The Valley of the Fox

Seventeen

‘You can’t be serious, Alice,’ I told her in her own bedroom later, when Clare was asleep. ‘It needs practice. You can’t just suddenly start jousting at my age — and that’s an understatement,’ I added smiling, hoping to treat the matter lightly, hoping to unearth the essential joke I assumed Alice intended.

But she said firmly ‘You could practise tomorrow morning. The others will be doing just that. The tournament doesn’t start till the afternoon. Besides, you don’t have to kill anyone, you know. It’s just a game.’

‘I wish you really believed that.’

Alice was over by the window, starting to get out of her elaborate Elizabethan costume. The wizard’s hat she had worn, with its lovely zodiac patterns, was on her bed. I picked it up, fondling the swathe of light muslin that fell from the peak.

‘What do you mean?’ she asked abruptly, and I realised I was on delicate ground. But I was annoyed with her now, that she should continue so wilfully to insist on this unnecessary charade.

‘That you really believed it was just a game: all these costumes and disguises, and now this bloody great suit of armour. You said I’d helped you, cured you even, by sharing your madness by my living wild in the valley first, and then with all the roles I had to play myself. That’s what you said, and that’s fine. But we can’t live this sort of theatrical life forever, these dreams of chivalry and whatnot. Perhaps now and then. But if you live it all the time, well, that puts you way out of touch with reality.’

Alice was about to step out of her heavy dress. But now, at the last moment, like an actress refusing to relinquish a part, she decided not to, hitching it up on her shoulders again. She walked over to me.

‘Reality?’ she said brightly. ‘I can afford to disregard it. And so can you.’

‘We can’t,’ I said. ‘That’s just silly.’

Alice came right up to me then and put a finger on the tip of my nose, touching it reprovingly. ‘It’s nothing to do with money, Peter. What I mean is I’m just like you. You despise the real world as much as I do. I know that. You’re just as much a stranger to reality as I am.’

This was true enough. And yet I avoided the truth of it in my next words to her. ‘But I’ve had to leave the real world,’ I said. ‘I’ve been on the run. You don’t, since no one’s looking for you.’

‘That’s simply convenient argument. I’m talking about basic personality. Long before you met me you hated the common lot — you isolated yourself from it, from them. And so have I, yet you blame me for it now.’

‘No. I just said I didn’t think we could make a lifetime’s performance out of it, that’s all.’

I was well on my way to disappointing Alice, I could see that. But there was nothing for it. I could no longer acquiesce in her every fantasy. I was sure I’d damage Alice then, as much as I’d helped her before by identifying with her dreams.

Alice turned away. ‘You’re just suiting yourself now. You forget: you played all these “games”, as you call them now, to your advantage before. They were the saving of you, too. Don’t you remember? Living wild in the wood. That saved you. That wasn’t a game. And when you were Harry Conrad and that London antique dealer in the hospital those roles saved you — and Clare as well. And the cricket match this afternoon, dressed up in that little cap and side whiskers, and being an Albanian nobleman this evening — you enjoyed all that as well didn’t you?’ she added bitterly.

‘Yes. But now —’

‘Now you’re becoming like Arthur. Just like him: full of refusals, dull care, the common lot.’

‘No. It’s just that I don’t want to break my neck tomorrow with a barge-pole on a galloping horse.’

Alice turned to me again with a slightly malicious smile, like a teasing child. ‘You’ve just lost your nerve, Peter, that’s all.’

I could see now how, after all my other impersonations, she had contrived a last testing hurdle for me in the shape of this jousting tournament: finally, to succeed with her, to deserve her, I must actually appear as a shining knight in armour, tilting victoriously in her cause, with her favour, a little ribbon or red hanky, tied to my lance. It was an absurd dream. But I could not think of any other reason for her insistence in this obviously and unnecessarily dangerous nonsense.

‘Alice,’ I said, trying to make things up with her. ‘it’s not really a question of nerve — though that’s part of it, I’ll admit: it’s a question of sanity. It’s an unnecessary risk. Can’t you see that? If I was injured and had to go to hospital what would happen to Clare? And they’d find out who I was then, so I’d just be locked up afterwards. There’d be no future for us.’

But Alice, this dream so nearly within her reach, was quite unwilling to relinquish it. ‘You could at least try it,’ she said. ‘It can’t be all that difficult.’

‘I should think it’s bloody difficult, especially if you’re no great horseman. And I’m not. But what’s the point, Alice? What’s the point? That’s the real question.’

‘It’s life. Don’t you see?’ she answered simply.

‘It’s death, more likely.’ I thought even then that I could rescue the situation with a joke, by taking Alice in my arms. But when I touched her she withdrew, unable even to look at me. And I sensed then that her madness went back much further than I’d thought; that the games she played at Beechwood were not the result of her marriage or of her isolation in the great house but had their origins in some unresolved trauma way in her past, that I knew nothing of, which I could never unearth or cure. I had failed her in this last event, this charade of courtly valour: I was thus no fit person to accompany her on her golden journey through life. I would not be that ever-daring, valiant knight from her child’s story book, In the Days of the King, who would rescue her from the dark and brambly wood. I wanted to rescue her with sanity, not by injecting some continual drama into our affair.

