The Valley of the Fox

Two

‘Bom Dias!’

The vague old man who ran the lifts in the Avenida Palace Hotel bade us good morning as we came down from my bedroom that afternoon.

‘“Bom Dias” indeed.’ I turned to Laura afterwards. ‘It’s nearly four o’clock.’

That was the first time we made love, in August, almost a year ago in the heavy, gilt-decorated room I had in the old belle-époque hotel, at the bottom of the Avenida da Liberdade, Lisbon’s Champs Elysées, which ran straight through most of the city, like an arrow, down into Pombal’s magnificent eighteenth-century town by the waterfront, with the hills all round, climbing into the summer winds, where you could follow the breeze up in street lifts, ancient trams or along steeply rising cobbled alleyways.

‘Shall we have some tea?’

‘Shall we walk?’ I said.

‘It doesn’t matter what.’

The city was an open invitation. We had no appointments. Clare was at home with her grandparents in the suburb of Cascais. Laura looked at me, still with bedroom glints in her eyes as we passed through the lobby, and I had that sudden sharp feeling, in the pit of my stomach, of youth, when age doesn’t push any more, at least, and there is no end to things in the air.

The hotel was being redecorated that summer. There was a smell of paint everywhere downstairs and sawdust where they were cutting out the wood from an old cloakroom, carpenters sawing away like animals in dark corners.

‘The Retournados,’ Laura said. ‘There were nearly a million of them, ex-colonials back from Angola and Mozambique: the government put them up for months in all the luxury hotels in town. Now they’re “refurbishing” them.’

‘A million of them?’

‘Well, the lucky ones. Four in a bed, I suppose.’

‘The beds are big enough.’

‘Yes.’

We remembered. We’d had lunch that day in the great panelled dining-room, with its mirrors and canopy of chandeliers, on the first floor, the lifts just down the corridor outside, the old man off duty, so that no one had seen us go upstairs afterwards. Not that they’d have cared one way or the other, I fancy. The Portuguese, I’d found in over a month’s stay in the country, had a classic restraint, a politeness in almost every matter; the last people in Europe, it seemed, with such old-fashioned virtues.

But perhaps the old liftman not being there made things easier for us, in our own minds at least, for we were both of us old enough ourselves, with similarly formal backgrounds, to remember all such ancient prohibitions.

Laura wasn’t a prude. She just had a lot of out-of-date manners. She liked to do things in an acceptable way. Despite, or more likely because of, her obvious beauty, she presented a cool anonymity to the public. She tended to hide in the light of the world, her face immobile; her stance, her walk or gaze things calculated to deceive; so that they would not draw attention, at least, either to her body or her soul.

In private, with her parents, her friends — or with me in bed — she was something different. We all are, of course. But with Laura this change, though not schizophrenic, was much more extreme. There was a natural barrier in Laura, which Clare’s fate and her husband’s death had helped increase, between the public and the private person. She could be very formal, even cold on the surface. So that when I’d first met her, more than a month before, she had struck me as the last person in the world I was ever likely to sleep with. Yes; before I knew her, she seemed far too haughty and beautiful for me. She was, I imagined, one of those idle Tory women living abroad, remittance women in the sun, on permanent holiday, rich enough, no longer young, probably divorced, with loud-voiced horsey friends back in the English shires, one of the skin-deep people herself, all floating on gin and tonic.

When I first saw Laura, three pews ahead of me in St George’s Anglican church with Clare fiddling strangely at her side, I thought she was someone merely decorative, those wisps of blonde hair down the back of her neck too carefully tended, with a spoilt child in tow that she had not bothered to bring up properly. Even her name — ‘Mrs Kindersley’, when she was introduced to me at the church’s sardine barbecue afterwards — seemed a perfect suggestion of old upper-middle-class hauteur, impregnability, respectability, foolishness.

