The Valley of the Fox

by Joseph Hone

  ‘That’s simply convenient argument. I’m talking about basic personality. Long before you met me you hated the common lot – you isolated yourself from it, from them. And so have I, yet you blame me for it now.’

  ‘No. I just said I didn’t think we could make a lifetime’s performance out of it, that’s all.’

  I was well on my way to disappointing Alice, I could see that. But there was nothing for it. I could no longer acquiesce in her every fantasy. I was sure I’d damage Alice then, as much as I’d helped her before by identifying with her dreams.

  Alice turned away. ‘You’re just suiting yourself now. You forget: you played all these “games”, as you call them now, to your advantage before. They were the saving of you, too. Don’t you remember? Living wild in the wood. That saved you. That wasn’t a game. And when you were Harry Conrad and that London antique dealer in the hospital those roles saved you – and Clare as well. And the cricket match this afternoon, dressed up in that little cap and side whiskers, and being an Albanian nobleman this evening – you enjoyed all that as well didn’t you?’ she added bitterly.

  ‘Yes. But now –’

  ‘Now you’re becoming like Arthur. Just like him: full of refusals, dull care, the common lot.’

  ‘No. It’s just that I don’t want to break my neck tomorrow with a barge-pole on a galloping horse.’

  Alice turned to me again with a slightly malicious smile, like a teasing child. ‘You’ve just lost your nerve, Peter, that’s all.’

  I could see now how, after all my other impersonations, she had contrived a last testing hurdle for me in the shape of this jousting tournament: finally, to succeed with her, to deserve her, I must actually appear as a shining knight in armour, tilting victoriously in her cause, with her favour, a little ribbon or red hanky, tied to my lance. It was an absurd dream. But I could not think of any other reason for her insistence in this obviously and unnecessarily dangerous nonsense.

  ‘Alice,’ I said, trying to make things up with her. ‘it’s not really a question of nerve – though that’s part of it, I’ll admit: it’s a question of sanity. It’s an unnecessary risk. Can’t you see that? If I was injured and had to go to hospital what would happen to Clare? And they’d find out who I was then, so I’d just be locked up afterwards. There’d be no future for us.’

  But Alice, this dream so nearly within her reach, was quite unwilling to relinquish it. ‘You could at least try it,’ she said. ‘It can’t be all that difficult.’

  ‘I should think it’s bloody difficult, especially if you’re no great horseman. And I’m not. But what’s the point, Alice? What’s the point? That’s the real question.’

  ‘It’s life. Don’t you see?’ she answered simply.

  ‘It’s death, more likely.’ I thought even then that I could rescue the situation with a joke, by taking Alice in my arms. But when I touched her she withdrew, unable even to look at me. And I sensed then that her madness went back much further than I’d thought; that the games she played at Beechwood were not the result of her marriage or of her isolation in the great house but had their origins in some unresolved trauma way in her past, that I knew nothing of, which I could never unearth or cure. I had failed her in this last event, this charade of courtly valour: I was thus no fit person to accompany her on her golden journey through life. I would not be that ever-daring, valiant knight from her child’s story book, In the Days of the King, who would rescue her from the dark and brambly wood. I wanted to rescue her with sanity, not by injecting some continual drama into our affair.

  She turned and looked at me now from the far side of the big divan. ‘You’ve really been using me, haven’t you? As long as you were in a fix, I was useful to you: my money, this house. But now–’

  ‘Alice, that’s not true, I’m still in a fix. And besides it was always your suggestion that you help me, that I came up to the house in the first place, for example. You forget that.’

  We were arguing now, prevaricating, accusing, objecting, denying. All the angry emotional grammar we had never known before we seemed to know by heart now. And that was nonsense, too, I suddenly decided. I was becoming like the schoolmaster I’d been, treating Alice like the child she was. There was no future there, as Arthur had so obviously found, who had treated her in the same way. Yet I was determined not to give in, not to be bullied in the matter of the tournament: there was equally no future for us in that either.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘Let’s not fight any more about it – can we not?’

