The Valley of the Fox

by Joseph Hone

  Arthur’s rooms were even more contemporary, but in a much heavier mode, which included unbearable chrome-plated easy chairs, mirror-topped table, a futuristic bureau and a chest of drawers in some highly polished, deep-veined hardwood, edged in brass, with counter-sunk brass handles, an old portable Indian Army officer’s travelling chest gone very wrong.

  I was surprised. ‘You lost heart with the Victorian, I see,’ I said, looking about me. ‘When it came to the essential creature comforts?’

  ‘In a house this size,’ she said, ‘you’ve got the space to make a lot of little theatres, haven’t you? Different rooms. Different settings, whole new backdrops, that you can walk into. And out of. A variety. Lots of new parts,’ she added with excitement, like an actress reflecting on some unexpected recent successes, where she had broken out of a previous typecasting with a vengeance.

  ‘And the attics?’ I said. ‘Are they belle-époque – or Louis Quinze?’

  ‘A lot of the rooms up here are a little different,’ she admitted. ‘Only the ground floor is all in the original Victorian period. Change,’ she added with the sudden excited stridency of a dancing mistress, ‘Change! Variety! Why not? You didn’t think the whole house was a sort of Victorian mausoleum, did you?’

  ‘No,’ I said, lying. For I had expected exactly that. It was obvious that she saw this house, this whole estate as some kind of personal theatre, woods and rooms made available, made over, each in a different fashion, in a manner that would enhance or fulfil her in some way. And I didn’t mention this thought to her either.

  The bed in Arthur’s room was slightly raised on a dais, a huge affair, covered in a snowy white counterpane: it was like a remote sacrificial tomb or an Emperor’s sarcophagus. I knew I would never sleep in it. A dressing-room led off to one side filled with hanging cupboards and beyond that a large bathroom, with showy gold and marble fittings. Two unopened boxes of Roger & Gallet soap, one of carnation, and the other cologne, lay to either side of the twin washbasins.

  ‘Two basins?’ I asked. ‘“His” and “Hers”?’

  ‘That was the idea. To begin with.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘It was the second time round for both of us.’

  ‘Yes. It was the same with us. I expect we shouldn’t have hoped for so much.’

  I looked up then and saw myself properly for the first time in the big triple mirror. My beard, even in ten days, was no more than a half-hearted, unsuitable thing. The scar above my eye had healed well enough. But the half-beard and the red wound together gave me an ugly, even a frightening, piratical air. And I noticed, too, how scratched and torn my skin was, particularly behind my shoulders and down my back, red welts, as if, a martyr to something, I had been scourged recently. I wondered what Alice would have thought of me had she met me in any ordinary circumstances, dressed and shaved, the dull pedagogue smelling of chalk. She would never have noticed me. But, obviously, in the guise she had found me – naked, hirsute, scarred – I must have seemed an ideal player for her repertory company. I would be costumed soon. But what was my role to be?

  Back in Arthur’s dressing-room Alice opened out half a dozen drawers in the deep-veined mahogany wall cupboard. There were formal and leisure shirts, from Turnbull and Asser, and Hawes and Curtis, in every shade and material; silk, sea-island cotton and winter wool, sky blue, red pin-stripe, casual olive. There were classic and tropical suits, from Benson, Perry and Whitley in Savile Row, tweed sports jackets from Dublin and Edinburgh, together with tail suits, formal grey morning wear and smoking jackets with scarlet cummerbunds, all meticulously, expectantly tucked into the big press. There were casual Bally shoes, more casual multi-coloured sneakers and traditional bespoke brogues from Ducker and Son of Oxford; silk ties by Gucci and silk socks from someone else – and sporting wear, too, I saw; jogging suits, tennis clothes, shorts, swimming trunks, patent white cellular cotton shirts, and even cricket flannels.

  ‘Does he play cricket?’ I asked.

  ‘He’s tried. Out in the Park. It’s the old Beechwood estate team. I’ll give him his due: he tried as well.’

