The Valley of the Fox

Seven

I raised my hands automatically, feeling more awkward than frightened, stupid in my nakedness.

‘Ah,’ she said slowly, looking up at my arms. ‘There’s not much need for that, is there? Unless you’ve got something hidden up there in all that nest of hair. A little gun, a knife?’ she added quizzically, smiling a fraction.

She spoke carefully: an American accent, East-Coast, New York State, Connecticut? New England, at least. And yet somehow it wasn’t absolutely convincing East Coast. There was a touch of somewhere else, something harsher and more natural, lurking behind the over-educated consonants, a breath of the Mid-West perhaps. There was money and there was culture in the voice, but it wasn’t certain that both came from the same place. The timbre was fine, though, a thing beyond background, only of nature: distinct, resonant. Like a small bell, the tone stayed on the air for a moment at the end of each sentence. She said nothing more then, just went on examining me carefully, with that same studied concern: a curiosity, almost a surprised welcome, as if for some rare species she had long sought and had now stumbled upon in this least expected of places.

‘Well,’ I said at last, feeling that one of us had to break the silence. ‘You’ve caught me. Clever of you. You’re the Lady of the Manor, I suppose?’ My voice, as well as this latter phrase, sounded forced, very formal, as if both came from some other man, a stranger who stood beside me. I felt I should be shaking hands with this woman, accepting a cocktail from her, perhaps, in some fashionable American drawing-room. Yet I had no clothes on.

‘Yes. I’m Alice Troy. And all this,’ she gestured round the thick circle of trees, ‘all this is my property. You’re trespassing. Where are your clothes? You’ve been swimming, I guess?’

‘Yes.’ Was it conceivable that the police hadn’t visited her, that she didn’t know who I was, a wife-killer on the run: that she thought I was just some lone eccentric camper poaching on her preserves? But that rifle? She had come prepared.

All the same, I decided to pretend for a moment. ‘Yes,’ I went on innocently, ‘I was just having a swim.’ I spoke casually, naturally. But of course I couldn’t see myself — my wild hair and half-beard, the scar on my brow, the savage I must have appeared to her.

Her eyes smiled first, then her lips, as she considered my innocent response. Like her naked back, that I’d seen a week before, her mouth was unusually long; long, well-bowed lips beneath a straight nose and above a chin that ran out very firmly from sharply cornered jawbones, ending in an equally firm point. Though her body was muscular and compact, her face was thin, finely chiselled, every bone, each line carefully angled and distinct, like an anatomical drawing. Below her neck she was an athlete; above it there was a contrary, quite unexpected refinement, a questing distinction of some sort; the face of someone who has thought about life more than they needed to, who had hounded the conventions.

‘Just having a swim!’ she said rather mockingly. ‘With that bow on the ground there. And looking like Robinson Crusoe. You’re something of a shot, aren’t you?’ she went on, looking at the recurve bow on the ground next the well. ‘You killed that German Shepherd with it, didn’t you? — the dog I saw you tipping down that hole.’

‘Yes,’ I admitted.

‘Curious,’ she said, appraising me carefully once more. ‘Curiouser and curiouser.’

‘Why?’

‘You’re the teacher, aren’t you? That boys’ school near here: the one who killed his wife ten days ago.’

‘Yes. I’m Peter Marlow. But I didn’t kill her.’

‘Of course not.’

‘No, I didn’t.’

‘They all say that, don’t they?’

‘It’s true,’ I said wearily.

‘Well, maybe it is,’ the woman replied after another long pause. ‘That’s what’s curious you see. That’s what makes it really very interesting,’ she went on with sudden enthusiasm. ‘Why you should choose to lie up in the woods here for ten days and how you managed it. You must be an educated man, after all.’ She said this with a touch of admiration or mockery in her voice, I couldn’t decide which. ‘Books and chalk,’ she went on. ‘Grades and all that. I wonder you managed to survive at all out here in the wilds.’

‘I haven’t survived so well. Not really.’

‘What have you been doing? To eat I mean. Shooting the pigeons or the duck? You must really be a fine shot —’

‘Look,’ I interrupted. ‘What does it matter? We’re not here to talk about survival or the wild life, are we?’ I started to move. ‘Why don’t you just call the police. I’m tired of standing here like an ass. I’m cold. Let me get some clothes.’ I moved again. But she raised the rifle.

‘Not so quickly, please,’ she said. She had a genuinely polite, concerned tone in her voice now.

‘Look, you think I killed my wife,’ I said. ‘Well, call the police then. You’d better not take any risks.’

‘I’m not taking any risks.’ She lifted the rifle, holding it up in one hand now, finger still on the trigger, cowboy fashion. ‘I can use this as well as you seem to be able to use that bow.’

