Authors: Ruth Rendell
A crackling sound ripped through the house, a mindless chattering. Shiva got out of bed, smelling the burning which was strong enough to make him cough, to choke him, sucking the oxygen out of the air. He ran across the room and threw the door open and saw the whole hall on fire, a pit of fire down there, the flames strong and thrusting and greedy, as if fire were eating the house.
He gave a cry that was lost in the roaring of the fire. The flames came to climb the stairs and eat the banisters. Through it he could not see the door to the living room, which they had left open and through which the fire had burst and driven. A cascade of sparks broke over the burning staircase. Shiva retreated into the bedroom, slamming the door behind him, covering his mouth with clamped hands,
Whimpering, crying out, calling to Lili, he threw up the window sash and as he did so a great tongue of flame shot up from the burning bay below him. It seared his face and he backed, his hands up, as the long, curling, crackling flames licked into the room.
He turned blindly back to the bed and picked up the sobbing Lili in his arms.
THE SOMBER PHOTOGRAPH
of the blackened house, the account of the preceding fire and the search for arsonists, served only to remind Adam of that last night at Ecalpemos. He recalled how he had half-hoped, half-dreaded, his own house catching fire. It was an Indian man and his wife who had lived in that little terraced box on Walthamstow Street and they were both dead, the man dying in an attempt to save his wife, she surviving for an hour or two after the ambulance reached the hospital. A deliberate racist act, some policeman said on television. Adam did not catch the name of the couple or bother to read about them in the newspaper.
He fancied that during the previous night he had heard the sirens of fire engines. But would such vehicles be permitted to have sirens on at that hour? He didn’t know. Perhaps he had imagined it, just as, ten years ago, he had imagined the sound of footfalls circling the house on that last night, or had dreamed of them.
Sometimes he thought that it was then he lost the ability to sleep soundly. His sleeping since had always been light, precarious. The footsteps passed beneath his window, went on, stopped, continued toward the corner of the house where the Centaur Room was and Rufus slept and went on to the stables. The sky was lightening, with dawn not sunrise. A bird cried, it could not have been called a song.
What had he feared? That they had tracked the kidnappers of the baby here? If so, what he did was foolhardy in the extreme. But he had not known what he was doing, he was overwhelmed and conquered by his instinct for self-preservation. He ran downstairs and into the gun room and took Hilbert’s shotgun down off the wall. He loaded the gun and stepped into the dining room, approached the window, hiding behind the curtain.
There was no one there. He went into the hall and listened. The birds had begun their chorus, the twitterings of autumn, not spring birdsong. But there was no other sound. He opened the front door and went outside, the gun cocked. He must have been mad. Suppose it had been the police out there, for who else would have come searching for Catherine Ryemark?
Ecalpemos lay gray and barren in the gray morning. It was rather cold, the air having a chilly, humid feel, and he could smell stale woodsmoke. Still carrying the gun, he went to look at the site of his fire. It was dead, a sprawl of gray ash with the blackened metal frame of the portable crib balanced on a half-burned branch. He was aware of an awful silence, the deep silence of the countryside at dawn which the sound of birds does not seem to mitigate, as if the birdsong were something else, were on a different level of perception.
Had he dreamed those footsteps? It would seem so. He had no inclination to go back to bed but took himself into the gun room and huddled there in the Windsor chair with the gun beside him. He must have dozed off, for he awoke freezing cold in spite of Hilbert’s old shooting coat he had slipped his arms into. From the kitchen he could hear Vivien moving around and singing. Perhaps she always sang when she got up in the mornings. He had in the past been too far away to hear. It was “We Shall Overcome” that she was singing, the hymn of resistance, and the sentiments expressed maddened him, the simplicity of it and the assumptions.
He went upstairs. At last Zosie was awake. At the sight of him she gave an inarticulate cry and burst into tears, clinging to him, sobbing into his shoulder. It was strange and horrifying what had happened to him in those past twenty-four hours. He had lost his love for her. Overnight really it had gone. He had thought his feelings everlasting, profound, a reason for existence, as if he and she were all those things true lovers were supposed to be, one flesh, two halves of the one whole, all in all to each other and the world excluded. Twenty-four hours before he had wanted nothing so much as to live here at Ecalpemos with her, the others gone, the two of them in solitary bliss. She had been all sexuality to him but she had also been his high goddess. He was miserably aware now that it was a poor little frightened girl he held in his arms, an infantile creature, not very bright, not even very pretty.
