Alice’s Secret Garden
Rebecca Campbell
Stylish and witty tale of city life from the author of THE FAVOURS AND FORTUNES OF KATIE CASTLEAlice is content to drift along in her job at Enderby’s, the fusty auction house, among colleagues who are toffs, tarts or swots. It’s an excuse not to engage in real life; having suffered loss before, she finds it altogether easier to dream about what might have been.Life, however, is about to insist upon engaging with her. Enderby’s future might be saved by pulling off an enormous coup: selling a first edition of the exquisitely rare Audubon’s Birds of America. Alice is despatched to persuade its current owner, an aristocrat in his rural retreat, to give her the commission. Her mentor and friend Andrew – the one normal person at Enderby’s – is highly suspicious. What follows is a mercilessly sharp yet moving lesson in how to spot the genuine article.
Epigraph (#ulink_2e0a48d4-4b36-53d5-b41f-4a9c3bdc7bb8)
I dreamt it last night that my true love came in, So softly he entered, his feet made no din;
He came close beside me, and this he did say ‘It will not be long love, love, till our wedding day.’
Based on ‘She Moved Through the Fair’
– Padraic Colum
The last and best Cure of Love Melancholy is, to let them have their Desire.
Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy
Contents
Cover (#u9a5d762c-ce63-51bc-b363-0cc9e04f881e)
Title Page (#u8d86ddfb-cfec-59f0-baa2-41574419e6fc)
Epigraph (#ulink_06b86944-9bea-54cc-8223-e2cb3c06f993)
ONE: She Moved Through the Fair (#ulink_1bf2e0f2-13a9-5d1a-8710-e55d2b403afb)
TWO: The Secret Garden of Alice Duclos (#ulink_3212bc1d-a9db-5136-aa0c-910c8326b297)
THREE: The Death of a Boy (#ulink_2ecdd186-2b85-57a5-9ffd-3581cfe1cc11)
FOUR: Odette and Alice (#ulink_4206c437-c0a5-542f-adc5-a9707facd6f6)
FIVE: The Prior History of Andrew Heathley (#ulink_6f4f1d03-ed18-5360-bafd-b4ed61415623)
SIX: Quantock Bound (#ulink_4141be4a-16f0-5c7b-af95-bed17d21af11)
SEVEN: A Cave of Ice (#ulink_d594b5bd-33c7-5c02-9bd0-d88b47dae35b)
EIGHT: The Sublime Machine (#ulink_8133e994-ad62-5e33-aead-d9bdd358167c)
NINE: Drinking it Over (#ulink_e102bcf4-c487-529d-ba58-8dc57e8860ee)
TEN: Odette in Venice (#ulink_c2f2c974-ba0d-5a63-b834-74c7ffe14a7d)
ELEVEN: Drink to Me Only with Thine Eyes, or The Quest for the Historical Noddy (#ulink_90f4218f-a01b-54da-9b45-770893bb075e)
TWELVE: Country Pleasures, Suck’d on Childishley (#ulink_70f4518a-ca9c-5d8a-99d0-ce89c8a2ac85)
THIRTEEN: Thanks, Rosencrantz and Gentle Guildenstern (#ulink_bb2c2852-e896-584f-bb07-1d2e1bb639cc)
FOURTEEN: The Return of the Gothic (#ulink_6077012e-bd31-5efb-9ef2-eafb54efe43f)
FIFTEEN: Of Monkey Nuts and Hard-Boiled Eggs (#ulink_8691b072-5611-5984-bb37-9ff7b646b090)
SIXTEEN: Ghostly Limbs (#ulink_0411ae1e-44d1-5fdc-a287-8a627e8caf49)
SEVENTEEN: The Hand that Rocked the Cradle (#ulink_4dcc205f-a6f0-5cae-8439-0291ab386e8e)
EIGHTEEN: The Dead Boy (#ulink_cf9cbb31-020a-5729-b0d4-9a81be10d70e)
NINETEEN: The Sadness of Everything (#ulink_9788bc35-7dd8-53c5-adb5-2bc29f4839f8)
TWENTY: Preparations (#ulink_a8fc604b-2e08-5e93-b06a-885856ece61e)
TWENTY-ONE: Declarations (#ulink_2ec9df08-ceec-592d-911c-6a45ee4c6fde)
TWENTY-TWO: Love for Sale (#ulink_57b65d9d-c896-5716-8c8a-4f0ac4f016f1)
TWENTY-THREE: Complicity (#ulink_f25dffd2-0998-5c68-816a-dff0d57f3f30)
TWENTY-FOUR: The Last Party (#ulink_aefbfda9-71b8-51b0-ae2c-3357510d8dec)
TWENTY-FIVE: Two Interesting Occurrences (#ulink_cdc2878f-e30b-544f-a6de-2fa1c3e1bd3c)
TWENTY-SIX: The Mitre (#ulink_a8d1b427-1f22-5fa4-9305-28b71d1034c2)
TWENTY-SEVEN: A Death at Heathrow (#ulink_211639b2-a41c-5e5a-8abf-9944b50941cf)
Keep Reading (#ud2539a1c-bc03-557b-897e-4648331b63c0)
Acknowledgements (#ulink_19e3ac09-5298-5b7d-9de0-aacdcffb95ec)
About the Author (#ulink_e6635cd7-9a68-5e80-b2a8-a88c9e68ffa2)
Copyright (#ulink_9ddf0219-b3c3-5029-abb0-5254f0e9c7c4)
About the Publisher (#ulink_da49b544-37b9-5be3-aebb-7b8b64361d90)
ONE (#ulink_75cb6561-1dda-5eea-b7cb-3286be9bbb2c)
She Moved Through the Fair (#ulink_75cb6561-1dda-5eea-b7cb-3286be9bbb2c)
Alice had been thinking about the Dead Boy for nearly six months before anyone else at Enderby’s found out about him. And that was funny, because for those six months the Dead Boy was the most important thing in Alice’s life: more important than her job in the Book Department, looking after Natural History; more important than her mother in the tiny flat in St John’s Wood; more important than her friends, her living friends, scattered around London.
