The Valley of the Fox

by Joseph Hone

  ‘Of course, doctor; I’d no intention …’ Ross excused himself. ‘I’d just like to talk to Mr Burton privately for a few minutes, here in the hospital.’

  ‘Well, if Mr Burton agrees, that’s all right. But you can do it here. We can pull the curtains.’

  I’d no wish to see Ross privately here or anywhere else. He’d probably try and get rid of me at once, in whatever circumstances, I thought. But I saw that if I wanted to get Clare out I’d have to move immediately in any case. With Ross so certainly on my trail again, yet with Alice waiting outside for me at that same moment, I knew I’d never get another chance of taking Clare. The best thing was to get out of bed, prepare myself, get ready to run … There was nothing to be gained by staying put, that was for sure.

  ‘All right,’ I said, ‘I’ll come to your office. We don’t want to go on making a fuss in the ward.’

  I got slowly out of bed. I still had my dressing-gown on. The others made way for me as I stood up gingerly. Then I grasped my stick, taking it as support, before limping carefully out from between the beds.

  The three men were moving slowly behind me now, as we all made our way towards the ward door. A night nurse had just arrived and was sitting at a table ahead of us, in the middle of the central aisle near the exit, a table which, I saw, would slightly block our progress. We would have to move past it, to either side, in single file. And if I were first through, as I would be, the three others behind me could well be delayed … And the sooner they were delayed in some manner the better, so that I could have the more time to lose myself in the tortuous corridors outside and reach Clare’s ward without their knowing where I’d gone. There was only one obvious way to ensure their delay. I had it in my hand.

  As I moved through the gap by the night nurse’s table I started to release the safety catch beneath the antler handle on my swordstick. I’d have used the stick against them anyway. But Ross’s words just then, as he came up behind me, suddenly annoyed me, gave me added impetus.

  ‘A bad limp, Marlow?’ he said condescendingly. ‘So that’s your problem. I hope you haven’t hurt yourself, on the run these past weeks.’

  I was through the gap now, the catch released. I turned and in the same movement I pulled out the long needle of steel and held it up, straight at Ross’s chest, blocking his way through.

  ‘Put that down, Marlow!’ he said. ‘I only want to talk to you: to explain things. With that bad leg you can’t get far anyway. Don’t play the fool!’

  I touched Ross’s shirt with the tip of the sword. ‘Back!’ I said. ‘Back a little! Like you people played the fool with my wife.’ I had a sudden urge to stick the sword in him there and then – and give the meddlesome little Indian a jab with it too. But I controlled the impulse.

  The nurse, who had got up to let us pass, turned to me now and gave a short, little delayed-action yelp, like a dog. I spun the table round so that it ran lengthways across the aisle, blocking the gap almost completely.

  Ross tried to vault the table, throwing himself towards me. But he came straight onto the tip of the sword, which I’d raised again. It pricked him in the arm, so that he drew back hurriedly, clutching his shoulder, amazed. I think he thought I was simply pulling his leg with these theatrical props and antics. He put his good arm inside his jacket, reaching for a gun I thought.

  ‘Don’t!’ I said, moving forward towards him over the table, flourishing the swordstick at his throat this time. He withdrew and I backed away, the ward in some pandemonium now, as the shaded light on the table fell to the floor, the bulb breaking, leaving the whole room in darkness and confusion. But by then I had turned and was running furiously out the door. I was gone.

  The corridor outside was deserted. I streaked along it, sword in hand, came to a T-junction at the end, and turned round one of two corners towards the children’s wards before anyone saw me from behind. I had just a head start on them; they couldn’t know exactly which route I’d gone. Speed was the only thing that mattered now.

  And then, ahead of me, coming slowly along the next corridor and blocking most of it, I saw a prostrate patient, quite covered by a sheet on a raised trolley being wheeled by two porters. Perhaps at first they thought the building was on fire. But then, noting my flying red dressing-gown, swordstick and my pace, the two men froze with their silent passenger, and just stood there, straight in the middle of the passage.

