‘Why? Why?’ she said over and over again, so that I leant across trying to take her hands, to calm her.
‘Because I like you — and your mother. That’s why I’m here,’ I said.
She seemed not to hear me and certainly wouldn’t be appeased. ‘Why? Why?’ she shouted to herself, her thumb bleeding badly now as she attacked the screw again. I got a handkerchief out. But she pushed it away. She was lost, unreachable, her eyes quite vacant, seeing nothing, but her body electric with violence. She was punishing herself, kicking and tearing her flesh, trying to dig into herself, deeper and deeper, as if looking for some ultimate hurt.
Laura came out then. I thought she would stop the child — physically stop her, take her up in her arms and end this self-destruction. But she didn’t. She let Clare go on kicking the table, let her thumb bleed, standing away from her: so that I moved towards her myself.
But Clare avoided me in a flash, running away then with great speed back to the cork tree, climbing it like a rocket, where she perched dangerously among the top branches.
‘It’s no use when she’s like that,’ Laura said calmly. ‘You have to leave her. She has to be allowed to test us. “How much do you love me?” All that.’
‘But she’ll kill herself.’
‘She won’t. Not unless you push her.’
We were at the bottom of the cork tree ourselves now, whispering, Clare above us swaying defiantly, precariously on a top branch.
‘It’s crazy — she’ll fall!’
‘It seems insane, I know. But it’s the only way. I know. You’ll see.’
Laura had brought out a first-aid box with her and she showed it to Clare now, lifting it up, flourishing it under the tree. Then she put it on the ground, leaving it there.
We went back to the table and waited. ‘Surely you can’t let her do these things?’ I asked.
‘She drove a nail right through the palm of her hand a few months ago,’ Laura said easily. ‘You have to leave her. She stops at a certain point. Oh, I thought just the same as you to begin with. These fits, they were worse then, I was terrified, mad with worry. But then I realised these children, like Clare, they have an extraordinary need to guard their separateness; not like most children at all in that way. If you force yourself on them, or use force, you’re lost: they clam up altogether then. You’ll never reach them. It’s an endless tightrope for them: care on one side, freedom on the other. They want both. And you have to give them both. By just waiting beneath.’
Them. They. Laura spoke of her child as of a stranger, another species. And it was exactly so, I thought then. I saw Clare perched up in the branches against the blue Atlantic sky, her back to us, gazing like a look-out into another world, a girl in the crow’s nest of a ship, as she had been on the ketch a few days before, blonde hair running in the wind, absorbed in some secret voyage. Yet was she going anywhere? A branch swayed to and fro beneath her as she pushed it with monotonous regularity. And there was the first sense of hurt for me then — about Clare: I felt she would never really accept me, that I was an enemy, a sane stowaway rudely discovered now aboard her mad ship.
She came down an hour later. And we saw her in the twilight, kneeling by the first-aid box, rustling among the Band-aids and ointments before expertly tending her dry wounds.
I said to Laura, ‘She asked me why I was with you, with her, all the time. That was what started all this, I think. It’s probably a bad idea, my being here. I’d better leave.’
The evening had come on very suddenly and the bats were on the air now, big bats, malign shapes swirling round against the crimson sheet of sky.
‘She wanted you on the raft in Cascais,’ Laura said.
‘Perhaps. But I don’t understand her, Laura. She’s really miles away from me.’ It all seemed too much for me then. I was no rock of ages, no child specialist, no surrogate father.
‘You’re wrong,’ Laura said. ‘You’re part of her life already. If you weren’t she wouldn’t test you like this. She’d just ignore you completely.’
‘I see,’ I said, pondering this sudden commitment.
‘And if you leave she won’t forget about you.’
‘Like Willy, you mean?’
‘A bit. She loves you — quite a bit.’
‘That’s why she hurts herself like this, is it?’
‘Partly. She’s frightened of losing you, that’s why, I think. So she punishes the thought.’
We rarely embarked on psychological theory about Clare after that, the cloudy jargon of the specialists. We had no need to. We were her specialists by then, on a permanent basis. Laura and I were married at the Lisbon Embassy when I came out there during the following October half-term. There was a small party afterwards at the Warrens’ house. The young Portuguese General attended, still in battledress. He spoke to me this time, jocularly, a hand on my shoulder, commiserating with himself: ‘Ah! Fortuna cruel! Ah! Duros Fados!’
‘What?’
‘It’s from Camões — our greatest poet. “Cruel fortune — hard fate.”’
‘Oh,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry about that. He sounds like a tragic poet.’
The little General was like a soothsayer when I think of it now. But I try to think more of the happier things when I look back. I know now, for example, what made me so change my mind about Clare, about taking some responsibility for her. It was seeing her that evening in the garden, after her fit, kneeling by the first-aid box, under the cork tree in the twilight, patching herself up with Band-aids. A strong sense of independence has always appealed to me in women.
Three
Spinks, the games master, was sacked a week before half-term in my school that summer. And since no reason was given to the other staff by the naive Anglican cleric, phrases such as ‘gross indecency’ and ‘unnatural vice’ echoed wordlessly in our minds.
In fact, as one of the all-knowing school prefects told me privately later, it had been a simpler, entirely natural matter. The worse for drink one night Spinks had forced himself upon the school housekeeper, a pneumatic divorcee known by the boys as the ‘Michelin Woman’, down near her room by the garages.
There was, indeed, a decidedly motorised air about the whole business, since, as the boy explained to me, the assault had apparently taken place not only in one of these lock-up garages, but in or about Spinks’ own car, a small, ill-conditioned MG two-seater, the lady in question forced over the bonnet or some such. Though Spinks had vehemently maintained, the prefect who knew him went on, that the event had occurred with the lady’s full co-operation, while the two of them were actually seated in the passion-wagon — a proposition which, given the housekeeper’s girth and apparent decorum, had not convinced the Headmaster.
However it was, this matter, a farce in one way, turned out a blessing for me in another. Spinks had packed his bags at once and left. And since I had some athletic inclinations I was immediately given his job, pending a replacement. Yet Spinks, in his blind hangover, hadn’t taken everything with him. Going alone into the sports room the next afternoon I saw that he’d left a big backpack of his behind in a corner, hung up in a slovenly way, but complete with sleeping bag, a small camping gas burner, some iron rations and a lot of other jumbled-up camping equipment I didn’t bother to look at.