The Valley of the Fox

by Joseph Hone

  But when I opened Spinks’s backpack I wondered if I had sufficient or appropriate equipment for the crusade. For the first thing I came on, in an outside pocket, was a quarter-bottle of vodka that had smashed somehow during my journey in the night. The liquor had soaked into a small book that had been stuffed in with it. It was a copy of Baden-Powell’s Scouting for Boys, but an old edition, thirty years old at least, for the youths were drawn in brimmed felt hats and there was mention of doing one’s duty to a King, not a Queen.

  I thought kindly of Spinks again: evidence here of the amiable rogue once more – vodka soaking through the precise plans of how to lay a fire: the saloon-bar jokes impinging on all that long-ago Empire idealism. How like Spinks not to bother with anything up to date, going off into the wilds of Snowdonia with just his own tipsy goodwill and commonsense to preserve him: that, and a quarter of Smirnoff and scouting instructions a generation out of date.

  If he could survive on so little, then so could I. On the other hand, his had been a legal enterprise; mine was not, and with these fairly useless objects found to begin with, I feared that Spinks might not have much more to offer me inside his bag.

  But he did. I took the stuff out carefully, draping most of it on the branches about me. Apart from the sleeping bag and the small blue gas burner, there were a variety of other outdoor survival necessities: a first-aid kit, a tin mug and plate, a billycan, an imitation Swiss Army knife, complete with assorted files, probes, blades, bottle openers and a magnifying glass; a canvas waterbag, a lightweight mountain hammock, a folding pocket saw (two rings at either end of a flexible line of minutely serrated steel), a packet of half a dozen assorted Woolworth’s fish-hooks with leaders but without any line, a small mountaineering axe, unused, with half a dozen aluminium pitons still strapped to it, together with a coil of quarter-inch nylon rope and a small pair of green Army surplus binoculars, old but functional.

  The food line wasn’t so good: just half a packet of Lyons Green Label tea, one of Ritz biscuits, some bone-hard cheddar and two crumpled packs of Knorr Spring Vegetable soup. There were other personal odds and ends, some likely to be of use, but most not: an old dark green Army pullover with leather epaulettes, an unopened pack of ‘Fetherlite’ French letters, and two soiled paperbacks: Hot Dames on Cold Slabs by Hank Janson and last year’s Good Beer Guide to Great Britain. Spinks, obviously, had thought well of Baden-Powell’s maxim: ‘Be Prepared’. He had followed this injunction to the letter.

  There were also two maps: a large-scale Ordnance Survey of the Snowdonia area and, much more usefully, a smaller-scale one of the north Cotswolds, from Woodstock south-west to Winchcombe, which included the school and the big estate where I now was. In another outside pocket I found three emergency distress flares, a compass and a torch. But the battery was nearly done for. There were no matches.

  I checked through my own possessions then, feeling about the pockets of my grey-green cord suit. I had a box of matches, a little damp, less than half full; eighteen cigarettes, my red felt-tip pen that I’d been correcting the fourth form’s essays with, and the keys of our car. Nothing else. No money. I rarely carried my wallet or cheque book.

  But there was something else, I felt it now, in my other inside pocket: it was the boy’s exercise book I’d been correcting the previous evening, folded up and stuffed in there without my remembering: his ‘Great Experience’, the rainy soccer match between Banbury and Oxford United. But it was the first and only essay in a new book – the rest a hundred blank pages, which I use now to write this.

  I put Spinks’s stuff carefully back into the bag. Yes, I thought, there was enough here to make a go of it: a start at least. But then it struck me: apart from the previous night I’d never spent twenty-four hours entirely out of doors alone in my life. I’d lit picnic fires and barbecues as a child, and years later had done the same with Laura and Clare. But nothing more. And what of the elements, the damp? It was fine now, in this last week of May, but it would surely rain soon and it was still cold at night. The tea and the Ritz biscuits and the lump of cheddar would suffice as a snack. But when they were gone, what then?