Alice had never spoken to the Dead Boy. She had never felt, as she longed to feel, the fine dense blackness of his hair as it swept with such sensuous, careless, charm across his face, across her face. She had never touched the full Slavic lips that fell so easily into a pout – not the pout of a spoilt child or of a sulking teenager, but a little ‘o’, a pout of pure surprise, surprise at the onrush of death. She had never brushed her own lips against those high cheekbones, cheekbones which would have looked cruel, tyrannical, implacable, had they not slid into the fine smiling lines around the eyes. The eyes, to Alice, were something of a mystery. No matter how many times she replayed the incident, winding backwards and forwards, slowing it down or speeding it up, panning back to take in the whole street, or the whole of London, or zooming into ultra close-up, she could not settle on the colour of the eyes. It was not even the precise shade that was in question – it was not some unimportant semantic quibble about hazel or chestnut or rowan – it was that Alice could not even decide if they were blue or brown, dark or light. Sometimes they would burn through her with an intense cobalt light, or dazzle with shimmering bright crystal; at others they would fold in on themselves in wave after wave of growing darkness, like evening falling on a forest.
Had Alice known the Dead Boy for more than four seconds, or had she never gone for that seemingly harmless stroll, but rather sat on the imposing steps at Enderby’s with Andrew that lunchtime, as she often did, to eat a sandwich and breathe in the petrol fumes, while they talked about the oddness of people, and he tried to think of something clever and nice to say that wouldn’t trumpet his devotion in her ear like an elephant in musth, then everything would have been different.
Back in the office that afternoon, the afternoon when everything changed, Alice was surprised to find that nobody noticed anything different about her. It seemed that none could see the penumbra of light around her, or sense the dramatic transformations that had taken place within her.
But no, nothing. The only comment as she made her way slowly, like a bride, to her desk, was one of Pamela’s deafening whispers:
‘Alice, where have you been?’
Pamela, or Pammy, or Spam, as she was known with varying degrees of affection, had been there longer than anyone, and was seen as a sort of retaining wall which couldn’t be demolished without dire, if unspecified, consequences. Of course it was possible that she retained nothing at all, supporting only her own weight, which was considerable. Originally she had typed letters, but now that everyone did that for themselves her main responsibility was ordering the rubber bands which spilled and coiled in pointless abundance from every drawer, like intestines after a battle.
‘Mr Crumlish has been around. He’s got one of his faces on. You know, the one like Easter Island. He’ll be using one of those thingummy bobs … metaphors on you if you’re not careful.’
Mr Crumlish was then still part of the ill-defined strata of middle managers within Books, or, to give it its full title, Books, Manuscripts and other Printed Matter. Books was the smallest department in Enderby’s, the fifth biggest auction house in London, which is quite as unimpressive as it sounds. The office, an ornate Florentine palazzo, complete with dirty windows, and spluttering drains, and the grand statue of its founder, the buccaneering Mungo Enderby (1772–1861) in half armour, was the one relic of the glory days, back in the nineteen-twenties when Enderby’s was briefly acknowledged as one of the Big Three. But then came the scandals: the famous fraud case; the fake Canaletto; the 1949 public indecency charge against Ashley Enderby. And so eventually the Americans had come, or rather the Americans who ran the business for the Japanese bank which bought, at bargain basement rates, fifty-one per cent of Enderby’s. Ashley Enderby had died without issue, alone in Marrakech, befuddled with intoxicants, and the family share had gone to the Brooksbanks, obscurely related by marriage. The Brooksbanks, whose interests were principally rural, were content for the Americans and Japanese to take the decisions while they drew off what they could in the form of profit and prestige. Only one Brooksbank was still involved in any practical sense in the running of the company, and he only in the way that the froth is technically still part of the beer. But he was, at least, a link of sorts with the past.
‘Alice, where have you been?’ repeated Pamela, looking perplexed, the second of her two facial expressions after her more familiar vacuous jollity.
But Alice couldn’t think of anything to say back to Pamela, and nor could she meet her vacantly inquisitive stare. Where had she been? To heaven. To hell. Nowhere special.
To begin with not even Andrew, the closest thing she had to a friend at Enderby’s, noticed anything unusual. But he was preoccupied with his work that afternoon and was soon called in to a meeting, which lasted for the rest of the day. And of course Alice was still quite new then, and generally perceived to be a little strange. The problem had been summed up for her two months earlier, on a bright, cold February morning, by Mr Crumlish, whom Alice was destined never to call by his first name, Garnet. Mr Crumlish was showing Alice ‘the ropes’, a phrase he used with such relish she assumed he felt it to be an expression of thrilling vulgarity.
‘You see, if we leave aside dear, dear Spammy over there,’ – at this point Crumlish toodled with his fingertips over to where Pam was arranging paperclips; she burst into gales of girlish laughter, which set off curious seismic events in the various pendulous and drooping zones of her body: a small tremor about her middle; a major quake in the jowls; a volcanic eruption of spittle at the lips, and a devastating bust-tsunami – ‘everybody here is either a Toff or a Tart or a Swot. Oh. Are you allowed three “eithers”? I can’t remember. Anyway, I, of course, am a Toff. We don’t know very much, but the gentry do like one of their own to deal with. Not perhaps when it comes to going on a rummage: then they seem to prefer it if you act like staff, and you think yourself lucky if cook gives you a chipped mug in the kitchen. But when they bring in one of their gewgaws for a valuation they appreciate the rich and heady aroma of old money.’
Alice was clearly supposed to be shocked by Mr Crumlish’s performance. But she noticed that the people in the office, the twenty or so men and women arranged in clumps about the room, paid him no attention, despite the arch and actorly projection of his voice. She assumed that they had heard it all before; perhaps received the same initiation themselves.
‘Ophelia,’ continued Mr Crumlish, ‘is, as you can see, a Tart. Pretty, pretty, pretty.’
With each ‘pretty’, Mr Crumlish twitched the hem of his pin-striped suit, flashing the vivid lilac lining.
Alice quickly glanced in the direction that Mr Crumlish had flicked his thin wrist. She saw a young woman of astonishing, languorous beauty, playing idly with her long dark hair. She seemed to have nothing else to do. Alice instantly felt shabby: her own long hair was cheaply cut, underconditioned, and prone to acts of reckless rebellion; her clothes were ill-matched, picked up as the sales were entering the please please please don’t buy me phase.
