The Valley of the Fox

by Joseph Hone

  ‘Take it anyway,’ Alice advised. ‘You may need it. And don’t forget some shaving things, toothpaste … They expect all that in hospitals.’

  Alice finished the packing and then looked up at me, peering into my face. ‘That scar, it’s still there: a way of identifying you afterwards. We’ll just have to risk that, or find you a hat to cover it.’ She ran her finger gently along the mark on my temple. Then she was brisk again. ‘Now: some papers. You can have one of my wallets. I got it in Florence years ago. There’s nothing American about it.’

  She handed me a lovely Florentine leather wallet, edged in gilt. Inside was a number of fairly grubby £5 and £10 notes. ‘I’m sure they can’t trace them,’ she said. I counted them. There was £100 in all.

  ‘Thank you. I’ll make a note of it.’

  Alice said nothing until, as we left the room, she asked: ‘A weapon of some sort? Do you need one?’

  ‘Why? I don’t think so.’

  ‘I have a small hand-gun.’

  ‘You think I’ll have to fight my way out of the place? That’s nonsense. Besides, they’d spot it when I got undressed in the hospital.’

  ‘I know!’ Alice suddenly said. ‘There’s some old swordsticks downstairs. Arthur collects them.’

  ‘Come on –’

  ‘No. It could be useful. And you could keep it by you all the time. Pretend you have a limp.’

  ‘Yes, but why bother, if they’re not expecting me?’

  ‘You never know. They might try and stop you on your way out. Besides, a limp is a good disguise,’ she added brightly. ‘A man with a limp …’ She considered this conceit for a moment, as if contemplating a proposed charade in a Christmas drawing-room, before finding the idea good. But I didn’t.

  ‘A man with a limp and a swordstick and a Noël Coward dressing-gown,’ I said. ‘It’s too much, Alice. I’d be overplaying my hand.’

  ‘If you don’t overplay your hand a bit you won’t ever get into that damn hospital. Remember, you have to act as if your whole gut was on fire to begin with. Unless you really want to eat a cake of soap. And remember, too, the less you look like your old self the better. Who are you anyway? This John Burton from London?’

  ‘Well, with a gammy leg, swordstick and that tarty dressing-gown I’d better be a London antique-dealer. What do you think?’

  Alice smiled. ‘You’re certainly getting the idea,’ she said.

  Later she showed me the collection of swordsticks, kept locked up in Arthur’s gun-room at the back of the house. There were half a dozen of them – silver-topped, eighteenth-century canes for the most part. I chose the least antique and ostentatious: a stout Victorian bamboo walking-stick with an antler handle and a secret release catch. Inside was a long needle of engraved Toledo steel, double-edged, half an inch wide at the top and tapering to an extremely fine, sharp point.

  ‘I don’t like the look of it,’ I said.

  ‘Nor will they if you just bring it out. You won’t have to use it.’

  I put the blade back and, using the stick as support, practised my limp across the gun-room. Arthur’s suit chosen for me this time was a lightweight tweed. And I had a hat to go with it now – a tweed pork-pie that came down over my scar. I looked too carefully, too expensively dressed for an antique-dealer. On the other hand I certainly looked nothing like my real self: the man the police would be looking for.

  Alice, now almost carried away by her sense of the theatrical, was pleased with the result. She looked at me from a distance, head to one side, quizzically. ‘I wouldn’t recognise you,’ she said.

  ‘No. Just like the first time I got into Arthur’s clothes.’

  Was it her wish that I should undergo successive transformations in this sartorial manner, each of which would take me further away from the chalk-dusted, badly dressed teacher I’d been with Laura, and closer to Alice – all changes which would make me more dependent on her, as puppet, as lover? In her eyes certainly I must have already fulfilled all her theatrical expectations, played the game well – changing from naked savage to tweedy countryman in little more than twenty-four hours. In my own eyes I felt less and less the actor and more the fool – who had still to assume a dangerous role. On the other hand, if Clare was to be freed … And I had to admit that Alice’s ideas here, simply because of their very drama, might well work. I was dependent on Alice; it was simply this dependence that I didn’t like.

