The Valley of the Fox

by Joseph Hone

  Three

  Spinks, the games master, was sacked a week before half-term in my school that summer. And since no reason was given to the other staff by the naive Anglican cleric, phrases such as ‘gross indecency’ and ‘unnatural vice’ echoed wordlessly in our minds.

  In fact, as one of the all-knowing school prefects told me privately later, it had been a simpler, entirely natural matter. The worse for drink one night Spinks had forced himself upon the school housekeeper, a pneumatic divorcee known by the boys as the ‘Michelin Woman’, down near her room by the garages.

  There was, indeed, a decidedly motorised air about the whole business, since, as the boy explained to me, the assault had apparently taken place not only in one of these lock-up garages, but in or about Spinks’ own car, a small, ill-conditioned MG two-seater, the lady in question forced over the bonnet or some such. Though Spinks had vehemently maintained, the prefect who knew him went on, that the event had occurred with the lady’s full co-operation, while the two of them were actually seated in the passion-wagon – a proposition which, given the housekeeper’s girth and apparent decorum, had not convinced the Headmaster.

  However it was, this matter, a farce in one way, turned out a blessing for me in another. Spinks had packed his bags at once and left. And since I had some athletic inclinations I was immediately given his job, pending a replacement. Yet Spinks, in his blind hangover, hadn’t taken everything with him. Going alone into the sports room the next afternoon I saw that he’d left a big backpack of his behind in a corner, hung up in a slovenly way, but complete with sleeping bag, a small camping gas burner, some iron rations and a lot of other jumbled-up camping equipment I didn’t bother to look at.

  Spinks had been in charge of some senior boys on a mountaineering trip in Wales during the Easter holidays, and this was the unpacked remains of their week in the hills. I left the bag where it was, assuming that Spinks, when he’d sobered up, would return for it.

  In the same room, behind a locked metal grill, was the school’s archery equipment, half a dozen junior flat bows, with arrows to match, and the same number of more powerful, fibreglass, recurve bows, 25- and 30-pounders, for the seniors. One of these, the biggest of them, belonged to Spinks, a 32-pounder which he used on the longer ranges and which I’d come to shoot with fairly well myself over the past year. I had duplicate keys now, both to this archery equipment and to the sports room itself. So it was that Spinks’ alcoholic and sexual excesses led directly to my own survival a week later.

  But before then the headmaster had asked to see me.

  ‘About Spinks,’ he said, getting up suddenly from the big mahogany table. His study, the best front room of an older Georgian building in the school, looked out over the playing fields. A house cricket match was in progress on one of the far pitches, the white clad figures distant moving spots on the green sward. The headmaster, at the window now with binoculars, gazed at the players lovingly. He’d been something of a cricketer himself, apparently, in his youth, playing for his county.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘What about Spinks?’ I bad things to do, indeed I should have been out umpiring one end of the cricket match at that very moment. I liked my cricket, too.

  The headmaster turned. ‘I don’t want it voiced around: that he was … drunk in charge.’

  ‘Oh, was he? I didn’t know.’

  ‘Yes. That wretched car of his.’

  ‘His car? I understood it all had to do with Matron – in his car.’

  The Head looked at me quickly. ‘You heard that?’ he said, alarmed.

  ‘It’s a rumour.’

  ‘Worse still.’ The head pulled at one of his long earlobes mournfully.

  ‘I liked Spinks,’ I said suddenly. ‘I’m sorry he’s gone. He was very good with the boys, even when he was drunk.’

  ‘No good at cricket, though.’

  I didn’t point out – and I should have done – that the Head himself, fanatic that he was, normally tried to deal with most of the cricket, certainly with the seniors, leaving Spinks and me to manage all the unwilling or incapable other boys. Spinks himself had told me he’d never been given a chance with the cricket.

  I hadn’t respected the Headmaster much before. Now I suddenly disliked him. Spinks had had to do with life, at least, drinking and copulating and thumping most arrows into the gold at fifty metres on a good day. This man and his third-rate school were both concerned only with appearances.