“Stop crying,” he said. “Please. Try and get yourself together.”
She sobbed and shivered.
“Where’s Catherine?”
“In our room. In the other room. She’s to stay there, you’re to leave her there, Zosie. Listen, we have to take her away from here today, we have to hide her somewhere. Yes, stop, please”—for she had begun to cry out in protest—“Zosie, she’s dead. You know she’s dead. She’s not a baby anymore, she’s not
there.
It wasn’t our fault but we have to look after ourselves now. You don’t want them to put you in prison, do you? You don’t want us all to go to prison?”
He had meant to say that they would do what they had to do and then they must start to forget, come back here, just the two of them, and start forgetting. But he couldn’t say it because he no longer wanted this. He didn’t want to be here alone with her or anywhere with her. As for the two of them living together, having their own child …
Her face was swollen with tears, almost ugly. She smelled of sweat. He would have liked to shake her till her teeth chattered. It was your fault, he wanted to say to her, you brought all this on us, you with your crazy hunger for babies, your kleptomania, your lies. But he only set her upright on the bed, wiped her face on a corner of the sheet, handed her clothes to her item by item, helping her to dress.
“I’m not meant to have babies, Adam. Why are all my babies taken away from me?”
He was impatient with her.
“It wasn’t yours. You’d no business with it.”
“She.
With
her.
She was a person.” She pulled the gray sweater over her head, pushed her fingers through the fine pale hair. “Where are her things? Her clothes?”
“I burned them. I made a fire and burned everything.”
As he looked again at the photograph, the skeleton of the house, its girders a blackened rib cage, he seemed to hear her wail again, her keening cry, fists clenched and shaken in the air. The shell of the portable crib had looked not unlike the burned bones of that house, reared up on a bed of smoldering ash with a soot-bleared wall behind.
Vivien was in the kitchen in her cream-colored dress, making tea in the big brown teapot Adam could remember his aunt Lilian using. And Shiva and Rufus sat on either side of the table, Rufus slicing up one of Vivien’s smooth round loaves of brown bread topped with poppy seeds. It was like any other morning, any other day, only everything was happening much earlier. And outside, a little thin rain was blown in gusts against the windowpanes. He sat Zosie down at the table and put food in front of her, a mug of tea, a piece of bread with butter and honey. She began picking off the tiny blue poppy seeds and placing them on her tongue. She’s mad, he thought, she’s lost her mind.
Somewhere in the house a chiming began. A clock was striking. Adam started and shuddered. None of Hilbert’s clocks had been set going since they came there.
“What the hell’s that?”
“I wound up the grandfather clock,” Rufus said. “On an impulse.”
“Fuck you,” Adam said, trembling. “Why can’t you mind your own business?”
Ten times the clock struck. Last week he had hardly known there was such a time as ten in the morning. Vivien pushed a mug of tea over to him.
“Have a drink, Adam. It’ll make you feel better.”
Like a half-drowned kitten, Zosie looked, a rescued creature for whom there is yet no hope. She had her forefinger in her mouth, pulling down one corner of it. Vivien said, “Would one of you drive me to the village? I should like to phone Mr. Tatian.”
Shiva looked angry. “You’re still insisting on that? You realize how you are letting the poor man down, don’t you? He is relying on you to come and be nurse to his children. What will he do? Have you thought of that?”
“It’s impossible,” Vivien said. “I can’t go there. Anything is better than my going there.”
“I shall leave here without you then. I have my future to think of even if you haven’t.”
Adam could tell Vivien was waiting for him to say she could stay, that she would be welcome, but he wasn’t going to say it. The bread they were eating she had made. Because of her the house was clean and everything smooth-running. By her housekeeping and her management she had probably saved him from denuding the place of furniture but he couldn’t ask her to stay. Rufus hadn’t looked at him since that outburst over the clock but now he did and Adam thought he could read a lot into that glance, especially when Rufus said, addressing himself to Vivien: “I’ll take you back to London with me, if you like. If you want to go back to that squat you were living in, I don’t mind taking you over to Hammersmith.”
