So we sat there, quietly, on the top landing — Alice with her small automatic and I with the old pump-action Winchester.22 across my knees. After what I’d experienced that afternoon, I wasn’t going to bother with Spinks’s bow, or the swords tick or the poisoned dart. Now, if it came to violence, I aimed to fire first. It was time to put away native things.
But it didn’t come to it. Nothing untoward happened that night. And the only news next morning was good news: along with an account of the Oxford fracas, there was an answer from Captain Warren at last in the personal column of The Times. Under the code name ‘St. George’ which I’d asked him to use, the message ran:
‘That’s clever of him,’ I said to Alice. ‘Tewkesbury is way inland. Only about twenty miles or so south-west of here, on the river Avon, where it joins the Severn and runs out to sea at Gloucester. Obviously he knows he can get the ketch that far up-river. He won’t have to risk staying in any port, with police or customs about. And with all the summer boats around on the river and in the Bristol Channel, he won’t be noticed either.’
But Alice was not so enthusiastic. ‘It’s probably a trap. And how can he sail over here alone in any case, all that way? An old man? All the way from Lisbon and back?’
‘Why not? He has a man to help him, and he was a captain in the Navy himself. He did it before, too, when he first took the boat out there.’ I was elated. ‘The first of September,’ I said. ‘That’s in ten days time. We should be able to get to Tewkesbury from here easily enough.’
It all seemed suddenly possible just then — my escape, Clare’s escape. I’d forgotten the African. I’d very nearly forgotten Alice. We were sitting, the three of us, having breakfast up in the tower, with the windows open. Mary, the daily help, was downstairs doing the rooms. The Pringles were still away on holiday and the two gardeners were still clearing the wood, but round the lake now and the valley to the east where we had lived, cutting out the burnt trunks of beech. The weather was hot again. But it was a muggy, flyblown, mid-August heat, with low hung cloud overhead and little black thunderflies in the air even at that time in the morning.
Alice stood up and went over to the fridge. She was wearing a thin, short-sleeved cotton shirt and she reached round an arm now, trying to scratch the small of her back where something had bitten her. I got up myself, following her, and scratched her back for her. Clare meanwhile had returned to the floor where some days before she had started trying to re-assemble the model of the old tea clipper she had destroyed a few weeks ago. It was as if, unconsciously, she already sensed a maritime departure in the air.
‘I’m sorry.’ I still had my arm on Alice’s back. ‘It’s just that yesterday left its mark. I was hoping I could be out of all this: the African. Not you.’
‘But why bother about him at all now? Why not tell the police yourself in any case? About everything, from the beginning?’
‘About that Libyan in the museum? And what about that Hell’s Angel I shot — apart from Laura, who they’ll still think I killed. There’s an awful lot of mayhem I still have to account for.’
‘Well, you can’t run forever. And you can certainly prove self-defence in the museum. And what you did in the woods could have been an accident. Besides, it was the African who pushed that lout onto the fire. And you didn’t kill Laura.’
‘Maybe. But while I was proving all that the police would be bound to hold me for quite a time. And what would Clare do meanwhile? No — I have to try and get her back to Portugal, where the Warrens can look after her. So I can’t tell the police now. Don’t you see?’
‘Perhaps.’
I could see how Alice clearly foresaw an end to things between us now; a possible future let go by default. She opened the fridge and bent down, and her shirt slipped up her back a few inches, showing her narrow, bronzed waist and the sharp bones in her vertebrae. A sense of other life — ordinary life, domestic life, loving life — suddenly moved in me.
‘What about your divorce?’ I asked.
Alice stood up, three yoghurt tubs in her hand. ‘September,’ she said. ‘The settlement is all but agreed in New York. Not that there was much to settle. The house here is mine, of course.’
I thought I knew what she was thinking. ‘Would you live with me? Would you really want to?’ I asked.
‘Yes,’ she said abruptly, impatiently. ‘What else could be so obvious? It’s you, though. Do you want to?’
‘Yes,’ I answered, but more slowly.
‘You don’t seem so sure.’
‘Just it’s never been so easy, for me.’
‘Nor me. I told you. With anyone. But we could probably get on together. We’ve plenty in common.’ She smiled. ‘We don’t get on with other people after all. That could be the main thing!’
She stopped smiling then. But there was something even better in her face — hope, and a wry, calm amusement: the reflection of a future between us, offered up and jointly accepted.
‘I love you,’ she said. ‘But if you’re going to be running all over the world soon —’
‘Let me get Clare safely to Portugal.’
‘Safely?’ she said, suddenly angry. ‘But the boat could sink. Besides the old man may have set up a trap for you in Tewkesbury. He probably told the police here as soon as he got your letter.’
‘I’ll have to take that risk. But if I get to Portugal, and leave Clare, I’ll come back here and we can start afresh. I’ll tell the police all about it then. And later maybe we can get Clare back, and she can live with us.’
Life sprang up before me then, another life, another chance with Alice and Clare. Perhaps I didn’t deserve it. But it was there all the same, waiting for me.
Then we heard the car drawing up, crunching round the gravel in front of the house, and I felt threatened once more. ‘Don’t worry,’ Alice said. ‘It’s nothing. Just those Victorian people — the Society. They’re coming this morning to start fixing things up. This weekend it’s the hundredth anniversary of the house, you remember? The fête, the jousting tournament, the cricket match, the costume ball. Had you forgotten?’ She smiled now, that active smile of hers, where she suddenly became a decisive person, intent on life, with all the gifts for living. Indeed, I saw how our being together these past few months had so encouraged both our better qualities. She no longer acted without cause, a mad Ophelia in a Camelot outfit, spotlit among the greenery of the conservatory, or gave Indian war-whoops without answer down by the lake, or brought roses to a crumbling tomb. She had a live audience at last, a sounding-board with me — and her mimic vigour, her quick laughter, her idiosyncratic renovations about the house were no longer masks in front of some awful despair, but the true face of appropriate passions. As for me, where there had been an equal despair, she had given me a similar hope. All the same, I wasn’t living with Alice yet.