The Valley of the Fox

Sixteen

On the drive back to Beechwood I wondered how I could have been so wrong about Willy Kindersley — and about his wife Laura. Though perhaps that was unfair. Clare’s abduction hadn’t been her fault. Rather the opposite: with her subsequent care she’d probably saved the child’s life. And yet she had never told me anything about it all. Had she intended to — one day? And I thought again of all the days we’d never had together. Or maybe, more likely, when she married me, she had wanted a clean slate over the whole thing, to start afresh, as if this frightening past had never happened. She had wanted to forget Africa, forget the African. And the tragedy lay in his wanting, so insistently, to remember her — and Willy and the other two, and Clare. His revenge had caught up with almost all of them. And the one thing I had to ensure now was that it didn’t catch up with Clare.

With his Libyan friend out of the way, I couldn’t see that the African had much chance of ever getting her back to his own country now. And so I could only assume that, at this point, driven by bitterness and anger in the whole matter, he simply wanted Clare dead, along with any of the white protectors or guardians he found with her. The African wanted his own simple revenge now on a white world that had dispossessed him of his home, extinguished his tribe and sent him into exile. That made sense. I could well understand that. But meanwhile the search for this natural justice had probably deranged him, which was why he’d been haunting our valley a few weeks before: not as rescuer but as killer.

There was also the matter of Ross to think about. Since it hadn’t been one of his hit-men, I realised now, who had killed Laura in mistake for me, Ross must simply have been pursuing me on his own account for any damning facts I might yet publish about my time in British Intelligence. Ross, as well as the African, was still to be accounted for.

Suddenly, as I drove along through the Oxfordshire lanes, I wanted to be out of England, away from the Cotswolds. I wanted another fresh start, just as Laura had, a year before. I wished I could have been in Lisbon again, on top of one of those windy hills, or in the old Avenida Palace Hotel, or out in Cascais — anywhere away from these threats, these imponderables.

But of course this was just what Laura must have felt, before she met me, when she first came back from Africa. She had wanted to forget it all too. And yet the past had caught up with her and with Willy. And now with George Benson as well: the past in the shape of this canny, ever-persistent and now explosive African.

When I got back to Beechwood that evening Clare was asleep upstairs in the old nursery, safe and sound. After Alice had let me in through the back door we had gone up to her at once. I saw her sleeping then, just a sheet pulled half over her small body in the dry heat under the slates of the old house. She lay sprawled on her stomach, face down against the bed without a pillow, head sharply profiled, arms outstretched, with one leg raised like a hurdler about to jump.

I looked at her face as carefully as I’d ever done, remembering how often in the past I’d seen something of Laura’s expression there — a sudden narrowing at the corner of each round eye, the very slight, snub-like cast at the tip of her nose, the same fine, peach-coloured hair and skin. But I’d been wrong about all that, too. She wasn’t Laura’s child. And for the first time I realised I’d nothing left of Laura now — nothing of her flesh and blood, which I’d cherished in Clare in the months since Laura’s death. An inheritance, as I’d seen it — something of our love together commemorated in Clare — had been snatched from me. This child was a total stranger, reared in the African wilds, who had just happened to share some of Laura’s physical traits, that was all. And for a moment the realisation of this seemed to invalidate my life with Laura. It had been based on false premises. For Clare hadn’t been autistic either, but simply a child brought up without others of her kind who thus never received human affection or the language which comes to underwrite that. I had been wrong about everything, among them these things which Laura could so readily have explained to me. And again, I felt a sharp discontent — no, more a sense of exile: that Laura had kept me outside such vital places in her heart.

But watching Clare just then, lost so calmly and completely in sleep, I saw how vulnerable and thus how human she was. In such sleep, at least, she lost all her wild animal qualities: her speechlessness, her physical excesses, that worry in her eyes where she seemed to search for some ultimate horizon, a dream of a fair country where she could no longer live. In sleep now, she was an ordinary child in an old nursery, surrounded by animals as toys and not as sole companions and supporters. She was supported here by all the traditions of an essentially human childhood. And suddenly I saw another reason why Laura had kept me in the dark. She had wanted to give the child just such an ordinary background, a conventional future in a world which we had both hoped Clare would one day enter. And so she had kept Clare’s real past hidden from her as from me, so that the girl — with her disabilities or her wild gifts — could live a life in civilisation as easily as she might, and at least be unencumbered with African ghosts.

