The Valley of the Fox

Nine

Of course, I was safe enough now, I realised, in the locked cellar. The police, if they’d bothered to check it at all, must have done so some time before. On the other hand, unless Alice came to fetch some of the fine wines, which was unlikely, I was incarcerated here. Letting myself down on the dumb-waiter had been easy enough: the pressure on the mechanism had not been extreme. But tugging the whole thing upwards would be another matter altogether: the ropes and pulleys would probably take the strain on any return journey, but I would hardly have the strength for such continuous effort.

I looked around me more carefully in the light of the single dim bulb. On a table by the door was a cellar book, together with several empty decanters, a few tulip-shaped wine glasses, a candle for checking the vintage colours and another of those old pub-counter cork extractors, a mate to the one I’d seen upstairs in the butler’s pantry. And, of course, there was the wine itself, carefully but generously chosen, with champagnes, ports, sherries and brandies to go with it.

I looked in one of the stone alcoves: Tättinger. Blanc de Blanc, 1967. The bottles were held in a metal rack here, given their bulbous shape. Further along was a great pyramid of Haut-Brion, 1961 — and beyond that there were a lot of Burgundies: Chambolle Musigny, 1971 and Les Charmes from the same year. There was some superb drinking here, I could see that, with all the necessary decanters, glasses and a most suitable corkscrew to start things moving. But there was no one to share it with …

And then, to one side of the dumb-waiter, I noticed two bell-pushes that had been let into the wall. One was marked ‘Pantry’ — the other ‘Smoking Room Tower’. Of course: having loaded the clarets and vintage port into the serving-hatch in the old days, the cellarman would thus warn the staff on the floors above to expect the lift’s arrival.

If I waited here for an hour or so, until I was sure the police had left — and if the bells still worked — I could write a message on a page of the cellar book, put it in the lift, haul it up and sound the alarm. There was a good chance that Alice would hear it, either in the pantry or up in her tower.

I tore a page out of the back of the cellar book. There was a ballpoint next to it. ‘Am locked in the wine cellar,’ I wrote, and then to make sure she saw the piece of paper I stuck it onto the partly released wire surrounding the cork on a bottle of Tättinger. Then I added a P.S.: ‘Come on down and join me!’

I was rather pleased with myself.

About an hour later I sent the lift upwards, straight up to the tower first, and rang the bell. I couldn’t hear if it sounded or not, that high up. Nothing happened in any case. So I brought the lift down then, to the pantry level on the first floor, and rang the ‘Pantry’ bell. Now I heard the sound, quite clearly, not far above me. And a few minutes later, after I’d rung a second time, the hatch doors opened and I heard the champagne bottle being taken out.

‘Alice?’ I called up the shaft. ‘I’m here!’

But there was no reply. She was obviously coming down to me straight away. I was saved.

I stood by the cellar door, waiting expectantly. Some time passed. Eventually a key was pushed into the Yale lock outside and the door finally opened.

‘Alice!’ I said.

But it wasn’t Alice. It was a very large, almost gross, woman in a pink twin-set and tight skirt, smartly got up, with too much powder and lipstick, who held the door open for me. Her size made her seem older. But she couldn’t have been more than forty. Her face was quite creased in fat, but the brown eyes were sharp and small and set close together, like chocolate buttons on a big sponge cake. She was large … Of course, I realized then: she was the same woman I’d seen spying on Alice down by the lake a week before.

I said nothing. I was speechless.

‘I’m sorry,’ the woman said entirely self-possessed. ‘Miss Troy must have gone outside. I’m the housekeeper, Mrs Pringle. I just got back. I heard the bell ring.’

‘Stupid of me,’ I said, for want of anything better to say. ‘I–I locked myself in.’ I thought I might bluff it out. ‘I was looking …’ I turned and gestured vaguely at the wine behind me.

‘Yes, of course,’ the big woman said easily, sympathetically. ‘You’re not the first person to get locked in here: the door, it swings to without your noticing.’ She had a London, not a Cotswolds voice; not Cockney London or South Kensington either, but the voice of someone trying to rise from one of the grey areas in between. Then to my great surprise she said, ‘You’ll be Mr Conrad, from London. Miss Troy said you’d be coming down some time this week. She must have shown you your room already. I don’t know where she is at the moment, out round the park looking for you, I expect. She wasn’t here when I got back.’

