Alice thought very hard about what they might be. Something to do with scholarship . . . preserving the works for posterity . . . saving Enderby’s from bankruptcy.
“Really? Fine. Why don’t you come down here and tell me about them.”
Alice was startled. What did Lynden mean? There didn’t seem to be anything she couldn’t tell him over the phone. But, innocent though she was, she did have an inkling, and it frightened her.
“I’ll have to see if . . . when Andrew and I can make the trip.”
“What do we need him for? I could see that you were the expert.”
“Well, technically he is my superior.” She didn’t at all mean for the technically to come out as officially, but not in reality, but she knew it did.
Before she could think of how to put things right, Lynden had continued. “Then we shouldn’t waste his valuable time. When can you come?”
Without thinking, Alice said, “Tomorrow.”
“WHAT DOES THE fucker want? What does the fucker want?” Andrew had been repeating the phrase for about half an hour, trying out different stresses. “What does the fucker want?”
“Andrew, I don’t know. All I know is he says he’s changed his mind about the sale. I think if I go there I can change it back again.”
“Oakley thinks you should go. He seemed pretty impressed that Lynden wanted you. Makes me look like a bozo, though.”
Alice was squirming. This was a very awkward situation. She didn’t want to tell Andrew that Lynden had seen her as the expert. Nor did she want to tell him that he might be . . . interested in her in some less than professional capacity. Apart from anything else, she might be wrong and would look a vain and arrogant fool if it transpired that Lynden was only pursuing her for her knowledge. It was the kind of thing Ophelia would think, although in her case the interest could only be in her beauty.
At the thought of Ophelia, Alice looked over to her desk. Inevitably she was watching, slyly. In repose, her lips would always draw back a few millimeters to reveal the tips of her teeth, which gave a wholly inaccurate impression that she was about to smile, and which had led at least three of the boys around the office—admittedly when new and inexperienced—to believe they might have a chance if they asked her out. How quickly she had educated them as to the depth of their folly and presumption. One, a harmless, freckle-faced youth from the mail room, whose thin shirts always managed to be both loose at the collar and short in the sleeve, was subjected to a tirade so withering that he simply never came to work again.
Now Alice read into her look not only the expected casual malice but also something more. Ophelia had never attempted to hide the fact that she saw her “career” at Enderby’s as simply a stepping-stone to the right sort of marriage. She was content with her relatively junior role and had no real ambition to excel or be promoted above the point at which she would come into regular contact with the eligibles. She hadn’t seemed to mind, beyond the usual background level of malevolence, that Alice and Andrew had gained so much attention with the Audubon scoop; she’d simply left the office with a toss and a flourish of her exquisite head. But now, with the discussion taking such an unexpected turn, a new light flickered in Ophelia’s eyes, and Alice felt as though tiny crystals of something not at all nice had formed in her blood.
“No, it doesn’t. A . . . a what, did you say?”
“A bozo.”
“No, it doesn’t make you look like a bozo.”
Clerihew, who’d materialized silently from somewhere, like a miniature hot-air balloon, snickered and then blew his nose. Alice thought for a moment that he might take up a schoolyard chant of “Bozo, bozo, Andy is a bozo,” and go dancing around the room. Instead, he blew his nose some more and floated off.
“I think,” continued Alice, watching Clerihew’s tiny feet in their shiny shoes patter over the carpet, “we both know that he wants me because . . . I’m a woman, and he probably feels he can . . . I don’t know, intimidate me.”
“Yeah, intimidate you into bed.” Andrew would have done something about his tone if he’d realized how much like a sulky teenager he sounded. “Are you sure you’re up to it? You were pretty . . . distressed last time you saw him.”
This was the first time either had alluded to the emotional turmoil of the trip. Andrew hadn’t mentioned any of it to Oakley but had praised Alice’s expertise.
“I think I’ll be okay. I have to do this . . . sort of thing. It’s important to face—”
“Your demons?” said Andrew, with one of the least subtle ironic looks Alice had ever seen. It made a noise in her mind like an orchestra tuning up.