  ‘Come on,’ she said, having watched me think for half a minute. ‘We’re ready.’ She kissed me, briefly. I still didn’t respond. ‘I know,’ she said. ‘Sooner you than me. It’s difficult, changing your life. But you’ve done it so well already, Peter, you can do it again. I’ve been amazed, seeing you …’

  She gazed at me proudly, as on a Knight Errant about to depart on some great cause in her honour. And I saw the madness of the whole scheme once more then – but saw equally that it was an escapade which Alice, in her own bizarre mind, now relied on me to fulfil. She expected my fidelity in this cause; we were brother and sister in arms. To fail her in it would be to betray her. And I realised it was she who was dependent on me now – her life on mine, and I was ashamed at my earlier thoughts of her manipulation.

  ‘Say goodbye to Mrs Pringle. And I’ll take you to your – London train.’

  She turned away, busying herself with some last-minute detail, so that I was left with an image of Alice in the great house. An image of someone I wanted to kiss now, but couldn’t.

  *

  I threw a convincing fit, writhing in the hall of the hotel next morning in Banbury. I had earlier called the receptionist from my bedroom, complaining of severe stomach pains and cramps, so that this subsequent performance was not unexpected. The Manager offered me a doctor there and then – there was a surgery, he told me, just next door to the hotel, but I suggested a taxi to the hospital at once, and thus I left five minutes later, doubled up with my bamboo walking-stick and suitcase, a surprising casualty from the sumptuous Inn, stumbling out into the bright summer morning.

  In the hospital waiting-room I repeated the performance, and having filled in a form, or rather dictated most of it to the receptionist, such was the imagined force of my pains just then, I was soon taken down a corridor to a consulting room where I was laid out on a raised couch and left alone.

  Five minutes later a young Indian medico arrived in a white jacket with half a dozen ballpoints sticking up in his front pocket. He was a very small man, narrow-headed, with vague, heavy-lidded, apparently quite aimless eyes. His hair was dark and greased with a Disraeli kiss-curl neatly imprinted on his forehead like a bass clef.

  He took one of the ballpoint pens from his pocket as if to make notes, though he had no paper with him.

  ‘What seems to be the matter?’ he asked, looking away from me towards the clouded glass window through which he could see nothing. He seemed sleepy, almost asleep. His English was perfect, almost without accent.

  ‘Pains,’ I said grunting. ‘Here. I don’t know – but I have an ulcer disposition.’

  I had lowered my trousers and taken up my shirt.

  ‘Where?’ he asked, paying attention at last. I showed him. He prodded my stomach with the top of his ballpoint, as if keen not to sully his fingers.

  ‘Higher up,’ I said. ‘And don’t prod me with that pen. It hurts.’

  The man said nothing. But next time he used his fingers when he probed me.

  ‘Sick – have you been sick?’

  ‘No. But I feel sick.’

  ‘Have you ever had a barium meal? With your London doctor?’

  ‘No.’ The man thought for half a minute about this, his head turned away from me, dreaming again. He seemed only just in touch with life. Perhaps he’d been up all night on duty.

  ‘It’s just there, the pain, is it? The upper middle of the stomach?’ He pushed me fairly hard, so that I had no difficulty in almost screaming.

  ‘Yes,’ I said breathlessly. ‘There. That’s it.’

&n
bsp; ‘Emm …’ he said. He took up his ballpoint again and flipped it in the air several times.

  ‘It’s as if a stake had been driven through me,’ I said.

  ‘Peritonitis, I should think, if the pain is that bad.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Bad ulceration. You have an ulcer disposition? Well there’s a risk of a perforation. I told you, if it really pains like that.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘We should probably operate. Have you signed a disclaimer form?’

  ‘Operate? No, I’ve signed nothing.’

  ‘I’ll have one sent round. Meanwhile I’ll arrange for a barium meal and an X-ray.’

  ‘I don’t think I want an operation, surely. Just keep me in for observation, no?’

  ‘Yes. But if it bursts, well – we’d be too late,’ the Indian said offhandedly.

  ‘A second opinion? Could we have that?’