  The dressing-room was an emporium of very expensive male attire, all of it tasteful, to certain tastes, but not to mine. And I prayed that none of the clothes would fit me, that here would be an excuse, a first reason to make it back to the woods. But Alice flicked one of the sea-island cotton shirts out of its neatly ironed shape, and held it up against me. The chest width and length, the arms exactly matched my own. And the shoes, I’d noticed before without admitting it, were exactly the same size as mine.

  Yet she sensed my lack of enthusiasm, how I held back.

  ‘You said you wanted help, remember, to get out of here, didn’t you? Well, you can’t get out of here without clothes. And your own clothes out in the woods must be pretty filthy by now. So what had you in mind? Running naked?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘So go on, then. Have a hot bath, a shower, a shave. It’s all here. Choose whatever you want. Then we’ll have lunch. And you can tell me … whatever you want to tell me. If I can help … You did ask. Remember?’

  It was warm in the dressing-room, with a smell of expensive carnation soap, good cotton, old leather and fine worsteds: tempting smells that I had missed in the woods. She laid out the short-sleeved summer shirt and some casual trousers. But she put back one of the formal silk ties that had fallen on the floor.

  ‘You won’t want this, I think. Not yet, anyway.’

  ‘Yet?’

  ‘Unless we have guests in,’ she smiled, leaving me.

  Eight

  ‘My!’ she said when she saw me transformed half an hour later outside Arthur’s bedroom. ‘I wouldn’t recognise you.’

  ‘No.’

  She looked at me in her carefully appraising manner again. ‘You’re a whole different person. It all fits, doesn’t it? Even the shoes.’

  She looked down at the pair of hand-stitched moccasins I’d found in the bottom of the press.

  ‘A bit tight round the toes,’ I said.

  ‘Yes. But you’re not the same man at all.’ She considered me, a distant look in her eyes, like a casting director giving nothing away.

  ‘Maybe the beard was better,’ she said at last.

  ‘I can always grow it again.’

  ‘Maybe.’ She thought about this intently, so that I became impatient at her too careful consideration.

  ‘Or I could black up,’ I said. ‘With burnt cork and one of your husband’s cutaway morning suits and play a nigger minstrel.’

  ‘You could,’ she said shortly and decisively, as though she really believed this. ‘There’s an awful lot of clothes in this house one way or another,’ she went on. ‘Even old ones. We found a lot of Victorian clothes here, in one of the attics.’

  ‘Yes. I think I saw some of them on the scarecrow out in the kitchen garden. And that Camelot outfit you were wearing the other night in the conservatory,’ I added pointedly.

  ‘I like dressing up,’ she replied with equal point. ‘So did the Hortons. Why, they even had a theatre here. Oh, just a little stage they rigged up at the end of the real tennis court at the back of the house. But that’s where all those old clothes must have come from, including the Camelot outfits.’

  ‘What?—the Hortons had Medieval Pageants here, did they? The Death of Arthur? That sort of thing? They took the Gothic Revival that far?

  ‘Yes, they did indeed. That’s one reason why I bought the house. They had pageants and jousting tournaments and all sorts of Gothic things. Rose Blumberg was an actress, of sorts, before she married.’

  ‘Was she? I wondered about her. Jewish, marrying such a worthy-sounding Victorian, some provincial coal baron.’

  ‘He wasn’t so worthy, or provincial. They were lovers, to begin with. He was already married. There was quite a scandal before they came down here and built this place. I found out quite a bit about them.’

  Alice walked away dow
n the long corridor. ‘So they produced themselves, did they?’ I called after her. ‘“Life as theatre”; I thought the great new psychology was not playing games?’

  ‘What a bore!’ she called back over her shoulder. ‘I’m hoping to get the stage going again. I’ve had the curtains fixed and talked to some of the local people. They weren’t mad about the idea. But then maybe that’s just because we’re a little too far out from Stow,’ she added optimistically.

