Alice was thinking of everything, and so I was suddenly determined to think up a name for myself. ‘I’ll be John Burton,’ I said, ‘and I’ll come from 16 Bradford Road, London, W 2. How’s that?’
‘Fine. You’re getting the hang of things.’
We stopped at a call-box in Stow and I made the booking that night for a single room, for one night, at the Whately Hall Hotel in Banbury. There were no problems.
I’d committed myself at last. And suddenly I felt easier, more confident as a result: the enemy was in view once more, the long-delayed plan of attack under way. There were only two choices open to me now, to sink or to swim. And since it had once again boiled down to this, to a matter of life and death almost, I felt as I had when I’d waited for Ross’s vicious dog running up the valley towards me two weeks before, the bowstring tight against my cheek, just before the shaft transfixed the Alsatian: and I felt that strange surge of animal confidence as I got back into the car — something brutal rising in me, beyond thought certainly, a sort of blood-lust that surprised me. I suddenly had a vital will to succeed and I didn’t know at all where that will came from.
Back at the Manor after lunch we looked out some suitable clothes together in Arthur’s rooms — pyjamas, a suit, shirts, some casual wear — and carefully cut off all the labels on them.
‘I’ll need a dressing-gown maybe,’ I said. ‘If I’m to go walking round the wards.’
But Arthur had left only one dressing-gown behind — in surprising red silk, a Noël Coward affair that would surely call unwanted attention to me.
‘Take it anyway,’ Alice advised. ‘You may need it. And don’t forget some shaving things, toothpaste … They expect all that in hospitals.’
Alice finished the packing and then looked up at me, peering into my face. ‘That scar, it’s still there: a way of identifying you afterwards. We’ll just have to risk that, or find you a hat to cover it.’ She ran her finger gently along the mark on my temple. Then she was brisk again. ‘Now: some papers. You can have one of my wallets. I got it in Florence years ago. There’s nothing American about it.’
She handed me a lovely Florentine leather wallet, edged in gilt. Inside was a number of fairly grubby £5 and £10 notes. ‘I’m sure they can’t trace them,’ she said. I counted them. There was £100 in all.
‘Thank you. I’ll make a note of it.’
Alice said nothing until, as we left the room, she asked: ‘A weapon of some sort? Do you need one?’
‘Why? I don’t think so.’
‘I have a small hand-gun.’
‘You think I’ll have to fight my way out of the place? That’s nonsense. Besides, they’d spot it when I got undressed in the hospital.’
‘I know!’ Alice suddenly said. ‘There’s some old swordsticks downstairs. Arthur collects them.’
‘Come on —’
‘No. It could be useful. And you could keep it by you all the time. Pretend you have a limp.’
‘Yes, but why bother, if they’re not expecting me?’
‘You never know. They might try and stop you on your way out. Besides, a limp is a good disguise,’ she added brightly. ‘A man with a limp …’ She considered this conceit for a moment, as if contemplating a proposed charade in a Christmas drawing-room, before finding the idea good. But I didn’t.
‘A man with a limp and a swordstick and a Noël Coward dressing-gown,’ I said. ‘It’s too much, Alice. I’d be overplaying my hand.’
‘If you don’t overplay your hand a bit you won’t ever get into that damn hospital. Remember, you have to act as if your whole gut was on fire to begin with. Unless you really want to eat a cake of soap. And remember, too, the less you look like your old self the better. Who are you anyway? This John Burton from London?’
‘Well, with a gammy leg, swordstick and that tarty dressing-gown I’d better be a London antique-dealer. What do you think?’
Alice smiled. ‘You’re certainly getting the idea,’ she said.
Later she showed me the collection of swordsticks, kept locked up in Arthur’s gun-room at the back of the house. There were half a dozen of them — silver-topped, eighteenth-century canes for the most part. I chose the least antique and ostentatious: a stout Victorian bamboo walking-stick with an antler handle and a secret release catch. Inside was a long needle of engraved Toledo steel, double-edged, half an inch wide at the top and tapering to an extremely fine, sharp point.
‘I don’t like the look of it,’ I said.
‘Nor will they if you just bring it out. You won’t have to use it.’
I put the blade back and, using the stick as support, practised my limp across the gun-room. Arthur’s suit chosen for me this time was a lightweight tweed. And I had a hat to go with it now — a tweed pork-pie that came down over my scar. I looked too carefully, too expensively dressed for an antique-dealer. On the other hand I certainly looked nothing like my real self: the man the police would be looking for.
Alice, now almost carried away by her sense of the theatrical, was pleased with the result. She looked at me from a distance, head to one side, quizzically. ‘I wouldn’t recognise you,’ she said.
‘No. Just like the first time I got into Arthur’s clothes.’
Was it her wish that I should undergo successive transformations in this sartorial manner, each of which would take me further away from the chalk-dusted, badly dressed teacher I’d been with Laura, and closer to Alice — all changes which would make me more dependent on her, as puppet, as lover? In her eyes certainly I must have already fulfilled all her theatrical expectations, played the game well — changing from naked savage to tweedy countryman in little more than twenty-four hours. In my own eyes I felt less and less the actor and more the fool — who had still to assume a dangerous role. On the other hand, if Clare was to be freed … And I had to admit that Alice’s ideas here, simply because of their very drama, might well work. I was dependent on Alice; it was simply this dependence that I didn’t like.
‘Come on,’ she said, having watched me think for half a minute. ‘We’re ready.’ She kissed me, briefly. I still didn’t respond. ‘I know,’ she said. ‘Sooner you than me. It’s difficult, changing your life. But you’ve done it so well already, Peter, you can do it again. I’ve been amazed, seeing you …’
She gazed at me proudly, as on a Knight Errant about to depart on some great cause in her honour. And I saw the madness of the whole scheme once more then — but saw equally that it was an escapade which Alice, in her own bizarre mind, now relied on me to fulfil. She expected my fidelity in this cause; we were brother and sister in arms. To fail her in it would be to betray her. And I realised it was she who was dependent on me now — her life on mine, and I was ashamed at my earlier thoughts of her manipulation.
‘Say goodbye to Mrs Pringle. And I’ll take you to your — London train.’
She turned away, busying herself with some last-minute detail, so that I was left with an image of Alice in the great house. An image of someone I wanted to kiss now, but couldn’t.
I threw a convincing fit, writhing in the hall of the hotel next morning in Banbury. I had earlier called the receptionist from my bedroom, complaining of severe stomach pains and cramps, so that this subsequent performance was not unexpected. The Manager offered me a doctor there and then — there was a surgery, he told me, just next door to the hotel, but I suggested a taxi to the hospital at once, and thus I left five minutes later, doubled up with my bamboo walking-stick and suitcase, a surprising casualty from the sumptuous Inn, stumbling out into the bright summer morning.