“My demons,” she replied flatly.
IT WAS ARRANGED that Lynden would collect Alice at the local station, which turned out to be fourteen miles away. The train journey was pleasant enough, and Alice even quite enjoyed the unexplained delays and sudden juddering stops in the midst of empty fields. She deliberately avoided thinking about Lynden, swerving away whenever her thoughts drifted toward the reason for his strange invitation—not, however, because the thoughts were unpleasant.
She thought about Andrew. Alice had never taken it for granted that anyone would like her. Too many years of snide comments from Kitty had so entirely undermined her self-confidence that she simply could not imagine why any man might find her attractive. Kitty had put her on her first diet at the age of twelve and still occasionally left packages of Slim-Fast prominently in the kitchen, but Alice would never be diet material. If anything, Kitty’s snide propaganda worked too well: Alice felt she was too far gone to be salvaged by mere calorie restriction or even (and she suspected that Kitty might not have dismissed the option outright) bulimia. So she reasoned, somewhere around her eighteenth birthday, I will never be loved for my face or my figure; therefore, I will perfect my mind.
Not that Alice’s quest for learning was some alternative form of coquetry; she never hoped to win love through mental pyrotechnics. It was just that the seed of vanity landed on a ground scoured and rendered sterile.
Besottedness (or even any of the more modest forms of romantic interest) was therefore generally the very last item on her list of possible explanations for odd male behavior. But after eight months of close contact with Andrew, passing pencil sharpeners, clashing heads over books, laughing together at Ophelia’s antics (somewhat bitterly in Andrew’s case), even she had detected (without ever raising it to the level of full consciousness) that something was going on. She could feel his excitement and tension on the first trip to the glass house. She had shared it, up to a point. Who knew what might have happened if . . . if Lynden had not looked like . . . the way he did. Andrew had been so sweet to her in the days that followed. He had given her all the credit for the triumph. It seemed faithless somehow: If she were to reenter the world, abandon the Dead Boy out in the cold, lost forever, surely it must be for Andrew and not for this new . . . new phenomenon.
But Andrew was Andrew and this was something, someone, very different.
“I’LL BE IN the car park. See if you can guess what I’m in,” he’d said. It turned out, rather predictably, to be a battered old Land-Rover. He shoved the door open from the inside as she approached. There was no polite inquiry about her journey, just a brief nod and a longer gaze.
“I’ve a confession,” he said, looking away at last.
“Already?”
“From the last time. When I met you. I wasn’t really shooting mink.”
“Really. What had you been shooting, children?”
“What? No. Not children. Not anything.”
“Why did you say you had?”
“I suppose I was trying to shock you. Or, I don’t know, maybe it was just something to say. I did see a mink, and I threw a stone at it, which made me slip in the mud. I don’t usually lie. It’s why I’m saying this now. I didn’t want it to be between us.”
“So now,” said Alice, conscious that she was about to say something ambiguous, “there isn’t anything
between us.”
FORTY UNCOMFORTABLE BOUNCING minutes later, Alice found herself again in the glass house. She’d noticed that Lynden seemed hardly more at ease behind the wheel than had Andrew, although she attributed this to a lack of familiarity with the Land-Rover. Alice couldn’t see Lynden making a living from the country. To break the awkward silence that had fallen (if you filtered out the savage grinding catarrh of the engine, the buffeting of the wind, and the merciless whining of the dysfunctional wipers), she’d begun to ask him about the estate, but he interrupted her roughly.
“There’s no estate at all to speak of now. Most of it had gone before I came into it. Dad and Granddad only played at farming. I didn’t even play.”
“What do you do, then?”
“I squander what little’s left of the inheritance.”
It was hard to discern any irony, let alone good-humor, in the voice. But Alice wanted there to be, and she replied jauntily. “That hardly seems like a proper job.”
