The Valley of the Fox

Thirteen

Clare and I were back in the great house, hidden in Alice’s tower, next morning: we could see over most of the burnt valley to the east. The fire had destroyed half a dozen of the trees there, round the lake, and must have burnt every remnant of our own life in the place as well — our tree-house, the makeshift furniture, the old nursery-stained copy of Pigling Bland, Spinks’s Good Beer Guide and French letters, along with the ropes and aerial walkways which had been paths out of our house into a green web, a remote world hidden in space, yet where the shapes of branches, the pattern in a particular cluster of leaves, had become familiar to us as if they’d been the garden round our cottage on earth. All this must have been burnt to a cinder by now.

I had only managed to rescue Spinks’s fibreglass bow, and his backpack filled with a few things that wouldn’t burn and could have identified us afterwards — the army binoculars, the gas burner, the metal pots and pans. Of the rest, of all the haphazard bits and pieces which had been vital adjuncts to our life in the woods, there could have been nothing left. And I felt homeless once more, looking out on the ruined valley from the carefully arched Gothic windows in the tower, back in a contrived world, at risk again. Clare was beside me, the two of us crouching down, noses almost on the windowsill. She was sucking her thumb, bereft herself once more, looking out over the valley where there was nothing left of her content, nothing but the central trunks and a few of the larger branches of the great beech trees, blackened, still smoking in the blue summer light. I held her hand as we watched, but it was inert like the hand of a doll. The firemen were still pumping water on the smouldering ruins from the lake and the police were downstairs with Alice again.

We had escaped the flames a few hours earlier, running from the valley up the path from the lake, into the greenhouse and walled kitchen garden, and from there we’d made our way into the house by the back door, which Alice had arranged always to leave open for us in case of just such an emergency.

We met her coming down the oak staircase, half-asleep, alarmed. I told her what had happened and she had sent us at once to hide in the tower while she contacted the fire brigade and the police. And now we waited for her to come back from her interviews with the police downstairs: to hear the worst, perhaps? Had they, for example, found the arrow?

Hank, almost certainly, must have been burnt to the bone. But the arrow was made of aluminium. Besides, others in the circle must have seen the arrow: its impact, if not its flight. Would they remember the angle it had come from? From above? Or had they all been too drunk to remember anything? And what of the African? Had he escaped? Or had the police got him, along with the louts? Was this an end for Clare and me, or another beginning?

We waited. There were pots of raspberry and nut yoghurt in the fridge. But neither of us could eat. Alice’s big pinewood hand loom was in one corner of the room, with a half-completed roll in the weave, a rug it looked like, or the beginnings of one of her Indian bedspreads. Clare walked over to it and gazed at the emerging cloth intently. There was a complex pattern in it, red circles and lozenges on an oatmeal background. Clare touched one of the lozenges. Then she tried to pick the cloth apart there, extract the diamond, undo the weave, and failing this she started to manhandle the shuttles, tearing them out of the loom, so that I had to force her to stop.

And she was angry suddenly, a bitter fountain of rage, the pent-up frustration at the loss and change of her life coming into her throat with a violent scream, so that I was sure we would be heard downstairs. And I knew I wanted us both to survive, so I gagged her mouth with a hand, and kept it there, cruelly, firmly, for a minute.

Then I heard steps on the stairway outside the tower, and the door opened. It was Alice. Clare and I were down on the floor, as if we’d been two children fighting, struggling. But I could hold her tongue no more. I took my hand away, expecting the awful scream again. But it never came. Instead Clare gazed up at what Alice was cradling in her arms. It was a splendid model boat, several feet long, a fully-rigged three-masted tea clipper, an East Indiaman, the hull a gleaming black with a gold band right round beneath the rails and a scrubbed pine deck with little coils of rope and meticulously detailed brass fittings. It was obviously part of Alice’s expensive Victorian bric-à-brac from the top landing.

Alice saw the tears of rage, the anguish in Clare’s face. ‘Look,’ she said, without looking at her, bending down and setting the boat up on the floor, ‘there are even real tea-chests down here in the hold. You can take them out. And there are a few real sailors too, somewhere.’ Alice played with the ship then, rather than in any way pressing Clare to occupy herself with it. Alice had learnt all about Clare, was as tactful in her approaches to her now as Laura had once been.

Clare didn’t respond at all. But she didn’t scream, though, either. And, of course, I had realised by now that all her language would have gone again in this second change of home. She was mute with this loss of Eden. And we were back again at the beginning, where I’d been with her two months before in the valley: where one couldn’t look at the girl directly, explain anything to her, where she was practically an automaton, a vegetable.

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?’

