A Fatal Inversion Read online

  Lili had had no more babies. Perhaps they would have another child one day. Lili was still under thirty and there was no reason, the hospital staff had said, why such an unfortunate thing as a placenta previa should occur again, or if it did, they would be ready for it. Shiva was not too keen. The area in which they lived was overcrowded and unsalubrious, and if there was rather less unemployment than in the north of England, that was about all that could be said for it.

  The name of their street was Fifth Avenue. It is not the custom in English cities to name streets by numbers, but it has happened. There are, for instance, no less than fourteen First Avenues in the London area, twelve Second Avenues, nine Third Avenues, and three Fourth Avenues. The only other Fifth Avenues are in West Kilburn and Manor Park, which also possess a Sixth, while the latter possesses a Seventh. Shiva’s Fifth Avenue was a long, curving treeless street that dipped steeply down and switchbacked up again, though the neighborhood was not in general a particularly hilly place. At the end nearest the tube station was a block of shops containing a small supermarket run by Pakistanis, a Greek restaurant run by Cypriote, a triple-fronted emporium given over to the sale of motorcycle spare parts and equipment, and a newspaper shop run by people who when asked where they came from ingenuously replied that they were Cape coloreds. In the middle of Fifth Avenue, where Pevsner Road crossed it, was another small grocer’s and a pub called The Boxer, and at the far end, opposite each other, a unisex hairdresser’s and a betting shop. These were linked by belts of houses in infrequently broken blocks, composed of bricks in a dull purplish-red or khaki yellow, and all now between ninety-seven and ninety-nine years old. A double line of parked cars ran parallel to the sidewalks from the newspaper shop to the pub and the grocer’s to the hairdresser’s. If you half-closed your eyes and looked at it, you might have likened it to a string of colored beads.

  Shiva went into the newspaper shop. There were two Jamaican boys in there and they made a point of crowding the counter, holding their elbows akimbo, so that Shiva was unable to pick up his paper from the pile in front of them. Quietly he asked for the Standard and handed across his money between the jutting arms; he didn’t want any trouble. It was the Indians they hated down here, not the whites. Well, there were few whites left except for very old people who couldn’t have moved if they had wanted to.

  Lili was waiting outside, standing between their cases. She was very brave, he thought, to wear the sari and shop in the Indian shops and have her Bengali lessons when all these things drew attention to her. It would have been easy for her to pass for a white girl. Only her eyes, that distinctive dark bluish-brown and with somewhat protuberant bluish whites, betrayed her. But people were not that perceptive and for God’s sake this was London, not Johannesburg in the fifties. She could have gotten away with it, and he had more than once suggested she should, begged her almost. But it was her identity, she said, it was all she had, and she went on putting a caste mark which she had no right to on her forehead and wearing all her gold bracelets and cooking sag ghosht and dal instead of the defrosted hamburgers and chips that most people around there ate. He picked up the suitcases and she took their hand luggage and they walked home, passing three separate black people who looked at them with silent hostility and two elderly white women who did not look at them at all.

  Lili would start unpacking at once. She would put all the light clothes into one bag and all the dark into another and take them to the launderette in Pevsner Road. He knew it would be useless to try to hinder this; she would be fidgety and fretful if there were dirty clothes around. So long as she wasn’t out after dark, he supposed it would be all right. Nothing much could happen to her on a sunny September afternoon between here and the launderette, and Mrs. Barakhda, who ran it, was a friend of hers, or the nearest Lili had to a friend.

  He made her a cup of tea while she sorted the washing, closed up the valises, and pushed them into the closet under the stairs. At least they had a whole house with three bedrooms. Most of the houses down here were divided into two flats, two front doors squeezed in under the tiny porch. He offered to carry the bags for her but she wouldn’t hear of it. In her reactionary way—for Lili had been brought up by an independent feminist mother—she thought it all right for men to carry suitcases but not bags of wash. With his second cup of tea in front of him, he sat down to look at the newspaper.

