A Fatal Inversion (39 page)

“I felt responsible for her and I didn’t want to be. I just saw all this as adding to my troubles. If she didn’t go the next day, what would Adam do? I was afraid all the time, too, of the police just turning up.

“In the middle of the afternoon I packed the two bags I’d brought with me, I didn’t have much and they weren’t very heavy. I’d made up my mind to walk to Colchester. It was ten miles, but I thought I could walk ten miles, as I’d been having a lot of exercise lately, I was quite fit. Some motorist might stop and give me a lift, I thought.”

“What about your responsibility for Vivien?” said Lili.

“I’d tried to dissuade her from phoning Mr. Tatian. I’d tried telling her that sometimes she should put herself first. It was useless. And I was no good to her anymore. She took up with me in the first place because I was Indian and she had some sort of mystical feeling about Indians, that they had something special to offer her, that they were more civilized than other people. But she’d found out that I was just ordinary, just like anyone else only inside a brown skin. I wasn’t a prophet or a poet or a saint.

“I told her I was going, I didn’t just sneak off. Rufus I couldn’t get hold of, he had shut himself up in the Centaur Room and locked the door. She didn’t put up any objections, I think she was glad to see the back of me. I walked off up the drift carrying my bags and when I got halfway up I met Adam coming out of the wood.

“He begged me not to go, he implored me. It was flattering, that, to be wanted at last. He said he relied on me to take Vivien away. If she was allowed to do what she wanted and phone Mr. Tatian and give up the job, she would stay on at Ecalpemos, he would never get rid of her. So I went back to the house with him. I gave in.”

“Did you try to get Vivien to go?”

“Where could I take her? That was the trouble with all of us. We had nowhere to go except back to our parents. We could either stay where we were or go back to our families. And Zosie, or so we thought, didn’t even have that. In the end Rufus drove Vivien to the village to phone Mr. Tatian, but she couldn’t get a reply. There was nothing to do but for her to try again the next day.

“You know what happened the next day. I’ve told you before.”

“I know what happened,” Lili said.

“And after that I went home and immediately I got ill. It was a sort of nervous breakdown, they said. I was ill for a year and by then I’d given up the idea of being a doctor. I gave up the pharmacology too. You see, I could never make myself see it as all inevitable, as something I couldn’t have prevented. If I’d stuck by Vivien in the first place, Rufus would have supported us, he was nearly there. If I’d said the baby must go back, we’d have taken her back somehow.”

“And Rufus—and Adam—might have had some respect for you.”

Shiva shrugged. “Perhaps the baby wouldn’t have died. Rufus thought she wouldn’t have if she’d been at home or with people who knew how to look after her. Adam and Zosie neglected her, though that was the last thing they meant to do. They didn’t know, they were ignorant.

“I could have taken Vivien to my auntie. It would have been a hassle, there would have been a lot of explaining, but I could have done it. It seemed easier to try to persuade her to go to Mr. Tatian as she had undertaken she would. I thought I could talk her into it. I didn’t see what harm waiting another day would do… .”

It was a windy, cool evening of sporadic rain. Of all of them the only one who was innocent and tranquil was Vivien, who cooked a lentil dish and made a salad. The plums had been turned into a sort of mousse. While the food was cooking, Vivien stood in the kitchen ironing the blue dress. And upstairs, drugged by Rufus’s barbiturates, Zosie slept on.

Adam could remember very clearly destroying the radio. He took it up into the wood in the afternoon, smashed it with a heavy stone, and buried the pieces under the thick soft leafmold. Coming back he had met Shiva sneaking off, running away really, but he had made him stay on. When she had finished her ironing, Vivien started looking for the radio. She wanted to hear what the Ryemarks’ reaction had been to the return of their child, she wanted to rejoice with them, she said. Adam went upstairs to look at Zosie. Every five minutes he went in to look at her. She was still asleep and he didn’t like it in spite of what Rufus had said, he didn’t like her sleeping on and on like that, dead to the world.