  She didn’t reply. I picked up her wizard’s hat. ‘You looked marvellous this evening, you know,’ I said.

  She turned then, smiling at last. She took the hat from me and put it on again, setting it at an angle rising back from her dark hair, so that the long swathe of silk spun round her body as she swirled about for a moment on the far side of the bedroom. ‘Tomorrow I’ve another costume, for the tournament: it’s a surprise, as the Queen of Beauty.’

  ‘Queen of Beauty?’

  ‘Yes. There was one at every tournament in the old days: I’m to be the Queen of Beauty tomorrow. The Victorian Society suggested it. So why not, I thought? It should be fun.’

  She let me kiss her then, lightly on the cheek. ‘Great,’ I said. ‘I’ll look forward to it all.’ Then I turned back, halfway to the door. ‘Of course, they were quite right, the Society – there couldn’t have been any other choice.’

  It seemed we’d made it up then as I looked across at her and we smiled at each other. But out on the landing I had that last vision of her as someone quite isolated again, as she had been when I’d first seen her apparently talking to herself in the conservatory – isolated now, madness creeping up on her once more in the shape of her Elizabethan gown and wizard’s cap. I had somehow lost her. She would sleep with these props next to her that night, and not me, I thought, dreaming of another even more elaborate disguise on the morrow. I had lost her, and she had lost all those happy, decisive connections with real life which my predicament had given her. And yet all my problems remained as great as ever. Could I overcome them without her help? I was tempted to go back and tell her then that I’d take part in the tournament after all. But when I got to my own room and saw the great mass of black armour looming up at me, still confronting me like a brutal foe about to attack, I thought better of the idea. I picked the crusader’s shield up. And I saw then that it wasn’t real – that none of the armour was genuine. It had been made quite recently, in some light metal, as a theatrical or movie prop. So much for Alice’s Arthurian legends, I thought: Camelot and all the Knights of the Round Table were just as fake.

  And yet on the following afternoon I had to admit that the whole medieval recreation looked real enough: startlingly real – a dream come to genuine life in the brilliant sunshine. There was a Grand Procession first, Alice leading it side-saddle on a white charger, of all the Knights and Officers of the tournament, all of them moving on dazzlingly caparisoned horses from the Manor to the lists on the far side of the cricket pitch. A dozen small candy-striped tents for each Knight had been set up here, with individually coloured pennants snaking out in the slight breeze above them.

  Nearer the centre of the park a line of wooden hurdles had been set up, like an endless tennis net, along which, down either side, the Knights would charge each other. Further across, facing the middle of the hurdles, a gaily decorated stand had been built, with a long striped awning overhead and the rest festooned with flowers, in swathes of cloth and coloured ribbons, all contrived to form Gothic patterns of slim arches and rose medallions which successfully hid the basic metal scaffolding beneath.

  At either end of the hurdles tall lances had been stacked in cones, one against the other, stiletto pennants flying from their tips. A large crowd meanwhile, freed from their morning sports and balloon rides about and above the Manor, had gathered all round the boundary ropes, and there was a buzz of incredulous expectation in the air. Clare and I, dressed again in our costum
es of the previous night, had seats in the main stand, not far from where Alice was to sit, right in the front, in a flower-bedecked loggia, with the President of the Victorian Society. In front of us at that moment, a medieval jester, complete with cap and bells, was entertaining us. But this archaic amusement was well forgotten when the long procession came in sight. Each of the Knights was surrounded by their own little retinue of grooms, armourers and supporters, while interspersed between them walked a colourful assortment of archers, halberdiers, standard-bearers and men at arms. At the very head of the procession the musicians of the previous night doubled now as strident trumpeters, announcing the tournament in long high clarions.

  I was suddenly lifted by the magic of it all, by the great winding line of armoured horsemen and attendants, chain-mail glinting in the sun, with all the other colours in their shields and pennants – the reds and golds and blacks – turning the procession into a vision from some medieval Book of Hours, a crusader’s army setting forth on the vellum of the green sward.

