I knew all this from my past with Clare, when she was suffering: how not to look at or speak to her directly; to approach her in every way surreptitiously, at an angle as it were, never to confront her in any way directly, always to leave room for her mental ‘escape’. And there were other tricks, too, learnt either from Laura or, more painfully, face to face with the child herself. Clare in her earlier days, in Cascais not long after her father had been killed in Nairobi, had only consented to eat from a plate set on the floor, on all fours, like a dog. And so I gave her food in the same way that first day on the island: little chunks of processed cheese Alice had bought, among other food, and which Clare adored, smeared over the digestive biscuits I put out and left for her on the floor beside Lady Horton’s tomb. Clare sat against the tomb for most of that first day, sullen, hunched up, when she wasn’t screaming.
‘There,’ I said, looking away from her. ‘I eat that. That’s good.’
Clare’s speech had improved tremendously in the last year. But now it was non-existent. She had, for some time, come to use the word ‘I’ in relation to herself, and this had been a huge, a vital advance. Since before this, like nearly all such children, she had inverted the personal pronoun in order to avoid any picture of her self. Thus ‘I’ was always ‘you’ in any demand or question. ‘You want some orange.’ … ‘You want to go out,’ she would say.
But for those first few days, more than knowing — yet simply avoiding — any word for herself as an individual, she literally, I think, had no sense of who she was at all. She survived in a continual state of animal shock alternating with panic, no more than that: a state of mere temporary survival, like a rat in a trap, with a mind closed, sullenly or viciously, to all stimuli.
She must have missed her mother. Or did she? At that time it was impossible to tell. Neither her expression nor her behaviour hinted at this emotional loss. There was a numbness in her big blue eyes; they had no depth. And her cheeks were pale, with nothing of their old bloom. She was too far gone from our world to comprehend unhappiness in it.
Sometimes her round, expressionless face would jerk in convulsive movements up and down, her chin stabbing the air, so that her blonde fringe bounced, and I would try to calm her as Laura might have done, stroking her head, offering her sanctuary in my arms; she neither accepted nor refused, simply allowing herself to be moved this way or that like a log. I might eventually cradle her, but the bobbing, craning searching motion, like a fish on dry land appealing for water, would persist, the eyes wide and blank, staring up at me. Those were the worst times, when it seemed there was no future for either of us: Clare a permanent vegetable and myself a fool holding this beautiful, broken doll in my arms.
And yet, to my astonishment, she suddenly started to improve. There was a turning point on the fourth day, a discovery that liberated her. She found the broken stonework at one end of Sir George Horton’s raised tomb and saw the bones inside — the skull and shoulder-blades. And as soon as she discovered these remains she had gazed at them intently, suddenly quiet, fascinated, concentrating on something at last. And after ten minutes of this investigation she began to come alive. It was a remarkable transformation.
She put her hand inside the tomb, tickling the skull at first, before finally taking it out and holding it. I didn’t stop her, for I could see from the expression on her face that here was the beginning of a cure, some miracle seeping from these dead bones in the broken tomb.
Of course, when I thought of it, I realised why these relics might hold such magic for her. The skull here, and the other bleached remains, had given her back some happy memory of those earlier days which she had spent wild in the East African rift valley, when she had followed her father about the scorching rocks, looking for just the same sort of thing: the vital fossil evidence, in just this same shape of part skulls and jaw bones, which she would have seen so laboriously assembled later, realising their importance. And so here, the discovery of Sir George’s bones, in something of the same shape and condition, had given her a sense, only a glimmer perhaps, of old adventure and happiness. A sense of life itself, which she had so lost, had been returned to her.
And then I wondered too, seeing how she so obviously cared for these bones, fondling them almost, whether, in that strange upside down mind of hers, she might have thought they were the remains of her own father, whom she had apparently idolised, mysteriously returned to her here, a gift I had brought her to, and which she thanked me for by consenting to recognise me, as soon afterwards she did.
I didn’t know. It’s only theory, as so much must be with the minds of such children whose thoughts are so totally at odds with the logic and assumptions of our world, living as they do in their own closed universe where, like Clare, they create systems, visions, associations incomprehensible to us, roving through a whole utterly strange landscape of the mind, of which we can only see the smallest evidence, in acts such as Clare’s with these bones, when they surface, as it were, for a few moments into the air of ordinary life.
Certain it is that Clare changed that day, and changed the more the day following when I carried her up, strapped to my back in a kind of rope chair, to the tree-house on top of the oak. From then on, slowly at first but with ever-increasing enthusiasm, she took to life in the trees as if she’d been born in them. Yes, for her it was much more than any child’s game, a treat, something different. For Clare, I soon came to recognise, this kind of existence was the real thing. Again, I thought, a life lived once in Africa had been returned to her. A thorn tree, or a hide beneath a black rock in the Turkana Province, had become the branches of a summer oak and a wild valley hidden in the middle of England.
Clare took to this outdoor existence, the swimming when it came, the rough sleeping in the wind, fishing from the branches, the messy sticky-fingered picnic cooking and eating, as if the whole thing was a way of life specially prepared for her: as if, knowing it to be her only real cure, she had long craved exactly such a life, a life without furniture, beds, walls, roofs, plates, knives, forks: an existence totally devoid of every civilised prop, where there were no denials in closed windows, doors or other people, no timetables or duties other than those necessary for immediate pleasure or survival.
In all, and above all, she found herself in a world now so entirely lacking conventional structures and impositions that it was akin to the secret, unruly landscapes of her own mind. This life in the trees confirmed something vital in her which the people in her life had unwittingly tried to iron out. And this, I think, was precisely the reason for her cure: the valley, for the next two months, awakened in her the only ‘self’ she really had, a completely unconventional soul, a natural animal which prospered here, where it had withered in London and Cascais and had only barely survived with Laura and me in our cottage in the Cotswolds. Here, this quite wild balm at last gave her wings.
It was now mid-June, almost the height of a warm summer. The nights were short, starlit, rainless for the most part. Sometimes it rained quickly in the day, sudden, stormy thunder-showers from plum-bruised skies that were soon gone, leaving the air moist, steamy and filled with insects above the great bunches of cow-parsley that rose up now with a sweet rank smell, feet-high about the valley.
Clare slept at first in a sleeping-bag on the floor of the tree-house, while I slept beside her. But soon, too hot at nights, she was tempted by Spinks’s string hammock, so that I slung this across the upper part of the tree-house for her, and she swayed here in the hot afternoons, head-in-air, mesmerised, the regular pendulum motion visibly releasing her anxieties, drawing the tense sullenness out of her like a poultice.