I relaxed. ‘All right,’ I said. ‘Yes, I’m sure you can. And you can track people just as well, I’ve noticed. Without a sound. I never heard you come up behind me here. Like an Indian scout.’ I stopped, thinking then of her own strange behaviour the past week. ‘You know,’ I went on, taking the offensive now, ‘You’re an even more curious mixture than you think I am. I’ve been watching you recently. You don’t add up somehow. Oh, I’ve seen you without your knowing it, I’ve become something of a scout myself: those strange lights on all round you in the conservatory in the middle of the night. And bringing that bunch of roses out to the tombs on the island. And those war-whoops you let out the other day, when you came down to swim here, that afternoon when it was hot, when the midges were about. I thought you were a Red Indian, I really did: so bronzed, that long brown back, all that dark hair.’ I looked at her now, straight in the eye, then up and down, moving over her body, appraising her minutely as she had me, undressing her with my eyes, taking visual revenge on her as she stood in the pool of sunlight by the corner of the old pumping-shed.

Her face changed, a whole new expression, forceful, amused. She smiled at me intently, just as she had that afternoon coming back from the lake: a huge smile, almost too radiant, so that I wondered again if there was, after all, a touch of madness in her.

‘So you saw all that did you?’ she asked, a hint of excitement in her voice.

‘Yes. And heard it, too: those war-whoops. I liked that. In fact,’ I went on, filled with sudden enthusiasm myself now, ‘The way you behaved … it made me feel … I was going to ask you to help me.’

‘You were? About what?’ she said with interest.

‘About my daughter, my getting out of here. I’m not that good at living rough, I’ve found.’

‘Funny. It’s the opposite with me. I’m not that good at being civilised,’ she said. ‘Perhaps we’re in luck: we could change places maybe.’

‘No, I meant — I thought if I explained things you might understand how I didn’t kill my wife. It was the people I once worked for. I used to be … with British Intelligence.’

She nodded her head as I spoke, too readily, as though agreeing wordlessly with a child’s preposterous story, as I told her a few brief details of my recent history, my present predicament. But I stopped quite soon.

‘Why should you believe it?’ I said. ‘It sounds nonsense enough just in the telling.’

‘Maybe I do believe it. You’d hardly have spent ten days lying up in the woods here if it wasn’t true, would you?’

‘Why not?’

‘A real wifeslayer,’ she said with some relish. ‘Well, you’d have kept on running or given yourself up at once. They nearly always do.’

‘Are you a detective?’

‘Only of myself. That’s what I’d have done. One or the other. I wouldn’t have hung about if — ’

‘If you’d killed your husband?’ I said to her pointedly. ‘I saw you both the other night. I was watching when you were in the conservatory together, very late. You were eating a chicken leg. I saw the way he looked at you.’

She didn’t say anything for a moment. ‘Was yours a good marriage?’ she asked finally.

‘Yes. Very.’

She pondered this. Then she said suddenly. ‘I’ll listen to you then. You’d better tell me all about it, properly. Though all the same …’ She thought about something, undecided. Then out of the blue she threw the old Winchester across at me, so that it came at me very quickly out of the air, slap into my hand. I only just caught it.

‘What?’ I said. ‘What’s this for?’ I held the rifle, completely at a loss.

‘Just to see,’ she said. ‘Well? Go on!’

‘To see what?’

‘If you’re really being honest.’

‘How?’

‘Well, you’d shoot me now, if you weren’t telling me the truth, wouldn’t you? Or at least, you’d run away. No?’

I stood there, doing nothing.

‘You see? You’re telling the truth,’ she said with satisfaction. I handed the rifle back to her.

‘Yes, but what if I hadn’t been?’

‘I’d be dead. Or you’d be gone. That’s all.’

‘But why take the risk?’

‘My! Why do you think? I had to know now, not later. If I’m going to help, I had to know at once, don’t you see, if you were lying? Well, that was the best way. The quickest. I hate wasting time, if I can help it. There’s so much to do.’

She paused in her staccato rush of words, looking round her at the empty lake, the empty woods, as though she was in the middle of Bond Street, surrounded by all sorts of marvellous choices and conflicting temptations. Something nervous had overcome her in the last minutes as she spoke; impatience had replaced the calm to such an extent it seemed as if a whole different person had crept into her skin without her knowing it, a frustrated, vehement spirit.

She looked at me much less clinically now, with a candid restlessness, looking just at my eyes, enquiringly, as though we were old friends, school friends perhaps: children suddenly, contemplating mischief, both now trespassing in someone else’s woods.

‘I say,’ she started up again, ‘before you come up to the house, why don’t you finish your swim? It’s hot already. It’s going to be another scorcher.’

Her language, I noticed, was sometimes curiously archaic, Edwardian almost. ‘I say, it’s going to be a scorcher.’ The accent remained American but some of these phrases were from an England of long ago, again as if some completely different character, a different nationality indeed, had come to possess her.

‘Well,’ she said. ‘What about swimming?’

‘That dog,’ I said, pointing down the well. ‘The man, the policeman who owned it, he’ll be coming back this way most likely, to look for it. It’s hardly worth the risk.’

‘He won’t be back. I met him before I got round to you here. He was trespassing too. I moved him off,’ she added proudly, a childish rashness in her voice, as though Ross had been no more than a snotty schoolboy whose unwelcome attentions she had repulsed.

‘How did you know I was here? It couldn’t have been a surprise: you had that rifle with you.’

‘I knew someone was here. The police were all up at the Manor ten days ago, warned us. Then we heard they thought you’d got clean away. But I wasn’t so sure of that. Someone had been out on the island.’

‘But I didn’t touch a thing out there —’

‘No. But I found an old Band-aid on the floor.’

