‘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.