The Valley of the Fox

by Joseph Hone

  ‘Yes. But Mrs Pringle likes to do it all properly. And so do I.’ Alice looked at me almost severely. ‘So why not?’ Then she smiled. She liked having this formal dinner with me, I realised then, the huge candelabrum in the centre of the table, the flames casting steady shadows in the warm, still air, the long silver-strewn sideboards running away from us, down either side of the dining-room walls: a ghostly, summer dinner-party, with just the two of us at a table made for a dozen.

  Alice liked entertaining me in such formal circumstances – as a prelude, perhaps, as she had hinted in Arthur’s bedroom, to even more elaborate occasions, to the ‘real thing’: dinner parties with real guests, honourable, courtly people like ourselves, parties we two would preside over from opposite sides of the great round table.

  Behind us, running right round the curved wall of the embrasure, was a rather faded Victorian mural of a medieval jousting tournament. Heavily armoured knights, bearing different coloured plumes and shields, charged at each other across the length of the wall while women in high toque hats and veils gazed at them with saintly rapture from a candy-striped pavilion in the middle. The whole thing had an air of idealised unreality.

  ‘That’s by Walter Crane,’ Alice told me, noticing my interest. ‘The Hortons had it done, after they’d staged a jousting tournament here when they opened the house in 1880. And do you know, we’re going to do just the same thing later this summer. It’s a hundred years since they built the house. There’s to be a two-day fête: a jousting tournament, a medieval costume ball, an 1880s cricket match. The Victorian Society are helping me.’

  Alice’s face shone with something of the same rapture as the damsels on the wall as she spoke. It made me want to tease her a little ‘But it’s rather out of date, isn’t it?’ I said. ‘Mimicking all those old, good, brave causes?’

  I smiled. But Alice had ceased to smile. ‘No. It’s not out of date,’ she said shortly, looking at me reprovingly, as though I was a Knight Errant criticising some glorious commission. So that by way of excuse I said to her, ‘No, I meant that it was the shadow now, rather than the substance: of bravery, honour. It’s not the “real thing”.’

  I wondered again why Alice had been so drawn to all these medieval symbols of chivalry and derring-do: these intense concepts of honour and glory. Had she been treated dishonourably once herself? Or was it just the fiction of a rich and aimless woman which she longed to enact here, another role she wanted to interpret? Was it real or false, this passionate identification with a Gothic past?

  She said then, by way of answering my unspoken thoughts, ‘It’s all quite real to me. That’s what Arthur and I fell out about. You see, I believe in all those values.’

  ‘At face value?’

  ‘Yes. And he didn’t.’

  Arthur, I could see in her mind, had betrayed the Glorious Company of the Round Table, while I had just joined it, taking his place now. I was tempted to say ‘Isn’t it all a little mad, in this day and age?’ But I didn’t speak the words in the end, for I sensed that I’d lose my place at the round table if I had. I knew now that Alice really believed in all these flawless virtues. Her shaky sanity was indeed based on this madness.

  The salmon mousse was delicious. There was a bottle of slightly chilled Montrachet to go with it. But after this first course, before we went out to grill the cutlets in the pantry, I could eat no more. I pulled my chair back and lit a cigarette.

  ‘About Clare,’ I said. ‘How do we get her out?’

  ‘Well, she’s in the Banbury General Hospital, we know that. In some private room there. Suffering the after-effects of that night, obviously. But Banbury’s not far. Only fifteen miles or so.’

  ‘And we just barge in?’

  ‘No. We’ll have to think.’

  ‘And even if we do get her back here,’ I shrugged my shoulders. ‘It’s ridiculous: Mrs Pringle will know at once. She’ll hear the news. She’ll know who the child really is – and that I’m not Mr Conrad.’

  ‘Yes. I’d thought of that.’ Alice fingered a tall Elizabethan silver salt-cellar. ‘There’s only one answer: take her back to the woods with you for the moment, until we get things straightened out. We can fix you up with a proper hideout out there meanwhile. Make it comfortable. The weather’s fine enough. And there’s plenty of cover.’ She turned to me excitedly. ‘Somewhere up in the trees, maybe. Had you thought of that?’

  ‘A tree-house?’

