A Fatal Inversion (38 page)

That day, that first time, he had gone up the stairs two at a time and run into the Pincushion Room and snatched the child out of the cradle Zosie had made for her in a drawer. Zosie was sitting naked on the bed rocking from side to side, an unearthly unhuman sound issuing from her closed lips, a thin, catlike wail. The baby felt cool but not cold, her face waxen but not blue, her blue eyes clear and staring but empty of their vital force. Rufus tipped her upside down and began compressing her chest with his thumb. He gave her kisses of life, his mouth over her cold, pearly lips.

“She was lying with her face down,” Adam kept saying. “She was lying with her face down.”

Zosie’s keening rose an octave.

“Make her shut up,” Rufus said. “Take her away.”

She wouldn’t go, she clung to the bedpost. Rufus continued to work on the baby, but he knew she was dead, it was useless, hopeless, she had been dead before he began. He could feel what little warmth remained in the tiny fragile body receding under his hands.

“What is it? What happened to her?”

Rufus didn’t stop even then. He didn’t look at Adam.

“Sudden Infant Death Syndrome,” he said. “Cot death to you.”

18

THEY WERE NOT EXPERIENCED
parents. They didn’t know about babies, how they don’t let you sleep until ten or eleven in the morning. Adam had not even thought about it. He would have been surprised and even angry if the baby had disturbed him in the night or wakened him early, but he wasn’t at all troubled by these things not taking place. Nine years afterward, when he was married and Abigail was newly born, he scarcely slept, he was too afraid, and when he grew hopelessly exhausted and fell into a doze he would wake and jump up in horror, certain Abigail had died while he slept. For nearly three months, until Abigail had passed the age of Catherine Ryemark, he had made Anne take turns with him in staying awake to watch over her. Or, rather, he had tried to make Anne take turns, and it was her unwilling halfhearted compliance and her ridiculing of his fears that had caused so much damage to their marriage. It made an abyss between them, only Adam knew that it was his own past experience and personal knowledge that had really caused this rift.

He had fallen asleep that night while it was still very dark, two or three hours before dawn probably. Just before he woke up he dreamed he was out with Hilbert’s gun in the wood when a large animal appeared between the trees in the distance. Adam saw, though without surprise, that the animal was a lioness, a beautiful nervous beast of a pale straw color. He lifted the gun and took aim, but before he could fire, someone seized him. He woke up to find Zosie shaking him.

“You were making awful noises. You were snorting.”

The room was full of clear gray light. It was broad daylight but for the first time for months there was no sun. He turned over and put his arms around Zosie and she cuddled up to him.

“Isn’t Catherine good? She’s slept for hours and hours. She must like it here, she must like us.”

“I don’t suppose it’s very late. It’s probably only about six. Go to sleep again.”

“I’ve had enough sleep,” said Zosie. “I do feel happy. Are you happy?”

“Of course I am.”

“I wish I could show her to my mother. But I don’t suppose I can.”

“Don’t even think of it.” Worries of the day ahead had begun to crowd into his mind, pushing sleep away. Rufus was going and with him they would lose their transportation. He couldn’t remember what he had done with the letter, brought it up here with him or left it with Shiva. He put out his hand to the table by the bed, feeling blindly for the envelope he might have left there, encountered instead his watch. “You were right,” he said to Zosie. “It’s ten past eleven.”

She sat up. In seconds she was out of bed and across the room. “Poor Catherine will want her breakfast!”

What fools they had been, what children, not to know that when a healthy baby wants breakfast it yells for it. It doesn’t lie meekly waiting like some elderly hospital patient. Zosie knelt down, she bent over the drawer, gave a shocked gasp, then a long high scream. He would never forget the sound of that scream or his own sight of the baby, her face deep into the pillow, her body utterly still, and the feel of her skin, cool and waxen.

They got Rufus, or he did. Zosie sat on the bed, hugging herself, swaying back and forth, making a noise like a cat howling. Adam meant to try to explain lucidly to Rufus but all he could say was, “She was lying face downward, she was lying face downward.”

