The Valley of the Fox

by Joseph Hone

  ‘Willy was really just an eccentric academic, I keep telling you. Besides, Benson ran all the practical details on these safaris.’

  ‘So he might know something special?’

  ‘Perhaps. Perhaps I should risk visiting him.’

  But I postponed the visit. After so long in the open I began to enjoy the comforts and surprises of life in the house. And although Clare hadn’t improved with any coherent speech, still just expressing herself, when she did at all, with grunts and tantrums and in bursts of some strange language of her own, she was calm, at least, for long periods. She appeared to have accepted her enclosure. And when the Pringles went off on their Spanish holiday two days later, things were easier still, for though we kept our beds and ate mostly in Alice’s tower, we now had the run of the great house after twelve o’clock each morning when Mary left. So, as once the trees and lake in the valley had been our secret estate, now the house became an equally covert playground – the long upstairs passages, empty rooms, the junk-filled nooks and crannies in the attics, which Clare and I roved up and down on voyages of discovery during the rainy, unsettled week that followed.

  We took Clare downstairs, too, showing her all the reconstructed Victoriana: the great hall, the dining-room, the real tennis court at the back, the old kitchen with the lamp room, larders and laundry beyond. Yet the great cast-iron boiling tub in the laundry was the only thing that intrigued her. She assumed it was for cooking in – an African memory, I supposed, though hardly of missionaries and cannibals. She would have stayed there content all day, sitting in the big pot and poking about in the grate beneath. But it was a dangerous room for a child to be left in, since there was a great mechanical linen press at one end against the wall, a Victorian patent device with an unruly ton weight, like a great broad coffin resting above a series of wooden rollers, which you turned with a handle and chain, pressing the rollers over the fabric.

  She liked the real tennis court, too, at the back of the house, built with a sloping interior roof all down one side, like a monastery cloister, where the Hortons, presumably giving up the archaic game, had built a little stage at the far end of the court. And it was this stage which Alice had refurbished, complete with new velvet drapes and Victorian oil footlamps. And here one day we set up an old nineteenth-century Punch and Judy show, which Alice had bought at Sothebys, and played rumbustious scenes for Clare, as an audience of one on a single chair beneath the stage on the vast pinewood floor. This mime, with gruff and shrill voices added, drew a response from her: a smile, a human laugh almost. She was involved, certainly. I remember looking out through the side of the little wooden proscenium at the end of an act, and seeing Clare’s face, caught in a shaft of afternoon sunlight from the clerestory windows overhead: a face from which tragedy and vacancy has disappeared now, where she had escaped her past for a moment and could, I thought, have moved off there and then into a future in this house. Indeed, immediately after this last Punch and Judy show, Clare seemed to want to do just this: she tried to skate away across the huge space, thinking the old tennis court some magic place, an ice rink or frozen pond perhaps, but the floor wasn’t slippery enough.

  But mostly we lived upstairs in the tower and on the long, half-repaired attic corridor on top of the house, where Alice stored her costly junk. And we gave Clare a headquarters here in the old nursery further along, at the end of the landing, where there was so much we thought she could occupy herself with: the row of blackberry-eyed Victorian china dolls on the sofa, the big doll’s house … There was a marvellous wooden train on the floor, too, a black-and-green engine big enough to sit in, with two open carriages behind. And a vast collection of old wooden animals, each of them paired, male and female, camels, elephants, giraffes, cows, cats and dogs, all of which had a place in a large white Ark; the deck came off the boat and the whole menagerie could be bedded down in stalls inside, with Noah, a commanding figure with a golden beard, standing by the ramp.

  But none of these riches stirred Clare much. She was listless, fractious here in the nursery, where she was not totally lost, staring vacantly out into an empty world from an empty mind.

  Alice, now that Clare was a guest in her house, took a special interest in Clare’s problems. We often sat, all three of us, in the nursery, for the bad weather had set in for a week and we couldn’t venture far outside the house in any case. Alice would look at Clare across the room, sunk on her haunches, playing repetitively with her pile of bricks: again the strange circles, with pyramids and cones inside them; and again the clear blue eyes, unblinking, as she repeated her handiwork by the hour.