  I realised I was as unfitted to life alone in the open as I had been to life among most people in the ordinary world, a stranger, really, in both places. A walk in the woods, yes, I’d done that. But I’d never lived in them. I’d never been a boy scout either. The whole thing seemed ridiculous once more. My legs hurt now, too, the cuts and bruises I’d suffered climbing the dry-stone walls and my face and hands and back were scored with little scratches from the barbed-wire fence. My feet were cold; cold and damp.

  I took my shoes and socks off and let them lie in a pool of sunlight out along the branch. I opened Spinks’s first-aid box. There were antiseptic ointments, bandages, a lot of Band-aids – and using them on my hands and legs, the pain easing after a while and the sun warming my toes, it struck me how much of a lucky gift all these things were, that Spinks’s backpack had been something meant. Fate was on my side, had given me a chance, at least, and I had better take it.

  A police helicopter flew over the woods at about midday not far above my tree: the downthrust from its rotors blew the leaves about above me like whirlwind for a few moments. But the storm didn’t penetrate to the foliage where I was. I was still safe. The news – which I heard later on, a local bulletin from Radio Oxford, describing me in some detail and the precautions people in the area should now take – made me more resolute. I was free here. Even with tracker dogs and a helicopter they hadn’t found me. The copper beech tree had saved me. I was invisible, from beneath or above. The next thing to do was to make or find some more permanent hiding place. And I thought then: why not a tree house?

  The beech-tree I was in wasn’t suitable. The leaves thinned out too much towards the top while the branches halfway up, where I was now, would never have allowed for any platform of logs or planks such as I had in mind. I’d have to find another tree. But in the meantime I strung up the lightweight hammock between two branches, ate some of the Ritz biscuits and cheese and slept afterwards for several hours. I listened to the radio again, the volume turned down, close to my ear: the local news and the ‘P.M.’ show, which talked about me, too: a wife-slayer on the run. I had gone nationwide. The police might be back, I thought, sometime in the daylight, with fresh men, fresh dogs, so I waited until well into the evening before I climbed down carefully from my perch. I was surprised the day had passed so quickly: those early days all did. It wasn’t until a few weeks had elapsed that the problem of boredom arose.

  I came on the lake first, upstream, barely half a dozen yards beyond the overhanging branch I’d found. If I’d gone tramping up the brook that previous evening in the failing light I’d have fallen right into it. The equipment in Spinks’s bag would have been soaked, most of it ruined. I was lucky again.

  The lake, more large pond than lake, was about 300 yards long and 70 wide, a slowly moving sheet of dark, copper-coloured, leaf-filled water, shaped like an hourglass, the heavily overgrown banks narrowing in the middle, leaving two channels on either side of an even more heavily encrusted island covered in wildly rampant rhododendrons with a huge yellow-leaved willow at the centre whose branches drooped out over it all like an umbrella. The water in these two channels moved quickly enough on one side over the fallen supports and arches of a small wooden footbridge. Elsewhere, along its margins, this lower part of the lake was choked with duckweed and flowering waterlilies vying for the light, beneath the circle of great beech trees which leant right over the water, completely surrounding the whole area. And above these lakeside trees were other copper beeches, rising straight up from the steep sides of the little valley, so that I had the impression, as I stood there that evening, of being at the bottom of a vast, dark, leafy well, with the dregs of water about me, where to get in or out one would either have to fall or climb.

  Besides the waterlilies there was the long gone to seed, and sometimes exotic, evidence of other cultivated
plants and bushes, sprouting wildly here and there in the choked banks, while up by the ruined footbridge I found the remains of a covered boathouse in the overhanging trees, the rotten timbers in the roof collapsed over a small inlet, with a jetty that had sunk into the duckweed leaving only a chunk of dressed stone and a rusting metal bollard above water.

