by Joseph Hone
It was now mid-June, almost the height of a warm summer. The nights were short, starlit, rainless for the most part. Sometimes it rained quickly in the day, sudden, stormy thunder-showers from plum-bruised skies that were soon gone, leaving the air moist, steamy and filled with insects above the great bunches of cow-parsley that rose up now with a sweet rank smell, feet-high about the valley.
Clare slept at first in a sleeping-bag on the floor of the tree-house, while I slept beside her. But soon, too hot at nights, she was tempted by Spinks’s string hammock, so that I slung this across the upper part of the tree-house for her, and she swayed here in the hot afternoons, head-in-air, mesmerised, the regular pendulum motion visibly releasing her anxieties, drawing the tense sullenness out of her like a poultice.
At night, too, against lightly-mooned skies and a shadow filigree of leaves and branches, I would see the string hammock move from side to side above me, shaped like a canoe wrapped around her body, as she rocked herself far out on some imaginary voyage. And then, the boat floating home on a dark sea of leaves, the swaying would gradually diminish until finally all movement stopped, and the craft berthed as she slept, held by a thread to earth.
*
Alice came to see us each day, usually in the mornings, out to the island first, and afterwards clambering quickly and silently up to the tree-house, so that she sometimes surprised us, like an animal rising stealthily through the leaves.
I wondered what Clare would make of her. To begin with she made nothing of her at all, she barely looked at her. I had warned Alice that this might happen, told her to take no notice of Clare, to behave just as we did, as if life in these trees, for her as well, was the most natural thing in the world. And thus Alice merged with us, with our life, imperceptibly, doing as we did in the time she stayed with us.
She had brought new clothes for Clare on the first day – cord dungarees, an anorak, socks, plimsolls. But for a long time Clare preferred her grubby hospital pyjamas or just a pair of pants. Later, in the tree-house, she hung up all these new clothes on a line of string, as if they were washing, or the sails of her grandfather’s ketch, and would simply gaze at them, hypnotised, for hours on end, as they swung in the breeze.
Of course, the job I had to do here in the valley was to give Clare life again; life, and speech. So I would talk to her indirectly as often as possible without looking at her, as if talking to myself, while I tidied up the tree-house after breakfast, and she involved herself with one of her elaborate rituals or routines, placing the coloured bricks from the hospital in certain strict and mysterious patterns. Another obsessive therapy she found in stripping the oak leaves about her down to their central stem and then placing these in long opposed ranks on the tree-house planks, like soldiers confronting each other in an opposing army.
The routines were many. But each of them was recreated exactly as they’d been the hour or the day before. There was no change or development here; in these rituals constancy was all. They were her lifelines, imperative duties which licensed not only her very existence but also any attempt she might make to escape from the cage of her anonymity. And escape from this would need speech, I knew – speech as a tendril, words as antennae which would reach out and form a bridge for her to cross into full life. And speech she didn’t have at all beyond mere grunts and screams; this above all I had to return to her.
So I would use words throughout the day and the tree became a babel of my voice. ‘We’re living here for a while,’ I would say quietly as she picked at the oak leaves. ‘Mummy has gone. We’ll live here for a bit and enjoy ourselves. There’s swimming and lots of things we can do. And Alice – Alice that comes up here – she’ll bring us things we need. She has books and food too. Books you might like. That Pigling Bland book she brought: did you see that? Though I expect you’re a bit old for it …’
Thus I would natter on, with apparent aimlessness, about this and that, about anything that came to mind, familiarising Clare with just the sound of words and thoughts again, throwing the currency heedlessly about that she might one day pick some of it up.
Though much more in those early days, besides her rituals, it was the light, the weather and the clouds that most absorbed her attention. She would climb up some way above the tree-house, almost to the top of the oak where I could still see her, and stay there for hours on end, gazing upwards into the blue sky, as if expecting something. It was some time before I realised she was waiting for the clouds which, whenever they passed overhead, she would watch intently, her head moving like a camera with them as they crossed the dome of blue. It was the same with the morning sun. She was often up before dawn, in her perch above the tree-house, waiting in the same way for the first rays of light to streak across the sky, then following the rising flood as it climbed over the rim of trees round the valley, finally cascading over the oak leaves with shafts of green-gold light.
Watching the puffy clouds roll by near to, or studying them in their imperceptible glide far up; lurking, hidden in the grey first light, to ambush the sun, Clare was like a figure for rain or shine in a Swiss weather-house, moving about the tree, alert to every variation in the sky.
Clare’s life then was made up of watching. She watched the birds: the swallows as they swooped and feinted about the sky, on their usually distant aerial careers, but now almost intimate with us, feeding on the wing only a few feet above the topmost branches of our oak tree. She studied the grey and white flash of pigeons as they shot across the valley in sudden cannonades, and then glided upwards in little swoops, breasting the air like a roller-coaster before stalling suddenly, then diving sheer for a second, elated by the very medium of space. There were rooks, too, a colony of them high up on several beech trees above the valley behind us; birds that chattered incessantly at certain times of day, and which Clare would listen to, spellbound, as if eavesdropping on a familiar, long-lost tongue.