‘The Tarts,’ continued Mr Crumlish, breaking the spell that Ophelia’s beauty had cast over Alice, ‘tend not to know very much either, but they are easy on the eye, and it’s so much cheaper than getting the decorators in. Anyway, what else would they do with their History of Art degrees? The Swots, on the contrary, know everything; not everything about everything, but everything about something. Couldn’t do without the Swots. Could do without the smell.’
‘The smell?’ Alice was mystified.
‘You know, the stale, composty, damp-tweed aroma, combined with the smell of a shirt worn for a second, or even third, day, mixed finally with the faint, sweet tang of distressingly recent onanism. I present to you Mister Cedric Clerihew.’ He pronounced Cedric ‘seed-rick’, which Alice hadn’t heard before. She had no way of knowing if Crumlish was being amusing. Clerihew certainly wasn’t going to put her right. He was a small round person, like a globule of some unappetising but not actively repulsive liquid. Like many round people, his age was difficult to estimate, but certainly above twenty and below forty. He was very neatly dressed, almost like a boy receiving his first Holy Communion. He smiled and sweated towards Alice, but Crumlish swept her on and away before he had the chance to speak to her, or reach out with his little hands, the fingers of which looked a knuckle shorter than the usual complement.
‘Poor boy,’ said Crumlish, this time in a voice that only Alice could hear, ‘one day he might, by pure good fortune, stumble upon the right posterior, but, until that happy time, he licks in vain.’
Alice giggled too loudly, hiding her wide mouth behind her hand. A couple of faces turned, Ophelia’s among them. She performed what must have been a very deliberate up-and-down look of dismissal. Anyone who’d cared to glance towards Clerihew would have seen him staring intently at his desk, his face red, his mouth set hard. Mr Crumlish, pleased with the response, moved Alice on through the large, book-splattered room.
‘But you, Alice, what are you? Not, obviously, one of the Tarts. I’m afraid your degree, what was it? Of course, Zoology of all things, suggests that. Not to mention your commendable lack of vanity.’
As was perhaps intended, Alice took the statement that she lacked vanity as a hint that she ought to rectify the deficit.
‘Nor, despite your name, which, between the two of us I don’t entirely believe, do you appear to be one of us … I mean a Toff. That only leaves the Swots. And, my dear Alice, you really are far too fragrant to be a Swot. I fear you may be sui generis, which is frightfully inconvenient for the … oh, what is the word? A putting-things-into-classes person?’
‘A taxonomist. Was that a test, Mr Crumlish?’
All the while they had been winding their way between the desks, each carrying its burden of computer and heavy reference books. In the far corner they finally came to two facing desks with a low partition between them. One was free, and the other occupied by a young man who might have been handsome had the frown lines been etched a little less deeply.
‘Oh,’ said Mr Crumlish. ‘I’ve got it all wrong. There’s a fourth category. As well as the Tarts and the Toffs and the Swots, we’ve recently acquired our first Oik. And look, he’s to be your intimate desk chum. How affecting. Alice, meet Andrew Heathley. I suspect his mates call him “Andy”. Andrew, this is Alice Sui Generis. Be gentle with her.’
Andrew scowled yet more heavily, and Alice was convinced that a brute impulse to hurl a profoundly unacceptable insult in the face of Mr Crumlish had been forced down into some subterranean chamber of the mind. She doubted it would be lonely.
‘Hello,’ he said, smiling the frowny smile which was soon to become so familiar to Alice.
‘Hello,’ replied Alice, a little intimidated by Andrew’s apparent seriousness.
‘You’ve had the tour from Crumlish. I presume you got the Tarts and Toffs stuff. I had that when I joined. I suppose I ought to be flattered that I’ve entered the pantheon.’
‘Are you really an Oik? Whatever an Oik is.’
‘I think he means I’m a socialist. From the “North”.’
‘Seems like a funny sort of place for a socialist to be working. If you are. I mean a socialist, not working.’
‘It is. A bloody funny sort of place.’
‘How did you come to be here?’
‘Oh Christ, life story time already. Well, I was doing a PhD on … oh, stuff, but I ran out of funding. There was a girlfriend who worked here. A vacancy came up. They never advertise them: there’s usually one of Crumlish’s Toffs grown in a pod in the basement ready to step in. Somehow they screwed up and I got the job.’
Alice wondered at the strange way Andrew referred to ‘a’ girlfriend, but she could hardly ask any more personal questions on her first day. Months later when she asked about the girlfriend, Andrew replied only that she was tall, and had gone to the other place, by which he meant, she supposed, Christie’s, rather than heaven or the House of Lords.
As for Andrew, as soon as he saw Alice walking towards him, looking charmingly flustered by the Crumlish routine, he knew that he was going to fall for her. Just how far he couldn’t even guess, although he had a brief and blurry vision of precipices. Not that having Andrew fall for you was particularly difficult. At that time he was principally (and hopelessly) in lust with Ophelia and subordinately (and, had he but known it, more promisingly) keen on a girl called Tessa, who would occasionally wander through Books on unspecified errands.
‘You know, I haven’t much of a clue what I’m supposed to be doing,’ said Alice, once she had sat down and unpacked her pencil case and reached around on both sides in vain pursuit of the computer’s on button.
‘Oh don’t worry, nobody does to begin with. Or sometimes ever. I can show you where the canteen is, and where to make tea, and where the bogs are. You’ll pick up everything else as you go. You’re our new Science and Natural History bod, aren’t you?’
‘Mm. I think they want me to do some Travel as well, but I don’t know much about that.’
‘Well, you’re not quite what I was expecting. Usually the … people on the Science side are … well, you know. I can help you a bit with the Travel.’
‘Is Travel your main responsibility?’
‘Yes, no. Well, I do everything, really. An expert generalist. Or a general expert. And, by the way, when Crumlish says “recently acquired”, he means I’ve been here for less than ten years, not that I joined last week.’
Andrew was losing his focus a little. Alice, although not quite beautiful, had the kind of face that made you want to look at it, that made you think that things would be all right, or at least a little better, if you spent another minute or so just looking. Andrew had to struggle hard against the urge to stare baldly at her. He broke loose by looking at her clothes. Most of the younger Enderby girls were Vogue perfect. Not Alice. He couldn’t quite put his finger on what was wrong, but he knew that either the right sort of directed intelligence, or the time, or the money was missing. It made him like her more by, in his own reckoning, about seven per cent. It also made him feel more comfortable: at least she wasn’t perfect like Ophelia, and soon they were chatting about nothing in particular, which was how most days were spent in the Books department.