She turned and looked at me now from the far side of the big divan. ‘You’ve really been using me, haven’t you? As long as you were in a fix, I was useful to you: my money, this house. But now — ’

‘Alice, that’s not true, I’m still in a fix. And besides it was always your suggestion that you help me, that I came up to the house in the first place, for example. You forget that.’

We were arguing now, prevaricating, accusing, objecting, denying. All the angry emotional grammar we had never known before we seemed to know by heart now. And that was nonsense, too, I suddenly decided. I was becoming like the schoolmaster I’d been, treating Alice like the child she was. There was no future there, as Arthur had so obviously found, who had treated her in the same way. Yet I was determined not to give in, not to be bullied in the matter of the tournament: there was equally no future for us in that either.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘Let’s not fight any more about it — can we not?’

She didn’t reply. I picked up her wizard’s hat. ‘You looked marvellous this evening, you know,’ I said.

She turned then, smiling at last. She took the hat from me and put it on again, setting it at an angle rising back from her dark hair, so that the long swathe of silk spun round her body as she swirled about for a moment on the far side of the bedroom. ‘Tomorrow I’ve another costume, for the tournament: it’s a surprise, as the Queen of Beauty.’

‘Queen of Beauty?’

‘Yes. There was one at every tournament in the old days: I’m to be the Queen of Beauty tomorrow. The Victorian Society suggested it. So why not, I thought? It should be fun.’

She let me kiss her then, lightly on the cheek. ‘Great,’ I said. ‘I’ll look forward to it all.’ Then I turned back, halfway to the door. ‘Of course, they were quite right, the Society — there couldn’t have been any other choice.’

It seemed we’d made it up then as I looked across at her and we smiled at each other. But out on the landing I had that last vision of her as someone quite isolated again, as she had been when I’d first seen her apparently talking to herself in the conservatory — isolated now, madness creeping up on her once more in the shape of her Elizabethan gown and wizard’s cap. I had somehow lost her. She would sleep with these props next to her that night, and not me, I thought, dreaming of another even more elaborate disguise on the morrow. I had lost her, and she had lost all those happy, decisive connections with real life which my predicament had given her. And yet all my problems remained as great as ever. Could I overcome them without her help? I was tempted to go back and tell her then that I’d take part in the tournament after all. But when I got to my own room and saw the great mass of black armour looming up at me, still confronting me like a brutal foe about to attack, I thought better of the idea. I picked the crusader’s shield up. And I saw then that it wasn’t real — that none of the armour was genuine. It had been made quite recently, in some light metal, as a theatrical or movie prop. So much for Alice’s Arthurian legends, I thought: Camelot and all the Knights of the Round Table were just as fake.

And yet on the following afternoon I had to admit that the whole medieval recreation looked real enough: startlingly real — a dream come to genuine life in the brilliant sunshine. There was a Grand Procession first, Alice leading it side-saddle on a white charger, of all the Knights and Officers of the tournament, all of them moving on dazzlingly caparisoned horses from the Manor to the lists on the far side of the cricket pitch. A dozen small candy-striped tents for each Knight had been set up here, with individually coloured pennants snaking out in the slight breeze above them.

Nearer the centre of the park a line of wooden hurdles had been set up, like an endless tennis net, along which, down either side, the Knights would charge each other. Further across, facing the middle of the hurdles, a gaily decorated stand had been built, with a long striped awning overhead and the rest festooned with flowers, in swathes of cloth and coloured ribbons, all contrived to form Gothic patterns of slim arches and rose medallions which successfully hid the basic metal scaffolding beneath.

At either end of the hurdles tall lances had been stacked in cones, one against the other, stiletto pennants flying from their tips. A large crowd meanwhile, freed from their morning sports and balloon rides about and above the Manor, had gathered all round the boundary ropes, and there was a buzz of incredulous expectation in the air. Clare and I, dressed again in our costumes of the previous night, had seats in the main stand, not far from where Alice was to sit, right in the front, in a flower-bedecked loggia, with the President of the Victorian Society. In front of us at that moment, a medieval jester, complete with cap and bells, was entertaining us. But this archaic amusement was well forgotten when the long procession came in sight. Each of the Knights was surrounded by their own little retinue of grooms, armourers and supporters, while interspersed between them walked a colourful assortment of archers, halberdiers, standard-bearers and men at arms. At the very head of the procession the musicians of the previous night doubled now as strident trumpeters, announcing the tournament in long high clarions.

I was suddenly lifted by the magic of it all, by the great winding line of armoured horsemen and attendants, chain-mail glinting in the sun, with all the other colours in their shields and pennants — the reds and golds and blacks — turning the procession into a vision from some medieval Book of Hours, a crusader’s army setting forth on the vellum of the green sward.

Despite the flimsy veil she wore I could see Alice’s face clearly when she arrived to take her throne. Dressed in a long white gown with vast billowing silk sleeves, in a tight, almost wasp-waisted gilt embroidered velvet bodice, she was in seventh heaven — in the midst of an incredibly extravagant dream now at last perfectly realised. I was sorry in a way that I couldn’t share it with her. I envied her invention then. And somehow I think she sensed this, for when she finally sat down in the flower-strewn box at the front of the stand, she turned to me for a moment, to where I was sitting a few rows behind her, and, having first looked at me with surprise, for I’d not seen her all that morning, she went on to smile at me with an expression of extraordinary triumph — triumph with an element of spite in it: she had moved finally, with this glorious procession, into a vital world of colour and light, into a promised land where I, through my lack of faith, could not join her.

