She turned then, smiling at last. She took the hat from me and put it on again, setting it at an angle rising back from her dark hair, so that the long swathe of silk spun round her body as she swirled about for a moment on the far side of the bedroom. ‘Tomorrow I’ve another costume, for the tournament: it’s a surprise, as the Queen of Beauty.’
‘Queen of Beauty?’
‘Yes. There was one at every tournament in the old days: I’m to be the Queen of Beauty tomorrow. The Victorian Society suggested it. So why not, I thought? It should be fun.’
She let me kiss her then, lightly on the cheek. ‘Great,’ I said. ‘I’ll look forward to it all.’ Then I turned back, halfway to the door. ‘Of course, they were quite right, the Society — there couldn’t have been any other choice.’
It seemed we’d made it up then as I looked across at her and we smiled at each other. But out on the landing I had that last vision of her as someone quite isolated again, as she had been when I’d first seen her apparently talking to herself in the conservatory — isolated now, madness creeping up on her once more in the shape of her Elizabethan gown and wizard’s cap. I had somehow lost her. She would sleep with these props next to her that night, and not me, I thought, dreaming of another even more elaborate disguise on the morrow. I had lost her, and she had lost all those happy, decisive connections with real life which my predicament had given her. And yet all my problems remained as great as ever. Could I overcome them without her help? I was tempted to go back and tell her then that I’d take part in the tournament after all. But when I got to my own room and saw the great mass of black armour looming up at me, still confronting me like a brutal foe about to attack, I thought better of the idea. I picked the crusader’s shield up. And I saw then that it wasn’t real — that none of the armour was genuine. It had been made quite recently, in some light metal, as a theatrical or movie prop. So much for Alice’s Arthurian legends, I thought: Camelot and all the Knights of the Round Table were just as fake.
And yet on the following afternoon I had to admit that the whole medieval recreation looked real enough: startlingly real — a dream come to genuine life in the brilliant sunshine. There was a Grand Procession first, Alice leading it side-saddle on a white charger, of all the Knights and Officers of the tournament, all of them moving on dazzlingly caparisoned horses from the Manor to the lists on the far side of the cricket pitch. A dozen small candy-striped tents for each Knight had been set up here, with individually coloured pennants snaking out in the slight breeze above them.
Nearer the centre of the park a line of wooden hurdles had been set up, like an endless tennis net, along which, down either side, the Knights would charge each other. Further across, facing the middle of the hurdles, a gaily decorated stand had been built, with a long striped awning overhead and the rest festooned with flowers, in swathes of cloth and coloured ribbons, all contrived to form Gothic patterns of slim arches and rose medallions which successfully hid the basic metal scaffolding beneath.
At either end of the hurdles tall lances had been stacked in cones, one against the other, stiletto pennants flying from their tips. A large crowd meanwhile, freed from their morning sports and balloon rides about and above the Manor, had gathered all round the boundary ropes, and there was a buzz of incredulous expectation in the air. Clare and I, dressed again in our costumes of the previous night, had seats in the main stand, not far from where Alice was to sit, right in the front, in a flower-bedecked loggia, with the President of the Victorian Society. In front of us at that moment, a medieval jester, complete with cap and bells, was entertaining us. But this archaic amusement was well forgotten when the long procession came in sight. Each of the Knights was surrounded by their own little retinue of grooms, armourers and supporters, while interspersed between them walked a colourful assortment of archers, halberdiers, standard-bearers and men at arms. At the very head of the procession the musicians of the previous night doubled now as strident trumpeters, announcing the tournament in long high clarions.
I was suddenly lifted by the magic of it all, by the great winding line of armoured horsemen and attendants, chain-mail glinting in the sun, with all the other colours in their shields and pennants — the reds and golds and blacks — turning the procession into a vision from some medieval Book of Hours, a crusader’s army setting forth on the vellum of the green sward.
Despite the flimsy veil she wore I could see Alice’s face clearly when she arrived to take her throne. Dressed in a long white gown with vast billowing silk sleeves, in a tight, almost wasp-waisted gilt embroidered velvet bodice, she was in seventh heaven — in the midst of an incredibly extravagant dream now at last perfectly realised. I was sorry in a way that I couldn’t share it with her. I envied her invention then. And somehow I think she sensed this, for when she finally sat down in the flower-strewn box at the front of the stand, she turned to me for a moment, to where I was sitting a few rows behind her, and, having first looked at me with surprise, for I’d not seen her all that morning, she went on to smile at me with an expression of extraordinary triumph — triumph with an element of spite in it: she had moved finally, with this glorious procession, into a vital world of colour and light, into a promised land where I, through my lack of faith, could not join her.
Yet when the jousting itself actually started and the darkly armoured knights, like evil machines, their plumes flying, thundered down along the hurdles at each other, I was glad I was no part of it. Clare was on her feet most of the time with excitement. But had I been on one of the horses myself, I would almost certainly have ended up in hospital, or worse. One of the well-practised Knights, indeed, took a fearful tumble, jolted violently out of his saddle by a padded lance, to be rescued by St John’s Ambulance men suitably attired in striped doublets and hose.
I thought the whole thing comic for a moment, as well as dangerous. And yet what a lot of energy and imagination had been given — by Alice particularly, I knew — to organising the vastly elaborate charade. And I was amazed then at the intensity of Alice’s dream, the tenacity with which she had pursued and successfully realised this pageant of archaic valour. I had to admit now that there was something wonderful about her obsessions, something that was not madness. Perhaps it was a particularly American quality, extinct there as everywhere else now, which she still possessed and had brought to life again here: a quality of reaching out, far beyond the boundaries of ordinary hope, towards an imagined light — of risking the infinite, sure of its promise. Alice certainly had this continuously available generosity of spirit, a romantic vision which I, in my sanity, had lost years ago, if I had ever had it. And I felt ashamed of my tardy, careful nature. I was a prisoner of my wishes — someone always at several removes from the real action — a spy by nature as well as by old profession, who could only really see the world through binoculars.
And it was through these, towards the end of the jousting, when the flags and pennants began to dance in long, snake-like shadows across the parkland in an evening breeze, that I noticed the man walking down from the Manor towards us. He was immediately, blatantly noticeable as he came among the costumed spectators in the stand, dressed as he was in a dark business suit, a smallish, almost elderly, rather common-looking little man. I noticed his hair, too, dank, dark tufts of it plastered down with some stiffened dressing over his ears and collar. He searched the stand for someone, gazing about him with an air of great self-assurance and superior concern, as if such costumed nonsense and all the jousting was nothing but a dalliance for rogues and vagabonds.