by Joseph Hone
Alice turned to me. ‘That’s one good thing about your being back in the house. There’s plenty to occupy Clare with. That whole top corridor is filled with stuff, old games and things.’
‘She’s going to need it,’ I said. ‘But will there be time?’
Alice looked at me, a sudden confident surprise in her face. ‘Why, of course. A lot of the wood is gone. But the fire burnt out all your tree-house as well. They’ve no idea you were there.’
‘But what about the one I shot?’
‘I don’t know about him. The police didn’t tell me, only that one of the boys died in the fire. They didn’t mention finding any arrow.’
‘And the African?’
‘They didn’t mention him either. So of course I couldn’t bring the topic up.’
‘Just playing cat-and-mouse with us,’ I said. ‘That’s all. They must be putting two and two together down there by now. It won’t be long –’
‘Nonsense,’ Alice interrupted. And then there was an interruption at our feet, a rending and splitting of wood. Arms suddenly flailing, her fists crashing through the masts and sails, Clare had destroyed most of the model ship before we could stop her.
The tea clipper lay like a real wreck on the floor all about us. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ Alice said, in a matter-of-fact way, clearing the bits up, while Clare meanwhile had slunk away on all fours like an animal and hidden behind the day bed.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ Alice said again lightly, as if Clare had just spilt some milk.
‘But it does,’ I said. ‘She’ll smash the whole place up. We can hardly keep her here anyway. I’m sorry. It’s ridiculous. It’s too much for you –’
‘You’re wrong. And it’s not.’ Alice was very firm, candid, in control. We were guests in her house now, she implied. We had come into a magic circle of her chivalrous protection, and thus all would be well. I was no longer responsible for our existence, as I had been in the valley. Alice was in charge now. I liked the idea and yet I resented it. I longed suddenly for the freedom of the trees again, where Alice had been a subsidiary visitor with us, in my world, dependent on me. Now, the chance unexpectedly emerging, she meant to turn the tables on me, it seemed. But perhaps what I really resented was the fact that in the woods, where my first priority was survival with Clare, I had not had to make up my mind about whether I loved Alice or was simply using her. In the wild, busy with Clare in the tree-house I’d built myself, the question hadn’t arisen. But now, as her guest once more, totally dependent on her, I had to ask myself again what our future was. How far could I go in using someone for my own convenience, if that was the only thing which bound us together? Without love?
‘I don’t know,’ I said weakly. ‘They’ll surely be looking for us again up here. We can’t stay here.’
‘But you can!’ Alice was almost joyfully dramatic. ‘Up here in the tower for the moment. No one ever comes up here but me. And the Pringles are off to Spain for their summer vacation in a few days. They’ll be away three weeks. You can come downstairs then. The place will be empty after Mary leaves in the mornings. That’s just it, don’t you see? You can stay here. And wait till you hear from your naval friend in Portugal.’
I walked over to the window looking westwards, down over the formal gardens, the lines of baroque statuary and the pond with the Neptune fountain and the flat top of the great cedar tree to one side. I could see a peacock in one of its upper branches and two others pecking fastidiously along the grass beneath. The heat wasn’t up yet. Indeed, the day looked set for some kind of change, for I could see huge rain-clouds gathering in the west. But this room, locked away high in the tower, was quite insulated from any change in the weather. And it was just as distant from the real world, too, which from this height and security one could view with equal disdain.
From here, on this side of the tower, one saw nothing but formal beauty, the well cut lawns, the imported eighteenth-century fountain, the ageless cedar tree, the bright blue birds who stretched their tails wide now and then in fans of dazzling colour.
On the other side of the tower was the burn-scarred valley we had left, the smoking ruins of a native happiness. I had thought in terms of alternatives. But there were none. Clare was still crouching behind the day-bed, feet up against her chest, hands over her face, living in a womb of her own making again. She was the first problem once more. She would have to be tempted back into life. I remembered the bones in the tomb on the island which had caught her fancy six weeks before. I’d told Alice about it at the time, and now I mentioned it again.
Alice said, ‘There’s a little sort of museum in one of the rooms off the top landing: British rock specimens, wild flowers, butterflies, as well as things from abroad. There are some bones in there, too.’
‘Bones?’
‘Yes. I bought them all with the place, in a locked room, a lot of bits and pieces in glass cases. The people who lived here after the Hortons. He was something important in the Colonial service, a Governor in Africa.’
‘You mean African bones?’
‘I think so. There’s a broken skull. And a strange sort of shrunken head – that sort of thing. As well as spears, shields made from Zebra hide – you know.’
‘Yes. I saw the big crocodile up on that landing.’
‘It’s part of the same collection. I don’t suppose Clare would care for that. But there’s a lot of other things up there might draw her out. You see? You could help her just as well here as down in the valley.’