Lynden looked at her sharply. His eyes were black beneath his self-consciously beetling brow. His scowl looked faintly cartoonish, reminding Alice of the famously silly painting of Beethoven, doing a tortured-romantic-genius face, and she giggled.
“You find me amusing, Miss Duclos?” Was there the minutest suggestion of a smile at the corners of his mouth?
“Perhaps if you took yourself a little less seriously, I’d be able to take you more so.”
“I see you can talk in sentences like a Jane Austen heroine.”
Alice blushed and was still blushing minutes later as they climbed out of the Land-Rover. Semele was standing in the doorway.
“Why is she here, Daddy?” she asked matter-of-factly, without apparent malice.
“As you know very well, Miss Duclos has come to have another look at my books. Why don’t you try to be nice, as you promised?”
Turning to Alice, Semele said, “He didn’t kill any minks, or anything else, you know—”
“Yes, she does know,” interrupted Lynden.
“Did he tell you he hasn’t even got a gun anymore?”
Alice was going to say something lighthearted, but then she saw Lynden’s face. The Sturm und Drang caricature had given way to something more real and more terrible: an expression of utter blankness.
“Go away, Semele,” he said, exercising what Alice could see from the twitching of his fingers was supernatural control. He turned toward Alice and made an unreadable gesture with his hands, which might have been despair, anger, resignation, or apology. “Please . . . wait for me in the library, Miss Duclos. I have to do something.”
Wandering through to the library, Alice found herself deeply perturbed by Lynden’s strange mood swings. First there had been the tears and anguish she had seen when she first met him, and now this chilling response to Semele’s teasing. But she was still enough of a scientist to realize that she had insufficient evidence on which to base any firm conclusions, so she deliberately closed her mind to speculation.
When she reached the library, she found that the Audubon volumes were still on the huge leather-faced desk where she and Andrew had left them. There was nothing much for Alice to do except sit and leaf slowly through the magnificent prints. She knew that Audubon originally employed an engraver in Edinburgh, William Lizars, but only five of the plates were completed before Lizars’s colorists went on strike, forcing Audubon to look elsewhere. He was fortunate to find Robert Havell in London, who was now generally regarded as the better craftsman. Alice couldn’t remember which five of the plates were the work of the Lizars team and spent half an hour trying to pick out the inferior work. But it was too difficult. There were so many barely distinguishable warblers and finches, and Alice simply lacked the connoisseurship: that special gaze, acutely focused, supernaturally alert to tiny variances in the density of a line or the elegance of a curve. It was a gaze that poor Crumlish had acquired, nurtured by long labor and perseverance; it was a gaze that Andrew was developing, almost against his will, through some combination of quick wit and ardent practice; it was a gaze that so many of the auction-house fops and dandies felt they must possess by virtue of birth; it was a gaze that would come, perhaps, for Alice, if she lingered long enough in the world of fine things. But for now the gaze was elusive, and she was beginning to yearn for it.
She wandered around the library. For want of anything better to do, she climbed to the top of a mahogany library stepladder.
“If it’s secrets you’re looking for, you won’t find them up there. I’m an enthusiast for the Holmesian doctrine that the best place to hide a pin is in a pin cushion. My secrets are all around you.”
Alice nearly fell from the ladder with surprise. She dismounted with as much poise as she could muster. Lynden put down the bottle and wineglasses he was carrying and held out a hand to help her with the last few steps, but she ignored it.
“You were gone for such a long time. I didn’t know what to do with myself.”
“What, a book expert at a loss in a library? How curious.” Pointing to the wine, he said, “I thought you might be thirsty after your journey. If you’d rather have some of the local cider, I can send Grace out for a keg. I’m told it is very potent.”
With relief Alice noted that Lynden had recovered his gruff good spirits. She decided on a sally.
“For a man with secrets, you seem to find it very difficult to conceal your feelings.”
Without a pause Lynden replied, “ ‘There’s no art to find the mind’s construction in the face.’ “
“Isn’t that what physiognomy is?” she returned quickly.
