A Fatal Inversion (25 page)

“I’ve looked after someone’s baby before. She’d give me a reference, I think. I’m going to give her address if I’m asked.”

He hadn’t been able to see Zosie any more than he had Vivien, and it was hindsight that made him recall a stricken face, a faltering note as she asked: “Do you like babies?”

“Yes, of course. I’m a woman.”

Rufus burst out laughing.

“It isn’t funny. Women naturally like babies.”

Zosie always spoke with great simplicity. She was like a child, yet more straightforward, more naïve. “Why doesn’t his wife look after her baby?”

“I suppose she’s too rich,” said Vivien. “The baby’s got a nanny now but she’s leaving soon. There’s another child, a bit older.”

Returning to Marigold, Rufus took a longer pull at the vodka behind the curtain, then decided it was in need of recharging. He took the glass to the bottle, not the bottle to the glass. This is the way of all secret drinkers who will thus not, or less probably, be caught with a bottle in their hands. The glass he restored to its niche behind the curtain hem.

It was then, as they came into the far eastern suburbs of London, Romford and Ilford and Newbury Park, that he had thought of drawing Zosie out, of eliciting from her the answers to a few questions. The time seemed ripe, the conversation tending in appropriate directions. And he had started in with: “That wouldn’t do for you, Zosie. You wouldn’t have anything to do with babies, would you?”

The silence was long. The traffic was getting thick, three lanes of it, brakes groaning and squeaking as it pulled up at lights. As if she had been drowning, coming up with a gasp to clutch at a lifeline, in the voice of someone whose head has been underwater, Zosie said: “I would. I’d like six, I’d like twelve.”

That made him laugh. They were stopped at a red light. He turned around and looked at the two girls, at Vivien, who had taken Zosie in her arms and was holding her. It was so hot he could see a wet patch on Zosie’s back where the sweat had come through her T-shirt. Vivien’s strong, capable hands, large for someone so small, held her shoulders with maternal sureness, not patting in an embarrassed way, which is what most people do when called to take part in a spontaneous hug.

They delivered her to View Road. The house was called Cranmer Lodge, white, with a green-tiled roof and green iron balconies. Topiaried trees cut in tiers, cones of thick dark plates, stood on either side of the front door. The front gates were of wrought iron and there were stone pineapples on the gate pillars.

Zosie, who had been silent in the back except for an occasional muffled sound that might have been crying, said, “I love that house. Isn’t it lovely?”

It was big, Rufus had thought, you could say that for it, imposing and rather pretentious. He had been back there just once and that was to pick Vivien up an hour and a half later. But never again, never nearer than North Hill out of which View Road turned and on that occasion he had been taking one of the routes out of London up to the North Circular Road. The district had an unpleasant feel as if—and this was more a typical Adam reaction—it were full of eyes and memories. The school years were lost, the later days remembered. He wouldn’t dream of considering moving to Highgate, which Marigold had suggested.

Sitting down next to her, he tried to think where they had gone, Zosie and he. They had gone somewhere to kill time while Vivien was in that house—some big store it had been, or group of big stores, some shopping center. It might have been Brent Cross, or John Barnes which, at that time, had still been at Swiss Cottage.

“When did Brent Cross open?” he asked Marigold.

She turned to him, astonished. “What made you ask that?”

“I don’t know. When did it?”

“I was still at school,” she said. “I was only about eleven, I think.”

So it might have been Brent Cross. He had a distinct memory of somewhere that was air-conditioned. You hardly ever needed air conditioning in an English summer, but you did that year. The van he had parked nearby, in a car park he thought, which argued for its being Brent Cross, and now he recalled a central hall and escalators, and a feeling of excited anticipation, the stomach muscles tautening. Zosie would steal something and he wanted to see her do it. He found himself observing her as one might watch the behavior of a laboratory animal in a drug trial. All desire he had ever had for her was dead. He would not even have cared to touch her.

In and out of shops they had wandered—or simply through the departments of stores? A food department he could remember and all those clothes and the crowds and the heat. So perhaps there had been no air conditioning or only part air conditioning. If Zosie took anything from a shelf or out of one of those bins filled with stockings, with panty hose, with underclothes, he didn’t see her. He lit a cigarette and a man in a suit with a lapel badge came and asked him to put it out. Then the message came over the public address system. The exact words he had forgotten but the gist of it he remembered.