  ‘Yes. Exactly. That’s something a child would like: yes, of course! A tree-house.’ She beamed.

  ‘I’ve made one already,’ I said. ‘In a big oak, overlooking the lake at the south end.’

  Alice smiled. Then she laughed, her eyes glittering in the candlelight. ‘So that’s how you managed! Up a tree! I should have guessed. So that’s why they never found you. I kept wondering. It’s ideal! We can improve on it, maybe, but that’s the answer.’

  ‘And getting Clare out of the hospital. How about that?’

  ‘I’ll go there tomorrow. Into the children’s ward I’ll make some excuse – take in some old toys, some books and things. I’ll find out exactly where she is.’

  ‘Then just walk in and take her? There’ll be nurses on duty twenty-four hours.’

  ‘We’ll have to make a plan,’ Alice said, looking down, concentrating deeply. She spoke like a child herself just then, like a girl in a girl’s adventure story, something from Angela Brazil, contemplating a raid on a rival school’s dorm. So that I had to smile at her seriousness, her daring, over something, as I saw now, so essentially preposterous. But Alice believed. She was idealistic, never cynical. With all her money, real life had never touched her, I thought, and so this raid on Banbury Hospital didn’t strike her as unusual. It was entirely appropriate to her chivalrous vision, a shining deed in a naughty world. But of course it wasn’t something out of the pages of Angela Brazil. Alice would hardly have known that writer. It was a text straight from Arthurian legend again, out of her child’s book perhaps, In the Days of the King, part of the search for the Holy Grail, or some other chivalrous quest, this rescue of a damsel in distress in the shape of Clare.

  ‘Yes. We’ll make a plan. We’ll have to think about it,’ she went on, without looking up, her dark hair fallen over her cheeks, partly covering her face, so that I could only really see the tip of her fine nose and chin.

  I was so touched by her, suddenly; that she should help me thus. Even if nothing ever came of these plans … if I was caught tomorrow, if I never saw Alice again, I would have had this marvellous gesture of hers. Perhaps I fell in love with Alice at that moment. Or was it another feeling just as strong – of reverence? Of amazement certainly at her forthright generosity, at what seemed to me then to be her innocent, untroubled spirit. And it was I who kissed her now, standing up as she sat with her head over the table; it was I who gently turned her face to mine and kissed her then.

  Whatever the feeling, it took us to bed together later that night, or rather onto the floor of her white, bare room with the cushions everywhere on the soft carpet and the cane dressing-table rising only a foot or so above it. The room seemed to have been decorated for life at ground level. And so we used it that way too in our loving.

  The evening was hot, the big window open, looking westwards. But there wasn’t a breath of wind to move the long loose-weave woollen curtains. The light came softly from a single white shade low down on the other side of her bed, and insects flew out of the night to it, through the wide mesh of the curtains, fluttering and buzzing round the bulb, trying to feed from it like a honey-pot.

  I was completely exhausted after the long, fraught day. But it wasn’t for this that we didn’t make love. Alice, naked enough, was more unable than unwilling, and in my exhaustion it hardly mattered to me. I imagined her inability might well be part of her courtly ideals. But whatever caused it, we were happy enough just in each other’s arms, and I was glad of my exhaustion.

  Had I been more intent and lively I might have thoug
ht too much, too clearly, about Laura or Clare. As it was I was so tired I could barely think coherently at all. Loving Alice was more like floating in and out of sleep, where a dream stays so clearly fixed in your mind that it takes a minute before you realise you are conscious, only to find that you are asleep again by then, returned to the real dream, so that the two states are afterwards indistinguishable.

  At one point, later in the evening, when I had drifted off into real sleep lying beside Alice on the bed now, I woke with a start for some reason and found how, rather than sleeping close to me, which would have been uncomfortable in the sticky heat in any case, she had moved away, a good two feet from me, asleep herself, but grasping my hand so firmly, almost fiercely across the sheet, that I feared to wake her if I moved myself at all. And so we lay like that on our backs, apart but closely linked.

