“Is that the one with a long-haired man gassing a parrot, while his family all gathers round and the children cry?”
“Yes. It’s actually one of my favorite paintings.”
“Bit hard to re-create on my own, though.”
“You could have teamed up; it’s what a lot of others are doing. But no, so not the Experiment with an Air Pump. What then?”
“You’re being coy, and so will I.”
With the party due to begin at five, the girls started to get ready at three-thirty, giggling their way in excited groups to the Ladies, whence they did not return. Alice was in the midst of them, laughing and pushing with the others, which charmed and delighted Andrew. It really did seem as though her burden had been shed. At four, Oakley emerged from his office, with Clerihew in attendance, carrying a bottle of cheap Spanish red wine.
“Quite enough slaving for one day,” he said, unnecessarily. “Time we all got in the party mood. Open up, please, Cedric, and let’s—er, party.”
Clerihew then made a meal of opening the bottle, and handing out paper cups to the ten or so men standing around, a group made up of three Toffs, three Swots, an Oik, and two porters.
“Can’t wait to see what the girls come back in,” Oakley continued, trying to make conversation. “Lovely peacocks that they—er, are.”
“I think you’ll find that the peacocks—the colorful ones—are the boys. The lady peacocks—I mean peahens—are brown.”
“Thanks for that piece of pedantry, Cedric,” replied Oakley, clearly annoyed. Another two bottles of what one of the Toffs described, audibly, as rank Diego juice, appeared and were consumed primarily by the porters and Andrew. The others were discriminating enough to know that they were about to have something very much better down in the party proper.
Andrew spent the time chatting with the porters and Cartwright the map man, whom he still hadn’t really got to know, and who proved to be a little dull when you got him off his home ground of maps and very dull when he stuck to it. Still, nice enough fellow, and he laughed at your jokes, which was all you could hope for, ultimately. Andrew had always got on well with the porters, at least the younger ones. The older porters tended to look on any expert not wearing pinstripes as having somehow let them all down. They were the upholders of the ancient traditions: Stay at your station, keep your eye on the fuzzy-wuzzies, worship the Queen, officers know best, anything other than cheese and pickle on your sandwich means you’re a Bolshevik child-molesting bum bandit. But the younger ones were okay as long as you kept to sport and girls and what a cunt Oakley was, which Andrew was always happy to do.
Eventually, after most of the drinkers had gone themselves to dress for the party, Oakley found his way round to Andrew.
“I wonder if we perhaps might—ah, have a little, you know.”
“Sure. Want to glory in this morning’s triumph?” Andrew was already a little drunk.
“Well, that is actually it—what I want to talk about, I mean.”
Oakley was sounding, as he often did when under pressure or stressed, as if his language chip had been damaged. Andrew noticed that one of the wings of his mustache was slightly shorter than the other. A practical joke, perhaps, from a barber, annoyed by years of tipless snipping? Or maybe Mrs. Oakley did him in the bath, along with his ear and nose bristles. And overcome, perhaps, by passion, she’d climbed in with him and worked the cheap bubble bath into an ecstasy of foaming froth with her powerful abdominal flexing before she’d properly finished the job. Andrew shuddered.
“Could have happened to anyone. Fucking up completely like that. My sympathy is entirely with you. Bleed for you, in fact.”
“I’m not entirely blind to irony, you know.”
“Shouldn’t that be deaf? Anyway, that wasn’t irony. That was sarcasm.”
Oakley did an elaborate I’ll ignore that shrug. “I’m sure you’ll appreciate that what happened could hardly be lain at my—in any way attributed to . . . However, the events and circumstances could, I think, and if I were you then I would be forced to agree with my analysis on this, be said to stem from, if not originate in—er, with Alice.”
“What are you talking about?” Despite the gobbledygook, Andrew had a fair idea.
“Look, I’ll be quite clear on this. There are two reports I could write about the unfortunate events of this morning. Could write and, in actuality, have written. The first sets out the romantic entanglement of Alice with Lynden as what ultimately undermined and led to the abortive failure of the sale. The unprofessional conduct, the leading on and fickle rejection of, spurning, and so forth that all of us saw undergoing. I have, of course, sought and found corroboration of these facts from the testimony of witnesses closely involved.”