Vivien thought she hadn’t come down because she was too upset at parting from the baby. She said she would go up and talk to her and offer her some of her Bach rescue remedy and when Adam said no, not to do that, she was asleep, she said: “Will it be all right if I stay on a bit, Adam, just till I find myself a job?”

“You’ve got a job,” Shiva said. “Why don’t you just go ahead and take the one you’ve got?”

“I’ve told you why. It wouldn’t be right. I should be deceiving him. Mrs. Ryemark might come to the house with her baby and I should be acting a lie even if I wasn’t telling one.”

“Life is too short to be so circumspect.”

“How do you know it is, Adam? You’re no older than me, you’re not as old, so how do you know better? I think life’s too long to do anything that we know is wrong before we begin.”

She had been so earnest, yet so meek, too, never aggressive but talking in that soft low serious voice, humorless, utterly sincere. He saw her as one of those incubi that appear along life’s route, clinging, insinuating, almost impossible to shake off.

“You can’t stay here,” he said, surly, short, looking down at the plate of food she had cooked.

She was terribly taken aback. This was not what she expected. “I mean for only a week or two.”

“I am staying here alone with Zosie and that’s final.”

She looked at him, her hand going up to her mouth.

“Okay, so you think I’m ungrateful. I’m not. Thanks very much for all you’ve done. But it’s over, right? The party’s over, the summer’s over. Shiva’s going and Rufus is going and I’m afraid you’ll have to too. Now excuse me, will you?”

He just made it to the bathroom. He held his head over the lavatory pan and was repeatedly sick.
Mal au coeur
was what the French called feeling sick and that was about right, that was how he felt, sick at heart. In the Pincushion Room Zosie slept, lying on her back, breathing regularly. He thought, suppose she isn’t asleep, suppose she’s in a coma? But he had to trust Rufus, he would trust him.

In the Deathbed Room where the newly ironed blue dress hung on a hanger from the wardrobe door handle, he unhooked the picture from the wall and with the dusty paper backing outward and the painted scene turned against his chest, he took it downstairs and outside into the garden. He was going to make a fire.

The site for it was just this side of the fruit garden wall. Adam had never before made a bonfire, but he thought paraffin might assist him and he found some in a can in the stables. The gale had blown dead branches and twigs down from the big trees. He went around gathering them up, looking with dismay at his wrecked garden. His lost Eden. The picture he threw into the flames without removing it from its frame. There was nothing subtle or ominous about its burning. A sheet of fire leaped from the shellac on the frame and engulfed glass and picture in seconds. The portable crib burned less easily. No doubt it was purposely made from some nonflammable material.

Later on, because he could not bear to think of sleeping—or even just remaining—in the same place with it, he took the drawer and its contents into the Room of Astonishment. He couldn’t even remember why they had called it that, for there was nothing astonishing in there except a staircase that wound up into the loft from a closet The room was on the opposite side of the passage from the Deathbed Room but north facing and always rather dark. No one went in there.

He did not immediately get into bed beside the still heavily sleeping Zosie. His fire was still burning. He had lit it too close to the wall of the fruit garden and the smoke had blackened the bricks. That much could be seen from the window in the lasting glow from the fire. The night was dark, gusts of wind rising from time to time, moving black branches against a faintly paler sky. Earlier, before they separated for the night, he had said to Rufus that a kind of poetic justice would have been for the flames to spread to the house and set it on fire. At this point there would have been a rightness about the destruction of Ecalpemos.

A light moved on the lawn. It was someone with a torch. Adam saw that it was Shiva going up to look at the fire and obscurely he resented this, seeing it as interference. But he did nothing, only watched, saw Shiva take hold of a dead branch and poke at the fire, sending cascades of sparks into the air like fireworks.

Lili had left Shiva a note. It wasn’t that sort of note, the sort he dreaded when first he saw the white square held firm on the table by a small vase with two chrysanthemums in it, but the customary line or two she sometimes wrote to remind him she had gone to her Bengali lesson.

He got himself some food from the fridge, tried to watch television. There was nothing about Wyvis Hall on television but there never had been since that first time. If he wanted an evening paper he would have to walk the length of the street to get it and he did not much care for the idea of that. He had not looked at his face in a mirror since he reached home but now he did and saw that his face was cut on his right cheekbone, a dried trickle of blood running down from the punctured skin.