Rufus turned the baby upside down and massaged her chest and gave her the kiss of life. She had been dead long before he got to the Pincushion Room, before they even woke up, perhaps before dawn. If he had looked at her while he lay wakeful listening to the rain and the dripping gutter, could he have saved her then? He knew it was what they called cot death before Rufus told him.

Zosie pushed him away screaming when he tried to get her out of the room. She knelt at Rufus’s feet and put her arms around his knees and said in a little thin mad voice that the baby had died because she had swallowed her ring.

“She did
what
?”

“Of course she didn’t swallow your ring,” said Adam.

“You’ve got your ring on.”

It was the only thing Zosie did have on. He pulled the sheet off the bed and wrapped it around her. She began keening again. In a singsong voice she said, “I put my ring on her but her little fingers were too small for it.”

“It’s nothing to do with your ring,” said Rufus. “It’s not known what causes cot death but it may have something to do with the respiratory center in the brain that controls breathing shutting off.”

Adam was trying to control a desire to scream himself. “What makes that happen?” he said, stammering.

“It could be some sort of infection or have something to do with inhaling food—I mean milk in this case. Perhaps she had a cold. Did you hear her wheezing?”

Adam couldn’t remember. He said helplessly: “What are we going to do?”

Rufus didn’t answer him. He said something Adam would never forget, that would haunt him forever, whatever the outcome of all this. And he said it to be cruel.

“There is a theory that cot death could be due to fear. Things are not the way the child has been used to. The tranquility of routine has been disturbed. It isn’t the mother’s face that the child sees when first she wakes.”

Adam shuddered. He felt himself shrink in pain. They both looked at the demented girl rocking herself this way and that, her head flung back, animal sounds trickling from her half-open mouth. Rufus’s words had not touched her. She hadn’t heard them.

“I’ve got something I can give her.” Rufus meant a sedative drug. “And we ought to make her a hot drink.”

It was then that Adam caught sight of the envelope with the Ryemarks’ name and address printed on it sticking out of Rufus’s pocket. He made a sound of pain and put his hands up over his mouth.

“Christ,” he said, “that bloody letter.”

“It doesn’t matter now.”

“Did you mean that? Is it true? I mean about the baby being afraid because it’s the wrong face it sees?”

“It’s what I’ve heard. It’s a theory I read somewhere.”

“Why should she die because she was afraid?”

“I’m not saying she did. It’s only a theory. No one’s proved it. You know how animals play dead? Pretend to be dead to deceive a predator? The theory is that it’s something like that babies do and then they really do die.”

Adam turned away his face.

“You’re not making me feel any better.”

“I’m not in the business of making you feel better,” Rufus said roughly. “I’m telling you what I think, what the possibilities are. Right?”

“You won’t go, will you, Rufus?” Adam said like a child, pleading like a small child. “For God’s sake, don’t go and leave me with this lot.”

“I won’t go,” said Rufus.

Zosie had stuffed the end of the sheet into her mouth. Her head hung down over her knees. The sounds she was making were like the grunts of a gagged person.

“What are we going to do?” Adam said again.

“Stay here. I’ll get her something.”

Adam tried to put his arms around Zosie. He tried to pull away the sheet from her mouth. The muffled noises she made turned to a thin, choked scream emerging from the folds of sheet. He turned away, twisting his hands within each other, wringing them. He looked at the dead little baby with feelings of terror and pity and disbelief. She lay on her back, her eyes wide open, her skin bloodless, pale as ivory. Remembering something he had read of or perhaps seen in films, he pulled Vivien’s red shawl up to cover her face.

Rufus came back with something hot in a mug. He had got barbiturates from somewhere, “downers” that he had bought from Chuck, Adam thought. Zosie hit out at the mug and Rufus nearly dropped it, tea splashing everywhere. But after a while he did manage to calm her, easing the sheet from between her lips, talking softly to her, not comforting her but telling her screaming and crying wouldn’t help, would make things worse. He held the two red and black capsules out on the palm of his hand and offered her the half-empty tea mug and, silent now, white and aghast, she took the capsules and drank, gagging on the tea with a sob, but drinking it down.

Watching Rufus’s every movement, Adam realized he was relying on him utterly. Rufus would save them; Rufus would be their rock.

“Don’t ask me what we’re going to do, please,” Rufus said. “Don’t ask me that again. I don’t know yet.”

