The Valley of the Fox

by Joseph Hone

  On the morning of my fifth day in the open I was literally starving. I’d sharpened the steel tips of the six arrows on the stone jetty meanwhile, and practised long hours with them against a rough target, the end of a fallen beech branch near the old pumping-shed. So I suppose I’d already taken the decision subconsciously, without admitting it yet. But I did then: there were all those lambs just beyond the rim of the quarry, so many that one, surely, would never be missed. I thought about it for a while. It was a risk and I was no butcher, though the various blades of Spinks’s knife were sharp enough, I thought … All the same, how did you gut a sheep? Would you let the carcase hang for a bit, like a pheasant? And what about the blood? I didn’t think about it any more then. But by late afternoon I was thinking about nothing else.

  I’d never understood before how hunger could cause actual pain, an ache in the belly that spread everywhere else like a wasting disease. But I understood then. I took two of the sharpened arrows with the bow, as well as the knife, and climbed down the tree.

  Passing the ruined footbridge and old boathouse, I moved up the western edge of the lake, back from the water, along the hidden paths I’d found there. There was only one danger spot – almost at the end of the lake, where some days before I’d found another path that led away from the lake at right angles, up a much gentler slope here, through the trees towards what must have been the back of the great house.

  There was a big clump of flowering hawthorn here just before you reached this path, and I always stopped behind it, hiding in its cover for a minute, before crossing over the open space and going on up the valley. But there were no sounds that afternoon in the sunlight, no sign of any movement among the sloping trees to my left or on the path that ran through them. I moved from cover and I was several yards out into the clearing before I froze: there was a woman coming straight down the hill towards me now, only about a hundred yards away.

  I don’t know how she failed to see me. The hawthorn immediately behind me must have served as camouflage – or else she was just preoccupied, with a big bath-towel wrapped round her folded arms, held in front of her like a muff. I got back behind the bush again in an instant. But I could still see her through the flowering branches as she came nearer: not tall, but with a lot of wavy black hair that made her seem tall, rising well forward on her brow and combed straight back so that it looked like a helmet, glistening in the distance: a bouncing helmet, for she had a strange jaunty walk, putting little skips and steps into her pace, as though merry over something, wearing smartly cut cords and a blouse wide-open at the front for it was muggy hot down here by the water in the late afternoon heat.

  Crouching down, I crawled into the hawthorn bush and, working my way gently round inside the cavern of branches, I got almost to the front of the tree where I could just see out the far side through the snowstorm of white twigs.

  I saw the boat then, a little blunt-nosed fibreglass dinghy, which must have been hidden in the bank. Leading back from the lake at this point a rough clearing had been made in the long grass. And the woman was there, too, her back towards me now, less than fifty yards away, getting undressed. She must have been in her late thirties, not muscular, but compactly built, with a great neatness about her, the neatness of a young girl: not an inch spare or wasted in the body. I couldn’t see her face, just her naked back, and this was unusual: a long slim back, very long, out of proportion with the rest, which splayed out dramatically just below her waist. She was deeply bronzed everywhere, without any strap marks. She was so sunburnt indeed, so dark-haired that I thought for a moment, irrationally, that she might be a Red Indian. She swam then, calmly, easily, yet with a kind of powerful athleticism – out into the equally bronzed water.

  She swam for ten minutes or more, vigorously, up and down the lake, ducking her head right under now and then, kicking her legs back high in the air, diving deeply, only to emerge in a fountain of spray a few yards further on, vertically like a missile, shaking the water out of her eyes, the skein of dark hair twirling round her face now like a whip.

  She swam like someone who had just discovered the trick, finding water a marvellous pleasure for the first time. Yet there was something spiteful, wilful in her pleasure, too – an unnecessary determination, as if she were challenging the liquid, wanting to fight it, punish it. She was bullying the water, that’s what it was – as if taking out some great frustration on it.

  I noticed, though, that she never went further than the island halfway down the lake, never swam on through the small channels on either side of it, down to my end of the water. This lower half of the lake, where I had my tree, she never visited, it was, indeed, invisible from the northern end where I was then hidden.

  When she got out she lay flat on the great bath-towel for five minutes in the sun, letting the heat dry her, for she couldn’t have wanted any more tan. She stood up at last and looked out over the lake into the trees on the other side, arms akimbo. I thought she was going to get dressed. But instead she did a curious thing: putting her hand to her mouth she let out a series of loud war whoops – yes, war whoops – letting her fingers fall rapidly on her lips like a drum. The surprising sounds spread over the water, echoing round the small valley. She stopped and listened intently, as if waiting for a reply – and I was petrified, fully expecting one. Then she did it again, in a slightly higher register, but more a question than a threat in the tone now.

  I looked around wildly, peering through the branches of the bush to my left, first over to the far side of the lake, then right, looking up the steep side of the valley. And it was then that I saw the other woman – hidden, as I was, behind another clump of hawthorn, near the old pathway here that led up from the lake towards the house. She was a big woman, middle-aged, dressed in what looked like a white housekeeper’s coat. Or was it a nurse’s uniform? There was the sense of an overseer – a wardress almost – something powerful and malign in this huge Woman as she stood dead still, a threat in the warm valley, observing the antics of the other younger girlish figure, standing by the water now, naked, bellowing and whooping like some lovely savage.

