A Fatal Inversion (2 page)

This not only prevented him from putting forward the excuse of having to stay awake to nurse her but also had its own power to frighten. She slept so peacefully, she was so quiet and still. He had gotten into the habit of getting up five or six times a night and going into her room to see if she was all right. An anxiety so acute was not natural, Anne said, and he ought to see a psychiatrist if he was going to go on like that. She, the mother, slept dreamlessly, thankfully. Adam did see a psychiatrist and received some therapy, which was not much use since it was impossible for him to be open and tell the truth about the past. When he told the therapist he was afraid of going into the room and finding his child dead, he was offered tranquilizers.

Abigail was now six months old and still very much alive, a placid child, large and bland-looking, who at lunchtime on a Thursday in late September took an incurious look at the check-in line in which she found herself, laid her head back on the stroller pillow, and closed her eyes. A Spanish woman, going home, who had been watching her, gave a sentimental sigh, while an American with a backpack, irked by the slowness of the service, opined that Abigail had the right idea. Adam and Anne and Abigail—if they ever had a son they intended to call him Aaron—were on their way to Tenerife with Iberia Air Lines, a ten-day vacation carefully planned for when Abigail was too old to be endangered by climatic and environmental changes and young enough still to be dependent on her mother’s milk.

Heathrow was densely crowded—when was it not?—thought sophisticated Adam, a frequent traveler for his firm—a milling mass of strangely dressed people. You could always tell the seasoned ones by their jeans and shirts, invulnerable garb, sweaters to roll up and stuff into the overhead locker, from the tyros in smart linen suits and Italian glitter and skin, boots that might have to be sliced open to release swollen feet at the other end.

“I’d prefer window to aisle,” said Adam, handing over their tickets. “Oh, and nonsmoking.”

“Smoking,” said Anne, who had given it up when she was pregnant. “Unless you’re going to sit by yourself.”

“All right. Smoking.”

It so happened that there was no room left in smoking and only aisle seats. Adam put their two big suitcases, one stuffed with disposable diapers in case these were not easily obtainable in the Canary Islands, onto the weighing machine. He kept his eye on them as they passed through to see that the correct label went on the handles. Twice last year, going to Stockholm and Frankfurt, his baggage had been mislaid.

“I’d better change Abigail,” Anne said. “And then we could go straight through and have some coffee in the departure place.”

“I’ll have to find a bank first.”

Giggling, Anne pointed to the international sign indicating the mothers’ room. “Why a feeding bottle? Why not a breast?”

Adam nodded, absently acknowledging this. “You have your coffee and I’ll join you.” He had once had a sense of humor, but it was all gone now. The dreams and the subtext of anxiety that underwrote his actions and speech had eroded it. “And don’t have more than one Danish pastry,” he said. “Having a baby doesn’t just make you eat more, you know. It alters the metabolism. You need a whole lot less food to put on weight.” Whether or not this was true he wasn’t sure, but he had gotten back at her for wanting to sit in smoking.

Abigail opened her eyes and smiled at him. When she looked at him like that it made him think, with infinite pain and terror, of what losing her would be like, how he would instantly and without a thought kill anyone who harmed her, how gladly and easily he would die for her. But how much harder it is, thought Adam, to live with people than to die for them. The associative process brought another father to mind. Had he felt like that about his child, his baby? And had he recovered by now; did you ever recover? Adam touched the canceling switch, experienced very briefly a frightening blankness, made his way with an empty mind across the check-in area toward the escalator.

Empty minds are abhorred by thought as vacuums are by nature, and Adam’s was quickly filled again by the small speculations and stresses that were attached to banks and exchange rates. The crowd upstairs was even greater than that down below, augmented by two planeloads, one from Paris and one from Salzburg, which had taken their baggage from adjoining carousels and surged simultaneously through Customs. In the far distance Adam could see the illuminated turquoise blue sign for Barclays Bank. It was a color he deeply disliked, had almost an antipathy for, but some interior warning voice always stopped him inquiring of himself why this should be. Only reason, or reasonableness, had stopped him changing his bank on this account. He began battling toward this band of blue light past ticket desks, apologized perfunctorily for sticking his elbow into the ribs of a woman in tyrolean hat and
Trachtenkleid
—and through a turbulent sea of faces looked into the face of the man he always thought of as the Indian.

