Alice said, ‘There’s a little sort of museum in one of the rooms off the top landing: British rock specimens, wild flowers, butterflies, as well as things from abroad. There are some bones in there, too.’
‘Bones?’
‘Yes. I bought them all with the place, in a locked room, a lot of bits and pieces in glass cases. The people who lived here after the Hortons. He was something important in the Colonial service, a Governor in Africa.’
‘You mean African bones?’
‘I think so. There’s a broken skull. And a strange sort of shrunken head — that sort of thing. As well as spears, shields made from Zebra hide — you know.’
‘Yes. I saw the big crocodile up on that landing.’
‘It’s part of the same collection. I don’t suppose Clare would care for that. But there’s a lot of other things up there might draw her out. You see? You could help her just as well here as down in the valley.’
I started to believe Alice then. This whole vast house so stuffed with Victorian treasures, in packing-cases and now museum exhibits, along landings and in tiny rooms under the eaves, all this would surely form a cure for any child on a rainy day. And what did it matter about our relationship, any ambiguity between Alice and me? We still had one thing in common, certainly: both of us remained as cut off as ever from reality. We’d both of us come to hate the present world in all its bland and mean or vicious spirits, a place quite drained of character or design: that still held us firmly together: we’d come to hate the louts and the polo-players equally, in England or Long Island, along with the sly and the craven everywhere else. And I felt our shared distaste strongly as we stood together in the warm, pine-scented room, high above the land, gazing down on the imperious peacocks and the fountain. Why not stay here, I thought, perched as high above the house as we had been above the valley? Such remote eyries had become our natural habitat. Alice had gone to the fridge and opened it. I turned to her.
‘I didn’t really have time to tell you last night,’ I said, ‘about the African down there in the valley.’
‘No.’
‘But your mentioning those African things in the museum, African bones …’ I stopped.
‘So?’
‘Well of course it struck me: the man might have had something to do with Clare’s parents when they were out in East Africa. You remember that article you showed me — do you still have it?’
‘Yes. And there was another article about it in Time magazine last week. But you didn’t believe any of it.’
‘Well, what am I to believe now? What’s a man like that doing here? Just a chance hiker? Hardly. And he’s not one of Ross’s men. So who is he?’
I explained my theories about the African to Alice and she said finally, ‘Who knows?’
‘I wonder if he got away.’
‘We’ll soon know. It’ll be in the papers, on the news.’
‘But, if I’m right, why should he be after us? Clare would have been too young to have had anything to do with him in Africa, and I certainly don’t know him. So even if any of my theories are right — and if he killed Willy and Laura — what’s he going on following us for?’
The sun began to fade just then and a dark crept up over the whole landscape and there were spots of rain on the window. For the first time that summer it looked like a real change in the weather, with great cigars of grey cloud rolling up from all round the horizon.
‘I don’t know,’ Alice said. ‘Perhaps we’ll find out. Or perhaps we should make it our business to find out.’
She had prepared some biscuits and covered them with processed cheese squeezed from a Primula tube in the fridge, chopping the lot up on a plate. Then she put it all down in front of Clare, still crouched by the day-bed, without looking at her, offhandedly, just as one might leave out a dog’s dinner under a kitchen table.
‘We’ll find out about the African. Or we’ll have to find out.’ Alice repeated her ideas, thoughtful now, as if planning something vital once more, as she had with Clare’s rescue from the hospital.
‘There are some old friends of the Kindersleys,’ I said. ‘The Bensons. I know them quite well. They might help. She’s an entomologist and he used to work with Willy picking up fossils in East Africa. He lives in Oxford now. Works at the Natural History museum there.’
‘Can you trust them now? Won’t they just think like the others: that you killed … your wife?’
I turned away from the window. It had started to rain now, a setting-in sort of rain, the first of that summer. ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘They’re certainly a pair of rather dry sticks, the Bensons. It could be worth trying them all the same.’
I looked covertly at Clare hunched in the corner then. She hadn’t moved. But she had taken her hand away from her face. She was looking at the plate of food at least.
‘She might like some music,’ I said. I hated seeing Clare as she was now, trapped, caged, like a hurt animal. It was terrible.
‘There’s a radio here somewhere. There, under that cloth.’
Alice went over to where rolls of variously coloured tweed were piled up on a trestle table against one wall. There was a stereo transistor behind them. She turned it on. The music was from Radio 3 again: Vivaldi, precise, dainty, remote. The sound from the two speakers reverberated perfectly about the domed ceiling of the old smoking room. But it made no difference to Clare.
‘It’ll be some time,’ I said, ‘before she improves. If ever. God …’ I was depressed, tired. I closed my eyes against the world, against the sudden grey and rain-filled weather that was sweeping in over the wolds. I tried to let the music wash through my mind like the rain: wash thought away.
‘I know!’ Alice said, suddenly enthusiastic about something. But I didn’t open my eyes until I heard the door of the fridge close. Alice had a half bottle of champagne in her hand. She popped the cork and poured it all out into three coffee mugs, the foam gently climbing up the sides. She put one mug down in front of Clare and handed another to me. Then she raised her own, drinking.
‘I’ve kept it up here — for a rainy day,’ she said.
I sipped some. It was good champagne, tingling cold. I drank some more. ‘Thank you,’ I said, looking over at her.
Alice had her hair combed severely back straight over the crown of her head, above her ears, so that the sharp curve of her jaw stood out very clearly, like a diagram in anatomy. Her eyelids flickered for an instant, caught in the rising spume of champagne bubbles. I was quite close to her.
I saw a small scar she had on one eyelid, running out a little towards her temple, which, close though I’d been to her, I’d not noticed before.
‘That scar,’ I said. ‘What happened?’ I touched her face briefly. ‘Just there. I hadn’t noticed.’
‘Oh, years ago. I fell down some steps.’
‘Yes?’
‘One summer out in the Hamptons. I must have been about ten. It bled a lot.’
‘I see.’
‘Yes. My father had just arrived. I was running down the steps too fast. He’d driven up from New York. I remember, we were all excited. He had a new car he’d gotten himself. A British car —’
‘A Rolls —’
‘No — some sports car they’d just introduced. Very fast. A two-seater, long bonnet and wire wheels — and a big, sleek, rounded ass —’
‘A Jaguar probably. An XK 120 — I remember them.’
‘Maybe.’
‘Or was it a Morgan or an MG?’