by Joseph Hone
*
And so, as Harry Conrad, on that Saturday afternoon, I finally got my game of cricket. Certainly no one could have recognised me – as either Marlow or Conrad. For I was the perfectly dressed late nineteenth-century cricketer now, complete with rather moth-eaten old flannels riding high above my ankles and secured at the waist by a yellow and purple tie, a cream shirt and a minute Tweedledum cap, striped in various faded blues, with an even smaller peak perched high on my head. I had heavy sidewhiskers, blossoming like rampant ivy round my ears, and a handsome bandit’s moustache curling down round my chin, which Alice had fixed up for me, together with a bandana handkerchief, like a stevedore’s, knotted against the sweat about my neck.
The rest of the equipment, gathered together by the Victorian Society from old pavilions, schools and houses about the country, was equally in period – stumps, bats and pads. Only the ball was contemporary, along with the players beneath their beards, among them half a dozen well-known cricketers. I had secured a place on one of these celebrity teams purely as Alice’s house-guest.
Of course, I needn’t have taken part. But I couldn’t resist it. My disguise seemed overwhelming, Clare was being looked after nearby by Alice all the time, and the air of pleasurable anticipation down in the old log-built pavilion where we all assembled for drinks before lunch, was immense. It was all worth the risk, I thought. The food was cold, a sumptuous buffet with whole hams and pâtés with a great deal of chilled Frascati to go with it, slaking already rising thirsts, for the day was brilliantly fine and hot again. The captain of my team was a distinguished ex-England cricketer, a batsman from Gloucestershire, a classic stylist in his day, tall and still supple and now unsuitably got up to look like his great predecessor in that county, Dr W. G. Grace. The poor man had to remove part of his huge beard before he could get near the Yorkshire ham.
But I was put to sit next another player, at a back table out of the way, someone, like me, quite unknown in the game. Middle-aged, with thin hair cut short, a very conventional-looking fellow ill-at-ease in his disguise, as well he might, since it was composed of a most rapacious growth of mutton-chop whiskers. I didn’t press myself on my neighbour here. On the other hand I couldn’t remain entirely silent. And nor could he, though he seemed no great talker either, even encouraged as we both were with repeated draughts of iced Frascati. But I explained vaguely that I was down from London, and more vaguely still that I was a lawyer.
My companion perked up at this information. ‘Oh,’ he said, trying to extricate a piece of the salad that had lodged in his rampant whiskers. ‘I used to see a lot of lawyers. I’m with the Police. The South Riding. I’m Alec Wilson. Chief Superintendent, for my sins.’
My stomach turned over. ‘I play a little cricket,’ the man went on. ‘But I’m really interested in the history of the game. That’s why they invited me here. I’ve written a bit for the cricket magazines – mostly about overseas tours in the nineteenth century: that’s my speciality. Those American and Canadian tours, for example, in the late nineties. There was quite a bit of good cricket over there then, did you know? Surprising.’
‘Oh, was there?’ I tried not to look at the man uneasily.
Luckily, shortly afterwards, the Chief Superintendent became engrossed with his other neighbour in some long and arcane tale about an early Indian tour, games against the great Ranji some time after the Great War. Meanwhile, I studiously occupied myself with an innocent young man to my right – beardless, in a peach-coloured blazer, who turned out to be an Oxford scholar doing a thesis on Sport and Society in nineteenth-century Britain.
The lunch passed off without further alarm, and with a good deal more cold Frascati, so that by the time I was fielding in the blazing heat out on the mid wicket boundary half an hour later I could barely see the game, seventy-five yards away, what with the sun in my eyes and the drink running to my head. Thus when one of the celebrity batsmen, an old English wicket-keeper rarely noted for his circumspection, clouted the ball mightily in my direction, I never saw it at all. It sailed right over my head and into the cornfield, not yet cut, which lay behind the pavilion: the same field which, starving in my tree nearly three months before, I had stalked through on my way to steal the cricketer’s tea.
