Alice didn’t know what to make of it all or what the appropriate thing to say was. She felt horribly guilty about advising her friend to go to Venice, a trip that by any objective criteria had been a disaster. And yet Odette exuded her new serenity.
“Somehow you don’t seem particularly upset by it,” she tried, for want of anything better to say. The it could have been the Matt fiasco or the job catastrophe.
“You know, the truth is, I’m not. I’ve always tried to take control of my life, but there’s something refreshing in being the hapless plaything of fate. I didn’t realize how much I hated the job—no, not hated, was bored by it—until it wasn’t there. And Matt was never the one. He was just a shell, and my love or my need crawled into it like a hermit crab.”
“What will you do?”
“They’ve given me a great fat severance check. I’ll live on that for a while. But I have a few ideas. Well, one idea, really, but I think it’s a good one. Or maybe a mad one. I hope not: I’ve already put it into operation.”
Odette’s scheme, briefly told, involved investing a fair chunk of her severance money in financing the long-ago ex-boyfriend’s business manufacturing garden ornaments. The ex-boyfriend, called Gerald, was actually a perfectly competent if excessively hairy artist, specializing in monumental sculptural works. However, with neither a trust fund nor a Tory patron, and lacking the necessary crudity or showmanship to attract prizes or commissions, he had hit, in desperation, on the idea of putting circles of upright stones in suburban gardens. It was a world he knew; his father had managed a garden center in Woking, a place where Gerald still worked occasionally and where Odette had met him on a special trip to buy shrubs for her balcony. He’d made his play while loading her Golf with a tightly bound lemon tree and a stripy-leafed thing she’d bought. It had seemed unnecessarily callous to turn down a drink, and besides, he had a muscly salt-of-the-earth feel to him. She didn’t know then about the art.
“Listen, babe,” he’d said, on that first and only date, drawing audibly on four millimeters of a hand-rolled cigarette, “people like spending their money on their gardens. It’s fucking mental, but it’s a fact. I don’t believe they actually want gnomes and what-have-you. It’s just that there’s not much else, once you’ve got the bird bath and the cartwheel and the sundial. And you know, I believe people have a suppressed yearning for the spiritual. The more materialistic you are, the deeper the yearning.”
“I hate that kind of logic, the finding of evidence for something in the very absence of evidence.”
“Stone circles concentrate energy. You ever screw in Avebury?”
“Um, no.”
“Fucking cosmic. By the way, I don’t use condoms. It’s a vibe thing.”
She hadn’t slept with him, but she had found him agreeable enough to keep up the relationship on an occasional phone-call basis. So she knew that the stone-circle business was hobbling along, keeping him in high-grade Moroccan red, but that was about it.
“WELL,” SAID ODETTE to Alice, “I’m not sure it’ll ever make us millionaires, but it’s all quite . . . stimulating. We have brainstorming sessions where we decide what to make—I’ve just had the idea of trying a range of glass-topped coffee tables, you know, over the top of the stone circ—then he goes off and makes the things—a stone original, chiseled out of granite, which he then mass-produces in resin—and I do all the marketing and the officey things he can’t cope with, being an artist. God, I know the more I tell it the madder it sounds, but I love it. There’s no one to suck up to, no one to bitch about, and a faint feeling that even if we aren’t doing anything especially virtuous, at least we aren’t doing any harm.”
“And what about you and Gerald? The old spark back?”
“No, not at all. There wasn’t ever an old spark to come back. He lives with a woman who weaves shawls. Very nice, in a tenty way.”
“The shawls?”
“No, her.”
“And you’re still on for this drinks thing at my work? I know it sounds terrible—in fact, probably will be terrible—but I’ll be so much happier if you can be there.”
“I’m actually rather looking forward to it. Quite interested in meeting this Andrew chap of yours.”
Alice looked at Odette with wide eyes.
“Of course! Why didn’t I think of it? You’d be perfect!”