On weekends, when they were playing cricket in the park, Clare and I would spend afternoons hidden in the look-out perch on top of the big beech tree that gave out over the estate. And though I listened to the far-away thwack of leather on wood with nostalgia, Clare seemed to hear the sound much more acutely and to see the game in quite a different manner. She looked on the distant players as toys, I think, as though seeing them very close to, and would reach her hand towards them and move it busily in front of her eyes, as if she was picking the batsmen and fielders up on a board in front of her and putting them in different places. She seemed to have an equally long and short vision, like a naive painter who shows details on the horizon as clearly as those in the foreground.
Clare watched and she listened for most of every day then, so that her sight and hearing, always fine, grew startingly acute. There were sounds that she heard, at midday or late in the evening, of some animal moving or crying, which I never heard at all, until, like a pointer, I noticed her sudden attentive stillness as she distinguished a particular warble or crackle in the branches or undergrowth, naming it in her mind perhaps.
‘Pheasant?’ I would say. ‘Rabbit? Stoat? Fox?’ always the man with words, tempting her with them like a bag of sweets. But at best unhappy at this verbal distraction, she would merely turn and look at me, her face blank where it was not annoyed, unable or unwilling to confirm anything for me in her own voice.
Sometimes, as another way of encouraging her with language, I read to her in the hot afternoons sitting in the tree-house, when she was swaying in the hammock above me, the bees and insects a humming gallery all round us. There was the old copy of Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Pigling Bland which Alice had brought down from the Victorian nursery. It wasn’t the most suitable story, this account of porcine deprivation and exile. I don’t know, but perhaps for this very reason it was the only book that Clare took any great interest in. Yet it wasn’t the story, I think, so much as the onomatopoeic dialogue of the animals that caught her attention. Words, if no more than sounds, were acceptable to her: she had banished the cohere
nce of plot from her life.
‘A funny old mother pig lived in a
stye, and three little piggies had she;
(Ti idditty idditty) umph, umph, umph!
and the little pigs said, wee, wee!’
My voice would rise up to Clare, like an actor’s, trying to give the piglets real life for her. And sometimes she almost laughed; she reponded to the ‘idditty idditties’. But more often there was silence as I ran through the saga of Pigling Bland: only the leaves stirring in some faint breeze as an accompaniment, Clare’s hammock swaying, as she watched them, as she watched the puffy clouds float by, quite given over to some swoon in the summer greenery.
Several times, watching her growing passion for the natural world and the silent skills it fostered in her, I was tempted to give up words myself, give up trying to attach them once more to Clare. Surely, as she seemed to suggest so clearly, we lived in a place and in a manner, in a pre-human kindgom, where language was no longer necessary?
Signs would do – as they did for so much of real importance that passed between Clare and me in that time. For if Clare didn’t speak, she soon willingly followed by example. She learnt to hang the canvas bag out over the lake and dredge for water, and to fish from the same branch first thing or at evening when she heard the perch rise. And later, above all, when I took her right round the edge of the valley, she learnt the limits of our safety, how beyond this hidden domain lay danger, a world where she should not go. She was particularly fascinated by Spinks’s recurve bow, which I showed her how to operate. She wasn’t strong enough to draw it, of course. But she would handle it lovingly, for whole mornings or afternoons, aiming at imaginary targets in the branches, miming the draw and the release, the arrow singing away in her mind and striking home, leaving her with an expression of rapturous satisfaction which surprised me.
All this knowledge she absorbed far more by my showing her than from words. So that sometimes, as I say, I was loth to educate this increasingly skilful innocence, to infect it with words. I thought Clare might well be left free of the long sad language of history. At the same time I knew that one day she would have to learn this. We couldn’t live in the valley for ever. We were not animals in a pre-human kingdom. This vegetable world, this life on high formed a cure for both of us now, but at some point we would have to leave the trees and come down to earth. At some point? Day by day then I was happy to postpone it. There was so much to do, so much to keep us here meanwhile.
I’ve used the phrase ‘vegetable world’. But that may give a false impression, as if we lacked human response in the valley, became vegetables. It was rather the opposite. Freed completely from the ties of conventional thought, from all the devious forecasts and immediate considerations which ordinary life imposes, there was time for real thought at last. One could concentrate on the essence rather than the extraneous; on matters which at normal times occupy only the corners of one’s vision for brief moments: one could concentrate on looking, where one becomes so embedded in the object, so carried away by it, that self-consciousness is lost at last – corruption and mortality forgotten.
Painters work for such vision. But it came naturally to me, in that time out of life, and when it did self-realisation was complete. And instead of the hours in the day having to be filled, as I had expected, these traditional shapes of time disappeared altogether and there were only the acts and thoughts themselves, let loose from the clock, so that one was free at last. There was never too much or too little to do. There was simply the one thing to be done at that moment, without reference to past or future, complete in itself.
It’s only now, weeks later, that I remember certain moments, or actions which at the time I was unaware of while simply living through them, yet which must have impressed me unconsciously, so that I can only regain them now as events in a dream brought to light long after waking.
