‘Look — down there.’ I couldn’t see anyone. ‘There, just by the corner of that wall. I can’t see his face — he’s got a pork-pie hat on. And something round his neck.’
We saw him then. But only because he was moving quickly away from us, at right-angles to our bridle path, climbing a wall, heading out from the village. He had field glasses and a streaky, mud-and-green army type anorak, which was why we hadn’t spotted him at once against the spring grass.
As far as I knew there was no footpath along the direction he was taking. Yet he wasn’t the local farmer, who was a burly man, and the hikers always went in groups. He didn’t look back, just scuttled expertly away, a query in the placid landscape. We never saw his face.
Now I can see him well enough, though. He was one of Ross’s henchmen, sent down by Marcus to spy my land out, and the same man, in the same pork-pie hat and old army anorak, was responsible for the subsequent disaster. But then, on that bright spring afternoon with our friends, after nearly a year of such peace, we took no more notice or thought of him. He disappeared from our minds completely as we strolled away down the pasture, Clare trotting a little ahead on the pony, Laura with her arm in mine, the Bensons behind, talking about Cotswold long barrows and Iron Age forts.
‘On that rise there.’ George pointed ahead. ‘With those beech trees. I’m sure that’s one. You can just see the vague shape still, a ditch like a crown all round the top. There’d have been stakes above it as well in those days of course. They’d have brought the animals in at night. Wolves, other predators, rival tribes. A different world.’
‘Do you find artefacts?’ Annabelle asked in her neat scientific voice. ‘In ditches? Implements, pottery?’
‘Or bones?’ George added with interest.
‘I haven’t,’ I said, clutching the flesh of Laura’s hand for a moment. How pervasive the sense of happiness was that afternoon.
Later, when we got back, we burnt some old elder branches and trash, making a bonfire in the corner of the garden. The days were lengthening rapidly now. It was light till nearly eight o’clock, a violet sky, streaked with red on the horizon. The wind had died and the smoke went straight up into the air, but there was cold in the twilight and we warmed our hands on the embers before going inside and eating again, in the kitchen this time, a sort of Spanish omelette which Clare had always liked: she was quite calm now after her earlier distress.
Afterwards, when Clare had gone to bed, we finished most of a bottle of port, all of us together chatting by the fire, and I was glad I’d already corrected the fourth form’s English essays, due next morning.
I found this school work something of a drudge, taken up nearly three years before, back from Yugoslavia, in desperation for some activity, some money. But I still had my slim academic qualifications, last used in Egypt twenty years before, and the Headmaster at this school, a naive Anglican cleric, had liked my face; and more, I suppose, the evidence in my curriculum vitae and some formal letters that I had worked for several years in the information department of the Foreign Office.
I didn’t, of course, tell him that in fact I had been with British Intelligence, a clerk, if not exactly a spy, thumbing through Arab newspapers in the old Mid-East section in Holborn, and afterwards unwillingly involved with David Marcus, now Head of the Service in a wild goose chase through Europe that had ended three years before in every sort of folly and disaster.
But I’d left all that nonsense then, had returned to my cottage, and was in bed now with Laura. That past was largely forgotten. In my early forties I was living again at last, as Laura was after her own tragedies, five years younger than I.
I said to her ‘Remember all those old books and magazines the villagers left in with us for the book stall at the church fête, which got all damp out in the garage?’
Laura was sitting up in bed still, arms behind her head letting her hair out. It wasn’t that long but in the daytime she usually wore it up in a small knot at the back of her head, where it splayed out in wisps over her neck. She nodded now, some hairgrips in her mouth.
‘I was burning some of them today, a lot of old useless books, all soaked through. They smoked a lot. But then I saw one by R.M. Ballantyne in the flames — do you remember him at all? Marvellous Victorian, sort of Boys Own Paper author.’ Laura shook her head.
‘The World of Ice it was called. Some polar adventure. I’d never read it as a child. Coral Island yes, but not this one. I’d have rescued it from the fire but it was no use, all charred and the pages mostly stuck together. I just managed to see the beginning of one page: “The men gathered round the huskies for the last time …”’
‘Well?’ Laura broke the silence at last, the grips out of her mouth.
‘I don’t know really. But you remember George was talking about that Iron Age fort this afternoon? “A different world” he said. And I suppose he meant adventure: hunting, basic survival and all that, like that World of Ice story.’
‘So?’
‘I was thinking, it’s only children who have that sort of instinct now, when they play Red Indians and games in trees and hide and seek and so on —’
‘Men too,’ Laura interrupted sharply, ‘when they go to war or play those silly spy games like you used to do. It’s all still there, isn’t it? Just under the surface. Why? Do you think it’s a valuable instinct?’
‘Not valuable — it’s vital, surely.’
‘But we don’t have to survive that way any more.’
‘No. So we fight just as badly — between ourselves — in more subtle ways, all those natural instincts frustrated.’ I didn’t say any more.
‘We don’t fight,’ Laura said.
‘No.’
‘Well, le voilà …’ She turned the light off, and settled down for the night.
I thought afterwards that I didn’t know quite what I was trying to tell Laura, that I hadn’t really told her anything in fact. But much later I woke in the pitch black and heard Minty barking downstairs. And later still, just before dawn, I dreamt of dogs racing across an ice floe, where I was a helpless, terrified child again pulled by them wildly on a sleigh going headlong towards some frozen water, where I couldn’t control them, where I knew we were all about to be drowned. And yet there was a tremendous sense of excitement in the ride, a thrill of sheer pace where we seemed to be airborne, the dogs and I gliding like valkyries towards disaster.
Laura told me how I’d tossed and turned in bed unusually that night. I told her of the dream, explaining it as a common mix of repressed fear and longing, where the two are inseparable. Later, before anyone else was awake, we made love first thing that Monday morning, and I was no longer alone then, but in the midst of life again after the nightmare.
Now, a month later as I write this — certainly alone perched in this oak tree — I remember the dream again, and the book, The World of Ice, burning in the fire. I remember the afternoon, Clare riding away over the pasture: the Spanish omelette, the evening’s port, next morning’s love. The nightmare and the reality were so utterly opposed then. Now they are one; indivisible, inseparable.
Still, I have escaped, have remained free so far, cradled in these branches. I am alive up here in the air, living what many would describe as a perfectly childish existence. Well, with this licence, I may at least freely plot my revenge. What would be unthinkable in ordinary, adult circumstances is now constantly on my mind: revenge, to kill, to make brutal amends.