The Valley of the Fox

by Joseph Hone

  The house was comfy in a chintzy, old-fashioned British manner. But the garden beneath the terrace was something quite original, far from the shires, a range of scent and dim colour on that first evening a month before when I’d first come out here with Laura to meet her parents. A great purple bougainvillaea and a tree like a weeping willow but with tightly packed yellow flowers festooning its branches, formed a centrepiece in the middle of the long coarse sea-grass. A path wound its way through the exotic undergrowth, with a table and chairs halfway down almost hidden beneath the flowering branches. A swing hung from a cork tree to one side and Clare was out there now, pushing gently to and fro in the warm half light, where the colours were smudged together in a strange, blue tinted luminosity.

  Thomas Warren’s wife, Laura’s mother, was almost crippled with arthritis. She lay out, a long form in a heavily cushioned steamer chair on the sun-baked terrace, greeting me faintly, a rather disordered, nearly old lady, her face lined with long pain and discomfort. She wrapped a loose straggly woollen cardigan round an old print dress as if she was cold; a crumpled copy of the Telegraph lay at her feet like a faithful dog.

  ‘Mrs Warren,’ I said. She could barely lift her hand. ‘Don’t move,’ I went on.

  She humphed. ‘I’m not likely to, I’m afraid. Bring up a chair – give him a drink, Tommy – and tell me all the news from home.’

  ‘I’m afraid I’ve been away some time, over two months,’ I said. It seemed, in fact, like a year, and England as distant as a childhood memory. That summer I’d been trying to live again, longing for anything new.

  ‘Been away, have you?’ Tommy asked. ‘Travelling?’ he added hopefully, bringing me over a drink, a perfectly prepared, fizzing gin and tonic, though I’d not asked for that, with just the right amount of ice and a delicate sliver, not a chunk, of lemon, all served up in a cut-glass tumbler from a Georgian silver tray.

  Tommy, very unlike his wife, was a small, sprightly man in slacks and a navy blue blazer, impeccably dressed, his hair so meticulously cut and groomed that it seemed almost a theatrical creation, something got up with glue and bootblack.

  ‘Yes,’ I answered. ‘I’ve just been wandering round Europe rather. Since the school term ended. Places I’d not been to before. The Rhine, Provence, Spain …’

  ‘At a loose end, eh?’ Tommy seemed enthusiastic about this idea.

  ‘Yes. I suppose so. Though perhaps it’s age, too. One wants to see the sights before –’ But I left it at that, realising I must have been nearly half their age.

  ‘See the sights indeed!’ Tommy said with relish.

  Laura had joined us. ‘My father – I told you – he was in the Navy. Given him itchy feet. What were you? Practically an Admiral,’ she added affectionately.

  ‘What do you think of Mrs Thatcher?’ Mrs Warren suddenly interrupted us, bright-eyed, looking up at me. Her eyes alone seemed to have escaped the encircling pain in her face, clear, bright blue pools in the threatening landscape.

  Mrs Thatcher? I don’t know. She seems to have –’

  ‘She’s an abrasive woman.’ Tommy came in sharply. ‘She won’t do. Simply not on.’ I was surprised at his vehemence. He seemed so quintessentially Tory himself.

  ‘Oh come now,’ Laura said. ‘Isn’t she going to resurrect the Navy? A new aircraft carrier?’

  ‘Just the opposite. It’s all too late,’ Tommy said.

  ‘Too late for you, Daddy.’

  Daddy humphed now in his turn, before leaving us to gaze out over the bay. I saw a big brass naval telescope then, mounted on the edge of the terrace. Tommy was a typical old naval buffer, I thought, retired to warmer climes. But how wrong I was about him too, in the beginning.

  ‘Why didn’t you join the Portuguese Navy?’ Laura asked mischievously. ‘After all you’re a Portuguese citizen now in any case, aren’t you?’

  ‘I should have done,’ Tommy shouted back to us. ‘Damn good sailors.’

  ‘Daddy retired early,’ Laura explained.

  ‘I see,’ I said. Though I didn’t.

  ‘They took our house away,’ Laura went on. ‘The land, everything.’

  ‘The Navy?’ I was surprised.

