She turned to me, intense, suddenly ecstatic, just as she had been with me before, offering up some brilliant project which we might share in the future.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘We can do that. That fence is ridiculous.’
Alice, I saw then, acknowledged no defeat. Her land, her great house and all the myths she had created there, though hundreds of feet away were now at last near enough for her to reach out and fully possess them.
Clare, who had been gazing rapturously over the side as well, suddenly said ‘Pigs? Sheep down there. We can have pigs,’ she added very definitely.
‘Pigs as well,’ I said. ‘I hope so.’
‘I want to sort out the books in the library, too,’ Alice went on, pushing further ahead into all the lovely caverns of her dream. ‘And the top corridor, all that Victorian stuff: I’ve left it far too long. That crocodile for example, the big beady-eyed monster upstairs, should we put it in the hall porch and scare the guests?’
Freed from the earth there was no longer any restraint whatsoever on Alice’s fantasies, no barrier at all for her now between illusion and reality. Both were one, the same bright flame, sustained by every frustrated longing she had ever had.
‘And the people, of course!’ She spoke again. ‘They can come now. All the people.’
‘Who?’ I ventured.
‘Why, the real people, of course.’
‘The people like yesterday, you mean? At the tournament.’
‘Yes — yes.’
She looked away from me. She was calmer now, distancing herself, as if studying long guest-lists in her mind, sorting out the wheat from the chaff, the quick from the dead, selecting the real, true people who, now that all the calculating cheats and liars had been vanquished, would finally make up the round table with us in the great dining-room. Alice, in her successful ascent from the world, had struck a decisive victory over the infidel, finally dispensing with all the earth-bound, common lot.
But there was one element in her fantasy still unfulfilled, a holy grail of sorts almost within her grasp but yet to be achieved. And that was me. I could tell from her eyes when she turned to me again just then that she still doubted me, doubted my full consent in her plans, doubted that I would share this glittering future with her, this coming world which lay all about us in its infancy, as clearly mapped as the real earth beneath us was just then, deeply etched in dark and misty greens by the long shadows of the morning.
She spoke with the gravity of a bishop before a marriage or confirmation. ‘You do believe me?’ she asked.
‘I do,’ I lied.
‘Everything?’
‘Yes. Everything.’
I moved across to her then and held her in my arms. ‘Everything,’ I said again.
And in those moments, when she was so close to me, I suddenly found, against all my better judgement, that I did believe her. It was as if, in touching her and making these promises, I had transformed all her folly into lovely inventions and happy devices, genuine articles of faith which she returned to me now and which I could thus no longer deny. I believed her. She let her belief run through me, like the lovemaking we had never managed, so that the sensation was physical and I was suddenly giddy, my head singing, struck by this passing miracle.
In those moments, and as she stood away from me, her face caught in the rising gold of the sun, Alice was transfigured. She had justified her life at last, with all its preposterous flaws and startling visions. The flaws were forgotten peccadilloes now, erased mistakes in the design, as in some great church window, where only the faith remained. Alice had come into her real estate at last, a place entirely of the spirit. At last, in a balloon instead of on a white charger, she had been rescued from that dark and brambly wood. Yet I was not her saviour: I knew that now. Forsaking the world, she had saved herself with her own great fidelity. And she was that chalice with the wine, not I–I who had simply had the luck to taste it briefly.
A small breeze had come up as the sun rose, and now suddenly we were moving, as well as falling in the sky.
Alice said, ‘There! We’re off. We’d better get some height again.’
She pulled the lever, but nothing happened. The gas snout, rising above us from a coiled pipe like the worm of an old pot-still, was silent. Alice tugged the line again. But again nothing happened. The mechanism that lit the gas had failed, or else there was some trick or process in the ignition which we knew nothing about.
‘Do we have any matches?’ Alice asked.
‘No,’ I said. ‘Nothing …’
‘Maybe you could climb up?’ she queried.
‘Why?’
‘See if something’s stuck in the pipe —’ There was an urgency in Alice’s voice, and with good reason, for we were falling now, beginning to descend quite fast. And without the gas, with the air cooling all the time in the fabric above us, we were likely to hit the earth with quite a thump.
I tried the lever myself, but it was no use. The life had gone out of it. I checked the pipes leading up from the two big gas cylinders in the basket, shaking them, thumping them, before switching the supply from one cylinder to another. But it made no difference. There was plenty of gas, I realised now, for we could hear it each time we pulled the cord, hissing up into the great gold throat of the balloon. It was the spark which was missing. The magic had disappeared. And now we were dropping faster, in a long angled glide, moving over the cornfield beyond the cricket pavilion, falling towards the ring of tall beech trees above our hidden valley with the lake beyond.
‘God,’ I said. But I kept my voice down. We were gaining speed and losing height all the time, as we dipped down into the cooler airs above the moist valley where we could see the mist still lying all over the lake in the middle.
I wanted to say something. But there was nothing to say. My throat was suddenly bone-dry and all I could do was fight the panic. The police, meanwhile, I saw, had doubled back, running across the park following our disastrous flight. The wind, which had been nowhere before in the balmy morning sky, blew past my ears now, and I could feel the dead weight of the balloon growing all the time as the warmth died inside it, and we fell to earth, helpless puppets in this great child’s toy gone wrong. We all knew we were going to crash then. Yet Alice was suddenly very angry, not afraid.
‘Why us?’ she shouted, above the wind, her eyes wild with defiance. ‘Why? We’ve done nothing wrong. It was the others!’
I didn’t have the words, or the time to reply. The bronze burnt tops of the old beech trees were rushing towards us now as if we were on the steep slope of a roller-coaster. I gripped the side of the basket, protecting Clare, bracing myself, Alice next to me. It seemed as if some down-draught had caught us, that we were being sucked into the tall trees on the rim of the valley. I couldn’t see how we could miss them.
But at the last moment we had just enough height to smash through the topmost branches, twigs cracking beneath the basket, and then we were headed straight for the misty waters of the lake, straight for the island in the middle, where only the little Gothic pointed roof of the Hortons’ mausoleum stood clear of the milky pools covering the water. There was nothing we could do then, except wait for the crash.
‘Get down!’ I yelled. ‘Below the sides, arms over your heads, back to the water!’
We were all of us down in the bottom of the basket then, bracing ourselves in a huddle, Clare between us — just a moment before we hit the roof of the mausoleum.
If only we had hit the water. But instead the basket jackknifed upwards against the slope of the roof while the balloon rushed onwards, so that suddenly we were on our side, being dragged across the slates, and then I was falling, pitched from the basket, falling into the milky envelope beyond the mausoleum, before the sudden intense cold as the liquid beneath gripped me. I was still holding Clare as I fell. But I had lost Alice.