“Will the parent or person in charge of a small boy aged about three dressed in a white shirt, blue shorts, and blue sandals, please come to …”

And there had followed directions to some manager’s office where the child could be claimed. Rufus could remember perfectly where he had been when he heard the message, by some trick of memory—so arbitrarily selective, so lacking in respect for the recall one most needed—photographed forever and printed on some wall of the mind. On one side of a bank of shelves packed with cosmetics he had been and the black and silver Mary Quant packaging he could see now. Zosie was on the other side of it, hidden from him but no more than six feet away. He heard the message about the lost boy and immediately turned to find Zosie, but she was gone; she, too, was lost.

He looked for her. The place was very crowded. The curious thing was that though Zosie was beautiful she was not very memorable, she was not unusual to look at. Thousands of young girls looked like her—or superficially like her, they looked like her from a distance. They all wore jeans and T-shirts and sandals and no makeup and had hair that was very long or very short.

She knew where the van was as well as he did. She knew the time—or did she? Of course she didn’t possess a watch. But he didn’t care, he wasn’t going to wait for her past ten past four. They were due to pick Vivien up at four-thirty. If Zosie got left behind in London, she would find her way back. Home is where you go to when you have nowhere else to go. Home is the only port in a storm.

Rufus sat in the van, smoking. He saw Zosie coming toward him along the aisle between parked cars, the metal glittering, the tarmac surface quivering with heat distortion, her shadow and that of the little boy black, short, dancing. He was fair-haired, blue-eyed, bewildered. He had a white shirt on and blue shorts and blue sandals, and he was holding Zosie’s hand.

“Open the door, Rufus, quick. He can come in the back with me. Let’s get away quickly.”

Rufus wasn’t often frightened. He prided himself on being easy, laid-back, cucumber-cool. But he was frightened then, fear hit him in the pit of the stomach, it was as physical as that. He jumped out, he slammed the van door.

“Are you mad?”

He knew she was. It wasn’t a real question.

“Take him back. How did you get hold of him? No, never mind. I don’t care. Just take him back. Put him inside the doors and leave him, anything.”

“I want him, Rufus. He’s called Andrew. He said he was called Andrew. He was saying Andrew wants Mummy so I walked in and I said here’s Mummy, Andrew, whatever happened to you? I said, and come on, let’s go. They didn’t stop me, they didn’t ask anything, and he just came. Look, he likes me. We can take him back to Ecalpemos and he can live with us.”

From the first Rufus had been always aware of his future career, that he must keep his hands clean. That, at any rate, he must appear to have clean hands. It ruled him, that principle, it kept him from the worst excesses. Shiva had it, too, but Shiva was a loser; Shiva, through not being ruthless enough, would go down. Rufus had nightmares about doing something or something happening to wreck his qualifying and prevent forever what might come after qualifying. They were nightmares, but he had them in the daytime when fully conscious.

“Take him back!”

The child, up till then stunned perhaps by events, began to cry. Rufus picked him up and held him up on his shoulders. His heart was in his mouth, he literally had that feeling of choking, of imminent nausea and throwing up. But he ran across the tarmac with the child in his arms, the child who by then was screaming, ran under some sort of covered way and in through glass double doors and into the first shop he came to, a shoe shop, where he thrust the little boy into the arms of an assistant and shouted: “He’s the lost boy, he’s called Andrew. There was a message …”

Between them they nearly dropped the boy. His screams shattered the air. Rufus turned and fled. He jumped into the van, aware that he was swearing aloud, muttering every obscenity he could think of, spitting out at Zosie that he would kill her, that she was criminally insane. She was crying, lying back on the seat with her head hanging back and weeping. He brought the van out as fast as he could, his heart knocking, his hands shaking. To think of it now even started his heart going. He brought the illicit drink, the one on the table by him, up to his mouth. The vodka had warmed and sweetened. But then, nothing compared to the first taste of it.