‘You’ve been back there? I never saw you go.’ I was surprised.

‘I can move about these woods as well as you can.’

‘Apparently.’

‘I live here. This is all mine,’ she added, again with that sharp proprietorial air. But again it wasn’t so much a tone of serious adult possessiveness as that of a child holding onto a doll in the face of a rival. And I thought once more that perhaps she was touched, if not mad. But touched by what? I couldn’t say. All these woods, this estate, the house itself — perhaps they did actually belong to her. There was certainly money in her voice. She need not have lied or exaggerated.

And yet … She wasn’t a child, clearly: she must have been in her late thirties. But she had the insistence of a ten-year-old, that was it: of someone craving recognition, fair play in some nursery cause that had been unjustly denied her.

I’d moved across from the dank shade by the well into a patch of sunlight now by the corner of the shed. Yet I was still cold. I shivered again. And I thought of the other woman, the big woman in the white housecoat or nurse’s uniform, who I had seen spying here, hidden in a bush, down by the lake, a week before.

‘I don’t think I’ll bother swimming,’ I said. ‘I’d prefer some clothes.’

‘Yes, where are your clothes?’ she asked casually.

I was just about to tell her where they were — back up in my tree-house in the oak. But I stopped myself at the last moment. It might have been a trick of hers to discover my hideout. She saw and understood my hesitation.

‘Of course, you’re still hiding out somewhere here, aren’t you? Why should you trust me?’

I’d picked up the bow and the two arrows and was close to her now, following her slowly, walking behind her as we left the undergrowth and came down towards the lake. But even though she was in front of me I was nervous, wondering if she might be leading me into some trap.

‘That rifle,’ I asked her. ‘You said it was loaded. Is it really?’

She turned quickly. ‘Why should I lie? I don’t lie,’ she added emphatically, with anger almost. Then she pumped the mechanism violently, holding back the firing pin, so that a stream of little bronze-coloured bullets dropped all over the woodland floor. ‘You may have to lie. But I don’t.’ She seemed genuinely angry, hurt.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said, bending down to retrieve the bullets. There were so many questions I wanted to ask this woman that I didn’t know where to start. Not having spoken to anyone for ten days I realised that I was as starved for words now as I’d been for food before, that I was as desperate for communication as she appeared to be. And yet I still didn’t trust her somehow. Was there a trap?

But then, I thought, if there was, what had I to lose? If she didn’t help me, I had no future hidden alone in this valley in any case, and the worst she could do then would be to hand me over to the police.

It was warm now out in the full morning sun by the edge of the lake: the start of another real scorcher, just as she had said.

‘All right,’ I suddenly decided, not caring now who might be watching us. ‘I’ll finish my swim. Why not?’

I was halfway out across the water, enjoying the wider, open spaces of this northern end of the lake for the first time, when I looked back to the shoreline for a moment. She had got undressed herself now and was standing on the edge, naked again. Then she dived in and swam towards me with just the same punishing vigour that I remembered from her aquatic antics a week before, doing a racing crawl, arms flying, her head half-beneath the water like a hidden prow butting the waves ahead of her.

She dived down again then, into the coppery depths, swimming completely under water now, passing close to me, several feet beneath the surface like a great fish, before she emerged ahead of me suddenly, exultantly, as she had a week before, like a missile from a submarine, exploding vertically, her body rising right up into the air almost as far as her knees. She might have been showing off, I thought.

‘You’re something of an athlete,’ I shouted over to her.

‘Once,’ she called back to me. ‘Once I was!’

Her eyes gleamed with excitement, reflecting the stark sunshine out in the middle of the lake. And the water falling down her cheeks, glistening on her dark skin, made her look much younger, fresher, almost adolescent. And I was reminded then of something by this face: an old photograph perhaps, of a face seen somewhere before, at least. But I couldn’t place the memory. It might just have been an advertisement from an old New Yorker: some chic woman in that magazine promoting a classic cotton summer dress or a select Park Avenue hotel.

‘I swim — a lot — all my life,’ she went on. ‘I love it.’ She was still gasping for breath. ‘But — the sea — mostly. The Atlantic,’ she shouted across to me. ‘I like this fresh water better — when it’s warm enough. Much more, really. You sort of swim in it somehow. It’s so much more watery. And the salt isn’t there. Your eyes don’t hurt. Do they?’

She looked at me enquiringly, intently again, as if her last question, far from being conversational, had some great importance for her and she expected some equally considered reply. We both of us trod water now, a few yards apart, the sun a great torch almost directly above us, dazzling the lake, turning all the copper shades to blue.

‘No. There’s no salt,’ I said. ‘And the sharks won’t get you.’

‘Did you catch fish here? Is that how you survived?’

‘Yes. A perch, I think.’

‘You came prepared, with a rod, hooks?’

‘No. Just with some luck: a man at the school, the sports master, he left a lot of camping stuff behind, in a backpack. I took it.’ I didn’t tell her about the sandwiches and cream cakes in the cricket pavilion.

‘You’re used to living outdoor then, living rough? With bows and arrows.’

