A Fatal Inversion (17 page)

Vivien was the only person Shiva had ever met whose aim in life was to find out what she was doing in this world, what the meaning of life was and to learn how to be good. To this end she had lived for a while on a kibbutz and in a commune in California and been a disciple of Bhagwan and attended hundreds of lectures and read hundreds of books. Shiva (whose mother described him as “education mad”) asked her why she didn’t go to college and study philosophy but Vivien despised formal education. After she left school and at the same time the children’s home, she lived for a while on the dole, but coming to believe that this was wrong, went out cleaning apartments and in between the kibbutz and Bhagwan had been a children’s nanny.

She was a small, dark girl with long hair she wore in braids or wound tightly around her head. Shiva had never known her to wear trousers or any garments of a masculine cast. Vivien wore robes rather than dresses, and sometimes she hung around her neck the Star of David and sometimes the Christian cross. Alone in the world and without ties, she seemed to have a hundred friends but no close ones and Shiva, when at last they made love, was only her second lover.

He parted from her with no thought of seeing her again until he returned to college in September. If he returned there. They would write to each other. The Hammersmith squat had no phone and Shiva would not have liked Vivien to phone him at home. He could imagine the scenes his grandmother would make if she found out he had an English girlfriend, and what praying there would be, what threats of retribution, and not made in vain either, for his mother was not so progressive as to fail in her deference to her mother-in-law and the old lady’s opinions carried great weight in the house in Southall. So Shiva wrote to Vivien and received her letters which he told his parents were from a friend of his at college, a boy whose family was from Benares.

Then the letter came with the suggestion that Shiva might like to join Vivien in a community at Ecalpemos, wherever that might be, just for a trial period to see what it was like. She understood he would have to go back to college in September. But she might remain. It all depended on whether a center for meditation might be established there.

Would he have to go back to college, though? Shiva asked himself. Perhaps not, not if he changed his mind about the pharmacology course and decided to try for medical school instead. In that case he would not be able to start until a year from October and in the interim might have to take his A Level in math. But he could study just as easily at Ecalpemos as in Southall and perhaps more easily. A house with gardens and land in the country, in Suffolk, Vivien had written.

Shiva, though far more deferential to his parents than any European contemporary would be, holding them in far greater esteem, nevertheless had no compunction about lying to them. He reasoned this way. If he told them he was going to spend two months in a center for meditation with an English girl who had no parents to speak of and was partly Jewish, they would be very unhappy indeed and would worry, whereas if he said what in fact he did say, that he would be attending a summer school designed as a preparatory course for those contemplating a medical career they would be happy and gratified. Really there was no choice about it. That such a summer school did not and could not exist need be no obstacle since his father was ignorant about these things and trusted Shiva’s word and opinions. He even gave them the address: Ecalpemos, Nunes, Suffolk, for he knew that nothing short of the death of one of them would induce the others to get in touch with him.

Shiva’s father told him to help himself to a selection from the best of the Indian cotton shirts so that he might look smart during his stay. Shiva knew he would have no need of new shirts, so he took a dress instead. No Indian woman had ever worn dresses like these—with low square necks and big sleeves and high waists and floor-length skirts—or ever would, but this bright turquoise blue one embroidered on the bodice in scarlet and gold might have been made for small, pretty Vivien. It would be the first present he had ever given her.

The squat was in a row of condemned houses in a street very close to the river off Fulham Palace Road. It was all gone now, Shiva had heard, the derelict cottages replaced by hygienic local authority housing and a day center for the handicapped. When Vivien had been living there the row had been awaiting demolition and scheduled unfit for human occupation, but squatters had come just the same and knocked out openings in the communicating walls so that entering at number one, you could walk all the way through to number nine without going out into the street. Shiva walked through, stepping over people asleep on mattresses on the floor. No one in that squat except Vivien ever got up before midday. It was shabby rather than dirty and it smelled of the river.