They had driven a long way in silence—silence but for the sound of Zosie’s sobbing. He should have known then, he should have been warned. The marks on her body he had seen, the blue and therefore recent stretch marks. He had seen her look at the picture and now she had tried to steal a child. What had happened to her own baby? He did not ask, he did not speak at all. They were late collecting Vivien and, incredibly now, he was more concerned about the delay than about Zosie and what she had done or what she might do. Indeed, he had not thought at all about what she might do.

The traffic was building up because it was close to rush hour. He drove along Aylmer Road, down Archway Road and into North Hill, with a whole lot of stopping at lights that gave him the chance to turn around and tell Zosie to shut up, to control herself. There was no one following them. Of course there wasn’t. What had he expected? Police cars? Posses of policemen brandishing truncheons? The conclusion reached had probably been that he, Rufus, had found the child wandering after his second abandonment and carried him in to safety.

Zosie turned her face into Goblander’s threadbare upholstery and drew her legs up into the fetal position. She had stopped crying. Rufus turned into View Road, seeing ahead of him Vivien waiting, seated on a garden wall, her bright blue dress incongruous among all the greens and grays, the hard whiteness of the light and faded lawns.

She got in beside him, gave Zosie a glance, and looked discreetly away.

“How did you make out?”

“It was his sister I saw, not his wife. His wife’s dead. She died when the child was born, she had an embolism or something.”

“Unusual,” said Rufus, “but it still does happen.” He started driving back toward North Circular Road.

Zosie put her head up. “What’s an embolism?”

“A bubble of air in a vein, and if it touches the heart or the brain you die. Is that right, Rufus?”

“More or less,” he said. Already, even at that time, he disliked discussing these esoteric matters with lay people. “Did you get the job or don’t you know?”

“They’re going to let me know. The sister was interviewing some more people before she goes back to America. She lives in America. They’ve got a nanny now for Nicola—that’s the baby—and the other little girl, Naomi, but she’s leaving, she’s getting married.”

Zosie said, “How old is the little baby?”

“She’s nine months old.”

“What is she like? Is she lovely?”

“Yes, of course. Beautiful.” Vivien hesitated. She lightly touched Rufus’s arm. “Do you know, I think I’ve done something silly. She said she’d write to me and I told her my address was Ecalpemos, Nunes, Suffolk. It isn’t really called that, is it?”

“It’s Wyvis Hall,” said Rufus, laughing. “You’ll have to phone them and set them right.”

“Or just wait and phone in a couple of weeks time. She said she’d let me know in about two weeks.”

Recalling this, Rufus thought that at least the presence of a Miss Vivien Goldman at Wyvis Hall in July 1976 could not be traced through the post office. No officious clerk with a superlative memory would be around to remember an envelope. Nor had that pretty postwoman ever brought a letter from Robin Tatian to the front door and left it in the box at the top of the drift. Such a letter had been written, addressed to Ecalpemos, and perhaps eventually returned to its sender, marked “unknown.”

Only Adam had received letters while there: that demand to pay the rates, and on the last day an electric bill. Sometimes, though, Rufus had lifted the lid off the big wooden mailbox that was up near the road on the pinewood side and looked inside. He had done so that day on their return from London and found lying there, a dead leaf on top of it, a copy of the Nunes parish magazine.

Halfway down the drift they met Adam and Shiva coming up, off to view the animal cemetery which Shiva must have just discovered. He parked Goblander and it was then that Zosie showed him what else she had stolen—a small, mass-produced camera. They all got out and followed the others up to the pinewood, Vivien scolding Zosie in a mild motherly way, reproaching her for being “a little thief.” Rufus could remember Zosie’s sulky face and the way she took dancing steps and fluttered her hands. He could remember the slanting rays of the sun penetrating the wood, and the muted tuneless twitter of birds going to roost.

“Do you want another drink?” said Marigold.

He shook his head. She turned off the television, picked up his empty glass, touched his shoulder in a vaguely caressing way as she went from the room. Rufus retrieved his secret drink, wondering if she knew about it, if she had known all the time, but tactfully did not say. Once or twice he had forgotten to remove and wash the secret drink glass, but it had been gone next day.