I followed Mrs Pringle along the basement passage. She clipped along the flagstones in her high-heeled shoes, with the neat-sounding rhythms of a Guardsman on parade, though she looked, on her small feet with her body rising out dramatically above, like a ninepin upside down. She seemed a very competent, authoritative woman, almost too familiar with her employers, I thought. But I assumed this might just be a reflection of an American domestic equality imposed on the household by its new owners.

We walked up some steps and round into the big kitchen. A kettle was already singing on the great black range.

‘Yes, Miss Troy can’t be very far away. I’m just getting tea ready. Perhaps if you’d like to take a look round the gardens? I’m sure you’ll find her. I’ll serve tea in the small drawing-room.’

‘Thank you. That’s very kind. I’m sorry to have bothered you.’

‘Not at all. It’s no trouble at all. And I hope you enjoy your stay here.’ She turned and took some cake tins from a cupboard. A big currant loaf was already out on the pinewood table, several slices cut and gone from it. Mrs Pringle obviously liked her tea early, I thought.

I left the kitchen and went out by the back door and through the yard into the parkland to the west of the house. I was dazed, light-headed. Did Mrs Pringle really think I was Mr Conrad? And who was this Mr Conrad?

The grounds to the west of the house sloped away in a series of formal Versailles-style herbaceous terraces, enclosed with box hedges. Romantic, mythical statuary — the Muses, the Four Seasons — lined a broad flight of steps leading down to an ornamental pond at the bottom, where a big Neptune fountain sent rainbows of fine spray from the mouth of a dolphin up into the dazzling summer sky. Alice, her back to me, was walking slowly round the circumference of the pond.

I surprised her with my footsteps. She turned, twenty yards away, and I’m sure she would have run towards me, full of relieved welcome, had I not whispered across the space to her: ‘Be careful! She’s probably watching.’

‘What happened? What happened?’ Alice was like a child again, a desperate child whose companion in some frightful mischief has just returned from a visit to the headmaster’s study.

I told her all that had happened. We walked slowly round the pond and then moved further away, almost out of sight of the house, towards the croquet and tennis courts beyond the formal gardens. There was a dry-smelling wooden summerhouse here, with steamer chairs, where we sat down, completely hidden from any view.

‘Well,’ I said, when I’d finished my tale, ‘what do you think? About Mrs Pringle?’

‘It’s true, of course. We were expecting Harry Conrad. He’s more Arthur’s friend than mine. But Mrs Pringle doesn’t know that. A lawyer in London. He was to have come down here this week. But Arthur cancelled it just before he left.’

‘Did Mrs Pringle know he’d cancelled it?’

‘No. I’m sure she doesn’t. Arthur left in such a hurry. And I forgot to tell her.’

‘So it’s possible she actually does think I’m him?’

‘Yes.’

‘But she must be perfectly well aware… of this hunt for me around here: the police all round the place this afternoon, for example.’

‘She may know about them. I was out when she got back. I thought you might have hidden somewhere in the garden. But she probably didn’t see any of the police here this afternoon. They left almost an hour ago — full of apologies.’

‘Has anyone ever locked themselves into that cellar?’

‘Yes. Arthur did, only a week or so ago. The door swings to. There’s a breeze along the corridor, if the back door out to the yard is open.’

‘Well, maybe she does think I’m Conrad,’ I said.

‘Why shouldn’t she?’ Alice asked hopefully. ‘She’s always been a perfectly reliable, sensible, honest person.’

‘I wondered … Is she really just a housekeeper? Those eyes: I’m not so sure she’s honest. And that puffy face.’

‘Oh, that’s her only problem. But it’s just physical. She’s overweight, got a frightful sweet tooth. Always eating candy and baking marvellous cakes, and eating most of them herself. But she’s not calculating, I’m sure. She’d stop feeding if she was, since she likes to look smart. I’ve tried to help, given her several diets. But she’ll never stick at them.’

‘And her husband? The chauffeur? Of course she’ll tell him about me.’