‘Just the opposite. I’m a great stay-at-home. A roof and four walls, I love that.’ And saying this I was suddenly reminded that I had no home now, that I was on the run, with my wife dead and a child that I loved gone away. Then, in the bright light, the water pliant as blue mercury, with a woman splashing happily a few yards away from me, I remembered the horrors of the last ten days; I didn’t belong here among these easy pleasures. I was from a world of disaster and loss.

I felt giddy, even faint. The sudden fun of this meeting, the surprise of swimming together, this no longer meant anything, and the sadness must have shown on my face, for she was concerned now, in her eyes, in her voice.

‘Are you cold?’ she asked.

‘No. Just — as you said yourself: I suddenly felt I’ve got so much to do.’

‘Come home and tell me about it, then. Why not?’ She swam a little closer, ever the concerned enquirer.

‘I’ll have to get my clothes,’ I said.

‘There’s plenty up at the house. You can use them. Arthur left a lot.’

‘Arthur?’

‘My husband. Or he was.’

‘The man I saw going off the other day? In a big Mercedes?’

‘Yes. He’s gone back to New York. The divorce should be through by the end of the summer.’

‘But I can’t just walk up there with nothing on.’

‘Why not?’

‘What about those two gardeners I’ve seen? And you’ve probably got friends up there. Or a cook, servants.’

‘I live alone. There’s a housekeeper, yes. Mrs Pringle. And her husband Tom, Arthur’s driver. They live in one of the gate lodges. But she’s out for the day. Gone to Stow. She has a sister there. And Tom is still up in London, since he took Arthur to the airport: something to do with the car. And the gardeners are thinning the trees right over the far side of the park. There’s no one there right now.’

We’d swum back to the shore. Alice had climbed out and was dressing on the bank. ‘I know,’ she said. ‘There’s a towel I keep in the little boat over there. You can use that. I’ll get it for you.’ She moved away.

‘Why do you bother?’ I shouted after her, exasperated, suddenly unsure of everything. ‘Why do you make it all so easy?’ She returned with the towel, throwing it at me as I came out of the water.

‘You expect people to be nasty to you, do you?’

‘Yes. Recently.’

‘I think you’re honest. I told you. But even if I didn’t … Well, I could hardly leave you to spend the rest of the summer stuck out in these woods, could I?’

‘You mean, you’re going to phone the police in any case. Is that it? Do me a favour, before I know it —’

‘If you want me to. But I’d prefer not to. I’d really prefer —’ She stopped.

‘What?’ I was even more abrupt, angry.

‘It’s childish,’ she said finally.

‘I’m sure it isn’t,’ I said, thinking that an open admission of this quality from such an unconsciously childish person would surely offer something vital.

She said, ‘I’ve often wanted to disappear myself and live away in the woods. Oh, for some real reason, like you, not just for fun.’

‘I’ve touched the romantic in you?’ I asked flippantly.

‘Yes, you have,’ she said, with an openness that surprised me even in her. ‘That’s why I bought all this — the house, the park, all the trees. “The Romantic in me.” I’ve had the money to pander to that instinct,’ she added rather bitterly. ‘But Arthur, of course, he finally thought I was just playing games. “Arrested development,” he said.’

‘It was his money, was it?’

She humphed then, the first trace of the cynical that I had noticed in her. ‘Oh no,’ she said. ‘It was all my money: Troy Shipping. Troy Meat Packaging and Refrigeration. Troy Hotels. Troy Leisure Incorporated. Troy Chemicals. Troy Everything. I’m the daughter.’

And now I remembered her: a face, a photograph, an article I’d seen a year or so before in the leisure section of Time magazine, or was it the Sunday Times? Alice Troy, of course, with her chiselled, Red Indian features, her fortune — rich beyond the dreams of avarice — her good taste, her interest in interior decor and pre-Raphaelite art: Alice Troy who had come to live in England, buying some half-ruined Victorian Gothic folly in the Cotswolds, and doing it up: a rich Manhattan socialite I’d thought then, a world away from me, from my simple, rather penurious cottage life with Laura: a woman I would never know — who yet stood in front of me now.

‘Of course,’ I said. ‘I should have realised. I read something about you, a year or so ago: what good taste you had, your Victorian paintings. And an interest in courtly etiquette — what was it? Yes: the Arthurian legends: Glastonbury, Camelot and the Knights of the Round Table. You were going to finance another archaeological dig, weren’t you? In the Vale of the White Horse, wasn’t it? Or was it the Red Bull, looking for the real Camelot?’

‘That was another me, another person,’ Alice interrupted sharply. She spoke with great finality and confidence — as if such various and totally assumed personalities had been as freely available to her as her family’s money had obviously been, as though a profligacy in both had not yet begun to satisfy her.

We walked up a laurel-bordered path, which shut out most of the sun, towards the back of the house. It was gloomy here even at midday, the thick green branches arching, linking completely overhead.

‘A typical Victorian idea,’ Alice remarked as she walked easily ahead, pointing upwards at the greenery. ‘This laurel-covered way was so that the household wouldn’t have to see the tradesmen or the servants coming and going. It leads to the back sculleries and kitchens. I left it as it was. Some Victorian houses actually had stone tunnels underground for the lower orders to come and go by. This was a compromise, a refinement on the part of the Hortons who built the place, because they were great horticulturalists, too, planting things everywhere — laurels, trees, shrubs, bog gardens.’

