by Joseph Hone
‘I haven’t survived so well. Not really.’
‘What have you been doing? To eat I mean. Shooting the pigeons or the duck? You must really be a fine shot –’
‘Look,’ I interrupted. ‘What does it matter? We’re not here to talk about survival or the wild life, are we?’ I started to move. ‘Why don’t you just call the police. I’m tired of standing here like an ass. I’m cold. Let me get some clothes.’ I moved again. But she raised the rifle.
‘Not so quickly, please,’ she said. She had a genuinely polite, concerned tone in her voice now.
‘Look, you think I killed my wife,’ I said. ‘Well, call the police then. You’d better not take any risks.’
‘I’m not taking any risks.’ She lifted the rifle, holding it up in one hand now, finger still on the trigger, cowboy fashion. ‘I can use this as well as you seem to be able to use that bow.’
I relaxed. ‘All right,’ I said. ‘Yes, I’m sure you can. And you can track people just as well, I’ve noticed. Without a sound. I never heard you come up behind me here. Like an Indian scout.’ I stopped, thinking then of her own strange behaviour the past week. ‘You know,’ I went on, taking the offensive now, ‘You’re an even more curious mixture than you think I am. I’ve been watching you recently. You don’t add up somehow. Oh, I’ve seen you without your knowing it, I’ve become something of a scout myself: those strange lights on all round you in the conservatory in the middle of the night. And bringing that bunch of roses out to the tombs on the island. And those war-whoops you let out the other day, when you came down to swim here, that afternoon when it was hot, when the midges were about. I thought you were a Red Indian, I really did: so bronzed, that long brown back, all that dark hair.’ I looked at her now, straight in the eye, then up and down, moving over her body, appraising her minutely as she had me, undressing her with my eyes, taking visual revenge on her as she stood in the pool of sunlight by the corner of the old pumping-shed.
Her face changed, a whole new expression, forceful, amused. She smiled at me intently, just as she had that afternoon coming back from the lake: a huge smile, almost too radiant, so that I wondered again if there was, after all, a touch of madness in her.
‘So you saw all that did you?’ she asked, a hint of excitement in her voice.
‘Yes. And heard it, too: those war-whoops. I liked that. In fact,’ I went on, filled with sudden enthusiasm myself now, ‘The way you behaved … it made me feel … I was going to ask you to help me.’
‘You were? About what?’ she said with interest.
‘About my daughter, my getting out of here. I’m not that good at living rough, I’ve found.’
‘Funny. It’s the opposite with me. I’m not that good at being civilised,’ she said. ‘Perhaps we’re in luck: we could change places maybe.’
‘No, I meant – I thought if I explained things you might understand how I didn’t kill my wife. It was the people I once worked for. I used to be … with British Intelligence.’
She nodded her head as I spoke, too readily, as though agreeing wordlessly with a child’s preposterous story, as I told her a few brief details of my recent history, my present predicament. But I stopped quite soon.
‘Why should you believe it?’ I said. ‘It sounds nonsense enough just in the telling.’
‘Maybe I do believe it. You’d hardly have spent ten days lying up in the woods here if it wasn’t true, would you?’
‘Why not?’
‘A real wifeslayer,’ she said with some relish. ‘Well, you’d have kept on running or given yourself up at once. They nearly always do.’
‘Are you a detective?’
‘Only of myself. That’s what I’d have done. One or the other. I wouldn’t have hung about if–’
‘If you’d killed your husband?’ I said to her pointedly. ‘I saw you both the other night. I was watching when you were in the conservatory together, very late. You were eating a chicken leg. I saw the way he looked at you.’
She didn’t say anything for a moment. ‘Was yours a good marriage?’ she asked finally.
‘Yes. Very.’
She pondered this. Then she said suddenly. ‘I’ll listen to you then. You’d better tell me all about it, properly. Though all the same …’ She thought about something, undecided. Then out of the blue she threw the old Winchester across at me, so that it came at me very quickly out of the air, slap into my hand. I only just caught it.
‘What?’ I said. ‘What’s this for?’ I held the rifle, completely at a loss.