But Laura wore all these marks of her tribe as mere camouflage. They were not her real colours at all. When you knew her you found everything different in her mind: strange furniture in what had seemed, on the outside, so conventional a house. And when you loved her, it was different again, for her clothes were formal too, even her casual ones: pleated skirts and blouses — and when she took them off, as she had an hour before, there was another landscape, other attitudes which one could never have anticipated.

She had said, quite suddenly half way through lunch, just after we’d done with the mountain trout and the vinho verde, her hands neatly in her lap, leaning across to me with a look of amused confidentiality, ‘Afterwards, Peter?’

‘What?’

‘Make love.’ She paused. ‘Won’t we? Upstairs. Where better? Don’t you —’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I’ve forgotten most of the tricks though.’

‘So have I.’

But we hadn’t.

Her face was very long as she lay flat in the light from the bedroom windows. The shafts of afternoon sun, slanting on her cheeks seemed to exaggerate the natural distance between her eyebrows and jawbone, just as, in this position, it emphasised the slight turn up at the end of her nose, the equal snub at the tip of each breast. Her long body angled across the sheets, toes almost poking through the brass rails at the end, she had an air of vastly settled comfort about her that afternoon — nothing feverish at all, as if she’d just found exactly the right spot in a garden and was sunbathing there. Her lovemaking had the same calm: no rising storms, no vast passions or alarms, simply a firmness, a clarity, something open-eyed where she did not want to forget herself but rather, to remember everything.

Laura, I soon discovered, had a great gift of sharp consciousness. Continually alert behind her cool façades, anxious to invest something in every waking moment, it was sleep she feared. Once you had fallen through her outer reserve, and, beneath that, the layers of the familial or the workaday, when you fell into Laura most truly herself, you were in a continually busy place, a mind always on the move, ever concerned with sights and thoughts and tastes, kingdoms in the sun. She was something of a daylight atheist, I suppose, for the nights were different. Then she fussed and cried in the dark, accused herself of non-existent crimes, murmuring incoherently about her earlier life in Africa, for sleep she feared — the dreams, the panic it brought.

In Portugal certainly, living out in the marvellous light and heat of Cascais by the Atlantic with her parents for a year, she had found what she needed: long dazzling afternoons in their big garden overlooking the bay with Clare, or days down on the beach swimming, constantly involved with her daughter: activities in any case which left her exhausted by bedtime, so that there would be few moments in the dark to fill …

Laura clutched me on the bed then, the only time she hurt. She said ‘Since Willy went, and Clare, too, in another way, I’ve had this thing about not sleeping, as if I at least have to remain fully conscious. Do you know?’

‘Yes.’

‘To stay alive. If I sleep — I mightn’t.’

‘It’s a fear, naturally. Especially since you sleep alone.’

‘It’s as bad sometimes as not putting your hand out under the bed as a child.’

‘Yes.’

‘I want to stay awake, all the time.’

But she didn’t that afternoon. She drifted off ten minutes later, in my arms, before going out like a light, released at last from fear, at peace. Loving thus was one part of our content.

But there was living, too, the whole city outside the bedroom window: the summer wind, always from the south, whipping the rubbish along the mosaic pavements beside the cafés on the downtown boulevards; the ferry klaxons out in the bay, sliding into my own dreams as I dozed beside her then; or on other empty afternoons when we returned to my bedroom — the great white cruise liners, indolent dreams which materialised in the harbour in the space of a siesta, between lunch and tea. The city had been a marvellous promise for me in any case right from the start. Now, with Laura, its gifts were guaranteed.

She said when she woke, startled, surprised that she had slept, ‘I’ve survived …’

Most things discourage us from love these days. The omens and confirmations are commonplace: it will not survive, it will crack up on the rocks of liberation, impatience, infidelity, so that we embark on it half-heartedly in any case, if at all in middle life.

Laura had had her chances since Willy’s death, she’d told me, vague hints from London friends and other less subtle approaches during her year in Portugal. But they had not convinced her of anything. She felt a great fatigue about all that side of life: it hadn’t tempted her at all, lying fallow as she had, with Clare absorbing all her energy.