That made sense: Laura had been protecting Clare, as much as herself. She had been offering Clare a future by erasing her past as a happy savage. Yet had Clare really been happy in that wild valley, lying on the earth among the chickens? I remembered with what fear she had looked at the African, when she had first seen him again, in our own valley a few weeks before. But she had loved the African masks in the little museum along the landing. They had brought her to life again. There were contradictions here that I couldn’t follow. Though perhaps that was the whole point: they were exactly the contradictions inherent in Clare herself, part animal, part human, and she could not reconcile the two. Clare both loved and hated what she had lost, and Laura, from the very beginning, had sensed this: how much human hurt as wild happiness there was in the life of this child. In any case people have an enormous need to bury or deny such savage imponderables, the pain of such contradictions, and thus prevent their spread like a contagion among the human tribe. And this was surely what Laura had done.

But the disease, for so long dormant, had come to light again: with an African in the moonlight of an English valley, in a ceremonial mask, an empty basement flat in Norham Gardens. The wound of the past had opened again years later, like a dragon’s egg, offering a gaping vision of human folly and disruption. It was my job to close the wound now, if I could. That was all. Clare might no longer be Laura’s child. And yet exactly because of this, because she was so completely an orphan, I saw how much more she belonged not to one, but to both of us. And if before, by Laura’s deception, I had felt something vital in our marriage had been taken away from me — I realised now, watching Clare, how, in this new-found truth, I had been given the chance of properly commemorating my love for Laura, by ensuring that what she had wished for Clare would come to pass.

Later I told Alice all that had happened that day in Oxford, as we sat on chairs outside Clare’s partly open nursery doorway, on the top landing. Safe and sound, I thought … Yet now every creak and movement in the old wood of the Manor, as the fabric cooled after the long hot day, made me uneasy. The house was well locked, with the alarms set, and we had checked through all the rooms — the basement, the tower and all the other nooks and crannies — for signs of any intruder. But the African had been so like a ghost before, coming out from the Great Rift Valley to Norham Gardens, stalking through our woods by the lake as easily as he’d moved through the busy streets of Oxford, that I felt, with such apparent magic at his command, he might surprise us at any moment even in this stronghold — suddenly sweeping up on us, borne on some secret wind, through the walls or the roof of the house.

So we sat there, quietly, on the top landing — Alice with her small automatic and I with the old pump-action Winchester.22 across my knees. After what I’d experienced that afternoon, I wasn’t going to bother with Spinks’s bow, or the swords tick or the poisoned dart. Now, if it came to violence, I aimed to fire first. It was time to put away native things.

But it didn’t come to it. Nothing untoward happened that night. And the only news next morning was good news: along with an account of the Oxford fracas, there was an answer from Captain Warren at last in the personal column of The Times. Under the code name ‘St. George’ which I’d asked him to use, the message ran:

‘That’s clever of him,’ I said to Alice. ‘Tewkesbury is way inland. Only about twenty miles or so south-west of here, on the river Avon, where it joins the Severn and runs out to sea at Gloucester. Obviously he knows he can get the ketch that far up-river. He won’t have to risk staying in any port, with police or customs about. And with all the summer boats around on the river and in the Bristol Channel, he won’t be noticed either.’

But Alice was not so enthusiastic. ‘It’s probably a trap. And how can he sail over here alone in any case, all that way? An old man? All the way from Lisbon and back?’

‘Why not? He has a man to help him, and he was a captain in the Navy himself. He did it before, too, when he first took the boat out there.’ I was elated. ‘The first of September,’ I said. ‘That’s in ten days time. We should be able to get to Tewkesbury from here easily enough.’

It all seemed suddenly possible just then — my escape, Clare’s escape. I’d forgotten the African. I’d very nearly forgotten Alice. We were sitting, the three of us, having breakfast up in the tower, with the windows open. Mary, the daily help, was downstairs doing the rooms. The Pringles were still away on holiday and the two gardeners were still clearing the wood, but round the lake now and the valley to the east where we had lived, cutting out the burnt trunks of beech. The weather was hot again. But it was a muggy, flyblown, mid-August heat, with low hung cloud overhead and little black thunderflies in the air even at that time in the morning.

Alice stood up and went over to the fridge. She was wearing a thin, short-sleeved cotton shirt and she reached round an arm now, trying to scratch the small of her back where something had bitten her. I got up myself, following her, and scratched her back for her. Clare meanwhile had returned to the floor where some days before she had started trying to re-assemble the model of the old tea clipper she had destroyed a few weeks ago. It was as if, unconsciously, she already sensed a maritime departure in the air.