  In mounting confusion as I approached, instead of pulling over to one side, they started to turn the whole trolley in the opposite direction, as if to beat a retreat. They ended by blocking the corridor completely, the trolley stuck between the two walls.

  I simply had to vault it – which I did, clearing the white-sheeted figure in one leap, while the porters backed against the walls like ambulancemen on either side of a dangerous jump at a steeplechase. At least, I thought, they might hinder the others behind me even more. And I ran on again, elated by my success, the sudden physical activity pushing the adrenalin sharply through my veins. I had that strange, sure animal feeling again: that I was going to win.

  The children’s ward was in almost complete darkness when I got there, only a single light coming from the far end where the four private rooms were. The children were nearly all asleep. Few of them were disturbed as I closed the outer door behind me and tiptoed quickly down to the far end.

  Clare was awake again, I saw through the glass partition. A nurse was still up playing with her, and I remembered how difficult, long-delayed or irregular her sleeping could be when she was disturbed.

  I opened the door. Clare looked up. But she looked past me, not at me. The nurse turned. Clare was sitting up by her pillows, constructing some elaborate edifice with delicately balanced plastic bricks on her bedside table. The nurse saw the swordstick and immediately stood up, as if to protect the child.

  ‘It’s all right,’ I said. ‘I’m Clare’s father. I’m taking her away.’

  ‘No!’ the nurse said immediately. ‘No!’ But she was too stunned to say anything else.

  Clare didn’t speak either. Having looked up in my direction to begin, she now calmly returned to her bricks. I knew I had very little time left.

  ‘Look,’ I said to the nurse, keeping her back from Clare with the swordstick. ‘I can’t explain now. But I promise you it’s all right. I am her father. She’ll be quite safe.’

  I simply took Clare then, quite unresisting at first, picking her up in her pyjamas, until she saw that she was being taken away from her bricks, when she screamed, a short sharp scream, so that I was forced to take away as many of the bricks as I could with me as well, stuffing them into my dressing-gown pockets. Then I made off with her, lifting her up under my arm like a parcel and carrying her out the door with one of the yellow bricks still clasped firmly in her hand.

  She made no other sound as I ran with her towards the french windows at the end of the ward corridor, turning the key and wrenching the door open. Then I was out in the night.

  It was difficult to move fast in the gathering darkness over rough ground, and I could hear the nurse shouting behind me now. But suddenly there was a light round a corner, above some builders’ huts where they were making extensions to the hospital. And beyond these huts, right at the edge of the car park, I saw the black Ford Fiesta. The engine was running, the door open, while I was still ten yards away from it.

  They never caught us. We only saw a police car once, lights flashing, tearing along the high road between Banbury and Chipping Norton, while we were half a mile away, down in the valley beneath, moving with dipped lights in a parallel direction along a winding cross-country lane. Alice had done her homework well, travelling these minor roads three times, twice at night, since I’d left her.

  In little over half an hour, driving fast, we’d skirted Stow and were approaching the back entrance to Beechwood Manor, from another small by-road. There was no lodge here. The drive led to the home farm behind the Manor and there was only a cattle-grid between the stone gatepo
sts. Turning off the drive, on to a narrow lane, we were soon hidden by thick undergrowth on either side. And half a mile further on we turned again, away from the farm, along no more than a grass track that had once been a back avenue leading round to the manor house itself. But this soon petered out, narrowing into a defile of thick brush, old elder trees and hawthorn bushes.

  And here Alice drove the car into the old cow-shed hidden in the undergrowth, the bushes scraping the roof over our heads, until the headlights came up against the back wall. Then she turned everything off and we sat there, elated, exhausted, in the darkness and sudden complete silence of the deep midnight countryside.

  ‘We’ll stay here till first light,’ Alice said softly. ‘Then we can move. I’ll open the gate in the fence for you. When you get through you’ll find yourself just at the head of the valley. The sheep pasture runs away to the left: the chalk quarry on top, and the stream runs down from there to the lake. I’ll come and see you tomorrow.’