And so Alice’s first day at Enderby’s had been only mildly traumatic and if she never did quite fit in, she at least, in those two months before she fell in love with the Dead Boy, found a place as one of those who were officially permitted not to fit in.
The same, alas, could not be said for Mr Crumlish who, for all his protestations, was not a Toff, but an Edinburgh council-estate boy, whose brilliance and taste had doomed him to alienation from his own people, and yet never quite achieved for him acceptance in the world to which he aspired, the world of the beautiful and the clever and the rich. Perhaps it was the name, Garnet, that had sealed his fate. His father, a merchant seaman, had brought one of the semi-precious stones back from a distant port for his wife, and she had so loved its profound crimson opacity that she had insisted that the unborn child should carry the name. Had he been a simple John, or Davey, or Robert, then a different life might have been his.
It was the Americans who insisted on his dismissal. They acted, of course, through Oakley, the Head of Books.
Oakley had been promoted from the documents basement, where he acted as a Cerberus to its Hades. No one in Books (or anywhere else in Enderby’s), with the exception of those unfortunate clericals who’d been forced to request a document from storage, had ever heard of Oakley. He had, however, one asset which, from the American perspective, set him aside from, or rather above, his more knowledgeable, refined, cultured, eloquent, sophisticated, amusing and able colleagues: a qualification in Business Studies. That qualification, vaguely defined as a ‘diploma’, had been awarded by the Llandudno Business School, an institution which usefully allowed itself to be abbreviated to the LBS, and thereby readily confused with other, possibly more august institutions. On his elevation to Head of Books, Oakley had become simultaneously more English and more American; the former accomplished by the rapid purchase of a pin-striped suit, and the latter by a studied replacement of the word ‘arse’ by ‘ass’ in his vocabulary. Alice would eventually come to agree with the general view of those who worked in Books that he was a fawning toady to those above him at Enderby’s and a ruthless tyrant to those below; a snob and a fool.
When asked, at his first monthly round-up, by the American management to give an appraisal of his ‘team’, Oakley had initially replied that they were all ‘top drawer’, which he hoped would reflect well on himself.
‘But what about that guy Crumlish?’ asked Madeleine Illkempt, aka The Slayer. ‘All he seems to do is file expenses claims and make inappropriate personal remarks. And to be frank, we don’t care at all what you people do in private but his kind of open … display in the work environment just isn’t efficient.’
‘Ah, Mr Crumlish,’ said Oakley, rapidly assessing what it was that The Slayer wanted to hear. ‘Well, I did feel it was my duty to … protect … to … but of course, yes, there have been one or two … problems.’ And if there weren’t, he knew how to go about manufacturing some.
And so Alice never got to call Mr Crumlish, Garnet. But she had liked him, and she never forgot that the Books department at Enderby’s auction house was made up of Toffs, Tarts and Swots, or that she was sui generis.
TWO (#ulink_60cd46c8-e10d-5bff-9a2b-4ad9756ed8a3)
The Secret Garden of Alice Duclos (#ulink_60cd46c8-e10d-5bff-9a2b-4ad9756ed8a3)
Alice was in the garden again. She looked back and saw the low arch and the little green door through which she must have entered. The garden was her special place. Its high brick wall kept out the wind and the world. Its paths wove complicated patterns, which, once deciphered, would tell her the answers to all of her questions. The roses, always in bud and never blooming, dwelt partly in the garden, and partly in fairytales, guarding princesses, holding the impure or the unwary forever in their gauzy tangles. At the heart of everything stood the dead stone fountain and the dark green pool.
She reached up and felt her father’s soft hands; felt with her fingertips for his smooth, clean nails. The sensation filled her with excitement and yet soothed her.
‘Daddy, can we go to the fish?’ she said, but she knew he would not answer. And then she was looking down through the shadows to where the long lazy goldfish slid and turned amid the darker green of the weeds. She could see the shape of her father reflected in the water, but the details were lost in the murk and silt.
‘Don’t the fish get cold, Daddy?’ she asked, but again she knew that there would be no answer. She looked up to where his face should have been, but the sky was pure white and dazzled her eyes after the darkness of the water. She would close her eyes in the dream to shut out the light and, as her dream eyes closed, so her waking eyes would open onto the world.
It was a dream, but not a dream. She could summon the vision when she was awake, sometimes as she lay in bed at night, sometimes as she sat and stared at the computer screen on her desk at work, and once in the garden she would try to drive the dream on to the point at which she would see her father’s face, and know him again. The dream was a dream of love and a dream of loss. But then so was the other dream. The dream of the Dead Boy.
The garden of Alice’s dream was a distillation of the many gardens of her early childhood. Her father, Francis Duclos, was a doctor, specialising in infectious diseases. The fever hospitals he moved between all had huge grounds, acres of parkland with great horse chestnut and yew trees and lines of dense privet. But the killers of the past: diphtheria, measles, scarlet fever, even TB, had vanished or been attenuated, and so the long wards and the open grounds and secret gardens were empty. Duclos found himself in a branch of medicine without a future, and yet for him it was the only medicine, the only life there could be. He wanted to grapple with the invisible enemy, to fire his magic bullets at the tenacious and merciless microbes.
Around the core of the dream-memory, other memories would form: less vividly hyper-real, perhaps, but more soundly based in hard, nuggety reality. She remembered collecting conkers for their beauty. There were no other children allowed in the grounds and so, but for the occasional foray over the wall by the local urchins, she had the trees and their fruit to herself. She could still remember the intense biscuity smell of the newly opened chestnut and its dark iridescence. Her father showed her how to twist off the shell, and would have taught her how to string them, and ready them for warfare, but she could not allow their irregular organic perfection to be destroyed by the awl. She remembered cutting her wrist when she and an older cousin, come from France for the holidays, broke a pane in the hospital greenhouse to plunder tomatoes. The cousin burst into tears at the sight of her blood, and Alice had to guide him home. She remembered her father making her wrist better, calmly sewing the edges of the cut together. She saw again the white fingers working the needle, and she remembered that she had not been afraid, but she forgot that she had cried from the pain. She remembered living in a big old house that was always cold. There were better memories of a room in the nurses’ home; memories of running through the long corridors pretending to be Tarzan (who, after all, would ever want to be Jane?) with a toy knife stuck in her green knickers.