‘I’m sorry.’ I still had my arm on Alice’s back. ‘It’s just that yesterday left its mark. I was hoping I could be out of all this: the African. Not you.’

‘But why bother about him at all now? Why not tell the police yourself in any case? About everything, from the beginning?’

‘About that Libyan in the museum? And what about that Hell’s Angel I shot — apart from Laura, who they’ll still think I killed. There’s an awful lot of mayhem I still have to account for.’

‘Well, you can’t run forever. And you can certainly prove self-defence in the museum. And what you did in the woods could have been an accident. Besides, it was the African who pushed that lout onto the fire. And you didn’t kill Laura.’

‘Maybe. But while I was proving all that the police would be bound to hold me for quite a time. And what would Clare do meanwhile? No — I have to try and get her back to Portugal, where the Warrens can look after her. So I can’t tell the police now. Don’t you see?’

‘Perhaps.’

I could see how Alice clearly foresaw an end to things between us now; a possible future let go by default. She opened the fridge and bent down, and her shirt slipped up her back a few inches, showing her narrow, bronzed waist and the sharp bones in her vertebrae. A sense of other life — ordinary life, domestic life, loving life — suddenly moved in me.

‘What about your divorce?’ I asked.

Alice stood up, three yoghurt tubs in her hand. ‘September,’ she said. ‘The settlement is all but agreed in New York. Not that there was much to settle. The house here is mine, of course.’

I thought I knew what she was thinking. ‘Would you live with me? Would you really want to?’ I asked.

‘Yes,’ she said abruptly, impatiently. ‘What else could be so obvious? It’s you, though. Do you want to?’

‘Yes,’ I answered, but more slowly.

‘You don’t seem so sure.’

‘Just it’s never been so easy, for me.’

‘Nor me. I told you. With anyone. But we could probably get on together. We’ve plenty in common.’ She smiled. ‘We don’t get on with other people after all. That could be the main thing!’

She stopped smiling then. But there was something even better in her face — hope, and a wry, calm amusement: the reflection of a future between us, offered up and jointly accepted.

‘I love you,’ she said. ‘But if you’re going to be running all over the world soon —’

‘Let me get Clare safely to Portugal.’

‘Safely?’ she said, suddenly angry. ‘But the boat could sink. Besides the old man may have set up a trap for you in Tewkesbury. He probably told the police here as soon as he got your letter.’

‘I’ll have to take that risk. But if I get to Portugal, and leave Clare, I’ll come back here and we can start afresh. I’ll tell the police all about it then. And later maybe we can get Clare back, and she can live with us.’

Life sprang up before me then, another life, another chance with Alice and Clare. Perhaps I didn’t deserve it. But it was there all the same, waiting for me.

Then we heard the car drawing up, crunching round the gravel in front of the house, and I felt threatened once more. ‘Don’t worry,’ Alice said. ‘It’s nothing. Just those Victorian people — the Society. They’re coming this morning to start fixing things up. This weekend it’s the hundredth anniversary of the house, you remember? The fête, the jousting tournament, the cricket match, the costume ball. Had you forgotten?’ She smiled now, that active smile of hers, where she suddenly became a decisive person, intent on life, with all the gifts for living. Indeed, I saw how our being together these past few months had so encouraged both our better qualities. She no longer acted without cause, a mad Ophelia in a Camelot outfit, spotlit among the greenery of the conservatory, or gave Indian war-whoops without answer down by the lake, or brought roses to a crumbling tomb. She had a live audience at last, a sounding-board with me — and her mimic vigour, her quick laughter, her idiosyncratic renovations about the house were no longer masks in front of some awful despair, but the true face of appropriate passions. As for me, where there had been an equal despair, she had given me a similar hope. All the same, I wasn’t living with Alice yet.

‘Well, I won’t be involved in this fête,’ I said.

‘Why not? The police aren’t going to bother to look here again.’

‘That’s nonsense.’

‘You could just be a guest.’

‘Disguised, you mean?’

‘Yes. Exactly. Just like you’ve been before, as Harry Conrad and that antique-dealer in the hospital. This cricket match they’re playing — that’s your game, isn’t it? You told me how much you like to play it. Well, now you can. It’s all in nineteenth-century costume. The Society are arranging it. Or what about the jousting tournament? You could get dressed up for that. They wouldn’t recognise you got up in a lot of armour either, would they?’ Alice was suddenly very happy. She saw a future between us: a future of all sorts of fun and games, a future of disguises.