  Alice had changed herself meanwhile, into just such a classic cotton summer dress as I’d imagined her advertising in the New Yorker. And her hair, parted in the middle now and quite dry, had been combed to either side in a long wavy flow so that it came out like a black fan covering her neck and most of her shoulders. She wore no jewellery. But then of course, with her almost over-dramatic beauty, she didn’t need any. The two of us walked downstairs together, both of us quite different people.

  But Arthur’s unaccustomed clothes had already begun to itch by the time we got to a small drawing-room beyond the great fireplace in the hall. My skin, though enclosed only by the lightest cotton, prickled in the heat. My face itched, too, the beard gone. I wished I was naked and bearded again.

  ‘Please, help yourself.’ Alice said. ‘Can you get me a lime soda?’

  There was a generous Georgian silver drinks tray incongruously placed on the turned-down leaf of a Gothic lacquered desk in one corner. A heavy Victorian tantalus with three cut-glass spirit decanters stood on top. I gave Alice her lime juice and had the same myself, but with a good measure of gin thrown into it instead of the soda. The ice, I noticed, was already there, in a silver-lidded chalice adapted as a vacuum bowl, with a beautifully coloured enamelled kingfisher as a handle on top.

  ‘You were expecting someone?’ I asked. ‘With the ice.’

  ‘No. Mrs Pringle or it may have been Mary – she comes in most mornings to help – one or other, they fill it up every morning. It was a thing of Arthur’s. He was always expecting people.’

  ‘You don’t have any cigarettes do you, by any chance?’

  ‘Yes, somewhere. I don’t, but there are some.’ She found a silver cigarette-box behind some social invitations on the mantelpiece and handed it to me. There was a message engraved on the lid, cut as in sloping longhand. It said: ‘Arthur – with love, Alice.’

  When I opened it there was another message, engraved on the inside of the lid, a verse:

  ‘When I die in the long green grass,

  Death will be but a pause.

  For the love that I have is all that I have,

  Is yours and yours and yours.’

  Alice saw me looking at it.

  ‘It’s nice.’ I handed her back the box and lit the cigarette. ‘He didn’t take it with him?’

  ‘Arthur’s very busy.’

  ‘Yes. I suppose so. Everyone’s very busy these days. It’s the curse of the age.’ It struck me then how strange it was that neither of us had anything to do, becalmed in this great warm empty house, detached, suspended, waiting. It made me uneasy. ‘I’m sorry – about Arthur.’

  I repeated the sympathetic phrase, but with an emotion now in my voice that had not been there before. And then a much stronger flood of feeling came to me, that I couldn’t account for at first, until I realised I was thinking of Laura. I walked away from the fireplace, looking round the room, my back to Alice so that she wouldn’t see the pain of this memory. There was a picture, an exquisite ink and pastel drawing, on the far wall, of a woman, a little like Alice, just the head and shoulders, with long wavy black hair. But the eyes were much bigger, the neck thicker, the lips even more bowed than Alice’s.

  ‘That’s a study of Jane Burden, by Rossetti. Dante Gabriel. For his Queen Guinevere.’

  ‘It’s beautiful.’

  ‘Yes. Though people say she wasn’t really so ethereal at all. Bernard Shaw thought she was quite a frump. Only talked about pastry-making when he met her.’

  ‘Yes?’ I turned back to where Alice was standing by the fireplace.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. And she was smiling; one of her radiant explosions, almost mischievous, so that the whole mood changed and the sadness in the air quite disappeared.

  The drawing-room, built at the corner of the house, had long windows looking both south and west, over two sides of the open parkland, but with the thick line of beech and oak as usual all round the horizon blocking out any further view. The room was a little more cheerful than the great hall, with a daisy-patterned Morris wallpaper and some fairly easy chairs covered in a heavy matching chintz. Yet, like the hall, with its great Victorian bracket lamp fittings and slightly fusty smell, the little drawing-room felt barely lived in. The desk where the drinks were had no other clutter; nothing poked from any of the pigeonholes at the back. There was a large engagement diary and a fine leather address book next a telephone by the tantalus. That was all. Elsewhere a few copies of the Field and Country Life were stacked too neatly on a small drum table by the window.