Alice’s mother never had a role in her memories. Alice’s mother was too much part of her present to belong to her past. The past was for the good and beautiful things, worn smooth with the years. The past was for the dead, the sacred dead. Alice could, however, remember her mother’s special friend, one of the patients, a boy called Gulliver. He was dying from some intractable strain of consumption. Alice remembered his glistening eyes, and the dark circles around them, and his long, straining neck and she feared him because on the only occasion Alice had seen him smile, his lips peeled back to reveal his bright red gums.
After the death of her father, Alice and her mother had moved to a small flat in St John’s Wood. Kitty was from a prosperous family, with what she always described as ‘good connections’, although to whom or what was never specified. She was sharp-faced, and had once been very pretty. Her marriage to the tall, handsome doctor seemed like a good one, until he decided to abandon London for draughty, remote prisons, millions of miles from theatres and restaurants and dinner parties.
She snatched at the opportunity to return to London, the opportunity wrought by his death. Using every penny that they had saved, she bought the little flat, back here, where the people were, where the life was. It was a shame that London had moved on so much in the ten years that she had been away. Her friends had new friends. The places were all different. The invitations wouldn’t come. The romance that she expected never happened, apart from one or two crooks out, she eventually convinced herself, to purloin what little money she had left. The years passed and she found herself becoming old.
At times she blamed dull, strange little Alice. She took her away from the expensive private school, little knowing that Alice had hated it, despising the catering and grooming skills it seemed intent on imparting, loathing the silly girls who talked of nothing but ponies and lacrosse. The fact that Alice actually seemed to enjoy the local comprehensive confirmed Kitty’s doubts about her, doubts amplified by the child’s interest in science, in the horrid creepy-crawly world of beetles and locusts and dissected rats. So like her father. Such a disappointment. And as Alice grew so Kitty shrank. She went out less and less, although she dressed immaculately for each evening in with the television and the dry martinis.
Alice could never blame her mother for being what she was; but nor could she love her. The sense of duty she had absorbed from her father prevented her from taking up the place at Cambridge, and she went instead to Imperial College, living all the while in the little flat. However much her mother pursed her lips, and rolled her eyes and criticised (‘How did I make such a dreary, dowdy thing as you?’), Alice could not leave her on her own. She cooked her meals, and paid, out of her meagre student loan, for a girl to come in twice a week during the day, ostensibly to tidy, but really to act as company. These acts of charity were undertaken not with the kind of glad and cheerful heart that would have made them glow in Alice’s own eyes, but with the sense of a heavy duty performed joylessly, and this deprived her even of that sense of wellbeing which comes from the knowledge of being virtuous.
Bizarrely it was Kitty who helped to get Alice the job at Enderby’s. Secretly fearing that Alice would leave her forever to go and pursue her vile zoophylliac interests in some shamingly out-of-the-way place, Kitty had roused herself, called all of her few surviving acquaintances, pulled whatever strings remained in reach, and arranged a lunch with a reasonably senior Enderby’s panjandrum. Alice well remembered the two hours of preparation (not including hair). Her attempts to help were met with screeches, and agonising nips from the long red talons. Kitty eventually emerged looking stretched and gaunt and frightening. Alice suspected that the combination of pearls and diamonds (Kitty still had some very old and, taken individually, rather beautiful jewellery) might have been wrong, but she knew better than to say anything.
The Enderby’s man was none other than Parry Brooksbank, a younger son of impeccable manners but limited intelligence, who existed principally for this sort of task. He had no idea of quite what he was in for when he found himself steered towards a lunch with ‘Old Crawley’s daughter, Kitty’ by one of his colleagues. He’d never heard of Old Crawley, and assumed the daughter was another more or less marriageable girl dangled before him as part of some Machiavellian plot by the Family, who seemed incapable of understanding that he was utterly, immovably and happily confirmed.
He was initially pleased to see the very definitely unmarriageable Kitty. ‘P-post p-post-menopausal, I’d have s-said,’ as he put it, a little unfairly, to his partner, Seamus. ‘Looked like Mrs Simpson after a night on the ch-cherry brandy.’
Brooksbank had begun affecting a stammer as a teenager in an attempt to appear more interesting. It was now more or less second nature, although he occasionally forgot which consonants he was supposed to have trouble with.
‘Marge?’
‘No, dear b-boy, the other Mrs Simpson.’
To Kitty herself he was, of course, the soul of charm. Entertaining wealthy eccentrics was just part of the job, and one (perhaps the only one) at which he excelled. He paid close, almost minute-taking, attention to the rambling anecdotes about people of whom he had never or only dimly heard. Most of the stories culminated in Kitty’s triumph over some enemy: a rival hostess or impertinent tradesman. He noted with little interest that all of her stories took place in the ancient or very recent past, with nothing filling the middle distance, and put it down to some sub-variant of senile dementia. However, once Brooksbank had established that Kitty was neither a potential threat to his mental or domestic equilibrium, nor, despite appearances, amusingly mad, his mind began to drift, helped along by the second bottle of surprisingly good Argentinian red (even Claridges were looking Westward now). Seamus, so broad, and yet so sweet; what a find he’d been. Really must go back to …
And then, with a start, accompanied by a quite-possibly audible click made by some intricately wrought cartilaginous structure at the back of his nose, Brooksbank realised, an hour into the lunch, that Kitty had reached The Point.
‘… and her degree was of the first class, you know, the only one they gave out that year. But after all I’ve told you about our history, you’ll admit that she shouldn’t be looking at molluscs and woodlice?’
Brooksbank, driving away other visions entirely, wondered what it might have been about the girl’s background that made such investigations inappropriate. Something to do with gardening, perhaps?
‘No, I quite see. Fearful creatures. Do terrible things to one’s radishes and lettuces.’
‘I’m so pleased you understand,’ said Kitty, looking at him as if he’d just started to caress his own nipples. ‘So you’ll be able to arrange it then?’
Arrange it? What could the ridiculous old hag be talking about?
‘Oh, I expect I’ll ah um,’ he said, playing for time as he scrolled through his longish list of meaningless and/or ambiguous platitudes. He was looking for one that would work something like: well, you could take it to mean yes, but equally, I could explain it back to you and if necessary the courts, at some stage in the future as, in no way, not at all, you must be joking, forget about it, couldn’t possibly do that kind of thing, against all the rules, more than my job’s worth. What came out was, ‘y-yes, yes, of course.’