‘Yes. And burying themselves out on that island. They seem to have been eccentric generally.’

‘Eccentric? Hardly. Little family mausoleums somewhere on the estate? It wasn’t uncommon then, especially after the Queen had Frogmore built for Albert. It was quite the fashion.’

She pushed the latch down on an old, heavily studded, red door that led into the back of the house, and my bare feet were suddenly chilled on the big flagstones that led away up a dark passage, with similarly heavy, red-painted doors leading off to either side. A big, black old-fashioned woman’s bicycle, with cord skirt-guards forming a fan over the back wheel, stood propped against one wall. A patent gas cycle lamp of the same Edwardian period, with a bulbous magnifying lens, rested on the handlebar bracket. The whole thing looked in exceptionally good order. Yet it was no museum-piece. It had been used recently. There was mud on the front tyre, which had splashed up onto the fresh, gleaming black paintwork.

‘We found several of these in one of the old coachhouses,’ Alice said casually, taking the bike up. ‘I had them put in order.’

She got onto the machine suddenly and rode away up the long stone passage on it, before trying to turn back by some steps at the far end. She nearly succeeded, losing her balance only at the last moment. ‘Sometimes I can get right round and back again in one,’ she said joyously, the child working in her again.

As she wheeled the bike back towards me I noticed that it left an intermittent trail of white tyre-marks on the flagstones. Then I saw that each of the half-dozen steps leading up at the end of the passage had a bright rim of whitewash along their edges, and that the front bicycle wheel, pushing against the lowest step as she’d tried to turn, had then repeated the whitewash in a series of broken lines back down the passageway.

‘It’s to make sure they cleaned the steps every day,’ she explained, when I asked her about the fresh paintwork. ‘They painted them first thing every morning, so that all the dirt would show up quite clearly at the end of the day. Though of course the official reason was that it made the steps stand out more clearly at night, in the lamplight.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘But why do you still have them painted? There’s plenty of light here now, isn’t there?’ I looked upwards then, along the roof of the passageway. There were no light fittings anywhere and no switches on the walls.

‘No,’ she said, ‘All this part of the house on the ground floor, I’ve made it over, exactly, I think, as it was. Just with oil lamps. Here, I’ll show you.’ She opened one of the heavy red doors leading off the passage. ‘This is the lamp room.’

And so it was, as I could just see now in the faint light. There was a sudden sharp breath of paraffin oil, and on the dim shelves inside I saw a considerable collection of old Victorian oil lamps, of every shape and sort. Some were merely serviceable, kitchen lamps, with pewter-coloured metal oil reservoirs and sensible white globes. Others were much more elaborate, cut-and-coloured glass affairs: tulip-shaped red shades perched on top of fretted brasswork; or heavy brocade cloth pierced through by delicate clear-glass chimneys. Some were small and easily held, the sort to light you to bed with. But a few were very large indeed, three and four feet high, formidably decorated Gothic illuminations, made to stand on pedestals, lighthouses for a baronial hall.

‘But you don’t use any of these now,’ I said.

‘Oh yes, some of them. Why not?’ Alice looked at me in surprise. ‘We have electricity, of course. But this sort of light, lamplight, it’s far nicer, softer. Isn’t it?’

My feet were getting cold on the dark flagstones of the lamp room. I shivered now, with just a towel round my waist.

‘Come on up to the kitchen and get warm,’ she said.

She closed the door behind me and we walked up the steps at the end of the passage.

By now I almost expected it, I think, the big room we entered next, with its half-dozen arched clerestory windows along either side, high up; and the white scoured wood of the ancient cloth dryers, anchored far up by ropes to the ceiling; the long double lines of heavy cast-iron pots and pans on the shelves above the immense, black-leaded kitchen range which ran along most of one wall, with the legend ‘Waste Not, Want Not’ picked out in Gothic-lettered tiles above it. A coal-fired range, I assumed, with projecting hobs and brass hot-water taps, hummed softly, warming the whole room.

Yes, I had half-expected this Victorian kitchen, with its vast scrubbed pinewood table down the centre; an oak dresser eight or nine feet tall, filled with heavy old kitchen crockery at one end; a huge flour-barrel with a wooden scoop in a corner; the high-backed chair with its patchwork quilted cushion by the grate where Cook might have relaxed after a hard day’s work; a kitchen complete in every Victorian detail as far as I could see, right down to the heavy cast-iron meat mincers on the shelves and the rectangular wooden kitchen clock, each corner cross-hatched in the Gothic manner. There was, I noticed, some modern equipment: a big refrigerator, an expensive Moulimix, a long line of contemporary glass spice jars, an electric toaster, a waffle grill. But these were just incidental scratches on this Victorian masterwork.

‘Warm yourself by the range.’ Alice seemed terribly out of place in the old kitchen, in her smart blue cotton jeans and open shirt, like a guide in a museum.

‘Arrested development’: I remembered the phrase she’d told me her husband had used of her. And I thought now how he might quite easily have left her, at first impatient and finally contemptuous of her decorative Victorian obsessions: this apparent need she had to translate each of her fantasies into exact fact, and the fortune she did this with. It was enough to bemuse, and finally annoy any spouse.

