Clare fell asleep first, with my velvet Albanian doublet over her: fast asleep, quite at ease, it seemed, as if Alice and I were both shepherding her, between us, through the night towards some exciting new adventure, the world of some other lake in a valley or hidden African paradise, where she would wake in another miraculous landscape. To begin with, in the complete darkness, all we knew of her existence was the easy rhythm of her breath: small waves, an echo of her journey, her transformation between light and dark, the only worldly sound, beyond which lay deep sleep or the noise of her fantastic dreams. But then Alice and I, moving towards each other, gently closed the gap between all three of us, so that we came to shield the girl like leaves round a bud and we felt her life then, heart-beat as well as breath.
Alice touched my face in the complete dark, stumbling on an ear, an eye, my mouth. She had forgiven me, it seemed, for what she had seen as my earlier betrayal. Whatever anger she had felt for me in her bedroom the previous night, in the kitchen, had dissolved. No, not dissolved; it was more than that. It was as if some whole new person had taken over Alice’s mind — her body even — as a substitute does for some injured person in a game. Alice had re-invented herself, taken on another role, that of pliant mistress in my arms, a woman without any knowledge now of her murderous disruption, her violence and hatred. It was a strange feeling: I was touching some other woman in the dark.
I had thought to ask her about her father. But it wasn’t the moment — the answers could only have come from the woman she had been and was no longer — and there wasn’t time. And then I thought again: husband or father, what did it really matter? She had seen Arthur as both: as lover and enemy. That was clear enough. The rest, for answer, could only lie on a psychiatrist’s couch. And I, with Laura, had given up on all the quacks and specialists a long time before with Clare, in what we had seen as her tragedy. But was it such, I wondered now, with either of these two, Alice or Clare? Was it not simply their way of looking at life, a way as valid as ours, in which they saw things hidden to us and made associations which lacked all our dull logic? And if their strange visions gave them a disadvantage among ordinary mortals, that vision, that madness even, seemed to me then an inviolable gift, as much a part of both their characters as any other of their attributes I loved. Without it, I realised, Alice and Clare would have lacked their most vital dimensions, that quality of fierce excess in a bankrupt world, bounty amidst impoverishment, swift imagination riding over every mean thought.
How shortsighted I’d been to look so hard for sanity in everyone, in Alice or in Clare. After all, I saw now, the bizarre was Clare’s particular gift too: that untutored wildness in her which, whatever disadvantages it might bring, would always free her from the mundane. A cure for such people could well become a life worse than the disease, I thought, when they would lose all their strange stature, as we would miss their passionate example.
So I loved Alice that night without reserves, without queries or judgements: and loved her the more since in any case there would be no world between us tomorrow where such reservations could have any effect. And thus, an end so certainly in view between us, we were both quite free at last.
Eighteen
Next morning a thin, almost translucent blanket of mist lay everywhere, low down, hugging all the parkland: the sun rose above it, trying to force its way through, with patches of blue sky just visible here and there, promising another brilliant day in these last days of summer.
I’d woken early and gone to one of the pavilion windows, the others still asleep behind me. Then I’d opened the door a fraction. Finally I stepped right outside. The manor was completely hidden, nearly half a mile away. It was difficult to see more than twenty yards, and there wasn’t a sound on the muffled air. Nothing penetrated the soft, pearly stillness. The police, until the mist cleared, would be handicapped in their search for us — and the tracker dogs would be at a disadvantage, too, with so many confusing human trails to follow after the fête. We had some time left.
I shivered in the cool, early air, still just in my thin costume shirt and woollen tights, a foolhardy reveller about to face the police courts. And I felt another stab of regret then — looking out on this magic shroud, this safety curtain touched with coming sunlight, beyond which the day lurked, full of promise, that I would never be free in.
The mist was already beginning to clear as I watched, the sun warming. Suddenly I heard the muffled sound of a dog barking and then another: up by the manor. I went back inside. Perhaps there’d just be time to brew some tea before they found us — on the gas ring in the little kitchen to the side of the pavilion where the cricketers had their food prepared. I lit the gas, gazing vacantly out over the cricket pitch where the mist was thinning quickly now.
Then I heard another noise above the sound of the gas in the small kitchen, a much stronger rush of air, a great whooshing sound, like a jet-engine starting up. I looked beneath the sink, at the canister of propane stored there. But there was nothing amiss. This new sound came from outside the pavilion, I realised, from somewhere in the mist.
I was very tired, so that at first I thought what I saw a few minutes later must be an illusion, a projection on my mind of a last suppressed longing for freedom. Less than fifty yards away, as the mist cleared, I saw a big square box on the ground, a sort of wicker basket it seemed, and above it, swelling up into the air like an effect in a surrealist painting, a huge pear-shaped object, striped in vivid reds and golds, grew in front of my eyes, suddenly reflecting the rising sun like an orb of fire. I wasn’t dreaming.
It was a balloon.
Of course: it was the hot-air balloon they’d used all yesterday morning at the fête for tethered trips with Passepartout into the sky. I’d quite forgotten about it. The men had returned this morning and were starting it up again, about to take it away.
I went back into the main room of the pavilion. Alice was awake when I got there, with Clare, both of them standing spellbound at the window.
‘Quick!’ Alice said when she saw me. ‘Here’s our chance — we can take that balloon!’
Alice was off her head again, I thought. There were two fairly burly men tending the balloon, we saw now, one of them on the ground unleashing some of the tie-ropes, the other inside the basket manipulating the gas burner, so that as we watched he pulled a lever, like a beer tap, beneath the fabric and there was a sudden dart of flame and another great roar of sound as he maintained the great balloon, now almost fully expanded, in a stable position above him.
‘Take it?’ I asked. ‘But how? We can’t —’
Then Clare, still half-asleep, interrupted. ‘It’s a magic!’ she said. She smiled easily as if this vision in the dying mist was something entirely expected, the balloon a transport arranged by us, in which she would shortly continue her dramatic life at the Manor by soaring into the sky above it. Alice had just the same optimism. She stood beside me in her slip — shivering, but from excitement more than from the early chill in the misty air.
Yet even as we stood there the mist was clearing ever more rapidly, all the blue and white horizons above the parkland coming into focus. We could see the Manor now, half a mile away to our right, and I heard the dogs bark again. And then I saw some dark figures, spread out in a long line, approaching us. The police were just stepping down across the ha-ha.
Alice saw them too: and suddenly she had the little automatic in her hand. She’d hidden it, not thrown it away at all.