The Valley of the Fox

by Joseph Hone

  ‘There!’ she shouted as she fired. ‘That’s for sneaking on me: you fat sneak, you spy!’

  Alice found these archaic expressions again in her anger, like a character in a Boys Own Paper adventure, while pumping the life out of this contemporary glutton, this cunning modern woman who had betrayed her – phoning her father in New York and now the police – finally destroying all her too honourable dreams.

  Mrs Pringle keeled over the table like a huge top-heavy ship, scattering the fancy biscuits and the bottle of Ruby port, which broke on the old flagstones, the wine spreading like early blood, before the woman’s own wounds opened.

  Again, the sound of the trumpets and the other raucous entertainment in the great hall drowned the shots from the automatic. No one moved for an instant. Then Mrs Pringle’s husband was down on the floor, tending his wife, while I stood there by the kitchen dresser, confused, appalled, the gunfire still ringing in my ears a certain end to things, to any future.

  I turned to her. ‘For God’s sake!’ I shouted. But before I’d finished Alice swung round to face me, still holding the gun, levelling it at me now, as another who had betrayed her. I can’t be certain if she actually intended to fire at me, since I never gave her the chance, throwing myself violently to one side down behind the dresser. And when I looked up again a few seconds later, she and Clare were gone from the room, their footsteps beating on the corridor which led up to the great hall.

  When I reached the entrance to the hall there was no sign of either of them. They’d been swallowed up by the crowd of costumed revellers, and it was almost impossible in any case to distinguish anybody in their various courtly disguises. All I did see was the two black-and-white chequered caps of police officers over by the hall door, bobbing about among the other more colourful headgear. Avoiding the police, I circled round the hall in the opposite direction, pushing and shoving among the ragged, jolly Knights and their women, the trumpets still blaring. For a moment I thought I saw Alice, her dark hair and bronzed shoulders, over by the hall door. But when I eventually struggled over to it, there was no one there. Alice and Clare had disappeared – out of the house perhaps, for the hall door was open. But where?

  Outside on the gravel surround I saw the flashing lights of two police cars, parked some way down the drive, blocked by other cars parked all over the verge. They could hardly have gone down that way, I thought. I looked out over the dark parkland straight ahead of me. If Alice and Clare had left the house, and I felt sure they had, that would have been the only safe way for them to go: out into the darkness, beyond the ha-ha which divided the front lawns from the park. I moved off in that direction in any case, jumping down in the ditch and going on towards the cricket pitch.

  *

  Clare – as if the evening’s events were all part of some large joke – was laughing in a strange soundless way when I found the two of them fifteen minutes later sitting on the cricket-pavilion steps: knees tight together, head swaying up and down, hands clasped round her ankles, her face was full of smiles, as though Alice had just come to the end of some very good story. Alice was sitting next to her, breathing hard, puffed with her run across the long field.

  I’d approached them warily enough, thinking Alice might draw her gun on me again. But when I asked her about it she laughed, as if she’d never levelled it at me.

  ‘I threw it away,’ she said. ‘No need for it now.’

  She seemed to have forgotten the mayhem in the kitchen. She had already removed her shoes and now she started to take off her Queen of Beauty costume. There was a thin moon behind a filigree of clouds; it was bright enough, at least, to make things out. The night was still warm.

  ‘This is nonsense,’ Alice said casually. ‘This great outfit. I’m sweating.’

  She took her velvet bodice off, then pulled the arms of the silk dress down from each shoulder before starting to release the catches at the back of her waist. Then she stepped out of it, leaving just a slip on beneath.

  ‘Cold,’ I said. ‘You’ll get …’ I really didn’t know where to begin. I was sweating myself. I shook my head. ‘Alice,’ I said finally, ‘I don’t see the point.’

  ‘Does there always have to be a point?’ she said. ‘Besides, there is a point,’ she went on suddenly. ‘We’re free.’

  ‘Yes. But –’

  ‘We’re still free,’ she insisted.