An oak tree, as I discovered for example, supports an extraordinary variety of minute or invisible life in midsummer: bees, flies, insects of all kinds hovering up and down the long interior glades in the leaves: glades and twisting tunnels and undulating roads made by the branches, a whole stereoscopic geography which, living in the midst of it, becomes as familiar and unnoticed as the tracks or alleyways around a childhood home. Along these airy paths, shut out from the world in a green shade, the insects move, like traffic, with a constant hum …
And what I see – and hear – now, and had forgotten, is Clare gazing deep down into one of these leafy caverns, with an extraordinary longing in her face, as if she was struggling to resist the temptation to glide off after the insects, to actually get into and share their world with them. Instead, compensating for her inability to do this, she hummed with the insects. Yes, she ‘buzzed’ in different ways with her lips, miming a variety of them distinctly, successfully identifying with them in this way. And it’s strange that I’ve forgotten this until now, for it was the first time that Clare used her lips, gave tongue at last, when she properly broke her silence.
I told Alice when she came up to see us later that day, ‘She may talk again. Soon.’ But Alice said nothing in reply. Perhaps, like me, she silently feared a change, any change, in this Arcadia. Of course the world outside was not entirely forgotten. Alice, together with the old transistor, kept me in touch with it. Much of central England was being scoured in a search for us. But no one visited the valley again, and no one, apparently, had traced the car, or Arthur’s clothes, or Alice’s money. In the middle of that warm summer, with so many people looking for us, searching all round us, hurrying to and fro with messages, rumours, tip-offs, we were a still centre in the hidden valley.
‘What about Mrs Pringle?’ I asked Alice one afternoon in the tree house.
‘Nothing. She never mentions Harry Conrad’s visit. She looks at me, that’s all: rather pityingly, I think. As if I should have someone to look after me. The hell with that. I can look after myself. I’m busy anyway, preparing this fête with the local Victorian Society.’
‘Fête?’
‘Remember – I told you. It’s exactly a hundred years ago this
August when they finished building the Manor. So we’re going to celebrate: a jousting tournament, a costume ball. In medieval dress.’
‘I’d forgotten. But surely you’ll need your husband for that?’
‘Certainly not. He’ll be out on Long Island all summer – watching polo, I expect. The divorce comes through in September. I never want to see him again.’
Alice was sitting on the edge of the tree house, her feet dangling in space, looking away from me, down into the green depths beneath. Clare was high above us, on top of the oak, absorbed in her vision of the clouds. It was a humid afternoon, stuffy. Something threatened. And there was another tenseness in the air now between Alice and me. This talk of Arthur and divorce again proposed a future which we both seemed unwilling to face. There were suddenly all sorts of things once more undecided, like the weather, for both of us.
Then Alice looked up at me and, as if to get away from this uncomfortable future, I thought, she said, ‘I’ve been wondering about Clare’s autism. It’s curious …’
‘I know that.’
‘The causes, I mean, There’s a book apparently, The Forbidden Fortress, by someone called Bettelheim.’
‘Yes. I know it. Never got to the end of it, though. It’s mostly case-histories. We gave up on books, Laura and I. On books and quacks and the special schools.’
Alice looked at me now, carefully this time, some big hidden query in her eyes. ‘The causes, though,’ she said again.
‘They vary. Biological, psychological, traumatic, environmental – ad nauseam. They vary in each child, and in most professional theory.’
‘Isn’t it basically rejection though?’ Alice said quickly, as if the words would dissolve in her throat otherwise. ‘By the parents. By the mother. At some early stage?’
I still had no idea what Alice was pursuing at this point. ‘With Clare,’ I said
, ‘I always thought it was leaving East Africa. But the medicos and child specialists said not. I don’t think I ever believed them.’
‘Was Laura a cold person?’ Alice asked decisively, as if she’d at last made her mind up on something.
I looked at her, surprised. ‘No. Of course not. Not with me. Least of all with Clare,’ I added equally decisively.
And yet, after I’d said this, I remembered Laura’s initial effect on me, when I’d first seen her in the church in Lisbon and met her afterwards at the sardine barbecue on the windy hill: her apparent hauteur then, the distance she kept from people – like an insensitive Tory divorcee from the shires, I’d even thought. Yes, she could give, she had given a distinctly cold impression then. But I’d seen this frigidity as so obviously the result of Clare’s tragedy and her husband’s subsequent death.
It was these blows that had distanced her and nothing else. There was nothing basic in her character which would ever have made her reject Clare. Besides, I remembered the efforts she had afterwards made on Clare’s behalf, the endless care and attention … I told Alice this and she said simply, ‘People make up for things, don’t they?’
‘Laura never had to make up for anything. That’s nonsense.’
But again, I remembered how Laura had sometimes allowed Clare to do exactly what she wanted: how, in Cascais once, she let her drive a nail through her palm, telling me afterwards that it was the only thing to do sometimes with such children. I didn’t tell Alice, though.
Instead I said ‘But why do you ask about all this?’
‘You have a great tie with Laura still, don’t you?’
‘Of course. We were very happy. I’ve told you. It really worked for both of us, I think.’
‘It didn’t work with her first husband then? With Willy, the famous bone man you told me about. It didn’t work with him?’ she asked rhetorically.
