She thought again about Grace Harbour and was taken back to the moment that she realized Lynden was sleeping with her. Why had she reacted so violently? Lynden had made no promises to her, told no lies. And they had never slept together. Never even, she realized, properly kissed. How strange. She felt as though they had been lovers, and yet they had never even approached intimacy, apart from the time he had rescued her from the inept clutches of Johnny Twogood. He had kissed her then, on the cheek. But hadn’t she turned her face for a moment and brushed his lips? Was it that she had felt betrayed? No, somehow that didn’t catch it. It was something . . . less than that. Something smaller. She thought hard. And then she spoke to him.
“There are things I haven’t told you either. Important things about me.”
“Only a fool would think there weren’t important things about you that needed to be told.”
They both looked puzzled for a moment about his syntax, but this wasn’t the time to dwell.
“Do you remember,” she continued, “when we first met?”
“Do I remember?” he said loudly, almost angrily, as if he had been insulted. And then, more quietly, he said again, “Do I remember?”
She took it all as a yes.
“Didn’t you wonder about how I behaved? The fainting, all of that?”
“Yes, of course I wondered. But back then, and even now, you seemed a strange thing, a thing not of our time. You looked like you might be the kind who would faint—or swoon, for that matter. For all I knew it was your third of the day.”
“Well I’m not—I mean, the kind that would faint or swoon. And it was my first of the day. My first ever. It was because I thought you looked like someone.” She had been, despite herself, nettled by the accusation that she was a habitual swooner, and the explanation had come out more directly than she had intended.
“I used to get that all the time. They said the resemblance to the young Olivier was striking.”
Was he joking? It was hard to tell. She took it at face value.
“Not a famous person. You see, some time ago, I saw a boy killed in a road accident. A . . . beautiful boy. And just before he was hit by the car, he looked at me. Or I thought he did. And I fell in love with him. And I thought he fell in love with me. It was an experience that changed my life.”
This was now the fourth time she had told the story: first to Odette, next to Andrew, then to the Dead Boy’s grandmother. And now Lynden. Something so secret, so private, and yet now so public. Part of her wished she had never told anyone, that she had let it burn and glow like radium inside her. And what if it had driven her mad? Weren’t there worse things than madness? Suddenly she looked up from her own thoughts. She had forgotten about Lynden. What could he make of this? He looked curious: a little wary perhaps, but not—well, of course she hadn’t finished.
“And this boy?”
“He looked like . . . I mean, you looked like him. For a moment, lying in your chair. You see, I had become—I suppose obsessed is the only way to put it. There is some resemblance, but not profound. Perhaps just the look of—I don’t know—anguish that you both seemed to have. But anyway, seeing you—him—there, it was . . . a shock.”
And now, as the meaning found its way home, Lynden did begin to react. How could he not? She had told him that the impact he had had on her was solely because he happened to look like a boy she was in love with. A dead boy. How could a man of his arrogance respond to that?
He began to laugh. The sound was rich and fruity: a theatrical laugh, but not thereby necessarily false.
“ ‘The Dead,’ “ he said, still half laughing.
Alice thought he was referring to the Dead Boy, and his humor seemed misplaced.
“I don’t see what’s funny about it. A person died.” Again her tone felt wrong, and she feared she sounded priggish. She hadn’t meant to.
“No, no. ‘The Dead’: It’s a story by James Joyce. I acted in a radio dramatization, years ago. There’s a party, and a bumbling, hearty fellow has a rare old time, and there’s a pretty wife who seems happy enough with him. But then back home she gazes out the window, through the falling snow over the hill and the fields, to the grave of the boy she’s always loved; and the poor lump of a husband just there . . . Well you see how it all fits.”
“Not really. Well, perhaps, partly.”
But the story did resonate with her. The way minds come up against each other, seem to touch, to connect, to communicate, but then you realize that all along the glass was a mirror and not a window; that you were talking to yourself; that the world had closed in around you and you were alone.