Yet I didn’t want to leave this woman, who seemed just about to help me, though I was wary of her again now, standing in this perfectly restored kitchen, looking at her. For it was obvious that she saw nothing unusual at all in so meticulously recreating the past in this manner — old Edwardian bicycle lamps, whole Victorian lamp rooms and kitchens — and using these things, quite casually, it seemed, as if time had not moved forward at all in the intervening years.

She seemed to be living in the past of eighty, a hundred years before, and yet she seemed quite unaware of any contradiction: a sort of Queen Canute, I thought, defying time, living alone in this vast house, moving backwards into the years, not forwards. There was something eerie about it all. And yet there was nothing the least sinister about Alice herself: she was no Miss Havisham. Indeed she looked as fresh and contemporary just then as a woman in a telly commercial for some space-age kitchen. I couldn’t follow it.

‘Come upstairs. Get shaved, washed if you like. There’s all Arthur’s stuff. He had rooms to himself.’

Beyond the kitchen was another brighter, cream-painted passage leading into the body of the house, with doors, open this time, leading off into various smaller service rooms on either side. There was a butler’s pantry, with row upon row of perfectly carpentered silver drawers beneath a green-baize worktop; there were wine coolers, a partly filled bottle rack with the necks of some old vintages up from the cellars poking out; there was an old brass cork-puller screwed to a table-top, such as pubs had on their counters long ago. Further on was a footman’s room, with two braided uniforms on a pair of tailor’s dummies, white waistcoasts, navy-blue cutaway jackets with tails and gold buttons, knee-breeches and white stockings hanging beneath them.

At the end of this corridor, to the right, giving out through a hatch into an invisible dining-room, was a serving pantry, with long silver-gilt plate warmers, methylated-spirit chafing dishes and two huge carving trolleys with great half-globes of brilliantly polished silver closed over the tops. On shelves behind, someone’s family dining plate was stored — heavy crested dishes with a green pattern, rimmed in gold, in every shape and size, for the most varied foods, on the most formal occasions.

Immediately in front now was a sombrely panelled Gothic Baronial Hall, which ran for a hundred feet or more at right-angles to the passage we had just travelled along: a dozen tall, indented windows, hung on either side with great brown plush curtains, gave out onto the front of the house, with the parkland and cricket pitch, brightly green, just visible beyond.

In the middle of this vast space, immediately opposite, was an inner hall door, two wooden half-arches, glass-paned, so that one could see out into a large porch beyond, with formal columns and steps leading down to the gravelled drive beneath. Between each of the front windows, in a long line, were Corinthian pedestals, and on each of these was a white marble bust: Victorian worthies, all of them, to judge by their beards and mutton-chop whiskers, but here masquerading as Roman noblemen, each with a creamy stone toga thrown casually over one shoulder.

The floor was polished wood throughout the long hall, except at one end, where there was a thick, rather grim Aubusson carpet, and on it a vast horsehair sofa together with a collection of equally large high-backed brocade armchairs, all of them camped like an invading army round a fireplace as big as a tunnel-opening. Around and above the grate here, to a height of ten feet or so, a most elaborate stuccoed mantel frieze had been set in the wall. It told a story of some kind, I could see: there were figures active in various pursuits, carefully moulded in the plasterwork.

Standing in the middle of the huge hall, I turned about and then looked upwards. On the long high wall behind me, beneath a row of stag’s heads, interspersed with shining swords and breastplates, to either side of the last flight of a great oak staircase, were the principal pictures in the house, I thought, eight or nine of them, in recesses, large canvases, all from the pre-Raphaelite school. I looked at them more carefully. One of them was the romantic figure of a young knight, in dark medieval armour, kneeling at the feet of some quite ethereal woman with long, golden tresses, holding a haloed chalice: Sir Galahad or Sir Launcelot, I thought, reaching for the Holy Grail. A second picture was of a shepherd in a smock with a wispy but minutely rendered red beard, on a hillside filled with highly coloured, almost photographically real wild flowers, walking towards another kneeling woman in the foreground. She had just laid out some bread and cheese for him on a red check handkerchief. The food was painted in such detail it brought my own hunger back as I gazed at it.

‘That’s a Ford Brown,’ Alice said. ‘It’s called “Noon”.’

‘The food’s real enough. But were wild flowers ever as colourful as that, in England?’

‘Of course. Why not? Before all the pesticides, before they ploughed everything up and tore the hedges out. And do you see?’ she went on, with sudden sparkling enthusiasm, ‘Look! Down here in this corner: he’s painted in a Ghost Orchid, right behind where the woman is kneeling. Look! She’s almost sitting on it, as if she hadn’t seen it. It’s the rarest of all the wild orchids in England. It’s only been sighted fifty times or so in a hundred years! And only by women, for some reason. So he put it in there. As a bit of spite, I think.’

She was smiling radiantly once more as I turned to her. ‘I see,’ I said. ‘You know about flowers, English wild flowers, do you? Past, present?’

‘Yes,’ she said, surprised at my surprise. ‘I’ve always known. But then I’ve had a thing about England.’