Yet when the jousting itself actually started and the darkly armoured knights, like evil machines, their plumes flying, thundered down along the hurdles at each other, I was glad I was no part of it. Clare was on her feet most of the time with excitement. But had I been on one of the horses myself, I would almost certainly have ended up in hospital, or worse. One of the well-practised Knights, indeed, took a fearful tumble, jolted violently out of his saddle by a padded lance, to be rescued by St John’s Ambulance men suitably attired in striped doublets and hose.

I thought the whole thing comic for a moment, as well as dangerous. And yet what a lot of energy and imagination had been given — by Alice particularly, I knew — to organising the vastly elaborate charade. And I was amazed then at the intensity of Alice’s dream, the tenacity with which she had pursued and successfully realised this pageant of archaic valour. I had to admit now that there was something wonderful about her obsessions, something that was not madness. Perhaps it was a particularly American quality, extinct there as everywhere else now, which she still possessed and had brought to life again here: a quality of reaching out, far beyond the boundaries of ordinary hope, towards an imagined light — of risking the infinite, sure of its promise. Alice certainly had this continuously available generosity of spirit, a romantic vision which I, in my sanity, had lost years ago, if I had ever had it. And I felt ashamed of my tardy, careful nature. I was a prisoner of my wishes — someone always at several removes from the real action — a spy by nature as well as by old profession, who could only really see the world through binoculars.

And it was through these, towards the end of the jousting, when the flags and pennants began to dance in long, snake-like shadows across the parkland in an evening breeze, that I noticed the man walking down from the Manor towards us. He was immediately, blatantly noticeable as he came among the costumed spectators in the stand, dressed as he was in a dark business suit, a smallish, almost elderly, rather common-looking little man. I noticed his hair, too, dank, dark tufts of it plastered down with some stiffened dressing over his ears and collar. He searched the stand for someone, gazing about him with an air of great self-assurance and superior concern, as if such costumed nonsense and all the jousting was nothing but a dalliance for rogues and vagabonds.

I had seen this man somewhere before, I thought, seen just that same expression of contemptuous dismissal. But where?

Then I remembered. Months before, in the conservatory, when I had first seen Alice, dressed in a Camelot outfit, apparently talking to herself, she had in fact been talking to this same man: her husband Arthur.

I had forgotten Arthur. I’d been worrying about the police, the African, about Ross. I’d quite forgotten him — forgotten that we had another, and in the present circumstances just as dangerous enemy, who had now walked in on us out of the blue, a pallid ghost, the bad fairy come at the end of the feast. He was looking for Alice, of course, but hadn’t seen her yet.

I realised we couldn’t run. Clare and I would get nowhere in our costumes. We would have to bluff it out somehow. Alice no doubt would have ideas. At least, I hoped she would.

She did. When the tournament came to end, and Arthur had finally recognised and approached his wife, she immediately called Clare and me over to her little loggia in the front of the stand, where she calmly introduced us to Arthur.

‘My friends,’ she said. ‘You don’t know them: Bob Lawrence and his daughter Belinda. They’re staying here — down from London for the celebrations.’

Alice introduced us in her most gracious social manner. But her husband replied in quite a different manner. ‘Oh, are they? Well, I guess that’s fine, for them, I’m sure. And you too, Alice, Just fine.’

He spoke contemptuously as well, a harsh, grating American accent, a common tongue, quite unlike Alice’s. There was power in his voice, but not the educated power of any East-Coast attorney, I thought. This was much more the tone of a brutal success derived from the Chicago stockyards.

We shook hands. Clare looked up at me and smiled, enjoying these fictional introductions, which she saw as no more than a continuation of the day’s brilliant theatricals. Then she looked up at Arthur. And she stopped smiling, for Arthur wore a steady expression of weary disgust. I saw him properly for the first time. I was surprised by how much older he was than Alice, twenty years older at least, I thought. He must have been in his mid-sixties. There was a chilled, blue look about him in the warm twilight, as if he’d just come out of a cold store. The crown of his head, together with his brow, was over-large, protuberant. But the cheeks hollowed out rapidly and his chin was small, pointed, decisive. His head was like an inverted pear: there was the sense, almost, of some deformation in it, while the dark, moist tufts of unruly hair were widely spaced, I saw now, showing clear patches of skin beneath, like the scalp of a new-born baby. There was the sense of someone who had got his own way with life, in every matter, at the cost only of his appearance which alone reflected unpleasant failure. I was surprised that Alice could ever have come to marry such a cold, elderly fish.

Yet it seemed as if Clare and I had successfully passed this initial test with him. But how would it be when we were back in our own clothes, as ordinary guests in the Manor? Could we sustain the fiction then? Arthur had such a wary look in his eye for all three of us that I feared for the future.

And I was right there, too. I was unable to speak to Alice alone before we all trooped back to the Manor, where another smaller buffet supper with cooling drinks had been laid out in the great hall for the sweating contestants and the costumed guests from the stand.

Quite soon after the exultant merry-making had begun here, when the band of musicians, now well laced with mead and ale, had started out on some jaunty trumpet themes, Arthur cornered all three of us where we had been standing by the great fireplace at one end of the hall. He was fidgeting, frustrated, clearly with something pressing on his mind, which wouldn’t wait.