‘Just to see,’ she said. ‘Well? Go on!’
‘To see what?’
‘If you’re really being honest.’
‘How?’
‘Well, you’d shoot me now, if you weren’t telling me the truth, wouldn’t you? Or at least, you’d run away. No?’
I stood there, doing nothing.
‘You see? You’re telling the truth,’ she said with satisfaction. I handed the rifle back to her.
‘Yes, but what if I hadn’t been?’
‘I’d be dead. Or you’d be gone. That’s all.’
‘But why take the risk?’
‘My! Why do you think? I had to know now, not later. If I’m going to help, I had to know at once, don’t you see, if you were lying? Well, that was the best way. The quickest. I hate wasting time, if I can help it. There’s so much to do.’
She paused in her staccato rush of words, looking round her at the empty lake, the empty woods, as though she was in the middle of Bond Street, surrounded by all sorts of marvellous choices and conflicting temptations. Something nervous had overcome her in the last minutes as she spoke; impatience had replaced the calm to such an extent it seemed as if a whole different person had crept into her skin without her knowing it, a frustrated, vehement spirit.
She looked at me much less clinically now, with a candid restlessness, looking just at my eyes, enquiringly, as though we were old friends, school friends perhaps: children suddenly, contemplating mischief, both now trespassing in someone else’s woods.
‘I say,’ she started up again, ‘before you come up to the house, why don’t you finish your swim? It’s hot already. It’s going to be another scorcher.’
Her language, I noticed, was sometimes curiously archaic, Edwardian almost. ‘I say, it’s going to be a scorcher.’ The accent remained American but some of these phrases were from an England of long ago, again as if some completely different character, a different nationality indeed, had come to possess her.
‘Well,’ she said. ‘What about swimming?’
‘That dog,’ I said, pointing down the well. ‘The man, the policeman who owned it, he’ll be coming back this way most likely, to look for it. It’s hardly worth the risk.’
‘He won’t be back. I met him before I got round to you here. He was trespassing too. I moved him off,’ she added proudly, a childish rashness in her voice, as though Ross had been no more than a snotty schoolboy whose unwelcome attentions she had repulsed.
‘How did you know I was here? It couldn’t have been a surprise: you had that rifle with you.’
‘I knew someone was here. The police were all up at the Manor ten days ago, warned us. Then we heard they thought you’d got clean away. But I wasn’t so sure of that. Someone had been out on the island.’
‘But I didn’t touch a thing out there –’
‘No. But I found an old Band-aid on the floor.’
‘You’ve been back there? I never saw you go.’ I was surprised.
‘I can move about these woods as well as you can.’
‘Apparently.’
‘I live here. This is all mine,’ she added, again with that sharp proprietorial air. But again it wasn’t so much a tone of serious adult possessiveness as that of a child holding onto a doll in the face of a rival. And I thought once more that perhaps she was touched, if not mad. But touched by what? I couldn’t say. All these woods, this estate, the house itself – perhaps they did actually belong t
o her. There was certainly money in her voice. She need not have lied or exaggerated.
And yet … She wasn’t a child, clearly: she must have been in her late thirties. But she had the insistence of a ten-year-old, that was it: of someone craving recognition, fair play in some nursery cause that had been unjustly denied her.
I’d moved across from the dank shade by the well into a patch of sunlight now by the corner of the shed. Yet I was still cold. I shivered again. And I thought of the other woman, the big woman in the white housecoat or nurse’s uniform, who I had seen spying here, hidden in a bush, down by the lake, a week before.
‘I don’t think I’ll bother swimming,’ I said. ‘I’d prefer some clothes.’
‘Yes, where are your clothes?’ she asked casually.
I was just about to tell her where they were – back up in my tree-house in the oak. But I stopped myself at the last moment. It might have been a trick of hers to discover my hideout. She saw and understood my hesitation.
‘Of course, you’re still hiding out somewhere here, aren’t you? Why should you trust me?’