“Considered by James the First to be a branch of witchcraft, punishable in the same barbaric manner.”
“Are you suggesting I’m a witch, Mr. Lynden?”
“That would be to imply that you might have the power of bewitching. And please, make it Edward. Mr. Lynden makes me sound like your headmaster.”
Alice couldn’t keep it up any longer and broke into a giggling blush.
“My headmaster wasn’t at all like you. He was small and bald and smelled of taramasalata. Macbeth.”
“What?”
“Macbeth. ‘There’s no art.’ It’s from Macbeth, isn’t it? I’m not normally very good on quotations from plays, but we did that for GCSE.” And then, on impulse, she added, “You’re an actor, aren’t you.”
What had made her make such an outrageous suggestion? Something, she felt, about the size of his gestures. Yes, that was it: It was as if he were projecting his emotions to the back of the theater, making sure that even the students and pensioners up in the gods could follow the contours of his torment.
Lynden looked surprised but not, as she had feared, annoyed.
“You’ve seen, somewhere, the pictures?”
“Pictures?”
“The photographs.”
“No, I—”
“Oh. Well, now I’ve mentioned them, I suppose I’ll have to show you.”
He walked across the library and pulled an album from one of the shelves.
“You see,” he continued, “I wasn’t always an idle landowner.”
He had opened the album to a page of carefully posed head-and-shoulder shots. The face was obviously Lynden’s, brooding, intense, melancholic, but there was a playfulness about the mouth and something that suggested the possibility of hope in the eyes. Old photographs, however jaunty the theme, always made Alice sad, but there was a particular poignancy about the contrast between Lynden’s young and not-so-young selves.
“Good-looking boy, eh?” he said carelessly. But Alice could feel his scrutiny.
“Not bad. What happened to him?”
“Life.”
They both smiled at the cliché.
Alice turned the pages. There were black-and-white pictures of theatrical productions. The actors were all young, giving a sense of unreality, occasionally even comedy, to the scenes that involved old characters. There was a fairly obvious King Lear, and two suspicio
usly young tramps hanging around, it could only be, for Godot. Everything about the productions, from the Roman togas to the Elizabethan ruffs, screamed out seventies. Mustaches drooped, flares flopped, hair hung limp and greasy.
“This is drama school, yes?”
“Yes. I was . . . at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art.”
“Strange how less convincing it is when young people play old people than the other way round,” she said thoughtfully.
“Well, of course. Every harlot was a virgin once.”
“What do you mean?”
“Oh, only that the old have the experience of being young, but the young have no experience of being old.”
She found a picture of Lynden receiving some kind of award. Alice was surprised to see that the younger Lynden looked less like her Dead Boy than the old. She was perplexed. It was as if her boy was born with the lines of suffering and wisdom it had taken Lynden decades to acquire.
“What was that for, best leading scowl? Best supporting eyebrows?” Without quite realizing how it had happened, Alice saw that she was holding a glass of red wine. She took a gulp. Lynden was already on his second glass.
“You’re very funny,” he said, deadpan. “Believe it or not, great things were expected of me. Except by Dad. He always associated the theater with a habitual preference for the love of boys. He kept expecting to hear about my arrest in a public lavatory. He used to do a comic turn based on it. He did a special voice for the undercover policeman used in the entrapment: ‘Well, your honor, the haccused young gentleman approached me while I was engaged in a urinatory capacity and inquired if I should like it up me. I politely declined ’is offer, and read ’im ’is rights as ’e was writhing and squirming in the piss—begging your pardon, your honor, just reading me notes—an’ clutching at ’is kidneys.’ He often used to get carried away like that. Suspect he always wanted to be an actor himself.”
This was another new Lynden, and Alice found herself beaming. She didn’t know what to make of this rush of eloquence from someone previously so laconic. Although she was pleased that he was confiding in her, she felt there was something unhealthy in the sudden flow. It was as if sutures had given way. But she didn’t want it to stop.
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