  She spoke softly because Clare was sound asleep in my arms, asleep at last. I told Alice then what had happened in the hospital. And finally she said, ‘Well done. I wish I’d seen it all. I really do.’ Then she kissed me gently – a sweet reward, I thought, for a crusader home from his first successful campaign.

  Eleven

  More than anything autistic children hate any change in the meticulous, often senseless routines they impose on themselves, with which they secure themselves to life, which makes life bearable for them. And I suspected Clare’s docile sleep that night was simply due to exhaustion: a calm before the storm.

  I was right. When she woke in the car that morning, in the dark just before dawn, she struggled and screamed, and she screamed the louder when the sun rose and I carried her through the heavy dew up the edge of the long green sheep-pasture and then on down the stream towards the lake. She was like a howling tornado blowing about in my arms and had we not been at least a mile away from the home farm and nearly the same distance from the Manor I’m sure it would have been all over for us; someone would have heard her cries.

  As it was she didn’t cease her pain until late that afternoon, out on the island in the little mausoleum, when she fell asleep, exhausted again. Even to remember those early days with Clare is painful; to write about it even more so. And several times then I was just about to pack it all in and give ourselves up.

  But I knew that a return to hospital or to some special institution would only be worse for Clare. And I knew as well that, after nearly a year dealing with her problems, I was better fitted than anyone else to help her now. I had rescued her at last and I wouldn’t willingly desert her again.

  In the last few weeks she had obviously become attached to one of the nurses in the hospital. And I wasn’t sure whether she even recognised me during those first few days. Of course I know that autistic children, in their bad times, intentionally refuse to recognise people. This is one of the hallmarks of their complaint. Since, generally, they cannot confront their own ‘self’, they will do everything possible to prevent any outsider recognising or promoting that same missing quality.

  I knew all this from my past with Clare, when she was suffering: how not to look at or speak to her directly; to approach her in every way surreptitiously, at an angle as it were, never to confront her in any way directly, always to leave room for her mental ‘escape’. And there were other tricks, too, learnt either from Laura or, more painfully, face to face with the child herself. Clare in her earlier days, in Cascais not long after her father had been killed in Nairobi, had only consented to eat from a plate set on the floor, on all fours, like a dog. And so I gave her food in the same way that first day on the island: little chunks of processed cheese Alice had bought, among other food, and which Clare adored, smeared over the digestive biscuits I put out and left for her on the floor beside Lady Horton’s tomb. Clare sat against the tomb for most of that first day, sullen, hunched up, when she wasn’t screaming.

  ‘There,’ I said, looking away from her. ‘I eat that. That’s good.’

  Clare’s speech had improved tremendously in the last year. But now it was non-existent. She had, for some time, come to use the word ‘I’ in relation to herself, and this had been a huge, a vital advance. Since before this, like nearly all such children, she had inverted the personal pronoun in order to avoid any picture of her self. Thus ‘I’ was always ‘you’ in any demand or question. ‘You want some orange.’ … ‘You want to go out,’ she would say.

  But for those first few days, more than knowing – yet simply avoiding – any word for herself as an individual, she literally, I think, had no sense of who she was at all. She survived in a continual state of animal shock alternating with panic, no more than that: a state of mere temporary survival, like a rat in a trap, with a mind closed, sullenly or viciously, to all stimuli.

  She must have missed her mother. Or did she? At that time it was impossible to tell. Neither her expression nor her behaviour hinted at this emotional loss. There was a numbness in her big blue eyes; they had no depth. And her cheeks were pale, with nothing of their old bloom. She was too far gone from our world to comprehend unhappiness in it.