But Catherine Ryemark? What was Rufus indicating here? That he would take the tiny body with him or that he, Adam, left alone, was somehow to conceal it?
Rufus said, “Do you want to go into the village now?”
“The sooner the better, I suppose.” Vivien looked troubled. She was making a decision to act quite against her personal desires, Adam could tell. She was doing this, as she did so many things, for an abstract principle. It mystified and mildly annoyed him. “I’ll just go up and get my shawl,” she said. “It’s got quite cold. We’ve forgotten it gets cold but it does.”
It was at this point that the post girl came. Shiva was the first to hear her. He sat quite still at the table, his head turned.
“What the hell’s that?” Adam said.
They all thought it was the police, even Rufus. He got up and moved to a yard or two inside the window. The letterbox on the front door made its double rap and by that time Adam had been into the gun room and come back with Hilbert’s shotgun. Shiva jumped up.
“My God!”
The red bicycle passed the window, a flash of red and silver only, as a bird might have flown by or a flag been pulled out by the wind. Rufus came in from the hall with an envelope in his hand.
“It was the mail,” he said. “A bill. Are you crazy?”
“Jesus,” said Adam, “I thought it was the fuzz.”
“We all thought it was the fuzz. What were you going to do if it was? Kill them?”
“I don’t know. Did they see you?”
“It was that girl again. How do I know if she saw me?” Rufus looked at the gun that Adam held pointing at the table. Limp, pale, wide-eyed, Zosie stared apathetically into the muzzle of it. “Put the bloody thing down. Christ, the sooner I get out of this madhouse the better.”
From upstairs, a long way off, Vivien’s voice came to them in a strange, drawn-out cry. Not a scream or a howl but a round O sound immensely protracted, a cry of sorrow.
They knew what had happened, what she had found. She had gone to look for her shawl. Adam, too late, remembered where that shawl was, that it had been used to cover the body in the tallboy drawer. Unable to find the shawl in her own room, Vivien had gone looking for it, recalling no doubt that she had lent it to Zosie for the baby.
They found themselves moving closer together, taking up a united stand along the back and the head of the table. Zosie got up and held on to Adam. There was silence in the kitchen but for Shiva clearing his throat, a nervous, muffled sound. Adam thought of the post girl, still not far off, no doubt having to push her bike up the drift… .
Vivien’s footsteps sounded, running, along the passage, down the back stairs. Zosie began to whimper.
“Shut up,” Adam said. “Shut up or I’ll kill you.”
Vivien opened the door and came in, her tanned face bleached as if she had jaundice. Her eyes had become big and staring, the whites showing all around the irises. She was goosefleshed and the down on her arms stood erect. He felt the hair rise on his own neck.
Incongruously Vivien said, “What are you doing with that gun?” And then, “Haven’t you done enough damage?”
“It was cot death, Vivien.” Rufus took a step toward her but she recoiled from him. “It was no one’s fault. These things happen. It would probably have happened if the child had been in her own home.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Why should I tell lies about it? We’re all in this together. There’s no point throwing the shit around.”
“You’ve lied to me once. You said you’d taken the baby back.”
It was unanswerable. “Okay,” Adam said. “We lied to you but we’re not lying now.” He wished he could keep his voice steady, he wished he could control the muscles of his mouth and throat. Rufus could. “D’you think Zosie would have hurt the baby? She loved her, you know that.”
He had made a mistake in mentioning it. Zosie let out a wail, and rushing to the back door began pounding on it with her fists. If people are allowed to have guns, even in any sort of danger, people will use them. Adam had read this but never before put it to the test. He found himself raising the gun and pointing it at Zosie.
“Put that down,” Rufus said.
It was brave of him not to be deterred by Adam’s shout to mind his own business and keep out of this. He simply reached out and took the gun and laid it on the table. Vivien went over to Zosie and got hold of her arms, pulling her to her and holding her. She walked her back to the table, sat her down, sat beside her. Adam heard himself give a heavy sigh, a release of long-held breath.