And then Lynden’s laughter died in his throat.
“But no,” he said, “I don’t understand any of it. Did you ever love me? Want me? Want me for myself? And if you didn’t, why were you so concerned about Grace?”
At last Lynden had hit on the heart of it. Alice’s instinct was to be kind. And the pity of it, of him, now had come. She wanted to say something that would make him happy, or at least take away his pain. She wanted to give him hope. But that hope would be a lie.
“I don’t know what I felt for you, for you as yourself. The tragedy, the grandeur—and now I know it was a false tragedy, a fake grandeur—well, you became so mixed up with them, with him, with it all, that I could never have teased them apart. And I cannot say that the idea of your beautiful house, and the wildness, and . . . the wealth did not attract me. But somehow the illusion and the grandeur were shattered when I thought of you with Grace. You became small in my eyes. I wouldn’t say sordid, more just ordinary. What you did was not what I thought my Dead Boy would do. The link with him had been what had captivated me, and now the link was broken. In a way it was because you became real, became yourself, that I lost interest.”
She thought for a moment of trying to explain further the appalling irony of it all: that aching gap between her Dead Boy and the real Matija Abdic; if only his worst crime had been the seduction of a serving girl and the petty evasions and lies consequent upon it. But explanations were pointless or worse. How would it help Lynden to know that the person he had failed to emulate was himself a sham and a shadow?
“I’m sorry,” she said, as flatly as she could. “I know all this hardly puts me in a good light, but it’s the way it was, I think.”
“I don’t care about any of that. I don’t care about your dead boy or whatever madness you were under. All I care about is now and what you want to do.”
“But surely you must see . . . after what I’ve just said—”
“You haven’t really said anything about me.”
“I said that you became ordinary, that I lost interest.”
“But that was before I explained to you about Grace, explained my feelings.”
“Just because you feel something doesn’t mean that the world will bend itself to accommodate you.”
“Tell me that you don’t love me.”
Alice smiled. The lapse into cliché, particularly one so manipulative, made things easier.
“Okay. I don’t love you. I never loved you. I have things to do now. I’ll see you at the sale later on. I’m taking phone bids with Andrew. Goodbye.”
Before she reached the door, it was thrown open and Ophelia stood there, as vibrant and glorious as an Audubon watercolor.
“Oh, good, I thought I might find you here. Mr. Oakley asked me to look for you both. He asked if I wouldn’t mind taking care of Edward until the sale. And he suggested you go and do whatever it is you do with your telephone lines, Alice. Apparently you’re dealing with Japan. Or is it Europe? It isn’t America, anyway, because Andrew’s doing that.”
Throughout, Lynden’s face was frozen into blankness. But now he started to laugh again. Once more the laugh was theatrical, but now, rather than the richness of a joke shared, the laughter was the laughter of a stage lunatic, of a ghoul, of a vampire, of a lost soul.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Love for Sale
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nbsp; IT HAD all gone wrong. Not horribly wrong, just wrong. Alice realized, as she left the room and wandered through the high corridors back to Books and her desk, that she had craved a dramatic last encounter with Lynden. She had wanted him to beseech; she had wanted to be tempted, and wanted to resist heroically that temptation. She knew it was wicked of her to want these things. It smacked, in its vanity and folly, of Kitty. Nevertheless, she had felt the need for an elaborate endpaper to signal the conclusion of her involvement with Lynden. What she did not want was whatever it was she had just experienced—a clumsy, awkward, embarrassing mess: no grandeur, no tragedy, not even an approach at closure, no satisfying clunk. She had imagined something like the moment of pure silence at the end of a symphony, after the last cymbal crash has died and before the eager chokers have time to insert their coughs. The part of her that could lose itself in fiction still thought that life ought to have a pattern, that people could, at least sometimes, say the right thing—right both in bearing some adequate relationship to their thoughts and in the more formal sense of sounding good. But the rational core in her knew she might as well try to paint white lines on the sea as to try to force life into the straitjacket of meaning.
