She liked the real tennis court, too, at the back of the house, built with a sloping interior roof all down one side, like a monastery cloister, where the Hortons, presumably giving up the archaic game, had built a little stage at the far end of the court. And it was this stage which Alice had refurbished, complete with new velvet drapes and Victorian oil footlamps. And here one day we set up an old nineteenth-century Punch and Judy show, which Alice had bought at Sothebys, and played rumbustious scenes for Clare, as an audience of one on a single chair beneath the stage on the vast pinewood floor. This mime, with gruff and shrill voices added, drew a response from her: a smile, a human laugh almost. She was involved, certainly. I remember looking out through the side of the little wooden proscenium at the end of an act, and seeing Clare’s face, caught in a shaft of afternoon sunlight from the clerestory windows overhead: a face from which tragedy and vacancy has disappeared now, where she had escaped her past for a moment and could, I thought, have moved off there and then into a future in this house. Indeed, immediately after this last Punch and Judy show, Clare seemed to want to do just this: she tried to skate away across the huge space, thinking the old tennis court some magic place, an ice rink or frozen pond perhaps, but the floor wasn’t slippery enough.
But mostly we lived upstairs in the tower and on the long, half-repaired attic corridor on top of the house, where Alice stored her costly junk. And we gave Clare a headquarters here in the old nursery further along, at the end of the landing, where there was so much we thought she could occupy herself with: the row of blackberry-eyed Victorian china dolls on the sofa, the big doll’s house … There was a marvellous wooden train on the floor, too, a black-and-green engine big enough to sit in, with two open carriages behind. And a vast collection of old wooden animals, each of them paired, male and female, camels, elephants, giraffes, cows, cats and dogs, all of which had a place in a large white Ark; the deck came off the boat and the whole menagerie could be bedded down in stalls inside, with Noah, a commanding figure with a golden beard, standing by the ramp.
But none of these riches stirred Clare much. She was listless, fractious here in the nursery, where she was not totally lost, staring vacantly out into an empty world from an empty mind.
Alice, now that Clare was a guest in her house, took a special interest in Clare’s problems. We often sat, all three of us, in the nursery, for the bad weather had set in for a week and we couldn’t venture far outside the house in any case. Alice would look at Clare across the room, sunk on her haunches, playing repetitively with her pile of bricks: again the strange circles, with pyramids and cones inside them; and again the clear blue eyes, unblinking, as she repeated her handiwork by the hour.
‘It’s as if she had things on her mind too hard for her to tell us,’ Alice said one afternoon. ‘Or that we wouldn’t understand. Complicated things, beyond us. When you look at her eyes — you can telclass="underline" she knows something, and we don’t, and can’t know it.’
‘Whatever she knows in that way,’ I said, ‘she doesn’t know. She’s suppressed it. That’s the whole point of her problem: whatever it is, she can’t face it.’
‘I wonder. That’s the usual view. I have the feeling she has some kind of power which she knows all about. Some extraordinary knowledge, a gift she has no use for here with us, in this world, which is why she doesn’t respond. She’s somewhere else all the time.’
‘Obviously. But there’s nothing positive about that “somewhere else” where she is. It’s just a blank. She keeps whatever is real in her at bay by playing repetitive games.’
‘How can you be so sure?’
‘It’s too well known. It’s the syndrome: she has all the classic symptoms. Kanner’s Syndrome, it’s called. That’s autism. She’s not the first child to suffer it, you know. Why should you think it’s any different with her?’
‘You assume it’s autism, and that’s the way you treat her —’
‘Yes, of course.’
‘But you won’t look for the cause of it and treat that instead. That’s what I’m saying. The cause is something quite different, isn’t it? You’re treating the complaint, the result, without knowing the reason.’
‘You think there’s a quite logical mind there, do you, ticking away behind the empty façade?’
‘No. A quite illogical mind maybe. But she’s thinking about something. I can feel it. It’s just that what she has on her mind doesn’t correspond with anything in our way of thinking. We’d deny it in her if we knew about it. So she keeps it to herself.’
‘What, though? What’s she hiding? What’s the form of her thought? If it’s not normal, is it paranormal? What are you getting at?’
‘At something maybe in that direction. I don’t know what. For example, have you ever wondered why she always sits like that, always crouched down on her haunches?’
‘Children often do. Quite normal children. They can get at things on the ground more easily.’
‘It’s how Africans sit though, isn’t it? Out in the wilds.’
‘Yes, that too. She’d have seen them doing it. That’s another reason why she does it probably.’
‘And look at the circles she always makes with the bricks,’ Alice went on, suddenly running off after some undefined theory of her own.
‘Yes. What’s remarkable?’
‘The gap she always leaves, every time she builds it. Then she puts some of the animals, the cows usually, from the ark there inside. Then she closes the gap, with another brick.’
‘Yes, she makes a sort of stockade out of it. In Kenya they call it a boma, a native camp, with a circular wall round it made of thorn bushes. She’d have seen that too, up in Turkana province where they were, and the other wilder places. It’s just imitation.’
‘Possibly. But there’s one other thing: when she makes the circle and gets the animals in and blocks off the stockade, at the end of nearly every game like this, she climbs inside the circle herself, or tries to. She actually sits on the animals, like a sort of great broody hen. Have you noticed that?’
‘Yes, But she’s just destroying the game so that she can start it all over again. Why? What else?’
‘I think there’s something else. She’s trying to go back and live in the place, in some place like that: a circular stockade, with animals locked in safely for the night. She’s trying to get back into some security, some home of her own.’
‘Maybe. She may well see it in that way. Africa, all that early life of hers out there, is a kind of lost Eden for her. I told you before: I’ve often thought that was exactly the reason for her autism — that she was taken away from it. There’s your “cause” for you. But how do you treat that? Send her back there?’
‘Maybe. Maybe that’s exactly it. Perhaps that’s exactly what you should do. Or it’s what she wants to do.’
‘Don’t be silly. Clare hasn’t the kind of reasoning to want anything so intangible right now.’
‘I wouldn’t be so sure.’
We left it at that. However, the following day, I wondered if Alice might not have stumbled on something.
I had gone down the attic corridor with her to look over the collection in the little museum, in case there was something Clare could safely make use of there. The room — a maid’s room, I suppose — was halfway down the landing, the doorway partly blocked with Alice’s Victorian acquisitions, as well as by the great Nile crocodile which crouched in the shadows, its beady eyes and vicious snout guarding the room as though it was the entrance to a Pharaoh’s tomb.