by Joseph Hone
I remembered this, and with it came other vivid glimpses of my nine months with Laura: the afternoon sun on her body in the hotel bedroom in Lisbon, the beach at Cascais, Clare on the pony; our big, too-loving dog Minty, the Easter hyacinths crushed with the grave-dirt all over the fine linen Sunday tablecloth, the disaster of Clare’s eating, the potato-throwing in the bathroom – and yet the way she had slowly recovered with Laura and me. Here, in all these things created together, this was where my real future had been. And I couldn’t really see my doing the same thing with Alice in this great house, which was already so much her own eccentric creation, a succession of theatrical sets where I was a latecomer, and now a prisoner held by all Alice’s loving inventions.
I couldn’t go back. I knew that, of course. Laura was dead. But my way forward was towards Clare. It was Clare first, before Alice, whose life had to be returned to her. That was my problem: Alice was a means to an end, not hers. Did she know this? And if she did, how long would she accept it? Those wonderful, childish traits of hers, if frustrated, could well lead to tears before bedtime.
And then, confounding all such thoughts, Alice turned from the balcony and seeing my glum face, she suddenly brightened.
‘No,’ she said, ‘I shouldn’t be worrying about you. And I’m not … not really. It’s me I’ve been worrying about. Can’t you see?’
‘How?’
‘You heard me the other day down by the lake – those war-whoops and beating the water up and taking those roses out to the island, not to mention playing Camelot –’
‘But I liked all that. I told you.’
‘Yes,’ she said simply. ‘You liked it. I liked it. But don’t you see? I was going crazy. And I’m not any more.’
‘I stopped you playing Red Indians, you mean?’
‘No! I found you playing them – you forget: naked with a bow and arrow!’
‘It was just that I’d had a swim that morning, before Ross arrived.’
‘It was just nothing of that sort at all! You’d been up a tree for ten days as well, killing sheep and thieving the cricketers’ tea.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Don’t be. That’s the whole point. You saved me: I thought I was mad, going down deep, cracked. I thought Arthur and the others were going to be proved right – Oh so right! – that I’d be dragged out of this place in a straitjacket screaming. Until I saw you, behind that shed, and heard your story. Then I knew I wasn’t alone. And it’s that feeling that you’re uniquely crazy that makes you so.’
‘I see.’ And I did see.
‘So,’ Alice said lightly, ‘I’m really saved already. It’s your turn now.’
She stood with her back to the stone balustrade, no longer worried about tidying up the landscape, looking at me with a confidence and happiness that had nothing possessive about it, with no end in view apparently but mine.
‘It’s your turn now. You’ll see!’ There was a ringing American optimism in her voice. She spoke with the passion of the converted, the certainty of a prophet guaranteeing a future, offering me a miraculous world at the end of the yellow-brick road. How could I have refused her?
Alice left the balcony, going inside to dress. I picked the binoculars up and gazed out over the sunlit parkland towards the far side where the sounds of the axe had come from. Swinging the glasses round I suddenly came on Alice’s two workmen, together with a third man supervising them, a little tough-looking, wiry fellow – Mrs Pringle’s husband, I supposed – all of them just inside the margin of the trees. But they were not clearing the undergrowth. That had been done already. They were reinforcing the high barbed-wire fence with wooden stakes, I saw when I focused the glasses, ten feet tall, where the wire strands, less than a foot apart, made an unnecessarily formidable barrier for any animal. The fence was clearly there to keep people out of the estate. Or to keep them in, I wondered? To keep Alice in? The barrier would serve both purposes equally well. Alice thought herself sane at last. But her husband would have had no reason for thinking this, and the Pringles, it struck me then, were more likely to have been employed by him as jailers rather than housekeepers.
I turned the glasses to the south of the park. Looking beyond the cricket pitch I could just see the Pringles’ lodge. Next to it were some huge iron gates, firmly shut, with the same high wire fence running along inside the estate wall to either side. Alice might be sane, but she was trapped. And so was I.
