The Valley of the Fox

by Joseph Hone

  But it didn’t rain. I listened to the news on the transistor which never mentioned me now, and the weather forecast, which talked of high pressure away to the north by Iceland, but with bad weather doing battle with it, a depression moving in from the Azores. The man thought the rain would win, but not until tomorrow. I had another day to fill before I could use climate as an excuse for throwing in the towel.

  Today was Saturday. I’d been a week in the valley. The world outside had become like home when one is in an ugly foreign country. After the news there was news of sport: football in Italy, tennis at the Queen’s Club, cricket in Nottingham, seventy miles away, against the West Indians, events as distant to me now as things passing on the other side of the world. I felt a touch of shocking loneliness then, of self-pity, which overcame me almost to the point of tears, like a great luxury; a warm, pathetic feeling. But even that didn’t last; the hunger was a sharper pain. I lit a cigarette and saw that my hands were shaking. I thought the tobacco would dull the starvation; instead it only made me feel sick. I put it out.

  I had three and a half cigarettes left – but only three matches. There was always the small magnifying glass attached to Spinks’s scouting knife. But that would need strong, direct sunlight, and there was little of that in the valley, except on the water and out on the island, away from the overhanging trees. Should I move to the island, as an answer to my hunger as well? For, perhaps, since the woman had brought roses to the old tombs there, she might, like the other Indians in their religion (or was it the Chinese?) come to leave bowls of milk out there, and sweetmeats too …

  Such wild thoughts came and went, the result of a mild delirium, as I dozed the morning fitfully away in a green limbo, the tree shuddering in the wind. I hadn’t even the energy to dream when I finally slept.

  But a little after twelve o’clock I stirred myself. If I was to get some food, it was now or never. Soon I’d be too weak to get up or down the tree. I climbed the tall beech first, next my oak, going up to the look-out post I’d made there, which gave over the parkland and the side of the manor. I went up because I’d heard a hammering noise faintly through the trees, and the thump of an engine droning from the same direction.

  I could see now, even without Spinks’s glasses, what was going on: Saturday. They were preparing the cricket pitch, near the bottom of the parkland, about half a mile away from the house: hammering boundary pegs in while a gang-mower moved slowly round the outfield. Some local team must have used the place at weekends. There was only one man that I could see, on the mower, with a car parked near the curiously thatched, log-built pavilion.

  Then, looking more carefully through the binoculars, I saw a woman leaning into the back seat of a car. She emerged holding a big covered tray, taking it into the pavilion. She returned for a second tray a minute later – and then some cake tins and a big carton. I could just make out the legend on the side: ‘Walker’s Crisps.’ Crisps and cakes and sandwiches no doubt – for the cricketers’ tea. But for me as well, me too …

  My spirits leapt like a child’s. The man finished cutting the outfield and five minutes after that he left with the woman in the car, driving away from me, along the side of the cricket field and out onto what must have been a back drive into the estate. It was lunchtime. Just after one o’clock. The match wouldn’t start until 2.30 perhaps. No one would be there for another half hour or so. If I was quick, if I was lucky …

  I’d seen part of a field of young corn immediately to the left of the cricket pitch, beyond a post-and-rail fence which formed the boundary. The corn wasn’t high. But it was deep enough to duck down and hide in, I thought, if anyone appeared while I was in the open moving towards the pavilion. And if I followed this fence, it led directly behind the strange building.

  Ten minutes later I had left the steep side of the valley, moved down through the cover of the beech wood, and was out on the edge of the cornfield. The pavilion was on the other side, a few hundred yards away, with the wooden fence for cover as well, if I could get safely across the field to it.

  I did, and after that it was relatively easy, skirting along, with my head well down behind the fence, until I got in behind the back of the pavilion. There was a door here, next some rough latrines, which led through into a small open kitchen with a circular counter beyond. The trays were on top of it, covered in tea-towels, together with the cake tins and the crisps. When I lifted the towels my hand was shaking again.

