‘No. I’m sorry it ever began.’ Annabelle called after me.
I turned, half-way across the patio. ‘Sorry? Is that all?’ I said bitterly. ‘I wish you’d told someone about all this before. What a lot of trouble you’d have saved everyone.’
‘Yes. But I thought Laura would have told you all about it, long ago.’ Annabelle looked at me sadly. She had a point there, I suppose. I turned and left.
Sixteen
On the drive back to Beechwood I wondered how I could have been so wrong about Willy Kindersley — and about his wife Laura. Though perhaps that was unfair. Clare’s abduction hadn’t been her fault. Rather the opposite: with her subsequent care she’d probably saved the child’s life. And yet she had never told me anything about it all. Had she intended to — one day? And I thought again of all the days we’d never had together. Or maybe, more likely, when she married me, she had wanted a clean slate over the whole thing, to start afresh, as if this frightening past had never happened. She had wanted to forget Africa, forget the African. And the tragedy lay in his wanting, so insistently, to remember her — and Willy and the other two, and Clare. His revenge had caught up with almost all of them. And the one thing I had to ensure now was that it didn’t catch up with Clare.
With his Libyan friend out of the way, I couldn’t see that the African had much chance of ever getting her back to his own country now. And so I could only assume that, at this point, driven by bitterness and anger in the whole matter, he simply wanted Clare dead, along with any of the white protectors or guardians he found with her. The African wanted his own simple revenge now on a white world that had dispossessed him of his home, extinguished his tribe and sent him into exile. That made sense. I could well understand that. But meanwhile the search for this natural justice had probably deranged him, which was why he’d been haunting our valley a few weeks before: not as rescuer but as killer.
There was also the matter of Ross to think about. Since it hadn’t been one of his hit-men, I realised now, who had killed Laura in mistake for me, Ross must simply have been pursuing me on his own account for any damning facts I might yet publish about my time in British Intelligence. Ross, as well as the African, was still to be accounted for.
Suddenly, as I drove along through the Oxfordshire lanes, I wanted to be out of England, away from the Cotswolds. I wanted another fresh start, just as Laura had, a year before. I wished I could have been in Lisbon again, on top of one of those windy hills, or in the old Avenida Palace Hotel, or out in Cascais — anywhere away from these threats, these imponderables.
But of course this was just what Laura must have felt, before she met me, when she first came back from Africa. She had wanted to forget it all too. And yet the past had caught up with her and with Willy. And now with George Benson as welclass="underline" the past in the shape of this canny, ever-persistent and now explosive African.
When I got back to Beechwood that evening Clare was asleep upstairs in the old nursery, safe and sound. After Alice had let me in through the back door we had gone up to her at once. I saw her sleeping then, just a sheet pulled half over her small body in the dry heat under the slates of the old house. She lay sprawled on her stomach, face down against the bed without a pillow, head sharply profiled, arms outstretched, with one leg raised like a hurdler about to jump.
I looked at her face as carefully as I’d ever done, remembering how often in the past I’d seen something of Laura’s expression there — a sudden narrowing at the corner of each round eye, the very slight, snub-like cast at the tip of her nose, the same fine, peach-coloured hair and skin. But I’d been wrong about all that, too. She wasn’t Laura’s child. And for the first time I realised I’d nothing left of Laura now — nothing of her flesh and blood, which I’d cherished in Clare in the months since Laura’s death. An inheritance, as I’d seen it — something of our love together commemorated in Clare — had been snatched from me. This child was a total stranger, reared in the African wilds, who had just happened to share some of Laura’s physical traits, that was all. And for a moment the realisation of this seemed to invalidate my life with Laura. It had been based on false premises. For Clare hadn’t been autistic either, but simply a child brought up without others of her kind who thus never received human affection or the language which comes to underwrite that. I had been wrong about everything, among them these things which Laura could so readily have explained to me. And again, I felt a sharp discontent — no, more a sense of exile: that Laura had kept me outside such vital places in her heart.
But watching Clare just then, lost so calmly and completely in sleep, I saw how vulnerable and thus how human she was. In such sleep, at least, she lost all her wild animal qualities: her speechlessness, her physical excesses, that worry in her eyes where she seemed to search for some ultimate horizon, a dream of a fair country where she could no longer live. In sleep now, she was an ordinary child in an old nursery, surrounded by animals as toys and not as sole companions and supporters. She was supported here by all the traditions of an essentially human childhood. And suddenly I saw another reason why Laura had kept me in the dark. She had wanted to give the child just such an ordinary background, a conventional future in a world which we had both hoped Clare would one day enter. And so she had kept Clare’s real past hidden from her as from me, so that the girl — with her disabilities or her wild gifts — could live a life in civilisation as easily as she might, and at least be unencumbered with African ghosts.
That made sense: Laura had been protecting Clare, as much as herself. She had been offering Clare a future by erasing her past as a happy savage. Yet had Clare really been happy in that wild valley, lying on the earth among the chickens? I remembered with what fear she had looked at the African, when she had first seen him again, in our own valley a few weeks before. But she had loved the African masks in the little museum along the landing. They had brought her to life again. There were contradictions here that I couldn’t follow. Though perhaps that was the whole point: they were exactly the contradictions inherent in Clare herself, part animal, part human, and she could not reconcile the two. Clare both loved and hated what she had lost, and Laura, from the very beginning, had sensed this: how much human hurt as wild happiness there was in the life of this child. In any case people have an enormous need to bury or deny such savage imponderables, the pain of such contradictions, and thus prevent their spread like a contagion among the human tribe. And this was surely what Laura had done.
But the disease, for so long dormant, had come to light again: with an African in the moonlight of an English valley, in a ceremonial mask, an empty basement flat in Norham Gardens. The wound of the past had opened again years later, like a dragon’s egg, offering a gaping vision of human folly and disruption. It was my job to close the wound now, if I could. That was all. Clare might no longer be Laura’s child. And yet exactly because of this, because she was so completely an orphan, I saw how much more she belonged not to one, but to both of us. And if before, by Laura’s deception, I had felt something vital in our marriage had been taken away from me — I realised now, watching Clare, how, in this new-found truth, I had been given the chance of properly commemorating my love for Laura, by ensuring that what she had wished for Clare would come to pass.
Later I told Alice all that had happened that day in Oxford, as we sat on chairs outside Clare’s partly open nursery doorway, on the top landing. Safe and sound, I thought … Yet now every creak and movement in the old wood of the Manor, as the fabric cooled after the long hot day, made me uneasy. The house was well locked, with the alarms set, and we had checked through all the rooms — the basement, the tower and all the other nooks and crannies — for signs of any intruder. But the African had been so like a ghost before, coming out from the Great Rift Valley to Norham Gardens, stalking through our woods by the lake as easily as he’d moved through the busy streets of Oxford, that I felt, with such apparent magic at his command, he might surprise us at any moment even in this stronghold — suddenly sweeping up on us, borne on some secret wind, through the walls or the roof of the house.