His first name was Shiva, for the second god of the Hindu trinity. What his surname was Adam could not remember, though he supposed he must have known it once. The ten years that had gone by had not done much to Shiva’s face, unless it was a little more set, carrying within it now the foreshadowing of a gauntness to come, an inborn racial sorrow. The skin was darkly polished, the color of a horse chestnut fruit, a conker, the eyes a bluish-dark brown, as if the pupils floated in ink-stained water. It was a handsome face, more intensely Caucasian than any Englishman’s, the features more Aryan than any Nazi ideal or prototype, sharply cut and overchiseled except for the mouth, which was full and curved and delicately voluptuous and was now shyly, hesitantly, parting in the beginnings of a smile.

The eyes of each of them held the other’s for no more than a matter of seconds, an instant of time in which Adam felt his own features screw into a scowl, prohibiting, repelling, brought on by terror, while the smile on Shiva’s face shrank and cooled and died away. Adam turned his head sharply. He pushed through the crowd, gained a freer space, hastened, almost running. There were too many people for running to be possible. He reached the bank where there was a line and stood there breathing fast, momentarily closing his eyes, wondering what he would do, what he could possibly do or say if Shiva were to pursue him, declare himself,
touch
him even. Adam thought he might actually faint or be sick if Shiva were to touch him.

He had come to the bank because it had occurred to him, while bound for Heathrow in a taxi, that though in possession of traveler’s checks and credit cards, he had no actual pesetas in cash. In Tenerife there would be another taxi driver to pay and at the hotel a porter to tip. Adam turned over to the bank cashier half of what he had in his wallet, two ten-pound notes, and asked, in a voice so cracked that he had to clear his throat and cough to make it audible, for these to be converted into Spanish currency. When his money had been given to him he had to turn around to give way to the next person in the line, there was nothing else to do. With a considerable effort of will he forced himself to lift His head and look ahead, down the long length of the arrivals area, at the milling host of travelers. He began to walk back. The crowd had cleared a little, to swell again no doubt in a minute or two when the planeload arriving from Rome came through. He could make out several dark-skinned people, men and women of African, West Indian, and Indian origin. Adam had not always been a racist, but he was one now. He thought how remarkable it was that these people could
afford
to travel around Europe.

“Europe, mark you,” as he had said to Anne when first they got there and in answer to his scathing comment she had suggested that the black people might have been going home or arriving from lands of their own or ancestral origin. “This is Terminal Two,” he said. “You don’t go to Jamaica or Calcutta from here.”

“I suppose we should be pleased,” she said. “It says something for their living standards.”

“Hah,” said Adam.

He started looking for Shiva. His eye lighted on an Indian man who was evidently an airport employee, for he wore overalls and carried some kind of cleaning equipment. Could it have been this man he had previously seen? Or even the sleekly dressed businessman, passing him now, on whose luggage label was the name D. K. Patel? One Indian, Adam thought, looks very much like another. No doubt, to them, one white man looked very like another, but this was an aspect of things Adam felt to be far less significant. The important thing was that it might not have been Shiva he had glimpsed so briefly among the faces of the crowd. It might be that his mind, in general so prudently policed, had been allowed to get a little out of hand, to run amok as a result of the previous night’s dreams, of his anxiety over Abigail, of the sight of that baggage label, and had thus become receptive to fears and fancies. Recognition there had seemed to be on the Indian’s part, but could he, Adam, not have been mistaken there? These people were often ingratiating and a scowl evoked in them a smile of hope, of defensiveness.

Shiva would not have smiled at him, Adam now thought, for he would surely have been as eager to avoid a meeting as Adam was. They had done different things at Ecalpemos, he and Shiva—indeed all five of them had had different roles to play—but the actions they had taken, the dreadful and irrevocable steps, would have lived equally in the memory of each. Ten years afterward they were not of a sort to raise a smile. And in some ways it might have been said that Shiva had been closer to the heart and core of it, though only in some ways.

