I had seen this man somewhere before, I thought, seen just that same expression of contemptuous dismissal. But where?
Then I remembered. Months before, in the conservatory, when I had first seen Alice, dressed in a Camelot outfit, apparently talking to herself, she had in fact been talking to this same man: her husband Arthur.
I had forgotten Arthur. I’d been worrying about the police, the African, about Ross. I’d quite forgotten him — forgotten that we had another, and in the present circumstances just as dangerous enemy, who had now walked in on us out of the blue, a pallid ghost, the bad fairy come at the end of the feast. He was looking for Alice, of course, but hadn’t seen her yet.
I realised we couldn’t run. Clare and I would get nowhere in our costumes. We would have to bluff it out somehow. Alice no doubt would have ideas. At least, I hoped she would.
She did. When the tournament came to end, and Arthur had finally recognised and approached his wife, she immediately called Clare and me over to her little loggia in the front of the stand, where she calmly introduced us to Arthur.
‘My friends,’ she said. ‘You don’t know them: Bob Lawrence and his daughter Belinda. They’re staying here — down from London for the celebrations.’
Alice introduced us in her most gracious social manner. But her husband replied in quite a different manner. ‘Oh, are they? Well, I guess that’s fine, for them, I’m sure. And you too, Alice, Just fine.’
He spoke contemptuously as well, a harsh, grating American accent, a common tongue, quite unlike Alice’s. There was power in his voice, but not the educated power of any East-Coast attorney, I thought. This was much more the tone of a brutal success derived from the Chicago stockyards.
We shook hands. Clare looked up at me and smiled, enjoying these fictional introductions, which she saw as no more than a continuation of the day’s brilliant theatricals. Then she looked up at Arthur. And she stopped smiling, for Arthur wore a steady expression of weary disgust. I saw him properly for the first time. I was surprised by how much older he was than Alice, twenty years older at least, I thought. He must have been in his mid-sixties. There was a chilled, blue look about him in the warm twilight, as if he’d just come out of a cold store. The crown of his head, together with his brow, was over-large, protuberant. But the cheeks hollowed out rapidly and his chin was small, pointed, decisive. His head was like an inverted pear: there was the sense, almost, of some deformation in it, while the dark, moist tufts of unruly hair were widely spaced, I saw now, showing clear patches of skin beneath, like the scalp of a new-born baby. There was the sense of someone who had got his own way with life, in every matter, at the cost only of his appearance which alone reflected unpleasant failure. I was surprised that Alice could ever have come to marry such a cold, elderly fish.
Yet it seemed as if Clare and I had successfully passed this initial test with him. But how would it be when we were back in our own clothes, as ordinary guests in the Manor? Could we sustain the fiction then? Arthur had such a wary look in his eye for all three of us that I feared for the future.
And I was right there, too. I was unable to speak to Alice alone before we all trooped back to the Manor, where another smaller buffet supper with cooling drinks had been laid out in the great hall for the sweating contestants and the costumed guests from the stand.
Quite soon after the exultant merry-making had begun here, when the band of musicians, now well laced with mead and ale, had started out on some jaunty trumpet themes, Arthur cornered all three of us where we had been standing by the great fireplace at one end of the hall. He was fidgeting, frustrated, clearly with something pressing on his mind, which wouldn’t wait.
Alice, brashly inventive as ever, gave him the opportunity to unburden himself. ‘Bob Lawrence, here,’ she said with happy charm, ‘is an expert on medieval armour …’
She had hardly finished speaking before Arthur replied softly, urgently, with barely suppressed vindictiveness. ‘Don’t for God’s sake play the fool any more, Alice,’ he said, sorrow equalling the anger in his rough American voice. ‘You’ve caused enough trouble already — but this time you’re really playing with fire.’ He stepped between us then, as if to protect Alice. Then he turned to me, foreknowledge and a dismissive arrogance crowding his face. ‘This man is Peter Marlow. And his daughter Clare. He killed his wife a few months back, then abducted the girl from hospital — helped by you, as I understand it. The police have been looking the whole country over for both of them ever since.’ He turned back to Alice now. ‘Don’t be such a damned fool, Alice. This is real madness.’
An angry brightness had come into Alice’s eyes as she listened, something sharp and fierce in her expression: hatred for this man. And yet, more than looking at Arthur now, she seemed to be gazing straight through him, focusing on something behind him or lost in some huge new bitter thought of her own. She smiled then. And it was the same overblown, unattached smile, now touched with real madness, that I had noticed in her expression the first time I’d seen her down by the lake, months before, when she had yelped in the wind, floating great Indian war-whoops out over the water.
‘Who told you?’ she asked.
‘Why, Mrs Pringle did, of course. She called me a few days back in New York, when she was certain of the matter. I came straight on over. This time you’ve really gone too far. But we’ll see what we can do.’
He tried to shepherd Alice away, with cold consideration, as the madwoman he so clearly considered her to be. But Alice resisted.
‘No! Leave me! We’ll all go together.’
And we did; all of us moving off in a rather awkward procession through the costumed throng, out of the great hall and into the porch of the house.
And it was here that Alice suddenly drew her little automatic from her velvet bodice, before levelling it at her husband’s back.
‘Don’t look round,’ she warned him. ‘Just go on walking.’
Arthur was unaware of what had happened. Then he half-turned, saw the gun. She prodded the weapon into his back.
‘Go on!’ she said, like a cattle-drover. ‘Out the front, then left. Round to the back.’
Clare was excited by this turn of events in our living theatre. I wasn’t. I had no idea of the script. Clare said ‘Good!’ in a considered voice, like a circumspect judge at a flower show. Then she repeated the commendation. ‘Good! Good!’
‘What are you doing?’ I asked.
‘You’ll see.’ Alice didn’t look at me, concentrating on her work.
We walked out of the porch, down the wide front steps of the house and into the warm still airs that had come up with the night, no more than a strolling family group, it would have seemed — to the few people, chauffeurs and others, who were grouped around the cars parked everywhere about us, on the drive and over the lawn surround that gave out onto the dim parkland beyond. Our feet crunched on the crisp white gravel that lay faintly all about us, like a thin fall of snow in the half-light, and Alice trod the pebbles lightly, gun in hand, like an avenging angel in her long white Queen of Beauty costume, intent on retribution, pushing her husband forwards into the darkness.
‘I don’t know where you think this can get you, Alice,’ Arthur spoke lugubriously, as if he had quite lost interest in everything.
‘It’s getting you somewhere. Not me.’ Alice replied with tart efficiency. ‘I’ve really had too much of you interfering in my life. This is my life, my house. Not yours.’
‘I gave it you, though: your life and this house. You forget that. I thought this house, for example, when I bought it for you …’ Arthur hesitated and there seemed a touch of genuine sadness and regret in his voice when he spoke again. ‘I thought it might … cure you? If that was ever possible. All this Victorian craziness, that and all the other madness. Yes, a cure, if that was possible. Improve you at least.’