The Valley of the Fox

Four

Apart from fear and my soaking clothes, it was cold as well by the middle of the night, so that I barely slept at all, wedged in the branches halfway up a big copper beech that had saved me a few hours before, one of its lowest limbs reaching out horizontally over the stream.

The police with their lights and tracker dogs had passed close beneath me some time before midnight and they were likely to return, I thought, when the dogs found no further scent as they went on up into the woods. I didn’t know about the lake then, or the fact that the little brook which fed it rose several miles beyond it to the north. They must have followed this stream right to its source, perhaps thinking that I’d swum across the lake in the night, for they didn’t return until just after sun-up, when I was well awake and could hear them stomping about almost directly beneath my tree.

The dogs whimpered. I thought they must have smelt or sensed me high up in the leaves above them. In the morning light the police would surely see the branch over the water, put two and two together and would be up after me in a moment.

But they were tired or I was lucky, for after a few minutes they left, the sounds dying away as the men went back down the wooded valley to the road. That was where my scent ended, just by the bridge: finding no trace of me in the forest they would think, for the time being at least, that I’d stopped a car and got a lift out of the area the previous night.

I was safe. Or was I? I couldn’t be certain. So I stayed where I was, halfway up the tree, sitting astride the stem of a big branch, my back wedged into a fork of the smooth trunk. I tried to relax and the first of those nearly silent, very early summer mornings started for me, living in a green world, in a capsule of leaves, where every smallest movement in the air about me was registered by an equally small rustling in the foliage. But this noise seemed strangely loud that first morning, almost alarming, as if some great hand were dusting the tree from outside, shaking it, searching me out.

To begin with the light that filtered through was grey and indeterminate. After ten minutes, as I let my head lie back against the trunk, the leaves above me turned gradually to a lighter shade — faint green at first. But soon they were edged with sunlight at the top, odd bright points dazzling my eyes, as the morning breeze moved them.

Gazing upwards, I wondered again if the whole business was worth it. I could hardly live in this tree for the rest of my life. I’d escaped: I’d proved something. Perhaps that was enough. If I climbed down now and went to the police I could surely explain everything in the calm light of day: my behaviour had all been an aberration, a brainstorm. They would hold me for a week or so. But the presence of the tall masked man in the cottage would inevitably come to light and I would — I paused in my thoughts here: yes, I’d pick up the threads of my life again with Clare. But what life, without Laura?

Her loss struck me then, a series of hammer-blows in the calm morning, a vast shadow over all my future that first was sad but then brought a fury to me which I felt could only be eased by revenge. Indeed, without this thought of retribution, I couldn’t think of Laura for very long at all. I know now that one of the reasons I decided to stay in the woods was that I felt that, for as long as I remained an outlaw in this manner, I could freely contemplate such violent amends. And in another way, by not returning, I could avoid facing the actual fact of her death, avoid the place, the circumstances, the whole memory. In short, if I stayed outside the real world completely, I could imagine Laura still alive. It was I who had gone absent, was missing somewhere, and so long as I remained free in these woods I could plot her rescue, a return to her, she whom I had temporarily left behind in civilisation.

Or so I persuaded myself. But perhaps there was something else, deep in my character, which made this persuasion an easy matter. At more than forty, with so little behind me other than Laura, I was tempted now, with this forced change in circumstance, to go on and change my life completely: to leave my ruined past where it was, leave the pretentious school, England, too, in effect, with all its squalor, its whining, lazy compromises, to clear out, let it all die and take on some new life. I was tempted by vast change, a leap into the blue, just as a child sees the world simply as a place of limitless opportunity, each new day nothing but a space for adventure.

For me, the mould of my existence was already broken, however I looked at it. I could only die myself, or create some quite new way of life. It was all or nothing. I could return: to prison or at best to a familiar life in the cottage that would soon become unbearable without Laura. Or I could set off in a new direction, self-reliant, master of my fate.

Yes, that last phrase, so redolent of some Victorian adventure yarn, comes easily to me, as an emblem of youth, ambition unachieved when I was young. So that what I really felt that morning was that the chance had perhaps come for me to find my roots again, find that lost way back into real life. Apart from anger, apart from the need to get Clare back, I had a purpose of my own then. Not just to escape but to create: to change everything, to risk everything, to win at last.