‘Oh good! When will the interview be – I know it’s a formality you have to go through …’
‘You didn’t cave in did you, Parry?’ said Seamus that night as they lay together on the sofa watching Coronation Street.
‘Well,’ he replied, ‘as it happens there is a small recruitment exercise under way …’
‘You old softie.’
‘Anything for an easy life. P-pass the Maltesers.’
From Kitty’s perspective the lunch had been a triumph. The rather handsome, silver-haired fellow had obviously adored her.
‘You should have seen the far-away look in his eyes,’ she said to a not-really-listening Alice, whose eyes had something of the same character. ‘Nice to know I can still bedazzle. You know, before I was married …’
She was not in the least surprised when the letter came inviting Alice in for an ‘informal chat’. Alice, on the other hand, was astounded. She had only agreed to the idea on the assumption that Kitty’s project was doomed to failure. She wanted to do research in some aspect of island biogeography and had applied to Sheffield and Southampton, proposing to launch herself into field trips to the islands of Mauritius and Reunion, exquisitely isolated in the Indian Ocean. Why would she want to work in a silly office in London, selling old things to very rich people? There was a world of seething, replicating life out there to be studied, catalogued and understood. If it wasn’t her father’s work, it was at least work that he would comprehend and respect. What would he make of her dusting down ornate picture frames, or whatever else happened in a place like Enderby’s?
It was only when the issue of the great auk arose that Alice began to think that she might actually want the job and, more importantly, when the job began to think that it might want Alice.
‘What do you make of this?’
The man, tall and craning and unhappily bald (a baldness for which he tried vainly to compensate with one of the last heterosexual moustaches in London outside of the police and fire services), held out a large book open at a picture of an ungainly black and white bird, like a penguin painted by someone relying on second-hand witness accounts.
Alice, who had been bored by the questions about her experience and qualifications, almost leapt in the air.
‘It’s an auk, the great auk! It’s so sad.’
The panel members exchanged a variety of smiles, raised eyebrows and ear-wiggles.
‘Well it is, actually,’ said the moustache. ‘Very good. But we’re more interested in what you make of the plate, and the book, if you take my meaning, in which it appears. Could you give us your impressions as to value, for example?’
This was an extraordinary piece of luck, although whether ultimately good or bad Alice would never be able to say. A request for practical information about almost any other book would have left Alice perplexed. She loved books – not just the scientific works in which she lived, but also the wider humanist canon that she had absorbed (a little erratically) through her father. But books as objects didn’t much interest her, beyond a vague desire, which she recognised as feminine weakness, to arrange them according to colour rather than subject matter or author.
The great auk, however, did interest her. It was the world’s unluckiest animal. It had the misfortune, first of all, to taste (to half-starved codfishermen battered by arctic storms) good. Its eggs were large and delicious. You could squeeze a useful, if smelly, oil from its flesh. It lived in places taxing, but not impossible, to reach. It had a trusting and gentle demeanour, making it simple to harvest. It had once nested in millions, but the cliffs and islands where it waddled were gradually stripped by hardy sea folk (and later scientific egg collectors, eager to bag an auk shell before the creature went the way of the dodo) until the very last survivors clustered together on one rocky islet off the coast of Iceland. Which happened to be a volcano. Which happened to blow up. Alice came across the story in her research on island biodiversity, and had to leave the library to go for a good cry in the park.
The question had been a trick one, contravening one of the unwritten rules of interviewing. But then that was Colin Oakley, who liked to show his masters how ruthless he could be in their cause. The plate was a reproduction of an old watercolour of the auk, but the book was relatively new. New, but printed privately as a limited edition. Would Alice fall into the trap of overestimating the value based on a false assumption of age? Or would she take it to be a worthless modern work, of some interest, perhaps, to auk-enthusiasts, but none at all to book collectors? Well neither, as it turned out. She had read an article in a Sunday newspaper about the author, and his lonely, monomaniacal interest in the auk. She knew that the book was a modern limited edition. She knew its approximate value. She made the right sort of cautious noises about checking just how limited the edition was, and having to scan the internet for any information on recent sales, but when pressed for a number, hit happily on exactly the figure the panel had before them.
She then realised that a pun had been staring her in the face for a while without her fully noticing.
‘Of course,’ she said, a little shy smile making her look as pretty as she ever would, which was really quite pretty, ‘we’d have to wait to see what it actually reached at … auk-shun.’
There was a worrying moment or two, in which Alice seriously contemplated simply walking out, before the panel decided to laugh, but once underway the general chortle acquired enough momentum to last for a good ten seconds.
‘It’d be handy having a scientist around. You know, for facts and suchlike.’
The panel were having a final round-up.
‘Mmm, she certainly knew her stuff when it came to auks.’
‘And seemed to have a reasonable sense of humour.’
‘For a scientist.’
‘Not bad-looking either.’
‘For a scientist.’
‘And of course there’s Old Crawley to think about.’
‘Crawley, of course.’
‘Ah yes, good Old Crawley.’
So Alice got the job, despite the fact that none of the panel members ever had a clear idea of who or what Old Crawley might have been.
Alice approached the body that had agreed to fund her research. She half wanted them to say that no, they really couldn’t defer her award, and who did she think she was anyway, even to ask. But in the event they were horribly decent and agreed that her funding was available for any time over the next year, after which she would have to reapply. It made her think of the tutor who’d first suggested that she stay in research. ‘They always like to have a girlie or two on their books,’ she’d said with minimal bitterness. ‘Makes it look like they have a decent equal opps policy.’
So Alice told herself that she could do the job for a year, save some money, have some fun, and then carry on with her research. After all, she was only twenty-four. Mauritius wasn’t going anywhere. And just how many species of snail could go extinct in a mere twelve months?
The plan, had it not been for the intercession of the Dead Boy, might well have worked out. As it was, everything changed when Alice entered her dreamtime.