He found Vivien in her room, sitting cross-legged and meditating. She turned on him her bright-eyed gaze but gave no other sign of greeting and he did not interrupt her. He sat down among the mats and cushions that furnished the place in a vaguely oriental way that was quite unlike the solid three-piece suites and carved wood and etched brass of his own home. There was a rack of essential oils in tiny vials on the windowsill and the case in which Vivien kept her Bach flower remedies. A reflexology chart hung on one wall and the chart of Vivien’s own horoscope underneath it. Her book collection he found daunting, the Bible, the Koran, the Gita, the
Imitation of Christ,
the Tibetan
Book of the Dead.
The
I Ching
lay open on a cushion, what looked like slips of straw beside it, as if before he came she had cast to know what her fate would be at Ecalpemos… .

Since then he had sometimes wondered what the
I Ching
had told her. Not, surely, anything like an accurate forecast or she would hardly have gone. It was impossibly cryptic, anyway; it could be made to mean anything. He sat and waited, not minding, not impatient, but beginning to feel soothed and at peace as one did in Vivien’s presence. Twenty minutes went by and then she got up. Her bag was packed but she opened it again and put the flower remedies in and a big dark red shawl in case it got cold in the evenings. The bag was a carryall made of carpet with padded cloth handles, for Vivien wore no leather or any animal material, not even wool.

“What time is the train?” Shiva asked.

“I don’t know. If we go to the station, a train will come. They always do.”

He thought it quite amusing that Vivien should have to teach
him
this serene fatalism. “Are you in a great hurry, Shiva?” she said. “Have you got some pressing business at Ecalpemos that will vanish or be lost if you aren’t there by nightfall?”

It was just a tradition, an accepted way of life, that you made haste, you rushed busily, irrespective of what you had to do when the end was reached. His parents were as much afflicted by it as English people.

“We have time,” Vivien often said. “We’re young. It’s when we’re eighty and we haven’t much time left, then we’ll have to rush.”

He gave her the turquoise blue dress and immediately she put it on, for she had no understanding of the concept of keeping something for best. What would “best” be? All days were alike to her and all places for her to look at, not where others would look at her.

It was a gray and cream striped Moroccan cotton robe she had been wearing. She folded it carefully and laid it beside the
I Ching.

“I won’t need that now. I’ve got another dress with me.”

Shiva found her amazing. What other woman would go off for perhaps months with only two dresses?

“You can always collect it,” he said, “if you have to come back to London for an interview.”

She had applied for a job as a children’s nanny before Bella told her about Ecalpemos. But Shiva could tell that though calm and unhurried, she was excited by the prospect before her. The job might be disregarded if Ecalpemos turned out to be what she was always seeking, a real community of dedicated people, all with ideas similar to hers, people that she might teach and who might teach her something. He watched her write a note to someone else in the squat, ending it: “Love and peace, Vivien.”

Traveling with her was a placid, restful experience. They missed the fast Inter-city train because Vivien refused to run for it and got into a slow train instead that took fifteen minutes longer to get there, stopping at half a dozen stations on the way. The blue dress was very conspicuous, the embroidery on the bodice and low-cut neckline glistening like real jewelry. Vivien looked beautiful and exotic but a little bizarre too. Outside Colchester station, off the grass verge, she had picked a yellow flower of a very common sort, though Shiva did not know what sort, and stuck it in her hair. Perhaps because of the way she looked—and the way he looked, too, come to that, a lithe, small-boned, dark-skinned Oriental—it was a while before a motorist stopped to give them a lift. Vivien had given no thought to the proximity or otherwise of Nunes to Colchester but they learned at the station that it was twelve miles away. There were buses but these were infrequent and the last one had gone. The car driver who picked them up said he would go into the village of Nunes but no farther.

Shiva had seldom been out into the English countryside and it was with wonder and a certain amount of curiosity that he looked at the wide fields of yellowing wheat and barley across which exaggeratedly long shadows lay. It was the driver who told him they were wheat and barley; they might have been sesame and sainfoin, for all he knew. There was no wind. There were no animals in the meadows, which surprised him, for he had expected herds of fat black and white cattle. They passed not a single walker or cyclist and met few other cars. The houses which he thought would be the dwellings of the poor, ramshackle and mean, were for the most part large and prosperous-looking, set in gardens full of flowers.