Ten
I hadn’t forgotten Alice’s athleticism, but I was still surprised by the ease with which she shinned up the beech branches and across to my oak tree down by the lake later that morning. The child was mother to the woman here, I knew that. And I knew she kept herself fit, thrashing the waters and playing tennis. But this was quite another sort of agility for a woman, more in the circus trapeze department. And, indeed, she was like a girl happy under the big top that morning as she hooked her legs and arms over branches, swinging upwards through the green leaves into shafts of sun that filtered through them, moving into the light above like a swimmer rising effortlessly from the deep. And suddenly, after the confines and alarms of the house, in the clear, early-summer air of the trees, the smell of wood and moss and water all around, I felt as if I was coming home again, to a kind of freedom in this hidden place.
‘It’s up there,’ I’d said to begin with, pointing to my oak.
‘Why, even you couldn’t climb that.’ Alice had looked at the smooth fifteen-foot bole of the tree.
‘No. That’s the whole point. No one could climb it. I get across onto it from that copper-beech tree, higher up there.’
And we’d gone back up the steep side of the valley, to where the great sloping beech limb came to within a few feet of the ground, giving access to my oak.
‘I’ll go up first and let a rope down. Then you can tie that bag of things on and I’ll pull it up.’
We’d brought down two sleeping-bags from the Manor, along with blankets and some makeshift clothes for Clare to use, and some old toys, games and books as well from the Victorian nursery. I’d taken soaps, towels, a toothbrush, shaving gear and a hand-mirror from Arthur’s suite. There was a decent torch and some extra tools in the bag: a hammer, nails and a small sharp hatchet.
I had taken some books from the library, for the long evenings: Scott’s Ivanhoe and Conan Doyle’s The White Company among them and a lot of picture magazines for Clare. In the old days this had been part of her cure, lying on the cottage floor and thumbing through the pages of the colour supplements, picking out and concentrating for an hour on some unlikely photograph – the gaudy vicious picture of a gyrating punk rocker, some bloody battlefront scene, or a skyscraper collapsing. She had found a strange solace in such violent images before; they calmed her, and I expected she might need them again now, among much else in the way of a cure, for she would almost certainly have regressed in her autism since I had left her.
Alice had given me several large bottles of soda and lime juice for Clare, along with some good malt whisky and red plastic picnic tumblers. Food had been more of a problem, since Mrs Pringle had been in and out of the kitchen all morning. We’d only managed a package of digestive biscuits from the pantry and an expensive wooden box of Harrods’ liqueur chocolates which had been left in the drawing-room from the previous Christmas. On the other hand I knew I could pick up food, and anything else we needed, from the house at night, when Alice was there alone.
I pulled the big hold-all up to the top of the oak, along with Spinks’s bow and the two arrows which I’d brought back from the manor. Then Alice had come up after me and finally we were both together in the tree-house.
Everything was just as I’d left it: my muddy cord suit, grubby shirt and underclothes, the billy can with the flakey remains of the boiled perch still stuck to it, the transistor, the ex-army binoculars, along with Spinks’s bawdy paperback and the Good Beer Guide for 1979. Alice looked around, touching things, fascinated.
‘You see,’ I said,
‘this is how I get the water, and the fish.’ I let the canvas water bag over the side of the planks. ‘Of course, you’ve got to go along that lower branch there – out over the lake. But it’s no problem.’
‘No. Except for a child. Maybe I was wrong suggesting you brought her back up this tree: a child in some state of shock, too, if she’s been in hospital these two weeks.’
‘I’d thought of that myself. I can keep her out on the island for a few days, to begin with. That’s what I’d thought: out in the little mausoleum.’
‘Yes. I’ll put some clothes and food in there in any case, when you’ve gone.’