I’d picked up the bow and the two arrows and was close to her now, following her slowly, walking behind her as we left the undergrowth and came down towards the lake. But even though she was in front of me I was nervous, wondering if she might be leading me into some trap.
‘That rifle,’ I asked her. ‘You said it was loaded. Is it really?’
She turned quickly. ‘Why should I lie? I don’t lie,’ she added emphatically, with anger almost. Then she pumped the mechanism violently, holding back the firing pin, so that a stream of little bronze-coloured bullets dropped all over the woodland floor. ‘You may have to lie. But I don’t.’ She seemed genuinely angry, hurt.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said, bending down to retrieve the bullets. There were so many questions I wanted to ask this woman that I didn’t know where to start. Not having spoken to anyone for ten days I realised that I was as starved for words now as I’d been for food before, that I was as desperate for communication as she appeared to be. And yet I still didn’t trust her somehow. Was there a trap?
But then, I thought, if there was, what had I to lose? If she didn’t help me, I had no future hidden alone in this valley in any case, and the worst she could do then would be to hand me over to the police.
It was warm now out in the full morning sun by the edge of the lake: the start of another real scorcher, just as she had said.
‘All right,’ I suddenly decided, not caring now who might be watching us. ‘I’ll finish my swim. Why not?’
I was halfway out across the water, enjoying the wider, open spaces of this northern end of the lake for the first time, when I looked back to the shoreline for a moment. She had got undressed herself now and was standing on the edge, naked again. Then she dived in and swam towards me with just the same punishing vigour that I remembered from her aquatic antics a week before, doing a racing crawl, arms flying, her head half-beneath the water like a hidden prow butting the waves ahead of her.
She dived down again then, into the coppery depths, swimming completely under water now, passing close to me, several feet beneath the surface like a great fish, before she emerged ahead of me suddenly, exultantly, as she had a week before, like a missile from a submarine, exploding vertically, her body rising right up into the air almost as far as her knees. She might have been showing off, I thought.
‘You’re something of an athlete,’ I shouted over to her.
‘Once,’ she called back to me. ‘Once I was!’
Her eyes gleamed with excitement, reflecting the stark sunshine out in the middle of the lake. And the water falling down her cheeks, glistening on her dark skin, made her look much younger, fresher, almost adolescent. And I was reminded then of something by this face: an old photograph perhaps, of a face seen somewhere before, at least. But I couldn’t place the memory. It might just have been an advertisement from an old New Yorker: some chic woman in that magazine promoting a classic cotton summer dress or a select Park Avenue hotel.
‘I swim – a lot – all my life,’ she went on. ‘I love it.’ She was still gasping for breath. ‘But – the sea – mostly. The Atlantic,’ she shouted across to me. ‘I like this fresh water better – when it’s warm enough. Much more, really. You sort of swim in it somehow. It’s so much more watery. And the salt isn’t there. Your eyes don’t hurt. Do they?’
She looked at me enquiringly, intently again, as if her last question, far from being conversational, had some great importance for her and she expected some equally considered reply. We both of us trod water now, a few yards apart, the sun a great torch almost directly above us, dazzling the lake, turning all the copper shades to blue.
‘No. There’s no salt,’ I said. ‘And the sharks won’t get you.’
‘Did you catch fish here? Is that how you survived?’
‘Yes. A perch, I think.’
‘You came prepared, with a rod, hooks?’
‘No. Just with some luck: a man at the school, the sports master, he left a lot of camping stuff behind, in a backpack. I took it.’ I didn’t tell her about the sandwiches and cream cakes in the cricket pavilion.
‘You’re used to living outdoor then, living rough? With bows and arrows.’
‘Just the opposite. I’m a great stay-at-home. A roof and four walls, I love that.’ And saying this I was suddenly reminded that I had no home now, that I was on the run, with my wife dead and a child that I loved gone away. Then, in the bright light, the water pliant as blue mercury, with a woman splashing happily a few yards away from me, I remembered the horrors of the last ten days; I didn’t belong here among these easy pleasures. I was from a world of disaster and loss.