‘Willy was really just an eccentric academic, I keep telling you. Besides, Benson ran all the practical details on these safaris.’

‘So he might know something special?’

‘Perhaps. Perhaps I should risk visiting him.’

But I postponed the visit. After so long in the open I began to enjoy the comforts and surprises of life in the house. And although Clare hadn’t improved with any coherent speech, still just expressing herself, when she did at all, with grunts and tantrums and in bursts of some strange language of her own, she was calm, at least, for long periods. She appeared to have accepted her enclosure. And when the Pringles went off on their Spanish holiday two days later, things were easier still, for though we kept our beds and ate mostly in Alice’s tower, we now had the run of the great house after twelve o’clock each morning when Mary left. So, as once the trees and lake in the valley had been our secret estate, now the house became an equally covert playground — the long upstairs passages, empty rooms, the junk-filled nooks and crannies in the attics, which Clare and I roved up and down on voyages of discovery during the rainy, unsettled week that followed.

We took Clare downstairs, too, showing her all the reconstructed Victoriana: the great hall, the dining-room, the real tennis court at the back, the old kitchen with the lamp room, larders and laundry beyond. Yet the great cast-iron boiling tub in the laundry was the only thing that intrigued her. She assumed it was for cooking in — an African memory, I supposed, though hardly of missionaries and cannibals. She would have stayed there content all day, sitting in the big pot and poking about in the grate beneath. But it was a dangerous room for a child to be left in, since there was a great mechanical linen press at one end against the wall, a Victorian patent device with an unruly ton weight, like a great broad coffin resting above a series of wooden rollers, which you turned with a handle and chain, pressing the rollers over the fabric.

She liked the real tennis court, too, at the back of the house, built with a sloping interior roof all down one side, like a monastery cloister, where the Hortons, presumably giving up the archaic game, had built a little stage at the far end of the court. And it was this stage which Alice had refurbished, complete with new velvet drapes and Victorian oil footlamps. And here one day we set up an old nineteenth-century Punch and Judy show, which Alice had bought at Sothebys, and played rumbustious scenes for Clare, as an audience of one on a single chair beneath the stage on the vast pinewood floor. This mime, with gruff and shrill voices added, drew a response from her: a smile, a human laugh almost. She was involved, certainly. I remember looking out through the side of the little wooden proscenium at the end of an act, and seeing Clare’s face, caught in a shaft of afternoon sunlight from the clerestory windows overhead: a face from which tragedy and vacancy has disappeared now, where she had escaped her past for a moment and could, I thought, have moved off there and then into a future in this house. Indeed, immediately after this last Punch and Judy show, Clare seemed to want to do just this: she tried to skate away across the huge space, thinking the old tennis court some magic place, an ice rink or frozen pond perhaps, but the floor wasn’t slippery enough.

But mostly we lived upstairs in the tower and on the long, half-repaired attic corridor on top of the house, where Alice stored her costly junk. And we gave Clare a headquarters here in the old nursery further along, at the end of the landing, where there was so much we thought she could occupy herself with: the row of blackberry-eyed Victorian china dolls on the sofa, the big doll’s house … There was a marvellous wooden train on the floor, too, a black-and-green engine big enough to sit in, with two open carriages behind. And a vast collection of old wooden animals, each of them paired, male and female, camels, elephants, giraffes, cows, cats and dogs, all of which had a place in a large white Ark; the deck came off the boat and the whole menagerie could be bedded down in stalls inside, with Noah, a commanding figure with a golden beard, standing by the ramp.

But none of these riches stirred Clare much. She was listless, fractious here in the nursery, where she was not totally lost, staring vacantly out into an empty world from an empty mind.

Alice, now that Clare was a guest in her house, took a special interest in Clare’s problems. We often sat, all three of us, in the nursery, for the bad weather had set in for a week and we couldn’t venture far outside the house in any case. Alice would look at Clare across the room, sunk on her haunches, playing repetitively with her pile of bricks: again the strange circles, with pyramids and cones inside them; and again the clear blue eyes, unblinking, as she repeated her handiwork by the hour.

‘It’s as if she had things on her mind too hard for her to tell us,’ Alice said one afternoon. ‘Or that we wouldn’t understand. Complicated things, beyond us. When you look at her eyes — you can tell: she knows something, and we don’t, and can’t know it.’

‘Whatever she knows in that way,’ I said, ‘she doesn’t know. She’s suppressed it. That’s the whole point of her problem: whatever it is, she can’t face it.’

‘I wonder. That’s the usual view. I have the feeling she has some kind of power which she knows all about. Some extraordinary knowledge, a gift she has no use for here with us, in this world, which is why she doesn’t respond. She’s somewhere else all the time.’