  ‘Yes.’ He turned away, in a dream again. ‘You’d have that anyway. But the consultant isn’t in just yet. Nor the surgeon. I’ll arrange for a meal and an X-ray meanwhile. Then we can operate – or not, as the case may be.’ He turned back to me. ‘The nurse will give you something for the pain. All right?’

  I nodded and he left me. God, I thought, an operation. I had obviously overplayed my part. If they operated. But of course they wouldn’t – when the X-rays showed nothing amiss. They would then simply keep me in bed under observation for a few days. But could I be sure? Of course, I could simply refuse the operation and leave the hospital, release myself. But that wouldn’t serve my purpose at all. I had to stay in the hospital and find out where Clare was; that was the whole point. I was suddenly uneasy then, all my earlier confidence gone.

  A nurse arrived and gave me a pain-killing injection, and soon afterwards the same nurse helped me into a wheelchair and a porter drove me down interminable corridors to the X-ray department. I still had my stick with me, and the suitcase. I felt like a very old man, incapable of anything. The pain-killer made me drowsy.

  The barium meal – a nasty, cherry-and-milk flavoured concoction – together with the X-ray took up most of the morning as I had to wait my turn in line. And afterwards I was left to wait again in a cubicle nearly an hour while they studied the results.

  But eventually I had the verdict. The Indian doctor saw me again. There was nothing wrong with my gut, he said. Nothing at all, as far as the X-ray plates went.

  ‘Just your ulcer disposition.’ He smiled wanly. ‘Or maybe a grumbling appendix.’

  ‘It still hurts, certainly.’

  ‘Well, we’ll keep you in for observation anyway. Just in case. And no food, in case we have to operate. All right?’

  I nodded, relieved at last. And by lunchtime, though I was ravenously hungry, I was safely a-bed, sitting up in Arthur’s flashy dressing-gown, in one of the long modern wards that ran away at the back of the building towards the car-park, with my suitcase gone but with my bamboo stick still with me, as I’d insisted, leaning up against the bedside table.

  I was halfway down one side of a general ward of about thirty beds, nearly all of them filled, with only two where the curtains had been pulled round in tactful silence. For the rest, the patients were a garrulous lot, when they did not hawk and cough and groan. The noise increased around lunchtime, some of the old men behaving with the excitement of predatory animals over their food. And afterwards, smacking their toothless chops, they talked to each other, loudly, often across several beds, swapping raucous notes on the past and future of their various complaints. The place was like a strange zoo, or some contemporary and unpleasant open-stage theatrical event. It was impossible to sleep.

  The man immediately to my left, an elderly Cotswolds type who must have been in his eighties, swathed in bandages, soon got talking to me. He spent little enough time enquiring of my illness; his own misfortune entirely absorbed him and I was a captive audience. He was a passionate gardener, he told me, and had been out in his back patch a fortnight before where he had an old wooden-framed greenhouse. It had suddenly collapsed all over him, in a high wind up on the wolds – the same thunderstorm, I imagined, that had come up to me in the valley – and he had been badly cut about the head and neck by the falling glass.

  ‘I didn’t know what hit me,’ the old man explained. ‘I thought it were one of those Yankee bombers from the Heyford base, I did.’

  ‘Dear me,’ I commiserated with him. Though I hoped not to encourage him, for I could see he loved his mishap. And sure enough, almost immediately, he proceeded to repeat the misadventure in every detail, from start to finish.

  By late afternoon, the old man still talking, I could bear it no more. I asked the nurse if there was a day-room for patients on the mend. I was feeling much better. There was, and she allowed me to go to it. So, wrapped up in my colourful dressing-gown, I limped out of the ward.

  Once outside and moving towards the day-room, I had free run to explore all the many corridors and wards in the main part of the hospital. And it wasn’t long, wandering up and down these passageways, before I came on the children’s wards. There was two of them, both on the ground floor, both running back towards the car park. The first, with its high-sided white cots, was for the youngest of the children. The one next was for children of Clare’s age. The doors into both were open as I passed by. It was just after 5.30. Many relatives and friends were already inside the wards visiting, and many more were arriving immediately behind me as I walked along the corridor.