‘Tom? Yes, but why should he bother about you? It’s true he’s more calculating, maybe. He’s thin, wiry. Just the opposite of her. A real Jack Sprat. He was in the army here, before they came to us. But he’s totally honest.’

‘Well, if so that’s what worries me: if they think I am … who I am, well, they’re going to let the police know at once.’

‘They won’t think, I’m sure. They’re not like that.’

‘What happens if Mrs Pringle finds I have no luggage, in the guest bedroom? If she goes up to turn the bed down or something?’

‘We’ll go back now. And I’ll put some luggage in the room. There are plenty of suitcases in the house she’s never seen. And plenty of Arthur’s clothes. I can fix that. You’ll see.’

Alice had regained all her confidence and enthusiasm. ‘I told you,’ she went on, ‘I told you, when you first changed into Arthur’s clothes: you’re a completely different person. You’re free! The police found nothing up here. The Superintendent said he was quite convinced that you’d got a car out of here that first night. He told me before he left how this whole new search for you was just a wild goose chase. It was only that man, with the shotgun — Ross wasn’t it? — from London who thought you might be still here.’

‘Yes. And that worries me too.’

‘Well, don’t let it,’ Alice said lightly. ‘Ross won’t be back; he’s not going to bother the local police a third time. Don’t you see? You can stay here quite openly now, for a bit anyway. You don’t have to go back to the woods like a savage. And we can start thinking about Clare. I asked the Superintendent —’

‘Yes, I heard you. In Banbury hospital. Her grandparents obviously haven’t been allowed to collect her yet.

‘But I told you at lunch: it was in the papers. Laura — your wife: they sent the body back to Lisbon for burial. And the child, well, she must be in some state of shock. Unable to move yet, maybe —’

‘It’s all nonsense,’ I suddenly interrupted. ‘Running like this, pretending to be Harry Conrad, thinking of kidnapping my daughter. I don’t know what I’m, doing. I wanted — just wanted revenge, when I first got away that night. I wanted to kill Marcus. Or Ross. Or anyone. But now it’s different. All this childish plotting. If you hadn’t encouraged me,’ I said angrily, confused and annoyed at my predicament now that I recognised how that first wild need for revenge had died in me. Revenge wouldn’t bring Laura back, which was all I wanted just then, for Laura had gone back to Lisbon for ever. They had probably buried her in the Anglican graveyard by the Estrela gardens on that windy summer hill where I had first met her.

And it was the thought of this and the state I was in generally, exhausted and overwrought, that made the tears prick my eyes, so that I turned away, unable to stop them.

But Alice confronted me the moment I stood up — her arms suddenly around my shoulders, kissing me, kissing me.

They weren’t the kisses of a lover, I thought then. They simply represented the concern of a close friend whose sympathies could no longer be restrained and whose artless nature it was to express them in such a way. Of course, I was still in love with Laura. And I hadn’t yet realised that Alice had already started to fall in love with me.

She drew back from me, perspiration, hers and mine, smudging her long, angular face. It was too hot again now in the little pavilion, exposed all day to the glare of the sun. Sweat had come to mark both our shirts beneath our arms and where she had pressed against me her breasts showed through the damp of the fine material.

Oh, I liked Alice; I was attracted by her — that would never have been difficult, God knows. But I held back. It all seemed too convenient. It was nonsense, really.

‘It’s not nonsense, you know,’ she said at last, as though listening to my thoughts. ‘You’ll see. Everyone can start again. You’ll see.’

I thought she was simply invoking the American right to happiness here, that hopelessly optimistic amendment to their Constitution. I have never had such expectations. On the other hand, I could not but be drawn forward by her optimism, by what she offered me, both spiritual and material. Certainly I couldn’t go back. In the space of six hours I seemed a part of Alice’s life already, as though I’d known her for years. I was responsible for her now, just as she, almost from the beginning, had so clearly meant to take charge of me. And I thought: such a sense of responsibility belongs as much to friendship as to love, especially with her, who lacked friends. I was a friend at last for Alice, I thought.

So I kissed her myself then, briefly, but just long enough to sense the ache in her lips, in her body, which I should have known had little to do with friendship.

‘I’ll put the luggage and some clothes in your bedroom,’ she said. ‘We can have some tea then.’