Above us, on the first-floor level, heavy banisters ran right round three sides of the hall, forming a gallery. And above that, very high up, was a dark hammer-beam roof, the beams picked out in faded circles and diamonds of colour, like old Red-Indian totem poles. To the left, at the opposite end of the hall from the great fireplace, was an intricately carved wooden screen, completely dividing the space, with a Gothic entrance arch in the middle, that led to a library beyond. And further on were stone arches in an identical style, but with plateglass screens set between them, and a glass door that led into the tall conservatory beyond where I could just see a green jungle of shrubs, small trees and hanging plants dangling in the bright sunshine coming through the glass.

The hall was warm, almost breathless, filled with a dry smell of old wax polish and the remains of great log fires burnt here long ago. It was calm, dark, heavy. Yet for all its impeccable tradition, there was something antiseptic about it. The space here had been filled once, or waited for fulfilment. But meantime, in the present, there was no life in it. With a few tactful signs and velvet ropes it could have been turned into an art gallery or museum straight away.

‘You don’t seem to do much here,’ I said, ‘do you? It’s as big as a football pitch. Or a tennis court.’ And then, thinking of such games, of youth, the question suddenly struck me, and I wondered why I hadn’t asked her before.

‘With all this space,’ I said. ‘Do you have children? It’s the sort of place, ideal …’

‘Yes, a son. He’s nineteen. Touring Europe now. In Italy, I think. But that was an earlier marriage.’

‘He’s not interested, in all this?’ I looked about me and then out the windows, thinking of the great parkland, the home farm beyond.

‘Not very,’ she said, turning away, moving over to the fireplace now, looking up at the great plaster frieze above her. She touched one of the little figures. I joined her.

‘It’s a moral story. Do you see?’ she said, her voice regaining an interest which it had not had in speaking of her son. ‘It’s called “Art and Industry”. Full of good works.’

I could see now how the frieze was divided into a series of intricately linked rectangular and diamond frames, with inset stucco figures: a group of men scythed corn in one; barrels rolled from a warehouse in another towards where a fully-rigged clipper lay at unlikely anchor in a third; in a fourth a half-draped woman, ample as a pastrycook, cradled a lyre. It was all executed in the most literal manner and the conjunctions were absurd. But as a piece of madly idealised Victoriana it was superb.

‘It was specially commissioned for the Great Exhibition in 1851,’ Alice said, admiring it with loving surprise, as though seeing it for the first time. ‘We bought it from another house. But it suits. Don’t you think?’ Again she made the enquiry as if something vital hung on my response.

‘Yes,’ I answered. ‘It’s … splendid. A bit overpowering perhaps, if you were just sitting here trying to read the paper.’

‘Of course. But this isn’t the library. Of course it’s showy, pompous, self-righteous. But it’s practically the ultimate in all that, isn’t it?’

‘Yes.’ I had to agree with her. It was.

‘And do you see this man down here?’ She touched a little bowed figure down to one side of the frieze. ‘He’s dressed as a footman, or a waiter, I can never be sure which.’ She fondled the plaster man lovingly. ‘Well, he’s a bell pull. If you pull him —’ she pulled him — ‘he rings a bell!’ I heard a bell go off somewhere faintly in the back regions. She laughed then, another joyous laugh. And I thought how much more at ease she was among these purchased, inanimate objects, these figures in plaster relief or pre-Raphaelite paint, than she had been in the matter of her own nameless son, flesh and blood that really belonged to her.

I pulled the little man myself then and heard him tinkle away in the distance once more. ‘The whole place is wired up, I suppose,’ I said. ‘With all these … valuables. Alarms, I mean?’

‘Yes. What had you in mind?’ She smiled. ‘I think you’d need a truck to take anything out of here.’

‘It rings in the local police station, does it?’

‘It can do. If it’s turned on that way.’ There was a moment’s uneasiness between us. But Alice didn’t let it last.

‘Anyway,’ she said brightly, ‘You’ll have time enough to see the whole place. Why don’t you come upstairs?’

I’d wandered away from her as she spoke and gone over to the great hall door. Idly I turned the big plaited metal ring that formed one of the two handles. But it wouldn’t turn. It didn’t move. I realised the great doors were locked.

‘Of course,’ she said, seeing my attempts, ‘I keep it shut. As you said, with all these valuables here.’ She stood in the half gloom on the other side of the great hall. Was she staring at me? She might have been. In any case, hands on her hips, there was something impatient in her stance.

‘Well?’ she said, seeing me hesitate. ‘I’ll show you to your …’ she hesitated herself then, ‘your quarters!’ She smiled, making light of a description that might otherwise have sounded ominous. And I wished then that I’d never met this woman, never come into this great closed house of hers; that I was back safely hidden among the leaves of my tree-house. But instead of my oak tree, I climbed the great oak staircase behind her.

Upstairs, in Arthur’s suite of rooms, and what I glimpsed of her own room through an open door across the corridor, the fixtures and fittings were rather different. Indeed they could not have been more opposed to the meticulous Victoriana of the ground floor. Alice’s large bedroom, looking inside briefly as she pointed it out to me, was sparsely white; light and airy, with cushions on the floor and a very few bits of delicately modern furniture: a low bamboo, glass-topped table, and a dressing-table even lower, so low down by the big French windows looking over the formal gardens that a person, I thought, would have almost to kneel down to see themselves in the glass.

