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.