But when I opened Spinks’s backpack I wondered if I had sufficient or appropriate equipment for the crusade. For the first thing I came on, in an outside pocket, was a quarter-bottle of vodka that had smashed somehow during my journey in the night. The liquor had soaked into a small book that had been stuffed in with it. It was a copy of Baden-Powell’s Scouting for Boys, but an old edition, thirty years old at least, for the youths were drawn in brimmed felt hats and there was mention of doing one’s duty to a King, not a Queen.

I thought kindly of Spinks again: evidence here of the amiable rogue once more — vodka soaking through the precise plans of how to lay a fire: the saloon-bar jokes impinging on all that long-ago Empire idealism. How like Spinks not to bother with anything up to date, going off into the wilds of Snowdonia with just his own tipsy goodwill and commonsense to preserve him: that, and a quarter of Smirnoff and scouting instructions a generation out of date.

If he could survive on so little, then so could I. On the other hand, his had been a legal enterprise; mine was not, and with these fairly useless objects found to begin with, I feared that Spinks might not have much more to offer me inside his bag.

But he did. I took the stuff out carefully, draping most of it on the branches about me. Apart from the sleeping bag and the small blue gas burner, there were a variety of other outdoor survival necessities: a first-aid kit, a tin mug and plate, a billycan, an imitation Swiss Army knife, complete with assorted files, probes, blades, bottle openers and a magnifying glass; a canvas waterbag, a lightweight mountain hammock, a folding pocket saw (two rings at either end of a flexible line of minutely serrated steel), a packet of half a dozen assorted Woolworth’s fish-hooks with leaders but without any line, a small mountaineering axe, unused, with half a dozen aluminium pitons still strapped to it, together with a coil of quarter-inch nylon rope and a small pair of green Army surplus binoculars, old but functional.

The food line wasn’t so good: just half a packet of Lyons Green Label tea, one of Ritz biscuits, some bone-hard cheddar and two crumpled packs of Knorr Spring Vegetable soup. There were other personal odds and ends, some likely to be of use, but most not: an old dark green Army pullover with leather epaulettes, an unopened pack of ‘Fetherlite’ French letters, and two soiled paperbacks: Hot Dames on Cold Slabs by Hank Janson and last year’s Good Beer Guide to Great Britain. Spinks, obviously, had thought well of Baden-Powell’s maxim: ‘Be Prepared’. He had followed this injunction to the letter.

There were also two maps: a large-scale Ordnance Survey of the Snowdonia area and, much more usefully, a smaller-scale one of the north Cotswolds, from Woodstock south-west to Winchcombe, which included the school and the big estate where I now was. In another outside pocket I found three emergency distress flares, a compass and a torch. But the battery was nearly done for. There were no matches.

I checked through my own possessions then, feeling about the pockets of my grey-green cord suit. I had a box of matches, a little damp, less than half full; eighteen cigarettes, my red felt-tip pen that I’d been correcting the fourth form’s essays with, and the keys of our car. Nothing else. No money. I rarely carried my wallet or cheque book.

But there was something else, I felt it now, in my other inside pocket: it was the boy’s exercise book I’d been correcting the previous evening, folded up and stuffed in there without my remembering: his ‘Great Experience’, the rainy soccer match between Banbury and Oxford United. But it was the first and only essay in a new book — the rest a hundred blank pages, which I use now to write this.

I put Spinks’s stuff carefully back into the bag. Yes, I thought, there was enough here to make a go of it: a start at least. But then it struck me: apart from the previous night I’d never spent twenty-four hours entirely out of doors alone in my life. I’d lit picnic fires and barbecues as a child, and years later had done the same with Laura and Clare. But nothing more. And what of the elements, the damp? It was fine now, in this last week of May, but it would surely rain soon and it was still cold at night. The tea and the Ritz biscuits and the lump of cheddar would suffice as a snack. But when they were gone, what then?