I started to believe Alice then. This whole vast house so stuffed with Victorian treasures, in packing-cases and now museum exhibits, along landings and in tiny rooms under the eaves, all this would surely form a cure for any child on a rainy day. And what did it matter about our relationship, any ambiguity between Alice and me? We still had one thing in common, certainly: both of us remained as cut off as ever from reality. We’d both of us come to hate the present world in all its bland and mean or vicious spirits, a place quite drained of character or design: that still held us firmly together: we’d come to hate the louts and the polo-players equally, in England or Long Island, along with the sly and the craven everywhere else. And I felt our shared distaste strongly as we stood together in the warm, pine-scented room, high above the land, gazing down on the imperious peacocks and the fountain. Why not stay here, I thought, perched as high above the house as we had been above the valley? Such remote eyries had become our natural habitat. Alice had gone to the fridge and opened it. I turned to her.
‘I didn’t really have time to tell you last night,’ I said, ‘about the African down there in the valley.’
‘No.’
‘But your mentioning those African things in the museum, African bones …’ I stopped.
‘So?’
‘Well of course it struck me: the man might have had something to do with Clare’s parents when they were out in East Africa. You remember that article you showed me– do you still have it?’
‘Yes. And there was another article about it in Time magazine last week. But you didn’t believe any of it.’
‘Well, what am I to believe now? What’s a man like that doing here? Just a chance hiker? Hardly. And he’s not one of Ross’s men. So who is he?’
I explained my theories about the African to Alice and she said finally, ‘Who knows?’
‘I wonder if he got away.’
‘We’ll soon know. It’ll be in the papers, on the news.’
‘But, if I’m right, why should he be after us? Clare would have been too young to have had anything to do with him in Africa, and I certainly don’t know him. So even if any of my theories are right – and if he killed Willy and Laura – what’s he going on following us for?’
The sun began to fade just then and a dark crept up over the whole landscape and there were spots of rain on the window. For the first time that summer it looked like a real change in the weather, with great cigars of grey cloud rolling up from all round the horizon.
‘I don’t know,’ Alice said. ‘Perhaps we’ll find out. Or perhaps we should make it our business to find out.’
She had prepared some biscuits and covered them with processed cheese squeezed from a Primula tube in the fridge, chopping the lot up on a plate. Then she put it all down in front of Clare, still crouched by the day-bed, without looking at her, offhandedly, just as one might leave out a dog’s dinner under a kitchen table.
‘We’ll find out about the African. Or we’ll have to find out.’ Alice repeated her ideas, thoughtful now, as if planning something vital once more, as she had with Clare’s rescue from the hospital.
‘There are some old friends of the Kindersleys,’ I said. ‘The Bensons. I know them quite well. They might help. She’s an entomologist and he used to work with Willy picking up fossils in East Africa. He lives in Oxford now. Works at the Natural History museum there.’
‘Can you trust them now? Won’t they just think like the others: that you killed … your wife?’
I turned away from the window. It had started to rain now, a setting-in sort of rain, the first of that summer. ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘They’re certainly a pair of rather dry sticks, the Bensons. It could be worth trying them all the same.’
I looked covertly at Clare hunched in the corner then. She hadn’t moved. But she had taken her hand away from her face. She was looking at the plate of food at least.
‘She might like some music,’ I said. I hated seeing Clare as she was now, trapped, caged, like a hurt animal. It was terrible.
‘There’s a radio here somewhere. There, under that cloth.’
Alice went over to where rolls of variously coloured tweed were piled up on a trestle table against one wall. There was a stereo transistor behind them. She turned it on. The music was from Radio 3 again: Vivaldi, precise, dainty, remote. The sound from the two speakers reverberated perfectly about the domed ceiling of the old smoking room. But it made no difference to Clare.
‘It’ll be some time,’ I said, ‘before she improves. If ever. God …’ I was depressed, tired. I closed my eyes against the world, against the sudden grey and rain-filled weather that was sweeping in over the wolds. I tried to let the music wash through my mind like the rain: wash thought away.
‘I know!’ Alice said, suddenly enthusiastic about something. But I didn’t open my eyes until I heard the door of the fridge close. Alice had a half bottle of champagne in her hand. She popped the cork and poured it all out into three coffee mugs, the foam gently climbing up the sides. She put one mug down in front of Clare and handed another to me. Then she raised her own, drinking.
‘I’ve kept it up here – for a rainy day,’ she said.
I sipped some. It was good champagne, tingling cold. I drank some more. ‘Thank you,’ I said, looking over at her.
Alice had her hair combed severely back straight over the crown of her head, above her ears, so that the sharp curve of her jaw stood out very clearly, like a diagram in anatomy. Her eyelids flickered for an instant, caught in the rising spume of champagne bubbles. I was quite close to her.
I saw a small scar she had on one eyelid, running out a little towards her temple, which, close though I’d been to her, I’d not noticed before.
‘That scar,’ I said. ‘What happened?’ I touched her face briefly. ‘Just there. I hadn’t noticed.’
‘Oh, years ago. I fell down some steps.’
‘Yes?’
‘One summer out in the Hamptons. I must have been about ten. It bled a lot.’
‘I see.’
‘Yes. My father had just arrived. I was running down the steps too fast. He’d driven up from New York. I remember, we were all excited. He had a new car he’d gotten himself. A British car –’
‘A Rolls –’
‘No – some sports car they’d just introduced. Very fast. A two-seater, long bonnet and wire wheels – and a big, sleek, rounded ass –’
‘A Jaguar probably. An XK 120 – I remember them.’
