“Oh, Odette, I’m really pleased. You’ve been waiting so long for this.”
“I haven’t really. I mean, been waiting. That implies I was just hanging round, twiddling my thumbs like a desperate spinster until Mr. Right showed up. That’s not me; that’s the opposite of me. It’s only been the past couple of months that . . . well, you know, biological clocks and all that. Or maybe just boredom. There’s got to be more to life than spreadsheets and ER. I’d forgotten about how exciting it—you know, sex—can be, how it takes your mind off all the everyday crap. I so don’t care if the yogurt’s past its sell-by date, or if Starbucks has messed up my morning latte, or if my mum’s said something stupid. It’s wonderful. But I’d also forgotten about the fear.”
“The fear?” Alice spoke as though she knew something about fear.
“Yes. You know, the losing-them fear. I was fine before without him, but now . . . well, it’d be awful to have to go back to . . . to what I did—had—before.”
Alice felt little electric jolts whenever something Odette said connected with her own feelings. Electric jolts separated by an ugly void. Alice knew she was in danger of failing in friendship, failing to see the other as anything but an echo chamber for her own obsessions. It was partly her horror and revulsion at this failure that had driven Alice further toward reclusivity: better, surely, to inch herself out of the world of human love and friendship than to stand damned for her emotional autism? But it was different with Odette. At some level she realized Odette’s declaration was part of an attempt to reach out to her, an invitation to join in with a revelation of her own. And how she wanted to share. She looked at Odette’s sensible, boyish, pretty face and succumbed to a sudden surge of love, which subsided to leave the tips of her fingers thrumming gently.
“Odette, you’re such a wonderful person. Why should this boy—”
“Matt.”
“—this boy Matt ever want to leave you? You’re the cleverest, sensiblest, prettiest person I know.” The prettiest may not have been strictly correct, but it had, for Alice, an emotional truth.
“That’s incredibly sweet of you, Alice. But the trouble is, no man ever stayed with a woman because she was sensible or clever—”
“You’re leaving out pretty.”
Odette brushed it away. “Whatever. Somehow I feel he’s not really committed to me. That makes it sound as though I want—well, all I mean is, I can’t help feeling he just sees me as a bit of a fling, a way of keeping his hand in until something or someone else comes along. There. Oh, God, I sound like a typical female whiner. I’ll be writing to Cosmo next.”
Alice laughed. “Don’t worry, being in love . . . oh, I didn’t mean to assume that you love him, I just meant—”
“It’s all right, go on; we’ll use love as a general term covering all emotional, romantic, or sexual feelings directed toward another person. Scientific enough for you?”
“Quite scientific enough. Everyone’s allowed to go a bit mad when they’re in love. I know . . . I know that I have.”
There it was. She’d said it. They both knew that once the first words had been spoken, the whole story would inevitably emerge. But Odette was anxious not to ruin things by forcing the issue.
She waited for a few seconds to see if anything would emerge, and when it didn’t she said, “So what do you think I should do?”
“You mean to . . . what? Help things along a little?”
“Yes, I think that’s what I mean.”
Alice’s eyes came alive. She was delighted to have been asked for her advice, especially by Odette, to whom she had always ever so slightly looked up.
“Perhaps you don’t have to do anything. Perhaps you’re already doing exactly what you should be doing: just being you.”
“I know that’s sensible. It’s exactly what I’d say to you—to someone else in the same situation. But you must trust me; it won’t work here. Something needs to be injected, some—I don’t know—glamour or something. Something urgent . . . special . . . magical.”
“Heavens, Odette,” said Alice, laughing again, “you’ve so come to the wrong person for advice about that sort of thing. I know even less, I mean less than you, about love and boys and things.”
“But I think you know about magic.”
They both paused and looked at each other, glasses symmetrically raised at chin height. Then Alice had an inspiration.
“Oh, if it’s magic you want, why not take him to Venice?”
“Venice? I’ve never been. Isn’t it a huge cliché?”