  And then the sandwiches were suddenly there, like a stupendous conjuring trick. They struck me with the greedy force of some great restaurant display; moist, luscious, neatly cut, lightly buttered, in brown and white bread with all the crusts removed. There was ham; there was beetroot and grated cheese; there was egg; there was egg and tomato; there were some with a sort of spam filling which I didn’t fancy and others just filled with plain watercress which I left entirely aside.

  I gobbled one up there and then, unable to resist it, like a madman, scattering crumbs on the floor which I had to clear up. But from then on I was more careful. I took eight half-rounds from the two trays, carefully rearranging the rest so that the gaps wouldn’t show. I looked in the cake tins then: one was filled with flour-dusted scones, the next with raspberry-jam and lemon-curd tarts, the last with small, fluffy cream cakes. I took a careful selection from all three tins. There was a big plastic bag filled with sausage rolls. I took four of these, stuffing the lot into every pocket. The big carton of crisps hadn’t been opened so I had to leave them.

  I looked round the rest of the cricket pavilion. There was a nice smell of linseed oil and leather and old grass in the air. The main room beyond the kitchen was lined with trestle tables covered in red check cloths; old team photographs ringed the rough log walls. Though so quintessentially English in purpose, the place had somehow the air of a Swiss mountain chalet. There was a small bar at one end, with soft drinks and tins of shandy on shelves behind. I tiptoed across the room and pinched a bottle of lemonade. And then, on my way out through the kitchen I saw the box of matches by the Calor-gas ring, where they boiled up a great urn for the tea. I took the matches, too. The box was nearly full. I was saved.

  And yet, I thought – a last whiff of leather and old linseed oil in my nose – I thought how much I’d like to have stayed on that afternoon and had a game of cricket. But as I left through the back door I saw my face in a mirror by the gents for a moment: there was the scar across my forehead which I’d forgotten. And I had a beard now, which I hadn’t seen before, a nasty half-growth about the jowls. My hair, since I’d no comb with me, was a dirty, tangled mess, while my rust-green cord suit was caked in streaks of different-coloured mud. The idea of my playing cricket seemed suddenly laughable then. I was a world away from those smart, crisp white clothes. But I didn’t laugh. Instead, I realised it was no fun at all being a savage.

  I managed to watch the cricket, though, for most of the sunny afternoon, up in the top of the beech tree in my look-out post, a bottle of pop in one hand and a succession of sandwiches and squelchy cream cakes in the other. It wasn’t a bad match either. One of the teams, the visiting team I thought, had several West Indian players, and one of these, a small, wiry, afro-haired fellow, clouted the ball repeatedly for fours and sixes over the boundary, straight driving them in huge arcs into the cornfield.

  I played his game for him, vicariously, enjoying it all more than anything since I’d arrived in the valley. A few huge plum-bruised clouds ran in over the ground after tea, and the wind increased, with a slight chill in it now. But still it didn’t rain. Instead, great slanting shafts of sun pierced the tumbling clouds, apocalypse-fashion, brilliant beams low in the west, spotlighting odd parts of the parkland, setting the small white figures on fire. And I was happy again, seeing the match out, and happier still that I was fed at last, with energy once more to think, to move, to plan a future.

  I lit a cigarette when I’d finished half the food, keeping the rest for later. The sickness was quite gone no
w. I drained the lemonade bottle. It was like school, years before: behind the cricket pavilion taking a quick drag before first prep. Then I saw the flash of light, where the late sun had caught something moving in front of the manor away to my right.

  Training Spinks’s glasses on the building I saw that a huge Mercedes had just drawn up in front of the house. A man in a chauffeur’s cap got out of the car and a minute later he was carrying luggage, several heavy suitcases, down the porch steps. Finally the well dressed, dank-haired, middle-aged man that I’d seen in the conservatory appeared. There was no one with him as he hurried with a briefcase into the back seat. Then the car was gone, the dust rising, as the great hearse-like vehicle sped down the front drive away from me. And now I thought about this man and the woman and what had passed between them the previous night.