I went after the ball, vaulting the fence before wading into the edge of the tall corn. And it was then, less than twenty yards away to my right, that I heard something rustle in the stalks, deep down, and saw the corn move – agitated by some fairly large animal, I thought, since there was no wind at all that afternoon. I found the ball. And then it suddenly struck me: what sort of animal, in such broad daylight, near such crowds, would be lurking in a corn hide? A hare perhaps, or a fox? Or a man? An African?
I was uneasy for the rest of the match. Of course we were all being watched – by three or four hundred spectators round the ground. But increasingly from then on I had the feeling that I particularly was being watched, especially when I went out to bat, much later in the afternoon, when the sun had come to slant right down over the big chestnut trees on the western perimeter of the park. It may have been nothing more than sheer nerves or imagination of course. But I became convinced that someone was watching me as I walked out to the middle: someone from above, I thought, from one of the trees beyond the boundary. Someone, hiding, had their eye on me, just as I had spied before on the weekend games here from my own look-out post on top of the huge copper beech.
The fierce glare of the afternoon had gone now, replaced by velvet shades of blue and violet in the sky, and the long spiky shadows of the fielders crept across the wicket like Gothic spires and pinnacles as I took guard. And now I felt completely exposed, at risk, especially since the fielders were crowding in all round me, hoping to finish the game quickly and get back to the pavilion for some long drinks, for I was a tail-ender and our team still had forty-odd runs to make to win.
I wanted to get back to the safety of the pavilion myself, to see if Clare was all right. I was extraordinarily jittery. I looked round, checking the field, before the first ball. What was that sudden flash of light, I wondered, something reflected from the low sun in one of the trees? That movement of a branch in another? Why that sudden murmur from the crowd, riding on the evening breeze now? There was something malign in the air, in the thick trees round the boundary. I wanted to get out of the game as soon as I could, out of the firing-line. The ring of close fielders gathered round me, threatening me with their great beards. The bowler began his long run.
Of course, as happens in cricket, when one wants to get out one fails. And I failed miserably that afternoon. I swung viciously at every ball, the old ebony-coloured bat with its twine handle making perfect arcs down the line, carving the air with a tremendous swish, so that even if I’d not connected with the ball the impudent fielders would, I think, have retreated. As it was, they were all soon out on the boundary. I couldn’t get myself out at all. Instead, with fours and sixes sizzling back over the bowler’s head like cannon-shot, we won the game in less than twenty minutes.
Head down and running, I tried to escape the applause when I returned to the pavilion. One of my sidewhiskers had come loose. It was time to disappear back to the house. But I couldn’t see Alice or Clare as I walked through the crowds gathered now outside the log hut. Then I was inside the pavilion, among the other cricketers, offering their congratulations. And then I saw the tall, lanky, dark man with a fuzz of wiry hair, in the smart tropical sports jacket straight in front of me: the African. He was coming towards me, smiling. I raised my bat – as if to strike or protect myself, the sweat from my exertions falling in my eyes, almost blinding me, as I waited for the blows to fall.
But it wasn’t the African. I heard the voice of the Gloucestershire captain: he was introducing me. The man I was facing, shaking hands with now, was a West Indian, one of the great cricketers of his time, who, invited but unable to play in this charity match, had just arrived on the scene, making a courtesy call at the end of the game.
I shook his hand. ‘You surely got to the pitch of the ball there, man,’ he said dryly, remarking on my unexpected innings.
Then Alice was by my side, adding her congratulations. But for her, since she understood nothing of the game, seeing it at best as some dull version of baseball, the praise took a less restrained form. She jumped up and down like someone cheering a victory in a World Series.
‘You see?’ she exclaimed. ‘Nothing venture – I told you.’ Then she looked at me more circumspectly, from a distance as it were, her rumbustious praise suddenly changed to a speechless admiration, where the joy lay only in her eyes. There was nothing of the baseball fan in her then. It was much more as if my mild success out on the cricket-pitch had been for her a battle won against the infidel, and I a crusader home to her arms at last.