It had been mid-July. The sun was on the point of setting but the sky was still a dense blue and quite cloudless. Vivien had found out from Bella precisely where Ecalpemos was and when she saw the first of the landmarks she had been told about, Nunes church, flint-walled with a square tower and narrow pointed spire, set on a grassy mound, she said they would get out and continue on foot. They walked along quite slowly, watching the sun go down and as it vanished below the dark wooded horizon, saw the sky warm at once to gold and gradually flush rosy-pink.

It was after about half a mile that they found the path. Both of them, Shiva knew, were disconcerted because there was no sign saying Ecalpemos. He suspected Vivien had anticipated a handcrafted wooden sign with the name lettered on it and perhaps a carved flower or pair of acorns. But it must be the place. There were no other houses to be seen in any direction, only huge prairielike fields. A farmhouse called the Mill on the Pytle they had passed ten minutes before. To the left of them was a dense pinewood that looked quite black at that hour with the sky above it reddening as if from a distant fire.

They turned down the path, wondering and hoping. It was like entering a tunnel after a while, for the trees met overhead, though through the black network of branches you could still see the brilliant sky. This tunnel descended gradually, winding a little, then running straight down. It was the quietest place Shiva had ever been in, silent in a velvety, tactile way so that you felt you might have been stricken with deafness. And there were insects, flies and slow-wheeling transparent winged things with dangling legs, and moths. A dustiness in the air and a dustiness underfoot and a scent of something sweet and something rotten. Not like England, he had thought, not what he had expected a bit. Vivien had not spoken for some minutes and their footsteps on the sandy surface of the path, the dry turf, were soundless.

The trees parted. Briefly and absurdly, Shiva had the notion that the trees had stepped aside to reveal the house to him. It lay bathed in the afterglow of sunset, its windows turned to flat sheets of gold, a mansion it seemed to him, old and dignified and belonging in an unknown world. The breeze of dusk, the little wind that Shiva had come to learn always raised itself at about this time, fluttered through the bushes, the treetops, a clustering of feather-headed flowers, as if a living thing had passed and ruffled the leaves with its invisible paw.

It was a gentle nemesis Shiva felt was in pursuit of him, its approach slow and lightfooted, but as sure as that breeze. Whether it was Vivien who had taught him to wait and accept, or if this were an inheritance from fatalistic forebears, he did not know. But he did not specially want an awareness of the true state of things, of the progress the police were making. He would have liked Adam or Rufus to get in touch with him. Their indifference, their treating him as of no account, caused him a pain he thought he had long gotten over. In one respect only he felt glad, he felt relieved, and this was in that he had kept nothing from Lili. To his parents and his grandmother he might have lied when the expediency of lying appealed to him, but to his wife he had told only the truth. His father had died four years before, but his grandmother lived on, she and his mother sharing the Southall house, two widows, though his mother had never adopted the white sari. Abandoning that ambition to read medicine had caused Dilip Manjusri an enduring bitterness and sorrow, so much so that he hardly seemed to notice when his son gave up the pharmacology course as well. Of course by then Shiva had been very ill, had suffered a true mental breakdown that included physical collapse. It was curious, he sometimes thought, how in stories and books someone who had brought about another person’s death recovered from it immediately, was just the same afterward as before, was affected if at all only by the fear of discovery. The reality was very different. Lili understood that and it was this as much as anything that bound him to her. This was what he called his love for her.

The pharmacy closed early on Wednesdays. Shiva’s bus took him to the top of Fifth Avenue, and he walked home along the sidewalk, beside the parked cars that were like a string of colored beads, past the pub that was called The Boxer and past the grocery, both of which had their windows boarded up. There had been trouble down here the previous Saturday night, starting in The Boxer, when the barman refused to serve a man who was already drunk. The man happened to be Jamaican and the resultant mini-riot ensued, Shiva had heard, when he and his friends accused the barman of racial discrimination. A lot of windows had got broken and by the time the police arrived, someone had got as far as overturning a car. From inside their own house snug in front of the television Lili and Shiva had heard that car go over and Lili had been afraid. But the sound of the police sirens seemed to put an end to all of it, which was far from always being the case.