Alice, brashly inventive as ever, gave him the opportunity to unburden himself. ‘Bob Lawrence, here,’ she said with happy charm, ‘is an expert on medieval armour …’

She had hardly finished speaking before Arthur replied softly, urgently, with barely suppressed vindictiveness. ‘Don’t for God’s sake play the fool any more, Alice,’ he said, sorrow equalling the anger in his rough American voice. ‘You’ve caused enough trouble already — but this time you’re really playing with fire.’ He stepped between us then, as if to protect Alice. Then he turned to me, foreknowledge and a dismissive arrogance crowding his face. ‘This man is Peter Marlow. And his daughter Clare. He killed his wife a few months back, then abducted the girl from hospital — helped by you, as I understand it. The police have been looking the whole country over for both of them ever since.’ He turned back to Alice now. ‘Don’t be such a damned fool, Alice. This is real madness.’

An angry brightness had come into Alice’s eyes as she listened, something sharp and fierce in her expression: hatred for this man. And yet, more than looking at Arthur now, she seemed to be gazing straight through him, focusing on something behind him or lost in some huge new bitter thought of her own. She smiled then. And it was the same overblown, unattached smile, now touched with real madness, that I had noticed in her expression the first time I’d seen her down by the lake, months before, when she had yelped in the wind, floating great Indian war-whoops out over the water.

‘Who told you?’ she asked.

‘Why, Mrs Pringle did, of course. She called me a few days back in New York, when she was certain of the matter. I came straight on over. This time you’ve really gone too far. But we’ll see what we can do.’

He tried to shepherd Alice away, with cold consideration, as the madwoman he so clearly considered her to be. But Alice resisted.

‘No! Leave me! We’ll all go together.’

And we did; all of us moving off in a rather awkward procession through the costumed throng, out of the great hall and into the porch of the house.

And it was here that Alice suddenly drew her little automatic from her velvet bodice, before levelling it at her husband’s back.

‘Don’t look round,’ she warned him. ‘Just go on walking.’

Arthur was unaware of what had happened. Then he half-turned, saw the gun. She prodded the weapon into his back.

‘Go on!’ she said, like a cattle-drover. ‘Out the front, then left. Round to the back.’

Clare was excited by this turn of events in our living theatre. I wasn’t. I had no idea of the script. Clare said ‘Good!’ in a considered voice, like a circumspect judge at a flower show. Then she repeated the commendation. ‘Good! Good!’

‘What are you doing?’ I asked.

‘You’ll see.’ Alice didn’t look at me, concentrating on her work.

We walked out of the porch, down the wide front steps of the house and into the warm still airs that had come up with the night, no more than a strolling family group, it would have seemed — to the few people, chauffeurs and others, who were grouped around the cars parked everywhere about us, on the drive and over the lawn surround that gave out onto the dim parkland beyond. Our feet crunched on the crisp white gravel that lay faintly all about us, like a thin fall of snow in the half-light, and Alice trod the pebbles lightly, gun in hand, like an avenging angel in her long white Queen of Beauty costume, intent on retribution, pushing her husband forwards into the darkness.

‘I don’t know where you think this can get you, Alice,’ Arthur spoke lugubriously, as if he had quite lost interest in everything.

‘It’s getting you somewhere. Not me.’ Alice replied with tart efficiency. ‘I’ve really had too much of you interfering in my life. This is my life, my house. Not yours.’

‘I gave it you, though: your life and this house. You forget that. I thought this house, for example, when I bought it for you …’ Arthur hesitated and there seemed a touch of genuine sadness and regret in his voice when he spoke again. ‘I thought it might … cure you? If that was ever possible. All this Victorian craziness, that and all the other madness. Yes, a cure, if that was possible. Improve you at least.’

‘Improve me?’ Alice was angry again. ‘Like some reform school? But you’re my madness, you know that. Not me. You — with your … Well, every single stupid thing: possessiveness, meanness, bad temper, your ugliness. Was I to have nothing then before I got this house? Just a toy of yours? Cooped up like a —’ she couldn’t find the word, ‘like some fancy cake decoration, running your gracious social life out in the Hamptons or the Drake Hotel in Chicago or your New York apartment: just decorating your life, while the others worked. You gave them a life. But you took mine. You gave them everything that mattered. While I had to fight beyond fighting — that was my madness — just to get this house, to get away from you.’

I couldn’t follow this conversation at all. Who were these ‘others’? I assumed Arthur must have been married before and these ‘others’ were earlier children of his. We had walked right round the house by now and were coming up the covered laurel path, the old tradesmen’s entrance, where the branches arched overhead, blocking out almost all the light which came from the few lighted windows above us.

‘I told you when we spoke last time here three months ago.’ Arthur’s voice was faint, absorbed by the thick foliage above him. But the righteous anger in it was still clear enough. ‘I told you that you’d never make it here on your own. Go from bad to worse; dressed up in all these circus outfits, playing Red Indians or a bit-part from Camelot, living in the past — some damfool golden age of yours, with all those old crocks and platters, those cockamamie Victorian things. And I was right, by God. Now you’ve got yourself hitched to a killer. But if you give me that gun, maybe we can still get you out of it.’