  Despite the flimsy veil she wore I could see Alice’s face clearly when she arrived to take her throne. Dressed in a long white gown with vast billowing silk sleeves, in a tight, almost wasp-waisted gilt embroidered velvet bodice, she was in seventh heaven – in the midst of an incredibly extravagant dream now at last perfectly realised. I was sorry in a way that I couldn’t share it with her. I envied her invention then. And somehow I think she sensed this, for when she finally sat down in the flower-strewn box at the front of the stand, she turned to me for a moment, to where I was sitting a few rows behind her, and, having first looked at me with surprise, for I’d not seen her all that morning, she went on to smile at me with an expression of extraordinary triumph – triumph with an element of spite in it: she had moved finally, with this glorious procession, into a vital world of colour and light, into a promised land where I, through my lack of faith, could not join her.

  Yet when the jousting itself actually started and the darkly armoured knights, like evil machines, their plumes flying, thundered down along the hurdles at each other, I was glad I was no part of it. Clare was on her feet most of the time with excitement. But had I been on one of the horses myself, I would almost certainly have ended up in hospital, or worse. One of the well-practised Knights, indeed, took a fearful tumble, jolted violently out of his saddle by a padded lance, to be rescued by St John’s Ambulance men suitably attired in striped doublets and hose.

  I thought the whole thing comic for a moment, as well as dangerous. And yet what a lot of energy and imagination had been given – by Alice particularly, I knew – to organising the vastly elaborate charade. And I was amazed then at the intensity of Alice’s dream, the tenacity with which she had pursued and successfully realised this pageant of archaic valour. I had to admit now that there was something wonderful about her obsessions, something that was not madness. Perhaps it was a particularly American quality, extinct there as everywhere else now, which she still possessed and had brought to life again here: a quality of reaching out, far beyond the boundaries of ordinary hope, towards an imagined light – of risking the infinite, sure of its promise. Alice certainly had this continuously available generosity of spirit, a romantic vision which I, in my sanity, had lost years ago, if I had ever had it. And I felt ashamed of my tardy, careful nature. I was a prisoner of my wishes – someone always at several removes from the real action – a spy by nature as well as by old profession, who could only really see the world through binoculars.

  And it was through these, towards the end of the jousting, when the flags and pennants began to dance in long, snake-like shadows across the parkland in an evening breeze, that I noticed the man walking down from the Manor towards us. He was immediately, blatantly noticeable as he came among the costumed spectators in the stand, dressed as he was in a dark business suit, a smallish, almost elderly, rather common-looking little man. I noticed his hair, too, dank, dark tufts of it plastered down with some stiffened dressing over his ears and collar. He searched the stand for someone, gazing about him with an air of great self-assurance and superior concern, as if such costumed nonsense and all the jousting was nothing but a dalliance for rogues and vagabonds.

  I had seen this man somewhere before, I thought, seen just that same expression of contemptuous dismissal. But where?

  Then I remembered. Months before, in the conservatory, when I had first seen Alice, dressed in a Camelot outfit, apparently talking to herself, she had in fact been talking to this same man: her husband Arthur.

  I had forgotten Arthur. I’d been worrying about the police, the African, about Ross. I’d quite forgotten him – forgotten that we had another, and in the present circumstances just as dangerous enemy, who had now walked in on us out of the blue, a pallid ghost, the bad fairy come at the end of the feast. He was looking for Alice, of course, but hadn’t seen her yet.

  I realised we couldn’t run. Clare and I would get nowhere in our costumes. We would have to bluff it out somehow. Alice no doubt would have ideas. At least, I hoped she would.

  She did. When the tournament came to end, and Arthur had finally recognised and approached his wife, she immediately called Clare and me over to her little loggia in the front of the stand, where she calmly introduced us to Arthur.

  ‘My friends,’ she said. ‘You don’t know them: Bob Lawrence and his daughter Belinda. They’re staying here – down from London for the celebrations.’