“I didn’t mean like that,” said Odette, blushing and laughing awkwardly. But she did, really.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Two Coffees
“I CAN’T.”
“I’ve come all this way.”
“If you’d warned me I could have . . . might have been able to make arrangements.”
They were sitting outside at a café. Alice was in the weak sunshine, but Lynden glowered under the shadow of the canopy. He looked ill at ease, seemed too big for his chair, and his knees kept banging into the table, threatening to spill their coffee.
“My club . . . there’s a new chef. His name . . . I can’t remember it, but it is well known. You’d—”
“Your club?
“Yes. Well, when I come up to London I have to stay somewhere.”
Alice smiled.
“Are you laughing at me?” said Lynden.
“Yes.”
His face was hard, with deeply etched lines around his eyes. He looked as incongruous here in the London of tourists and office workers as a fallen meteor. His hand reached for the paper coffee cup. He put it halfway to his mouth and then placed it back on the table. Alice, unconsciously mirroring, moved to her own cup, but before she could drink, Lynden enclosed her hand in his. It was long-fingered but too strong and gnarled to be elegant, and Alice felt an involuntary shiver of pleasure that came at the same time as her annoyance. He was pressing her hand too tightly, and coffee spilled over the brim, burning her finger.
“Ow!” she said, loudly enough for faces to turn. Lynden didn’t release her, but smoothed away the bubble of coffee with his thumb.
“Let go,” said Alice. But she didn’t really mean it, and the lack of conviction was all the encouragement Lynden needed.
“Just dinner. There are things to talk over.”
“The Audubon?”
“Yes. The Audubon. And other things. No, not things. I don’t have an agenda. I’d just like to talk.”
The appeal was curiously plaintive. At the same time, Lynden softened his grip sufficiently for Alice to pull her hand away, but she did it slowly.
He’d telephoned half an hour earlier. She’d agreed to the coffee without thinking, but when Andrew asked her where she was going, she said, “Just out.” Lynden held her arms when they met and kissed her, once, on the cheek. He loomed over her like a megalith, and Alice felt as helpless as a sacrifice on a stone altar. Seeing him again here in London, so close to where the Dead Boy had walked into her life, left her feeling simultaneously drained and exhilarated, and it took her several minutes of alternate babbling and silence to recover her poise.
“How long will you be in London?” she asked, putting her burned finger to her mouth.
“I have to return tomorrow.”
“Why tomorrow? I’d imagined you as a man of leisure.”
“It’s Semele. Er, a parents’ evening at her school.”
Alice laughed. Suddenly Lynden looked a little less forbidding. “Parents’ evening? I can’t imagine you queuing up to see the geography teacher.”
Lynden scowled for a moment but then smiled back. “I haven’t been the greatest parent, but I’m not a monster. And there’s a concert. Semele is playing her clarinet. I have ear plugs. I’ve missed you.” He touched the small red burn on Alice’s finger with his knuckle. Alice felt herself soften toward him.
“Don’t be silly; you don’t know me well enough to miss me. We’ve only met twice.”
Lynden looked at her, his black eyes flashing. “Do you really think you need to meet a hundred times before you know someone? Know them absolutely? Have you never just see
n and known, felt the connection?”
“Yes, I have.”
“Then you’ll come tonight?”
“I’m sorry, I’ve already told you, I can’t. I wasn’t playing games.”
“Whatever it is, cancel it. Please.”
“That’s not the kind of thing I do. Sorry, that sounds pompous. Look, I’m seeing some friends. I’ve neglected them. Because of . . . things . . . things that happened. It’s the first time we’ve met up in months.”
Lynden looked suspicious. “Friends?”
Alice smiled, pleased, despite herself, by Lynden’s jealousy. “Girlfriends.”
“Oh. And you really can’t change it?”
“Not this late. I’ve become famous for pulling out, and I don’t think I’ve got any chances left.”
“I understand. It’s a good quality, loyalty. Faithfulness. If it can’t be helped it can’t be helped. But it means you must come to my party.”