I must have been simply lucky, I’d thought, in my timing, in meeting Laura at a moment when things began to stir in her again. Or was it, in fact, something special which we had for each other? One tends to play this sort of idea down nowadays as well. It seems presumptuous to imagine there is anything so unique between two people, especially among the middle-aged; especially with me, who had seen a first wife go and lost several other women since.

I’d loved well enough, but the knack of permanency wasn’t there. In twenty years I’d gone through three women, that was the fact of the matter, and I’d told Laura so one afternoon a few weeks before when we’d gone down with Clare to the little beach at Cascais.

We’d had lunch under the canopy on the Palm Beach restaurant terrace, set right over the sand Clare playing near the small frothy waves almost immediately beneath us.

‘Yes,’ I’d said to Laura, the prawns dismembered on our plates, gathering the soiled paper napkins up. ‘It seems like blind man’s buff, looking back on it: me and women.’ I made the point lightly, flippancy a ready balm to failure.

‘Surely it was your job?’ Laura asked. ‘That intelligence work you told me about in Egypt, America. You were living all sorts of lies then. And so were these women you were with too, apparently.’

I nibbled at a last bit of prawn. ‘Perhaps. Though that’s a convenient excuse. It was probably just me.’

We were hovering on the brink of love that afternoon. We were likely to think the best of each other in any case. So I put myself unduly at a disadvantage, wanting Laura to forgive my past as well as love me now. Age only sharpens the plays we bring to courtship. After forty we know too well how best to present what’s left of us.

But Laura understood all this that afternoon, I think. She was nearly forty herself, after all. She leant across, taking the soiled napkins from me, touching my hand at the same time.

‘Every failure, or success, is both people, surely? One as much as the other. Each of us is to blame — as much as we are not to blame. I don’t see men and women as unequal at all in such things.’

‘If you bothered to count up the score, though: men —’

‘Well, if you’d killed your first wife, or the other women, that would rather tip the balance, certainly. But otherwise you can’t run things on a profit and loss account between people.’

She paused, tidying up the paper plates before looking out over the deep blue sea.

‘Do you have — secrets?’ she said at last, still gazing out at the ocean.

‘Professional secrets?’

‘No. Wife-beating, drink?’ She picked up the nearly empty wine bottle, offering it to me gently. The sun was just beneath the canopy now, settling down in the sky for a blazing afternoon. ‘You peep through keyholes?’ she went on shading her eyes. ‘Read other people’s letters. What is it?’

‘Worse. I tend to be possessive.’ I poured myself a last glass.

‘Ah! The heavy paterfamilias?’

‘I’ve not had children.’

‘Perhaps that’s why. The women were everything.’

‘Possibly.’

I looked down at Clare then, playing in the sand beneath us, or rather obsessed with it, running it endlessly through her fingers, from one cupped hand into another, then back again. As I watched she stopped suddenly before starting off on another manic pursuit, spinning a plastic bucket round by its handle, with great dexterity, on the very tip of her index finger.

I said, ‘With you there’d be children, wouldn’t there? Clare’s half a dozen in one.’

I was rushing my fences. But age as much as youth can have its sudden fevers, its imperatives. The sky was lead-blue all the way down to the horizon. And yet the sea glittered, the waves capped with froth, for there was still that summer wind from the south, flapping the canopy gently above us. The breeze cooled my cheeks.

One day all this would be lost to both of us: the marine vision, the soft airs, lunch in summer. The cliché struck me forcibly, of loss, an end of things. Pain came then, just as strongly as hope arrived two weeks later as we left the lobby of the Avenida Palace Hotel. Laura must have seen it in my face.

‘We’d share the burden, you mean?’ she said, looking down at Clare. ‘Or do you want to marry me?’ she added brightly, almost mockingly.

‘Both. They’d go together wouldn’t they?’

‘Marriage?’ She looked at me quizzically, suddenly serious.