  Alice introduced us in her most gracious social manner. But her husband replied in quite a different manner. ‘Oh, are they? Well, I guess that’s fine, for them, I’m sure. And you too, Alice, Just fine.’

  He spoke contemptuously as well, a harsh, grating American accent, a common tongue, quite unlike Alice’s. There was power in his voice, but not the educated power of any East-Coast attorney, I thought. This was much more the tone of a brutal success derived from the Chicago stockyards.

  We shook hands. Clare looked up at me and smiled, enjoying these fictional introductions, which she saw as no more than a continuation of the day’s brilliant theatricals. Then she looked up at Arthur. And she stopped smiling, for Arthur wore a steady expression of weary disgust. I saw him properly for the first time. I was surprised by how much older he was than Alice, twenty years older at least, I thought. He must have been in his mid-sixties. There was a chilled, blue look about him in the warm twilight, as if he’d just come out of a cold store. The crown of his head, together with his brow, was over-large, protuberant. But the cheeks hollowed out rapidly and his chin was small, pointed, decisive. His head was like an inverted pear: there was the sense, almost, of some deformation in it, while the dark, moist tufts of unruly hair were widely spaced, I saw now, showing clear patches of skin beneath, like the scalp of a new-born baby. There was the sense of someone who had got his own way with life, in every matter, at the cost only of his appearance which alone reflected unpleasant failure. I was surprised that Alice could ever have come to marry such a cold, elderly fish.

  Yet it seemed as if Clare and I had successfully passed this initial test with him. But how would it be when we were back in our own clothes, as ordinary guests in the Manor? Could we sustain the fiction then? Arthur had such a wary look in his eye for all three of us that I feared for the future.

  And I was right there, too. I was unable to speak to Alice alone before we all trooped back to the Manor, where another smaller buffet supper with cooling drinks had been laid out in the great hall for the sweating contestants and the costumed guests from the stand.

  Quite soon after the exultant merry-making had begun here, when the band of musicians, now well laced with mead and ale, had started out on some jaunty trumpet themes, Arthur cornered all three of us where we had been standing by the great fireplace at one end of the hall. He was fidgeting, frustrated, clearly with something pressing on his mind, which wouldn’t wait.

  Alice, brashly inventive as ever, gave him the opportunity to unburden himself. ‘Bob Lawrence, here,’ she said with
happy charm, ‘is an expert on medieval armour …’

  She had hardly finished speaking before Arthur replied softly, urgently, with barely suppressed vindictiveness. ‘Don’t for God’s sake play the fool any more, Alice,’ he said, sorrow equalling the anger in his rough American voice. ‘You’ve caused enough trouble already – but this time you’re really playing with fire.’ He stepped between us then, as if to protect Alice. Then he turned to me, foreknowledge and a dismissive arrogance crowding his face. ‘This man is Peter Marlow. And his daughter Clare. He killed his wife a few months back, then abducted the girl from hospital – helped by you, as I understand it. The police have been looking the whole country over for both of them ever since.’ He turned back to Alice now. ‘Don’t be such a damned fool, Alice. This is real madness.’

  An angry brightness had come into Alice’s eyes as she listened, something sharp and fierce in her expression: hatred for this man. And yet, more than looking at Arthur now, she seemed to be gazing straight through him, focusing on something behind him or lost in some huge new bitter thought of her own. She smiled then. And it was the same overblown, unattached smile, now touched with real madness, that I had noticed in her expression the first time I’d seen her down by the lake, months before, when she had yelped in the wind, floating great Indian war-whoops out over the water.

  ‘Who told you?’ she asked.

  ‘Why, Mrs Pringle did, of course. She called me a few days back in New York, when she was certain of the matter. I came straight on over. This time you’ve really gone too far. But we’ll see what we can do.’

  He tried to shepherd Alice away, with cold consideration, as the madwoman he so clearly considered her to be. But Alice resisted.

  ‘No! Leave me! We’ll all go together.’

  And we did; all of us moving off in a rather awkward procession through the costumed throng, out of the great hall and into the porch of the house.