‘Obviously. But there’s nothing positive about that “somewhere else” where she is. It’s just a blank. She keeps whatever is real in her at bay by playing repetitive games.’

‘How can you be so sure?’

‘It’s too well known. It’s the syndrome: she has all the classic symptoms. Kanner’s Syndrome, it’s called. That’s autism. She’s not the first child to suffer it, you know. Why should you think it’s any different with her?’

‘You assume it’s autism, and that’s the way you treat her —’

‘Yes, of course.’

‘But you won’t look for the cause of it and treat that instead. That’s what I’m saying. The cause is something quite different, isn’t it? You’re treating the complaint, the result, without knowing the reason.’

‘You think there’s a quite logical mind there, do you, ticking away behind the empty façade?’

‘No. A quite illogical mind maybe. But she’s thinking about something. I can feel it. It’s just that what she has on her mind doesn’t correspond with anything in our way of thinking. We’d deny it in her if we knew about it. So she keeps it to herself.’

‘What, though? What’s she hiding? What’s the form of her thought? If it’s not normal, is it paranormal? What are you getting at?’

‘At something maybe in that direction. I don’t know what. For example, have you ever wondered why she always sits like that, always crouched down on her haunches?’

‘Children often do. Quite normal children. They can get at things on the ground more easily.’

‘It’s how Africans sit though, isn’t it? Out in the wilds.’

‘Yes, that too. She’d have seen them doing it. That’s another reason why she does it probably.’

‘And look at the circles she always makes with the bricks,’ Alice went on, suddenly running off after some undefined theory of her own.

‘Yes. What’s remarkable?’

‘The gap she always leaves, every time she builds it. Then she puts some of the animals, the cows usually, from the ark there inside. Then she closes the gap, with another brick.’

‘Yes, she makes a sort of stockade out of it. In Kenya they call it a boma, a native camp, with a circular wall round it made of thorn bushes. She’d have seen that too, up in Turkana province where they were, and the other wilder places. It’s just imitation.’

‘Possibly. But there’s one other thing: when she makes the circle and gets the animals in and blocks off the stockade, at the end of nearly every game like this, she climbs inside the circle herself, or tries to. She actually sits on the animals, like a sort of great broody hen. Have you noticed that?’

‘Yes, But she’s just destroying the game so that she can start it all over again. Why? What else?’

‘I think there’s something else. She’s trying to go back and live in the place, in some place like that: a circular stockade, with animals locked in safely for the night. She’s trying to get back into some security, some home of her own.’

‘Maybe. She may well see it in that way. Africa, all that early life of hers out there, is a kind of lost Eden for her. I told you before: I’ve often thought that was exactly the reason for her autism — that she was taken away from it. There’s your “cause” for you. But how do you treat that? Send her back there?’

‘Maybe. Maybe that’s exactly it. Perhaps that’s exactly what you should do. Or it’s what she wants to do.’

‘Don’t be silly. Clare hasn’t the kind of reasoning to want anything so intangible right now.’

‘I wouldn’t be so sure.’

We left it at that. However, the following day, I wondered if Alice might not have stumbled on something.

I had gone down the attic corridor with her to look over the collection in the little museum, in case there was something Clare could safely make use of there. The room — a maid’s room, I suppose — was halfway down the landing, the doorway partly blocked with Alice’s Victorian acquisitions, as well as by the great Nile crocodile which crouched in the shadows, its beady eyes and vicious snout guarding the room as though it was the entrance to a Pharaoh’s tomb.

The door was locked and the key stiff, so that it was some time before we managed to open it. But as soon as we did there was a strange smell, something soiled, pungent, that I couldn’t identify,

‘What is it?’ I wondered.

But Alice could smell nothing. There was a single window low down near the floor, with an old tasselled roller blind, torn, half-covering it. The blind flapped suddenly, as though caught in a draught, though the window was firmly shut. Running down the centre of the room was a double-sided glass case with other larger exhibits littered about the place, in corners or hung on the walls.