‘Me — in the jousting tournament —’ I said incredulously.

‘Yes. Why not? The riders are coming from all over: even some real knights —’

‘But I can barely ride a horse, Alice, let alone poke people with lances from one going full gallop.’

‘No?’ She seemed genuinely surprised, crestfallen, at my reply. And I saw then how much she wanted to believe in me, as a Sir Galahad or Launcelot reincarnate. She wasn’t cured of that sort of heroic delusion, I realised. Indeed, by my helping her achieve some sanity, I had encouraged her all the more to think of me as some shining knight errant, a worker of all sorts of miracles on her behalf.

‘Alice, you must be joking.’

‘Nothing venture, nothing win,’ she answered very seriously.

It was now Tuesday, the 20th of August, and there was more than a week to fill before I could think of leaving for Tewkesbury to get there after the 1st of September. The fête was due to last two days — starting the next Saturday afternoon, with stalls and sideshows in the immediate manor parkland, and the re-created nineteenth-century cricket match to be played further down in the grounds. On the Saturday evening a medieval Costume Ball had been arranged, with appropriate food to go with it — tickets at £40 a pair — to be held in the great Baronial Hall.

Sunday was the day of the great jousting tournament, with visits for the public round Beechwood Manor and gardens as well. There was to be a Mrs Beeton cooking competition in the morning, held in the old kitchens, and a selection of other treats later on: a vintage bicycle race round the manor drives, an exhibition of Victorian farm equipment in the yard, excursions about the estate in a coach and four, dog-and-donkey-cart rides for the children, together with short aerial trips for the more intrepid in a tethered hot-air balloon which was to be chauffeured by a man dressed up as Passepartout from Around the World in Eighty Days. Since the proceeds were all to go to the Victorian Society they were arranging everything. It seemed a fine programme and many hundreds of people were expected. But there was no place in it all for Clare and me.

I had other problems. For example, although Alice would be able to drive Clare and me to Tewkesbury easily enough, taking the small lanes over the wolds and perhaps travelling by night, I couldn’t leave for the river town before the Friday of the following week, to arrive there on the Saturday, which would be the 1st of September. I would have therefore to spend this corning busy weekend hidden in the Manor with Clare. And further, since the Pringles were due back from their holiday on the coming Saturday, Clare and I would have to spend the last week after that incarcerated up in the tower. It was not a happy prospect, especially since the weather, which had been quite cool and overcast for a week, had now turned brilliantly fine again, the start of an Indian summer.

The days were noticeably shorter, but they were burnished Mediterranean days now, with a shimmer of blue heat in the air almost from sun-up, while by early afternoon the temperature was intense, the sun a slanting fire in an ever-cloudless sky. We searched for shade, Alice and I, about the house. But Clare became restless. She wanted to be out in the open, to swim; above all, to cool herself down by the lake in the hidden valley where she had been happy. But this she could not do — for apart from the African, whose sudden violent presence loomed from every bush now, Alice’s two men were still clearing the burnt trees away from the shoreline there.

Nor could Clare play outside in the parkland or in the formal gardens down by the great Neptune fountain, for the volunteers from the Victorian Society were active everywhere in the grounds, preparing the fête. Thus we were confined for most of the day to the top landing or the tower and both places, so close to the sun, became unbearably hot.

So it was that I had brought Clare down one afternoon to the wine cellar in the basement, where it was deliciously cool and safe — bringing a chair and some rugs and Clare’s toys with us, the ark and its animals, with a book for me to read by the light of the single bulb above the pyramids of old wine bottles.

Yet when I got down there, I found I’d left the book behind, and more importantly that day’s newspaper, which I’d put aside somewhere with an account of that week’s test match in it. Clare seemed completely bound up with her animals on the rug next a bin of Gevrey-Chambertin. So I had left her, explaining what I was doing, and gone back upstairs, closing the cellar door. When I returned less than three minutes later the door was open and Clare had gone.

She had either run herself, I thought, or the African had taken her: the African, ghost-like again, who’d been haunting this dark, unused basement area, waiting for just such an opportunity. And though it was cool in the cellars I was suddenly drenched in sweat, mad at my stupidity in leaving Clare by herself. And worse, since Alice had gone far down into the parkland with one of the men from the Victorian Society, I would have to search for Clare alone.