  ‘No. The War Office – the RAF I suppose. During the war, in Gloucestershire, the village where we lived. They took the whole village over and the land all round for some secret aerodrome. They were developing something very hush-hush. The jet, wasn’t it? And they never gave any of it back. Compulsory purchase.’

  ‘It’s all still there?’

  ‘Yes. Ruined now though. The village, the church, our small manor. It’s still secret, out of bounds. We’ve never been back. And Daddy’s never even been back to England. He hates the place, the way they treated him over his house.’

  The Warrens said nothing. It seemed a painful enough subject. ‘I am sorry,’ I said, getting up, awkward in the silence. Tommy was over by the far side of the terrace now, looking through the telescope at something in the bay. The light was dying fast. He couldn’t have seen much, I thought.

  ‘How’s the ship?’ Laura asked brightly, changing the subject.

  ‘Ready and willing,’ her father answered promptly, still looking down the tube.

  ‘A ship?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes. Go and look, if you can.’

  I went over and Tommy offered me the lens. It was getting quite dark now. Bats were flipping about. I was doubtful if I’d see anything. So it seemed a miracle, in the great magnification, like a fairy tale coming up on a nursery wall from an old magic lantern, when the lovely blue and white ketch suddenly appeared at the end of the glass, moored to a buoy in Cascais harbour, bobbing gently in the violet light.

  Laura stood behind me, putting an arm on my shoulder as I crouched down. ‘His toy, his dream,’ she said. Tommy had gone away to recharge the drinks. There were lights on along the hull, I saw, a row of portholes glittering in the blue haze.

  ‘That’s Jorge, first mate, deckhand, general factotum. He looks after it. Cleaning up I should think. We’ll go out on it. Tomorrow perhaps.’

  I took another look at it. The long white boat, since one couldn’t see it at all with the naked eye, was certainly a dream, with its necklace of lights dancing on the water in the gathering dusk.

  ‘What’s it called?’

  ‘She’s called Clare – now,’ Laura said.

  *

  The graceful bow cut the Atlantic swell, flowing through it at a steady ten knots so that the spray jumped in the air over us, spitting in our faces as we dipped in and out of the big waves a mile out from Cascais.

  Clare, in a lifejacket, was next me on the prow, her hair pasted back against the side of her head by the wind. She seemed totally absorbed by something, her eyes fixed on some point on the horizon dead ahead of her. But there was nothing there.

  Then, above the wind, I heard a sort of keening noise, a low-pitched whistle almost, as if some strange bird was hovering immediately above the boat. But again there was nothing there. But, bending down, I realised it was Clare beside me who was whistling into the wind, half whistle, half hum, her face alight, an unbroken, unconscious sound of pleasure, elemental itself among the other elements.

  Tommy was behind us at the big brass-tipped wheel, with Jorge, master-minding things. They were some way back, their heads bobbing about behind the sails, for it was a large enough ketch – a fifty-footer, with a Croxley marine auxiliary diesel, which Tommy, angrily abandoning his country, had sailed out from Southampton forty years before. His wife, never a sailor, wasn’t with us. But Laura was there, joining us on the bow a minute later.

  ‘Have you ever done this before?’ she shouted against the wind. I shook my head. A turreted castle rose up on a promontory ahead of us, a kind of Martello tower suggesting old adventure. The sea lost its sheer blue further into shore, where bands of moving aquamarine, like green oil slicks, shimmered in the great light beneath the Atlantic cliffs. None of this sort of life had been mine before.

 
Laura kissed me briefly then, on the lips, putting an arm round my shoulder for a moment to steady herself. Salt ran down my throat as I swallowed afterwards, breathless suddenly. Her father must have seen us, I thought. And I felt a childish guilt, as though discovered in some shared mischief with a companion behind the laurels thirty-five years before. But I’d had no juvenile companions at my home in north Wales then. All this, even the guilt, was quite new.

  *

  Laura had younger friends in Lisbon outside her parents’ circle: one or two families from the Embassy, other British expatriates, but mostly a number of Portuguese acquaintances. She got on very well with the natives. She met them sometimes for mid-morning coffee on the Chiado, the Bond Street of the city which ran up the hill behind my hotel: at the Brasileira café or the Pastelaria Marquês, the last of the city’s old baroque tearooms. I began going with her on these occasions, carrying her parcels as she did her errands about the city. I had little else to do, after all. We were slipping into marriage, I suppose, before either of us was ever aware of it.

