My voice would rise up to Clare, like an actor’s, trying to give the piglets real life for her. And sometimes she almost laughed; she reponded to the ‘idditty idditties’. But more often there was silence as I ran through the saga of Pigling Bland: only the leaves stirring in some faint breeze as an accompaniment, Clare’s hammock swaying, as she watched them, as she watched the puffy clouds float by, quite given over to some swoon in the summer greenery.
Several times, watching her growing passion for the natural world and the silent skills it fostered in her, I was tempted to give up words myself, give up trying to attach them once more to Clare. Surely, as she seemed to suggest so clearly, we lived in a place and in a manner, in a pre-human kindgom, where language was no longer necessary?
Signs would do — as they did for so much of real importance that passed between Clare and me in that time. For if Clare didn’t speak, she soon willingly followed by example. She learnt to hang the canvas bag out over the lake and dredge for water, and to fish from the same branch first thing or at evening when she heard the perch rise. And later, above all, when I took her right round the edge of the valley, she learnt the limits of our safety, how beyond this hidden domain lay danger, a world where she should not go. She was particularly fascinated by Spinks’s recurve bow, which I showed her how to operate. She wasn’t strong enough to draw it, of course. But she would handle it lovingly, for whole mornings or afternoons, aiming at imaginary targets in the branches, miming the draw and the release, the arrow singing away in her mind and striking home, leaving her with an expression of rapturous satisfaction which surprised me.
All this knowledge she absorbed far more by my showing her than from words. So that sometimes, as I say, I was loth to educate this increasingly skilful innocence, to infect it with words. I thought Clare might well be left free of the long sad language of history. At the same time I knew that one day she would have to learn this. We couldn’t live in the valley for ever. We were not animals in a pre-human kingdom. This vegetable world, this life on high formed a cure for both of us now, but at some point we would have to leave the trees and come down to earth. At some point? Day by day then I was happy to postpone it. There was so much to do, so much to keep us here meanwhile.
I’ve used the phrase ‘vegetable world’. But that may give a false impression, as if we lacked human response in the valley, became vegetables. It was rather the opposite. Freed completely from the ties of conventional thought, from all the devious forecasts and immediate considerations which ordinary life imposes, there was time for real thought at last. One could concentrate on the essence rather than the extraneous; on matters which at normal times occupy only the corners of one’s vision for brief moments: one could concentrate on looking, where one becomes so embedded in the object, so carried away by it, that self-consciousness is lost at last — corruption and mortality forgotten.
Painters work for such vision. But it came naturally to me, in that time out of life, and when it did self-realisation was complete. And instead of the hours in the day having to be filled, as I had expected, these traditional shapes of time disappeared altogether and there were only the acts and thoughts themselves, let loose from the clock, so that one was free at last. There was never too much or too little to do. There was simply the one thing to be done at that moment, without reference to past or future, complete in itself.
It’s only now, weeks later, that I remember certain moments, or actions which at the time I was unaware of while simply living through them, yet which must have impressed me unconsciously, so that I can only regain them now as events in a dream brought to light long after waking.
An oak tree, as I discovered for example, supports an extraordinary variety of minute or invisible life in midsummer: bees, flies, insects of all kinds hovering up and down the long interior glades in the leaves: glades and twisting tunnels and undulating roads made by the branches, a whole stereoscopic geography which, living in the midst of it, becomes as familiar and unnoticed as the tracks or alleyways around a childhood home. Along these airy paths, shut out from the world in a green shade, the insects move, like traffic, with a constant hum …
And what I see — and hear — now, and had forgotten, is Clare gazing deep down into one of these leafy caverns, with an extraordinary longing in her face, as if she was struggling to resist the temptation to glide off after the insects, to actually get into and share their world with them. Instead, compensating for her inability to do this, she hummed with the insects. Yes, she ‘buzzed’ in different ways with her lips, miming a variety of them distinctly, successfully identifying with them in this way. And it’s strange that I’ve forgotten this until now, for it was the first time that Clare used her lips, gave tongue at last, when she properly broke her silence.
I told Alice when she came up to see us later that day, ‘She may talk again. Soon.’ But Alice said nothing in reply. Perhaps, like me, she silently feared a change, any change, in this Arcadia. Of course the world outside was not entirely forgotten. Alice, together with the old transistor, kept me in touch with it. Much of central England was being scoured in a search for us. But no one visited the valley again, and no one, apparently, had traced the car, or Arthur’s clothes, or Alice’s money. In the middle of that warm summer, with so many people looking for us, searching all round us, hurrying to and fro with messages, rumours, tip-offs, we were a still centre in the hidden valley.
‘What about Mrs Pringle?’ I asked Alice one afternoon in the tree house.
‘Nothing. She never mentions Harry Conrad’s visit. She looks at me, that’s alclass="underline" rather pityingly, I think. As if I should have someone to look after me. The hell with that. I can look after myself. I’m busy anyway, preparing this fête with the local Victorian Society.’
‘Fête?’
‘Remember — I told you. It’s exactly a hundred years ago this
August when they finished building the Manor. So we’re going to celebrate: a jousting tournament, a costume ball. In medieval dress.’
‘I’d forgotten. But surely you’ll need your husband for that?’
‘Certainly not. He’ll be out on Long Island all summer — watching polo, I expect. The divorce comes through in September. I never want to see him again.’
Alice was sitting on the edge of the tree house, her feet dangling in space, looking away from me, down into the green depths beneath. Clare was high above us, on top of the oak, absorbed in her vision of the clouds. It was a humid afternoon, stuffy. Something threatened. And there was another tenseness in the air now between Alice and me. This talk of Arthur and divorce again proposed a future which we both seemed unwilling to face. There were suddenly all sorts of things once more undecided, like the weather, for both of us.
Then Alice looked up at me and, as if to get away from this uncomfortable future, I thought, she said, ‘I’ve been wondering about Clare’s autism. It’s curious …’
‘I know that.’
‘The causes, I mean, There’s a book apparently, The Forbidden Fortress, by someone called Bettelheim.’
‘Yes. I know it. Never got to the end of it, though. It’s mostly case-histories. We gave up on books, Laura and I. On books and quacks and the special schools.’
Alice looked at me now, carefully this time, some big hidden query in her eyes. ‘The causes, though,’ she said again.
‘They vary. Biological, psychological, traumatic, environmental — ad nauseam. They vary in each child, and in most professional theory.’