“Good good good,” said Andrew. “Pray proceed.”
“I hate the soap girls use, which instead of getting you clean makes you soft.”
“Good shooting. What is it with that soap? Why don’t they just use proper soap to get clean and then use some other unguent to make them soft?”
“And then there’s the thing they do with their feet.”
“Which of the things they do with their feet? Kicking you?”
“No, no. The thing with that rasp they have, when they file off the hard skin on their heels, like grating Parmesan.”
“Yeah, what is it with girls and hard skin? I can’t help thinking it’s locked in with the soap that’s supposed to make them soft. I don’t think I’ve ever had to file away any part of me.”
“And,” continued Leo, after pausing to think for a moment, “there’s something about girls and pop music too.” He chewed it over for a few seconds. “I haven’t quite worked it out yet but—well, the thing about girls is that they never really understand about pop music. You put on a CD and the first song rocks out a bit, and they say Oooh, this is horrible, it’s too loud, or whatever, and then the next track comes on, and if it’s a slow one they say, Oooh this is nice, I like this one, and then the next loud one comes on and they say Oooh this is horrible again, can you please turn it off or down? They just can’t listen to a whole album; they can’t grasp anything beyond the immediate song and whether or not it’s too loud.”
“Well,” said Andrew, drinking the middle fifth of his pint in one swallow and simultaneously deciding to take a moderate centrist position on girls and pop, “it’s certainly true that they don’t understand about how sometimes you have to play things too loud, and that’s the point of the thing. But you can’t say all girls are pop-ignorant. I’ve had girlfriends who could hold up their end, more or less, in a debate on, say, what it is that makes the second Oasis album great and the third a total fucking disgrace.”
“Yeah, sure,” countered Leo, “there are specialist rock chicks, you know, specialist like the tanks they adapted for D-Day to double as bridges or for clearing minefields with big flails . . . What was I saying?”
“Specialist rock chicks.”
“Yeah, yeah, but the thing is they’ve all slept with Lemmy from Motorhead.”
“What, still?” said Andrew, as though Leo had told him that girls still wore whalebone corsets or used belladonna to make their eyes sparkle.
“Yes, still; it’s a kind of initiation. And they’re always, if not actual goths, then gothish, and their whole raison is that they’re one of the girls who know about pop. There’s nothing else to them, apart from enough mascara to blacken an elephant’s bum, and frankly I’d rather fuck an elephant’s bum.”
“As long as it was a girl elephant.”
“One of the pretty ones.”
“With those nice brown eyes and long lashes.”
“But no, none of the normal ones—girls, I mean, not elephants—know about pop. “
And then it came to Andrew, quietly, easily, like carbon monoxide poisoning. “You’re in love, aren’t you, Leo?”
“Yes.”
“With a girl who uses make-you-soft soap and grates her feet and doesn’t know about pop music?”
“Yes.”
“And this isn’t just some ruse to stop me from whupping your ass for ruining my life and probably getting me kicked out of my job?”
“Not only that, no. And Andrew,” said Leo, signaling his sincerity with subtle maneuverings of eye and mouth, “I know I behaved like a complete cunt the other night. I swear to God I’m sorrier about it than I’ve ever been about anything ever. I lost it. It was Ophelia.”
“Listen, mate, better men than you—oh, okay, other men than you—have been fucked over by her. She’s the femme fatale’s femme fatale.”
“But it was no excuse for what I did. I can’t believe I wheeled out the tactical nuclear weapons to deal with your chum Clerihew.”
“Let’s forget about it. We’ll just say you owe me one.”
Leo looked at Andrew. A beer mat had attached itself to the bottom of his pint glass. He wanted to say things to him. He wanted to tell him that he was the best friend he’d ever had; that he made him laugh more than anyone else; that he made him forget the things he most wanted to forget. He wanted to tell him that he loved him. But he also knew he shouldn’t, not only because it would be supremely awkward and embarrassing but, more important, because he didn’t have to. Instead he did what men do when they want to show affection.
“My round, I think.”
“Kills me to say it, but it’s actually mine.”
“Nah, not this time.”
Andrew looked at him and smiled. “Tell you what. I’ll let you get them in if you tell me the whole sordid tale, beginning to end.”
