At night, too, against lightly-mooned skies and a shadow filigree of leaves and branches, I would see the string hammock move from side to side above me, shaped like a canoe wrapped around her body, as she rocked herself far out on some imaginary voyage. And then, the boat floating home on a dark sea of leaves, the swaying would gradually diminish until finally all movement stopped, and the craft berthed as she slept, held by a thread to earth.
Alice came to see us each day, usually in the mornings, out to the island first, and afterwards clambering quickly and silently up to the tree-house, so that she sometimes surprised us, like an animal rising stealthily through the leaves.
I wondered what Clare would make of her. To begin with she made nothing of her at all, she barely looked at her. I had warned Alice that this might happen, told her to take no notice of Clare, to behave just as we did, as if life in these trees, for her as well, was the most natural thing in the world. And thus Alice merged with us, with our life, imperceptibly, doing as we did in the time she stayed with us.
She had brought new clothes for Clare on the first day — cord dungarees, an anorak, socks, plimsolls. But for a long time Clare preferred her grubby hospital pyjamas or just a pair of pants. Later, in the tree-house, she hung up all these new clothes on a line of string, as if they were washing, or the sails of her grandfather’s ketch, and would simply gaze at them, hypnotised, for hours on end, as they swung in the breeze.
Of course, the job I had to do here in the valley was to give Clare life again; life, and speech. So I would talk to her indirectly as often as possible without looking at her, as if talking to myself, while I tidied up the tree-house after breakfast, and she involved herself with one of her elaborate rituals or routines, placing the coloured bricks from the hospital in certain strict and mysterious patterns. Another obsessive therapy she found in stripping the oak leaves about her down to their central stem and then placing these in long opposed ranks on the tree-house planks, like soldiers confronting each other in an opposing army.
The routines were many. But each of them was recreated exactly as they’d been the hour or the day before. There was no change or development here; in these rituals constancy was all. They were her lifelines, imperative duties which licensed not only her very existence but also any attempt she might make to escape from the cage of her anonymity. And escape from this would need speech, I knew — speech as a tendril, words as antennae which would reach out and form a bridge for her to cross into full life. And speech she didn’t have at all beyond mere grunts and screams; this above all I had to return to her.
So I would use words throughout the day and the tree became a babel of my voice. ‘We’re living here for a while,’ I would say quietly as she picked at the oak leaves. ‘Mummy has gone. We’ll live here for a bit and enjoy ourselves. There’s swimming and lots of things we can do. And Alice — Alice that comes up here — she’ll bring us things we need. She has books and food too. Books you might like. That Pigling Bland book she brought: did you see that? Though I expect you’re a bit old for it …’
Thus I would natter on, with apparent aimlessness, about this and that, about anything that came to mind, familiarising Clare with just the sound of words and thoughts again, throwing the currency heedlessly about that she might one day pick some of it up.
Though much more in those early days, besides her rituals, it was the light, the weather and the clouds that most absorbed her attention. She would climb up some way above the tree-house, almost to the top of the oak where I could still see her, and stay there for hours on end, gazing upwards into the blue sky, as if expecting something. It was some time before I realised she was waiting for the clouds which, whenever they passed overhead, she would watch intently, her head moving like a camera with them as they crossed the dome of blue. It was the same with the morning sun. She was often up before dawn, in her perch above the tree-house, waiting in the same way for the first rays of light to streak across the sky, then following the rising flood as it climbed over the rim of trees round the valley, finally cascading over the oak leaves with shafts of green-gold light.
Watching the puffy clouds roll by near to, or studying them in their imperceptible glide far up; lurking, hidden in the grey first light, to ambush the sun, Clare was like a figure for rain or shine in a Swiss weather-house, moving about the tree, alert to every variation in the sky.
Clare’s life then was made up of watching. She watched the birds: the swallows as they swooped and feinted about the sky, on their usually distant aerial careers, but now almost intimate with us, feeding on the wing only a few feet above the topmost branches of our oak tree. She studied the grey and white flash of pigeons as they shot across the valley in sudden cannonades, and then glided upwards in little swoops, breasting the air like a roller-coaster before stalling suddenly, then diving sheer for a second, elated by the very medium of space. There were rooks, too, a colony of them high up on several beech trees above the valley behind us; birds that chattered incessantly at certain times of day, and which Clare would listen to, spellbound, as if eavesdropping on a familiar, long-lost tongue.
On weekends, when they were playing cricket in the park, Clare and I would spend afternoons hidden in the look-out perch on top of the big beech tree that gave out over the estate. And though I listened to the far-away thwack of leather on wood with nostalgia, Clare seemed to hear the sound much more acutely and to see the game in quite a different manner. She looked on the distant players as toys, I think, as though seeing them very close to, and would reach her hand towards them and move it busily in front of her eyes, as if she was picking the batsmen and fielders up on a board in front of her and putting them in different places. She seemed to have an equally long and short vision, like a naive painter who shows details on the horizon as clearly as those in the foreground.
Clare watched and she listened for most of every day then, so that her sight and hearing, always fine, grew startingly acute. There were sounds that she heard, at midday or late in the evening, of some animal moving or crying, which I never heard at all, until, like a pointer, I noticed her sudden attentive stillness as she distinguished a particular warble or crackle in the branches or undergrowth, naming it in her mind perhaps.
‘Pheasant?’ I would say. ‘Rabbit? Stoat? Fox?’ always the man with words, tempting her with them like a bag of sweets. But at best unhappy at this verbal distraction, she would merely turn and look at me, her face blank where it was not annoyed, unable or unwilling to confirm anything for me in her own voice.
Sometimes, as another way of encouraging her with language, I read to her in the hot afternoons sitting in the tree-house, when she was swaying in the hammock above me, the bees and insects a humming gallery all round us. There was the old copy of Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Pigling Bland which Alice had brought down from the Victorian nursery. It wasn’t the most suitable story, this account of porcine deprivation and exile. I don’t know, but perhaps for this very reason it was the only book that Clare took any great interest in. Yet it wasn’t the story, I think, so much as the onomatopoeic dialogue of the animals that caught her attention. Words, if no more than sounds, were acceptable to her: she had banished the coherence of plot from her life.