  I said, ‘You hardly live in this room either, do you?’

  ‘Oh, I’ve a room of my own up in the tower, where I keep my things. This was where the ladies came after dinner. While the others had their port.’

  ‘You led a … a pretty formal life, you two, together here?’

  ‘Sometimes. Americans often like that more than you British. We even had place names in the dining-room, on little bamboo easels.’

  ‘I thought you’d have liked all that: courtly manners, formality, etiquette. Isn’t that one of your things? That article I read …’

  ‘Yes. I do like it. But I didn’t like the little bamboo easels. That was Arthur’s idea.’

  ‘You had a lot of dinner parties here?’

  ‘Yes. To begin with …’

  ‘A busy social life? Out among the county folk?’

  ‘To begin with. But that rather faded, thank God. People have somehow … died for me, recently anyway.’

  Alice sat down by the fireplace, not at all the social failure, the rich American drop-out but poised, confident, beautiful. And I thought suddenly that despite her isolation here, how many other friends she must have, this very rich, attractive woman. And the more friends, surely, at just this moment in her life, on the brink of divorce: girl-friends, old flames, relations, sympathetic confidantes, or just scandalmongering nosy parkers. Where were they all? Surely the phone would go at any moment, long-distance from New York: or a big car from London would sweep up the drive, hell-bent on some mercy mission.

  I said, with as much hidden nervousness as curiosity, ‘With Arthur gone, where are all your friends? Surely … just being alone here?’

  ‘Yes,’ She drank deeply from her glass. ‘I’ve not been so good with my friends. It wasn’t just a question of Arthur.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Oh, coming over here in the first place. They didn’t understand that.’

  ‘You mean the Edwardian bicycle out in the back hall? And all this, the Gothic restoration?’

  ‘Perhaps. Some of them said it was “cute”. They were being polite. But most said nothing. They thought I was out of my mind.’

  I smiled then. I very nearly laughed. But I stopped just in time. ‘Are you?’ I said.

  ‘Do you think so?’

  ‘I wondered. But,’ I hurried on at once, ‘all this – it’s nothing so crazy as my lying up in the woods out there for ten days, running about naked with bows and arrows.’

  ‘No. That’s really strange,’ Alice said, looking at me, genuinely surprised once more. And indeed it was, I thought. By comparison her life in this Gothic folly was almost conventional. There was something of an agreement between us now, I felt: a wordless contract that we shared against the world. We had somehow touched each other without touching.

  ‘Besides, about friends,’ she went on. ‘I’ve always asked too much or been too honest or had too much money. The usual things.’ She rubbed her chin. ‘Friends were difficult. Loving – or hating. That was e
asier.’

  ‘Of course. But –’

  ‘The friend thing, you know,’ she interrupted with enthusiasm. ‘It’s like this: friends prepare themselves too much for you. Oh, that’s exactly what they’re not supposed to do. But it happens: it becomes prepared, a role you or they take on: “I’m your friend.” But I’ve never been completely sure about that.’

  ‘They might just have wanted something from you – in your case?’

  ‘Possibly. But much more it was the feeling of their coming a long way out of the past, into an equally long future. It all seemed endless,’ she added lugubriously.

  ‘But isn’t that the whole point about friendship: that it is the same, that it is always there?’

  ‘Yes,’ she admitted. ‘It should be. But, I told you, I just haven’t been good at it. I had a great friend once – oh, I didn’t see her that often. But when I did, well, it was like living suddenly, when you realized you’d just been getting by before. I met her in Florence, at the design school I went to there. An English girl. She did silk-screen printing, beautiful scarves and things. She was very bright and funny: original – outré, you’d say. And talented. So I offered to back her myself, with my money, to go into partnership. But she wouldn’t. Said it was taking the easy way. In fact she thought I was patronising her, or trying to get in on her act. Either way I … I found in the end I simply couldn’t explain myself to her at all. And I wanted to. I wanted that very much because I knew it was the real thing.’