  I said to Laura when I got home that evening. ‘The Head’s a fool.’ She was out in the back garden by the stable, helping Clare with the pony.

  ‘And his school is worse,’ I went on. ‘If you can’t get into Eton or Winchester why bother with any of these other tatty sort of places at all?’

  She said nothing. So I added, with a touch of annoyance, ‘I’ll have to get another job.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said at last. ‘What?’

  It was the old story. Apart from the nonsense of espionage and now fourth-form English, I was unemployable. Oh, I might have held down some awful job in London in advertising or some such. But in the middle of the country?

  ‘You’ve almost finished that book, haven’t you? About your time in Egypt,’ Laura said.

  ‘Yes. But they don’t publish books like mine any more: colonial memoirs, amateur history. There’s no market. Only for sex or violence – or Edwardian country diaries.’

  I looked out over the pasture behind the cottage, the fine, early evening light piercing through the great lime tree next the church, edging all the fresh green leaves with gold. More than forty I thought, with nothing, professionally, to show for it. A feeling of disappointed ambition came over me. But for what, I wondered? What had I ever really wanted to be? A taxi driver, yes, when I was a frustrated, motor-mad boy during the war and had noticed that, besides doctors, only taxi drivers could get petrol and drive freely all over the place. But apart from that, afterwards? I realised that I’d never wanted to do very much in the world as it had become. I’d fallen into my few jobs or, as with my work in British Intelligence, they’d been forced on me.

  I’d seen behind the curtains of British political power – seen the moral vacuum there, the casual mayhem, the violence to no end. And since then I’d compromised with the public face of our morality, too, in the minor public school where I worked, and I saw that now in all its pretentious hypocrisy.

  There weren’t any more dashing people left in England, I suddenly decided; only crafty ones. The idealists, the witty drunks, the eccentrics, they were all gone. Decent fools like Spinks, for example, they got the chop every day, while the cunning, the dull and the vulgar prospered. The small men had come to rule.

  And since I wasn’t a crusader, lacking the heroic almost entirely, there wasn’t much left for me to do in England, I realised. Without Laura and Clare I would have sold up and gone out to the south somewhere, France or even further afield. But with them I had everything, I saw that then, and the school didn’t matter.

  Laura said, ‘Well, you’ll have to stay where you are then, won’t you? For the time being.’

  Our lazy Welsh pony leant against the stable door, dozing in the sunlight, almost asleep even though Clare was using the curry-comb, working it vigorously down its flank. She talked to the animal as she combed out the last of its winter coat. He was called ‘Banbury’.

  ‘Blueberry, Bunbury, Bellberry,’ she chanted with each stroke. She named him differently almost every day. Minty, our wire-haired terrier, had joined us and was lying out now, knowing it to be quite safe, in a sunny spot right beneath the pony’s belly.

  Laura said, ‘Why don’t we have a drink when I’m finished here – and forget about the stupid school.’

  With happiness, how easy it was not to care a damn in the end about failed ambition or the state of the nation. ‘For the time being,’ Laura had said. And that, certainly, I knew now, was everything.

  *

  Of course, what I’ve asked myself since is why David
Marcus should have suddenly decided to kill me more than two years after I’d finished all my dangerous business with him. So why take so long to move against me?

  I can think of only one answer: as Head of Service now, he’d got wind that I’d started to write about my chequered career in British Intelligence, and thought that I was about to join the ranks of those little sneaks, as he would have seen it, who told tales out of class. Yet there must have been more to it than this: many others, in fact and fiction, had thus publicly betrayed the faith and survived. And especially so, since I’d only written about the very beginning of my career in Cairo, as a schoolteacher, when I’d first become involved in the old Mid-East section there, more than twenty years before. I’d sent a few sample chapters about this to a London publisher some months before. I’d thought it was innocuous stuff, those early days in Cairo, the life of that burnt city just before Suez: how I’d met my first wife there: before she ended up in Moscow a few years later working for the other side. A broken marriage – as well as a smashed and betrayed British network in Egypt. But it was all very old stuff.