*
By the time the medieval costume ball got under way in the great Gothic front hall that evening I had become quite used to my disguises. This time I appeared as a fifteenth-century Albanian nobleman, with a villainous moustache, wearing a velour doublet embroidered with crescent moons and stars, with woollen hose, soft leather boots and a fur-rimmed turban surmounted by a splendid ostrich feather. No one could have recognised me from Adam.
Alice’s pre-Raphaelite features and hairstyle went perfectly with a more conventional medieval costume: a long off-the-shoulder Elizabethan gown with high ruffed shoulders and a velvet overdress and some sort of crinoline beneath, for the whole thing came out like a bell round her legs, right down to the ground. On top she wore a conical hat, like an old wizard’s cap, with emblems of the zodiac on it, and a long fine muslin drape falling away from the peak. Perhaps the gown didn’t entirely suit her. She was a little too short in the leg and long in the torso to carry it perfectly. But her natural athletic grace made up for this: she moved in it beautifully, making it a dancing veil where, though the body was invisible, you could so clearly sense all the supple lines beneath, a perfect force controlled, withheld.
‘It’s funny dancing in this,’ she said, flushed with excitement, as we took a turn round the floor before supper, with Clare always in our view, dressed as a page, just a few yards away, on a seat by the great fireplace. ‘My legs – it’s like moving them about inside a big tent. I can’t really feel the material. It’s as if I was dancing with nothing on below the waist!’
The small orchestra, equally in period dress, with Elizabethan harps and horns and other suitably odd instruments, played quadrilles. Great firelit braziers and huge candles glittered all round the hall, the wooden floor had been polished and chalked, and the couples moved to and fro in their courtly dance, increasingly amazed at their prowess, with a passion for the dainty steps either invented or re-discovered. The air was full of memorials, the contents of theatrical costumiers and old cupboards revivified: breaths of French chalk dust, a hint of starch and mothballs, of warmed silk and fine scents. An elaborate medieval buffet supper waited for us in the long dining-room next door, laid out on a full complement of old plate, with silver goblets, cuts of roast venison, whole pigs with apples in their mouths and tall crystal jugs of mead.
Filled with these costumed dancers, the huge Gothic house, for so long an empty shell, now at last displayed its true colours. Something of the gallant love and theatricality of its original creators – the Hortons now entombed down on their Avalon in the middle of the lake – had been returned to it. It was impossible not to share in this regeneration. And for long moments, as I danced with Alice then, though immersed in this reflected past, I was equally convinced of a future: of a time between us where this evening’s impossible theatricality would naturally give way to an appropriate contemporary life between us.
Alice, on the other hand, had entirely given herself over to the moment. The evening perfectly fulfilled all her craving for the chivalrous gesture, for disguise, for wild adventure, for a life of marvels. She was released by her costume and the heroic mood onto one of the many stages in her mind which before had been dark, frustrating her imagination. Now she could play one of her hidden roles in public, entirely appropriately, without the scorn of her husband or friends. I had freed her from that stigma and this evening’s nostalgic requirements gave her complete theatrical licence. She could live fully at last, by escaping completely into an imagined past, where she had always wanted to live, without doubts or the accusation of dottiness. Here she could justify her fantasies, her long isolation from the real world: here, in this recreated medieval dream, she saw reality.
It worried me. In the future, would she always want, have to live like this, a life so far removed from the ordinary? If I lived with her, one day she would find me ordinary enough, and I could come to be just another outworn prop in her ever-touring company. I foresaw a time when I might need her more than she needed me, since, after my own years of adventurous stupidity with British Intelligence, I had learnt to thrive on ordinary life with Laura and with Clare and with our dog Minty. Alice in the long run might offer, and require in return, far too rich a mix.
True, I had been mad enough myself, more recently, living wild, killing sheep – and living with Clare in Arcadia. And it had been my example in all this which had at last rescued Alice from her mad despair. But I had no great wish to carry on the game. And perhaps she had.
Yet if she did, I saw then that I would have to help her all the more. I loved her and thus my life, I realised, had come to be framed by her needs – and by Clare’s. Without their problems, disabilities and obsessions, I would have no real existence myself.