We walked back up to the house, the great Gothic pile shimmering in the afternoon light. And the thought first brushed across the edges of my mind. What if I was ever free again, if they caught the man who’d really killed Laura and I had Clare back with me? What if Alice and I ever came to love and marry? Would we all live together here, in this great place, the scheming, mean-spirited, penny-pinching world outside well forgotten? Would all three of us live happily ever afterwards? I let the thought die at once, unlikely as a fairy story: or a medieval romance.

But I was wrong here. The same thoughts soon crossed Alice’s mind. She was quite an actress, of course. More than most of us, she saw inviting, if quite unlikely or unsuitable parts ahead of her in life, which she had but to choose to fulfil. But that’s no excuse. I should never have encouraged her in this role of courtly damsel with me. On the other hand I encouraged her by my very presence. She was in love with me — if not that very afternoon in the summerhouse, then very shortly afterwards. The only way I could have changed things was by going back, there and then, to my oak tree in the woods. And of course I didn’t do that.

Instead, as I soon realised, we embarked on a world then, that afternoon, where everything seemed possible at last for us, where we had both miraculously been given a second, a third? — but certainly a last chance in life: she to make amends for that social and emotional failure which had apparently so plagued her and I to find some hope, some renewal, out of my own disasters. Thus, alone together afterwards in the empty house, we took to each other with the sharpest sort of appetite: our very lives came to depend on each other. Each could save the other. But could we be saved together?

I changed into some more of Arthur’s casual clothes in a guest bedroom along the corridor from Alice’s room. Mrs Pringle hadn’t come to turn the bed down and one of Arthur’s large leather suitcases now occupied a prominent place on a chair.

Mrs Pringle gave us tea in the small drawing-room afterwards, an elaborate tea, of scones and cakes and sandwiches. If I’d not been told of her own gluttony I’d have thought she must have known all about my starvation in the woods. When Mrs Pringle was in the room with us, bringing the tea or taking it away, Alice and I talked about London and New York — about friends she and the real Harry Conrad had in common. I knew London and New York well enough, so I was able to reply convincingly in the same coin. But I watched Mrs Pringle’s face out of the corner of my eye. It was impossible to tell anything from it. The extreme plumpness hid almost all facial movement and thus any change of expression.

Then she said to Alice, ‘I hear the police were up all over the place here again this afternoon. Looking for that man.’ She gathered the tea things up onto a tray as she spoke.

‘Yes,’ Alice replied easily, ‘we were just talking about that. They found nothing of course.’

‘Oh, I’m sure the villain left the area weeks ago,’ Mrs Pringle said, confidently putting the silver lid back on the strawberry jam pot. ‘I’m sure of it.’

She never so much as glanced in my direction either then or as she made her way out of the room. I was just going to say something to Alice when suddenly Mrs Pringle was back, putting her head round the door.

‘For supper, Madam, I’ve done a salmon mousse. It’s in the fridge. And there are the lamb cutlets you ordered afterwards. Five minutes under the pantry grill should do them. And I’ve made a salad.’

‘Thank you,’ Alice said. ‘Thank you, Anna. I don’t know what I’d do without you.’

And in that instant, just as Alice spoke to her, Mrs Pringle looked at me directly for the first time from the doorway. Her expression had certainly changed now. She smiled at me. But was it simply a polite courtesy, or a smile of connivance? I couldn’t tell which. It could quite well have been either. Its meaning remained buried somewhere beneath the pumpkin of flesh, behind her little dark eyes.

Alice and I ate supper next to each other at a large round table set in an embrasure at the head of the great windowless dining-room in the centre of the house. Mrs Pringle had laid the two places complete in every high Gothic detail: gleaming fern-handled cutlery and old plate, with chased silver goblets and all the other accoutrements of a feudal dinner in time to go with them. I felt I should have been dressed in one of Arthur’s dinner-jackets, though this, of course, would hardly have suited the Arthurian mood of the surroundings. I would have needed a doublet and hose to match the Camelot outfit, the almost diaphanous, high-waisted silk dress which Alice wore again that evening.

‘We could have had all this in the kitchen,’ I ventured.

‘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 thought 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 have 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.

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.