Why her? Why then? Why the Dead Boy? The questions drifted through her mind but never pressed her to answer, never forced the issue. If someone had taken her face in their hands with gentle pressure and implored her to say what it was about her, Alice Duclos, that had made her vulnerable to this obsession, then she might have tried to say something about her father, something about the rotten, death-filled, loveless cavity where he had been, that marked his loss. She might have said something about the bitter wilderness, the tedium, the endless ache of her life with Kitty. She might have said those things, or she might only have pulled away, her eyes empty.
Whatever it was, Alice’s plans dried and shrivelled and blew away, and she stayed at Enderby’s. It certainly wasn’t that she’d fallen in love with her job; it was more that her life came to a kind of a stop when she saw the Dead Boy; everything became frozen, petrified. She didn’t want change; she most emphatically didn’t want Sheffield. What she wanted was to think about her boy, to imagine his life, to invent a life together with him. Working at Enderby’s was a link to the Dead Boy, because that’s where she was when she found him, but it also left her with the time to live in her imaginary world. She wasn’t stretched or tested. Her colleagues presented no real difficulties or challenges, and she found that she could function perfectly well with only a fraction of her consciousness above the surface, in the waking, office world.
The main problem had been Andrew. At some point during the two months of innocence before things changed, she had gradually become aware that he might like her, although she never fully admitted it to herself. And he was nice. Well, no, not nice, but funny and interesting. They’d even had a sort of a date.
‘I hate parks,’ Andrew said one afternoon. Alice had brought him a mug of tea, as it was her turn. They had a little running joke about how terrible her tea was – too milky, and not brewed for long enough. ‘You’ve got to shqueeze the bag,’ he’d say in a comical version of his northern accent, and she’d pretend to get huffy about his ingratitude.
‘What’s wrong with parks? I don’t think I could survive in London without them. It’s the only way to escape the clamour and rush.’
‘Yeah, well, that’s the cliché, but it’s just a thing that people say without meaning it, or thinking about it at all. Parks are full of weirdos, and people doing t’ai chi, and old codgers with nowhere to go, and dogs, and pigeons with gammy legs, and people snogging as if nobody can see them. The ground’s always wet, and there’re trees and shrubbery and stuff all over the place. When did anyone ever have a decent conversation in the park? No, parks are for losers. There’s that Larkin poem, you know, about turning over your failures by some bed of lobelias.’
Alice was laughing.
‘Have you ever actually been to a park?’
‘Yeah, loads.’
‘Which ones?’
‘You know, just parks. The regent thing. And that other one, the green one. No, not really. I told you, I don’t like them, I prefer to get drunk sitting down in the corner of a pub, not standing up with a can of Special Brew, and a gang of old men with bandaged heads, and piss stains down the front of their trousers.’
‘There’s a beautiful one that I used to go to when I was young. We used to bunk off from PE lessons and sit in the grass and eat ice cream. It saved me, in a way, because I used to live in the country when I was very little, and London was … difficult. I still go there sometimes. I think even you’d like it. It has an aviary, and an enclosure with wallabies, and an old-fashioned bandstand. It’s not really a Special Brew kind of park. More cream tea.’
Now Andrew was laughing, but his eyes had narrowed. He’d suddenly realised that this was the fabled shot-to-nothing, the freebie, the chance to ask Alice out without actually seeming to ask her out. No declaration of intent was needed, no fear of rejection, no embarrassment at all. This could all be passed off as an innocent trip to the park. A mere matter of friendship. But still, how to ask her. Words. What happened to them when you needed them? And anyway, it wasn’t true that there was nothing to lose. What if she didn’t even want to be friends? Wasn’t that worse than not wanting to go out with him? (On balance, he decided that it wasn’t worse, but only by between six and eleven per cent, depending on other variables.)
‘Wallabies,’ he said, after a few moments of computation. ‘You’re winding me up. No? Well, if you say so. I’ve always liked the idea of wallabies. Little kangaroos. Charming fellows. Mmmm. It is, you know, on this plane of existence, isn’t it?’
Alice already had a reputation for being a little dreamy, which Andrew used occasionally to tease her with, staying, he hoped, on the right side of being an arse.
‘Yes, Golders Hill Park. It’s a sort of offshoot of Hampstead Heath. But without the men having sex with each other in the bushes.’
‘Why don’t you show me round it? You know, the wallabies and the cream teas?’
With sublime ease the date was arranged for the next day, Saturday. Andrew’s pleasure at this was dulled after he became aware that the divine and/or profane Ophelia had been listening to the conversation. Although he didn’t have the nerve to look directly at her, he could easily picture the aspect of disdain into which her exquisite features so easily fell. For a moment his mind projected Ophelia’s contemptuous sneer onto Alice’s open and innocent face, where it curled like an obscene wound. The vision made him hate Ophelia, but he would still have given a month’s salary for the chance to pin her down on an unmade bed and …
‘I’ll meet you by the flamingos,’ said Alice.
And it was that lunchtime, Friday 14th April, that she found the Dead Boy.
Andrew couldn’t put his finger on what had changed, but it was clear that things were different as soon as he saw her. He would have noticed the difference if he hadn’t had meetings on the Friday afternoon, and he deliberately spent the time in between appointments away from his desk, just in case Alice should change her mind. After all, that’s what girls did, sometimes, didn’t they?
He’d been watching the flamingos for about ten minutes, thinking what ugly organisms they were, close up, with their birth-defect, upside-downy faces, and trying to work out why they would want to stand on one leg. Something to do with heat conservation? Showing off to lady flamingos? Just because they could? And then Alice appeared, wordlessly. Her eyes wouldn’t meet his, which wasn’t like her at all, and she was dressed in something beyond her usual endearing simplicity in a combination of heavy top and light skirt and idiot-grade, lumpen brown shoes.
‘Alice, hello,’ he said. ‘Lucky you got here. The flamingos were starting to get bored with my conversation. And to be honest even I can only take so much small talk about whatchacallit, plankton.’
There was a profoundly disconcerting pause before Alice said, ‘I’m sorry.’ Andrew couldn’t think what she was apologising for, but it seemed a strange sort of greeting. The park was, as Alice had said, very pretty. There really were wallabies, or one at least, accompanied by what Alice said without looking was a capybara, a big brown thing like a guinea pig on steroids. There was a bandstand with a large sign warning people to stay away. Although it was a chilly April morning, the sun shone in its weak-willed way, and it ought to have been fun.
But for Alice.