‘Well, that’s too grand, perhaps. Sounds too formal. I suppose — I’m too old,’ I went on, backing out, piling up the excuses. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘Oh don’t be! Not at all. That’d be fine. If you think —’ She leant across, pausing.

‘What?’

‘Clare is more than a handful. A big commitment — to me, I mean.’

‘That’s fine.’

‘You see, I think she can get better, with a lot of love, attention, effort. Oh, not the child psychologists, the quacks. We’ve tried that. Just me.’

‘Or us. You said it was Willy dying that had put her back so much.’

Laura smiled. ‘You can’t just pick new fathers up off the street though, can you?’

‘Or wives.’

‘It’s barely six weeks, since you came out here.’

‘You count the weeks?’

‘Yes,’ she said candidly. ‘I have.’

‘Well then?’

‘Oh, I love you. That’s not the problem.’ She looked down at Clare again.

‘Nor that either, then,’ I said. ‘Unless you think she’s taken against me. Or would do, if I took Willy’s place in that way.’

‘I don’t know. She likes you now, I know that. But if we lived together …’

Clare herself answered the problem later that afternoon, when we’d all swum out to a wooden raft, anchored fifty yards from the shore. She and Laura were up on the platform, I was still lolling in the water, my arms on the edge.

‘Come up!’ Clare said urgently. ‘Come up! Please!’

Yet there was nothing imperious in her tone. She was simply worried, frightened that I might sink or disappear or swim back to shore on my own. She put her small hands out, gripping my wrist, tugging at me strongly. I joined them, heaving myself out of the water and onto the burning wood so that the whole raft pitched and the water boomed and belched among the drums beneath.

We lay in the sun for five minutes, the light too bright in our eyes to look at each other for more than odd seconds. Clare knelt over my back, scooping up the sea beside her, trickling it through her hands so that it fell in little cool points all over my skin. I could just see Laura, the line of her body like a run of small golden hills against the light, stretched out in front of me, lying on her back, one arm across her eyes, the other barely six inches from my nose. I could see the fine hairs like a forest on her wrist.

The ocean warbled all round us, the sounds from the small beach drowned in the afternoon heat. Without looking at me Laura moved her hand, blindly searching out the features on my face, before finally letting her fingers come to rest on my lips. She spoke then — but softly, her voice lost in the sea murmur.

‘What?’ I looked up.

‘I said “Yes”,’ she said.

The garden in Cascais had some strange trees round its edges — strange to me at least: like overgrown olive trees, the branches extraordinarily twisted, with heavily crusted bark, the whole blown sideways from many years in the south wind. They were old cork trees, last remnants of a time when this slope that led down to the sea had been part of an estate attached to a large house on the hill immediately behind Cascais.

The big house was long gone and all the open land, too, cut up years before into half-acre plots and filled now with expensive villas, ranch-style bungalows, ugly hotels, or tactless modern apartment buildings.

But Laura’s parents, Captain and Mrs Warren, when they’d left England more than thirty years before, had bought one of these empty plots intact and kept it that way, a last completely rural garden, a largely overgrown retreat amidst the vulgar glamour all round. Their house had originally been a farm building on the edge of the old estate and, apart from a new terrace looking out over the little harbour, they had left the property as it had been, a simple two-storied whitewashed house with thick bright umber slates running down a single sloping roof above.

The house was comfy in a chintzy, old-fashioned British manner. But the garden beneath the terrace was something quite original, far from the shires, a range of scent and dim colour on that first evening a month before when I’d first come out here with Laura to meet her parents. A great purple bougainvillaea and a tree like a weeping willow but with tightly packed yellow flowers festooning its branches, formed a centrepiece in the middle of the long coarse sea-grass. A path wound its way through the exotic undergrowth, with a table and chairs halfway down almost hidden beneath the flowering branches. A swing hung from a cork tree to one side and Clare was out there now, pushing gently to and fro in the warm half light, where the colours were smudged together in a strange, blue tinted luminosity.