“Your party?” The word sounded funny coming from the smoldering Lynden. “Will there be ice cream and paper hats?”
Lynden smiled, slowly but hugely, as he realized that she was accepting, or at least not instantly rejecting the idea.
“If you would like for there to be.”
“No, but really, what kind of party is it?”
“Just drinks. A few friends. Not my idea of fun, but one is . . . obliged.”
“When is it?
“In a month.”
“Yes, I’ll come.”
“In that case I’ll leave you a happy man.”
“You’re going now?”
“Yes, this second, before you change your mind. Don’t say another word.”
He reached his arm across the table and put his finger to her lips. It was a more passionate and tender gesture than any kiss. And then he was gone. Alice still had half a cup of coffee and twenty minutes of her lunch break left, and she was glad of the chance to think. Her heart was beating quickly and she felt hot. She fanned herself ineffectually with a paper napkin.
“Yes, warm work that, lounging in cafés while your poor colleagues toil at their desks.”
Alice looked up, startled. Andrew. His tie had worked its way around and under his collar. “Oh, shut up! Anyway, it’s lunchtime, and no one toils at lunchtime in Enderby’s.”
Alice was speaking too quickly. She hoped Andrew hadn’t seen Lynden, but she was also a little ashamed of her secretiveness.
“You don’t normally come here, do you?”
“I didn’t realize you’d been monitoring my movements.”
“Just getting in a bit of stalking practice.”
“That’s not funny.”
“No? Suppose you’re right. I’ve been hanging round Leo for too long. Mind if I join you? Feel in need of a double mocha espresso latte pavarotti mascarpone hold-the-chocolate-powder thanks-very-much. Get you another?”
“No, thanks.”
Andrew went inside, fumbling for change. It was one of Alice’s abiding images of Andrew—the frantic search through every available pocket, turning out pens, old bus tickets, candy wrappers.
“You sure you’re okay?” he asked, as soon as he came back.
“Why?”
“Oh, I don’t know. You just look a bit—preoccupied. I haven’t interrupted something, have I? You’re not having a tryst with Clerihew? You are! The sly dog. It’s always the plump little tweed-wearers you have to watch out for. I always suspected something was going on between you two. No use denying it—I’ve seen the looks you give each other, you know, those lovers’ looks, remembering the special things you did, his ways of—”
Alice could take it no longer. “Gross gross gross!” she squealed. “And I’m not his type.”
“How do you know? Just because he hasn’t thrust his moist hand up your skirt doesn’t mean he hasn’t thought about it. I expect he’s got loads of secret pictures of you stuck into an album back home, and I don’t mean stuck with glue. He collects your used tissues, you know. I caught him sniffing your desk chair the other day—”
“Enough! Anyway, I thought you were the stalker.”
“Unkind to use a fellow’s self-deprecation against him.” Andrew took a sip from his cup, pulling a face. “The other day I told my dad that they have flavored coffees now: you know, raspberry and stuff. He went berserk. ‘Flavored coffee?’ he said. Well, more screamed than said. ‘Don’t they know that coffee is a flavor? It’s like having raspberry-flavored vanilla. It’s a bloody contradiction in terms.’ “
“He sounds like you.”
“God, but you fight dirty. So,” he said, after a pause, “you never answered my question.”
“About being okay?”
“Yes. Are you?”
“I think so. Time we were heading back. I don’t think Mr. Oakley likes me very much, and I don’t want to give him a reason to lecture me.”
“Ah, Miss—as it were, insofar as I might say, which is in this instance quite far enough—Duclos, or, if I might add, Alice, regular hours are, in regularity, kept in this—ah, office, and lunchtimes are—”
Alice laughed. “You’ve been working on that.”
“Well, I need something to do of an evening. My TV’s bust, and I’ve read the backs of all the cereal packets. But you’re right. Let’s get back. After all, it’s the big night on Friday, and I want to keep some conversation fresh for that, or a very dull time will be had by all.”
