‘A tree-house?’
‘Yes. Exactly. That’s something a child would like: yes, of course! A tree-house.’ She beamed.
‘I’ve made one already,’ I said. ‘In a big oak, overlooking the lake at the south end.’
Alice smiled. Then she laughed, her eyes glittering in the candlelight. ‘So that’s how you managed! Up a tree! I should have guessed. So that’s why they never found you. I kept wondering. It’s ideal! We can improve on it, maybe, but that’s the answer.’
‘And getting Clare out of the hospital. How about that?’
‘I’ll go there tomorrow. Into the children’s ward I’ll make some excuse — take in some old toys, some books and things. I’ll find out exactly where she is.’
‘Then just walk in and take her? There’ll be nurses on duty twenty-four hours.’
‘We’ll have to make a plan,’ Alice said, looking down, concentrating deeply. She spoke like a child herself just then, like a girl in a girl’s adventure story, something from Angela Brazil, contemplating a raid on a rival school’s dorm. So that I had to smile at her seriousness, her daring, over something, as I saw now, so essentially preposterous. But Alice believed. She was idealistic, never cynical. With all her money, real life had never touched her, I thought, and so this raid on Banbury Hospital didn’t strike her as unusual. It was entirely appropriate to her chivalrous vision, a shining deed in a naughty world. But of course it wasn’t something out of the pages of Angela Brazil. Alice would hardly have known that writer. It was a text straight from Arthurian legend again, out of her child’s book perhaps, In the Days of the King, part of the search for the Holy Grail, or some other chivalrous quest, this rescue of a damsel in distress in the shape of Clare.
‘Yes. We’ll make a plan. We’ll have to think about it,’ she went on, without looking up, her dark hair fallen over her cheeks, partly covering her face, so that I could only really see the tip of her fine nose and chin.
I was so touched by her, suddenly; that she should help me thus. Even if nothing ever came of these plans … if I was caught tomorrow, if I never saw Alice again, I would have had this marvellous gesture of hers. Perhaps I fell in love with Alice at that moment. Or was it another feeling just as strong — of reverence? Of amazement certainly at her forthright generosity, at what seemed to me then to be her innocent, untroubled spirit. And it was I who kissed her now, standing up as she sat with her head over the table; it was I who gently turned her face to mine and kissed her then.
Whatever the feeling, it took us to bed together later that night, or rather onto the floor of her white, bare room with the cushions everywhere on the soft carpet and the cane dressing-table rising only a foot or so above it. The room seemed to have been decorated for life at ground level. And so we used it that way too in our loving.
The evening was hot, the big window open, looking westwards. But there wasn’t a breath of wind to move the long loose-weave woollen curtains. The light came softly from a single white shade low down on the other side of her bed, and insects flew out of the night to it, through the wide mesh of the curtains, fluttering and buzzing round the bulb, trying to feed from it like a honey-pot.
I was completely exhausted after the long, fraught day. But it wasn’t for this that we didn’t make love. Alice, naked enough, was more unable than unwilling, and in my exhaustion it hardly mattered to me. I imagined her inability might well be part of her courtly ideals. But whatever caused it, we were happy enough just in each other’s arms, and I was glad of my exhaustion.
Had I been more intent and lively I might have thought too much, too clearly, about Laura or Clare. As it was I was so tired I could barely think coherently at all. Loving Alice was more like floating in and out of sleep, where a dream stays so clearly fixed in your mind that it takes a minute before you realise you are conscious, only to find that you are asleep again by then, returned to the real dream, so that the two states are afterwards indistinguishable.
At one point, later in the evening, when I had drifted off into real sleep lying beside Alice on the bed now, I woke with a start for some reason and found how, rather than sleeping close to me, which would have been uncomfortable in the sticky heat in any case, she had moved away, a good two feet from me, asleep herself, but grasping my hand so firmly, almost fiercely across the sheet, that I feared to wake her if I moved myself at all. And so we lay like that on our backs, apart but closely linked.
I looked over at her face, in sharp silhouette against the beam of light from the lamp below the other side of the bed. Her nose was tilted in the air, as though sniffing something vital in the night. The sheet lay twisted diagonally across her body, baring one breast, covering another before running on up like a toga round her shoulder. Eyes closed, lips slightly apart, she gripped my hand as if I was leading her down a street, a blind person, completely trusting.
Alice had wanted to touch hands, I remembered, from her engagement diary in the tower. Arthur’s hand, which he had denied her, I supposed. Beyond elegant dinner-parties or playing Red Indians by the lake or seeing herself as some Camelot maiden, beyond all her roles, even in deep sleep Alice wanted to hold hands more than anything else, it seemed. I’d left soon after that night and gone to my own room along the passage, for Alice had her breakfast brought up to her first thing each morning by Mary, the daily help.
When I woke, fairly late in the too-comfortable bed, someone was knocking at the door. It was Mary, with a pot of morning tea on a silver tray. Where Mrs Pringle had been gross, Mary was petite: a small woman in her thirties, with narrow features, spindly legs, bosomless and with her dank, dark hair cut dead straight round her neck, together with a boyish fringe. She might have been Irish from the last century — a famine victim. I couldn’t think how she managed any strenuous housework.
‘Good morning, sir,’ The accent was local, north Cotswolds. She put the tea-tray down neatly on the bedside table and opened the curtains. The sun streamed in, out of an already flat, lead-blue summer sky.
Mary turned back from the window, standing awkwardly in front of the bed like a child, about to make a speech. Miss Troy asks you to have breakfast with her, sir, when you are ready. I’ve brought your tray to her suite.’
She spoke with an assumed formality as though she’d picked up the tone as well as these stilted phrases from a book of etiquette. Where Mrs Pringle seemed on too familiar terms with Alice and the household generally, Mary, clearly, was entirely conventional in her service.
Fifteen minutes later, shaved and dressed in yet more of Arthur’s too flattering clothes from the big suitcase, I was in Alice’s white room once more, the curtains and the big French window open, giving out onto a small balcony, I saw now, with the sun blazing outside like fire.
Alice, in a long loose-weave cotton housecoat tied only at the neck, was out on the balcony, where two breakfast trays had been put on a slatted wood table. She’d started already.
‘Sorry, I couldn’t wait. I was ravenous! Are you?’ she asked briskly, before biting deeply into a croissant. There was fresh orange juice as well, with apricot jam, a tall earthenware pot of coffee and two brown boiled eggs. I joined her on the other side of the table.
‘That’s fine,’ I said. ‘Of course, go ahead.’ I was sitting directly opposite her now, both of us rather formal, even awkward for a moment. We might have been guests at an hotel. But then, just before I got the orange juice to my mouth, she put her hand across to me, stretching right over the table, and ran her index finger quickly down my cheek. And suddenly she wasn’t brisk any more and we weren’t hotel guests.