  ‘It’s as if she had things on her mind too hard for her to tell us,’ Alice said one afternoon. ‘Or that we wouldn’t understand. Complicated things, beyond us. When you look at her eyes – you can tell: she knows something, and we don’t, and can’t know it.’

  ‘Whatever she knows in that way,’ I said, ‘she doesn’t know. She’s suppressed it. That’s the whole point of her problem: whatever it is, she can’t face it.’

  ‘I wonder. That’s the usual view. I have the feeling she has some kind of power which she knows all about. Some extraordinary knowledge, a gift she has no use for here with us, in this world, which is why she doesn’t respond. She’s somewhere else all the time.’

  ‘Obviously. But there’s nothing positive about that “somewhere else” where she is. It’s just a blank. She keeps whatever is real in her at bay by playing repetitive games.’

  ‘How can you be so sure?’

  ‘It’s too well known. It’s the syndrome: she has all the classic symptoms. Kanner’s Syndrome, it’s called. That’s autism. She’s not the first child to suffer it, you know. Why should you think it’s any different with her?’

  ‘You assume it’s autism, and that’s the way you treat her –’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  ‘But you won’t look for the cause of it and treat that instead. That’s what I’m saying. The cause is something quite different, isn’t it? You’re treating the complaint, the result, without knowing the reason.’

  ‘You think there’s a quite logical mind there, do you, ticking away behind the empty façade?’

  ‘No. A quite illogical mind maybe. But she’s thinking about something. I can feel it. It’s just that what she has on her mind doesn’t correspond with anything in our way of thinking. We’d deny it in her if we knew about it. So she keeps it to herself.’

  ‘What, though? What’s she hiding? What’s the form of her thought? If it’s not normal, is it paranormal? What are you getting at?’

  ‘At something maybe in that direction. I don’t know what. For example, have you ever wondered why she always sits like that, always crouched down on her haunches?’

  ‘Children often do. Quite normal children. They can get at things on the ground more easily.’

  ‘It’s how Africans sit though, isn’t it? Out in the wilds.’

  ‘Yes, that too. She’d have seen them doing it. That’s another reason why she does it probably.’

  ‘And look at the circles she always makes with the bricks,’ Alice went on, suddenly running off after some undefined theory of her own.

  ‘Yes. What’s remarkable?’

  ‘The gap she always leaves, every time she builds it. Then she puts some of the animals, the cows usually, from the ark there inside. Then she closes the gap, with another brick.’

  ‘Yes, she makes a sort of stockade out of it. In Kenya they call it a boma, a native camp, with a circular wall round it made of thorn bushes. She’d have seen that too, up in Turkana province where they were, and the other wilder places. It’s just imitation.’

  ‘Possibly. But there’s one other thing: when she makes the circle and gets the animals in and blocks off the stockade, at the end of nearly every game like this, she climbs inside the circle herself, or tries to. She actually sits on the animals, like a sort of great broody hen. Have you noticed that?’

  ‘Yes, But she’s just d
estroying the game so that she can start it all over again. Why? What else?’

  ‘I think there’s something else. She’s trying to go back and live in the place, in some place like that: a circular stockade, with animals locked in safely for the night. She’s trying to get back into some security, some home of her own.’

  ‘Maybe. She may well see it in that way. Africa, all that early life of hers out there, is a kind of lost Eden for her. I told you before: I’ve often thought that was exactly the reason for her autism – that she was taken away from it. There’s your “cause” for you. But how do you treat that? Send her back there?’

  ‘Maybe. Maybe that’s exactly it. Perhaps that’s exactly what you should do. Or it’s what she wants to do.’

  ‘Don’t be silly. Clare hasn’t the kind of reasoning to want anything so intangible right now.’

  ‘I wouldn’t be so sure.’

  We left it at that. However, the following day, I wondered if Alice might not have stumbled on something.

  I had gone down the attic corridor with her to look over the collection in the little museum, in case there was something Clare could safely make use of there. The room – a maid’s room, I suppose – was halfway down the landing, the doorway partly blocked with Alice’s Victorian acquisitions, as well as by the great Nile crocodile which crouched in the shadows, its beady eyes and vicious snout guarding the room as though it was the entrance to a Pharaoh’s tomb.