  ‘What can we do here, though? Just postpone the inevitable. The police –’

  ‘Why not? They can wait till morning.’

  Clare spoke then, seemingly equally unaffected by the recent events, which I supposed she must have seen simply as a continuation of the two-day-long drama of the fête, the cricket match, the costume ball, the jousting tournament. ‘Are you playing again now here?’ she asked, ‘That game you had here before?’

  ‘No. It’s too dark, sweet. It’s too dark.’

  I sat down beside Clare and picked her up and put her on my knee, holding her round the shoulders lightly in one arm. I thought this must be the end of things between she and I. And I wanted to make the most of it with her, without her knowing of my sadness. At least, I saw now, Alice was right in one way: there was some point in this last folly of hers: it had given Clare and me time together once more. We were both headed for separate institutions now, just as Alice was.

  ‘Clare,’ I started, thinking how I could tactfully explain my imminent departure from her life. ‘I thought I’d tell you –’

  ‘Story?’ she burst in brightly. ‘Iddity, Iddity story? The one of the pigs?’

  ‘Well, but I don’t have the book –’

  ‘Yes!’ she said. ‘The book in your head. Go on.’

  And so instead of the slightest grim news, I started out on The Tale of Pigling Bland again, inventing what I couldn’t remember, the three of us sitting quietly on the pavilion steps in the dark.

  ‘This is the story of Pigling Bland …’

  There was no noise in the night, far down in the parkland where we were hidden: except, after five minutes, the faint sound of a siren in the distance, just when I had got to the point in the tale where Pigling Bland, released from bondage, is stopped by the local village constable on his bicycle.

  Later we slept fitfully on the pavilion floor, in a corner, on batting pads and among stumps, waiting for the police to find us: the three of us together in a line, secure in the dark, breathing the night air in the pavilion still warmed by the day, a faint smell of leather and willow, touched with linseed oil and old grass cuttings.

  Clare fell asleep first, with my velvet Albanian doublet over her: fast asleep, quite at ease, it seemed, as if Alice and I were both shepherding her, between us, through the night towards some exciting new adventure, the world of some other lake in a valley or hidden African paradise, where she would wake in another miraculous landscape. To begin with, in the complete darkness, all we knew of her existence was the easy rhythm of her breath: small waves, an echo of her journey, her transformation between light and dark, the only worldly sound, beyond which lay deep sleep or the noise of her fantastic dreams. But then Alice and I, moving towards each other, gently closed the gap between all three of us, so that we came to shield the girl like leaves round a bud and we felt her life then, heart-beat as well as breath.

  Alice touched my face in the complete dark, stumbling on an ear, an eye, my mouth. She had forgiven me, it seemed, for what she had seen as my earlier betrayal. Whatever anger she had felt for me in her bedroom the previous night, in the kitchen, had dissolved. No, not dissolved; it was more than that. It was as if some whole new person had taken over Alice’s mind – her body even – as a substitute does for some injured person in a game. Alice had re-invented herself, taken on another role, that of pliant mistress in my arms, a woman without any knowledge now of her murderous disruption, her violence and hatred. It was a strange feeling: I was touching some other woman in the dark.

  I had thought to ask her about her father. But it wasn’t the moment –
the answers could only have come from the woman she had been and was no longer – and there wasn’t time. And then I thought again: husband or father, what did it really matter? She had seen Arthur as both: as lover and enemy. That was clear enough. The rest, for answer, could only lie on a psychiatrist’s couch. And I, with Laura, had given up on all the quacks and specialists a long time before with Clare, in what we had seen as her tragedy. But was it such, I wondered now, with either of these two, Alice or Clare? Was it not simply their way of looking at life, a way as valid as ours, in which they saw things hidden to us and made associations which lacked all our dull logic? And if their strange visions gave them a disadvantage among ordinary mortals, that vision, that madness even, seemed to me then an inviolable gift, as much a part of both their characters as any other of their attributes I loved. Without it, I realised, Alice and Clare would have lacked their most vital dimensions, that quality of fierce excess in a bankrupt world, bounty amidst impoverishment, swift imagination riding over every mean thought.