  The food, at last, had revived my interest in such things. And yet, after a few initial points had struck me, I realised there wasn’t all that much to think about them. The woman wasn’t mad – just high-spirited, immature perhaps, with something of the actress in her, remembering her sudden change from merry outdoor girl to sorrowing pre-Raphaelite maiden. The man – her husband I presumed, the American business magnate – had appeared wary, world-weary and perhaps he was cruel. Certainly it was obvious they weren’t getting on together. He had just left, as a result of their row maybe, with sufficient baggage to suggest a prolonged absence. What more was there to say? Even the very rich had their domestic agonies.

  But then it struck me, a wild, faint thought: perhaps, where he had failed, I might succeed. I put it out of my mind at once, watching the end of the cricket.

  But later that night, as I leant over the darkening waters of the lake from my oak branch, some bread paste and cheese instead of worms on two of Spinks’s Woolworth hooks, I thought about it all again. The wind had dropped completely. Bats whipped about above the water; there were flies and midges up in the tree and the fish were moving, jumping, splashing in the deep silences beneath me. I had time to think. And I realised then that, if I was ever properly to make use of my freedom in these woods, to get Clare back, to clear myself, to take the various sorts of revenge I had in mind, I would have to have some help. I couldn’t do what I wanted all on my own. And what better help, perhaps, than that of a high-spirited, immature, theatrical woman?

  If I continued as I was, without moving from the valley, I could only arrive at a dead end. At best I might survive till the bad weather came in the autumn. But meanwhile, on my own unaided, I could never break out of this fenced prison and do something constructive: or destructive. I had no money, no shaving gear, my clothes were filthy, my hair appalling: I looked like a savage. Even if no one was looking for me, I’d be noticed at once in any local town or village, bus or train. However successfully I managed to survive in these woods, I was stuck in them. And it was not my purpose just to survive: I had ambitions … That was why I’d run in the first place: in order to fulfil them. And if I never made the effort to fulfil them, well then, I might as well give myself up now. Yet I couldn’t achieve them, I saw, without help. Thus all these factors in the equation led to a neat answer: if, in some fashion, I managed to persuade the woman to help me, and she refused, then I had really lost nothing – for without such help I had no future. She would phone the police and that would be that. If on the other hand she agreed to help …

  I smiled then. It was so unlikely: an American woman, living abroad, perhaps quite alone in the great empty house now, surrounded by priceless paintings. She’d be terrified out of her wits in any confrontation with me, a bearded wife-killer, as she would probably have heard, from the manor woods. Besides, how would I meet her? The house would have servants, alarms, perhaps a permanent security staff. But then I realised that meeting her might be simple enough. I had only to wait behind the hawthorn bush when next she came down to swim, or better still, surprise her when she came out to the island again, where she could not so easily escape, when she next brought her grave gifts. The roses would have faded by now. She might come soon.

  I had some hope then, and more still when, later that evening, just before real dark, I caught a fish: a perch, I thought, nearly a foot long, as I looked at it squirming in my hand after I’d pulled it up, its scales still reflecting a little silver in the last of the light. It had run and tugged excitingly in the water beneath me, but the strands of baler twine had held. And having got it up in the branches successfully I felt for a moment that I could now live in these woods for ever.

  But cooking it next morning for breakfast wasn’t so easy. In the end I had to chop the fish up with Spinks’s knife and poach the bits in the billy can, where in the end they disintegrated on the surface without being properly cooked inside. But it still tasted of fish, and I had the floury scones to go with it. All I needed was some lemon. I was living again, I thought. Yet I needed a proper cooking-pan, I realised – and I needed to lay in more food now that I was fit and eager enough to try and get it. I thought of the sheep again, or rather the lambs, though I avoided that precise description of them in my mind.