No need, thought Andrew, to wonder who they might be.
“And,” he continued, “I am quite prepared to see that this was compounded by the administrative oversight in not pursuing more actively the administrative norms and procedures, albeit that the administrators involved could hardly be expected to anticipate that a lover’s tiff would jeopardize the fulfillment of the arrangements.”
So, Alice was to be stitched up for the mess. Andrew supposed that she presented an easier target than he did.
“You said you’d written two reports,” he said hollowly.
“Two, yes. The second sets out a slightly different emphasis, and one which, frankly, disguises any errors committed by your colleague or colleagues unnamed, by which I mean Alice. It stresses the strenuous efforts undertaken by the Books management team to gain the usual guarantees and contractual arrangements from the vendor and his continual prevarication. The delicacy of the issue is also greatly stressed, his highly strung temperament and so forth. But great potential gains also to be taken into account. No one directly responsible for the mental breakdown or erratic behavior of the vendor. And I would be prepared to bear upon my shoulders the responsibility for any errors of minor judgment committed by my staff. That’s simply the kind of manager that I am. It, the enterprise, was a brave gamble that, in the final analysis, did not come off. We are risk-takers here, and occasionally those who live by the . . . will also perish by it. After all, who would not rather be, if you’ll allow me a classical allusion, Ganymede flying too near the sun than—er, someone else altogether who didn’t try in the first place. Getting near the sun or, for that matter, airborne in the sky at all.”
“It was Icarus who flew too near the sun. Ganymede was a shepherd boy taken up by an eagle to be royally fucked by Zeus. I believe I know the feeling.”
Oakley ignored the comment. “The advantages to this route are not only that Alice will be exonerated, at least in the main part, when the issue is considered, but others might also benefit.”
“Yeah, you.”
“Not only or even particularly me. Of course, this second interpretation of the events requires a degree of unanimity from those involved, directly or indirectly. And you know that the panel will shortly adjourn to decide, at long last, I may say, on the replacement for Mr. Crumlish. There are already front-runners for that position. Team players. Safe pairs of hands. I have to say that, at the moment, you are not necessarily seen as such. Talented, naturally, but not a team player. However, I will be writing reports for those who wish to put themselves forward for the post from within Books, and should you see fit to come into agreement with the line I propose, any qualms I might have entertained about your team-playing capabilities would be shelved, if not refuted. And with a good report from me, or at least in the absence of a report highlighting your weaknesses, you’ll be on a level playing field with the other candidates and your . . . flair might well show itself to good effect before the panel.”
So, there it was. Back up Oakley and save Alice and do himself a favor, all at the same time. Everyone’s a winner. So why did it make him feel sick to his stomach? For a moment he considered a flamboyant gesture, but it wasn’t fair to be flamboyant with someone else’s life. And anyway, he�
�d always had a streak of pragmatism. There was simply nothing to be gained by rejecting Oakley’s suggestion. Oakley had the ear of the Americans. And wasn’t there just enough truth in the allegation that Alice’s shenanigans with Lynden had had something to do with his withdrawal to engage the neutrals? Something in him almost admired the way that Oakley had pulled this one out of the fire; he made a mental note to remember that being an arse didn’t necessarily make you an idiot. He didn’t say anything, but the slump in his shoulders was all Oakley needed to see to tell him he had won his victory.
“Good, good. Now we can all really enjoy ourselves tonight.”
“What are you going as?” said Andrew. He tried to convince himself that he was just making conversation to tear himself away from the unpleasantness of the necessary choice he had made, but deep down he knew he had simply become another lickspittle.
Clerihew, the only other person still in the room, looked over and smiled at him, a smile of complicity and fellowship.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
The Last Party
THE TEARS that Alice had shed the night before were unlike any others that had fallen from her eyes with such unnerving regularity over the past year. These weren’t tears of sorrow or sadness, not tears of desperation or hopelessness. She wasn’t crying over the love that she had lost, or the loss of her love.
No.