  The lake had probably been an artificial creation and its borders must once have been a carefully tended water garden, a pleasure-haunt many years before, where people from the great house, I imagined, must have come down for boating afternoons, with parasols, when liveried butlers had served them hamper teas on the small island afterwards. I supposed the money had gone long before, with the previous owners, to keep it up, while the American magnate had yet to bring his cash to bear on this secret Arcadia. It remained now, with this overgrowth of the years, a deep wilderness where yet one could just make out all the bones of an airy formality beneath: eighty, ninety years before the great beech trees would not have leant so overpoweringly over the water; there would have been order and reason then, clearly imposed by the many contrived effects: the willow-pattern bridge, a Gothic folly on the island perhaps, a boathouse in the same mode. Now this hidden landscape, long since freed of all such impositions, grew apace, forgetting the world, by whom it was forgotten.

  Leading away from the ruined footbridge, the remains of a stepped path rose sharply up the angle of the valley, through the trees to the top of the ridge, which must have been a hundred and fifty feet above the water – though when I got to the top, the lake was quite invisible hidden somewhere below me. I had managed to move up the slope here quietly enough. But I realised that anyone coming directly down into the valley would almost certainly slip and make a fearful commotion in the process. Already I saw the place as an ideal retreat: and more than that, as my domain.

  At the top of the ridge the beech forest thinned somewhat. There were great clumps of flowering blackthorn here and there, but otherwise the undergrowth was less severe. Soon there were odd clearings in the wood and then I came on an old metal boundary fence, with open parkland beyond, open in the traditional eighteenth-century manner, informally landscaped with clumps of chestnut and oak dotted here and there, a few cows, and a flat, roped-off space to one side, near the estate wall – a cricket pitch, it seemed, with a strange thatched log-built pavilion facing it.

  The house itself was visible now, or at least the east-wing, hardly more than a quarter of a mile away, on a slight rise in the parkland, with elaborate, almost castellated terracing above the meadow grass, fringeing the house like a stone ruff.

  From what I could make out in the fading light, it seemed a huge Victorian creation, probably high Gothic, for I could see the tall brick chimneys and spiky towers against the sunset, the variety of different roofs and roof levels, as well as the steeply sloping slates and pinnacles and gable ends that jutted wildly about the crown of the house.

  I was surprised. The north Cotswolds, I knew, contained a few Georgian and other earlier masterpieces in mellow stone. But I’d never heard of any Victorian pile in the area, and certainly of nothing like this place, seemingly vast as a railway terminus: a house which, even in the bad light, clearly had a lot of mad character and a confidence to it, bristling with the busy confusion of half a dozen architectural styles.

  But then, as I’ve said, it had been impossible ever to see the house, either from the roads or hills about. From the outside the whole estate was entirely enclosed by its tall belt of beech-trees and I could see these now, from the inside, forming another complete circle round the parkland, leaving the house at the centre inviolate, unknown.

  I had Spinks’s Army fieldglasses with me, but the sun was low in the west behind the house and I could make few other details out except the thorny pyramids and spirals of masonry all about the top, the clusters of elaborate chimney stacks. It was just a soft charcoal silhouette on the hill, a fantasy like a Rackham drawing as the light waned behind it.

  There was, I could just see, a huge conservatory jutting out from the end of the wing nearest to me, two storeys high, a graceful glass arch over the top and what looked like a walled vegetable garden to the right of this, at the back of the house, where there must have been a big yard as well, together with a lot of other outbuildings. There was no sign of life and no lights on anywhere, though it was nearly dark now.

  And then, just before I moved away back down into the woods, a lot of surprising light did suddenly occur – in the big conservatory. It seemed as if a series of bright spotlights were being moved around inside as I put the binoculars on to it. Shafts of light illuminated great vague dark fronds, climbing plants, and even whole trees beneath the great crystal arch. I was too low on the ground to see anyone inside. There were just these mysterious lights, coming from beneath, playing up over the foliage, rhythmically patrolling the greenery, crystal fingers moving slowly up and down and around, as if someone was conducting some kind of horticultural theatre, or creating a mysterious ballet, a dance of white lines against the gathering dark. I watched it steadily for ten minutes or more, but could find no rhyme or reason to it, to these questing searchlights in the night.