The problem was that Lynden had not played his part. He just wouldn’t stay in the role that had been allotted to him. As this thought materialized and presented itself to her in all its absurdity, she stopped and let out a snorting laugh. It was the crudest noise she had made since she was a schoolgirl. That made her laugh even more. When she finally reached her desk she was wiping the tears away from her flushed cheeks.
“I shit you not, I will have that fucker,” said Andrew, looking at her and trembling with rage. “What has he done? What has he done?”
Alice hadn’t even noticed he was there, so bleary with laughter were her eyes. His chivalrous bluster was now more than she could take and she sank to her knees, unable even to reach the chair two feet away.
“People think because I work here that I must be some kind of nancy-boy, but they don’t know where I come from. And I don’t care how craggy he is, I’ll have him. Oh!” Andrew realized that the sobs were laughter, not weeping. “Okay. What’s the joke?”
Alice finally dragged herself up and sat on her chair. All her hard work in front of the mirror had been undone, and she looked, with her hair and face all a-scramble, like a Lapith ravished by a centaur.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I think I’ve just had what I think you’d probably call an epiphany.”
“What? Would I?”
“The thing is, I had my talk with Edward, and I was all set for a tragic and dramatic denouement, and then it never happened. Well, it may have happened for him, a bit. But it just all stopped looking sad to me. And then I sort of saw myself from the outside, and I realized I looked funny. You know, silly. I don’t understand how. I mean, all the facts are the same, but now everything’s different.”
“Mmm. Like the duck rabbit. Gestalt shift. All that. Come on, it’s your field. When you have a picture of a duck looking to the left, and then suddenly you see it as a rabbit looking right, with the beak becoming its ears. Stop laughing.”
“Can’t help it. Yes, just like the duck rabbit.”
At the repetition of duck rabbit, Andrew started laughing as well. “You won’t—um, mention about the—um, you know, threats to—”
“Have him?”
“Yeah. But—well, I was . . . I thought he’d been horrid to you or something.”
“No, I won’t tell anyone. And I thought it was sweet of you.”
“Well, well,” said Oakley, who’d sneaked up unawares. “I do like a good laugh and a joke at work, but there’s lots to be doing. Eleven now, sale kicks off in half an hour. Are the lines checked?” He wore a forced smile and looked tense.
“Yes, lines all checked,” said Andrew soberly. “I just popped back up here to do a last look at my e-mail.”
“And yours, Alice?”
“I’m—” she began, before Andrew cut in.
“Yes, all checked.”
Oakley looked uncertainly from face to face. “Good. Well, better get down there. And Alice, perhaps you could have a quick freshen-up—you look like you’ve been dragged through a—and there’re news cameras and crews and so forth. Lots of attention. First Audubon sale in the U.K. for . . . since . . . let’s all get down there, eh?”
The main auction room was filling up nicely. Andrew was always interested and amused by the startling variations in type and quality of buyer attracted to the different kinds of sale, although of course it would have been strange had they remained constant. Fine art pulled in the trendies to watch and the institutions to buy; pretty girls were not at all uncommon, although horribly outnumbered by gray men bidding for banks. Even within fine art there was a steady change in population; he could usually tell the period of the sale by spectacles alone: large steel-rimmed for the Renaissance, tortoiseshell for Victorian, rimless for modern. Furniture was older: blue-rinsed and tweedy. The men had port-reddened faces and small, black, shiny, expensive shoes; the women talked in voices like Roedean-educated klaxons. And naturally there’d be a few of the South Coast gays, up from Brighton for a day or two to snaffle a bureau at Enderby’s, leaving time, perhaps, to squeeze in a quick shag with a pliant boy in Soho, before retreating back to the grumpy long-term partner, whose looks and sphincter really weren’t what they once were.