Thomas Warren’s wife, Laura’s mother, was almost crippled with arthritis. She lay out, a long form in a heavily cushioned steamer chair on the sun-baked terrace, greeting me faintly, a rather disordered, nearly old lady, her face lined with long pain and discomfort. She wrapped a loose straggly woollen cardigan round an old print dress as if she was cold; a crumpled copy of the Telegraph lay at her feet like a faithful dog.

‘Mrs Warren,’ I said. She could barely lift her hand. ‘Don’t move,’ I went on.

She humphed. ‘I’m not likely to, I’m afraid. Bring up a chair — give him a drink, Tommy — and tell me all the news from home.’

‘I’m afraid I’ve been away some time, over two months,’ I said. It seemed, in fact, like a year, and England as distant as a childhood memory. That summer I’d been trying to live again, longing for anything new.

‘Been away, have you?’ Tommy asked. ‘Travelling?’ he added hopefully, bringing me over a drink, a perfectly prepared, fizzing gin and tonic, though I’d not asked for that, with just the right amount of ice and a delicate sliver, not a chunk, of lemon, all served up in a cut-glass tumbler from a Georgian silver tray.

Tommy, very unlike his wife, was a small, sprightly man in slacks and a navy blue blazer, impeccably dressed, his hair so meticulously cut and groomed that it seemed almost a theatrical creation, something got up with glue and bootblack.

‘Yes,’ I answered. ‘I’ve just been wandering round Europe rather. Since the school term ended. Places I’d not been to before. The Rhine, Provence, Spain …’

‘At a loose end, eh?’ Tommy seemed enthusiastic about this idea.

‘Yes. I suppose so. Though perhaps it’s age, too. One wants to see the sights before —’ But I left it at that, realising I must have been nearly half their age.

‘See the sights indeed!’ Tommy said with relish.

Laura had joined us. ‘My father — I told you — he was in the Navy. Given him itchy feet. What were you? Practically an Admiral,’ she added affectionately.

‘What do you think of Mrs Thatcher?’ Mrs Warren suddenly interrupted us, bright-eyed, looking up at me. Her eyes alone seemed to have escaped the encircling pain in her face, clear, bright blue pools in the threatening landscape.

Mrs Thatcher? I don’t know. She seems to have —’

‘She’s an abrasive woman.’ Tommy came in sharply. ‘She won’t do. Simply not on.’ I was surprised at his vehemence. He seemed so quintessentially Tory himself.

‘Oh come now,’ Laura said. ‘Isn’t she going to resurrect the Navy? A new aircraft carrier?’

‘Just the opposite. It’s all too late,’ Tommy said.

‘Too late for you, Daddy.’

Daddy humphed now in his turn, before leaving us to gaze out over the bay. I saw a big brass naval telescope then, mounted on the edge of the terrace. Tommy was a typical old naval buffer, I thought, retired to warmer climes. But how wrong I was about him too, in the beginning.

‘Why didn’t you join the Portuguese Navy?’ Laura asked mischievously. ‘After all you’re a Portuguese citizen now in any case, aren’t you?’

‘I should have done,’ Tommy shouted back to us. ‘Damn good sailors.’

‘Daddy retired early,’ Laura explained.

‘I see,’ I said. Though I didn’t.

‘They took our house away,’ Laura went on. ‘The land, everything.’

‘The Navy?’ I was surprised.

‘No. The War Office — the RAF I suppose. During the war, in Gloucestershire, the village where we lived. They took the whole village over and the land all round for some secret aerodrome. They were developing something very hush-hush. The jet, wasn’t it? And they never gave any of it back. Compulsory purchase.’

‘It’s all still there?’

‘Yes. Ruined now though. The village, the church, our small manor. It’s still secret, out of bounds. We’ve never been back. And Daddy’s never even been back to England. He hates the place, the way they treated him over his house.’