I realised I was as unfitted to life alone in the open as I had been to life among most people in the ordinary world, a stranger, really, in both places. A walk in the woods, yes, I’d done that. But I’d never lived in them. I’d never been a boy scout either. The whole thing seemed ridiculous once more. My legs hurt now, too, the cuts and bruises I’d suffered climbing the dry-stone walls and my face and hands and back were scored with little scratches from the barbed-wire fence. My feet were cold; cold and damp.

I took my shoes and socks off and let them lie in a pool of sunlight out along the branch. I opened Spinks’s first-aid box. There were antiseptic ointments, bandages, a lot of Band-aids — and using them on my hands and legs, the pain easing after a while and the sun warming my toes, it struck me how much of a lucky gift all these things were, that Spinks’s backpack had been something meant. Fate was on my side, had given me a chance, at least, and I had better take it.

A police helicopter flew over the woods at about midday not far above my tree: the downthrust from its rotors blew the leaves about above me like whirlwind for a few moments. But the storm didn’t penetrate to the foliage where I was. I was still safe. The news — which I heard later on, a local bulletin from Radio Oxford, describing me in some detail and the precautions people in the area should now take — made me more resolute. I was free here. Even with tracker dogs and a helicopter they hadn’t found me. The copper beech tree had saved me. I was invisible, from beneath or above. The next thing to do was to make or find some more permanent hiding place. And I thought then: why not a tree house?

The beech-tree I was in wasn’t suitable. The leaves thinned out too much towards the top while the branches halfway up, where I was now, would never have allowed for any platform of logs or planks such as I had in mind. I’d have to find another tree. But in the meantime I strung up the lightweight hammock between two branches, ate some of the Ritz biscuits and cheese and slept afterwards for several hours. I listened to the radio again, the volume turned down, close to my ear: the local news and the ‘P.M.’ show, which talked about me, too: a wife-slayer on the run. I had gone nationwide. The police might be back, I thought, sometime in the daylight, with fresh men, fresh dogs, so I waited until well into the evening before I climbed down carefully from my perch. I was surprised the day had passed so quickly: those early days all did. It wasn’t until a few weeks had elapsed that the problem of boredom arose.

I came on the lake first, upstream, barely half a dozen yards beyond the overhanging branch I’d found. If I’d gone tramping up the brook that previous evening in the failing light I’d have fallen right into it. The equipment in Spinks’s bag would have been soaked, most of it ruined. I was lucky again.

The lake, more large pond than lake, was about 300 yards long and 70 wide, a slowly moving sheet of dark, copper-coloured, leaf-filled water, shaped like an hourglass, the heavily overgrown banks narrowing in the middle, leaving two channels on either side of an even more heavily encrusted island covered in wildly rampant rhododendrons with a huge yellow-leaved willow at the centre whose branches drooped out over it all like an umbrella. The water in these two channels moved quickly enough on one side over the fallen supports and arches of a small wooden footbridge. Elsewhere, along its margins, this lower part of the lake was choked with duckweed and flowering waterlilies vying for the light, beneath the circle of great beech trees which leant right over the water, completely surrounding the whole area. And above these lakeside trees were other copper beeches, rising straight up from the steep sides of the little valley, so that I had the impression, as I stood there that evening, of being at the bottom of a vast, dark, leafy well, with the dregs of water about me, where to get in or out one would either have to fall or climb.

Besides the waterlilies there was the long gone to seed, and sometimes exotic, evidence of other cultivated plants and bushes, sprouting wildly here and there in the choked banks, while up by the ruined footbridge I found the remains of a covered boathouse in the overhanging trees, the rotten timbers in the roof collapsed over a small inlet, with a jetty that had sunk into the duckweed leaving only a chunk of dressed stone and a rusting metal bollard above water.

