‘Alice,’ I shouted. ‘No!’ I tried to take the gun off her. But I was too late. She raised it, pointing it at me. She had that great glint of adventure in her eyes once more, on the rampage again, determined on a last rash throw where she would finally turn the tables on her fate.
‘Well, are you coming?’ she said. ‘We’re going.’
‘Alice, it’s crazy. We can’t control it.’
‘I can. You just pull that thing.’
‘But where will it get us? It could blow us anywhere.’
‘Exactly. The police will never know where.’
I tried to stop her again. But before I had the chance she had grasped Clare by the hand and was out of the door running furiously down the pavilion steps towards the balloon. I ran after them.
The police, I saw, were moving towards us in a huge circle, round three sides of the park, not more than a quarter of a mile away. But though they must have seen the vividly coloured balloon through the dissolving mists, they hadn’t seen us yet. They were still walking slowly across the grass.
‘No!’ I shouted after Alice, gaining on her. But she was still well ahead of me. The two men, both of them on the ground now, releasing the last tie-ropes, didn’t know what hit them — a child dressed as a medieval page a woman in a slip flourishing an automatic, followed by a man in a velvet doublet and hose — all three of us streaking towards them. And Alice ran fast, with the child in tow, for the police had just seen us now, and were running towards us.
Alice flourished the gun at a fair-haired young man who had been tending to the gas burner, and who looked at us all when we arrived by the basket as if he’d seen ghosts.
‘Out of the way!’ she shouted at him. Then with her free arm she lifted Clare off the ground, putting her in the basket before starting to climb in herself.
‘What the bloody hell —?’ The second much older man spoke now. standing up on the far side of the basket where he’d been tending the ropes. He was a big swollen middle-aged fellow, gross with good living, with an adventurous old ‘Wizard Prang’ RAF moustache. He stepped briskly forward now, coming to eject Alice and Clare from his machine. But he hadn’t seen the little automatic.
Alice raised the gun over the edge of the basket and fired. The man stopped and looked about him wildly as the sound echoed round the park where the sun had bathed almost all the mist away. ‘The next one’s for you,’ Alice shouted. The big fellow retreated, as did his fair-haired colleague on the other side.
I stepped forward myself then. ‘Come on, Alice,’ I said. ‘This is nonsense. You can’t get anywhere. Come on out of it.’
But Alice had pulled the lever already, igniting the gas-burner again, starting it off with another roar, so that the basket, already just free of the ground, began to drift slowly upwards. There was nothing to do then but jump into it myself. But as I did so, I noticed that one of the tie-ropes was still in place, pegged to the grass.
The big man noticed this, too — and saw his opportunity, running quickly forward before clinging to this rope. Meanwhile the police were closing fast, all of them running hard now, little more than a hundred yards away.
Alice had her hand on the lever, activating the gas supply continuously, the snout erupting in a great sheath of flame above us, so that in moments we were ten feet above the ground. But the man had firmly grasped the last tie-rope and was hanging on to it for dear life as the balloon rose very slowly upwards, dragging the rope through his hands. The first of the police were only fifty yards away.
I leant out over the side of the basket. The man beneath was coming to the end of the tether, was almost airborne with us now. If the police got to help him before the rope ran out, their combined efforts would keep us on the ground. Already we were almost at a standstill. But the balloon, gradually filling with the hot air, won the battle, inching upwards. And in a moment the man was airborne, rising with us.
In the end he saw it was no use and suddenly he let go, dropping ten feet like a stone, sprawling over on the grass. Immediately afterwards, free of his great weight, the balloon surged upwards, the last tie-rope dangling just above the heads of the police as they arrived beneath. One of them had a revolver out; others shouted up at us.
But we couldn’t hear their voices. Already we were fifty feet above them, a hundred feet, rising fast in an upcurrent of sun-warmed air, the gas burner still on full charge, drowning all other sound. And soon all the men were far below us as we climbed through the last streaks of mist, a huge red rose in the brilliant morning air, the sun rising well above the line of trees to the east, burning my eyes, blinding me, so that I could see nothing.
But Alice had certainly managed to escape: there was no doubt about that. We were rising like an express lift, as if some great hand had snatched us up from the earth, and I could feel that, could feel all the pits opening in my stomach as we shot upwards. And despite my horror at the event, I suddenly felt a huge elation then as well, embraced by this sheer miracle, the giddy weightlessness of rising thus in space, the Manor and the parkland falling away, the green countryside just beginning to form a relief map beneath us with model animals and other toys on it.
I was blinded by tears from the rush of wind in my eyes, as well as by the sun, so that when I finally managed to look at Alice I saw she was laughing, laughing fit to burst, as at some fantastic joke. Yet I could hear nothing of her laughter against the great blast of gas that was propelling us up into the pale blue dome of sky. She was like the butt of some joke in an old comic silent film, a crazed woman caught in nothing but her slip, lost to the world.
We must have been about a thousand feet up when Alice suddenly released the lever and the gas flame died. There was an extraordinary silence then. And now that we were apparently suspended in mid-air without reason, I felt nervous for the first time, even afraid. There wasn’t the slightest turbulence, nor the sound of any wind through the wire lines of the balloon — nor the murmur, the faintest echo rising from the ground beneath. I looked over the side of the basket. A bird, a big seagull, glided past some hundreds of feet below us. But we were quite stationary, stuck in the air, trapped in space, in a vast, early-morning silence from which, like dangling puppets, we should never find release. Yet Alice looked at me then with triumph: a woman at last embarked on a long-postponed vital journey.
‘You see,’ she said. ‘We made it! We’re on our way.’
‘Yes,’ I said gently, determined not to antagonise her at this height, for she still had the gun in her hand. ‘You made it.’ And though we very obviously weren’t on our way and were going nowhere, I didn’t mention this.
Alice looked over the side of the basket, gazing down at the Manor and then at the parkland on the far side of the cricket pitch where all the little candy-striped jousting tents with their flowing pennants were still in place, the flower-strewn stand and the line of hurdles in between. The early sun, behind the tents and banners, casting long sharp shadows across the grass, gave these remains of the tournament a vividly fresh, three-dimensional effect from this height, like a field of battle, empty at first light, the warriors asleep under canvas, a field where the glory, far from being over, had not yet begun.
Alice gazed lovingly on this site of her dream, taking no notice at all of the reality on the other side of the park, the crowds of police by the cricket pavilion gazing up at us. She had no idea, beneath this heaven in a gilded orb, that her dream was behind her now and all Camelot laid waste.
She said, still looking over the side, ‘You see, there’s nothing you can’t do if you really try. And there’s so much we can do now. That big brambly wood over there,’ she went on, looking westwards, ‘We can really clear that, let the flowers breathe — and pull down that ridiculous barbed wire fence. Don’t you think?’