  One of her friends – a suitor, indeed – was a prominent young Portuguese general back from Angola, a Socialist officer prematurely elevated in the army coup six years before, an olive-skinned, volatile bachelor, a member of the Revolutionary Council, who strode about town eccentrically in combat boots and green battledress, followed by a monkey-faced chauffeur batman in a small broken down army car, which, against all regulations, he would park right outside the Brasileira while his master went about his business in the crowded interior.

  He burst in there one morning like a knight errant, moving easily among acquaintances, before seeing us at the back where I was surrounded by parcels, for all the world the hen-pecked husband. He joined us, a small, decisive, humorous figure, the gossips in the café hanging unsuccessfully on our every word.

  ‘How is the President?’ Laura asked him straight away. They had met originally at a reception in the Palace for the British community and press corps given by President Eanes.

  ‘Fine. Excellent. He is proposing a bill shortly requiring all unmarried foreign women to take Portuguese husbands. May I present myself?’

  ‘No. You may not. But have a coffee though.’ They started to chat. The man didn’t take the slightest notice of me. Perhaps, with all my parcels, he thought me an Embassy clerk or servant. I was tempted to disabuse him.

  Yet afterwards, when he left, I was determined not to appear possessive.

  ‘He’s rude. He’s pushy,’ Laura said, mildly excited. ‘But I do like him.’

  ‘Yes.’ But my silence then was an admission of my hurt and Laura noticed it.

  ‘Apart from your first wife – and the other serious girls – how many women have you had?’ she asked abruptly.

  ‘I never bothered to count.’

  ‘So many? Or so few?’

  ‘Why? Have you slept with him? Is that it?’

  She looked at me quizzically then, distancing herself, seeming to leave me, merging into the busy anonymity of the crowded café behind her.

  ‘You have a thing about fidelity,’ she said at last. I didn’t reply. ‘So do I,’ she added, standing up, smiling. We had lunch afterwards in the Avenida Palace – mountain trout and vinho verde. That was the day we first made love.

  *

  Clare had started to fidget badly. Then she said in her fractured, incomplete English, ‘Why do you be with us all the time?’

  I hadn’t answered at once, the question taking me by surprise, so that she looked at me now, doubtfully, out of the corner of one eye.

  I’d been pushing her quietly to and fro on the cork tree swing out in the Cascais garden one afternoon, pushing her back and forth like a metronome for nearly half an hour. It was one of the few balms in Clare’s life then, this calm, endlessly repeated movement.

  But now, since I’d been trying to read to her, we were sitting at the table beneath the bougainvillaea tree and Clare was twisting about, embarking on a quite different sort of restlessness, common to autistic children, Laura told me afterwards, where they become violently, inexplicably possessed.

  Clare had much improved, I gathered, from the time a year before when her father had been killed in Nairobi. But she could still be a vastly difficult child, prone to deep silences or just the opposite, to bouts of frenzied, ever-increasing movement, which struck her now, as she tried to twist a screw out from the side of the table with her thumb nail, bloodying herself in the process, so that I moved to stop her. But then she started to kick the table legs, viciously, repeatedly, bruising her shins and toes.

  ‘Why? Why?’ she said over and over again, so that I leant across trying to take her hands, to calm her.

  ‘Because I like you – and your mother. That’s why I’m here,’ I said.

  She seemed not to hear me and certainly wouldn’t be appeased. ‘Why? Why?’ she shouted to herself, her thumb bleeding badly now as she attacked the screw again. I got a handkerchief out. But she pushed it away. She was lost, unreachable, her eyes quite vacant, seeing nothing, but her body electric with violence. She was punishing herself, kicking and tearing her flesh, trying to dig into herself, deeper and deeper, as if looking for some ultimate hurt.

  Laura came out then. I thought she would stop the child – physically stop her, take her up in her arms and end this self-destruction. But she didn’t. She let Clare go on kicking the table, let her thumb bleed, standing away from her: so that I moved towards her myself.