  Finally she got dressed then and when she walked back up the path not far away from me – the other woman had vanished by now – I saw that she was smiling, an almost too radiant smile, like someone in a toothpaste advertisement.

  I forgot my hunger, watching her disappear in the distance up the path. War whoops and that bronzed skin – was she a Red Indian? I began to doubt my senses, before I remembered the actual timbre of her whoops, sharp, light, a tremulous excitement in the tone, a voice that cut through the muggy afternoon air like a romantic announcement. Was it this woman, then, who had brought the roses to the long-dead pair on the island? It seemed very possible. Yet could she be forty, middle-aged? Her acts were more those of a child or some dream-filled adolescent girl. Or was she just a madwoman, simply deranged, someone from the big house, a relation, a visitor, a servant?

  But then I realised suddenly how nothing she had done was actually mad at all. Working too long in the pretentious school, among dull or frightened people, in a country that had lost all its confidence in sharp personality or adventure, I had come to think of such behaviour as extreme, whereas the spirit of fun and energy which she had expressed just now was in fact quite natural. It was I who had gone sour, hemmed in by too many formalities and compromises. And it was I who was mad now, if anyone was, I who had gone to such unlikely extremes, up in my oak tree, running away from the world, almost a crazed hermit already. So that after the woman disappeared, I longed to throw it all in, to follow her – up the path back into civilisation. Instead, an hour later, I was up on the rim of the old quarry, behind the barbed-wire fence, wondering how I might kill a sheep: or a lamb.

  But even if the fence had not been in my way the sun was in my eyes, slanting down across the long green fields from the west, and the animals were much too far from me in any case, way out of bowshot. I thought of waiting till dark, climbing the fen
ce somehow and then taking the sheep by surprise, storming them, wrestling with one of them before cutting its throat. But despite my hunger this idea didn’t appeal.

  I began to wonder about the vegetable garden behind the great house. I’d seen this more clearly the previous day through Spinks’s binoculars, from near the top of the beech tree that gave me access to my oak, from a spot very high up in its branches that I’d made over into a look-out post, which gave me a good view from the top of the valley right over most of the parkland, together with the side of the house where the great conservatory was and all the yard buildings behind. The kitchen garden, I could see, surrounded by a large redbrick wall, was the last stonework attached to these out-buildings. Beyond it was an orchard and then the thick cover of beech trees. The path down to the lake, which the woman had taken, obviously ran through this orchard and then into, or near to, the vegetable garden. It was worth the risk; there might be some early carrots or late cabbage. Even an old onion would do. Anything would be better than the watercress or cutting a sheep’s throat.

  The moon was less of a scimitar and more of a bright gas globe at about twelve o’clock that night. But there were clouds too, now and then, which suddenly darkened the sky, when I had to stop completely or grope my way forward along the path up from the lake. However, by the time I’d come to the end of the orchard and saw the garden wall rearing up immediately ahead of me, there was a long cloudless spell and I could see as much as I needed. There was a door in the wall here. I waited behind it, listening, for five minutes. A dog was what I feared, or worse, some electrical device, a burglar alarm set against all the precious pictures, even this far away from the house. But there was no sound. A totally still, white, early June night. I lifted the latch and pushed. Inside I found myself not in the garden but in a long greenhouse, sloped against the wall on the other side. Small tomato plants were tied with string to overhead wires down almost the entire length and there were trestle tables next the wall crowded with petalled shrubs and flower pots. The moon shone down directly through the glass. At the far end was a workbench piled with trugs, with a stack of garden implements to one side, very old garden tools by the look of them. There was a faint smell of iodine and some booklets on the bench. I picked one up. It was a seed catalogue. Suttons. I could just see the name on the cover. But this must have been pretty old, too, for the paper was thin and dry, crumbling in my fingers. But there was nothing I could see anywhere to eat. Leaving the greenhouse I moved up a path next the garden wall. Again I could see nothing on the beds. It was too early in the year, I realised, and I certainly couldn’t risk digging about, pulling things up.

  I saw the figure then, in some sort of slouch hat and long, old-fashioned coat to my right, arms wide, suddenly menacing me. And there was a second’s blind terror before I saw it for the scarecrow that it was. It got me out of the garden, though, sooner than I intended. There was nothing here for me in any case. It was just the wrong season.

  Since the moonlight was still good when I left the garden, I decided to move along the outside of the wall, through the end of the orchard, and take a closer look at the house itself. A hundred yards further on there was a thick beech hedge and beyond that, as I’d seen from my look-out post, the pleasure gardens which ran down in a series of grass terraces from the great conservatory.

  As soon as I’d pushed through this hedge I saw the strange spotlights piercing the dark fronds in the conservatory again. I was much closer to them now, of course. But still, since the pleasure-garden rose above me here in a series of shallow herbaceous borders, I couldn’t see anything or anyone beneath, at ground level in the glasshouse: just the hidden lights again, moving gently to and fro, caressing the greenery inside. I was drawn to them like a moth.