At first glance it seemed a typical collection, picked up by some acquisitive colonial civil servant in a lifetime spent traversing the wild places seventy or eighty years before. It wasn’t a big collection, and not all of it was African. There was a Tsantsas head, a speciality of the Jivaro Indians, the label said, from Ecuador in the glass case: a tiny, jaundice-coloured human head, the skull removed, with obscenely protuberant lips and nose, shrunk now to the size of a small monkey’s, with a long thick tress of jet-black hair still attached to the top. And there were several dark cane blowpipes from Borneo and New Guinea, one of them not more than a foot long, like a pea-shooter or a little malicious flute, complete with barbed darts made of bamboo. There was an ordinary skull here, too, in the African section, a blackened ivory colour, with a smashed temple where someone must have killed the man years before with a blunt and heavy instrument. There were beads and cooking pots and tom-tom drums, together with a coin collection, Egyptian piastres and Indian rupees. There was the model of an Arab dhow in the case, along with an old Martini-Henry rifle and brass cartridges, with a legend in neat copperplate beneath explaining these objects as part of a contraband cargo captured by the British authorities in Mombasa harbour on July 7th, 1917. In a top corner of the case I found what looked like a minute powder-horn, the horn of a small goat, with a wooden plug stuffed into the hollow top. Inside were the hardened remains of some tar-coloured substance. I thought it must be an old portable ink-bottle, from some early missionary school in the bush, perhaps. And it wasn’t until I found the label nearby, which had obviously come adrift from the horn, that I saw what it was: ‘Wabaio Poison Horn for Arrow Heads — taken from Wandarobo Tribesman, Northern Frontier District, August 1919. (Made from the Wabai and Dukneya trees, found in British Somaliland.)’

The walls were covered with cracked Zebra-hide shields, long Masai spears, with decaying ruffs of red tassel just beneath the spearhead, and other native implements of destruction, all rather gone to seed now in the small, white-washed, musty room. But the really strange thing was the smell, which I couldn’t find any reason for, and a collection of extraordinary tribal masks.

There were half a dozen of them in the case: African ceremonial masks, each presenting a grotesque or fearsome image, painted in vivid reds and black, with the eyeholes rimmed in white, and with dangling necklaces of human teeth hanging down in short rows at either side. Alice took one of them out. It was made of antelope-hide, crimped like a canvas over a matrix of ink-dark thorn twigs.

As I looked at it something moved behind us. Turning, I saw Clare standing in the doorway. We had left her in the nursery, content with her bricks. But she had followed us for some reason and now she stood on the threshold looking into the room, looking at the mast in my hand with an expression of strange delight. She walked forward slowly, hand outstretched.

I thought the mask too valuable or delicate for her to handle. But Alice allowed her to have it and, far from being rough with it, she treated it with delicate respect. We watched her: she held it up in front of her face with both hands and looked at it for a minute. Then she set it down against the wall and crouched in front of it on her haunches, inspecting it from a distance for a much longer time. She didn’t want to touch it any more, just to gaze at it. And it seemed as she did so, as she looked into the empty eye-sockets of this hideous, livid emblem, that she had found some peace, drew some release from the violent drama in the mask. Her eyes were bright with an intelligent response at last.

Encouraged by this, Alice took the other five masks from the case and set them up against the wall for Clare, on either side of the first, which pleased her: except that something in the placing wasn’t quite right. And Clare re-arranged all the masks then in a semi-circle round her, flat on the floor, so that she sat erect in the middle of them finally, surrounded by these threatening visions, inspecting each calmly in turn as she slowly circled her head, perfectly absorbed, content at last.

It was Alice who said it, though the same thought had occurred to me. ‘Do you see?’ she said. ‘It’s as if she was holding court, as if the masks were real people, courtiers, paying homage to her.’

‘Yes. Something like that. Some strange game —’

‘As though she was a Queen,’ Alice ran on, excited by something, breathless in the closed room perched under the warm slates of the house. And then I knew what the smell in the room was: the acrid smell of old lime dust, congealed sweat, animal-hide and cow-dung, with a top-dressing, a rumour of pepper, spices. That was it: it was a faint amalgam of Africa itself, that first whiff on the quayside, or airport, or in the back streets of Cairo that I remembered now from my days in the same continent twenty years before. We were suddenly, all of us, in the middle of Africa then — even Alice, who had never been there, which was why the smell had meant nothing to her originally. The three of us had moved in time, to somewhere else, Alice and I standing over the child, onlookers at some secret ceremony. But what was it? What thing in these dead masks, what spirit in these African relics, had brought Clare to such life again? And what connection was there between Clare’s mysterious recreation of Africa and the real African, with his livid scars, who’d been looking for us in the valley, and was still perhaps lurking somewhere in the area?

I had no way of finding out. Clare couldn’t tell me. Willy was long dead and Laura was gone, too. Yet I felt now that she must have denied me something, some truth about their African past, which might explain all our subsequent tragedy. The only people who could help me over this were the Bensons — George and Annabelle Benson, in Oxford. And, seeing Clare’s behaviour, I felt a strange urgency now, and a danger, as if something vital was at last within my grasp, and that to identify it was a matter of great urgency, against an even greater peril.