“Well I’ve only been once, but it’s just so miraculously beautiful, treated as an object. And I don’t even mean the galleries, although you shouldn’t miss the Accademia. I went with school. The canals were smelly, and horrid men pinched your bottom and leered, but nothing could take away from the wonder of it. If it’s romance and magic you want, Venice has to be the place.”
“Well, it’s certainly an idea. What else am I supposed to spend my bonus on? It may just be that you’re a genius, Alice Duclos. You must know more about love than you claim.”
Alice drained her glass and looked down at the polished wooden table.
“Odette, when you asked the other day if I was okay, if anything was wrong, I should have told you about the . . . thing that happened.”
“Alice, darling, you know you don’t have to tell me anything you don’t want to. You don’t owe me a confidence because I told you about Matt.”
“I know. It isn’t that. I think I do want to tell you. I can’t talk to Mummy about it. Not yet. Probably not ever. And there’s nobody else. The thing is, I’m in love with a Dead Boy. I saw him killed. He was knocked down close to the office. We looked at each other just before the car hit him. He smiled and closed his eyes. It sounds insane, but I know he loved me in those moments before he died. His face was so peaceful, so beautiful. Odette, I can’t ever forget him. Every night I dream about him. Whenever I close my eyes, he’s there. I know him better than I know any living person. He’s in me like blood.”
The noise and even the light from the bar were instantly shut out. The table became a tiny universe, with just the two of them centered there. Odette tried hard to keep the shock from showing in her face. This explained everything. Was Alice genuinely mad after all? This kind of obsession was far beyond her experience, her understanding, but Alice seemed to be able to function perfectly well, apart from the distance, the growing isolation. And wasn’t her love for this Dead Boy just an extreme form of the kind of intoxication they all felt when in love? Oh, God, what to do, what to say? For Alice’s sake she must be sensible, she must be practical.
“Did you ever try to find out who he was?”
“Try—? No. How could I? Why should I?”
“Perhaps it might help.” What Odette meant was, perhaps it might help to get him out of your system. It wasn’t much, but it was something.
Alice’s thoughts were on a different track. Help, perhaps, to know him more. Help to deepen and strengthen her love.
“But I don’t know how to find things out about people, about people who—”
“I don’t think it’s very hard. I have a friend—an acquaintance, really—a journalist. I’m sure she could find out. It’s the sort of thing they do. When and where did he . . . where was the accident?”
Alice told her unhesitatingly. The date, the time, the place: all were cauterized in her memory.
And so it was agreed that Odette would ask her journalist to find out what she could about the Dead Boy. Alice felt a curious and not unpleasant numbness, the sort of vagueness she felt after an exam but before the results came out. It carried her through the next two weeks, until Odette called her.
Kitty answered the phone and called out a simple, brutal “You!” before leaving the phone dangling in the hall.
“He was a refugee from Bosnia. He came in 1991 as a fifteen-year-old, so he was twenty-four. There’s an address and phone number. I don’t know how Sarah
managed to get that; boy, she’s good.”
Alice wrote everything down in her red-velvet address book.
“Thank you, Odette. This . . . matters a lot to me.”
“What will you do?”
“I don’t know. What did you do about Venice?”
“Venice? Well, I’ve booked it! It was such a great idea. I’d love to talk tactics with you.”
But before they had the chance to speak, Kitty called out, “Alice, you’ve been gossiping for long enough. I am expecting a very important call.” Alice knew she wasn’t, or at least that the expectation was false. But it was futile to argue.
“Yes, tactics. We’ll talk tactics.”
CHAPTER FIVE
The Life and Times of
Andrew Heathley
ANDREW WAS SITTING with his closest friend, Leo Nye, in the White Lion of Mortimer, a public house in North London equally inconvenient for both of them but possessed of certain pleasant associations and, crucially, lacking a jukebox. The principal pleasant association was Zoë, a barmaid who’d worked there for one golden summer two years previously and who was, they had both instantly decided, the most beautiful girl in London. Zoë had gone, returning to a course in Media Studies at Manchester University, but she had left behind her a sweet white radiance that lifted the grimy old pub into a sort of Parthenon in their eyes.