  I had Spinks’s torch with me, going down the hill into the valley, hurrying back to my tree before total dark. But its beam was feeble and I didn’t want to use it anyway. And thus I fell, missing my footing about halfway down the steep hill – falling headlong at first, then slipping madly through the undergrowth as I tried to pull myself round and get a grip on things. But it was no use. I thundered down most of the last part of the valley, cutting and bruising myself all over again.

  A root or branch had caught me as well, I found, when I got to the bottom, hitting me somewhere just over the eye, a solid blow that I didn’t really feel at first but which made me gasp with pain, almost crying out, when I came to a final halt near the lake. I lay where I was, not moving. I found I couldn’t move in any case. I was practically unconscious – though I’d heard the racket I’d made coming down through the undergrowth clearly enough. And I hoped then that someone else had heard me, up at the house perhaps, that I would soon be found. For all I wanted at that moment was some sort of professional attention, a warm bed, comfort. My forehead was damp, there was blood there and the cloudless night sky above the lake moved round and round in my eyes when I looked up, with the trees forming a spinning margin around it: I was at the bottom of a dark whirlpool. Then I passed out.

  When I opened my eyes again it must have been the middle of the night, an hour or more later, for the stars were clearly out now, in the circle of sky above me, quite still in their courses. I was alive. The blood had caked over my eye. No one had come. I was still free. I found I could move myself a bit; no bones seemed to be broken.

  The woods about had resumed their nocturnal calm, an almost total silence, except, when you listened very carefully, after minutes on end, for odd sighs and crackles in the undergrowth that might have been the breeze. Then something definitely moved, a little way along the lake edge. Was it a water bird or some small thing fleeing from an owl on soundless wings? Was it a fox, a badger, a mole? I lay where I was for another ten minutes, wondering, letting the peace sink into me. A moon had come up, I saw then, which explained the gauze of faint white light in the air, a broad scimitar just above the trees on the other side of the water.

  I stood up at last and hobbled painfully to the edge of the lake where I could see the ruined footbridge to the island in the moonlight. Next to it was the old boathouse and the half-sunken jetty. Moving out along this I found a place where I could kneel. I bent out over the water and washed the blood from my face, trying to leave the scab intact, and then, cupping my fingers, I drank great handfuls of the liquid. It was cool, cool on my face and in my throat, with nothing brackish about it.

  In luck again, I thought. I might have been blinded, with a broken leg: instead, just a few more cuts and bruises, a bad graze on my head and my legs feeling as if they’d been shot out from un
der me once more. Yet I was certain I didn’t have the strength to get back to the beech tree at the far end of the lake, least of all pull myself up into its middle branches where my hammock was.

  But then, as I leant back from the water, wondering what I might do, I saw something man-made rising up from the edge of the island in faint silhouette against the moonlight: man-made because it rose upwards, in an exact straight line, from beyond the branches of the willow, at an angle of 45 degrees. It was the edge of a roof, I thought. Was it a folly or a bower, some Gothic summer house that I’d imagined the island supported earlier in the day?

  When I had come this same way earlier in the evening I had seen nothing on the island other than the rhododendrons and the willow flowering out above it like a yellow fountain. But here, certainly, was a building of some sort. I could see it more clearly now: the edge of a roof jutting out over the water.

  The channel was about ten yards across at this point. The ruined footbridge wouldn’t bear my weight. But by walking out into the stream and using the old wooden piles and arches for support I found I was able to wade across onto the island without too much difficulty. The channel had silted up here and the water never came above my waist.

  Pushing up through the bushes on the far side I first stumbled on some steps: a rise of half a dozen moss-covered steps. Beyond was a bramble-shrouded doorway, I saw, with a stab of Spinks’s torch, covered by a metal grille like a tall garden gate. When I touched it the rust came away in great flakes in my hand. But it opened readily enough.

  Inside I found myself in a small octagonal space, with cut stone all round in the walls, well made originally, but cracked in places now, I saw by the faint torchlight, where the ivy had come rapaciously in, ivy and bramble that had crept in from the door, and ferns that had risen between the flagstones from the earth beneath. In front was a small terrace, edged by a stone balustrade looking out over the water, and the sloping roof which I’d seen from the shore above that.