The Warrens said nothing. It seemed a painful enough subject. ‘I am sorry,’ I said, getting up, awkward in the silence. Tommy was over by the far side of the terrace now, looking through the telescope at something in the bay. The light was dying fast. He couldn’t have seen much, I thought.

‘How’s the ship?’ Laura asked brightly, changing the subject.

‘Ready and willing,’ her father answered promptly, still looking down the tube.

‘A ship?’ I asked.

‘Yes. Go and look, if you can.’

I went over and Tommy offered me the lens. It was getting quite dark now. Bats were flipping about. I was doubtful if I’d see anything. So it seemed a miracle, in the great magnification, like a fairy tale coming up on a nursery wall from an old magic lantern, when the lovely blue and white ketch suddenly appeared at the end of the glass, moored to a buoy in Cascais harbour, bobbing gently in the violet light.

Laura stood behind me, putting an arm on my shoulder as I crouched down. ‘His toy, his dream,’ she said. Tommy had gone away to recharge the drinks. There were lights on along the hull, I saw, a row of portholes glittering in the blue haze.

‘That’s Jorge, first mate, deckhand, general factotum. He looks after it. Cleaning up I should think. We’ll go out on it. Tomorrow perhaps.’

I took another look at it. The long white boat, since one couldn’t see it at all with the naked eye, was certainly a dream, with its necklace of lights dancing on the water in the gathering dusk.

‘What’s it called?’

‘She’s called Clare — now,’ Laura said.

The graceful bow cut the Atlantic swell, flowing through it at a steady ten knots so that the spray jumped in the air over us, spitting in our faces as we dipped in and out of the big waves a mile out from Cascais.

Clare, in a lifejacket, was next me on the prow, her hair pasted back against the side of her head by the wind. She seemed totally absorbed by something, her eyes fixed on some point on the horizon dead ahead of her. But there was nothing there.

Then, above the wind, I heard a sort of keening noise, a low-pitched whistle almost, as if some strange bird was hovering immediately above the boat. But again there was nothing there. But, bending down, I realised it was Clare beside me who was whistling into the wind, half whistle, half hum, her face alight, an unbroken, unconscious sound of pleasure, elemental itself among the other elements.

Tommy was behind us at the big brass-tipped wheel, with Jorge, master-minding things. They were some way back, their heads bobbing about behind the sails, for it was a large enough ketch — a fifty-footer, with a Croxley marine auxiliary diesel, which Tommy, angrily abandoning his country, had sailed out from Southampton forty years before. His wife, never a sailor, wasn’t with us. But Laura was there, joining us on the bow a minute later.

‘Have you ever done this before?’ she shouted against the wind. I shook my head. A turreted castle rose up on a promontory ahead of us, a kind of Martello tower suggesting old adventure. The sea lost its sheer blue further into shore, where bands of moving aquamarine, like green oil slicks, shimmered in the great light beneath the Atlantic cliffs. None of this sort of life had been mine before.

Laura kissed me briefly then, on the lips, putting an arm round my shoulder for a moment to steady herself. Salt ran down my throat as I swallowed afterwards, breathless suddenly. Her father must have seen us, I thought. And I felt a childish guilt, as though discovered in some shared mischief with a companion behind the laurels thirty-five years before. But I’d had no juvenile companions at my home in north Wales then. All this, even the guilt, was quite new.

Laura had younger friends in Lisbon outside her parents’ circle: one or two families from the Embassy, other British expatriates, but mostly a number of Portuguese acquaintances. She got on very well with the natives. She met them sometimes for mid-morning coffee on the Chiado, the Bond Street of the city which ran up the hill behind my hotel: at the Brasileira café or the Pastelaria Marquês, the last of the city’s old baroque tearooms. I began going with her on these occasions, carrying her parcels as she did her errands about the city. I had little else to do, after all. We were slipping into marriage, I suppose, before either of us was ever aware of it.