Lili would be home by nine. He decided to meet her. The presence of the graffiti made him decide that, though he was by no means sure how he would be received, whether or not she had rejected him. The idea dismayed him, and if he had not clenched his hands and set his teeth, panic would have taken hold of him. He turned the television on again and made himself watch a quiz show. At about a quarter to nine he went out into the hall and picked up the letter to Sabine Schnitzler. There was no stamp on it. Shiva had a stamp in his wallet, he had several, eighteens and thirteens. Neither would be sufficient for a letter to Switzerland, but two thirteens would be enough. He stuck two thirteen-pence stamps on the envelope and thought, suppose she is writing to her mother to ask if she can come to her when she has left me, I should be carrying, so to speak, my own death warrant to the executioner. But he took the letter with him just the same and mailed it on the way to Lili’s friend’s house which was on Third Avenue.

He had timed it so that she was just coming down the steps from the front door. Salwar and kamiz she was again wearing this evening with her brown tweed winter coat over the pink silk trousers. In the dark the pallor of her skin did not show. If she took his arm, he thought, he would know all was well. She did take it, but lifelessly, and he knew nothing. They walked along in silence and there were no flying stones, no catcalls, no other people even.

The graffiti on his mind as they turned into Fifth Avenue, Shiva nevertheless decided not to point out the spray-paint letters to Lili. Approaching from this direction she might not see them. Of course she would see them tomorrow, but things were different in daylight. They came up to the gate and Lili wasn’t looking to her left and didn’t see them. In the distance Shiva heard someone make a whooping sound and then the noise of a tin can being kicked began. He hustled Lili quickly into the house and drew across both bolts on the front door.

As they were getting ready for bed he forced himself to ask her if she had forgiven him.

“I don’t see that it’s for me to forgive you things you didn’t do to me,” she said quite reasonably.

“All right then. Can you forget?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I haven’t forgotten,” and that was all she would say.

Shiva lay in bed beside her—at least tonight she had not stayed up till goodness knows when, saying she wasn’t tired—and thought what a fool he was to talk of forgetting when things had not really begun yet, when the gathering forces were only just starting the work of retribution. She would not be
allowed
to forget, he thought.

The sound of running feet awakened him. Feet came running down from the Forest Road end of Fifth Avenue, pounding on the sidewalk—two pairs of feet, he thought, but there were no vocal sounds. And that was odd, for those people never moderated their voices or restrained their words because it was the early hours and others were sleeping. The footsteps slackened, it seemed outside his own house, and it came to him that they might be writing more words on the fence. But then his letterbox, the box on the front door, gave a double metallic snap and he knew that they, whoever they were, had put something through it. Not something disgusting, he hoped. He heard feet stamping and the gate banged. Once before a parcel had come in this fashion and though he had never opened it, from the feel and the smell he guessed it was full of viscera, the insides of a chicken probably.

The feet that stamped kicked at a tin can. The clanging the can made, not merely kicked but kicked from one side of the street across to the other, woke Lili. She sat up and held him. Shiva put a bedlamp on. Even in his fear he was happy that it was to him she turned instinctively, holding onto his arm, looking up into his face.

“Something came through the door,” he said. “I’ll go down.”

“Don’t go down.”

The sound of the rolling can went on and on, growing fainter but still audible. They had left the window open a little way at the top and the curtains quivered.

“I suppose the morning will do,” he said. “It won’t go away, will it?”

He put the light out. He felt the tenseness slowly go out of her, knowing that as soon as she relaxed she would sleep. Her back just touched his back and he was pleased because she did not flinch away. The deep silence that had succeeded the clatter came into the room and filled it with peace and filled Shiva’s head, too, bringing the beginnings of sleep, the first hesitant waverings on the edge of unconsciousness.

It was the smell that brought him back from the brink and into total wakefulness. Because he was confused he thought for a moment that he was smelling the contents of the parcel. And in a way, of course, he was.