  The door was locked and the key stiff, so that it was some time before we managed to open it. But as soon as we did there was a strange smell, something soiled, pungent, that I couldn’t identify,

  ‘What is it?’ I wondered.

  But Alice could smell nothing. There was a single window low down near the floor, with an old tasselled roller blind, torn, half-covering it. The blind flapped suddenly, as though caught in a draught, though the window was firmly shut. Running down the centre of the room was a double-sided glass case with other larger exhibits littered about the place, in corners or hung on the walls.

  At first glance it seemed a typical collection, picked up by some acquisitive colonial civil servant in a lifetime spent traversing the wild places seventy or eighty years before. It wasn’t a big collection, and not all of it was African. There was a Tsantsas head, a speciality of the Jivaro Indians, the label said, from Ecuador in the glass case: a tiny, jaundice-coloured human head, the skull removed, with obscenely protuberant lips and nose, shrunk now to the size of a small monkey’s, with a long thick tress of jet-black hair still attached to the top. And there were several dark cane blowpipes from Borneo and New Guinea, one of them not more than a foot long, like a pea-shooter or a little malicious flute, complete with barbed darts made of bamboo. There was an ordinary skull here, too, in the African section, a blackened ivory colour, with a smashed temple where someone must have killed the man years before with a blunt and heavy instrument. There were beads and cooking pots and tom-tom drums, together with a coin collection, Egyptian piastres and Indian rupees. There was the model of an Arab dhow in the case, along with an old Martini-Henry rifle and brass cartridges, with a legend in neat copperplate beneath explaining these objects as part of a contraband cargo captured by the British authorities in Mombasa harbour on July 7th, 1917. In a top corner of the case I found what looked like a minute powder-horn, the horn of a small goat, with a wooden plug stuffed into the hollow top. Inside were the hardened remains of some tar-coloured substance. I thought it must be an old portable ink-bottle, from some early missionary school in the bush, perhaps. And it wasn’t until I found the label nearby, which had obviously come adrift from the horn, that I saw what it was: ‘Wabaio Poison Horn for Arrow Heads – taken from Wandarobo Tribesman, Northern Frontier District, August 1919. (Made from the Wabai and Dukneya trees, found in British Somaliland.)’

  The walls were covered with cracked Zebra-hide shields, long Masai spears, with decaying ruffs of red tassel just beneath the spearhead, and other native implements of destruction, all rather gone to seed now in the small, white-washed, musty room. But the really strange thing was the smell, which I couldn’t find any reason for, and a collection of extraordinary tribal masks.

  There were half a dozen of them in the case: African ceremonial masks, each presenting a grotesque or fearsome image, painted in vivid reds and black, with the eyeholes rimmed in white, and with dangling necklaces of human teeth hanging down in short rows at either side. Alice took one of them out. It was made of antelope-hide, crimped like a canvas over a matrix of ink-dark thorn twigs.

  As I looked at it something moved behind us. Turning, I saw Clare standing in the doorway. We had left her in the nursery, content with her bricks. But she had followed us for some reason and now she stood on the threshold looking into the room, looking at the mast in my hand with an expression of strange delight. She walked forward slowly, hand outstretched.

  I thought the mask too valuable or delicate for her to handle. But Alice allowed her to have it and, far from being rough with it, she treated it with delicate respect. We watched her: she held it up in front of her face with both hands and looked at it for a minute. Then she set it down against the wall and crouched in front of it on her haunches, inspecting it from a distance for a much longer time. She didn’t want to touch it any more, just to gaze at it. And it seemed as she did so, as she looked into the empty eye-sockets of this hideous, livid emblem, that she had found some peace, drew some release from the violent drama in the mask. Her eyes were bright with an intelligent response at last.

  Encouraged by this, Alice took the other five masks from the case and set them up against the wall for Clare, on either side of the first, which pleased her: except that something in the placing wasn’t quite right. And Clare re-arranged all the masks then in a semi-circle round her, flat on the floor, so that she sat erect in the middle of them finally, surrounded by these threatening visions, inspecting each calmly in turn as she slowly circled her head, perfectly absorbed, content at last.

