‘I don’t know. My brothers were all over it. And I just fell down the steps running after them …’
Suddenly we were both talking fast, the mugs bouncing in our hands — talking about nothing really, as if some quite unexpected sexual excitement had overcome us both which we couldn’t acknowledge then.
I stepped forward, involuntarily. I wanted, I think, to kiss the scar. But instead I trod on part of the ruined model boat. A spar cracked beneath my foot and I withdrew.
She said, ‘I could see the whitecaps — just before I fell — on the waves out at sea beyond the car, framing the car like a picture. It was blowing quite hard. Then I slipped.’
‘That sea you wanted to swim across, all the way to England?’
‘Yes. That was about the same time. I think they thought I’d fallen down on purpose to get attention, so they’d make a fuss of me instead of the car.’
‘Which wasn’t true?’
‘No. At least …’ She hesitated. ‘I don’t think so. How can one be sure? I can see it all, the whitecaps, the car, the blood. But I don’t remember the feelings exactly.’
This small mystery unearthed lay about Alice’s life — a query at the end of her words, an indeterminate feeling she had carried with her for nearly thirty years like the scar: an aspect of her otherwise so assured character which she had not resolved.
It hardly mattered in itself, I thought, this childhood fall, this possible rebuff. It mattered only in that now, through this small scar on her eyelid, I had suddenly, for the first time, gained a real access to her personality. I was there for an instant myself, with her on the steps of the Charles Addams house, on that windy day out on Long Island. I could see the sleek Jaguar and the whitecaps out in the bay. And I could hear her sudden tears, the pain of injury or dismissal — it didn’t matter which — so sharp and rending in childhood. I loved her then.
Alice lived for me in a real perspective now, as a feature in a map where there were clear compass-points at last. Her life could be related to some constant scale, to this scar, which provoked an intimacy between us greater than that of any sex. I could have kissed her then all right. But there would hardly have been any point. As we just looked at each other, with such candour, we could not have been closer. There was no more ambiguity.
I saw something move over Alice’s shoulder. Clare’s hand emerged from behind the end of the day-bed. Then she dipped a finger in her mug of champagne. She swizzled it about in the liquid for a minute so that it foamed again. Then she licked her finger.
It was a start, at least.
It was the beginning of August. I had been living wild in the valley for over two months now. But living in a house again, and sleeping in a bed now each night, inevitably brought a change of thoughts. Once more, surrounded by all the haunting impositions of man-made life, with its permanent threat of plans, expectations, decisions, I was forced to think of the future again.
If Captain Warren didn’t reply there would be no future for us in Portugal. If, on the other hand, I could somehow lay my hands on the African, and if I could contact the Bensons, I might prove my innocence and stay with Clare in England.
But the news that day, and during the days that followed, wasn’t helpful. In their accounts of the fracas and fire there was nothing in the media about any coloured man being involved. I supposed that the drunks had all agreed on silence about the African, and their attempts to roast him alive. The man must have got clean away, indeed, for there was no word of his turning up anywhere else in the locality, though we searched the local papers, and Alice kept her ear open with Mary, the two gardeners, and with the Pringles before they left, for any possible gossip about him in the area.
This surprised me. I wondered how any such badly burnt and highly conspicuous figure could escape detection locally unless, like me, he had holed up somewhere or had some help in the immediate vicinity.
I read the article in Time magazine, a development of the piece in the Sunday Times. But here, unafraid of libel I suppose, they were more free with their theories and the names behind them. Willy Kindersley, they said, in order to finance his expensive fossil hunts, had become involved in gun-running and other dubious trades with one of the warring tribes on the Kenya-Sudan border. There had been trouble for many years all over that remote northern frontier, between the Kenyan ‘Shifta’ — roving brigands — and rivals to the north, nomadic cattle-and camel-herding tribes in Uganda, the Sudan and Ethiopia: a traditional tale of mutual theft and pillage. But now they were having at each other with AK 47s and even portable rocket-launchers, instead of assegais and poisoned arrows.
It was an unlikely tale. Willy, I knew, had been largely financed by an oil company with East African interests anxious for such prestigious publicity, but more concerned still that Willy might discover potential drilling sites for them during his fossil surveys over the arid wastes of that Northern Frontier District. Besides, had the story been true, and had Willy thus suffered for some kind of double-dealing, why had the revenge been extended to his wife and beyond that to Clare and me? That made no sense.
On the other hand — just on the basis of no smoke without fire — it seemed to me now that something terrible must have happened to Willy Kindersley in these wilds of East Africa. But what?
‘Of course even though she was out there with him Laura may never have known about any problems,’ Alice said, when I commented on the article. ‘You told me they were very different people, after all.’
‘Yes. Chalk and cheese. But Willy wasn’t dishonest.’
‘You never met him, though. It’s all hearsay, isn’t it? Anything you know about him, you know only through Laura.’
‘Yes. But one knows.’
‘Does one? Just because one loves someone?’
‘Willy was really just an eccentric academic, I keep telling you. Besides, Benson ran all the practical details on these safaris.’
‘So he might know something special?’
‘Perhaps. Perhaps I should risk visiting him.’
But I postponed the visit. After so long in the open I began to enjoy the comforts and surprises of life in the house. And although Clare hadn’t improved with any coherent speech, still just expressing herself, when she did at all, with grunts and tantrums and in bursts of some strange language of her own, she was calm, at least, for long periods. She appeared to have accepted her enclosure. And when the Pringles went off on their Spanish holiday two days later, things were easier still, for though we kept our beds and ate mostly in Alice’s tower, we now had the run of the great house after twelve o’clock each morning when Mary left. So, as once the trees and lake in the valley had been our secret estate, now the house became an equally covert playground — the long upstairs passages, empty rooms, the junk-filled nooks and crannies in the attics, which Clare and I roved up and down on voyages of discovery during the rainy, unsettled week that followed.
We took Clare downstairs, too, showing her all the reconstructed Victoriana: the great hall, the dining-room, the real tennis court at the back, the old kitchen with the lamp room, larders and laundry beyond. Yet the great cast-iron boiling tub in the laundry was the only thing that intrigued her. She assumed it was for cooking in — an African memory, I supposed, though hardly of missionaries and cannibals. She would have stayed there content all day, sitting in the big pot and poking about in the grate beneath. But it was a dangerous room for a child to be left in, since there was a great mechanical linen press at one end against the wall, a Victorian patent device with an unruly ton weight, like a great broad coffin resting above a series of wooden rollers, which you turned with a handle and chain, pressing the rollers over the fabric.