Andrew became increasingly frantic in his attempts to break through her … her what exactly? Reserve? No, she’d never been reserved, and that wasn’t it now. Veneer? God no. A cloud. For some reason Andrew remembered the derivation of ‘glamour’ which was originally a Scots word for an enveloping, obscuring cloud or mist, conjured up by a spell. So that was it: here in her mad-auntie clothes, Alice had acquired a glamour. Having a word for it didn’t help. His capering produced one brief smile, one moment of flickering recognition in her eyes. They were walking slowly around the aviary when Andrew was confronted by a tastelessly plumed, gangly bird, about a yard high, with a frill of what looked like 1960s eye make-up around its head.
‘What’s that one called?’ he asked.
‘It’s a crane.’
‘A crane! Amazing. It doesn’t look strong enough.’
There was a pause before Alice registered what he’d said.
‘Strong enough?’
‘You know, to do all that lifting, for buildings and things.’
She crystallised for a second, before deliquescing back into some unreachable place, behind the cloud, behind the glamorous cloud.
The last thing Alice said to him as they parted was, ‘I’m sorry.’
THREE (#ulink_50c4e357-3b93-59a8-8a14-a8f12ed21ba1)
The Death of a Boy (#ulink_50c4e357-3b93-59a8-8a14-a8f12ed21ba1)
Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lay open to the sky. From up here she could see the whole of the great city stretching away from her on every side: glass pyramids, skyscrapers in gleaming, beaten bronze and bright chromium, towers of intricate wrought iron, ecstatic arcs of light, bridging gulfs and chasms. And lower down, miles below her, acre after acre of teeming tenements rich, like a coral reef, with life, blooming and billowing in the clear currents of air. Lower still, she could just make out the network of placid brown canals, with their longboats, and oared Venetian barges, crusted with gold and sugar icing, laden with aromatic cargoes of spice and opium. Blue airships, borne on plumes of white canvas, sailed serenely above and between the towers, and she could see the children waving from the small windows, giddy and hectic with the thrill of flight. From here there was no noise, none of the roar and throb of the city, just the sighing of the cirrus clouds and the blood murmuring in her ears.
But this was too high: she couldn’t see what she wanted to see. Up here she was blinded by all the beauty and the splendour. She closed her eyes and thought herself closer to the ground, closer to the heart of things. She felt for the place, gently, timidly, like a tongue feeling for a point of tenderness. She opened her eyes into a layer of cloud. But no, not cloud: thick, choking smog, dirty with flakes of ash and busy particles of soot. She thought herself lower. Noises reached her: a harlot’s curse, the screams of a newborn baby, a hammering of iron upon iron.
And further down she plunged, hoping to drown the cries of the wretched with the rush of wind in her face. She opened her eyes again. Here was the street she had walked down so many times. She saw the cafés spilling tables out onto pavements, desperate to make the most of the spring sunshine; she saw the mannequins in the windows of French Connection, Hobbs, Gap, all eager for summer, in light dresses and swimwear. Queues formed at the cashpoints, each one headed by a bewildered old lady, randomly pressing buttons.
She hovered just below the roofs, close enough to feel the noise of the traffic: the buses and taxis and cars; close enough to hear the clip of heels, the jingle of change; close enough to see the faces, blank or anxious, smiling, wincing, cursing, laughing, of people pushing their way to the cafés and shops, all desperate to do what must be done this lunchtime. From here she could see directly into the windows of the rooms above the shops, but they stared blankly back, refusing to give up their secrets.
She didn’t have to wait long before she saw him, moving like a dream of beauty through the world of things. Instantly, the street and the other people lost their vibrancy, became muted and grey. He was dressed in a long black coat, which swept behind him as if he were walking into a strong breeze. Beneath the coat she could see a white shirt, which flickered, becoming now soft swan’s down and now shimmering chain-mail. The breeze which blew back his coat also caught thick strands of his long hair. But Alice made the wind stop: the image was false, too clearly derived from advertising or shallow girlish fantasies.
The boy’s slow, long strides took him steadily towards the crossing. The people before him dissolved as he passed, or melted into the pavement: he was the only real, solid thing in this world. And look, there, on this side of the road, Alice coming. So innocent in her dreaming: nothing there to cloud her thoughts or crush her will. She’s thinking about some silliness of Andrew’s (was it the time he’d tampered with the auto-correct function on Clerihew’s word-processor, so that whenever he typed ‘Cedric Clerihew’ at the end of a memo or letter, what came out was ‘Cedric King of the Visigoths, Emperor of all the Byzantines, and Lord of the High Seas Clerihew’? – the watching Alice smiled even now). Or perhaps she’s planning a mollusc hunt on faraway Mauritius. How easy the world had been then, how infinite in wonder and hope and opportunity.
The innocent Alice paused at the crossing, and the watching Alice looked for her boy.
When she replayed the incident, as she so often did, she could never quite see clearly enough to understand what had happened, why the car hadn’t stopped, why he hadn’t seen it approach. But there he was now, pellucid in the shade. This time she would learn the truth. And before she, the waiting Alice, had seen him, he had looked at her, paused for a moment, and then stepped out into the road.
The car must have come from his right. Alice looked, and there she saw it. Metallic blue; something nondescript; a badge she did not recognise. There was a thick crusting of grime around the butterfly pattern of the wipers. And coming too fast. The boy again. He was still looking at her, confident on the crossing. But now he sensed that something was wrong. He was alone. Where were the others? Just as Alice, the waiting Alice, saw him for the first time, registered his presence, his beauty, he turned away from her to the car. The watching Alice peered down through the screen to the driver: a young woman, blonde, smart, untroubled, looking ahead. Looking but not seeing. But seeing now. Seeing him. Her body tensed and she stamped down on the brake. Tyres screeching. The boy absorbed the car, the truth of the car, and turned slowly – so slowly she realised there must be some distortion in her perception – back towards Alice. And he smiled.
What could that smile have meant? The waiting Alice wondered; the watching Alice wondered; and later the Alice who replayed the visions of the waiting Alice and the watching Alice wondered. Was it some reckless, adolescent bravado – a determination to show no fear in the eyes of the world? Was it a smile of sadness for the world that he was leaving? Was it a smile of love for Alice, a love engendered in that moment of desire and death? All seemed to carry something of the truth, but none to fully contain it. There was something else. Something darker. Something in the boy that said – but how could it be? – that said yes, yes.
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