  How shortsighted I’d been to look so hard for sanity in everyone, in Alice or in Clare. After all, I saw now, the bizarre was Clare’s particular gift too: that untutored wildness in her which, whatever disadvantages it might bring, would always free her from the mundane. A cure for such people could well become a life worse than the disease, I thought, when they would lose all their strange stature, as we would miss their passionate example.

  So I loved Alice that night without reserves, without queries or judgements: and loved her the more since in any case there would be no world between us tomorrow where such reservations could have any effect. And thus, an end so certainly in view between us, we were both quite free at last.

  Eighteen

  Next morning a thin, almost translucent blanket of mist lay everywhere, low down, hugging all the parkland: the sun rose above it, trying to force its way through, with patches of blue sky just visible here and there, promising another brilliant day in these last days of summer.

  I’d woken early and gone to one of the pavilion windows, the others still asleep behind me. Then I’d opened the door a fraction. Finally I stepped right outside. The manor was completely hidden, nearly half a mile away. It was difficult to see more than twenty yards, and there wasn’t a sound on the muffled air. Nothing penetrated the soft, pearly stillness. The police, until the mist cleared, would be handicapped in their search for us – and the tracker dogs would be at a disadvantage, too, with so many confusing human trails to follow after the fête. We had some time left.

  I shivered in the cool, early air, still just in my thin costume shirt and woollen tights, a foolhardy reveller about to face the police courts. And I felt another stab of regret then – looking out on this magic shroud, this safety curtain touched with coming sunlight, beyond which the day lurked, full of promise, that I would never be free in.

  The mist was already beginning to clear as I watched, the sun warming. Suddenly I heard the muffled sound of a dog barking and then another: up by the manor. I went back inside. Perhaps there’d just be time to brew some tea before they found us – on the gas ring in the little kitchen to the side of the pavilion where the cricketers had their food prepared. I lit the gas, gazing vacantly out over the cricket pitch where the mist was thinning quickly now.

  Then I heard another noise above the sound of the gas in the small kitchen, a much stronger rush of air, a great whooshing sound, like a jet-engine starting up. I looked beneath the sink, at the canister of propane stored there. But there was nothing amiss. This new sound came from outside the pavilion, I realised, from somewhere in the mist.

  I was very tired, so that at first I thought what I saw a few minutes later must be an illusion, a projection on my mind of a last suppressed longing for freedom. Less than fifty yards away, as the mist cleared, I saw a big square box on the ground, a sort of wicker basket it seemed, and above it, swelling up into the air like an effect in a surrealist painting, a huge pear-shaped object, striped in vivid reds and golds, grew in front of my eyes, suddenly reflecting the rising sun like an orb of fire. I wasn’t dreaming.

  It was a balloon.

  Of course: it was the hot-air balloon they’d used all yesterday morning at the fête for tethered trips with Passepartout into the sky. I’d quite forgotten about it. The men had returned this morning and were starting it up again, about to take it away.

  I went back into the main room of the pavilion. Alice was awake when I got there, with Clare, both of them standing spellbound at the window.

  ‘Quick!’ Alice said when she saw me. ‘Here’s our chance – we can take that balloon!’

  Alice was off her head again, I thought. There were two fairly burly men tending the balloon, we saw now, one of them on the ground unleashing some of the tie-ropes, the other inside the basket manipulating the gas burner, so that as we watched he pulled a lever, like a beer tap, beneath the fabric and there was a sudden dart of flame and another great roar of sound as he maintained the great balloon, now almost fully expanded, in a stable position above him.

  ‘Take it?’ I asked. ‘But how? We can’t –’

  Then Clare, still half-asleep, interrupted. ‘It’s a magic!’ she said. She smiled easily as if this vision in the dying mist was something entirely expected, the balloon a transport arranged by us, in which she would shortly continue her dramatic life at the Manor by soaring into the sky above it. Alice had just the same optimism. She stood beside me in her slip – shivering, but from excitement more than from the early chill in the misty air.

