‘There you are,’ Alice said. ‘You can try it out tomorrow, in the tournament.’
My head started to swim. I was hot and sticky already after a night at the ball in my Albanian outfit: the idea of being enclosed in this monstrous straitjacket, even for a minute, appalled me. But Clare thought it a good idea. She was fascinated by the armour.
‘Yes!’ she said firmly, brightly. ‘Yes, yes!’
‘No,’ I said, just as firmly. ‘No.’
I turned to Alice. ‘I told you I can barely ride a horse. You must be joking.’
But Alice wasn’t.
Seventeen
‘You can’t be serious, Alice,’ I told her in her own bedroom later, when Clare was asleep. ‘It needs practice. You can’t just suddenly start jousting at my age — and that’s an understatement,’ I added smiling, hoping to treat the matter lightly, hoping to unearth the essential joke I assumed Alice intended.
But she said firmly ‘You could practise tomorrow morning. The others will be doing just that. The tournament doesn’t start till the afternoon. Besides, you don’t have to kill anyone, you know. It’s just a game.’
‘I wish you really believed that.’
Alice was over by the window, starting to get out of her elaborate Elizabethan costume. The wizard’s hat she had worn, with its lovely zodiac patterns, was on her bed. I picked it up, fondling the swathe of light muslin that fell from the peak.
‘What do you mean?’ she asked abruptly, and I realised I was on delicate ground. But I was annoyed with her now, that she should continue so wilfully to insist on this unnecessary charade.
‘That you really believed it was just a game: all these costumes and disguises, and now this bloody great suit of armour. You said I’d helped you, cured you even, by sharing your madness by my living wild in the valley first, and then with all the roles I had to play myself. That’s what you said, and that’s fine. But we can’t live this sort of theatrical life forever, these dreams of chivalry and whatnot. Perhaps now and then. But if you live it all the time, well, that puts you way out of touch with reality.’
Alice was about to step out of her heavy dress. But now, at the last moment, like an actress refusing to relinquish a part, she decided not to, hitching it up on her shoulders again. She walked over to me.
‘Reality?’ she said brightly. ‘I can afford to disregard it. And so can you.’
‘We can’t,’ I said. ‘That’s just silly.’
Alice came right up to me then and put a finger on the tip of my nose, touching it reprovingly. ‘It’s nothing to do with money, Peter. What I mean is I’m just like you. You despise the real world as much as I do. I know that. You’re just as much a stranger to reality as I am.’
This was true enough. And yet I avoided the truth of it in my next words to her. ‘But I’ve had to leave the real world,’ I said. ‘I’ve been on the run. You don’t, since no one’s looking for you.’
‘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.