“A blow-by-blow account?”
“A ball-by-ball commentary.”
“I’ll endeavor to comply.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Old Wine, New Blood
SOMEHOW ALICE made it through the cocktails. Both Johnny and Jeremy, as soon as it became apparent that Ophelia was not to be lured into their ambit, paid her some attention in their contrasting ways, Johnny with excessive laughter and Jeremy with unpleasant digs at the others, delivered sotto voce. Whatever benefits might have accrued from this were outweighed by the dislike it attracted from the other women. The “Country Pleasures” woman probed her for a while in case she might yield a story but clearly saw Ophelia as more likely material, at least if romance were to be her theme.
“Lovely-looking young woman,” she said, indicating Ophelia and Edward, who were both firmly in the grip of Ophelia’s mother. “And you work for her at Enderby’s?”
“We both work at Enderby’s, yes.”
“And she’s a cousin of Edward’s?”
“Not that close. But yes, some kind of relation.”
“Oh, I’m so glad they’re not too close. There’s quite enough of that in the country as it is. You can see it when you pop into the post office.” She pulled a surprisingly amusing face to indicate advanced rural idiocy. “And,” she continued, after drawing her features back into line, “Edward is using Enderby’s to sell his library?”
Alice guessed that Country Pleasures might be working herself up for a piece on poor farmers having to sell off family heirlooms just to buy silage (whatever that was) to keep the cattle going through the winter.
“Not the whole library, no. But I’m afraid I can’t tell you any more about it.”
“Oh,” said Country Pleasures. “Yes. I’d forgotten you’re here on a professional basis,” which made Alice feel like a not-very-high-class hooker.
Alice added several other colors to her spectrum of drinks; she made a joke about being disappointed on missing out on the ultraviolet and infrared. Nobody seemed to get it, but Johnny laughed good-naturedly, as if he’d just got a bargain on a second-hand combine harvester. Although she kept things together externally, Alice was in turmoil within. Edward appeared to be deliberately avoiding her company, and Ophelia was never more than one body away from him, often less. Alice still couldn’t quite work out what the woman was doing. Was this another example of the pure ethereal malice she had displayed at the office party? Was it simply an attempt to ruin any hopes Alice might have? (And Alice was still unsure if she did, in fact, have any hopes, or even desires, directed toward Edward.) Or did Ophelia love him? For all Alice knew, Ophelia may have secretly yearned for her second cousin (if that was really their relationship) since childhood. Another possibility was that the spite and love were combined in one package: Perhaps the thought that Alice might have him had made her cousin irresistible, and the love had followed the spite, like the hangover follows the binge.
The more she thought about Lynden, the less she understood. How could she explain all the strange things about him: the weeping, the extreme swings of mood, the things Semele had said about the gun? And what about
Semele herself? Where was her mother? Why was she never mentioned? And Grace: She embodied much of the mystery. So intense, so secretive, so possessive. Too many questions. Too many drinks.
They were going through to dine. Someone had taken her arm. She looked, expecting to find Johnny or Jeremy, perhaps even Edward, but it was one of the older men. Alice had barely spoken to him; he seemed quiet and reserved. Also very attractive, in a silver-haired, old-fashioned kind of way. His gravity reminded her a little of her father.
“Miss Duclos,” he said, “we seem to have avoided a formal introduction. My name is Conradian, Peter Conradian. I’m an old friend of Edward’s; I’ve already heard a lot about the beautiful book expert. If I didn’t know Enderby’s better, I’d have said you were sent deliberately to entrap him.” He smiled very handsomely. Alice thought his teeth looked slightly younger than the rest of him.
“Oh,” said Alice, “if they intended a honey trap, they’d have set it with my esteemed colleague Ophelia.”
“Ah, yes. I was forgetting that this is something of a work outing for you. Let me get that chair.”
They had arrived in the dining room. It had the same architectural purity as the rest of the Cave of Ice, but the effect was transformed by the presence of a huge Gothic table, in stained oak. Its legs were thicker than ALICE’S, and it was laden with old silver and tableware marked with heraldic crests. The light came from fat yellow candles, set in heavy candlesticks. Alice wasn’t sure if the clash between the room and the table was creative or destructive, and she was pleased to find that she was enough of a scientist to think of it in terms of wave patterns reinforcing or interfering with each other.