Arthur’s rooms were even more contemporary, but in a much heavier mode, which included unbearable chrome-plated easy chairs, mirror-topped table, a futuristic bureau and a chest of drawers in some highly polished, deep-veined hardwood, edged in brass, with counter-sunk brass handles, an old portable Indian Army officer’s travelling chest gone very wrong.

I was surprised. ‘You lost heart with the Victorian, I see,’ I said, looking about me. ‘When it came to the essential creature comforts?’

‘In a house this size,’ she said, ‘you’ve got the space to make a lot of little theatres, haven’t you? Different rooms. Different settings, whole new backdrops, that you can walk into. And out of. A variety. Lots of new parts,’ she added with excitement, like an actress reflecting on some unexpected recent successes, where she had broken out of a previous typecasting with a vengeance.

‘And the attics?’ I said. ‘Are they belle-époque — or Louis Quinze?’

‘A lot of the rooms up here are a little different,’ she admitted. ‘Only the ground floor is all in the original Victorian period. Change,’ she added with the sudden excited stridency of a dancing mistress, ‘Change! Variety! Why not? You didn’t think the whole house was a sort of Victorian mausoleum, did you?’

‘No,’ I said, lying. For I had expected exactly that. It was obvious that she saw this house, this whole estate as some kind of personal theatre, woods and rooms made available, made over, each in a different fashion, in a manner that would enhance or fulfil her in some way. And I didn’t mention this thought to her either.

The bed in Arthur’s room was slightly raised on a dais, a huge affair, covered in a snowy white counterpane: it was like a remote sacrificial tomb or an Emperor’s sarcophagus. I knew I would never sleep in it. A dressing-room led off to one side filled with hanging cupboards and beyond that a large bathroom, with showy gold and marble fittings. Two unopened boxes of Roger & Gallet soap, one of carnation, and the other cologne, lay to either side of the twin washbasins.

‘Two basins?’ I asked. ‘“His” and “Hers”?’

‘That was the idea. To begin with.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘It was the second time round for both of us.’

‘Yes. It was the same with us. I expect we shouldn’t have hoped for so much.’

I looked up then and saw myself properly for the first time in the big triple mirror. My beard, even in ten days, was no more than a half-hearted, unsuitable thing. The scar above my eye had healed well enough. But the half-beard and the red wound together gave me an ugly, even a frightening, piratical air. And I noticed, too, how scratched and torn my skin was, particularly behind my shoulders and down my back, red welts, as if, a martyr to something, I had been scourged recently. I wondered what Alice would have thought of me had she met me in any ordinary circumstances, dressed and shaved, the dull pedagogue smelling of chalk. She would never have noticed me. But, obviously, in the guise she had found me — naked, hirsute, scarred — I must have seemed an ideal player for her repertory company. I would be costumed soon. But what was my role to be?

Back in Arthur’s dressing-room Alice opened out half a dozen drawers in the deep-veined mahogany wall cupboard. There were formal and leisure shirts, from Turnbull and Asser, and Hawes and Curtis, in every shade and material; silk, sea-island cotton and winter wool, sky blue, red pin-stripe, casual olive. There were classic and tropical suits, from Benson, Perry and Whitley in Savile Row, tweed sports jackets from Dublin and Edinburgh, together with tail suits, formal grey morning wear and smoking jackets with scarlet cummerbunds, all meticulously, expectantly tucked into the big press. There were casual Bally shoes, more casual multi-coloured sneakers and traditional bespoke brogues from Ducker and Son of Oxford; silk ties by Gucci and silk socks from someone else — and sporting wear, too, I saw; jogging suits, tennis clothes, shorts, swimming trunks, patent white cellular cotton shirts, and even cricket flannels.

‘Does he play cricket?’ I asked.

‘He’s tried. Out in the Park. It’s the old Beechwood estate team. I’ll give him his due: he tried as well.’

The dressing-room was an emporium of very expensive male attire, all of it tasteful, to certain tastes, but not to mine. And I prayed that none of the clothes would fit me, that here would be an excuse, a first reason to make it back to the woods. But Alice flicked one of the sea-island cotton shirts out of its neatly ironed shape, and held it up against me. The chest width and length, the arms exactly matched my own. And the shoes, I’d noticed before without admitting it, were exactly the same size as mine.

Yet she sensed my lack of enthusiasm, how I held back.

‘You said you wanted help, remember, to get out of here, didn’t you? Well, you can’t get out of here without clothes. And your own clothes out in the woods must be pretty filthy by now. So what had you in mind? Running naked?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘Thank you.’

‘So go on, then. Have a hot bath, a shower, a shave. It’s all here. Choose whatever you want. Then we’ll have lunch. And you can tell me … whatever you want to tell me. If I can help … You did ask. Remember?’

It was warm in the dressing-room, with a smell of expensive carnation soap, good cotton, old leather and fine worsteds: tempting smells that I had missed in the woods. She laid out the short-sleeved summer shirt and some casual trousers. But she put back one of the formal silk ties that had fallen on the floor.

‘You won’t want this, I think. Not yet, anyway.’

‘Yet?’

‘Unless we have guests in,’ she smiled, leaving me.