One of her friends — a suitor, indeed — was a prominent young Portuguese general back from Angola, a Socialist officer prematurely elevated in the army coup six years before, an olive-skinned, volatile bachelor, a member of the Revolutionary Council, who strode about town eccentrically in combat boots and green battledress, followed by a monkey-faced chauffeur batman in a small broken down army car, which, against all regulations, he would park right outside the Brasileira while his master went about his business in the crowded interior.

He burst in there one morning like a knight errant, moving easily among acquaintances, before seeing us at the back where I was surrounded by parcels, for all the world the hen-pecked husband. He joined us, a small, decisive, humorous figure, the gossips in the café hanging unsuccessfully on our every word.

‘How is the President?’ Laura asked him straight away. They had met originally at a reception in the Palace for the British community and press corps given by President Eanes.

‘Fine. Excellent. He is proposing a bill shortly requiring all unmarried foreign women to take Portuguese husbands. May I present myself?’

‘No. You may not. But have a coffee though.’ They started to chat. The man didn’t take the slightest notice of me. Perhaps, with all my parcels, he thought me an Embassy clerk or servant. I was tempted to disabuse him.

Yet afterwards, when he left, I was determined not to appear possessive.

‘He’s rude. He’s pushy,’ Laura said, mildly excited. ‘But I do like him.’

‘Yes.’ But my silence then was an admission of my hurt and Laura noticed it.

‘Apart from your first wife — and the other serious girls — how many women have you had?’ she asked abruptly.

‘I never bothered to count.’

‘So many? Or so few?’

‘Why? Have you slept with him? Is that it?’

She looked at me quizzically then, distancing herself, seeming to leave me, merging into the busy anonymity of the crowded café behind her.

‘You have a thing about fidelity,’ she said at last. I didn’t reply. ‘So do I,’ she added, standing up, smiling. We had lunch afterwards in the Avenida Palace — mountain trout and vinho verde. That was the day we first made love.

Clare had started to fidget badly. Then she said in her fractured, incomplete English, ‘Why do you be with us all the time?’

I hadn’t answered at once, the question taking me by surprise, so that she looked at me now, doubtfully, out of the corner of one eye.

I’d been pushing her quietly to and fro on the cork tree swing out in the Cascais garden one afternoon, pushing her back and forth like a metronome for nearly half an hour. It was one of the few balms in Clare’s life then, this calm, endlessly repeated movement.

But now, since I’d been trying to read to her, we were sitting at the table beneath the bougainvillaea tree and Clare was twisting about, embarking on a quite different sort of restlessness, common to autistic children, Laura told me afterwards, where they become violently, inexplicably possessed.

Clare had much improved, I gathered, from the time a year before when her father had been killed in Nairobi. But she could still be a vastly difficult child, prone to deep silences or just the opposite, to bouts of frenzied, ever-increasing movement, which struck her now, as she tried to twist a screw out from the side of the table with her thumb nail, bloodying herself in the process, so that I moved to stop her. But then she started to kick the table legs, viciously, repeatedly, bruising her shins and toes.

‘Why? Why?’ she said over and over again, so that I leant across trying to take her hands, to calm her.

‘Because I like you — and your mother. That’s why I’m here,’ I said.

She seemed not to hear me and certainly wouldn’t be appeased. ‘Why? Why?’ she shouted to herself, her thumb bleeding badly now as she attacked the screw again. I got a handkerchief out. But she pushed it away. She was lost, unreachable, her eyes quite vacant, seeing nothing, but her body electric with violence. She was punishing herself, kicking and tearing her flesh, trying to dig into herself, deeper and deeper, as if looking for some ultimate hurt.

Laura came out then. I thought she would stop the child — physically stop her, take her up in her arms and end this self-destruction. But she didn’t. She let Clare go on kicking the table, let her thumb bleed, standing away from her: so that I moved towards her myself.

But Clare avoided me in a flash, running away then with great speed back to the cork tree, climbing it like a rocket, where she perched dangerously among the top branches.