  There was a big picture of the Princess of Wales visiting a home for handicapped children. The main story was about trouble in the Middle East and a subsidiary one about racial trouble in West London, street fighting mainly and breaking shop windows. Shiva’s eye traveled down the page. At the foot of one of the left-hand columns he read a headline. For the amount of text underneath it, a mere paragraph, it was a disproportionately large headline. It even rather spoiled the symmetry of the page.

  The headline said: Skeleton Found in Woodland Grave and the story beneath it ran: While digging a grave for his pet dog, a Suffolk landowner with a home near Hadleigh unearthed a human skeleton. The remains appear to be those of a young woman. Police declined to comment further at this stage and Mr. Alec Chipstead, a chartered surveyor, was not available for questioning.

  Shiva read it twice. It was rather strangely put, he thought. He felt this about most articles in newspapers. They didn’t know much but they told you what they did know in the most cryptic way possible to whet your appetite and make you speculate. For instance, they didn’t tell you if the landowner and Mr. Alec Chipstead were one and the same person, though you could tell that was what they meant.

  He could feel sweat standing on his face, on his upper lip, and forehead. Wiping it away with his handkerchief, he closed his eyes, opened them, and looked around the room, then back at the newsprint in front of him, as if he might have been dreaming or have imagined it. The paragraph, of course, was still there.

  There was no reason, Shiva thought after the first shock had subsided, to suppose any connection between this find and Ecalpemos. Suffolk was the only link, and he could remember quite distinctly, on first going to Nunes, how there had been some dispute as to whether it was in Suffolk or Essex. The blurring of boundaries, which took place at about that time, had created such anomalies as a householder having an Essex postal address while paying his taxes to the Suffolk County Council. This, surely, was what had actually happened to Adam Verne-Smith.

  It was not quite true that this was the only connecting link. The other, of course, was the body, the young woman’s body. Shiva thought, I must wait for more news, I must bear it and wait.

  His patient was close to fifty, a handsome, tall woman, very well-dressed. Her expensive clothes—Jasper Conran, he guessed—she had put on again and, while behind the screen, a little more lipstick. He had just done a smear test on her.

  “You have a very nice inside,” he told her, smiling.

  The nurse smiled too. She could afford to, being twenty years younger and with her gynecological problems, if any, taken care of by Dr. Fletcher for free.

  Mrs. Strawson said she was very glad to hear it. She looked happy and relaxed. Rufus gave her a cigarette. One of the many aspects of his personality which endeared him to his patients—the others being good looks, charm, youth, boyishness, and treating them like equals—was his inability to give up smoking.

  “I am that monstrous sinner,” he would say to them, “the doctor that smokes. Each one of us is said to be worth fifty thousand pounds of advertising per year to the tobacco companies.”

  And the patient, especially if she didn’t smoke, would feel empathy for him and maternal toward him. Poor boy, with all that stress, he works so hard, it’s only natural he needs something to keep him going. Mrs. Strawson inhaled gratefully. This was her first visit to Rufus Fletcher in Wimpole Street, and she was already delighted to have taken up her friend’s recommendation.

  “Now, how about contraception? Do you mind telling me what method you’re using?”

  After that implication that she was still i
n the prime of her fertile years, Mrs. Strawson wouldn’t have minded telling him anything. An account of an ancient intrauterine device, implanted twenty years before and never since then disturbed, made them all laugh once more. Rufus, however, suggested he should take a look, just to be on the safe side.

  The Jasper Conran dress removed once more, Mrs. Strawson got back on the table. Rufus had a probe around. It was impossible to tell whether the thing that she had surprisingly described as being shaped like a Greek alpha was still there or not. His thoughts wandered to the Standard, which he had folded up and stuffed into the top drawer of his desk when Mrs. Strawson was announced. It could not refer to the events of ten years past, of course it couldn’t. If it had been the house and the body, it would surely have referred not to digging a woodland grave but to digging in an animal cemetery. They would not have gotten that wrong. Rufus had forgotten how often he castigated the press for inaccuracy, how constantly he said to Marigold that you couldn’t believe a word you read. He told—or, rather, politely asked—Mrs. Strawson to get dressed again.

