A Fatal Inversion Read Free Page B

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.
    Life would go on more or less in tranquility, and time, a day or two in Tenerife, would dim the memory of that brown and shining face glimpsed between pale, anxious, stressful