said he had this new nurse for his children coming on Thursday but he didn’t know much about her, it was his sister-in-law who had interviewed her. He would have said there was something odd about her address, she had given him a false address. There was no such place as Ecalpemos but it might be true that she lived at Nunes in Suffolk. What do you think they would have done then? They would have been here by now, they would have found us, they would have called at every house here.”

“Congratulations,” said Rufus. “One of these days you will make a great detective, a credit to the force.”

A flush came into Shiva’s olive face. “It’s true, though, isn’t it?”

“My guardian angel was looking after me,” Zosie said.

“How about this baby’s mother’s guardian angel? He was on leave, was he?”

“I thought you were on my side, Rufus.”

The radio was playing music, rock, not very loud. Rufus turned it off. He lit a cigarette.

“Did you now?” he said. He was looking at Zosie in a speculative kind of way and yet as if he found her an astonishing creature. “I’ll tell you whose side I’m on. Rufus’s. And that goes for always.”

Adam had an uneasy feeling that the grown-ups had come. He looked at Rufus, needing him, needing him for guidance, for direction. And what Rufus said next struck him like a blow under the ribs. He felt the blood run into his face and the skin grow hot.

“Frankly, this is no place for me. Not any longer. It’s time for me to quit.” He smiled at Adam but not pleasantly, without camaraderie. “So if you’ll excuse me, I’ll be on my bike in the morning.”

Adam had to maintain a cool manner. He had to put up his eyebrows and shrug.

“As you like. It’s your decision.”

“Right. But I’m afraid I shall have to deprive you of the van.” He said “the van” and not “Goblander” and this twisted a knife in Adam. “So if you want to buy newspapers and baby clothes, I suggest you run into Sudbury now while the going is good.”

Very laid back was Rufus, cool as a cucumber and with a cutting edge to his voice. He didn’t have to put it into words. It was plain what he was thinking: I am a medical student at a great teaching hospital with a future before me. And I am good, I am going to be good, I am going to be a success. I have two years still before I qualify. I have far to go up the ladder but up it I am going and be damned to the lot of you. The last thing I mean to do is jeopardize my career for a crazy girl with kleptomania—the kind of kleptomania that has babies not things as its object.

From goodness knows where, Rufus produced a big square bottle of gin Adam didn’t know he had, poured himself a generous measure, and drank it down neat. He didn’t say any more but went off through the house, carrying his bottle. As soon as he was gone Zosie started telling them about the little boy she had tried to abduct from some shopping center when she and Rufus and Vivien were all in London together. It was the first Adam had heard of this and it turned him cold. The baby would have to be returned. Rufus could go, he would soon be going anyway, and all Adam really wanted was to be alone with Zosie. Without the baby.

Sometime later on, if he could divert her, if she would go to sleep, say, he might be able to take the baby back. And what would that do to their relationship? What would keeping the baby do to it?

The empty portable crib was on the backseat of Goblander. Zosie sat holding the baby, wrapped in Vivien’s shawl. Her childlike hand on which the plaited ring gleamed stroked back the cobweb-fine hair, touched the round satiny cheeks. Her face was rapt and her guardian angel sheltered her with his wings. She no longer reminded him of his sister but of girls he had seen in paintings, Renaissance madonnas whose ardent faces and shining eyes had nothing to do with piety.

Like a small ill-treated animal begins to trust the first human being who is kind to it, the first who does not kick it or desert it, she trusted him. She wasn’t afraid to leave the baby in his care. He supposed he should be flattered and in a way he was. It pleased him, it meant that later on he could do what he had to do. But first he left her with the baby, and bought the
Daily Telegraph.
The missing baby story was big on the front page and the name was there. The child who slept in the portable crib on the backseat of Goblander was called Catherine, her surname was Ryemark and her parents whose guardian angel had been on leave lived on the other side of Highgate, in the area called the Miltons.

Her arms full of packages, a shopping bag hooked on one arm, Zosie came back, came dancing back in spite of her burdens. The shopping she had done must have made a big hole in the mask jug and spoons money.

“Catherine,” said Zosie when he told her. “I like Catherine better than Nicola.”

The baby seemed to smile at her. It was very quiet, placid, staring. The large blue eyes were calm and mild, not wandering but fixed on Zosie’s face. Adam read aloud a minute description of the portable crib, cream with a white and cream checked lining, the linen white with a pink blanket and a pastel-colored patchwork quilt. He wondered why all the people passing by did not look into the van and see the crib and rush off to denounce him.

A few drops of rain had fallen, widely separated, each the size of a large coin. They watched the sparse rain with surprise, almost with curiosity. It was so long since they had seen it, it came as a phenomenon.

“It says here she’s fourteen weeks old,” Adam said as they began the drive back.

“Doesn’t that seem tiny? You can’t imagine being fourteen weeks old.” Zosie sat in the back with Catherine. She had taken her out of the crib and held her in her arms. “My baby was a little girl. I haven’t told you that before, have I? The funny thing is I feel just the same about her as I did about my own little girl, just the same, no different. Do you know, Adam, it won’t be long before we forget she’s not our own baby.”

Adam didn’t say anything. He would have liked more information than the newspaper gave, but he did not like the sound of a “nationwide hunt” for Catherine Ryemark. There was nothing in the story about motorists stopping to let a young girl in a blue top and blue and white checked skirt holding a portable crib go across the pedestrian crossing at North Hill. Perhaps no one had seen her.

At Ecalpemos Vivien was waiting for them, standing under the front porch waiting. The rain had never really come, though the sky was still a rolling mass of cloud and the thunder growled distantly. A wind had risen, swaying and shivering the trees. She began telling them before they got in the door how the baby must go back, how they must not even bring her in but take her home at once.