“How do you know Edward?” she asked.
“We go back a very long way, all the way, in fact, to drama school.”
“You’re an actor?”
Conradian looked disappointed; he’d evidently taken it for granted that she would have heard of him.
“Yes. You may have seen one or two of my things.”
He named some reasonably well-known TV series and a couple of classic dramas he’d been in, all dating from the seventies and early eighties. Alice, of course, recognized the names, but she hadn’t seen any of them. It resulted in a moment of awkwardness, before his natural charm reasserted itself.
“But you’re far too cultured to watch television; and anyway that is all ancient history. I sometimes think Edward’s decision to abandon the stage before it abandoned him was a very sound one: stopped him from boring young ladies at dinner parties about old triumphs.”
“I’m perfectly capable of boring young ladies in my own way,” boomed Lynden from the other end of the long table. This was followed by general laughter and demurring, led by Ophelia. The conversation then became more general. The crisis in the rural economy loomed large, and there was much carping about metropolitan elites and their failure to understand how things worked in the country. Thinking of the cars in the driveway, Alice could not resist the urge to contribute.
“But hasn’t the crisis in the rural economy really been a crisis for the little farmers, the ones who always only just scraped by? I thought the . . . well-off ones were still doing okay. What with the subsidies, and the hedges you’ve ripped up.”
Meaningful glances were exchanged in the following silence, ably conveying the sense of “See what we mean?”
“I told you she was a tigress,” said Lynden, smiling wickedly, not quite at Alice but broadly toward her quadrant of the table. Ophelia unfurled her lovely rolling laugh, like a Klimt painting made into music. How, thought Alice, could Lynden not fall in love with her?
He, at least, appeared to be enjoying himself. And then one of the chic women expressed a “custodians of the countryside” view that had everyone back on track, although Alice couldn’t see her as custodian of anything other than her own nails. Although she was now irritated as much as she had been perplexed, Alice decided not to continue with her views on fox hunting, pesticides, agricultural pollution, and so on; there were some gulfs that no amount of educated debate could span.
Given the way the table was laid, Alice half expected nineteen courses, with quails and carp and roast swan and something in aspic and a whole ox and some kind of towering jelly for pudding. Only the ox came close, with the main course Beef Wellington. Alice had no appetite. She turned again to Peter Conradian.
“I don’t want you to betray a trust or anything, but are you able to tell me about Semele’s mother?”
“Aha, the mysterious first Mrs. Lynden. I’m afraid I can’t, really. Not that it would be betraying a trust, but because I don’t know much about her. I never met her—Edward and I went through a period of not seeing each other, and in fact he’s always been a bit reclusive, as you’ve probably gathered. So all I know is that he was married, and then she . . . disappeared, leaving the little girl behind.”
Alice very nearly gasped. The drink and the Gothic dining room had put all kinds of ridiculous ideas into her head. Disappeared? What could that mean? That Lynden had killed her? Perhaps he shot her by mistake, and that was why he no longer had a gun. Other facts fell into place: weeping over Tristan and Isolde, the ultimate tale of love and death; the isolation—would he not be shunned, for a time at least, by society, as well as wanting to avoid contact with others? But no. This was absurd, truly absurd. She banished the ideas from her mind and nodded gratefully as Johnny Twogood reached across the table to offer her more of the wine, which, she could see from the label, had known the world for longer than she had.
AT FIVE MINUTES to nine, Leo said to Andrew, “So, that’s it. You now know, with all the detail you’re ever going to get from me, everything there is to know about us.”
Andrew had chivalrously failed to hide his anguish when Leo told him that he was having an affair with Odette Bach, Alice’s once sensible and now eccentric friend. Anything other than a show of ill will on Andrew’s part would have been taken (and intended) as an insult; it was standard practice between the two of them to bewail the snaffling of any female above the level of mid-table respectability, using the soccer-league analogy, on the self-evident grounds that it diminished the pool of available talent. “A little something inside me dies whenever I see a young girl in love,” was how Andrew had put it.