  “If we attempted to remove it,” he said to her, “it would have to be done under anaesthetic. I don’t suppose you want that, do you? It’s not harming you. Rather the reverse, I should say. It seems to have done you proud. Why not let it continue with the good work?”

  He sometimes thought how astonished, how appalled indeed, many of these women would be if they knew that these intrauterine devices were not in fact contraceptives but abortifacients. Before the IUD could do its work, conception must already have taken place, egg and sperm having fused in a fallopian tube and the multiplying cells traveled down to the womb to seek a place of anchorage, a home which the alpha-shaped loop by its very presence denied them, causing the minute beginnings of an embryo to swim in vain and ultimately be shed. Rufus did not in the least care about the moral issue, but the subject itself interested him. He had long ago decided never to say a word about it to any of his patients. Marigold, his wife, he would not of course have permitted to give womb room to such a foreign body or to take the pill or consider any so-called reversible tube-tyings. In his own bed in Mill Hill Rufus used a condom or practiced coitus interruptus, which he prided himself on being rather good at.

  He said that was all, thank you, to Mrs. Strawson, he would let her know the result of the smear, and he walked all the way back to the reception desk with her, where her forty-pound fee was taken from her. They shook hands and Rufus wished her a pleasant journey home to Sevenoaks, she would just be in time to avoid the rush. He was aware of the accusation frequently leveled at doctors of his sort, that they are charming to their private patients who pay them, while treating like so many malfunctioning machines their National Health patients who merely pay the state. He was aware of this and in principle disliked it, attempting when he first set up in private practice, to resist it, but he had not been able to. In this land of two nations he was not big enough to be one of the just. At the hospital with its crowd of outpatients and wards full of inpatients he was so busy, so plagued and hassled and rushed off his feet, and the women so submissive and ignorant or merely sullen, that he forgot about principles. Nor did they speak nicely or carry handbags from Etienne Aigner in which reposed American Express Gold Cards. These two sorts of women seemed to belong to different species, being sisters only under their panties whether these came from Janet Reger or the British Home Stores. The treatment Rufus meted out to them was, after all, the same.

  She was his last patient of the day. At this particular time he liked to begin the unwinding process. Whatever shamefaced and boyish confessions he might make to his patients, he kept control over his smoking, rationing himself to between ten and fifteen cigarettes a day. But in the afternoons he always smoked two after the last patient had gone. He sat smoking his cigarettes and reading the evening paper for the half hour it took to accomplish these combined exercises before leaving and getting into the tube at Bond Street.

  Today this usually pleasurable half hour was spoiled by the paragraph he had read prior to the arrival of Mrs. Strawson. His nurse had brought the paper back at lunchtime and left it lying on the low coffee table during his appointments with his two previous patients. It was because Mrs. Strawson was five minutes late—behavior he made no demur at, though he would have refused to see a National Health patient who failed to turn up on time—that he had picked up the Standard and seen that paragraph.

  The half hour was spoiled, but Rufus, just the same, was a disciplined man. He had not gotten where he was at the age of thirty-three by giving way to pointless speculation and neurotic inner inquiry. To have recovered as he had done, so successfully, so brilliantly, after such a traumatic experience had been a considerable feat. He had subjected himself to his own personal therapy, requiring himself to sit alone in a hospital room and speak of those happenings aloud. He had been therapist and client both, had asked the questions and supplied the answers, aiming at total frankness, keeping nothing back, expressing to those bare walls, that metal table and black leather swivel chair, that window, with its half-drawn dark blue blind, the crawling distastes and shames, the self-disgust, the shrinking from light and the fear which seemed sometimes to beat with frenzied wings against bars in his brain.