  Sometimes her round, expressionless face would jerk in convulsive movements up and down, her chin stabbing the air, so that her blonde fringe bounced, and I would try to calm her as Laura might have done, stroking her head, offering her sanctuary in my arms; she neither accepted nor refused, simply allowing herself to be moved this way or that like a log. I might eventually cradle her, but the bobbing, craning searching motion, like a fish on dry land appealing for water, would persist, the eyes wide and blank, staring up at me. Those were the worst times, when it seemed there was no future for either of us: Clare a permanent vegetable and myself a fool holding this beautiful, broken doll in my arms.

  And yet, to my astonishment, she suddenly started to improve. There was a turning point on the fourth day, a discovery that liberated her. She found the broken stonework at one end of Sir George Horton’s raised tomb and saw the bones inside – the skull and shoulder-blades. And as soon as she discovered these remains she had gazed at them intently, suddenly quiet, fascinated, concentrating on something at last. And after ten minutes of this investigation she began to come alive. It was a remarkable transformation.

  She put her hand inside the tomb, tickling the skull at first, before finally taking it out and holding it. I didn’t stop her, for I could see from the expression on her face that here was the beginning of a cure, some miracle seeping from these dead bones in the broken tomb.

  Of course, when I thought of it, I realised why these relics might hold such magic for her. The skull here, and the other bleached remains, had given her back some happy memory of those earlier days which she had spent wild in the East African rift valley, when she had followed her father about the scorching rocks, looking for just the same sort of thing: the vital fossil evidence, in just this same shape of part skulls and jaw bones, which she would have seen so laboriously assembled later, realising their importance. And so here, the discovery of Sir George’s bones, in something of the same shape and condition, had given her a sense, only a glimmer perhaps, of old adventure and happiness. A sense of life itself, which she had so lost, had been returned to her.

  And then I wondered too, seeing how she so obviously cared for these bones, fondling them almost, whether, in that strange upside down mind of hers, she might have thought they were the remains of her own father, whom she had apparently idolised, mysteriously returned to her here, a gift I had brought her to, and which she thanked me for by consenting to recognise me, as soon afterwards she did.

  I didn’t know. It’s only theory, as so much must be with the minds of such children whose thoughts are so totally at odds with the logic and assumptions of our world, living as they do in their own closed universe where, like Clare, they create systems, visions, associations incomprehensible to us, roving through a whole utterly strange landscape of the mind, of which we can only
see the smallest evidence, in acts such as Clare’s with these bones, when they surface, as it were, for a few moments into the air of ordinary life.

  Certain it is that Clare changed that day, and changed the more the day following when I carried her up, strapped to my back in a kind of rope chair, to the tree-house on top of the oak. From then on, slowly at first but with ever-increasing enthusiasm, she took to life in the trees as if she’d been born in them. Yes, for her it was much more than any child’s game, a treat, something different. For Clare, I soon came to recognise, this kind of existence was the real thing. Again, I thought, a life lived once in Africa had been returned to her. A thorn tree, or a hide beneath a black rock in the Turkana Province, had become the branches of a summer oak and a wild valley hidden in the middle of England.

  Clare took to this outdoor existence, the swimming when it came, the rough sleeping in the wind, fishing from the branches, the messy sticky-fingered picnic cooking and eating, as if the whole thing was a way of life specially prepared for her: as if, knowing it to be her only real cure, she had long craved exactly such a life, a life without furniture, beds, walls, roofs, plates, knives, forks: an existence totally devoid of every civilised prop, where there were no denials in closed windows, doors or other people, no timetables or duties other than those necessary for immediate pleasure or survival.

  In all, and above all, she found herself in a world now so entirely lacking conventional structures and impositions that it was akin to the secret, unruly landscapes of her own mind. This life in the trees confirmed something vital in her which the people in her life had unwittingly tried to iron out. And this, I think, was precisely the reason for her cure: the valley, for the next two months, awakened in her the only ‘self’ she really had, a completely unconventional soul, a natural animal which prospered here, where it had withered in London and Cascais and had only barely survived with Laura and me in our cottage in the Cotswolds. Here, this quite wild balm at last gave her wings.