I felt giddy, even faint. The sudden fun of this meeting, the surprise of swimming together, this no longer meant anything, and the sadness must have shown on my face, for she was concerned now, in her eyes, in her voice.
‘Are you cold?’ she asked.
‘No. Just – as you said yourself: I suddenly felt I’ve got so much to do.’
‘Come home and tell me about it, then. Why not?’ She swam a little closer, ever the concerned enquirer.
‘I’ll have to get my clothes,’ I said.
‘There’s plenty up at the house. You can use them. Arthur left a lot.’
‘Arthur?’
‘My husband. Or he was.’
‘The man I saw going off the other day? In a big Mercedes?’
‘Yes. He’s gone back to New York. The divorce should be through by the end of the summer.’
‘But I can’t just walk up there with nothing on.’
‘Why not?’
‘What about those two gardeners I’ve seen? And you’ve probably got friends up there. Or a cook, servants.’
‘I live alone. There’s a housekeeper, yes. Mrs Pringle. And her husband Tom, Arthur’s driver. They live in one of the gate lodges. But she’s out for the day. Gone to Stow. She has a sister there. And Tom is still up in London, since he took Arthur to the airport: something to do with the car. And the gardeners are thinning the trees right over the far side of the park. There’s no one there right now.’
We’d swum back to the shore. Alice had climbed out and was dressing on the bank. ‘I know,’ she said. ‘There’s a towel I keep in the little boat over there. You can use that. I’ll get it for you.’ She moved away.
‘Why do you bother?’ I shouted after her, exasperated, suddenly unsure of everything. ‘Why do you make it all so easy?’ She returned with the towel, throwing it at me as I came out of the water.
‘You expect people to be nasty to you, do you?’
‘Yes. Recently.’
‘I think you’re honest. I told you. But even if I didn’t … Well, I could hardly leave you to spend the rest of the summer stuck out in these woods, could I?’
‘You mean, you’re going to phone the police in any case. Is that it? Do me a favour, before I know it –’
�
�If you want me to. But I’d prefer not to. I’d really prefer –’ She stopped.
‘What?’ I was even more abrupt, angry.
‘It’s childish,’ she said finally.
‘I’m sure it isn’t,’ I said, thinking that an open admission of this quality from such an unconsciously childish person would surely offer something vital.
She said, ‘I’ve often wanted to disappear myself and live away in the woods. Oh, for some real reason, like you, not just for fun.’
‘I’ve touched the romantic in you?’ I asked flippantly.
‘Yes, you have,’ she said, with an openness that surprised me even in her. ‘That’s why I bought all this – the house, the park, all the trees. “The Romantic in me.” I’ve had the money to pander to that instinct,’ she added rather bitterly. ‘But Arthur, of course, he finally thought I was just playing games. “Arrested development,” he said.’
‘It was his money, was it?’
She humphed then, the first trace of the cynical that I had noticed in her. ‘Oh no,’ she said. ‘It was all my money: Troy Shipping. Troy Meat Packaging and Refrigeration. Troy Hotels. Troy Leisure Incorporated. Troy Chemicals. Troy Everything. I’m the daughter.’
And now I remembered her: a face, a photograph, an article I’d seen a year or so before in the leisure section of Time magazine, or was it the Sunday Times? Alice Troy, of course, with her chiselled, Red Indian features, her fortune – rich beyond the dreams of avarice – her good taste, her interest in interior decor and pre-Raphaelite art: Alice Troy who had come to live in England, buying some half-ruined Victorian Gothic folly in the Cotswolds, and doing it up: a rich Manhattan socialite I’d thought then, a world away from me, from my simple, rather penurious cottage life with Laura: a woman I would never know – who yet stood in front of me now.
‘Of course,’ I said. ‘I should have realised. I read something about you, a year or so ago: what good taste you had, your Victorian paintings. And an interest in courtly etiquette – what was it? Yes: the Arthurian legends: Glastonbury, Camelot and the Knights of the Round Table. You were going to finance another archaeological dig, weren’t you? In the Vale of the White Horse, wasn’t it? Or was it the Red Bull, looking for the real Camelot?’