  Keeping close against the rising beech hedge, I moved slowly up one side of the pleasure-garden until I reached the castellated stone balustrades which surrounded the house. There was a gravel walk behind this and then the conservatory itself, less than ten yards away. Peering through an arch in the balustrade now I could see right inside the glass building at last. And I saw the woman then, a moment later: the Red Indian woman by the lake.

  The space beneath the exotic shrubs and trees had been empty at first, before she had moved into it from the shadows, moved into the light, carrying a silver goblet in one hand, talking over her shoulder to someone apparently right behind her.

  Her face was lit then, with almost theatrical effect, as she stood for several moments in one of the hidden spotlights: a startlingly white face in the brightness. Or perhaps she was made up. The narrow, perfectly arched eyebrows seemed too good to be true, while her wavy dark hair was precisely parted in the middle, no longer a helmet against the sun but a discreet Victorian-style cowl, set carefully out over her temples, just touching her high cheekbones. She had changed: no longer the carefree outdoor girl by the lake, she seemed involved now in something contrived, even forced. Her face showed the strain: the huge smile by the lake was long gone. She wore what looked like a sort of Camelot outfit: a long, loose-fitting flimsy white dress with brightly patterned Etruscan borders, held tight, right up beneath her breasts and flowing out from there in folds of silken sheen. Her lips moved. She was still speaking, though no one had yet joined her. She turned then, swirling round in her thin dress, to greet someone at last as I thought. But instead she simply gazed up at the lights wandering about in the air above her.

  A classic Italianate fountain played in the background and just beyond that was a tall slim tree which rose up almost to the roof of the conservatory, a mimosa I thought, whose branches cascaded out in long feathery streamers. Wire baskets fell from the roof, little aerial gardens trailing long green anchors beneath them, while the walls were smothered in creeper. The whole place was a delicate jungle of blooms, with a minstrel’s gallery to top it all, jutting out from what would have been the first storey of the house, a sort of Juliet balcony with slim Gothic pillars set high above all the other natural effects.

  The woman moved to a table to one side of the conservatory, which I hadn’t seen, where a meal of some sort had been laid out. She lifted a heavy gilt platter. My attention was painful now, the more so when she took a chicken leg from it and, moving back towards me, started to pick at it fastidiously.

  I was so taken with this, imagining the taste, salivating, that I still didn’t see the discrepancy: that though she had continued talking, no one had yet joined her. She was talking to herself. The conservatory was empty. And it was only then that I recognised something eerie in the whole tableau: the woman’s pre-Raphaelite dress, hairstyle and appearance, the old goblets and platters: her general performance. For performance it must have been, I thought, just like the war-whoops by the lake, for herself alone, in the empty glass hall: a courtly picture, against this backdrop of Gothic stone and glass, here brought to actual life with medieval props and dresses.

  An act? Perhaps she had an audience somewhere behind her which I couldn’t see. Was there a house party, a late night of amateur theatricals in progress? If not, then she must be mad, I thought. Or was I still being too quick, too shallow in my judgement? Was there some other rational explanation?

  There was. The coarse-featured man moved into the light a moment later, dressed in a dark business suit, a drink in his hand, but held in an ordinary glass this time, not a handsome silver goblet: in every way a complete, even an appalling, contrast to all the woman’s lovely airs and graces: a tall, long-faced almost elderly man; dank tufts of hair carefully tended over his broad collar, American smart, expensively dressed, attentive. But the care in his expression was for himself, I thought, not for others. The face was carefully composed so that it would give nothing away; it was essentially sour, grasping.

  The woman must have been talking all the time to him, I realised then, where he had been invisible to me, hidden somewhere at the back of the conservatory. They were together now, though, facing each other. She was telling him something, speaking at s
ome length. He was listening, nodding from time to time, as though engrossed. But when she stopped talking he said nothing in reply, just stared at her for a long moment before turning quickly and walking away. And this last expression of his stayed with me, as it must have done for the woman: a look of hatred, of wordless, contemptuous dismissal.

  Six

  If I’d not been so hungry the following morning I’d have thought more about the events of the previous night. As it was, other than assuming that the two people in the conservatory were the American couple who owned Beechwood Manor, I thought of nothing but food. I still had a few spoonfuls left of Spinks’s Green Label tea and I was able to brew up one of these in the billycan for breakfast. There was some old cress left, too, and I forced myself to eat it, only to feel an even worse hunger afterwards. I realised I had to find something substantial to eat that day, or give myself up. But what? And where? It was obvious I had no talent for living wild. It had all been in the mind.

  I went back into the sleeping-bag when I’d had the tea and lay there like someone in a famine photograph, knees up in stomach, dead still, eyes wide open but unseeing. I was aware of the sun, though, bright again, filtering through the leaves. But there was a sharp wind as well, blowing from the west, coming in long gusts, rattling the top of the old oak like a storm at sea, and I imagined a change in the summer, a spell of rough weather approaching this calm centre of England, rushing up the Bristol Channel at that moment, bringing rain, which would soon catch me, drench me. I’d pack it in then …