‘Peter’ she said. But she didn’t continue. She just looked at me, quite still, as if she’d utterly forgotten what she was saying.
‘Yes.’ She broke the mood in the end, brisk again. ‘I’ve been thinking: about Clare. I think I know how. I’ll tell you. But first maybe we should take a look at your tree-house this morning, and bring some supplies down there?’
Sitting together on the sunny balcony, sipping fresh roast coffee and eating croissants in so civilised a manner that morning, I found it almost impossible to imagine living savagely in the woods again. And I thought it an even more unlikely thing to expect a ten-year-old autistic child to do.
‘Alice, maybe we’re both of us out of our minds,’ I said. ‘I want Clare back, yes. She hasn’t any relations in this country. And her grandparents are a thousand miles away, one of them crippled. But is this the way?’
‘If you want her, yes.’
‘But listen, if you make yourself known to the people in the hospital they’ll remember you afterwards, that you turned up out of the blue with toys for the children; and the next day that Clare disappeared. They’ll put two and two together. And then they’ll come up here looking for us all again.’
‘No they won’t. I’ve got another idea now. I won’t go there at all.’ Alice’s face was bright with hidden schemes.
‘You mean I’ll just walk into the hospital — cold — and grab Clare?’
‘No. You’ll be in the hospital already,’ Alice said proudly. ‘You’ll be there to begin with — ill in bed.’ She smiled.
‘Ill?’
‘Yes! Swallow soap or something. Get sick. Violent stomach pains. Take a taxi to the hospital. Collapse! They’ll keep you there for observation.’
‘With a false name, and so on?’
‘Yes. Why not? You said you’d trained in all that sort of subterfuge when you were in British Intelligence. They won’t be looking for you up in the hospital in any case. You can say you’re a tourist, staying in some hotel in Banbury overnight. Food poisoning — that’s it. Well, you’ll get better pretty soon. You’ll be on your feet, wandering round the wards, so you can find out where Clare is. Then call me and I’ll arrange to come round and wait for you both with a car sometime at night, behind the hospital maybe. We can check the place out this afternoon. Well?’
‘It’s possible.’ I had to admit there was something in Alice’s idea. If I could get into the hospital in such a bona fide manner that would be at least half the battle; finding Clare and getting her out would be a lot more feasible.
‘Nothing venture, nothing win,’ Alice said. ‘Right?’
‘I suppose so.’ I picked my coffee up. It was delicious — not too bitter: an American blend. They knew how to do it. And I thought: I wanted Clare — yes. I had to get her. But this way would surely take me back to disaster, to a murder charge, cold tea and slops in a prison cell, if not something worse at the hands of David Marcus or Ross or one of the other hit-men in my old intelligence section. I looked at Alice and then out over the rich summer parkland. The peace, the security, the privacy of this great estate, I thought; an elegant breakfast and the love of a good woman. I wanted all this, too. But could I have both? Could I have Clare as well? That seemed like too much of a good thing.
The sun glistened on Alice’s dark hair. She stood up, and taking a pair of binoculars that had been on the balcony rail, she looked out over the parkland to the west. We would hear the faint sound of an axe thudding on the morning air.
‘The men are still thinning the trees somewhere over there,’ she said. ‘I can’t see them. It’s a much thicker wood on that side of the park, you know. Goes on for a mile or more: oak and beech and elm, a lot of it dead. Not been touched in years. We’ve been trying to clear it, but it’ll take ages’
‘Don’t you use equipment,’ I said. ‘Chain-saws, bulldozers —’
She turned sharply. ‘Not at all. We’re doing it all by hand. There are wild flowers and things out there. You have to do it all very gently.’
‘Of course.’
‘Do you like that sort of work?’
‘Well …’ I was doubtful.
‘I love it,’ she rushed on. ‘Cutting out old briars, chopping dead wood, clearing paths, planting fresh shrubs.’ She looked at me hopefully, a child proposing some exciting new game.
I didn’t, in fact, care much for this sort of work at all, though I liked getting a bonfire together at the end of the day and just standing over it watching the flames.
‘I love bonfires,’ I said, by way of showing willing.
‘There’s such a lot to do here,’ Alice went on, a passionate frustration in her voice. ‘I’ve barely started.’
‘Yes. I saw the landing upstairs: that Victorian stuff lying about all over the place. You know, you should be seeing to all that, Alice, and not worrying about me.’
The moment I said this I realised I was lying — I wanted Alice’s help — and that I’d hurt her again, too, for she was suddenly crestfallen, as if at some vision of future happiness disrupted. And I hated myself for disappointing her again in this way, for the predicament I’d got myself into: I wanted her help and she wanted to love me. And that was the problem: we had different priorities. Alice, looking over her half-completed world that morning, was offering me a share in it, a life with her, where together we would literally fulfil life together — thin the trees, clear the paths, sort out that long corridor of bric-à-brac upstairs and, who knows, maybe find a real use for those fabulous nursery toys one day …
Consciously or not, she held all this out to me that morning. Yet I held back: saw her, even, as something of a temptress, the devil on a high hill offering me everything in the world, whereas in reality I thought it was too late. I had been given a promised land already, which I had lost with Laura. The talk of bonfires just then had reminded me: of that cold blue spring evening two months before, out in the back garden of our cottage with the Bensons when I had burnt the old elder branches and the damp books from the garage and seen the pages of R. M. Ballantyne’s The World of Ice curl and blacken in the flames.
I remembered this, and with it came other vivid glimpses of my nine months with Laura: the afternoon sun on her body in the hotel bedroom in Lisbon, the beach at Cascais, Clare on the pony; our big, too-loving dog Minty, the Easter hyacinths crushed with the grave-dirt all over the fine linen Sunday tablecloth, the disaster of Clare’s eating, the potato-throwing in the bathroom — and yet the way she had slowly recovered with Laura and me. Here, in all these things created together, this was where my real future had been. And I couldn’t really see my doing the same thing with Alice in this great house, which was already so much her own eccentric creation, a succession of theatrical sets where I was a latecomer, and now a prisoner held by all Alice’s loving inventions.
I couldn’t go back. I knew that, of course. Laura was dead. But my way forward was towards Clare. It was Clare first, before Alice, whose life had to be returned to her. That was my problem: Alice was a means to an end, not hers. Did she know this? And if she did, how long would she accept it? Those wonderful, childish traits of hers, if frustrated, could well lead to tears before bedtime.
And then, confounding all such thoughts, Alice turned from the balcony and seeing my glum face, she suddenly brightened.