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?