But it wasn’t the African. I heard the voice of the Gloucestershire captain: he was introducing me. The man I was facing, shaking hands with now, was a West Indian, one of the great cricketers of his time, who, invited but unable to play in this charity match, had just arrived on the scene, making a courtesy call at the end of the game.
I shook his hand. ‘You surely got to the pitch of the ball there, man,’ he said dryly, remarking on my unexpected innings.
Then Alice was by my side, adding her congratulations. But for her, since she understood nothing of the game, seeing it at best as some dull version of baseball, the praise took a less restrained form. She jumped up and down like someone cheering a victory in a World Series.
‘You see?’ she exclaimed. ‘Nothing venture — I told you.’ Then she looked at me more circumspectly, from a distance as it were, her rumbustious praise suddenly changed to a speechless admiration, where the joy lay only in her eyes. There was nothing of the baseball fan in her then. It was much more as if my mild success out on the cricket-pitch had been for her a battle won against the infidel, and I a crusader home to her arms at last.
By the time the medieval costume ball got under way in the great Gothic front hall that evening I had become quite used to my disguises. This time I appeared as a fifteenth-century Albanian nobleman, with a villainous moustache, wearing a velour doublet embroidered with crescent moons and stars, with woollen hose, soft leather boots and a fur-rimmed turban surmounted by a splendid ostrich feather. No one could have recognised me from Adam.
Alice’s pre-Raphaelite features and hairstyle went perfectly with a more conventional medieval costume: a long off-the-shoulder Elizabethan gown with high ruffed shoulders and a velvet overdress and some sort of crinoline beneath, for the whole thing came out like a bell round her legs, right down to the ground. On top she wore a conical hat, like an old wizard’s cap, with emblems of the zodiac on it, and a long fine muslin drape falling away from the peak. Perhaps the gown didn’t entirely suit her. She was a little too short in the leg and long in the torso to carry it perfectly. But her natural athletic grace made up for this: she moved in it beautifully, making it a dancing veil where, though the body was invisible, you could so clearly sense all the supple lines beneath, a perfect force controlled, withheld.
‘It’s funny dancing in this,’ she said, flushed with excitement, as we took a turn round the floor before supper, with Clare always in our view, dressed as a page, just a few yards away, on a seat by the great fireplace. ‘My legs — it’s like moving them about inside a big tent. I can’t really feel the material. It’s as if I was dancing with nothing on below the waist!’
The small orchestra, equally in period dress, with Elizabethan harps and horns and other suitably odd instruments, played quadrilles. Great firelit braziers and huge candles glittered all round the hall, the wooden floor had been polished and chalked, and the couples moved to and fro in their courtly dance, increasingly amazed at their prowess, with a passion for the dainty steps either invented or re-discovered. The air was full of memorials, the contents of theatrical costumiers and old cupboards revivified: breaths of French chalk dust, a hint of starch and mothballs, of warmed silk and fine scents. An elaborate medieval buffet supper waited for us in the long dining-room next door, laid out on a full complement of old plate, with silver goblets, cuts of roast venison, whole pigs with apples in their mouths and tall crystal jugs of mead.
Filled with these costumed dancers, the huge Gothic house, for so long an empty shell, now at last displayed its true colours. Something of the gallant love and theatricality of its original creators — the Hortons now entombed down on their Avalon in the middle of the lake — had been returned to it. It was impossible not to share in this regeneration. And for long moments, as I danced with Alice then, though immersed in this reflected past, I was equally convinced of a future: of a time between us where this evening’s impossible theatricality would naturally give way to an appropriate contemporary life between us.
Alice, on the other hand, had entirely given herself over to the moment. The evening perfectly fulfilled all her craving for the chivalrous gesture, for disguise, for wild adventure, for a life of marvels. She was released by her costume and the heroic mood onto one of the many stages in her mind which before had been dark, frustrating her imagination. Now she could play one of her hidden roles in public, entirely appropriately, without the scorn of her husband or friends. I had freed her from that stigma and this evening’s nostalgic requirements gave her complete theatrical licence. She could live fully at last, by escaping completely into an imagined past, where she had always wanted to live, without doubts or the accusation of dottiness. Here she could justify her fantasies, her long isolation from the real world: here, in this recreated medieval dream, she saw reality.
It worried me. In the future, would she always want, have to live like this, a life so far removed from the ordinary? If I lived with her, one day she would find me ordinary enough, and I could come to be just another outworn prop in her ever-touring company. I foresaw a time when I might need her more than she needed me, since, after my own years of adventurous stupidity with British Intelligence, I had learnt to thrive on ordinary life with Laura and with Clare and with our dog Minty. Alice in the long run might offer, and require in return, far too rich a mix.
True, I had been mad enough myself, more recently, living wild, killing sheep — and living with Clare in Arcadia. And it had been my example in all this which had at last rescued Alice from her mad despair. But I had no great wish to carry on the game. And perhaps she had.
Yet if she did, I saw then that I would have to help her all the more. I loved her and thus my life, I realised, had come to be framed by her needs — and by Clare’s. Without their problems, disabilities and obsessions, I would have no real existence myself.
Suddenly Alice said, with great happiness, quite unaware of any of these thoughts: ‘What luck we’ve had meeting, you and I.’
‘We’d never have met at all, you know, in ordinary circumstances. What could you have had to do with a schoolmaster from a fourth rate boys —’
‘That’s what I meant, idiot! Since the circumstances were so extraordinary. We had the luck. We earned that, don’t you see?’
‘We both of us really live a bit off the map you mean.’
She smiled and nodded. ‘We were meant for each other!’ she said with light irony. Then she added, serious now, ‘This is the real thing.’
Perhaps she was right. But again there was such a way to go between the dream and the reality here. For the moment I was Harry Conrad, masquerading as a medieval Turk. But in reality I was Peter Marlow on the run, pursued by the police, by a vengeful African — and by Ross, too, I suddenly remembered. I’d lost all my past. And my future, if I had one, hadn’t even begun.
Yet Alice, all the while that evening, had clearly seen at least one of my future roles. When I walked into my bedroom that night, after the ball was over, with Alice and Clare just behind me on the landing, I was suddenly confronted by a great suit of shining black, medieval armour — facing me like a threat on a stand by my bed, complete with a plumed visored helmet, long spurs, chain-mail gauntlets, and a white, heart-shaped shield, dazzlingly quartered by a red cross.