  It had worked—up to a point. This stuff (as he put it to himself) often does work up to a point. The point, though, is on a rather low threshold. Getting it all out and so getting rid of it—well, yes. Nobody tells you how it comes back again. With Rufus it did to some extent come back again, and all he could do was grind it down and soldier on. Time, the best of all doctors, though it kills you in the end, had done more than therapy could, and now days would pass, weeks, without Rufus thinking of Ecalpemos at all. For quite long periods of time it went away and he forgot it. The associative process did not work with Rufus in quite the same way as it did with his erstwhile friend, Adam Verne-Smith, for Adam was an “arts” person and he a scientist, so that Greek or Spanish names, for instance, evoked none of it. Ecalpemos, after all, was not Greek and did not even sound so to Rufus who, unlike Adam, had not received a classical education. Nor was he neurotically sensitive about babies. It would hardly have done him much good in his professional life, where women were always wanting to know if they were having them or how to stop them or conceive them, if he had been. He had long ago gotten the whole business of Ecalpemos under tight control and lived in high hopes of never having to refer to it again in word or thought—and then there had appeared this paragraph.

  If the house they referred to, thought Rufus, had been Wyvis Hall, why had they not said so? Or said “near Nunes” rather than “near Hadleigh”? The place had certainly been nearer Nunes than Hadleigh, three miles nearer, though of course Hadleigh was a town and Nunes merely a small village. There were a great many houses in the vicinity of Hadleigh of the same sort of size as Wyvis Hall, and a newspaper would be likely to describe anyone who possessed a few acres as a “landowner.” For all he knew it might not be unusual to unearth human bones in grounds such as these. Possibly they were ancient bones… .

  The only really hard piece of information the Standard gave was the name of the present owner of the house: Alec Chipstead. A chartered surveyor, it said. Rufus stubbed out his second cigarette, put the paper into his briefcase, and slung over his shoulders the marvelous black leather coat from Beltrami he had bought in Florence and which would have made him look like a gangster if he had not been so fair and ruddy-faced and with such blue English eyes.

  He said good night to his nurse and to the receptionist and walked off down the street, across Wigmore Street toward Henrietta Place. It occurred to him that he could go into any public library where they kept phone directories for the whole country and look up Alec Chipstead and see if his address was Wyvis Hall. There might well be a public library very near where he was now walking. Rufus told himself now was no time to go hunting for libraries; he would go home first. He would go home and think about what to do. He had an idea i
t was a rule with libraries to stay open late on Thursday evenings.

  Deliberately, he switched his thoughts. Library or no library, he would take Marigold out to dinner. Hampstead somewhere, he thought, and then he might take the opportunity to slip into the big library at Swiss Cottage… . No more of that. Over dinner they would talk about moving. Rufus thought he was growing out of Mill Hill and it was time to consider Hampstead. Marigold would have preferred Highgate, he knew, but in spite of the therapy and the control he shied away from Highgate. These places were all villages really, you got to know the neighbors, met people at parties and given that you were a middle-class professional person there was a limited number of like people it was possible to meet. Suppose he were to encounter the Ryemarks or even Robin Tatian? No, it was unthinkable.

  A house in Hampstead would mean taking on an astronomical mortgage, but so what? Take what you want, have what you like, he had read somewhere, and drag your income along behind you. He was doing well, anyway, getting more patients each month, would soon have more than he could comfortably cope with.

  The means he used for getting home was the Central Line to Tottenham Court Road and then the Northern Line to Colindale where he had left his car. Rufus just made it into the train before the rush began. Something happened that always pleased him. His wife opened the front door to him just as he was about to put his key into the lock.

  Marigold’s name suited her. She was tall and generously built and fair, with a high color and a red mouth and white teeth. In other words, she looked a lot like him. If not twins, they might have been taken for brother and sister. Rufus was one of those rare people who admire their own kind of looks better than any other sort and whose partners are chosen because they belong in the same type as themselves. Soon after he met Marigold he had taken her to the opera to see Die Walküre, and afterward had said without forethought, “The Brunhilde was all wrong. She should have looked like you.”