  Yet even as we stood there the mist was clearing ever more rapidly, all the blue and white horizons above the parkland coming into focus. We could see the Manor now, half a mile away to our right, and I heard the dogs bark again. And then I saw some dark figures, spread out in a long line, approaching us. The police were just stepping down across the ha-ha.

  Alice saw them too: and suddenly she had the little automatic in her hand. She’d hidden it, not thrown it away at all.

  ‘Alice,’ I shouted. ‘No!’ I tried to take the gun off her. But I was too late. She raised it, pointing it at me. She had that great glint of adventure in her eyes once more, on the rampage again, determined on a last rash throw where she would finally turn the tables on her fate.

  ‘Well, are you coming?’ she said. ‘We’re going.’

  ‘Alice, it’s crazy. We can’t control it.’

  ‘I can. You just pull that thing.’

  ‘But where will it get us? It could blow us anywhere.’

  ‘Exactly. The police will never know where.’

  I tried to stop her again. But before I had the chance she had grasped Clare by the hand and was out of the door running furiously down the pavilion steps towards the balloon. I ran after them.

  The police, I saw, were moving towards us in a huge circle, round three sides of the park, not more than a quarter of a mile away. But though they must have seen the vividly coloured balloon through the dissolving mists, they hadn’t seen us yet. They were still walking slowly across the grass.

  ‘No!’ I shouted after Alice, gaining on her. But she was still well ahead of me. The two men, both of them on the ground now, releasing the last tie-ropes, didn’t know what hit them – a child dressed as a medieval page a woman in a slip flourishing an automatic, followed by a man in a velvet doublet and hose – all three of us streaking towards them. And Alice ran fast, with the child in tow, for the police had just seen us now, and were running towards us.

  Alice flourished the gun at a fair-haired young man who had been tending to the gas burner, and who looked at us all when we arrived by the basket as if he’d seen ghosts.

  ‘Out of the way!’ she shouted at him. Then with her free arm she lifted Clare off the ground, putting her in the basket before starting to climb in herself.

  ‘What the bloody hell –?’ The second much older man spoke now. standing up on the far side of the basket where he’d been tending the ropes. He was a big swollen middle-
aged fellow, gross with good living, with an adventurous old ‘Wizard Prang’ RAF moustache. He stepped briskly forward now, coming to eject Alice and Clare from his machine. But he hadn’t seen the little automatic.

  Alice raised the gun over the edge of the basket and fired. The man stopped and looked about him wildly as the sound echoed round the park where the sun had bathed almost all the mist away. ‘The next one’s for you,’ Alice shouted. The big fellow retreated, as did his fair-haired colleague on the other side.

  I stepped forward myself then. ‘Come on, Alice,’ I said. ‘This is nonsense. You can’t get anywhere. Come on out of it.’

  But Alice had pulled the lever already, igniting the gas-burner again, starting it off with another roar, so that the basket, already just free of the ground, began to drift slowly upwards. There was nothing to do then but jump into it myself. But as I did so, I noticed that one of the tie-ropes was still in place, pegged to the grass.

  The big man noticed this, too – and saw his opportunity, running quickly forward before clinging to this rope. Meanwhile the police were closing fast, all of them running hard now, little more than a hundred yards away.

  Alice had her hand on the lever, activating the gas supply continuously, the snout erupting in a great sheath of flame above us, so that in moments we were ten feet above the ground. But the man had firmly grasped the last tie-rope and was hanging on to it for dear life as the balloon rose very slowly upwards, dragging the rope through his hands. The first of the police were only fifty yards away.

  I leant out over the side of the basket. The man beneath was coming to the end of the tether, was almost airborne with us now. If the police got to help him before the rope ran out, their combined efforts would keep us on the ground. Already we were almost at a standstill. But the balloon, gradually filling with the hot air, won the battle, inching upwards. And in a moment the man was airborne, rising with us.