  When I reached the end I turned sharply back. I decided to take the risk: just to walk calmly into the wards, with the crush of other visitors, take a look around, then walk out again. I could say I was lost if anyone stopped me.

  But no one did, as I entered the first ward. Everyone, children, parents and the few nurses, was totally taken up with their own affairs. I glanced and smiled at the beds as I walked down the centre aisle. But Clare was nowhere to be seen. And then, right at the end of the ward, I saw four glass-walled, private rooms, for iller children I assumed, or private patients. Walking through another open door here I saw that three of the rooms were occupied. There were visitors in two of them. But in the third room, right at the back, at the very end of the corridor, through the glass partition, I saw Clare sitting up in pyjamas at the end of her bed. A nurse, a young Chinese girl, was playing with her, or trying to at least occupy her with some toys.

  I turned away at once, in case she saw me. But I needn’t have worried, for when I turned back briefly and looked at Clare again, I could see her blank face, how her eyes were quite unfocused. But it was Clare all right, with the mop of golden colour all round the top of her head; Clare alive, if not well. But physically well, I thought, at least: capable of being moved. I wished I could have gone to her there and then, my heart jumping with excitement.

  As I left these private rooms, I saw a fire-extinguisher by some half-opened curtains at the end of the corridor. Beyond was a metal-framed french window leading out somewhere to the back of the hospital. I could see trees and some tired summer grass in the late-afternoon light. The car-park must have been nearby. And there was a key in the lock of the door: here was my escape.

  On the way back to my ward I stopped in the main hallway of the hospital. There was a public phone on the wall here, but it was engaged, and I had to wait ten minutes before I got through to Alice. We had agreed on a code before I’d left her.

  ‘It’s all arranged,’ I told her. ‘I’ve found the present we want. I’ll wait for you with it behind the station, from ten o’clock onwards, tonight.’

  I wasn’t given any supper that evening and I was light-headed with nervous excitement as well as from lack of food. I tried not to look at the clock at the end of the ward. I tried listening to the radio instead, taking the headphones down from above my bed. At least this ploy kept the old man next door at bay, though I could still see him trying to talk to me, his lips moving soundlessly as I listened to “The Archers”.

  And then, t
hrough nervous exhaustion I suppose, I must have fallen asleep with the headphones still round my ears, for the next thing I knew I was awake and on my side, with the curtains drawn all down the ward. It was 10.15 – the old man next me was still talking, I noticed, when I looked across at him.

  But after a moment I saw he wasn’t talking to me. With my headphones on there was still no sound from his lips. He was speaking to someone else, I realised now, someone I’d not seen on the other side of my bed. I turned.

  The Indian doctor was there, together with another older man I didn’t recognise, and beyond him a third figure, but one I knew: it was Ross, the man who’d stalked me two weeks before through the early mists in the valley by the lake, whose dog I’d killed and who now, much more certainly, had come to claim me.

  I took the headphones off. The other man had a clipboard in one hand. He looked at it and then at my name on the end of the bed.

  ‘Mr John Burton? he asked.

  ‘Yes. I’m John Burton. What’s wrong?’

  But Ross came in at once then. ‘You’re not “John Burton”,’ he said. ‘You’re Peter Marlow, aren’t you?’ He spoke quietly, very reasonably, with kindness almost.

  ‘I couldn’t find anything wrong with him, you see,’ the Indian piped in. ‘There was nothing wrong in the X-ray. Nothing whatsoever. I thought there was something strange then,’ he added, justifying himself.

  The old Cotswolds gardener in the next bed was all ears, craning over towards us, trying to pick up our conversation. And others in the ward were awake or alert now, curious at this intrusion.

  ‘If you wouldn’t mind coming to the administrator’s office for a moment?’ Ross asked, looking about him uneasily at the disturbance they’d caused.

  ‘You don’t have to move, Mr Burton,’ the other older man said to me, the Administrator himself, I presumed. He looked at Ross very critically. ‘I’m afraid,’ he went on, ‘if Mr Burton denies he’s the man you want, he can stay exactly where he is. He’s a patient here, appropriately admitted for observation pending treatment. Your writ stops at the entrance.’