‘This man has already got me out of it. I am out of it. Free and sane. And you’re not going to put me back — anywhere. I’m going to put you away this time.’ Alice spoke with the relish of a child now, winning at last in some long-running nursery antagonism. I was holding Clare’s hand tightly, walking along behind, more than uneasy. ‘But what can you do?’ I asked Alice. ‘Mrs Pringle knows everything. She’s probably called the police already.’

‘She has,’ Arthur intoned ahead of us.

‘We’ll see,’ Alice said brightly, firmly.

We’d come through the big stone gateway into the yard where the light from the tall back windows more clearly illuminated the enclosed space around us. We heard the trumpets spilling out from the great hall in front, some merry dance.

Alice was just ahead of me, Clare right behind, pushing forward, anxious not to miss the least development in this midnight charade.

‘We’ll lock him in here for the moment,’ Alice said, gesturing towards the old laundry, where the door was already half-open, blackness beyond. A moment later she had pushed her husband into the darkness and promptly locked the door on him, turning the heavy Victorian key with all the satisfied finality of a hanging judge.

‘We’ll find Mrs Pringle now,’ Alice said, ‘and do the same for her — the fat sneak.’ Again, the tone of Alice’s voice was high and childish. And the words, too, I felt, came straight out of some long-ago world of hers, from a childhood battle with her brothers perhaps, or from some Edwardian adventure book which she had read at the time, embarking even then on her golden age: a world of chivalry and derring-do. Alice, with the arrival of Arthur, seemed to have dispensed completely with all her new sanity and returned to a life of myth.

‘You mean — put her in with your husband?’ I asked.

She turned and I could see the startling glints in her eyes, even in the half light. ‘My husband?’ she said incredulously. ‘My father. Yes — he’s my father! Don’t you see?’

I hadn’t begun to digest this startling information before we heard the first thin scream coming from the old laundry a few yards behind us, more squeak than scream, like a rat’s first complaint in a trap. But it was Arthur’s voice, I realised, first this startled little whine, but suddenly rising then like some untuned wind instrument going wild until it reached the high strident pitch of a steam whistle. Then the shriek stopped, cut off in its prime only to start up again a few seconds later. But now the pitch was much lower, intermittent, as if someone was playing violently on an already broken instrument, punishing it, destroying it. There were scuffles after that and the sounds of heavy things falling about and being dragged along the floor inside. It was just as if Alice had unwittingly pushed the man into a cage where some wild animal had torn him to pieces and was now quietly devouring him.

We ran back. I turned the key and opened the door.

‘There’s no electricity here!’ Alice called out as we both tried to push our way through the door at the same time. ‘Just an oil lamp on the shelf, to the side there.’ I cursed Alice’s meticulous Victorian re-creations then. But I found the lamp almost at once, on a shelf next the diamond glassed windows, and lit it.

The old laundry was a longish, fairly narrow room, with the big copper boiler to the right, set slightly out from the wall, wooden draining-boards behind that and the huge Victorian linen-press running down the other side, its big wheel, handle and chain — which pulled the great coffin-like weight along the wooden rollers beneath — just visible in the dim light. But I could see nothing amiss anywhere. The room appeared quite empty, like a cave with its arched ceiling and heavy chocolate-brown paint, a cave or a freshly opened tomb filled with mysterious utensils, patent Victorian devices, strange grave gifts from a long-vanished civilisation which loomed up now, taking even stranger shape in the flickering shadows cast by the lamp.

Then, moving towards the boiler, I saw a single smart brogue shoe sticking up in the lamplight, over the rim of the cauldron. Arthur was slumped inside, lying like a banana, curved out round the bottom, his head rising up the other slope. His business suit still clung to him neatly like something dumped in a laundry bin before its time. But Arthur’s head had gone all astray. It was badly twisted, turned ninety degrees to the side, so that while he gazed straight over one shoulder, the rest of his body faced resolutely forward. It was as if his head had been a bottle-top which someone had wrenched open far too violently. He was dead. Yet he could hardly have killed himself in such a manner, I thought.

I lifted the lamp, searching out the other shadowy distances and corners in the room, looking for someone else. And as I did so, the wavering oil flames illuminating the spaces beyond, I saw the African — just for an instant — crouching beneath the draining board. It was certainly him. I saw the camouflage jacket, the long thin face a golden mahogany now in the lamplight, the ridges of scar tissue to one side, the eyes deeply inset, intent, vicious — exactly those of a trapped animal about to spring.

And in the next instant he did so, releasing himself like a sprinter from his blocks, rushing towards me. Yet it wasn’t me that he wanted. Clare, curious as ever, had come right into the room behind me, and in the darkness I hadn’t noticed her. But the African had, and he grabbed her now before I could do anything to stop him.

Then, putting the lamp aside, the three of us were on the floor, struggling beside the boiler, with Alice standing helplessly above us, flourishing the gun. But she could do nothing with it.

‘Don’t!’ I managed to shout up to her, as I tried to pin the African down. And she didn’t. The man, holding Clare with one hand, could only fight me with the other — while fear and vast anger gave me a second small advantage. Yes, just as I had when I’d shot Ross’s dog in the valley and battered the lamb to death afterwards, I found a fierce strength then, a strange, vicious physical supremacy. I had the African by the neck, with two hands round his sinewy throat. I think I would have squeezed the life out of him, as we twisted and turned, if he had not decided to cut his losses and struggle free. He pushed me away, his fingers driving fiercely up into my nostrils so that the pain became unbearable. Then he was on his feet, dragging Clare with him into the dark recesses of the room.

