We met her coming down the oak staircase, half-asleep, alarmed. I told her what had happened and she had sent us at once to hide in the tower while she contacted the fire brigade and the police. And now we waited for her to come back from her interviews with the police downstairs: to hear the worst, perhaps? Had they, for example, found the arrow?
Hank, almost certainly, must have been burnt to the bone. But the arrow was made of aluminium. Besides, others in the circle must have seen the arrow: its impact, if not its flight. Would they remember the angle it had come from? From above? Or had they all been too drunk to remember anything? And what of the African? Had he escaped? Or had the police got him, along with the louts? Was this an end for Clare and me, or another beginning?
We waited. There were pots of raspberry and nut yoghurt in the fridge. But neither of us could eat. Alice’s big pinewood hand loom was in one corner of the room, with a half-completed roll in the weave, a rug it looked like, or the beginnings of one of her Indian bedspreads. Clare walked over to it and gazed at the emerging cloth intently. There was a complex pattern in it, red circles and lozenges on an oatmeal background. Clare touched one of the lozenges. Then she tried to pick the cloth apart there, extract the diamond, undo the weave, and failing this she started to manhandle the shuttles, tearing them out of the loom, so that I had to force her to stop.
And she was angry suddenly, a bitter fountain of rage, the pent-up frustration at the loss and change of her life coming into her throat with a violent scream, so that I was sure we would be heard downstairs. And I knew I wanted us both to survive, so I gagged her mouth with a hand, and kept it there, cruelly, firmly, for a minute.
Then I heard steps on the stairway outside the tower, and the door opened. It was Alice. Clare and I were down on the floor, as if we’d been two children fighting, struggling. But I could hold her tongue no more. I took my hand away, expecting the awful scream again. But it never came. Instead Clare gazed up at what Alice was cradling in her arms. It was a splendid model boat, several feet long, a fully-rigged three-masted tea clipper, an East Indiaman, the hull a gleaming black with a gold band right round beneath the rails and a scrubbed pine deck with little coils of rope and meticulously detailed brass fittings. It was obviously part of Alice’s expensive Victorian bric-à-brac from the top landing.
Alice saw the tears of rage, the anguish in Clare’s face. ‘Look,’ she said, without looking at her, bending down and setting the boat up on the floor, ‘there are even real tea-chests down here in the hold. You can take them out. And there are a few real sailors too, somewhere.’ Alice played with the ship then, rather than in any way pressing Clare to occupy herself with it. Alice had learnt all about Clare, was as tactful in her approaches to her now as Laura had once been.
Clare didn’t respond at all. But she didn’t scream, though, either. And, of course, I had realised by now that all her language would have gone again in this second change of home. She was mute with this loss of Eden. And we were back again at the beginning, where I’d been with her two months before in the valley: where one couldn’t look at the girl directly, explain anything to her, where she was practically an automaton, a vegetable.
Alice turned to me. ‘That’s one good thing about your being back in the house. There’s plenty to occupy Clare with. That whole top corridor is filled with stuff, old games and things.’
‘She’s going to need it,’ I said. ‘But will there be time?’
Alice looked at me, a sudden confident surprise in her face. ‘Why, of course. A lot of the wood is gone. But the fire burnt out all your tree-house as well. They’ve no idea you were there.’
‘But what about the one I shot?’
‘I don’t know about him. The police didn’t tell me, only that one of the boys died in the fire. They didn’t mention finding any arrow.’
‘And the African?’
‘They didn’t mention him either. So of course I couldn’t bring the topic up.’
‘Just playing cat-and-mouse with us,’ I said. ‘That’s all. They must be putting two and two together down there by now. It won’t be long —’
‘Nonsense,’ Alice interrupted. And then there was an interruption at our feet, a rending and splitting of wood. Arms suddenly flailing, her fists crashing through the masts and sails, Clare had destroyed most of the model ship before we could stop her.
The tea clipper lay like a real wreck on the floor all about us. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ Alice said, in a matter-of-fact way, clearing the bits up, while Clare meanwhile had slunk away on all fours like an animal and hidden behind the day bed.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ Alice said again lightly, as if Clare had just spilt some milk.
‘But it does,’ I said. ‘She’ll smash the whole place up. We can hardly keep her here anyway. I’m sorry. It’s ridiculous. It’s too much for you —’
‘You’re wrong. And it’s not.’ Alice was very firm, candid, in control. We were guests in her house now, she implied. We had come into a magic circle of her chivalrous protection, and thus all would be well. I was no longer responsible for our existence, as I had been in the valley. Alice was in charge now. I liked the idea and yet I resented it. I longed suddenly for the freedom of the trees again, where Alice had been a subsidiary visitor with us, in my world, dependent on me. Now, the chance unexpectedly emerging, she meant to turn the tables on me, it seemed. But perhaps what I really resented was the fact that in the woods, where my first priority was survival with Clare, I had not had to make up my mind about whether I loved Alice or was simply using her. In the wild, busy with Clare in the tree-house I’d built myself, the question hadn’t arisen. But now, as her guest once more, totally dependent on her, I had to ask myself again what our future was. How far could I go in using someone for my own convenience, if that was the only thing which bound us together? Without love?
‘I don’t know,’ I said weakly. ‘They’ll surely be looking for us again up here. We can’t stay here.’
‘But you can!’ Alice was almost joyfully dramatic. ‘Up here in the tower for the moment. No one ever comes up here but me. And the Pringles are off to Spain for their summer vacation in a few days. They’ll be away three weeks. You can come downstairs then. The place will be empty after Mary leaves in the mornings. That’s just it, don’t you see? You can stay here. And wait till you hear from your naval friend in Portugal.’
I walked over to the window looking westwards, down over the formal gardens, the lines of baroque statuary and the pond with the Neptune fountain and the flat top of the great cedar tree to one side. I could see a peacock in one of its upper branches and two others pecking fastidiously along the grass beneath. The heat wasn’t up yet. Indeed, the day looked set for some kind of change, for I could see huge rain-clouds gathering in the west. But this room, locked away high in the tower, was quite insulated from any change in the weather. And it was just as distant from the real world, too, which from this height and security one could view with equal disdain.
From here, on this side of the tower, one saw nothing but formal beauty, the well cut lawns, the imported eighteenth-century fountain, the ageless cedar tree, the bright blue birds who stretched their tails wide now and then in fans of dazzling colour.
On the other side of the tower was the burn-scarred valley we had left, the smoking ruins of a native happiness. I had thought in terms of alternatives. But there were none. Clare was still crouching behind the day-bed, feet up against her chest, hands over her face, living in a womb of her own making again. She was the first problem once more. She would have to be tempted back into life. I remembered the bones in the tomb on the island which had caught her fancy six weeks before. I’d told Alice about it at the time, and now I mentioned it again.