The lake had probably been an artificial creation and its borders must once have been a carefully tended water garden, a pleasure-haunt many years before, where people from the great house, I imagined, must have come down for boating afternoons, with parasols, when liveried butlers had served them hamper teas on the small island afterwards. I supposed the money had gone long before, with the previous owners, to keep it up, while the American magnate had yet to bring his cash to bear on this secret Arcadia. It remained now, with this overgrowth of the years, a deep wilderness where yet one could just make out all the bones of an airy formality beneath: eighty, ninety years before the great beech trees would not have leant so overpoweringly over the water; there would have been order and reason then, clearly imposed by the many contrived effects: the willow-pattern bridge, a Gothic folly on the island perhaps, a boathouse in the same mode. Now this hidden landscape, long since freed of all such impositions, grew apace, forgetting the world, by whom it was forgotten.

Leading away from the ruined footbridge, the remains of a stepped path rose sharply up the angle of the valley, through the trees to the top of the ridge, which must have been a hundred and fifty feet above the water — though when I got to the top, the lake was quite invisible hidden somewhere below me. I had managed to move up the slope here quietly enough. But I realised that anyone coming directly down into the valley would almost certainly slip and make a fearful commotion in the process. Already I saw the place as an ideal retreat: and more than that, as my domain.

At the top of the ridge the beech forest thinned somewhat. There were great clumps of flowering blackthorn here and there, but otherwise the undergrowth was less severe. Soon there were odd clearings in the wood and then I came on an old metal boundary fence, with open parkland beyond, open in the traditional eighteenth-century manner, informally landscaped with clumps of chestnut and oak dotted here and there, a few cows, and a flat, roped-off space to one side, near the estate wall — a cricket pitch, it seemed, with a strange thatched log-built pavilion facing it.

The house itself was visible now, or at least the east-wing, hardly more than a quarter of a mile away, on a slight rise in the parkland, with elaborate, almost castellated terracing above the meadow grass, fringeing the house like a stone ruff.

From what I could make out in the fading light, it seemed a huge Victorian creation, probably high Gothic, for I could see the tall brick chimneys and spiky towers against the sunset, the variety of different roofs and roof levels, as well as the steeply sloping slates and pinnacles and gable ends that jutted wildly about the crown of the house.

I was surprised. The north Cotswolds, I knew, contained a few Georgian and other earlier masterpieces in mellow stone. But I’d never heard of any Victorian pile in the area, and certainly of nothing like this place, seemingly vast as a railway terminus: a house which, even in the bad light, clearly had a lot of mad character and a confidence to it, bristling with the busy confusion of half a dozen architectural styles.

But then, as I’ve said, it had been impossible ever to see the house, either from the roads or hills about. From the outside the whole estate was entirely enclosed by its tall belt of beech-trees and I could see these now, from the inside, forming another complete circle round the parkland, leaving the house at the centre inviolate, unknown.

I had Spinks’s Army fieldglasses with me, but the sun was low in the west behind the house and I could make few other details out except the thorny pyramids and spirals of masonry all about the top, the clusters of elaborate chimney stacks. It was just a soft charcoal silhouette on the hill, a fantasy like a Rackham drawing as the light waned behind it.

There was, I could just see, a huge conservatory jutting out from the end of the wing nearest to me, two storeys high, a graceful glass arch over the top and what looked like a walled vegetable garden to the right of this, at the back of the house, where there must have been a big yard as well, together with a lot of other outbuildings. There was no sign of life and no lights on anywhere, though it was nearly dark now.

And then, just before I moved away back down into the woods, a lot of surprising light did suddenly occur — in the big conservatory. It seemed as if a series of bright spotlights were being moved around inside as I put the binoculars on to it. Shafts of light illuminated great vague dark fronds, climbing plants, and even whole trees beneath the great crystal arch. I was too low on the ground to see anyone inside. There were just these mysterious lights, coming from beneath, playing up over the foliage, rhythmically patrolling the greenery, crystal fingers moving slowly up and down and around, as if someone was conducting some kind of horticultural theatre, or creating a mysterious ballet, a dance of white lines against the gathering dark. I watched it steadily for ten minutes or more, but could find no rhyme or reason to it, to these questing searchlights in the night.

I had Spinks’s torch with me, going down the hill into the valley, hurrying back to my tree before total dark. But its beam was feeble and I didn’t want to use it anyway. And thus I fell, missing my footing about halfway down the steep hill — falling headlong at first, then slipping madly through the undergrowth as I tried to pull myself round and get a grip on things. But it was no use. I thundered down most of the last part of the valley, cutting and bruising myself all over again.

