‘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.’