Instead, as I soon realised, we embarked on a world then, that afternoon, where everything seemed possible at last for us, where we had both miraculously been given a second, a third? — but certainly a last chance in life: she to make amends for that social and emotional failure which had apparently so plagued her and I to find some hope, some renewal, out of my own disasters. Thus, alone together afterwards in the empty house, we took to each other with the sharpest sort of appetite: our very lives came to depend on each other. Each could save the other. But could we be saved together?
I changed into some more of Arthur’s casual clothes in a guest bedroom along the corridor from Alice’s room. Mrs Pringle hadn’t come to turn the bed down and one of Arthur’s large leather suitcases now occupied a prominent place on a chair.
Mrs Pringle gave us tea in the small drawing-room afterwards, an elaborate tea, of scones and cakes and sandwiches. If I’d not been told of her own gluttony I’d have thought she must have known all about my starvation in the woods. When Mrs Pringle was in the room with us, bringing the tea or taking it away, Alice and I talked about London and New York — about friends she and the real Harry Conrad had in common. I knew London and New York well enough, so I was able to reply convincingly in the same coin. But I watched Mrs Pringle’s face out of the corner of my eye. It was impossible to tell anything from it. The extreme plumpness hid almost all facial movement and thus any change of expression.
Then she said to Alice, ‘I hear the police were up all over the place here again this afternoon. Looking for that man.’ She gathered the tea things up onto a tray as she spoke.
‘Yes,’ Alice replied easily, ‘we were just talking about that. They found nothing of course.’
‘Oh, I’m sure the villain left the area weeks ago,’ Mrs Pringle said, confidently putting the silver lid back on the strawberry jam pot. ‘I’m sure of it.’
She never so much as glanced in my direction either then or as she made her way out of the room. I was just going to say something to Alice when suddenly Mrs Pringle was back, putting her head round the door.
‘For supper, Madam, I’ve done a salmon mousse. It’s in the fridge. And there are the lamb cutlets you ordered afterwards. Five minutes under the pantry grill should do them. And I’ve made a salad.’
‘Thank you,’ Alice said. ‘Thank you, Anna. I don’t know what I’d do without you.’
And in that instant, just as Alice spoke to her, Mrs Pringle looked at me directly for the first time from the doorway. Her expression had certainly changed now. She smiled at me. But was it simply a polite courtesy, or a smile of connivance? I couldn’t tell which. It could quite well have been either. Its meaning remained buried somewhere beneath the pumpkin of flesh, behind her little dark eyes.
Alice and I ate supper next to each other at a large round table set in an embrasure at the head of the great windowless dining-room in the centre of the house. Mrs Pringle had laid the two places complete in every high Gothic detaiclass="underline" gleaming fern-handled cutlery and old plate, with chased silver goblets and all the other accoutrements of a feudal dinner in time to go with them. I felt I should have been dressed in one of Arthur’s dinner-jackets, though this, of course, would hardly have suited the Arthurian mood of the surroundings. I would have needed a doublet and hose to match the Camelot outfit, the almost diaphanous, high-waisted silk dress which Alice wore again that evening.
‘We could have had all this in the kitchen,’ I ventured.
‘Yes. But Mrs Pringle likes to do it all properly. And so do I.’ Alice looked at me almost severely. ‘So why not?’ Then she smiled. She liked having this formal dinner with me, I realised then, the huge candelabrum in the centre of the table, the flames casting steady shadows in the warm, still air, the long silver-strewn sideboards running away from us, down either side of the dining-room walls: a ghostly, summer dinner-party, with just the two of us at a table made for a dozen.
Alice liked entertaining me in such formal circumstances — as a prelude, perhaps, as she had hinted in Arthur’s bedroom, to even more elaborate occasions, to the ‘real thing’: dinner parties with real guests, honourable, courtly people like ourselves, parties we two would preside over from opposite sides of the great round table.
Behind us, running right round the curved wall of the embrasure, was a rather faded Victorian mural of a medieval jousting tournament. Heavily armoured knights, bearing different coloured plumes and shields, charged at each other across the length of the wall while women in high toque hats and veils gazed at them with saintly rapture from a candy-striped pavilion in the middle. The whole thing had an air of idealised unreality.
‘That’s by Walter Crane,’ Alice told me, noticing my interest. ‘The Hortons had it done, after they’d staged a jousting tournament here when they opened the house in 1880. And do you know, we’re going to do just the same thing later this summer. It’s a hundred years since they built the house. There’s to be a two-day fête: a jousting tournament, a medieval costume ball, an 1880s cricket match. The Victorian Society are helping me.’
Alice’s face shone with something of the same rapture as the damsels on the wall as she spoke. It made me want to tease her a little ‘But it’s rather out of date, isn’t it?’ I said. ‘Mimicking all those old, good, brave causes?’
I smiled. But Alice had ceased to smile. ‘No. It’s not out of date,’ she said shortly, looking at me reprovingly, as though I was a Knight Errant criticising some glorious commission. So that by way of excuse I said to her, ‘No, I meant that it was the shadow now, rather than the substance: of bravery, honour. It’s not the “real thing”.’
I wondered again why Alice had been so drawn to all these medieval symbols of chivalry and derring-do: these intense concepts of honour and glory. Had she been treated dishonourably once herself? Or was it just the fiction of a rich and aimless woman which she longed to enact here, another role she wanted to interpret? Was it real or false, this passionate identification with a Gothic past?
She said then, by way of answering my unspoken thoughts, ‘It’s all quite real to me. That’s what Arthur and I fell out about. You see, I believe in all those values.’
‘At face value?’
‘Yes. And he didn’t.’
Arthur, I could see in her mind, had betrayed the Glorious Company of the Round Table, while I had just joined it, taking his place now. I was tempted to say ‘Isn’t it all a little mad, in this day and age?’ But I didn’t speak the words in the end, for I sensed that I’d lose my place at the round table if I had. I knew now that Alice really believed in all these flawless virtues. Her shaky sanity was indeed based on this madness.
The salmon mousse was delicious. There was a bottle of slightly chilled Montrachet to go with it. But after this first course, before we went out to grill the cutlets in the pantry, I could eat no more. I pulled my chair back and lit a cigarette.
‘About Clare,’ I said. ‘How do we get her out?’
‘Well, she’s in the Banbury General Hospital, we know that. In some private room there. Suffering the after-effects of that night, obviously. But Banbury’s not far. Only fifteen miles or so.’
‘And we just barge in?’
‘No. We’ll have to think.’
‘And even if we do get her back here,’ I shrugged my shoulders. ‘It’s ridiculous: Mrs Pringle will know at once. She’ll hear the news. She’ll know who the child really is — and that I’m not Mr Conrad.’
‘Yes. I’d thought of that.’ Alice fingered a tall Elizabethan silver salt-cellar. ‘There’s only one answer: take her back to the woods with you for the moment, until we get things straightened out. We can fix you up with a proper hideout out there meanwhile. Make it comfortable. The weather’s fine enough. And there’s plenty of cover.’ She turned to me excitedly. ‘Somewhere up in the trees, maybe. Had you thought of that?’