She was crying, her face screwed up into a bitter conch of anguish, because she couldn’t think of anything to wear to the party, and the knowledge that she was upset by something so trivial did not help at all. The problem was that this so wasn’t her thing. There were two reasonable illustrated histories of art in the flat and she spent an hour going through them, convinced she would find something. But no. Everything seemed either too outlandish or too dull or, more to the point, unachievable, given her limited resources of time and money.
“Stupid, stupid girl,” said Odette, into Alice’s ear. “If you’d asked me a week ago I might have been able to think of something. But for tomorrow? Are you mad? Have you tried calling Jodie? She knows more about this sort of thing than we do.”
So Alice called Jodie. They hadn’t spoken for weeks, so Alice had to put up with all kinds of gush before they got to the point.
“Based on art? What a silly idea. Shame you’ve got arms.”
“What?”
“Venus de Milo, darling.”
“Please, be serious.”
“Mona Lisa?”
“No. There’ll be hundreds of those.”
“Have you got anything eighteenth-century-looking? You could go as something by Reynolds or one of those French artists who painted little girls on swings. Fragonard, was it, or Boucher?”
“I haven’t got anything eighteenth-century. How would I have anything eighteenth-century? Have you? Could I borrow?”
“No, sorry.”
Alice had to put up with two more minutes of pleasantries before she could go and get stuck into her cry. But she did manage to tell Jodie about her plans.
There was a knock at the bedroom door. Kitty came in without waiting for an answer. She wore the look of someone scraping old vegetables from the back of the fridge.
“What’s wrong with you?” she asked accusingly.
Alice told her.
Kitty’s face changed. “What a simply wonderful idea,” she said. Alice looked up from her forearms, stained with smudgy black, and saw that Kitty was smiling. Smiling in a way that Alice had never, she honestly thought, seen before. Not the pinched, forced smile that she remembered Kitty firing at her father whenever he said or thought the wrong thing. Not the half-mad smile she would use when recounting some mythical adventure or crazed plan. This was a full, broad grin, which dragged in the thin white skin around her eyes. Despite the unaccustomed crinkling, she looked younger and softer and, for as long as it lasted, sane.
“I have exactly the thing.”
“What do you mean?” Alice couldn’t bring herself to hope. The idea surely couldn’t be practical, real, could it?
“Wait just where you are. No, don’t do that. Go and splash some water on your face first. You look like you’ve been ravished.”
Alice went half sulkily, half hopefully, to the bathroom and stared at herself in the mirror as she waited for the water to run hot. Something about the face that gazed back at her caught her attention, and rather than the usual quick look to make sure there wasn’t a bird’s nest on the back of her head, or the brief scientific check as she raced around her mouth with the good-value lipstick she always bought from Boots (stocking up whenever they had a three-for-two offer), this became a long, appraising, attentive gaze. How many times had she done that in her life? Not more than three. And never before had she liked what she had found. Now she took in her eyes and her hair and her nose and her lips and her cheeks and her neck, and she saw that they were good, as eyes and hair and nose and lips and cheeks and necks went. Perhaps better than good. And that was despite the redness and the smudges from the recent tears. And she could also see that there was a unity about them all, a pulling-in-the-same-direction that further added to the effect. But she could never see, because it required a fonder gaze than she would ever manage, that there was something special that transfigured her, over and above these routine facts of facial geometry and harmony, the thing that Andrew had once, happily, thought of as the ghost in her machine.
Notwithstanding such intangible spectral presences, the discovery that she was pretty delighted her. She had known that she must be not unattractive because of the attention she had received from Lynden and Andrew, but that knowledge was both negative, in that it simply ruled out actual ugliness, and remote, in that it was an intuition about how others perceived her. Now she saw and felt it for herself. All the factors that had made vanity impossible for her throughout her life were still in place: She couldn’t and wouldn’t shrug off her history. But now she could see the truth of herself. And who could resist the thrill of pleasure upon such a realization?
But still she had nothing wear.
Water was splashed; teeth and hair were brushed.
Kitty called out as she walked back to her room, “I’m in here. Come and see. Are your hands clean?”
Alice usually never went into her mother’s room. Even when she was a child it had been a forbidden zone, full of things that must never be touched. Of course she had sneaked in more than once to finger the complex facets of the scent bottles, to caress the powder puffs and stroke the necklaces. But her favorite place had always been her father’s study. She remembered holding his leg as he typed reports with one finger, caressing her hair with his free hand.