  But Clare avoided me in a flash, running away then with great speed back to the cork tree, climbing it like a rocket, where she perched dangerously among the top branches.

  ‘It’s no use when she’s like that,’ Laura said calmly. ‘You have to leave her. She has to be allowed to test us. “How much do you love me?” All that.’

  ‘But she’ll kill herself.’

  ‘She won’t. Not unless you push her.’

  We were at the bottom of the cork tree ourselves now, whispering, Clare above us swaying defiantly, precariously on a top branch.

  ‘It’s crazy – she’ll fall!’

  ‘It seems insane, I know. But it’s the only way. I know. You’ll see.’

  Laura had brought out a first-aid box with her and she showed it to Clare now, lifting it up, flourishing it under the tree. Then she put it on the ground, leaving it there.

  We went back to the table and waited. ‘Surely you can’t let her do these things?’ I asked.

  ‘She drove a nail right through the palm of her hand a few months ago,’ Laura said easily. ‘You have to leave her. She stops at a certain point. Oh, I thought just the same as you to begin with. These fits, they were worse then, I was terrified, mad with worry. But then I realised these children, like Clare, they have an extraordinary need to guard their separateness; not like most children at all in that way. If you force yourself on them, or use force, you’re lost: they clam up altogether then. You’ll never reach them. It’s an endless tightrope for them: care on one side, freedom on the other. They want both. And you have to give them both. By just waiting beneath.’

  Them. They. Laura spoke of her child as of a stranger, another species. And it was exactly so, I thought then. I saw Clare perched up in the branches against the blue Atlantic sky, her back to us, gazing like a look-out into another world, a girl in the crow’s nest of a ship, as she had been on the ketch a few days before, blonde hair running in the wind, absorbed in some secret voyage. Yet was she going anywhere? A branch swayed to and fro beneath her as she pushed it with monotonous regularity. And there was the first sense of hurt for me then – about Clare: I felt she would never really accept me, that I was an enemy, a sane stowaway rudely discovered now aboard her mad ship.

  She came down an hour later. And we saw her in the twilight, kneeling by the first-aid box, rustling among the Band-aids and ointments before expertly tending her dry wounds.

  I said to Laura, ‘She asked me why I was with you, with her, all the time. That was what started
all this, I think. It’s probably a bad idea, my being here. I’d better leave.’

  The evening had come on very suddenly and the bats were on the air now, big bats, malign shapes swirling round against the crimson sheet of sky.

  ‘She wanted you on the raft in Cascais,’ Laura said.

  ‘Perhaps. But I don’t understand her, Laura. She’s really miles away from me.’ It all seemed too much for me then. I was no rock of ages, no child specialist, no surrogate father.

  ‘You’re wrong,’ Laura said. ‘You’re part of her life already. If you weren’t she wouldn’t test you like this. She’d just ignore you completely.’

  ‘I see,’ I said, pondering this sudden commitment.

  ‘And if you leave she won’t forget about you.’

  ‘Like Willy, you mean?’

  ‘A bit. She loves you – quite a bit.’

  ‘That’s why she hurts herself like this, is it?’

  ‘Partly. She’s frightened of losing you, that’s why, I think. So she punishes the thought.’

  We rarely embarked on psychological theory about Clare after that, the cloudy jargon of the specialists. We had no need to. We were her specialists by then, on a permanent basis. Laura and I were married at the Lisbon Embassy when I came out there during the following October half-term. There was a small party afterwards at the Warrens’ house. The young Portuguese General attended, still in battledress. He spoke to me this time, jocularly, a hand on my shoulder, commiserating with himself: ‘Ah! Fortuna cruel! Ah! Duros Fados!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s from Camões – our greatest poet. “Cruel fortune – hard fate.”’

  ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry about that. He sounds like a tragic poet.’

  The little General was like a soothsayer when I think of it now. But I try to think more of the happier things when I look back. I know now, for example, what made me so change my mind about Clare, about taking some responsibility for her. It was seeing her that evening in the garden, after her fit, kneeling by the first-aid box, under the cork tree in the twilight, patching herself up with Band-aids. A strong sense of independence has always appealed to me in women.