And thus they chatted on the way back to Enderby’s, and Alice was distracted, pleasantly but temporarily, from her other thoughts: thoughts of darker figures than Andrew, one dead, and one very much alive.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Drink to Me Only with Thine Eyes
“YOU LOOK NICE,” said Alice. And she meant it. Andrew was wearing a blue velvet suit, nattily cut. It went very prettily with his mauve shirt and lilac tie. Perhaps the sideburns could have done with a bit of a trim, but then Andrew was always reluctant to do that, citing both the fact that his strength lay, Samsonlike, in their luxuriance and, more plangently, the difficulty in getting a straight bottom line when having to do it for yourself.
“Thanks.” They were having a midmorning tea break, and Andrew took a long loud (comically loud, he hoped) slurp at his tea. Tea was one of the few remaining areas where Andrew still pretended to be working class—of the people, as he usually put it. Hence the ocher-staining, mouth-puckering strength; hence the noise. “You too.” Andrew also meant it. Alice looked less bag lady than normal. He detected another hand at work.
“My friend Odette has been helping me with clothes.”
“Ah! I thought . . . That’s the one coming tonight?”
“Yes. You’ll like her. She’s very sensible. Oh, God no! I didn’t just say sensible. What I said was glamorous and exciting.”
“If that was meant to undo the bad work done by sensible, I’m afraid it’s failed. All you’ve done is add very before sensible.”
Alice laughed. She’d been doing more of that recently, which both pained and pleased Andrew.
“It really isn’t fair. Odette used to be famously sensible in our gang.”
“You have a gang?”
“Not really a gang. Just a couple of friends. But then, in one fell swoop, she stopped being sensible and became eccentric.”
Alice went on to give brief accounts of the Venice expedition (leaving out anything that put Odette in a bad light), the sacking, and the rebirth as hippie entrepreneur.
“Okay, I’ll gladly give you back your sensible,” said Andrew, faintly impressed. “And um—er, what does she—”
“Look like?”
“Oh, well, that puts it rather brutally. Yeah, what does she look like: moose or maid?”
“Andrew, I don’t find that way of talking amusing. Certainly not when you’re talking about my friend. Is that really how you see us? Black and white, beautiful or ugly?”
Andrew was a little taken aback by Alice’s response. “Sorry,” he said, genuinely emb
arrassed. “Just, you know, talking.” He wouldn’t normally have taken such a po-faced rebuke so passively. But then he wasn’t normally in love with the po-faced rebukers. He thought about explaining that she was entirely wrong about the black and white, that he actually had a tremendously complicated and (to his mind) subtle system of classification based on the soccer league, but he held back on the almost certainly correct grounds that it would just make things worse.
Happy to have made her point, Alice answered Andrew’s question.
“Pretty,” she said.
“Oh,” said Andrew, looking generally around, before paying particular attention to a frail wisp of cobweb the cleaners had missed in the corner of the ceiling. Had missed, in fact, and gone on missing, ever since Andrew had joined Enderby’s. “Good.”
BY MIDAFTERNOON SOMETHING akin to excitement was beginning to stir in Books. Each year the whole of Enderby’s would throw itself into a fancy-dress Christmas party, but that—with the exception of the desultory Friday drinks that different departments might or might not go in for—was, socially speaking, that. Hence the elements of the carnivalesque: Pam had on a new set of curtains; Ophelia’s lips had acquired a gloss that could deflect lasers; Clerihew had specially burnished his leather elbow patches and buffed his brogues to the point at which you might well, had you wished and been prepared to hunker down, been able to see your face in them. Periodically, Oakley would stride purposefully from his office to chivvy and encourage with ill-judged compliments and oily banter.
At five, Andrew said to Alice, “How about you and me slip off quickly for a pre-drinks drink?”
“If you like, but it seems a bit—well, indulgent.”
“Don’t be such a square. It always pays to hit the ground running, I find.”
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