I picked up the lamp again. Alice had come right next to me now and together we stared into the gloom. Clare was crying. I could hear her, somewhere in the darkness ahead of me. I handed Alice the lamp.

‘Here! Hold it — up high — and follow me.’

I took the automatic from her and walked forward. We saw the African then as we both moved to the end of the room. With his back to the wall he was holding Clare, like a shield, high up, right in front of his chest, so that she covered almost all his torso. I couldn’t use the gun. I noticed how near he was to the end of the great oak linen press, the half-ton wooden coffin filled with stone, which faced his thighs and midriff, while he held Clare at a level above it. He obviously had no idea what the machine was for, or how its great weight could be made to slide towards him. Yet I couldn’t use it against him in this manner unless I was sure that, while I did so, he would keep Clare out of the way.

He answered the problem for me. Since Alice and I were now to one side of him and thus only the press blocked his escape towards the door, he let Clare go and stepped up onto it, before starting to walk over the top of the machine.

I had my chance then. I rushed for the handle as he towered above us. Grasping it with both hands I turned it viciously, so that the great box began to move, slowly at first, but with ever-increasing momentum.

The African, feeling the machine slide beneath him, lost balance, stumbled, righted himself — and then as the rollers began to spin faster, he found himself walking a treadmill, a journey he couldn’t sustain, being pushed back inexorably on the great box towards the wall. He panicked then, jumping off the moving press as it sped towards the wall, springing off the end of it, as from a diving board.

But the great weighted box was running like a battering-ram now, the handle at the side spinning round unaided. The African, landing on the flagstones, was immediately caught in the gap between the end of the press and the wall. And when the vice closed on him, it went on closing, without resistance, ramming into his back, first gathering all his bones together in a fierce grip, before squeezing them brutally like a car in a metal-compacter, driving the breath out of him. In the end he had no wind left to scream and all we heard were his ribs cracking, the vertebrae in his neck breaking, so that his head, now the only part of his body above the level of the butt end of the press, nodded first and then keeled over suddenly, unanchored now, like a dark fruit released from its branch.

I stood there horrified for several seconds. The man seemed to have been dispatched by some elemental force, a fly crushed on a windowpane. Yet I, in fact, had dispatched him — and I was horrified at the result: this death’s-head now caught in the flaring oil light, lying on its side at the end of the press, as after some violent beheading.

Nor was this the only madness of the evening. There was Arthur lying behind me. Arthur: husband or father? And it suddenly seemed to me more than likely, given his age and that touch of the old mid-West in his voice, that this man was her father, the rough tycoon and Chicago meat-baron, Arthur Troy, creator of the family fortunes. And I saw then how Alice had gained no sanity with me at all in the past months. She had come to tell the truth perhaps, here and there. But she had lied all the time about the real things. She had never been married to any New York attorney, never had a son by a previous marriage. There had never been the ‘real thing’ for Alice, and all this reality she had told me about was sheer invention, fictional replacements for life, dreams of living.

Long ago, something must have led her to think of this man, whom latterly she had come to despise, as her husband. Long ago, for some agonising reason, she had turned her father into a husband: and so, before this present hatred, she must have loved him once. Loved him to distraction? Perhaps. It was certainly madness. Anyway, father or father-figure — it hardly mattered any more. She had destroyed them both.

Clare was quite unhurt when I picked her up, while the trumpets from the great hall, with the attendant hum of excited talk and laughter, had obviously prevented anyone in the house from hearing our battles down in the old laundry. The yard was still empty when we looked outside.

Alice had regained most of her icy control, at least, if not her sanity. She took her little automatic back, then locked the door on the two corpses with nerveless competence, hiding the key.

‘That’s that,’ she said easily, as though completing some tiresome shopping expedition. ‘They won’t find them in there for quite a while.’

I was angry suddenly at what I felt to be her sheer callousness in the matter.

‘My God, Alice, you just told me he was your father. You can’t leave him in there like that. Is he your father?’

‘We’ve not the time,’ she called back tartly over her shoulder. ‘And yes, he is.’

‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

She didn’t reply. I was carrying Clare in my arms, as we threaded our way between the parked cars towards the kitchen entrance to the house.

‘No time?’ I whispered back angrily. ‘No time? For your father?’

‘Later. Afterwards!’ She dismissed her father as curtly in death as she had in life. ‘We need Mrs Pringle now,’ she went on.

Suddenly, longing to be away from all this mayhem, I said, ‘She must have told the police already. Why don’t Clare and I just try and make a run for it now — in your car?’

Alice stopped in her tracks. ‘No. I’ll come, too.’

‘Why? You’ve done nothing. Let us go alone. We can get to Tewkesbury and wait there.’

Alice was looking at me closely. I could see her face quite clearly in the light from the big windows above us. And now, just beneath the veneer of calm and control in her expression, I saw a great fear, fear for what we had just done, perhaps, of what we had both witnessed. I’m not sure. But I knew I couldn’t leave her then. She needed my help now as badly as I had needed hers, months back, when she had first surprised me naked in the valley. I couldn’t leave her then, someone I loved — and so I was perfectly willing to give ourselves up to the police. I was ashamed at my idea of leaving her.

