‘No,’ she said, ‘I shouldn’t be worrying about you. And I’m not … not really. It’s me I’ve been worrying about. Can’t you see?’
‘How?’
‘You heard me the other day down by the lake — those war-whoops and beating the water up and taking those roses out to the island, not to mention playing Camelot —’
‘But I liked all that. I told you.’
‘Yes,’ she said simply. ‘You liked it. I liked it. But don’t you see? I was going crazy. And I’m not any more.’
‘I stopped you playing Red Indians, you mean?’
‘No! I found you playing them — you forget: naked with a bow and arrow!’
‘It was just that I’d had a swim that morning, before Ross arrived.’
‘It was just nothing of that sort at all! You’d been up a tree for ten days as well, killing sheep and thieving the cricketers’ tea.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Don’t be. That’s the whole point. You saved me: I thought I was mad, going down deep, cracked. I thought Arthur and the others were going to be proved right — Oh so right! — that I’d be dragged out of this place in a straitjacket screaming. Until I saw you, behind that shed, and heard your story. Then I knew I wasn’t alone. And it’s that feeling that you’re uniquely crazy that makes you so.’
‘I see.’ And I did see.
‘So,’ Alice said lightly, ‘I’m really saved already. It’s your turn now.’
She stood with her back to the stone balustrade, no longer worried about tidying up the landscape, looking at me with a confidence and happiness that had nothing possessive about it, with no end in view apparently but mine.
‘It’s your turn now. You’ll see!’ There was a ringing American optimism in her voice. She spoke with the passion of the converted, the certainty of a prophet guaranteeing a future, offering me a miraculous world at the end of the yellow-brick road. How could I have refused her?
Alice left the balcony, going inside to dress. I picked the binoculars up and gazed out over the sunlit parkland towards the far side where the sounds of the axe had come from. Swinging the glasses round I suddenly came on Alice’s two workmen, together with a third man supervising them, a little tough-looking, wiry fellow — Mrs Pringle’s husband, I supposed — all of them just inside the margin of the trees. But they were not clearing the undergrowth. That had been done already. They were reinforcing the high barbed-wire fence with wooden stakes, I saw when I focused the glasses, ten feet tall, where the wire strands, less than a foot apart, made an unnecessarily formidable barrier for any animal. The fence was clearly there to keep people out of the estate. Or to keep them in, I wondered? To keep Alice in? The barrier would serve both purposes equally well. Alice thought herself sane at last. But her husband would have had no reason for thinking this, and the Pringles, it struck me then, were more likely to have been employed by him as jailers rather than housekeepers.
I turned the glasses to the south of the park. Looking beyond the cricket pitch I could just see the Pringles’ lodge. Next to it were some huge iron gates, firmly shut, with the same high wire fence running along inside the estate wall to either side. Alice might be sane, but she was trapped. And so was I.
Ten
I hadn’t forgotten Alice’s athleticism, but I was still surprised by the ease with which she shinned up the beech branches and across to my oak tree down by the lake later that morning. The child was mother to the woman here, I knew that. And I knew she kept herself fit, thrashing the waters and playing tennis. But this was quite another sort of agility for a woman, more in the circus trapeze department. And, indeed, she was like a girl happy under the big top that morning as she hooked her legs and arms over branches, swinging upwards through the green leaves into shafts of sun that filtered through them, moving into the light above like a swimmer rising effortlessly from the deep. And suddenly, after the confines and alarms of the house, in the clear, early-summer air of the trees, the smell of wood and moss and water all around, I felt as if I was coming home again, to a kind of freedom in this hidden place.
‘It’s up there,’ I’d said to begin with, pointing to my oak.
‘Why, even you couldn’t climb that.’ Alice had looked at the smooth fifteen-foot bole of the tree.
‘No. That’s the whole point. No one could climb it. I get across onto it from that copper-beech tree, higher up there.’
And we’d gone back up the steep side of the valley, to where the great sloping beech limb came to within a few feet of the ground, giving access to my oak.
‘I’ll go up first and let a rope down. Then you can tie that bag of things on and I’ll pull it up.’
We’d brought down two sleeping-bags from the Manor, along with blankets and some makeshift clothes for Clare to use, and some old toys, games and books as well from the Victorian nursery. I’d taken soaps, towels, a toothbrush, shaving gear and a hand-mirror from Arthur’s suite. There was a decent torch and some extra tools in the bag: a hammer, nails and a small sharp hatchet.
I had taken some books from the library, for the long evenings: Scott’s Ivanhoe and Conan Doyle’s The White Company among them and a lot of picture magazines for Clare. In the old days this had been part of her cure, lying on the cottage floor and thumbing through the pages of the colour supplements, picking out and concentrating for an hour on some unlikely photograph — the gaudy vicious picture of a gyrating punk rocker, some bloody battlefront scene, or a skyscraper collapsing. She had found a strange solace in such violent images before; they calmed her, and I expected she might need them again now, among much else in the way of a cure, for she would almost certainly have regressed in her autism since I had left her.
Alice had given me several large bottles of soda and lime juice for Clare, along with some good malt whisky and red plastic picnic tumblers. Food had been more of a problem, since Mrs Pringle had been in and out of the kitchen all morning. We’d only managed a package of digestive biscuits from the pantry and an expensive wooden box of Harrods’ liqueur chocolates which had been left in the drawing-room from the previous Christmas. On the other hand I knew I could pick up food, and anything else we needed, from the house at night, when Alice was there alone.
I pulled the big hold-all up to the top of the oak, along with Spinks’s bow and the two arrows which I’d brought back from the manor. Then Alice had come up after me and finally we were both together in the tree-house.
Everything was just as I’d left it: my muddy cord suit, grubby shirt and underclothes, the billy can with the flakey remains of the boiled perch still stuck to it, the transistor, the ex-army binoculars, along with Spinks’s bawdy paperback and the Good Beer Guide for 1979. Alice looked around, touching things, fascinated.
‘You see,’ I said, ‘this is how I get the water, and the fish.’ I let the canvas water bag over the side of the planks. ‘Of course, you’ve got to go along that lower branch there — out over the lake. But it’s no problem.’
‘No. Except for a child. Maybe I was wrong suggesting you brought her back up this tree: a child in some state of shock, too, if she’s been in hospital these two weeks.’
‘I’d thought of that myself. I can keep her out on the island for a few days, to begin with. That’s what I’d thought: out in the little mausoleum.’
‘Yes. I’ll put some clothes and food in there in any case, when you’ve gone.’
‘But Clare can climb all right,’ I went on. ‘Probably be part of a cure for her. She was always up and down the old elder trees in our back garden. And in Cascais last summer, there was a big cork tree in the garden there: she used to get right to the top of it in a flash. These children usually have extraordinary physical gifts; I told you. Clare certainly has — climbing, hiding, running, anything like that. Maybe she got it when she was very young, out in the bush, in east Africa. She lived practically wild out there, as far as I can gather, for months on end with her parents when they were fossilling about.’