  It was Alice who said it, though the same thought had occurred to me. ‘Do you see?’ she said. ‘It’s as if she was holding court, as if the masks were real people, courtiers, paying homage to her.’

  ‘Yes. Something like that. Some strange game –’

  ‘As though she was a Queen,’ Alice ran on, excited by something, breathless in the closed room perched under the warm slates of the house. And then I knew what the smell in the room was: the acrid smell of old lime dust, congealed sweat, animal-hide and cow-dung, with a top-dressing, a rumour of pepper, spices. That was it: it was a faint amalgam of Africa itself, that first whiff on the quayside, or airport, or in the back streets of Cairo that I remembered now from my days in the same continent twenty years before. We were suddenly, all of us, in the middle of Africa then – even Alice, who had never been there, which was why the smell had meant nothing to her originally. The three of us had moved in time, to somewhere else, Alice and I standing over the child, onlookers at some secret ceremony. But what was it? What thing in these dead masks, what spirit in these African relics, had brought Clare to such life again? And what connection was there between Clare’s mysterious recreation of Africa and the real African, with his livid scars, who’d been looking for us in the valley, and was still perhaps lurking somewhere in the area?

  I had no way of finding out. Clare couldn’t tell me. Willy was long dead and Laura was gone, too. Yet I felt now that she must have denied me something, some truth about their African past, which might explain all our subsequent tragedy. The only people who could help me over this were the Bensons – George and Annabelle Benson, in Oxford. And, seeing Clare’s behaviour, I felt a strange urgency now, and a danger, as if something vital was at last within my grasp, and that to identify it was a matter of great urgency, against an even greater peril.

  Fourteen

  I took Alice’s car to Oxford to try and talk to George Benson the following afternoon – disguised in one of Arthur’s most distinguished Savile Row s
uits and with another £100 of Alice’s money in my pocket, in case I was delayed overnight. I had asked Alice to keep Clare inside the house meanwhile, under her eye all the time, with the doors locked and the alarms on, until I got back. She had offered me her small automatic again, but I told her to keep it on her herself now. And I left the swordstick behind as well. The police would be on the lookout for just such an object. Yet I felt I needed something in the way of a weapon. And then I had it, a possible answer: the little horn of Somali arrow-poison in the glass case, together with the flute-like blowpipe from New Guinea and the bamboo dart. This would form a useful threat: indeed, if the poison was still active, it could form a lethal combination which Benson, given his vast anthropological knowledge, would surely appreciate.

  And certainly I might have to threaten him. If Laura, my own wife, had felt unable to tell me something murky from their African past, why should Benson, if he shared this knowledge, be any more willing? Indeed, with his professional eminence as a Professor of Anthropology at Oxford University and his latter reputation on television as an African pre-history Guru, he might be extremely unwilling indeed to disclose anything improper which had occurred on those fossil treks which he had organised for Willy. All the same, I knew I wouldn’t hesitate to force or frighten him into any useful admission, if he didn’t offer the same willingly. Laura – and Willy too – might have died as a result of something Benson could explain. Clare might have lost her mind in the same cause, and there was a half-burnt African still lurking somewhere in the middle of England. I wanted to know about him as well.

  I tested the little blowpipe upstairs in the morning before I went. At first I could make no progress with it. The darts simply fell on the floor at my feet. Then I found the technique: one had to compress a whole mouthful of air, with puffed cheeks, and then spit it all into the tube suddenly. This way, after a dozen experiments, I found I could hit the small window in the maid’s room, from the doorway on the other side, almost every time. I didn’t expect to use the pipe and I imagined the caked poison in the bottom of the horn was probably inactive now after sixty years in any case. All the same, if it was to be a real threat, or if I needed it in self-defence, I might as well avoid compromise: I stuck two of the darts deep into the inky substance in the goat’s horn, wrapped them carefully in a handkerchief and put them away, along with the blowpipe, into the inside pocket of Arthur’s smart business suit.