Leo had a face made for swashbuckling villainy, long and slightly twisted, as if flinching from the light slap of a woman’s gloved hand. His hair, black and thick, stood proudly on his head like the bristles on a goaded boar. He wore a black turtleneck sweater, recklessly challenging all comers to fuck off and read Being and Nothingness before they thought to interrupt his flow. Both Leo and Andrew were nursing pints of soapy brown fluid, mumbled complaints against which took up approximately one third of their conversation.
At the moment, however, the object of their discourse was the new quiz machine, installed by the brewery in an unwelcome attempt to move with the times. A large figure was hunched over the glowing screen, which was clearly visible to both of them. Leo was in full flow, his long face oscillating between extreme animation and a sort of laminated inertia. His voice, when not deliberately sinister or mocking or contorted with anger, had a surprising depth and beauty.
“It’s all to do with the compartmentalization of knowledge. You see that fop”—one of Leo’s commoner terms of abuse, not intended to suggest dandyism or effeminacy, merely irrelevance—“just got the right date for the Battle of Waterloo. He had the choice of 1066, 1745, 1815, and 1939. He’s probably played that thing a thousand times, and he’s tried all the other options, and he knows that the right answer, the answer that lets him carry on is 1815.”
“So what?” Andrew was usually up for this sort of thing, but tonight his mind was occupied with other matters.
“So what? So what? Don’t you see that 1815, one of the most crucial years in European—no, fuck it, in world—history has become nothing more than the answer to the question, What year was the Battle of Waterloo? All the complex historical reality, the treaties, the lives, the pain, the power—it’s all gone. All that’s left is the simple question and the simple answer.”
“So what?”
Leo paused for a megalithic second. He would have preferred to rant on for another half an hour, but friendship seemed to require something else.
“Look, just what the fuck is the matter with you?”
“Me? Nothing, I’m just not in the mood to play tutorials. Save it for your students.”
“Ah, I see. It’s chick-related. Is it still the weird girl in the office?”
“What weird girl? There isn’t a weird girl.”
“You know who I mean, the one you had the date with, the one with the eyes?”
Leo accompanied this question with a wiggling two-fingered gesture in front of his face, as if to suggest strange mystical powers in the organs under consideration.
Andrew, of course, knew exactly who Leo was talking about. He knew because he’d been talking about her himself for the best part of eight months.
“It wasn’t a date, it was a disaster. And I wouldn’t call her weird. She’s just a bit . . .”
“Mad?”
“Mad? Maybe, a bit.”
“Madness-of-King-George mad?”
“God, no, not madness-of-King-George mad.”
“How boring. So you mean mad in the usual madwoman-mad way. The not-getting-your-jokes kind of way, and suddenly saying out of the blue, Why don’t we ever go to Venice? kind of way, and thinking that whenever-you-make-a-general-point-in-an-argument-it’s-somehow-directed-at-them kind of way.”
“No, no, and no. She’s not mad like that. In fact, the opposite. We used to have quite a laugh together, in the early days. Maybe I don’t mean mad at all. At least not in any of those ways. Maybe I just mean . . . strange.”
“Ah, strange-but-interesting mad. The most dangerous sort. They suck you in, and they can appear enchanting to begin with, and sexy as anything, but in the end the mad bit always breaks through and then they come at you with a hammer or cut your pajamas up with scissors.”
“No, no, Alice isn’t like that. I can’t really see her with a hammer. I shouldn’t have said mad at all or strange. Scratch mad and strange. It’s more that when she’s there, she somehow isn’t really there. No, I mean the other way round—it’s we who aren’t really there, or we’re sort of semitransparent and she sees through us to the things that are really there.”
“So far so Neoplatonic. You’ll be giving us the parable of the cave next.”
“And she sort of says stuff, stuff that should make you laugh in her face, but you can’t, because she’s got some kind of . . .”
Leo did his two-fingered eye-wiggling thing again, accompanied this time by a head wobble.