I said, ‘We’ll stay. Of course we’ll stay. And wait for the police. Mrs Pringle is bound to have called them.’ It seemed an end at last.

But Alice, her faith renewed by my change of heart, now had other ideas. ‘She may not have told them,’ she said brightly, suddenly decisive again. ‘Let’s find out.’

We surprised Mrs Pringle a few moments later in the old kitchen as we came through. She was sitting at the long pine table, her back towards us, a huge tin of fancy biscuits open in front of her, nibbling at them furiously, nervously, like a great mouse. Her husband, Arthur’s chauffeur, a small ferret-like creature whom I’d not met before, was with her. They had a bottle of Ruby Port between them — unopened, though. Obviously, knowing my real identity now as a wife-killer, and that I was roaming about somewhere in the house at that very moment, the party mood had not blossomed in either of them. Recognising me, even in my guise as a fierce Albanian, Mr Pringle stood up in some alarm. His wife turned then, a chocolate biscuit stalled halfway into her great jaws.

‘It’s quite all right,’ Alice said gently. ‘Go ahead, Anna — it’s hundreds of extra calories, but go right ahead, relax. You needn’t worry at all. It’s all over. My father’s gone out. He’s gone to get the police.’

Mrs Pringle looked greatly relieved. ‘Oh,’ she said nervously. ‘He … he needn’t have bothered. He asked me to call them myself. We wondered where you —’

Alice interrupted her graciously. ‘We were just talking together, outside. And now we’ll wait upstairs, I think.’

She had already begun to shepherd Clare and me forward, through into the main house. The Pringles stood aside, letting us pass without a word. But just as we reached the doorway of the kitchen, Alice suddenly turned back. I never saw her reach for her little automatic — only saw the gun itself as she levelled it at Mrs Pringle: and heard the shots. She could hardly have missed the woman with her great bulk, standing by the kitchen table. And she didn’t. The bullets whipped into her like little darts, puncturing, burying themselves in the meat of her body. Not one bullet, but two, three. I couldn’t stop her, though I tried.

‘There!’ she shouted as she fired. ‘That’s for sneaking on me: you fat sneak, you spy!’

Alice found these archaic expressions again in her anger, like a character in a Boys Own Paper adventure, while pumping the life out of this contemporary glutton, this cunning modern woman who had betrayed her — phoning her father in New York and now the police — finally destroying all her too honourable dreams.

Mrs Pringle keeled over the table like a huge top-heavy ship, scattering the fancy biscuits and the bottle of Ruby port, which broke on the old flagstones, the wine spreading like early blood, before the woman’s own wounds opened.

Again, the sound of the trumpets and the other raucous entertainment in the great hall drowned the shots from the automatic. No one moved for an instant. Then Mrs Pringle’s husband was down on the floor, tending his wife, while I stood there by the kitchen dresser, confused, appalled, the gunfire still ringing in my ears a certain end to things, to any future.

I turned to her. ‘For God’s sake!’ I shouted. But before I’d finished Alice swung round to face me, still holding the gun, levelling it at me now, as another who had betrayed her. I can’t be certain if she actually intended to fire at me, since I never gave her the chance, throwing myself violently to one side down behind the dresser. And when I looked up again a few seconds later, she and Clare were gone from the room, their footsteps beating on the corridor which led up to the great hall.

When I reached the entrance to the hall there was no sign of either of them. They’d been swallowed up by the crowd of costumed revellers, and it was almost impossible in any case to distinguish anybody in their various courtly disguises. All I did see was the two black-and-white chequered caps of police officers over by the hall door, bobbing about among the other more colourful headgear. Avoiding the police, I circled round the hall in the opposite direction, pushing and shoving among the ragged, jolly Knights and their women, the trumpets still blaring. For a moment I thought I saw Alice, her dark hair and bronzed shoulders, over by the hall door. But when I eventually struggled over to it, there was no one there. Alice and Clare had disappeared — out of the house perhaps, for the hall door was open. But where?

Outside on the gravel surround I saw the flashing lights of two police cars, parked some way down the drive, blocked by other cars parked all over the verge. They could hardly have gone down that way, I thought. I looked out over the dark parkland straight ahead of me. If Alice and Clare had left the house, and I felt sure they had, that would have been the only safe way for them to go: out into the darkness, beyond the ha-ha which divided the front lawns from the park. I moved off in that direction in any case, jumping down in the ditch and going on towards the cricket pitch.

Clare — as if the evening’s events were all part of some large joke — was laughing in a strange soundless way when I found the two of them fifteen minutes later sitting on the cricket-pavilion steps: knees tight together, head swaying up and down, hands clasped round her ankles, her face was full of smiles, as though Alice had just come to the end of some very good story. Alice was sitting next to her, breathing hard, puffed with her run across the long field.

I’d approached them warily enough, thinking Alice might draw her gun on me again. But when I asked her about it she laughed, as if she’d never levelled it at me.

‘I threw it away,’ she said. ‘No need for it now.’

She seemed to have forgotten the mayhem in the kitchen. She had already removed her shoes and now she started to take off her Queen of Beauty costume. There was a thin moon behind a filigree of clouds; it was bright enough, at least, to make things out. The night was still warm.