‘But Clare can climb all right,’ I went on. ‘Probably be part of a cure for her. She was always up and down the old elder trees in our back garden. And in Cascais last summer, there was a big cork tree in the garden there: she used to get right to the top of it in a flash. These children usually have extraordinary physical gifts; I told you. Clare certainly has – climbing, hiding, running, anything like that. Maybe she got it when she was very young, out in the bush, in east Africa. She lived practically wild out there, as far as I can gather, for months on end with her parents when they were fossilling about.’
‘Did she?’ Alice asked vaguely. Yet she was thinking about something, concentrating on it sharply. ‘All away from the big bad world,’ she said at last. Then she was silent. Finally she picked up the camping gas burner. ‘That’s not really fair is it?’ she said.
‘No. But you can’t have a real fire up here. And anyway, I’m not out on a camping holiday, am I?’
‘What if it rains? You’ll need something overhead. There’s some polythene in the yard. The builders left it. That would do. I’ll bring it down.’ Alice gazed upwards through the topmost leaves of the oak into the burnished blue sky beyond. A breeze came just then, stirring the leaves minutely. She sighed.
‘It’s perfect, isn’t it,’ she said enviously.
‘Well, for a day or two. Or a game, for a child. I wouldn’t care to spend too long up here, though. I’m not exactly a hermit and it’s not a tropical island.’
‘You could make it bigger, though, couldn’t you? You could really build a whole house up in these trees and no one would ever know.’
‘I don’t expect to be here that long,’ I said.
‘No. And maybe you won’t have to. The Pringles are taking their summer vacation in a few weeks’ time. Going to Spain. You could both come back up to the house then.’
‘What about Mary? And the two gardeners?’
‘Mary leaves at mid-day. And they’re out and about all the time. We could get round that, hide you both up in the tower or something till Mary leaves each morning.’
‘What about Arthur, or your son, or some other friends? Someone’s bound to turn up.’
‘I doubt it. And anyway, you’ll probably be gone by then. You’re going back to Portugal, aren’t you?’
‘Yes.’
‘In a false beard? Or will you and Clare just walk away on the waters?’ Alice smiled. She was provoking a future, provoking choices, plans in me which I’d barely thought of. She had started, as I knew she would, thinking of herself. Where would she be, where would she find a place when all this music stopped? But there was no time to think about this then.
Alice had said she’d drive me to Banbury later that morning to scout out the ground, and I wondered just how she’d manage this, given the barbed-wire fence, the closed front gates and my theories about the real nature of the Pringles’ job at the Manor. Was Alice really trapped inside the estate?
We walked down a back drive, which ran through the trees behind the house, until after nearly a mile we came to a locked gate in the high barbed-wire fence at the northern edge of the estate. But Alice had a key to it.
‘What’s all this about?’ I asked innocently.
‘Oh, Arthur had this gross fence made all round the place. To keep robbers out, he thinks. But I have a car on the other side. I bought it myself, to get a little independence from him. He was always spying on me.’
She opened the gate and, sure enough, in an old tin cow-shed hidden among some overgrown bushes, was a new Ford Fiesta. Alice was trapped all right, by Arthur’s intention at least, and since she didn’t have to admit this, I certainly wasn’t going to remind her. She thought herself sane; her husband clearly thought otherwise.
*
Banbury General Hospital lay at the top of a hill on the main Oxford road leading half a mile east out of the Midland town. Beneath the hill, in the old market centre, beyond the cross, was the broad Horsefair with several hotels down its length. I noted the name of one of them: the Whately Hall. It would suit me fine. I’d play the role of businessman or visitor down from London for a week, starting a Cotswold tour. Stratford-on-Avon, after all, was not far down the road. No one would question my presence in this early summer tourist season, when already there were thousands of strangers in the area.
The hospital, Victorian redbrick where it fronted the main road, had been extended by a number of modern single-storey wards which ran away behind, like fingers, into an open space of gardens and a long car-park. If I found myself in any of these single-storey wards – and if Clare was in one of them as well – getting out and away via the car-park at the back shouldn’t be too difficult, I thought.
We parked there for ten minutes and looked around.
