‘It’s quite all right,’ Alice said gently. ‘Go ahead, Anna — it’s hundreds of extra calories, but go right ahead, relax. You needn’t worry at all. It’s all over. My father’s gone out. He’s gone to get the police.’
Mrs Pringle looked greatly relieved. ‘Oh,’ she said nervously. ‘He … he needn’t have bothered. He asked me to call them myself. We wondered where you —’
Alice interrupted her graciously. ‘We were just talking together, outside. And now we’ll wait upstairs, I think.’
She had already begun to shepherd Clare and me forward, through into the main house. The Pringles stood aside, letting us pass without a word. But just as we reached the doorway of the kitchen, Alice suddenly turned back. I never saw her reach for her little automatic — only saw the gun itself as she levelled it at Mrs Pringle: and heard the shots. She could hardly have missed the woman with her great bulk, standing by the kitchen table. And she didn’t. The bullets whipped into her like little darts, puncturing, burying themselves in the meat of her body. Not one bullet, but two, three. I couldn’t stop her, though I tried.
‘There!’ she shouted as she fired. ‘That’s for sneaking on me: you fat sneak, you spy!’
Alice found these archaic expressions again in her anger, like a character in a Boys Own Paper adventure, while pumping the life out of this contemporary glutton, this cunning modern woman who had betrayed her — phoning her father in New York and now the police — finally destroying all her too honourable dreams.
Mrs Pringle keeled over the table like a huge top-heavy ship, scattering the fancy biscuits and the bottle of Ruby port, which broke on the old flagstones, the wine spreading like early blood, before the woman’s own wounds opened.
Again, the sound of the trumpets and the other raucous entertainment in the great hall drowned the shots from the automatic. No one moved for an instant. Then Mrs Pringle’s husband was down on the floor, tending his wife, while I stood there by the kitchen dresser, confused, appalled, the gunfire still ringing in my ears a certain end to things, to any future.
I turned to her. ‘For God’s sake!’ I shouted. But before I’d finished Alice swung round to face me, still holding the gun, levelling it at me now, as another who had betrayed her. I can’t be certain if she actually intended to fire at me, since I never gave her the chance, throwing myself violently to one side down behind the dresser. And when I looked up again a few seconds later, she and Clare were gone from the room, their footsteps beating on the corridor which led up to the great hall.
When I reached the entrance to the hall there was no sign of either of them. They’d been swallowed up by the crowd of costumed revellers, and it was almost impossible in any case to distinguish anybody in their various courtly disguises. All I did see was the two black-and-white chequered caps of police officers over by the hall door, bobbing about among the other more colourful headgear. Avoiding the police, I circled round the hall in the opposite direction, pushing and shoving among the ragged, jolly Knights and their women, the trumpets still blaring. For a moment I thought I saw Alice, her dark hair and bronzed shoulders, over by the hall door. But when I eventually struggled over to it, there was no one there. Alice and Clare had disappeared — out of the house perhaps, for the hall door was open. But where?
Outside on the gravel surround I saw the flashing lights of two police cars, parked some way down the drive, blocked by other cars parked all over the verge. They could hardly have gone down that way, I thought. I looked out over the dark parkland straight ahead of me. If Alice and Clare had left the house, and I felt sure they had, that would have been the only safe way for them to go: out into the darkness, beyond the ha-ha which divided the front lawns from the park. I moved off in that direction in any case, jumping down in the ditch and going on towards the cricket pitch.
Clare — as if the evening’s events were all part of some large joke — was laughing in a strange soundless way when I found the two of them fifteen minutes later sitting on the cricket-pavilion steps: knees tight together, head swaying up and down, hands clasped round her ankles, her face was full of smiles, as though Alice had just come to the end of some very good story. Alice was sitting next to her, breathing hard, puffed with her run across the long field.
I’d approached them warily enough, thinking Alice might draw her gun on me again. But when I asked her about it she laughed, as if she’d never levelled it at me.
‘I threw it away,’ she said. ‘No need for it now.’
She seemed to have forgotten the mayhem in the kitchen. She had already removed her shoes and now she started to take off her Queen of Beauty costume. There was a thin moon behind a filigree of clouds; it was bright enough, at least, to make things out. The night was still warm.
‘This is nonsense,’ Alice said casually. ‘This great outfit. I’m sweating.’
She took her velvet bodice off, then pulled the arms of the silk dress down from each shoulder before starting to release the catches at the back of her waist. Then she stepped out of it, leaving just a slip on beneath.
‘Cold,’ I said. ‘You’ll get …’ I really didn’t know where to begin. I was sweating myself. I shook my head. ‘Alice,’ I said finally, ‘I don’t see the point.’
‘Does there always have to be a point?’ she said. ‘Besides, there is a point,’ she went on suddenly. ‘We’re free.’
‘Yes. But —’
‘We’re still free,’ she insisted.
‘What can we do here, though? Just postpone the inevitable. The police —’
‘Why not? They can wait till morning.’
Clare spoke then, seemingly equally unaffected by the recent events, which I supposed she must have seen simply as a continuation of the two-day-long drama of the fête, the cricket match, the costume ball, the jousting tournament. ‘Are you playing again now here?’ she asked, ‘That game you had here before?’
‘No. It’s too dark, sweet. It’s too dark.’
I sat down beside Clare and picked her up and put her on my knee, holding her round the shoulders lightly in one arm. I thought this must be the end of things between she and I. And I wanted to make the most of it with her, without her knowing of my sadness. At least, I saw now, Alice was right in one way: there was some point in this last folly of hers: it had given Clare and me time together once more. We were both headed for separate institutions now, just as Alice was.
‘Clare,’ I started, thinking how I could tactfully explain my imminent departure from her life. ‘I thought I’d tell you —’
‘Story?’ she burst in brightly. ‘Iddity, Iddity story? The one of the pigs?’
‘Well, but I don’t have the book —’
‘Yes!’ she said. ‘The book in your head. Go on.’
And so instead of the slightest grim news, I started out on The Tale of Pigling Bland again, inventing what I couldn’t remember, the three of us sitting quietly on the pavilion steps in the dark.
‘This is the story of Pigling Bland …’
There was no noise in the night, far down in the parkland where we were hidden: except, after five minutes, the faint sound of a siren in the distance, just when I had got to the point in the tale where Pigling Bland, released from bondage, is stopped by the local village constable on his bicycle.
Later we slept fitfully on the pavilion floor, in a corner, on batting pads and among stumps, waiting for the police to find us: the three of us together in a line, secure in the dark, breathing the night air in the pavilion still warmed by the day, a faint smell of leather and willow, touched with linseed oil and old grass cuttings.