“I’m not really getting it across, am I? I’ll give you a for-instance. You know how she deals with all the science and nature stuff at work?”
“I think you might have mentioned it, like about a million times.”
“Well, we’ve got a fucking massive—and I mean massive—job on. You’ve heard of John James Audubon?”
“Yeah, I think so. Some kind of birdwatcher fellow.”
“Yes, but also a pretty good artist. Anyway, there’s a reclusive aristo down in the Quantocks with a copy of Audubon’s Birds of America, which is, you know, the most expensive book in the world. We’re talking five million quid here. Apparently he wants to sell, and if we can get it, it might just be enough to stop the Americans from sacking us all. So we’re heavily into the research. As I said, it’s Alice’s area, but I’m involved as well, because she’s still pretty junior and she sort of comes under me.”
Here Leo contemplated one of his famous leers, complete with the sound of moist membranous flesh plapping and slithering, but decided this was not the time.
“We’re looking at some repros of the plates, which are about the size of a duvet. A few of the others have gathered round, because they know how hot the whole thing is. We’re looking at something called the Carolina parrot, but Alice says it’s actually a lorikeet. And, you know, although it’s not my period or subject matter, I could see it wasn’t bad—plenty of energy and panache in the execution, and certainly a notch up from the Lewis Birds of Great Britain and Ireland.
“Mmmnyaah,” said Leo, drawing deeply on a phantom briar pipe.
“Okay, I’ll get on with it. But then Alice says—and believe me it was one of those times when you didn’t know if it was going to end in us all laughing till our tonsils fell out or in a group hug and years of counseling—she says, ‘You know why they’re so alive, don’t you, the Audubon plates?’ And I thought she was going to talk about the vibrancy of the watercolors or the grace of the line or whatever, but she says, ‘It’s because Audubon painted them in death. He shot the birds and had them stuffed and mounted’ ”—At this point Leo couldn’t stop himself, and about two-sevenths of a leer emerged, along with a
solitary plap, but Andrew was too worked up to notice—“ ‘and that’s why they are so intense, so perfect, so alive. You see, it’s only because they were dead that they could be authentically, mesmerizingly, alive.’ Nobody knew what to do, so everyone drifted off, leaving just the two of us. Thank Christ Ophelia waved her hair around, or God knows what I’d have done.”
“You know, I really think we are talking madness-of-King-George mad after all,” said Leo, because he knew it was expected of him. And then, because it was time, “Another pint of Old Shagpiss? Or shall we try the guest ale, which this week, according to the board, is the famous old Bodkin and Feltcher’s Elephant Jism, at nine point seven percent proof?”
The eight months that had passed since Alice had joined Enderby’s had been uncomfortably intense ones for Andrew. His brief account of how he came to be in quite so unsuitable (from his own perspective and background) a place as Enderby’s was accurate, as far as it went, but missed out the various psychodramas, failures, and reversals that led up to it. Like Alice he was an only child, but there the resemblance ended. He was brought up in a small town in Nottinghamshire, where his father was a coal miner until the pit closed, whereupon he opened a shop selling fishing tackle and buckets of maggots, which used up all his severance without supplying any kind of adequate income.
Like most miners, Andrew’s dad had a reverence for learning and watched proudly as his son sailed through every exam he ever sat and became the first boy from the town to go to Oxford. School had been easy for Andrew, and not just because he was the cleverest boy in his or any other year—that, on its own, could have been a fast track to getting his face punched on a more or less daily basis. No, what made Andrew’s life a joy was being a soccer prodigy, as sporting prowess was the only sure way for a brainy kid to escape the regulation beatings.
It was in the concrete locker room at the local soccer field that he lost his virginity to an older (and considerably larger) girl called Jean, who worked behind the counter in the bakery. He wasn’t entirely sure he had lost his virginity, but she seemed confident enough and forever after let him have a free sausage roll whenever his mum sent him in for a loaf. In any case, it at least gave him a start and put him a notch above most of the other boys when he went, late that September, to college.
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