First I stalked from door to door along the shadows of the basement passage, a bottle in my hand ready to smash it in some dark face. But all the old, unused rooms here, with their creaking doors laced with cobwebs, were empty.

I went upstairs. She could not have come into the big hall, or gone up by the main staircase, since I’d just been in that part of the house myself. She could only have left by the back door into the yard via the kitchens. Then I thought — the old laundry room, with its huge copper cauldron and the dangerous linen press: that was where she’d probably gone, where she’d once before played so happily in the grate and in the big tub itself.

I rushed out to the yard and into the laundry. She wasn’t there. But she’d gone this way, I saw then, for on the cobblestones, next the gateway leading down towards our old valley by the lake, I found one of the wooden animals from her ark, a big tawny-maned lion.

I went back to the house and fetched Alice’s Winchester from the gun-room. Clare must have gone down to the lake. But had she gone there of her own free will or had she been taken? I took no risks myself, pumping the stock, priming the gun as I ran out of the yard gateway. Luckily there was no one about on the eastern side of the house where the covered laurel pathway led down to the back drive and then on to the orchard, and beyond that to the ridge of beech trees and the hidden valley below.

The sun cast fierce shadows through the bushes as I sprinted along beneath them. I crossed the back drive and then took a short cut through the orchard, stalking from tree to tree now, moving towards the hedge at the end which would bring me out near the top of the valley. Early Worcesters hung thickly on the branches and wasps hummed at my feet picking among some already rotten windfalls. But otherwise there was complete silence in the baking afternoon heat. I wasn’t far from the lake, yet the sound of the chainsaws and the axes, which had echoed up from the valley there for weeks past, was gone. The silence was unnerving. Then something moved beyond a row of apple trees — a gathering movement, as if from many feet, swathing steadily towards me through the dry grass. I raised the rifle.

A flock of white geese, big birds, striding through the dappled shade of the orchard, came into sight. And suddenly their loud and outraged cackles, when they saw me, broke the silence. A few of them pursued me as I moved away from them as quickly as I could, down towards the hedge at the end of the orchard, where I could get over onto the pathway on the far side which led down to the bathing-place at the northern end of the lake. But when I got to this hedge, hiding beneath it, I heard another sound: footsteps, human footsteps this time, coming slowly towards me along the path on the other side. I raised the gun again, trying to peer through the briars, hoping to get a clear first shot if necessary. Through the hedge I saw Clare coming up the path, hand-in-hand with one of Alice’s workmen, a middle-aged man, burnt a deep bronze, wearing a singlet. Clare wasn’t happy.

‘Why can’t you swim?’ she asked petulantly, reversing the pronoun as usual, wanting to swim herself. Of course the man didn’t understand.

‘Oh, I can’t swim down there now, Miss. I’ve work to do, see? But I’ll get you back to your Mum up at the house, you don’t worry. See, you can’t be down there with us with all those trees and branches falling about the place. Not safe. But you’ll be all right now, you’ll see. You have your Mum with you up at the house, I expect, won’t you?’

Clare didn’t reply. And there was nothing I could do. Clare’s existence here had been discovered. But perhaps the trusting gardener would think nothing of it — just a stray child belonging to one of the people from the Victorian Society. He would look for Alice now, who would take her over, having invented some suitable excuse for the girl’s presence. The man would make nothing of it. Why should he? There were a dozen people about the estate that afternoon. So I shadowed the two of them, keeping behind the hedge, back up the pathway to the Manor.

They went into the yard first and it was there, hidden behind the gateway pillar, that I saw the small car parked right next the kitchen entrance. It hadn’t been in the yard ten minutes before. The boot was open so that whoever was taking something out from the back was invisible.

Clare and the man walked over to the car. Then the boot slammed shut and I saw the gross figure of Mrs Pringle looming up with a load of parcels in her arms. At the same moment the gardener spoke.

‘Hello, Anna. Back sooner than expected. Not ’till the weekend, we thought.’

Mrs Pringle came round to the front of the car. ‘Billy, hello. Yes, we came back early. Half the Spanish hotel went down with some tummy bug. Terrible. We were offered the chance of an earlier flight home. So we took it. How has Miss Troy been — safe and sound, or mad as a hatter? We were worried. We phoned several times, heard about those thugs down by the lake. But she’s been all right, has she?’