“If I were he,” Adam found himself saying not quite aloud though his lips moved, “I would have gone back to India. Give me half a chance.” He bit his lips to still them. Had Shiva been born here or in Delhi? He could not remember. I won’t think of him or any of them, he said inwardly, silently. I will switch off.

How could he hope to enjoy his vacation with something like that on his mind? And he intended to enjoy his vacation. Not least among the blessings it would confer was sharing their bedroom with Abigail, whose crib would be (he would see to that) on his side of their bed so that he could keep his eye on her asleep through the long watches of the night. Now he could see Anne standing waiting for him outside the entrance to the departure halls. She had obeyed him and avoided food but, strangely, this made him feel more irritable toward her. She had taken Abigail out of the stroller and was holding her in that fashion which is possible to women because they have well-defined hips and the sight of which therefore angered Adam. Abigail sat on Anne’s right hip with legs astride, her body snuggled into Anne’s arm.

“You were so long,” Anne said, “we thought you had been kidnapped.”

“Don’t put your words into her mouth.”

He hated that. “We thought,” “Abigail thinks”—how did
she
know? Of course he had never told Anne anything about Ecalpemos, only that a legacy from a great-uncle had helped set him up in business, put him where he was today. In the days when he was “in love” with Anne instead of just loving her (as he told himself one inevitably feels toward a wife of three years standing) he had been tempted to pour it all out. There had been a time, a few weeks, perhaps two months in all, when they had been very close. They seemed to think each other’s thoughts and to be shedding into each other’s keeping all their secrets.

“What wouldn’t you forgive?” she had asked him. They were in bed, in a cottage they had rented in Cornwall for a spring vacation.

“I don’t know that it’s for me to
forgive
anything, is it? I mean, I wouldn’t think things you’d done my business.”

“Heine is supposed to have said on his deathbed,
‘Le bon Dieu me pardonnera. C’est son métier.
’”

She had to translate because his French was so bad. “Okay then, let’s leave it to God, it’s his job. And, Anne, let’s not talk about it. Right?”

“There’s nothing I wouldn’t forgive you,” she said.

He took a deep breath, turned over, looked at the ceiling on which the irregular plaster between the dark-stained beams showed strange patterns and silhouettes, a naked woman with arms upraised, the head of a dog, an island shaped like Crete, long and beaky, a skeleton wing.

“Not—molesting kids?” he said. “Not kidnap? Not murder?”

She laughed. “We’re talking about things you’re
likely
to have done, aren’t we?”

A distance yawned between them now so great as to make their relationship a mockery of what it had been during those days, during that time in Cornwall and a bit before and a bit after. If I had told her, he sometimes thought, when opportunity came and held open that door, if I had told her then we would either have parted for good or else moved toward a real marriage. But it was a long time since he had thought like this, since thinking like this was always handled by the escape key. Irritable shades of it crossed his consciousness now. He would have liked to carry Abigail through passport control, but she was on Anne’s passport and it was in Anne’s arms that she sat as the official looked at her, and at her name written there, and back again at her and smiled.

If it was Shiva, he thought, at least it was in
arrivals
that he had seen him, not
departures.
That meant Shiva was going home—wherever that might be, some ghetto in the north or east, some white no-go place—while he was going away. There was therefore no possibility of his encountering Shiva again. And what harm, after all, could come of this chance sighting, if sighting it had been, if Shiva it had been? It was not as if he had seriously believed Shiva to be dead any more than the rest of them were dead. Nor was it likely that he could hope to pass through life without ever seeing any of them again. Until now there had not been so much as a mention in a newspaper or word-of-mouth news. He had been lucky. He
was
lucky, for sighting Shiva had made no difference to things, had made them neither better than they had been before nor worse. Life would go on as it had been going on with Anne and Abigail, the business on a gradual ascent, their existence steadily upwardly mobile, exchanging their house next year perhaps for a rather better one, conceiving and bringing into being Aaron their son, the associative procedure retrieving Ecalpemos from among the stored files and the escape key banishing it.