  I looked over at her face, in sharp silhouette against the beam of light from the lamp below the other side of the bed. Her nose was tilted in the air, as though sniffing something vital in the night. The sheet lay twisted diagonally across her body, baring one breast, covering another before running on up like a toga round her shoulder. Eyes closed, lips slightly apart, she gripped my hand as if I was leading her down a street, a blind person, completely trusting.

  Alice had wanted to touch hands, I remembered, from her engagement diary in the tower. Arthur’s hand, which he had denied her, I supposed. Beyond elegant dinner-parties or playing Red Indians by the lake or seeing herself as some Camelot maiden, beyond all her roles, even in deep sleep Alice wanted to hold hands more than anything else, it seemed. I’d left soon after that night and gone to my own room along the passage, for Alice had her breakfast brought up to her first thing each morning by Mary, the daily help.

  When I woke, fairly late in the too-comfortable bed, someone was knocking at the door. It was Mary, with a pot of morning tea on a silver tray. Where Mrs Pringle had been gross, Mary was petite: a small woman in her thirties, with narrow features, spindly legs, bosomless and with her dank, dark hair cut dead straight round her neck, together with a boyish fringe. She might have been Irish from the last century – a famine victim. I couldn’t think how she managed any strenuous housework.

  ‘Good morning, sir,’ The accent was local, north Cotswolds. She put the tea-tray down neatly on the bedside table and opened the curtains. The sun streamed in, out of an already flat, lead-blue summer sky.

  Mary turned back from the window, standing awkwardly in front of the bed like a child, about to make a speech. Miss Troy asks you to have breakfast with her, sir, when you are ready. I’ve brought your tray to her suite.’

  She spoke with an assumed formality as though she’d picked up the tone as well as these stilted phrases from a book of etiquette. Where Mrs Pringle seemed on too familiar terms with Alice and the household generally, Mary, clearly, was entirely conventional in her service.

  Fifteen minutes later, shaved and dressed in yet more of Arthur’s too flattering clothes from the big suitcase, I was in Alice’s white room once more, the curtains and the big French window open, giving out onto a small balcony, I saw now, with the sun blazing outside like fire.

  Alice, in a long loose-weave cotton housecoat tied only at the neck, was out on the balcony, where two breakfast trays had been put on a slatted wood table. She’d started already.

  ‘Sorry, I couldn’t wait. I was ravenous! Are you?’ she asked briskly, before biting deeply into a croissant. There was fresh orange juice as well, with apricot jam, a tall earthenware pot of coffee and two brown boiled eggs. I joined her on the other side of the table.

  ‘That’s fine,’ I said. ‘Of course, go ahead.’ I was sitting directly opposite her now, both of us rather formal, even awkward for a moment. We might have been guests at an hotel. But then, just before I got the orange juice to my mouth, she put her hand across to me, stretching right over the table, and ran her index finger quickly down my cheek. And suddenly she wasn’t brisk any more and we weren’t hotel guests.

  ‘Peter’ she said. But she didn’t continue. She just looked at me, quite still, as if she’d utterly forgotten what she was saying.

  ‘Yes.’ She broke the mood in the end, brisk again. ‘I’ve been thinking: about Clare. I think I know how. I’ll tell you. But first maybe we should take a look at your tree-house this morning, and bring some supplies down there?’

  Sitting together on the sunny balcony, sipping fresh roast coffee and eating croissants in so civilised a manner that morning, I found it almost impossible to imagine living savagely in the woods again. And I thought it an even more unlikely thing to expect a ten-year-old autistic child to do.

  ‘Alice, maybe we’re both of us out of our minds,’ I said. ‘I want Clare back, yes. She hasn’t any relations in this country. And her grandparents are a thousand miles away, one of them crippled. But is this the way?’

  ‘If you want her, yes.’

  ‘But listen, if you make yourself known to the people in the hospital they’ll remember you afterwards, that you turned up out of the blue with toys for the children; and the next day that Clare disappeared. They’ll put two and two together. And then they’ll come up here looking for us all again.’

  ‘No they won’t. I’ve got another idea now. I won’t go there at all.’ Alice’s face was bright with hidden schemes.

  ‘You mean I’ll just walk into the hospital – cold – and grab Clare?’

  ‘No. You’ll be in the hospital already,’ Alice said proudly. ‘You’ll be there to begin with – ill in bed.’ She smiled.