  Well, it struck me that some publisher’s reader or editor must have seen this autobiographical material and chatted about it, in a London club, to a friend still in the game, who in turn had mentioned it to Marcus or someone close to him.

  And that was the rub. If I’d started to talk about my wife, Marcus must have thought, I must one day talk about the other agents and worse, the double agents I’d dealt with. There were other horses from the same stable, later recruits still active, apparently in Moscow’s cause, but in fact serving the west – or what was left of the ‘west’. I knew at least one of their names and even though I’d no intention of ever actually writing about them, I suppose Marcus had decided he couldn’t trust me and my entirely quiet life had to go. Of course, as I see it now, I should never have sent those few chapters of my memoirs to London in the first place. It’s the only time I ever had enough vanity to betray me, for they weren’t very well written anyway, I see that too, now.

  Clare was downstairs with us that evening, a Friday, just at the start of our week’s half-term. It was nearly eight o’clock. Had she gone to bed at her usual time she would have been saved some of the pain. But as it was we were all there together, Clare between us, on the big sofa in the drawing-room.

  The record-player was on, which was why Clare was late going to bed. She loved music, all sorts, as long as there was a melody, however faint, or a rousing tune to hang on to. It calmed her. Instead of the smell of flowers or lavender stalks, it was the pure sound here which she absorbed in rapt silence, like a fastidious critic, her eyes quite still but alert, as though she was looking backwards into herself, opening channels into the blocked confusion of her mind where the music could flow, miraculously easing the congestion.

  She withdrew deeply on these occasions. Indeed the child experts had previously forbidden her music for this reason. What fools they were: she went back into herself, yes, but only to find herself, to make amends, where the line of music could connect the broken circuits, and give her a good vision of herself which was what she most needed. Like all autistic children Clare lacked a sense of self. Oliver! could give this to her, or a good thumping, swirling version of ‘The Blue Danube’.

  Our sofa backs onto one of the drawing-room doors, which leads out through a small corridor into the kitchen. Thus we were facing the wrong way. Indeed there would have been no warning at all but for Minty in his basket under the fire canopy, where he slept in summer.

  He growled suddenly. I hardly heard him over the saucy duet between Mr Bumble and the Widow Dorney on the Oliver! LP. I was involved myself in any case, correcting an essay by one of my fourth-formers, my mind on the laboured banalities of his ‘Great Experience’, the theme which I had given the boys to write about the previous week. This one had chosen to discuss a rainy, scoreless football match he’d been to during the Easter holidays between Oxford and Banbury United. I remember wondering if his vision wasn’t a bit limited.

  Then Minty growled again. I heard him properly now, since the music, at the end of the track, had stopped for a moment, though the others still took no notice. Laura was sewing and Clare was sucking her thumb, looking meek and absorbed, hoping to postpone her bedtime indefinitely. I turned and looked round.

  Our drawing-room door has a habit of swinging wide, silently, unexpectedly, if someone opens the back door out of the kitchen and lets the draught through. And it opened now as I watched, as if touched by magic, giving me a clear view down the small corridor into the kitchen.

  A thin, tall man was standing there at the end, surprised at his sudden exposure, holding an automatic in a gloved hand. He had a stocking mask pulled over his face, and the collar of an old mud-and-green army anorak rose about his neck. He lifted the gun.

  There is always that first moment of total disbelief in a catastrophe – a sense of high farce almost, before one’s stomach drops like a rock and the gut turns over when you know it’s all going to be absolutely real.

  But this latter knowledge had barely come to me before the man fired the gun and I could see at once how it had missed me and hit Laura, next to me, in the back, for she hadn’t turned, had never seen the man. She slumped forward, her round sewing-basket spinning like a broken wheel across the floor, just as I stood up, trying to protect her. For I knew, even in those first instants, that it was me the man wanted, not her.