‘This is nonsense,’ Alice said casually. ‘This great outfit. I’m sweating.’

She took her velvet bodice off, then pulled the arms of the silk dress down from each shoulder before starting to release the catches at the back of her waist. Then she stepped out of it, leaving just a slip on beneath.

‘Cold,’ I said. ‘You’ll get …’ I really didn’t know where to begin. I was sweating myself. I shook my head. ‘Alice,’ I said finally, ‘I don’t see the point.’

‘Does there always have to be a point?’ she said. ‘Besides, there is a point,’ she went on suddenly. ‘We’re free.’

‘Yes. But —’

‘We’re still free,’ she insisted.

‘What can we do here, though? Just postpone the inevitable. The police —’

‘Why not? They can wait till morning.’

Clare spoke then, seemingly equally unaffected by the recent events, which I supposed she must have seen simply as a continuation of the two-day-long drama of the fête, the cricket match, the costume ball, the jousting tournament. ‘Are you playing again now here?’ she asked, ‘That game you had here before?’

‘No. It’s too dark, sweet. It’s too dark.’

I sat down beside Clare and picked her up and put her on my knee, holding her round the shoulders lightly in one arm. I thought this must be the end of things between she and I. And I wanted to make the most of it with her, without her knowing of my sadness. At least, I saw now, Alice was right in one way: there was some point in this last folly of hers: it had given Clare and me time together once more. We were both headed for separate institutions now, just as Alice was.

‘Clare,’ I started, thinking how I could tactfully explain my imminent departure from her life. ‘I thought I’d tell you —’

‘Story?’ she burst in brightly. ‘Iddity, Iddity story? The one of the pigs?’

‘Well, but I don’t have the book —’

‘Yes!’ she said. ‘The book in your head. Go on.’

And so instead of the slightest grim news, I started out on The Tale of Pigling Bland again, inventing what I couldn’t remember, the three of us sitting quietly on the pavilion steps in the dark.

‘This is the story of Pigling Bland …’

There was no noise in the night, far down in the parkland where we were hidden: except, after five minutes, the faint sound of a siren in the distance, just when I had got to the point in the tale where Pigling Bland, released from bondage, is stopped by the local village constable on his bicycle.

Later we slept fitfully on the pavilion floor, in a corner, on batting pads and among stumps, waiting for the police to find us: the three of us together in a line, secure in the dark, breathing the night air in the pavilion still warmed by the day, a faint smell of leather and willow, touched with linseed oil and old grass cuttings.

Clare fell asleep first, with my velvet Albanian doublet over her: fast asleep, quite at ease, it seemed, as if Alice and I were both shepherding her, between us, through the night towards some exciting new adventure, the world of some other lake in a valley or hidden African paradise, where she would wake in another miraculous landscape. To begin with, in the complete darkness, all we knew of her existence was the easy rhythm of her breath: small waves, an echo of her journey, her transformation between light and dark, the only worldly sound, beyond which lay deep sleep or the noise of her fantastic dreams. But then Alice and I, moving towards each other, gently closed the gap between all three of us, so that we came to shield the girl like leaves round a bud and we felt her life then, heart-beat as well as breath.

Alice touched my face in the complete dark, stumbling on an ear, an eye, my mouth. She had forgiven me, it seemed, for what she had seen as my earlier betrayal. Whatever anger she had felt for me in her bedroom the previous night, in the kitchen, had dissolved. No, not dissolved; it was more than that. It was as if some whole new person had taken over Alice’s mind — her body even — as a substitute does for some injured person in a game. Alice had re-invented herself, taken on another role, that of pliant mistress in my arms, a woman without any knowledge now of her murderous disruption, her violence and hatred. It was a strange feeling: I was touching some other woman in the dark.

I had thought to ask her about her father. But it wasn’t the moment — the answers could only have come from the woman she had been and was no longer — and there wasn’t time. And then I thought again: husband or father, what did it really matter? She had seen Arthur as both: as lover and enemy. That was clear enough. The rest, for answer, could only lie on a psychiatrist’s couch. And I, with Laura, had given up on all the quacks and specialists a long time before with Clare, in what we had seen as her tragedy. But was it such, I wondered now, with either of these two, Alice or Clare? Was it not simply their way of looking at life, a way as valid as ours, in which they saw things hidden to us and made associations which lacked all our dull logic? And if their strange visions gave them a disadvantage among ordinary mortals, that vision, that madness even, seemed to me then an inviolable gift, as much a part of both their characters as any other of their attributes I loved. Without it, I realised, Alice and Clare would have lacked their most vital dimensions, that quality of fierce excess in a bankrupt world, bounty amidst impoverishment, swift imagination riding over every mean thought.

How shortsighted I’d been to look so hard for sanity in everyone, in Alice or in Clare. After all, I saw now, the bizarre was Clare’s particular gift too: that untutored wildness in her which, whatever disadvantages it might bring, would always free her from the mundane. A cure for such people could well become a life worse than the disease, I thought, when they would lose all their strange stature, as we would miss their passionate example.

So I loved Alice that night without reserves, without queries or judgements: and loved her the more since in any case there would be no world between us tomorrow where such reservations could have any effect. And thus, an end so certainly in view between us, we were both quite free at last.