  ‘Ill?’

  ‘Yes! Swallow soap or something. Get sick. Violent stomach pains. Take a taxi to the hospital. Collapse! They’ll keep you there for observation.’

  ‘With a false name, and so on?’

  ‘Yes. Why not? You said you’d trained in all that sort of subterfuge when you were in British Intelligence. They won’t be looking for you up in the hospital in any case. You can say you’re a tourist, staying in some hotel in Banbury overnight. Food poisoning – that’s it. Well, you’ll get better pretty soon. You’ll be on your feet, wandering round the wards, so you can find out where Clare is. Then call me and I’ll arrange to come round and wait for you both with a car sometime at night, behind the hospital maybe. We can check the place out this afternoon. Well?’

  ‘It’s possible.’ I had to admit there was something in Alice’s idea. If I could get into the hospital in such a bona fide manner that would be at least half the battle; finding Clare and getting her out would be a lot more feasible.

  ‘Nothing venture, nothing win,’ Alice said. ‘Right?’

  ‘I suppose so.’ I picked my coffee up. It was delicious – not too bitter: an American blend. They knew how to do it. And I thought: I wanted Clare – yes. I had to get her. But this way would surely take me back to disaster, to a murder charge, cold tea and slops in a prison cell, if not something worse at the hands of David Marcus or Ross or one of the other hit-men in my old intelligence section. I looked at Alice and then out over the rich summer parkland. The peace, the security, the privacy of this great estate, I thought; an elegant breakfast and the love of a good woman. I wanted all this, too. But could I have both? Could I have Clare as well? That seemed like too much of a good thing.

  The sun glistened on Alice’s dark hair. She stood up, and taking a pair of binoculars that had been on the balcony rail, she looked out over the parkland to the west. We would hear the faint sound of an axe thudding on the morning air.

  ‘The men are still thinning the trees somewhere over there,’ she said. ‘I can’t see them. It’s a much thicker wood on that side of the park, you know. Goes on for a mile or more: oak and beech and elm, a lot of it dead. Not been touched in years. We’ve been trying to clear it, but it’ll take ages’

  ‘Don’t you use equipment,’ I said. ‘Chain-saws, bulldozers –’

  She turned sharply. ‘Not at all. We’re doing it all by hand. There are wild flowers and things out there. You h
ave to do it all very gently.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Do you like that sort of work?’

  ‘Well …’ I was doubtful.

  ‘I love it,’ she rushed on. ‘Cutting out old briars, chopping dead wood, clearing paths, planting fresh shrubs.’ She looked at me hopefully, a child proposing some exciting new game.

  I didn’t, in fact, care much for this sort of work at all, though I liked getting a bonfire together at the end of the day and just standing over it watching the flames.

  ‘I love bonfires,’ I said, by way of showing willing.

  ‘There’s such a lot to do here,’ Alice went on, a passionate frustration in her voice. ‘I’ve barely started.’

  ‘Yes. I saw the landing upstairs: that Victorian stuff lying about all over the place. You know, you should be seeing to all that, Alice, and not worrying about me.’

  The moment I said this I realised I was lying – I wanted Alice’s help – and that I’d hurt her again, too, for she was suddenly crestfallen, as if at some vision of future happiness disrupted. And I hated myself for disappointing her again in this way, for the predicament I’d got myself into: I wanted her help and she wanted to love me. And that was the problem: we had different priorities. Alice, looking over her half-completed world that morning, was offering me a share in it, a life with her, where together we would literally fulfil life together – thin the trees, clear the paths, sort out that long corridor of bric-à-brac upstairs and, who knows, maybe find a real use for those fabulous nursery toys one day …

  Consciously or not, she held all this out to me that morning. Yet I held back: saw her, even, as something of a temptress, the devil on a high hill offering me everything in the world, whereas in reality I thought it was too late. I had been given a promised land already, which I had lost with Laura. The talk of bonfires just then had reminded me: of that cold blue spring evening two months before, out in the back garden of our cottage with the Bensons when I had burnt the old elder branches and the damp books from the garage and seen the pages of R. M. Ballantyne’s The World of Ice curl and blacken in the flames.