Books tended to be very different and, generally, rather smellier. The joy of book auctions was that even an eminently covetable and collectable rare first edition might be had for a couple of hundred pounds, with plenty of less expensive but still desirable stuff for twenty or thirty quid. That meant ordinary people could get in on the game. Ordinary, that is, in relation to wealth; eccentric in most other respects. Weirdos of every hue proliferated: scholars with dirty collars, academics sans academia, twitchers, jerkers, mumblers, fumblers, frotteurs and felchers, experts on the Raj, collectors on the rampage. There was a curious anger about the book lot, a conviction that they were being diddled or fiddled or conned; a wariness about the other collectors; a suspicion of the sellers, of the auctioneers, of the world. Andrew had once helped preside over a sale of books about the so-called Great Game played by the world powers in nineteenth-century Afghanistan, at which one man had produced a huge antique blunderbuss from beneath a monumental overcoat and screamed, “I’ll show you a great game. I’ll show you a great game, Bang! Bang! Bang!,” the bangs emitting not from the burnished barrel of the beautiful brass weapon but from the pursed mouth of the wielder. It transpired later that the maniac had been driven over the edge by the discovery that his prized copy of Kipling’s Departmental Ditties, being neither that printed by the Civil and Military Gazette in Lahore in 1886 (£1,000), nor the edition produced in the same year in Calcutta by Thacker, Spink & Co (£250), but rather the 1890 Thacker & Co. of London edition, was relatively worthless. Yes, passions could rage high in the world of old books. As could the smell. What was it, Andrew often wondered, about book people that made them so neglect personal hygiene? Other types of obsessive managed to change their underwear, brush their teeth, and utilize efficient modern deodorants, so why not book collectors? Books themselves, of course, could often smell, so perhaps there was some semiconscious attempt at empathy. A brotherhood of mustiness and sticky crevices?
But this was not the usual book crowd, and no pall of odor hung over the room like mustard gas at Ypres. Yes, a reserve of six million quid would tend to keep out the great unwashed. And the Audubon was, anyway, more of an art thing than a book thing. So here was the art crowd, with the more fashionable section excised. Bird paintings were not, after all, at the cutting edge of anything, and so turtlenecks and shaven heads were as rare here as auk eggs. This left rather a bland and smug feel to the bidders. These were the dull wealthy, and the dull people who worked for the wealthily dull. But a crowd always had something for the connoisseur of amusing visages, and Andrew duly picked out women wit
h heads like cricket bats, and men with features crammed into the middle of their faces like rectums amid fleshy buttocks. He plucked at wattles and toyed with warts; he disarrayed meticulous comb-overs, and came over those in meticulous disarray.
The room held one hundred in reasonable comfort. The best chairs had been brought out, padded red velvet with carved gilt legs, but Andrew suspected that they weren’t as old as they were supposed to look. The walls were hung with paintings of surpassing Victorian tedium: portraits of elderly, Empire-building homosexuals and stout women in hats; invented landscapes that suggested a poverty of imagination of near cosmic proportions (oh, look, a cart horse; a hay wain; a tree; a sad-eyed doggy).
Thank Christ for Alice, he thought. She was sitting next to him at the desk along the side of the room where they were preparing to take the telephone bids. She had done something to put her hair and face right, and once again her rapturous beauty shone forth upon the world—or so he found himself thinking. He was happy that she had sloughed off the aristo, and even more pleased that she seemed so together about it. The new togetherness stemmed from her cathartic expedition to confront the Dead Boy’s grandmother. She had told him the story. He hadn’t the faintest idea what to say about it and so said nothing, which turned out to be exactly right.
Well, now, everything had been flushed through. No, that wouldn’t do. He didn’t like the thought of Alice as a WC, albeit a pretty Pre-Raphaelite sort of WC of the kind patronized by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, or Burne-Jones, or Millais, or the other one whose name he tended to forget. Ah, that was it, yes, she had been restored, like the Sistine Chapel ceiling, and now her true colors could shine through again. Much better, even though you could tell that all of Michelangelo’s women were really men in disguise, with their powerful torsos, thick waists, and wide-apart, deeply uninteresting breasts.
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