Suddenly Alice said, with great happiness, quite unaware of any of these thoughts: ‘What luck we’ve had meeting, you and I.’
‘We’d never have met at all, you know, in ordinary circumstances. What could you have had to do with a schoolmaster from a fourth rate boys –’
‘That’s what I meant, idiot! Since the circumstances were so extraordinary. We had the luck. We earned that, don’t you see?’
‘We both of us really live a bit off the map you mean.’
She smiled and nodded. ‘We were meant for each other!’ she said with light irony. Then she added, serious now, ‘This is the real thing.’
Perhaps she was right. But again there was such a way to go between the dream and the reality here. For the moment I was Harry Conrad, masquerading as a medieval Turk. But in reality I was Peter Marlow on the run, pursued by the police, by a vengeful African – and by Ross, too, I suddenly remembered. I’d lost all my past. And my future, if I had one, hadn’t even begun.
Yet Alice, all the while that evening, had clearly seen at least one of my future roles. When I walked into my bedroom that night, after the ball was over, with Alice and Clare just behind me on the landing, I was suddenly confronted by a great suit of shining black, medieval armour – facing me like a threat on a stand by my bed, complete with a plumed visored helmet, long spurs, chain-mail gauntlets, and a white, heart-shaped shield, dazzlingly quartered by a red cross.
‘There you are,’ Alice said. ‘You can try it out tomorrow, in the tournament.’
My head started to swim. I was hot and sticky already after a night at the ball in my Albanian outfit: the idea of being enclosed in this monstrous straitjacket, even for a minute, appalled me. But Clare thought it a good idea. She was fascinated by the armour.
‘Yes!’ she said firmly, brightly. ‘Yes, yes!’
‘No,’ I said, just as firmly. ‘No.’
I turned to Alice. ‘I told you I can barely ride a horse. You must be joking.’
But Alice wasn’t.
Seventeen
‘You can’t be serious, Alice,’ I told her in her own bedroom later, when Clare was asleep. ‘It needs practice. You can’t just suddenly start jousting at my age – and that’s an understatement,’ I added smiling, hoping to treat the matter lightly, hoping to unearth the essential joke I assumed Alice intended.
But she said firmly ‘You could practise tomorrow morning. The others will be doing just th
at. The tournament doesn’t start till the afternoon. Besides, you don’t have to kill anyone, you know. It’s just a game.’
‘I wish you really believed that.’
Alice was over by the window, starting to get out of her elaborate Elizabethan costume. The wizard’s hat she had worn, with its lovely zodiac patterns, was on her bed. I picked it up, fondling the swathe of light muslin that fell from the peak.
‘What do you mean?’ she asked abruptly, and I realised I was on delicate ground. But I was annoyed with her now, that she should continue so wilfully to insist on this unnecessary charade.
‘That you really believed it was just a game: all these costumes and disguises, and now this bloody great suit of armour. You said I’d helped you, cured you even, by sharing your madness by my living wild in the valley first, and then with all the roles I had to play myself. That’s what you said, and that’s fine. But we can’t live this sort of theatrical life forever, these dreams of chivalry and whatnot. Perhaps now and then. But if you live it all the time, well, that puts you way out of touch with reality.’
Alice was about to step out of her heavy dress. But now, at the last moment, like an actress refusing to relinquish a part, she decided not to, hitching it up on her shoulders again. She walked over to me.
‘Reality?’ she said brightly. ‘I can afford to disregard it. And so can you.’
‘We can’t,’ I said. ‘That’s just silly.’
Alice came right up to me then and put a finger on the tip of my nose, touching it reprovingly. ‘It’s nothing to do with money, Peter. What I mean is I’m just like you. You despise the real world as much as I do. I know that. You’re just as much a stranger to reality as I am.’
This was true enough. And yet I avoided the truth of it in my next words to her. ‘But I’ve had to leave the real world,’ I said. ‘I’ve been on the run. You don’t, since no one’s looking for you.’