It was laid out on the bed. Alice thought she’d never seen anything so beautiful.
“How . . .” she said. “What . . . ?”
“My mother had it made for her in the twenties when he was all the rage, even here. I wanted to wear it for my coming out, but she . . . she thought it wasn’t right for me. I did try it on once, and it made me feel like a work of art come to life. But that was back in the—well, a little while ago now.”
“But surely it won’t fit me if you wore it.”
“Nonsense. I was going through one of my plump phases. Anyway, it’s not exactly close-fitting, is it? But before we do anything else, I want to have a go at those eyebrows of yours. I’ve been meaning to for years now. Can’t have you going to the ball looking like a werewolf, can we now?”
After half an hour of agonizing plucking (Alice was an eyebrow virgin), Kitty seemed satisfied. It was the most intimate experience Alice had ever shared with her mother. Odd how pain, one inflicting, one suffering, had, if not brought them together, brought them a little closer. But before she tried on the dress, there were some things Alice wanted to say.
“Mummy, do you remember I told you what I was going to do?”
“Of course I remember. Do you think I’m senile? No. Mrs. Solomon in number forty-five, she’s got the first signs. I spoke to her son, wh
o I don’t believe is a doctor, and he said she couldn’t remember the name of her hairdresser.”
“But do you think you’ll be all right? Because if you won’t be, I can change my plans.”
“Why wouldn’t I be all right? I think I’ve earned my freedom, don’t you?”
“Yes,” said Alice. She thought she’d earned her freedom.
IT WAS ALL ruined for Andrew. He’d been looking forward to the party all year, and now it was going to be crap. He went to the bogs. There were two other people there: a Laughing (or was it Gay?) Cavalier, trying to stick on his fine curling mustaches, and an angel, who Andrew assumed to be Gabriel hotfooting it to an Annunciation, but he couldn’t even guess at the painting or artist. Both cavalier and angel were exuberantly plumed.
He stood in front of the mirror and took, from his jacket pocket, a rubber shark. To be precise it was two severed halves of a rubber shark, conjoined by eight inches of curved, springy metal. He weighed it in his hands for a few moments, considering whether it should go side to side, Napoleon style, or front-to-back like Wellington. He tried it on both ways. Napoleon, definitely Napoleon.
“Oh, very good. I say, yes. It’s that shark chappie, isn’t it. Daniel Hurst? Mmm, eh?”
“Yes,” said Andrew, back to the cavalier. “And you’re Courbet’s Origin of the World, are you?”
The night before, Andrew had been talking over his ideas on the phone to Leo. He liked the Shark but suggested Courbet’s Origin.
“What is it?”
“A big hairy, to put no finer point on it, cunt. It’s in the d’Orsay, you heathen.”
“Courbet’s what?” said the cavalier, looking worried. “No, the Laughing Cavalier, actually. Do you think people won’t realize? Did this Courbet fellow paint cavaliers?”
“Big hairy c—Never mind.”
But Andrew’s spirits had already started to lift again. By the time he hit the top of the sweeping stairway to the ground floor, he was raring to go. This may have been helped along somewhat by the fat line of coke he ineptly snorted after the Angel Gabriel and Laughing Cavalier (not looking very cheerful) had left. The coke was a birthday gift from an acquaintance, and was strictly against Andrew’s principles: He didn’t like what drugs did to the local economies of the producer countries; he didn’t like the fact that buying drugs meant, at some stage in the process, giving money to bad or very bad people; he didn’t like the general smugness and complaisancy of those who took them, perfectly encapsulated by the insistence on crisp new money as a siphon. He had only indulged twice before, faintly boring himself on both occasions. But, when all was said and done, this was a present, and he was loath to throw it away: Free stuff was not to be sniffed at. And so the tiny wrap had stayed in his pocket for four months (did cocaine go off? did it lose its potency? no, it transpired) until now, finding its way via the blood vessels in his nose to the pleasure zones of his temporal lobes, or whichever crinkly part of the brain it was that dealt with that sort of thing.
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