‘Literally running?’
‘Yes. Athletics. Apart from escaping school. I loved running and swimming and climbing and tennis, all those outdoor things. I hated books and pens and pencils and indoors. That’s what I loved about the Hamptons: everything was outdoors and summer. My father bought one of those great, spooky, Charles Addams houses out on Long Island. That was the Atlantic. I remember thinking one day I could just swim on and on straight out into the ocean and get right across to England and never come home. We lived there every summer. Then there was Vevey in Switzerland, a smart place for rich brats. I hated that, too. Then there was the design school in Florence, and that was something good, at last. And then New York, when I first married. My husband,’ she smiled remembering. ‘Well, he was something of a man-about-town. In fact, that’s all he was. We spent most of our time in the Russian Tea Rooms or at some smart disco till four in the morning. I got tired of that fairly soon. So I started a company, making fine cloths. Weaving. And big patchwork quilts, you know, designed with Red Indian motifs. Reconstructed. I specialised in those. You see, you were right: I am part Indian. An eighth or so. My mother’s mother, she was from one of the Michigan lake tribes.’
She stood up then, put her glass back on the desk and looked out over the hot parkland. ‘I suppose I was the golden girl,’ she said lightly, looking back on her life. But now there was another slight hint of disappointment in her voice. The memory, or the present fact, of some loss creeping into her tones. And I was sure I knew what it must be: Alice Troy had everything except what was really important: a husband, children, family. Those were the vital things she lacked, the permanency, support, the continuity created through love or blood. Something wilful or even disastrous in her character had withheld those gifts from her in the end. Some considerable flaw in her emotional make-up had prevented her ever maintaining such familial ties satisfactorily. And she wasn’t going to tell me now what this might be, even if she knew what it was herself.
‘Do you still weave?’ I asked.
‘Yes. I’ve several looms upstairs. For tweed. From Cotswold wool. I’m trying to revive that. We have our own special flock.’
‘I see,’ I said, fearing a sudden onset of Gothic Arts and Crafts talk, thinking that this might be Alice’s real problem: an obsession with woolly sheep.
‘Yes,’ she went on, going over to the window. ‘Out there. Can you see? Some of them are on the other side of the park, over there, by the chestnuts. Are you interested?’ She turned from the window, looking round at me sharply, suddenly intently quizzical again, as if the fate of the whole of the British tweed industry hung on my reply.
It seemed churlish to say ‘No.’ And besides, I did like good tweeds, even if I preferred the soft Irish Donegals to any of the tougher Scots varieties.
So I said ‘Yes. I am interested,’ and she smiled happily in return. Like a child rewarded.
We took a salad lunch on a trolley out to the conservatory where we sat in the shade of a great mimosa tree under the hanging flower-baskets, with the Florentine fountain splashing and warbling to one side of us. In this heat, the ventilating windows high above had all been opened, so that every now and then fronds rustled and the long green trailers from the baskets swung minutely in the little eddies and down-draughts of summer air.
Tomato and potato salad and Yorkshire ham cut straight from the bone, with watercress and mustard and cheese and bottles of chilled Guinness to go with it. Apart from the cress I ate everything, down to the bone, to the last rind of cheese, telling Alice my story from start to finish between mouthfuls. I left out nothing, not even my theft of the cricketers’ tea, or her Cotswold lamb that I’d killed and barbecued. And it was hard to tell her this, knowing how she valued the flock. At that point in my story I thought she might turn on me, divorce herself from my violent affairs: I thought she might see how far I’d gone into mad ways, stoning defenceless animals, gutting them, murdering them in the rain.
But instead my shamefaced account of this seemed to draw an increased interest and sympathy, a sort of happy wonder from her, as if I had returned to her something of great value which she had once prized and lost.
Sometimes she interrupted or interjected a query, sitting across the table from me, hoping to clarify something I’d said. She was not a passive listener. She listened like a military commander hearing vital news from the front, news upon which he would soon have to make even more vital decisions.
The thing that surprised her most was my handing Clare over to the policeman.
I said, ‘At the time I felt there was no alternative. Laura was dead. If they’d taken me I would have been dead for Clare as well, with ten years in gaol or worse. As it stands, well, at least I can do something now. I’m free.’
‘Yes. You mean we can get her back?’
‘We?’
‘You asked me to help.’
‘I didn’t mean personally. If I could just use a few things from the house: clothes, a car, money. I’d pay you back.’
She laughed. ‘And if you did manage to rescue her, all on your own, what then?’
I had, in fact, already roughly thought out what I’d do then: try and get Clare and me back to Portugal, to Laura’s parents in Cascais. It was the only thing to do, I thought, since I felt that Laura’s father, Captain Warren, would understand, would give me sanctuary. He hated the British authorities already, the War Office and the secret men generally in Whitehall who had dispossessed him of his land and home in Gloucestershire forty years before. And if I could get to Portugal, David Marcus and his hit-men in MI6, as well as the police, would have another problem altogether. And even if they eventually got me back to Britain, Clare would be able to stay out there, with her grandparents. She would be safe from any dreadful institution. I told Alice all this.
‘And how would you get yourselves to Portugal?’
‘A plane. A ship. The usual way.’
‘With false moustaches and so on? They’d be looking out for you, you know.’
‘I haven’t thought it all out. And anyway, it depends first on whether I can get Clare away from wherever she is.’
‘I could probably find that out for you,’ Alice said, leaning forward, a sudden sparkle of adventure in her eyes. ‘The regional Committee for Autistic Children held a wine and cheese party here last winter, to raise money. I know the secretary —’
‘I don’t want you to get involved personally. There’s no need.’
‘Why not, for heaven’s sake?’
‘I’m sorry, you shouldn’t.’ I stood up. It was getting too hot, even in the shade of the mimosa tree. ‘If you help me directly it can only make it worse for you.’
‘You mean, you’d just like me to pretend that you came up here, for example, and stole a car and some clothes and some money?’
‘Yes. That’s exactly what I thought.’ I stopped over by the Florentine fountain and splashed some cool water from the great Carrara marble bowl over my face. ‘There’s no point your getting involved. You mustn’t.’
I turned to Alice. She was sitting, rather hunched, over the table, her head down, hair falling over her cheeks, fiddling with a napkin, dejected: like a child just denied a treat.
It made me angry that I seemed to have upset her so. ‘Good God, Alice, you’ve got better things to do. You could find yourself in gaol as well!’
She looked up. ‘Why? Why should either of us find ourselves in gaol? You’re telling the truth, aren’t you? Well, they’re bound to find out you didn’t kill your wife in the end. And find that other man … And what’s wrong with regaining control of your daughter? You’re still her legal father, after all.’