The gardener nodded. ‘Yes, indeed. Mary and Alec have been keeping a firm eye on her, no problems. Apart from that mad lot down by the lake. Broke in through the fence they did, and then set the whole place alight. But we’ve strengthened the fence now. Miss Troy won’t get out of the place, leastways, that’s for sure.’

Mrs Pringle looked at Clare then. ‘Who have you got there, Billy?’ she asked, peering over her packages.

‘Don’t know. Some kid. She came down to the lake just now. But it’s not safe. We’ve been cutting back the burnt wood. So I’ve brought her back up here. Don’t know who she belongs to.’

‘I’ll bring her to Miss Troy. She’ll know. Must have something to do with one of all these people come to fix this fête. But doesn’t the child know who she is herself? She looks old enough.’

‘Doesn’t seem to. She talks kind of funny, too.’

‘Well, we’ll soon find out. Come here, child. What’s your name?’ Mrs Pringle, her great body towering over Clare, had the air of the Beadle in Oliver Twist. Clare didn’t answer her. So Mrs Pringle bent down and tried to wheedle Clare towards her, calling to her as though she was an animal.

‘Come with me, child,’ she said eventually, in sterner tones of her indeterminate London accent. She put her parcels on the roof of the car. Then she held out a very pudgy arm. She’d obviously been doing herself well in Spain before the tummy bugs set in. ‘Come on. Don’t be afraid.’

‘You don’t want to come,’ Clare said suddenly, staying where she was.

‘No. I don’t want to come, but you do, don’t you? Come on, we’ll go and find your Mummy or Miss Troy. She’ll know.’ Finally Mrs Pringle had to lead Clare away, in through the dark passageway towards the kitchen, like a child being taken into an institution.

And again, there was absolutely nothing I could do. I could only hope that Alice, with all her quick inventions, would find some sudden inspiration here, when she saw Clare coming towards her with the dreadful Mrs Pringle.

She did. Half an hour later Alice found me, on tenterhooks, up in the tower. From one of the turret windows I’d seen Mrs Pringle and Clare moving out into the parkland, and had seen them all return some time later, Alice walking easily, holding Clare’s hand, chatting to Mrs Pringle. Was it all over? Or just one more beginning?

‘It’s simple,’ Alice said when she had started to explain to me. ‘You’re Harry Conrad again. Remember? Our friend, Arthur’s lawyer friend from London, the man you were before, when Mrs Pringle found you locked in the wine cellar. And Clare is your daughter. Harry has a daughter anyway, just about Clare’s age. And you’re both staying with us — come down for the fête. What could be more natural?’

Alice smiled. I sighed.

‘Now don’t start thinking up objections,’ she went on. ‘It’s done. I’ve explained it all that way. And Mrs Pringle accepted every word of it. She doesn’t suspect a thing. Why should she? Just the opposite. She was pleased you were here again. You see, she thinks you’re my new man, my next husband. And she wants to think that, don’t you see? So that there’ll be a future for her down here: that I’m not going mad all on my own, talking to myself, before being dragged off in a straitjacket — which would mean the end of everything for Mrs Pringle here. Don’t you see? So she’s pleased.’

‘Yes. I see. We’re back to the theatricals.’

‘So all we’ve got to do now,’ Alice rushed on, ‘is to get you down to a spare bedroom again, have some suitcases out and some more of Arthur’s clothes. And Clare can come downstairs too, into the next bedroom. It’ll make everything easier. The two of us can stay here quite openly, until I take you to Tewkesbury next week. And you can join in the fête now — why not? You won’t have to stay cooped up in the tower anyway. It’s ideal.’ She emphasised the word sharply, brightly, happily. And when I didn’t reply she said, ‘Isn’t it?’ even more sharply, but less happily.

‘Yes,’ I said finally. ‘I’ll start getting my make-up on. And the costumes.’

‘Why, I hadn’t thought of that. You could play your cricket now —’

‘And the medieval costume ball,’ I interrupted. ‘That’s even better. That’ll suit me perfectly.’

Alice wasn’t sure whether my irony was real or assumed. She came towards me, undecided. ‘There wasn’t anything else I could think of saying to Mrs Pringle,’ she said. ‘I don’t see why —’

‘No. I’m sorry. There wasn’t anything else. My fault for letting Clare out of my sight.’

‘Besides,’ Alice broke in, suddenly enthusiastic again, ‘What better than spending a weekend down from London with me?’

‘What better, indeed,’ I said, kissing her.

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.