A root or branch had caught me as well, I found, when I got to the bottom, hitting me somewhere just over the eye, a solid blow that I didn’t really feel at first but which made me gasp with pain, almost crying out, when I came to a final halt near the lake. I lay where I was, not moving. I found I couldn’t move in any case. I was practically unconscious — though I’d heard the racket I’d made coming down through the undergrowth clearly enough. And I hoped then that someone else had heard me, up at the house perhaps, that I would soon be found. For all I wanted at that moment was some sort of professional attention, a warm bed, comfort. My forehead was damp, there was blood there and the cloudless night sky above the lake moved round and round in my eyes when I looked up, with the trees forming a spinning margin around it: I was at the bottom of a dark whirlpool. Then I passed out.

When I opened my eyes again it must have been the middle of the night, an hour or more later, for the stars were clearly out now, in the circle of sky above me, quite still in their courses. I was alive. The blood had caked over my eye. No one had come. I was still free. I found I could move myself a bit; no bones seemed to be broken.

The woods about had resumed their nocturnal calm, an almost total silence, except, when you listened very carefully, after minutes on end, for odd sighs and crackles in the undergrowth that might have been the breeze. Then something definitely moved, a little way along the lake edge. Was it a water bird or some small thing fleeing from an owl on soundless wings? Was it a fox, a badger, a mole? I lay where I was for another ten minutes, wondering, letting the peace sink into me. A moon had come up, I saw then, which explained the gauze of faint white light in the air, a broad scimitar just above the trees on the other side of the water.

I stood up at last and hobbled painfully to the edge of the lake where I could see the ruined footbridge to the island in the moonlight. Next to it was the old boathouse and the half-sunken jetty. Moving out along this I found a place where I could kneel. I bent out over the water and washed the blood from my face, trying to leave the scab intact, and then, cupping my fingers, I drank great handfuls of the liquid. It was cool, cool on my face and in my throat, with nothing brackish about it.

In luck again, I thought. I might have been blinded, with a broken leg: instead, just a few more cuts and bruises, a bad graze on my head and my legs feeling as if they’d been shot out from under me once more. Yet I was certain I didn’t have the strength to get back to the beech tree at the far end of the lake, least of all pull myself up into its middle branches where my hammock was.

But then, as I leant back from the water, wondering what I might do, I saw something man-made rising up from the edge of the island in faint silhouette against the moonlight: man-made because it rose upwards, in an exact straight line, from beyond the branches of the willow, at an angle of 45 degrees. It was the edge of a roof, I thought. Was it a folly or a bower, some Gothic summer house that I’d imagined the island supported earlier in the day?

When I had come this same way earlier in the evening I had seen nothing on the island other than the rhododendrons and the willow flowering out above it like a yellow fountain. But here, certainly, was a building of some sort. I could see it more clearly now: the edge of a roof jutting out over the water.

The channel was about ten yards across at this point. The ruined footbridge wouldn’t bear my weight. But by walking out into the stream and using the old wooden piles and arches for support I found I was able to wade across onto the island without too much difficulty. The channel had silted up here and the water never came above my waist.

Pushing up through the bushes on the far side I first stumbled on some steps: a rise of half a dozen moss-covered steps. Beyond was a bramble-shrouded doorway, I saw, with a stab of Spinks’s torch, covered by a metal grille like a tall garden gate. When I touched it the rust came away in great flakes in my hand. But it opened readily enough.

Inside I found myself in a small octagonal space, with cut stone all round in the walls, well made originally, but cracked in places now, I saw by the faint torchlight, where the ivy had come rapaciously in, ivy and bramble that had crept in from the door, and ferns that had risen between the flagstones from the earth beneath. In front was a small terrace, edged by a stone balustrade looking out over the water, and the sloping roof which I’d seen from the shore above that.