‘It’s no use when she’s like that,’ Laura said calmly. ‘You have to leave her. She has to be allowed to test us. “How much do you love me?” All that.’

‘But she’ll kill herself.’

‘She won’t. Not unless you push her.’

We were at the bottom of the cork tree ourselves now, whispering, Clare above us swaying defiantly, precariously on a top branch.

‘It’s crazy — she’ll fall!’

‘It seems insane, I know. But it’s the only way. I know. You’ll see.’

Laura had brought out a first-aid box with her and she showed it to Clare now, lifting it up, flourishing it under the tree. Then she put it on the ground, leaving it there.

We went back to the table and waited. ‘Surely you can’t let her do these things?’ I asked.

‘She drove a nail right through the palm of her hand a few months ago,’ Laura said easily. ‘You have to leave her. She stops at a certain point. Oh, I thought just the same as you to begin with. These fits, they were worse then, I was terrified, mad with worry. But then I realised these children, like Clare, they have an extraordinary need to guard their separateness; not like most children at all in that way. If you force yourself on them, or use force, you’re lost: they clam up altogether then. You’ll never reach them. It’s an endless tightrope for them: care on one side, freedom on the other. They want both. And you have to give them both. By just waiting beneath.’

Them. They. Laura spoke of her child as of a stranger, another species. And it was exactly so, I thought then. I saw Clare perched up in the branches against the blue Atlantic sky, her back to us, gazing like a look-out into another world, a girl in the crow’s nest of a ship, as she had been on the ketch a few days before, blonde hair running in the wind, absorbed in some secret voyage. Yet was she going anywhere? A branch swayed to and fro beneath her as she pushed it with monotonous regularity. And there was the first sense of hurt for me then — about Clare: I felt she would never really accept me, that I was an enemy, a sane stowaway rudely discovered now aboard her mad ship.

She came down an hour later. And we saw her in the twilight, kneeling by the first-aid box, rustling among the Band-aids and ointments before expertly tending her dry wounds.

I said to Laura, ‘She asked me why I was with you, with her, all the time. That was what started all this, I think. It’s probably a bad idea, my being here. I’d better leave.’

The evening had come on very suddenly and the bats were on the air now, big bats, malign shapes swirling round against the crimson sheet of sky.

‘She wanted you on the raft in Cascais,’ Laura said.

‘Perhaps. But I don’t understand her, Laura. She’s really miles away from me.’ It all seemed too much for me then. I was no rock of ages, no child specialist, no surrogate father.

‘You’re wrong,’ Laura said. ‘You’re part of her life already. If you weren’t she wouldn’t test you like this. She’d just ignore you completely.’

‘I see,’ I said, pondering this sudden commitment.

‘And if you leave she won’t forget about you.’

‘Like Willy, you mean?’

‘A bit. She loves you — quite a bit.’

‘That’s why she hurts herself like this, is it?’

‘Partly. She’s frightened of losing you, that’s why, I think. So she punishes the thought.’

We rarely embarked on psychological theory about Clare after that, the cloudy jargon of the specialists. We had no need to. We were her specialists by then, on a permanent basis. Laura and I were married at the Lisbon Embassy when I came out there during the following October half-term. There was a small party afterwards at the Warrens’ house. The young Portuguese General attended, still in battledress. He spoke to me this time, jocularly, a hand on my shoulder, commiserating with himself: ‘Ah! Fortuna cruel! Ah! Duros Fados!’

‘What?’

‘It’s from Camões — our greatest poet. “Cruel fortune — hard fate.”’

‘Oh,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry about that. He sounds like a tragic poet.’

The little General was like a soothsayer when I think of it now. But I try to think more of the happier things when I look back. I know now, for example, what made me so change my mind about Clare, about taking some responsibility for her. It was seeing her that evening in the garden, after her fit, kneeling by the first-aid box, under the cork tree in the twilight, patching herself up with Band-aids. A strong sense of independence has always appealed to me in women.