‘Maybe.’
‘Or was it a Morgan or an MG?’
‘I don’t know. My brothers were all over it. And I just fell down the steps running after them …’
Suddenly we were both talking fast, the mugs bouncing in our hands – talking about nothing really, as if some quite unexpected sexual excitement had overcome us both which we couldn’t acknowledge then.
I stepped forward, involuntarily. I wanted, I think, to kiss the scar. But instead I trod on part of the ruined model boat. A spar cracked beneath my foot and I withdrew.
She said, ‘I could see the whitecaps – just before I fell – on the waves out at sea beyond the car, framing the car like a picture. It was blowing quite hard. Then I slipped.’
‘That sea you wanted to swim across, all the way to England?’
‘Yes. That was about the same time. I think they thought I’d fallen down on purpose to get attention, so they’d make a fuss of me instead of the car.’
‘Which wasn’t true?’
‘No. At least …’ She hesitated. ‘I don’t think so. How can one be sure? I can see it all, the whitecaps, the car, the blood. But I don’t remember the feelings exactly.’
This small mystery unearthed lay about Alice’s life – a query at the end of her words, an indeterminate feeling she had carried with her for nearly thirty years like the scar: an aspect of her otherwise so assured character which she had not resolved.
It hardly mattered in itself, I thought, this childhood fall, this possible rebuff. It mattered only in that now, through this small scar on her eyelid, I had suddenly, for the first time, gained a real access to her personality. I was there for an instant myself, with her on the steps of the Charles Addams house, on that windy day out on Long Island. I could see the sleek Jaguar and the whitecaps out in the bay. And I could hear her sudden tears, the pain of injury or dismissal – it didn’t matter which – so sharp and rending in childhood. I loved her then.
Alice lived for me in a real perspective now, as a feature in a map where there were clear compass-points at last. Her life could be related to some constant scale, to this scar, which provoked an intimacy between us greater than that of any sex. I could have kissed her then all right. But there would hardly have been any point. As we just looked at each other, with such candour, we could not have been closer. There was no more ambiguity.
I saw something move over Alice’s shoulder. Clare’s hand emerged from behind the end of the day-bed. Then she dipped a finger in her mug of champagne. She swizzled it about in the liquid for a minute so that it foamed again. Then she licked her finger.
It was a start, at least.
*
It was the beginning of August. I had been living wild in the valley for over two months now. But living in a house again, and sleeping in a bed now each night, inevitably brought a change of thoughts. Once more, surrounded by all the haunting impositions of man-made life, with its permanent threat of plans, expectations, decisions, I was forced to think of the future again.
If Captain Warren didn’t reply there would be no future for us in Portugal. If, on the other hand, I could somehow lay my hands on the African, and if I could contact the Bensons, I might prove my innocence and stay with Clare in England.
But the news that day, and during the days that followed, wasn’t helpful. In their accounts of the fracas and fire there was nothing in the media about any coloured man being involved. I supposed that the drunks had all agreed on silence about the African, and their attempts to roast him alive. The man must have got clean away, indeed, for there was no word of his turning up anywhere else in the locality, though we searched the local papers, and Alice kept her ear open with Mary, the two gardeners, and with the Pringles before they left, for any possible gossip about him in the area.
This surprised me. I wondered how any such badly burnt and highly conspicuous figure could escape detection locally unless, like me, he had holed up somewhere or had some help in the immediate vicinity
.
I read the article in Time magazine, a development of the piece in the Sunday Times. But here, unafraid of libel I suppose, they were more free with their theories and the names behind them. Willy Kindersley, they said, in order to finance his expensive fossil hunts, had become involved in gun-running and other dubious trades with one of the warring tribes on the Kenya-Sudan border. There had been trouble for many years all over that remote northern frontier, between the Kenyan ‘Shifta’ – roving brigands – and rivals to the north, nomadic cattle-and camel-herding tribes in Uganda, the Sudan and Ethiopia: a traditional tale of mutual theft and pillage. But now they were having at each other with AK 47s and even portable rocket-launchers, instead of assegais and poisoned arrows.
It was an unlikely tale. Willy, I knew, had been largely financed by an oil company with East African interests anxious for such prestigious publicity, but more concerned still that Willy might discover potential drilling sites for them during his fossil surveys over the arid wastes of that Northern Frontier District. Besides, had the story been true, and had Willy thus suffered for some kind of double-dealing, why had the revenge been extended to his wife and beyond that to Clare and me? That made no sense.
On the other hand – just on the basis of no smoke without fire – it seemed to me now that something terrible must have happened to Willy Kindersley in these wilds of East Africa. But what?
‘Of course even though she was out there with him Laura may never have known about any problems,’ Alice said, when I commented on the article. ‘You told me they were very different people, after all.’
‘Yes. Chalk and cheese. But Willy wasn’t dishonest.’
‘You never met him, though. It’s all hearsay, isn’t it? Anything you know about him, you know only through Laura.’
‘Yes. But one knows.’
‘Does one? Just because one loves someone?’