Willy was greatly missed of course. But his memory was never oppressive about the house. Laura and I, or their old friends down for weekends, would talk of him, when we did, almost in the present tense, as if he were upstairs and would come down in a moment to correct or comment on some opinion we had ascribed to him.
He wouldn’t, of course, ever come down or drop by in any shape or form now. But we didn’t mention this. Clare had ready ears everywhere about the house, and it had been enough of a business, Laura told me, explaining Willy’s death originally to the child, who had then relapsed for months into fearful outraged traumas. She had almost recovered since, we had thought, in the ease and security of our Cotswold cottage. But she had not yet come to see me as she had her father: as the miracle man, digging up old bones all over the splendid wilds of East Africa.
I was a duller thing by far: a schoolmaster of sorts, taking junior English at a pretentious minor public school five miles away. It’s true Clare had once paid me really startled attention: when she’d come round to the school one afternoon with Laura and found me involved with the archery club there, which Spinks, the games master, ran with some senior boys.
Spinks was absent that day, I remember: he sometimes was, suffering dire after-effects of the bottle. I was in charge, in any case, and Clare had watched the sport intently, eyes out on stalks, as the arrows thumped into their straw targets away on the far side of the games fields, where the fields gave out onto a rise with a beech coppice on top, only the empty Oxfordshire farmland beyond.
Clare had stared at me then, as I let off half a dozen shafts on the 40-metre range, as though the modern recurve bow in my hand had some profound old magic for her.
As indeed it had. Laura told me when I’d finished shooting. ‘In the Northern Frontier District once, in the very wilds on the Sudanese border we were on a fossil search, looking for some dried-out stream up there — and we came on this tribe, a lot of nomadic woolly-haired people with thin cattle, and butter in their hair, and some of the men had these old smoke-black bows with them, small bent things, like toys really. But with poisoned arrows, Willy said. Clare remembers, even though she was hardly four. One of the old men showed her how to hold it.’
Clare had been happy in East Africa, apparently. I’d heard tales of this sort from Laura often enough, memories of wild adventure. Clare had lived with her parents all the time then, wife and child out of town and up country for months on end, following Willy across the bush, through long hot days to evening tents under the stars; travelling by Land Rover or, in the great desert stretches to the north, moving by camel, even, to distant waterholes.
Animals shimmered on vast horizons for Clare in those years. Flamingoes had paddled in pink waters, hippos rose from crystal pools — and she’d become as much a part of this natural landscape then, I gathered: an animal herself playing beneath the thorn trees. Her world, for the first three or four years of her life, had been a world before the falclass="underline" literally, in fact, for there is another painful irony here, in that Clare’s malady, her complaint, that strange mix of frenzy and vacancy which is autism, never shows itself for the first two or three years of its victim’s life, when the child appears perfectly normal. And thus with Clare it happened to emerge only after she had left the plainslands and the deserts of the Great Rift Valley, when she had returned with her mother to London.
Her freedom out there was suddenly over. Walls replaced the tents, stones the grass, the sun was mostly put away — and Clare fell down some deep hole in herself. Of course, it seemed to Laura at least, as it did afterwards to me, that Clare’s problem might have come as a direct result of this deprivation as much as through the death of her father. But the experts had denied this. Autism, they said in their typically equivocal manner, had a physiological, psychological, or parental, but not an aesthetic, cause. It was something deeply inherent in any case, implicit from before birth perhaps, and not brought about by a change in landscape. Clare’s arrival in London, they said, had no bearing on her illness, which would have occurred as readily in Timbuctoo as Hampstead.
Laura had thought, she told me, to take the girl back to East Africa and see if a return to paradise might work a cure in her. But the images of her latter unhappiness there were too much for her, and certainly I, when I married Laura, had no skills which would take me to, or fit me for, those wild parts. Besides, we thought, surely the Cotswolds might work instead as a natural remedy, the high sheep pastures beyond Woodstock where we lived, lost in the hills: was this not an equal grace, a balm of classic English fields and trees and dry-stone walls which would set Clare free at last from whatever bound her, release her soul from the tower of silence where it was so often imprisoned.
We had hoped the Windrush valley and a Welsh pony through the autumn stubble might form a cure. And gradually, it’s true, under Laura’s intensive care, helped by Judy from the Post Office, and with her special school when it opened, she had seemed to get better. The tantrums, the silences, diminished and Clare had found threads again to lead her back into life.
Yet it was clear from her behaviour that Sunday morning that her progress might always be subject to dramatic collapse. George had been right: it was disheartening. One foresaw all the possible years ahead, the pain that lay in wait, forever on tenterhooks over this child, who would become a woman, still carrying the hidden plague, which might erupt again at any time, in a bus or in a marriage bed, or which might eventually lead her permanently to an institution.
Clare’s brightness, her beauty seemed so provisional that Easter morning, a wonderful light threatened with extinction — now or ten years hence. And I suppose it was this that made me short-tempered at lunch with the Bensons on that Easter Sunday, angry at life, taking too much wine with the meal, so that the others had to rescue me afterwards, force me away from the fire for a tingling afternoon walk.
Ours is a manorial hamlet, set quite on its own, high on the wolds, isolated near the top of the western escarpment, without shops or even a pub, largely owned by a celibate aristocrat, the last of a long line, a recluse who lives in the manor at the far end of the single street. My cottage, once the sexton’s, which I bought from the Church Commissioners eight years before when I was ‘retired’ from the Mid-East section of the Service, is not part of his honey-coloured empire. A quirky red brick neo-gothic affair beside the churchyard, it looks out over the narrow road in front with a small lawn and vegetable plot behind, bounded by a dry-stone wall and beyond that a great empty expanse of typical rolling Cotswold country, most of it still open sheep pasture, but lined here and there with high ridges of beech sunken laneways and crossed in part by an old Roman road, now largely overgrown, but which, if you manage to follow it correctly, takes you near to the school I teach in, four miles away. I knew this landscape intimately, and quite often in summer, even walked to work through it.
We set off in this direction across the fields that afternoon along a bridle path, Clare on her pony which we’d saddled up for her in a garden outhouse made over into a stable. It was bright but the wind was cold, whipping up the valley to the west, long wispy streaks of mackerel cloud running high above us. From the back windows of our cottage you could see out over most of this great stretch of open sheep pasture, divided only by a few dry-stone walls, gently shaped here and there by small folds in the land.
Apart from a stand of beech on a rise half a mile ahead and lines of dead elms, old windbreaks dotting the western perimeter, there was little immediate cover. And since the bridle path led only to a farm a mile away, there were rarely other people to be seen out in this pasture. A local farmer took hay to his stock in winter and once in a blue moon a trail of serious city hikers, with maps and bobble caps, thick socks and ostentatious boots, would wind their way impudently across the landscape. So it was that Laura, who saw the tall man first, was surprised.