  Not her. Not her. My next thought was for Clare. But several seconds must have elapsed, for I don’t remember exactly what happened then. I can just see all the jumbled cotton-reels on the floor – and Laura on all fours like a dog sinking into them. Clare was nowhere. She was no longer on the sofa. She’d disappeared.

  I remember it all clearly then – I was over by the drawing-room door, slamming it shut and flattening myself against the brick work. Laura had sunk right forward now on her stomach, lying straight out, her head almost touching the fireplace, and Minty was barking round her, in a panic, as though to wake her. The music was still on – some rousing chorus from the orphans. Then I saw Clare. She’d hidden between the wall and the sofa arm on the far side of the room by the window and was peeking out at us looking at her mother’s fallen body, amazed.

  In my arms, I thought Laura must be dying. She couldn’t see me, though her eyes were wide open – eyes fresh as ever, but not seeing now, like a flower that appears to live as beautifully as ever the moment after its stalk is cut. She couldn’t see me and though her mouth was open too, she couldn’t speak; there was blood on her lips, no longer any words.

  But I hadn’t the time to watch her die – or die with her, for the door opened and the calm tall man was there again, standing high above us, raising the gun once more.

  I rolled out of his aim and kicked the door violently. It caught his arm. I stood up again, rushing the door, throwing all my weight against it, pinning half his body to the jamb. The force I brought to bear on the wood was incredible; the force of murder. The gun fell from his gloved hand as he pulled his body away. I tried to hold him. But I lost.

  I could hear him running back through the kitchen. In a moment I had the gun in my hand and was after him out into the back garden with Minty at my heels. It was still twilight, so that I saw him vault the small dry-stone wall to the side of our garden, over into the back of the churchyard. I fired once, as I ran, but the shot went wild.

  In the churchyard I could suddenly see much less. The shadow of the building blocked the last of the evening light. The old tombstones cut my shins as I ran. I thought I heard the church door open. But it wasn’t open when I came to it. I went in anyway and switched on all the lights. There was a dry smell of old wood and lime wash. The door leading into the vestry was open. I fired into the black space again as I ran. But I couldn’t find the switch inside and soon I was caught in the dark, surplices and vestments choking round my neck.

  I was running then, down the village street – firing the last sho
ts in the revolver wildly about the place, at anything that seemed to move, like a madman.

  *

  Laura was dead when the police came. I’d turned her over on the floor but hadn’t the strength to lift her. I was shaking violently, my head jerking about uncontrollably in a state of wild animation.

  There was just one young constable, in a police van, who had come first – on his way home, in my direction apparently, when the call had come to him. Together we got the body up onto the sofa and I explained what had happened.

  ‘Well, go and look for him!’ I shouted at the man then, who did nothing but just look at me warily. ‘After him – in your car. Don’t just stand there!’ I started to clear up all the cotton-reels and buttons and thimbles off the floor, suddenly obsessed that the room should be meticulously clean. But when I came to the blister of congealing blood where Laura had been lying on our green carpet I stopped tidying up and started to shout again.

  ‘For God’s sake! Someone’s emptied the tea pot all over the floor. Look at this – the filthy pigs. Look at it. Clean it up!’

  I remember the expression on the constable’s face then. It wasn’t one of sympathy or understanding. It was more a frightened enmity. And I realised for the first time: he thinks I’m mad. I’ve had the automatic in my hand. He thinks I’ve just killed my wife.

  I turned to Clare, who was still crouching behind the arm of the sofa, immobile, her eyes firmly shut now, but her thumb still working furiously in her mouth.

  ‘Tell them,’ I said. ‘About the man who was here, with the gun, who shot Mummy.’

  But Clare said nothing. And when I went to pick her up, to hold her in my arms, I found that her body, though quite unharmed, was absolutely rigid. She remained exactly as she had been against the wall, her legs up against her chest, one arm round her ear, thumb in her mouth: frozen solid.