  I’d swum then, in the hidden pool at the bottom of the lake, cleaning myself as best I could. The wind had gone entirely now. The day looked like being sultry and oppressive. There was thunder in the air, I thought. I practised with the bow and six arrows afterwards, taking them over to the undergrowth on the slopes above the old pumping-shed. I didn’t shoot for long. I had neither a bracer nor finger-tabs, so that the loosed string hurt the inside of my bow-arm after a dozen shots. But it was long enough for me to see that my aim had deteriorated in the past few days, when I hadn’t practised and hadn’t eaten. The arrows were nearly all short, dropping low beneath the target. I wasn’t strong enough to make a full draw and maintain it, quite still, for those few vital moments. I was still too weak. I’d had plenty of carbohydrates with the sandwiches and cakes. But I needed protein now. I needed some meat.

  A squirrel appeared as I was shooting, a quizzical little animal, flat out against the trunk of a beech behind me, about thirty feet up. I was about to test a shot at it when I noticed, above it, two other baby squirrels, running up and down like toys along another branch. I didn’t fancy shooting the animal then, possibly the mother, so I left it, frustrated. And then I thought: if I wasn’t prepared to shoot a squirrel, how was I ever going to kill a lamb? And, given this squeamishness, what did I really think I was going to do with David Marcus? Kill him too? It seemed an unlikely idea, in truth, even if I ever got the chance. I saw then that I was entirely unfitted for killing, unless, I suppose, my own life was at stake. But wasn’t it now? Without food, one died.

  I set out, up to the top of the lake and then on to the old quarry beyond, considering my inabilities. There was a strong smell of cow-parsley or elderflower, both come to rampant bloom now in the hedgerows along the cattle-path that led out of the valley a strong yet delicate, slightly tangy smell somehow, hanging everywhere in the silent, heavy air. The thunder rumbled in the distance, but a closer distance now.

  I supposed one could stew up cow-parsley, make a sort of soup out of it? Though possibly, through boiling, it became poisonous? It was bound to be pretty unpalatable in any case, worse than the cress. There was the elderflower, of course: I knew you could make elderflower wine. Laura, in fact, had been planning to make some later that spring, from the crowd of old elder bushes that ran along one side of our garden …

  And then, quite suddenly, as if touched by some violent hand out of the air, the sense of being able to kill came back to me, came like a physical thing, so that I could feel the muscles contracting all about my body. And I could have killed anything, man or beast, there and then, had it appeared at that moment.

  I hadn’t thought about Laura recently. I’d kept her out of my mind on purpose; it was too painful. And my hunger in any case had made me think about nothing else but food. But then, thinking of the elderflower wine she might have made, thoughts of her broke through me like water smashing a d
am, and the bitterness and enmity filled me again, as it had at the beginning, a frightful, uncontrollable violence which made me shake almost as I stood in the path, the thunder above me now, the first raindrops falling.

  By the time I got to the top of the old quarry by the barbed wire fence the rain was pouring down in long straight rods, the drops so close together it was like a solid grey curtain, the clouds massing low down in huge folds of dark velvet all over the long pasture running away to the north. And I was in luck: it was almost too easy. Half a dozen of the lambs had somehow pushed their way through the fence from the pasture and were flocked together in one corner of the field, near the old stone barn. I drove them through the open doorway, where once inside and trapped they began to panic, terrified, bleating above the thunder which crashed about us immediately overhead, the rain falling like pebbles on the broken slates. I herded the lambs into a corner of the old barn, where they pushed and shoved madly to and fro, a great mass of wool, their coats smoking in the damp air. I could have killed as many as I wanted, I thought at first.

  I chose the fattest of the lambs and, raising the bow, aimed for its neck. The arrow struck home all right: in fact it transfixed the beast, going right through its neck, without apparently doing it any other harm. It charged up and down in the corner of the barn, shaking its head wildly, rising up on its hind legs and dancing for moments, trying to rid itself of the arrow, pawing the air in a frenzy. And it was difficult to get in a second shot as the other beasts stampeded round me, escaping back out into the storm. I was left alone with the single wounded lamb.

  Now the panic spread to me, as I didn’t know what to do to stop the animal’s pain. I loosed another arrow but it missed entirely. Finally I rushed the lamb, caught it, straddled it and tried to cut its throat with Spinks’s knife. But this didn’t have any effect either: the blade wasn’t sharp enough or the fur was too thick. Or both.