Still, Andrew’s ill grace had been mainly for show, as he’d only fancied Odette in a purely formal sense, without any real hormonal commitment. Nor could he display too much of the real pleasure, amounting almost to joy, that he felt. He had long suspected that Leo’s accounts of his depredations on the hapless maidens of Queen Mary and Westfield College were exaggerated. And as, over the years, Leo failed to produce a single specimen of the genus, he began, occasionally, to entertain the thought that they might be entirely fictitious. But he didn’t like to dwell on the matter. At times he felt he needed to believe in the myth of Leo’s concupiscence and ardor even more than Leo did.
Leo’s account of the week he had spent with Odette was completely different from anything he had said before. There was no leering; no descriptions of sexual acts proscribed by law or custom; no dismissal of the woman in question as trivial, silly, bestially wanton, or dull. Andrew waited but it did not come. It was as unnerving as a bus arriving on time, or a British sitcom with funny jokes in it.
The story began with the taxi ride home after the drinks debacle.
“I sat there stinking like a pub urinal. Before she came up I’d done a certain amount of rolling in the gutter. You know how it is.”
“Been there. With you more than once.”
“I don’t quite know how, but she got me in the taxi. She looked so perfect. Prim’s not the word, but it captures something of it. So untainted by . . . whatever it is that taints the rest of us. I was huddled in the corner, feeling and looking like a Nibelung, and she started to talk. Just about things. Suddenly I stopped being quite so drunk. I can’t really remember what she was saying, chatter really, inconsequential but not trivial, which is a hard
one to pull off. Partly about the pub, partly about everything else. And the horror of it all became less real. All too soon we were at Queen Mary’s: She’d taken me miles out of her way. I asked if she wanted a coffee—no, don’t look like that. I only wanted to continue talking to her for a while longer. Then she said it: ‘I’m free tomorrow afternoon if you want to go for a walk.’ “
“Incendiary stuff,” said Andrew, accompanying it with a hot-under-the-collar, boy-it’s-baking-in-here act.
“We met up on the heath. It was only in the daytime that I realized how . . . beautiful she is. Your Alice, I can see she’s a stunner. And she was incredibly nice to me at the piss-up when she didn’t have to be, and I’m sure there were things she’d rather have been doing. But with her, it’s like lilies floating on top of a pond, with things happening down in the murk that you can only imagine. With Odette, though, there’s just pure crystal water, and you can see forever. If Alice is Keats, Odette is Pope.”
“Ah, the good old neoclassic versus the Romantic. Nice to know you can still be a pretentious shag when you want to be,” Andrew commented helpfully.
“A palpable hit,” conceded Leo.
“But,” continued Andrew, warming to his theme, “it doesn’t quite fit in with Alice the science bunny.”
“Unless we put her in with the Romantic scientists, Goethe playing with light, Joseph Wright of Derby’s Experiment with an Air Pump. . . . We’ll come back to it when I’m not in mid-rhapsody. And so we walked on the heath and talked like I’ve never talked before. With people like you and me, life’s this huge equation chalked on the blackboard we try to solve, and we get bogged down in some minor component and end up tying ourselves in knots and relying on metaphor to magic us to a solution. Yes, I know, before you say it, that’s just what I’ve done now, with the equation metaphor. But Odette just goes straight to the solution; she reads the equation as easily as a-b-c.
“We stayed together all that afternoon. We had a huge argument about the City and money, but she was fantastic about not taking anything personally; it was just ideas that were clashing, not egos. It was odd, and strangely honorable, that she felt inclined to defend the system that she’s dropped out of so spectacularly. And then we talked about culture—yes, I know, but this was a first date, although I didn’t know it at the time—and she said that my view of culture was elitist, and I countered by pointing out who it is that, in the end, benefits from the dumbed-down culture and the race of morons it produces: the real elite, the moneyed class, who want nothing more than an ignorant, compliant workforce to man their call centers, living on a diet of Pop-Tarts and chicken nuggets, before sitting stupefied in front of Blind Date every evening, the extent of their ambition being to get the video of Dad being head-butted in the goolies by a goat with an erection on You’ve Been Framed.”
Slave to Love Page 17