It was indeed some kind of summerhouse, a little pleasure-haunt, contrived, it seemed, in rather the same eccentric Gothic manner as the house in the parkland above. And since the island was set in the middle of the lake, with few trees to cloud the sun, the place was still almost warm inside, the stones retaining the heat of the day. I took off my trousers and finding a stone bench of some sort at one side of the summerhouse I laid myself flat out on it and was soon asleep.

When I woke there was a faint smell of roses in the air, the bright morning light reflecting off the lake making queer watery patterns on the white stuccoed ceiling immediately above my head. It was a conical roof, built in a series of stuccoed fan arches, the delicate Gothic tracery partly crumbled away and the paint badly flaked, though I could see it had once been blue like a sky, with the remains of flower garlands and cornucopias and cherubs here and there in the corners. There was a faintly ecclesiastic air about this heavenly tracery above me. And when I at last got up from the stone bench I saw why: I had spent the night sleeping on the flat top of a large raised tomb.

On the other side of the chamber, I saw then, was another identical tomb, with a stone base, but with a white stucco surround on top, elaborately carved along the edges allowing for an inscription beneath in heavy Gothic lettering: ‘When the wicked man turneth away from his wickedness …’ I couldn’t see the rest of it. The biblical admonishment ran right round the corner of the stone.

I didn’t shiver, even when I saw the skull and bones at one end of the other tomb, where part of the stone casing had caved in, for it was nearly warm already in the little mausoleum, the sun well up above the lake. I stood there instead, between the bodies wondering who they were, or had been, as if I’d spent an intimate night with two strangers who’d disappeared unaccountably at daybreak, companions who had given me vital sanctuary and warmth, whose names I had to know …

I looked on top of both tombs and along the sides. But apart from the old-testament inscriptions there was no other writing. Then I saw the ivy-margined tablet set in the wall above the doorway. I brushed a few leaves aside, displaying the whole stone, woodlice and earwigs caught in the light suddenly running madly now, escaping from crevices in the deeply cut inscription. There was no religious or other preamble, it started in straight away.

The tablet had an admirable simplicity, I thought, so happily lacking in the usual verbose and grandiose pieties expected in such Victorian inscriptions — this almost Arthurian legend applied to some Midland coal-baron, as I imagined, who had bought Beechwood estate, built himself a Gothic pile in the middle of it as a sort of re-created Camelot, perhaps, and had lived here with his Jewish wife, disdaining an appropriately Christian resting place in the local churchyard, choosing instead this lesser Gothic folly where, in due time, his wife could join him, passing eternity together in the middle of their lake, which the two of them had probably created, far from the prying, gossiping eyes which would otherwise have found them in some public burying-place.

For I sensed at once a clear attack on convention here, in the inscription as in the lives of these two people. The Jewish maiden name need never have been so bluntly included, after all — nor, indeed, in those severely Christian times, could it have been an expected marriage in the first place. The words here were an affirmation of something, a confirmation, in life, of some social disregard in this man who, with his traditional industrial honours, seemed otherwise so conventional. I admired what seemed such forthright deviations.

Something had changed George Horton, with his dour Midland background: a snub to his wife, perhaps, among the county gentry where he had come to live — the fault of ‘new’ money compounded by a Jewess. Or perhaps, more simply, his wife had changed him — softened the puritan industry, his hard familial ambition, had ironed out the rough nature of his soul. So that halfway through life he had changed course and they had built themselves a water garden, a pleasure-haunt where they were indeed together again now. It was all conjecture … But I could at least, with certainty, admire their love.

Then I saw the vase of flowers. It had been placed outside on the small terrace, shielded from the wind just beneath the stone balustrade that gave over the water: a dozen fine red roses, which had been the smell, I realised now, that had wafted in on me as I woke that morning in the faint breeze. They were fresh blooms, early hothouse roses I thought, most of their petals still firmly sheathed around the bud, a sheen of moisture on the deep colour. I was not the only person to have been here recently.

I turned quickly, involuntarily, searching the empty space behind me as though some fourth person had crept in with these flowers during the night while I slept, and might still be there, somewhere on the island, who would come on me through the bramble-filled doorway at any moment. But there was nothing: only the morning sun slanting directly on the tombs now, warming them once more.