“Can we keep it from the others?”

“Shiva knows,” said Rufus.

Zosie went to sleep very quickly. She had already slept for about twelve hours and a couple on the previous afternoon, but that didn’t stop her sleeping again.

“If she’s never had these things before,” said Rufus in a tone of satisfaction, “she’ll probably sleep all day and half the night.”

They told him nothing. Shiva had minded more about that than about the baby’s death. Well, then he had, at that particular time. Remorse came later. At the time his exclusion from the drama, the tragedy being enacted at Ecalpemos, mattered more to him than anything.

He and Rufus had been talking about the ransom note and Shiva had felt quite sufficiently put down and admonished. Rufus was going back to change the tire on the van and he, Shiva, was thinking he would offer to help and thereby—yes, he admitted it—get himself back into Rufus’s good graces. Up till then, up till that moment, he still cherished dreams of Rufus saying, “Let me know when you get into medical school. Give me a ring. We might meet and have a drink.” But then Adam had come running downstairs, saying he wanted Rufus, Rufus must come because he thought the baby was dead.

Shiva just stood there in the hall. Then he walked through the house to the kitchen and started to make tea. He made all the movements mechanically just to have something to do, to keep moving. Besides, he felt the need for strong hot tea. At that time he thought Adam—or Zosie—had somehow killed the baby. He decided he would tell Vivien—to be revenged upon them presumably.

In a little while Rufus came in and saw the teapot on the stove and said: “Pour me a cup of that, would you?”

Distant, doctorlike, indifferent.

“What’s happened?” Shiva said.

“You heard Adam say, didn’t you? The baby’s dead.”

Rufus took the note out of his pocket, opened the door of the stove and thrust the envelope inside, on top of the glowing coal. He went back the way he had come without another word, carrying the tea mug. Shiva went outside and into the garden, looking for Vivien.

He had told all this to Lili last night, before he made his confession, how he meant to find Vivien and tell her everything. The two of them together could go to the police and explain everything that had happened. The ransom note seemed unimportant, an irrelevancy. It was destroyed now anyway, burned, and it might never have existed.

And then, as he walked along the grass below the terrace, passing the stone figures he had always thought ugly and antierotic, he realized that Vivien would ask him why Adam had not taken the baby back on the previous night as he had undertaken to do and he, Shiva, would have to explain that it was he who had stopped him. A glimmering of that feeling of self-hatred began at that moment. He stood still, his hand to his forehead, looking around him, looking at the garden.

“If I had been asked,” he said, “I would have said the garden was a blaze of color, a mass of flowers, but in fact by then there were no more flowers. They were all over, finished, or else dried up. I looked at the place that morning, I looked with new eyes, I suppose, and it was just a wilderness I saw, a desert. The rain had come too late. There were dead trees with the leaves shriveled on them and plants dried up like straw. The apples were being eaten up by wasps and the plums Vivien brought in from the fruit garden were full of worms.

“We sat in the kitchen cutting up the plums for stewing, cutting out the maggoty bits. It made you feel sort of sick, you didn’t feel like eating them. I knew I wouldn’t eat them when Vivien had cooked them anyway. I just went on doing it mechanically. What I wanted to do was run away. I wanted to run away and hide, cut myself off absolutely from that place and everyone in it. It was dreadful being in that kitchen with Vivien and hearing her talk so—well, innocently. Rufus had told her the baby had been taken back to its parents, that Adam and he had taken it back, and she was relieved in a grave sort of way. She said to me she didn’t think she could go to Mr. Tatian now, though. She couldn’t take the job after what she knew, the Ryemarks being people he knew, you see. It would be wrong, it would involve deceit.

“Vivien was so circumspect in every aspect of her life. She daily examined her motives and her actions, it was all-important to her. Although she wasn’t prepared to tell lies, she thought she could go so far as to phone Mr. Tatian and tell him circumstances beyond her control prevented her taking the job. That was true, after all. It grieved her to let him down at the last moment, but as she saw it, she had no choice. The facts that she would have nowhere to live, nowhere to go, no income, didn’t affect her decision at all. As soon as the van came back she would get Adam or Rufus to take her to the village and from there she would phone.