I asked him, if he agreed to my proposals, to reply by way of a personal advertisement in The Times. Of course, he might send my letter straight to the police or, with them, set up some trap for me in subsequent travel arrangements. It was a risk. But given his long antipathy towards Britain in general, and his particular bitterness towards the secret men in Whitehall who had deprived him of his own house and lands forty years before, I thought he might well agree to any covert scheme I suggested, or even propose one of his own. His 50-foot ketch Clare, for example, struck me as a possible means of escape from England, and I said as much in a P.S. to the letter. I showed Alice what I’d written. She thought it a fair plan and posted if off some days later when she went up to London.
Meanwhile we extended the tree-house, bringing up more wooden beams from the old pumping-shed and making a lower floor to the house, connected by a ladder to what was now an open terrace on top of our accommodation. We made walls for this small lower room, with strips of polythene first covered by a cross-weave of small, leafy beech branches, so that in the end the breeze was kept out and the structure still maintained a perfect camouflage.
With the same broad wooden planks from the shed, and with the tools and other equipment we now had, I extended our reach over the line of trees that bordered the lake by building a series of aerial walkways with rope handrails through the upper branches, so that in the end it was possible to move right down to the beech tree above the stream at the foot of the lake without coming to ground, always hidden in the leaves. This gave us both another access to our tree house and another escape from it, if need be. We were no longer committed to a single front door.
And besides, we now had an aerial parkland to discover and explore along these wooden tracks. No longer confined to our own too familiar house and backyard, a whole new estate was opened up for us, new trees and leafy vistas, unfamiliar branches where the coppery summer light fell in different shades and patterns. Now we could move through the trees from one green country to another, almost as if the foliage was our permanent element, like fish in a stream moving invisibly through the weeds and shadows.
With more rope I built Clare a swing from one of the lower branches beneath the tree-house, out over the lake, so that if she fell it would only be a dozen feet into the water. But she never looked like falling. Always adept physically, in every kind of acrobatics, this mild trapeze-work came to her quite naturally. And certainly she preferred it, by way of occupation, to speech, speech which was so much more dangerous for her, full of compromises, a blueprint of discipline, of a restrictive order which Clare must have believed she had now well lost. So she grabbed the swing from a higher branch where she kept it out of sight, and would throw herself out over the lake on it, skimming the water like a swallow in the evening.
With the tools from the Manor we built a rough table as well, and Alice brought us down two small Victorian chairs from the nursery, which we could eat from, both of us crouched over the wood like oversized dolls in a nook. We had a small pinewood cupboard as well to keep things in. Thus the little lower room which emerged in the tree-house, where we now slept and ate, became a cosy place. Cosy, but small. It was difficult for me to do more than stretch my legs in it, sitting on the minute chair, after supper, sipping a whisky from one of the red picnic tumblers, while Clare became involved in one of her meticulous, mysterious games on the tiny table next to me.
I watched her one evening here as a bright sunset faded slowly all about us, her golden hair reflecting a last radiance in the twilight like a halo, as she concentrated on her ritual with the hospital bricks, moving them round and about, up and down, in Stonehenge circles and pyramids.
She wasn’t my daughter, I thought. But I loved her as much as if she had been. Loved her in a different way, I suppose, as someone free of me, as one might love an older woman from afar, for a beauty and an independence of spirit, who yet, without her knowing it, relied on me for her very existence. There was an unusual and comforting, a completely unpossessive intimacy between Clare and me; that of complete strangers forced together, who yet miraculously find, without words, that they share the same temperament, assumptions, hopes.
And at such times in the evening, after all the energetic activities of the day, her speechlessness no longer seemed out of place. We might have been two friends, tired together, sitting in the hotel lounge after a long day out in the ordinary world. Friends: that was it. That was what was unusual. There was an adult relationship between us, which her lack of words accentuated. We seemed, as adults, as two old friends might, to understand each other without speaking.
Two friends camping in a cosy place … We even made a shelf for books and had a basin for washing things in. The rubbish we wrapped up carefully every few days and Alice took it away with her in a bag with her swimming things back to the house. For this swimming, of course, which she had done in any case most days down by the lake, now became her excuse for visiting us.
We swam ourselves, Clare and I, as I’d done myself to begin with, first or last thing in the day, in the natural pool hidden behind the fallen tree at the bottom of the lake. And it was here one day, just after first light, down from our tree and sliding through the undergrowth, that we suddenly came on one of the deer from the parkland, a big antlered buck, head high, alert, drawing breath, its nostrils steaming in the early morning air. It was right by the edge of the water, next the ruined pier of the old boat-house.
I think Clare saw it first. Certainly she thrust her arm up at me, holding me back in excitement. But the animal must have smelt or heard us, for it suddenly turned and looked straight at us.
And it was then that Clare first spoke.
‘Game!’ she said, quite clearly, her face alight. And then she lifted both arms suddenly and mimed the action of shooting the buck with a bow and arrow. She drew and released an imaginary arrow several times at the animal, before it trotted away down the edge of the water. But then, like an arrow herself, suddenly released and homing viciously, Clare ran after it, fleetfoot, with an extraordinary speed and vigour the like of which I’d never thought to see in a child, so that I was barely able to keep up with her.
The buck, which before had simply been trotting away from us, now took to its heels in alarm, disappearing into the undergrowth before I heard it crashing up the slope of the valley. But Clare ran with it, keeping pace with it, her gold mop of hair flattened in the wind all round her head, before she disappeared as well.
I found her on top of the valley, leaning on the fence beyond which she knew she mustn’t go, looking out over the parkland where there were only a few sleeping cows. The buck had quite disappeared. She had a pained, mystified look on her face, as if, I thought, having so obviously killed the buck with her initial flights of fancy, she could not now understand where the carcase was.
Then she turned and said to me very urgently, ‘You kill it. You kill it!’
She inverted the pronoun, of course, as she had before in her damaged speech: she meant ‘I’ when she said ‘you’. But now, so much more than a single word, she could put words together into an expressive sentence. She could speak. I was so pleased with this miracle that it was only afterwards that I reflected on the nature of what she had actually said that morning in the dew-drenched summer airs above the valley. ‘I kill the deer. I kill it!’ That was what she’d said. A strange, animal vehemence which had not been there before had suddenly entered Clare’s life.