‘Here,’ Alice said. ‘If I wait for you around here, just facing the car park entrance, so that I can get away at once. All right? When you call me I’ll be here.’
The position Alice had suggested, at the end of the car park, was only thirty yards or so away from the end of one of the long ward buildings, not far from some big oil tanks and the back service entrance to the hospital. She was driving a small, almost new, black Ford Fiesta, a common enough car and colour, and speedy, too. Above all, it was just the right size for holding the narrow, winding roads which traversed all this part of the north Cotswolds, which we would have to travel on to get back to Beechwood Manor fifteen miles to the south. We studied a large scale map for the whole area.
‘When the police put blocks up,’ I said. ‘They’ll do it on all the main roads leading out of here and the Cotswolds first. Well, we won’t be on any of them. But they’ll put blocks up round the few towns in the area as soon as they can as well – Chipping Norton and Stow, which are between us and Beechwood. So we’ll need to bypass them on some minor roads. Let’s make a trial run back now.’
We drove southwards through the suburbs of Banbury and out into the country, marking our route on the map as we went along the smaller roads towards Chipping Norton. We avoided the town here by turning right a mile outside it at a roundabout and driving down a long valley towards Shipston and Stratford, before turning left up the wolds again towards Stow-on-the-Wold. We rode straight along a ridgeway here, where we could make good speed. And now in any case we made better time since these were roads Alice knew, nearer her home.
‘They’ll have the main road blocks out within about twenty minutes of our leaving the hospital,’ I said. ‘That will only get us as far as that roundabout back there.’
‘They can’t block all the roads as quickly as that. We’ll just have to be lucky.’
I looked at Alice. She drove well. She’d been driving in England for several years. But this was the full light of day. How would she manage at night? In the dark, which would almost certainly be the best time to get Clare out, if I could get her out at all? I asked her.
‘I’ll do the trip at night, that’s how, tonight, after I drop you near the hotel. I can make it several times.’
Again, I had doubts about the whole plan, which she sensed.
‘Look, it’ll either work, or it won’t!’ she said defiantly. ‘But I think it will.’
‘Why?’
‘Surprise, that’s why. They won’t be expecting it. How could they? We have the surprise element, completely.’
‘Yes….’
‘But
come on, we’re not nearly there yet. We’ll have to stop at a call-box, just in case they’re tapping the Beechwood phone, and you can reserve your hotel. And then we’d better get back and fix up your suitcase and clothes.’
‘Arthur’s clothes.’
‘Yes. But we’ll have to take all the labels out of them and get you some papers, money. Make another new person out of you.’ She smiled. ‘Who are you going to be this time?’
Alice was thinking of everything, and so I was suddenly determined to think up a name for myself. ‘I’ll be John Burton,’ I said, ‘and I’ll come from 16 Bradford Road, London, W 2. How’s that?’
‘Fine. You’re getting the hang of things.’
We stopped at a call-box in Stow and I made the booking that night for a single room, for one night, at the Whately Hall Hotel in Banbury. There were no problems.
I’d committed myself at last. And suddenly I felt easier, more confident as a result: the enemy was in view once more, the long-delayed plan of attack under way. There were only two choices open to me now, to sink or to swim. And since it had once again boiled down to this, to a matter of life and death almost, I felt as I had when I’d waited for Ross’s vicious dog running up the valley towards me two weeks before, the bowstring tight against my cheek, just before the shaft transfixed the Alsatian: and I felt that strange surge of animal confidence as I got back into the car – something brutal rising in me, beyond thought certainly, a sort of blood-lust that surprised me. I suddenly had a vital will to succeed and I didn’t know at all where that will came from.
Back at the Manor after lunch we looked out some suitable clothes together in Arthur’s rooms – pyjamas, a suit, shirts, some casual wear – and carefully cut off all the labels on them.
‘I’ll need a dressing-gown maybe,’ I said. ‘If I’m to go walking round the wards.’
But Arthur had left only one dressing-gown behind – in surprising red silk, a Noël Coward affair that would surely call unwanted attention to me.