Alice's Secret Garden

by Rebecca Campbell

  Odette had only three close friends: Frankie, a psychiatric nurse, Jodie, an all-kinds-of-things, but currently an interior decorator, and Alice, the focus of her current, highly atypical concern.

  Alice was the last to join the group. It had begun years before when Jodie, Odette and Frankie, who’d met at college, had taken an early season bargain holiday to Mykonos, unaware that its reputation as a party island was qualified by the fact that most of those partying, back in those days, were gay men. Frankie had spent two fruitless nights attempting to convert the impeccably turned out and exquisitely toned clubbers to the joys of heterosexual love, as Jodie and Odette rolled their eyes and consoled themselves with the lovely view of the harbour, when they spied the darkly attractive young woman evidently on holiday with her mother. They took pity on the girl, and dragged her out with them, despite her protestations that she must look after Mummy. What followed was two weeks of first shy, then warm, and finally hilarious bonding. As so often, the injection of new blood reinvigorated the gang, as the relations between them all shifted subtly. The nights were spent dancing, and perfect days followed, dozing on the beach, lulled by the shushing of the sea. Frankie moved on, with more success, to the locals, but the focus remained themselves. At the end they all agreed it was the best, just utterly and completely the best ever. Even Kitty had enjoyed herself, and was quite content to see Alice disappear with her new friends, leaving her among the polite and handsome young men of Mykonos.

  From the beginning Alice had always, of course, been a little odd. It was part of her charm, one of the reasons why they loved her. She was the one who, when their little group of friends would meet for a drink or a meal, would jolt them from their discussion of house prices and handbags with a dreamy soliloquy about beauty or truth or the extinction of a rare species of gaily-coloured mollusc, once indigenous to one of the scattered islands of the Indian Ocean, but now gone forever.

  Odd, but not this odd.

  It had begun back in the spring, not too long after Alice had joined, to everyone’s amazement, that toffee-nosed auction house. She hardly now ever said anything, just sat and smiled. Or sat and didn’t smile. She’d recently missed two of their regular get-togethers, and when she came to the last meeting, coffee and cakes for lunch at Vals in Soho, she sat throughout the hour-and-a-half of gossip silent but for a blank ‘no, fine’ when Jodie had asked her, without really thinking about it, sometime around the halfway point, if anything was the matter. More significantly, Alice, normally an enthusiastic scoffer of pastries, had left untouched the tarte au citron she had murmuringly ordered.

  Among the four of them, Odette was the one who was known for her ability to miss the subtle (or not so subtle) moods of the others, to fail to spot a new hair colour, or romance. But it was she who said to the other two, once Alice slipped away (‘my … I have work … I must go’):

  ‘There’s something wrong with Alice.’

  ‘Alice?’ said Frankie. ‘Yes of course there is. She’s fucking mental.’ One of Frankie’s ‘things’ was too throw around unpleasantly derogatory terms for the mentally ill. ‘It’s why we love her.’ She smiled her smile, defiantly showing the gap between her two front teeth. She was dressed in her usual costume of long, flapping skirt and bat-like membranous top; a combination which emphasised her enormous presence. Her nails were painted deep purple, a shade lighter than was normal for her (‘just felt like something sunshiny today’). Frankie had chosen her career largely because it would annoy her parents, Oxford academics who could never see the point of sullying themselves with anything that happened outside college life. Frankie was huge, not at all overweight, but just impressively tall and wide and looming, and her personality succeeded in entirely filling her frame. Her long dark-blonde hair writhed and squirmed over her shoulders, with occasional forays skywards. She’d been amusing them all (but for Alice) with another story about her complex and adventurous love life, and, like all of her stories, it had ended with her face down in a gutter, moaning and railing, legs splayed, knickers nowhere to be found. She’d used the opportunity to say again that if Odette was the brains of their little group, Alice the heart, and Jodie the pretty little sling-back mules, then she, Frankie, was its pelvis.

  ‘No, not wrong in general,’ said Odette, ‘wrong now. And not just now. For months.’

  ‘You mean because she’s been quiet?’ said Jodie, delicately wiping the corner of her mouth with a little finger. ‘But you know she just is quiet sometimes.’

  Jodie was a chameleon, able to look at home wherever she found herself. She was wearing a simple blue dress that might well look cheap and cheerful to anyone not used to spending a thousand pounds on an outfit. But those who knew, knew.

  ‘Not quiet like this.’

  ‘Well, I suppose she was a bit funny, even for her. I know, she’s in love!’ That was Frankie’s explanation for everything, except where people were in love, in which case she would cynically invoke lust or economics.

  ‘If it’s love it doesn’t seem to be making her very happy.’

  ‘Does it ever, for anyone?’ said Jodie, wistfully, although it had, in fact, made her perfectly happy, coming as it did in her case with a pretty house in Sevenoaks and an angst-free Platinum Amex.

  ‘I think she’d have told us about it if there was someone new. I mean someone at all. It’s not as if there’ve been many,’ said Frankie. She immediately regretted saying that as it could apply equally to Odette, and she certainly hadn’t meant to be bitchy.

  Odette picked up her bag. ‘I don’t think it’s love. Not the ordinary sort, anyway. I’m going after her.’

  ‘She’ll be long gone, you’ll never catch her,’ said Jodie or Frankie, or both together; Odette wasn’t listening.

  Running from the café, she turned left towards Piccadilly. Luckily, she just caught sight of Alice’s dark hair bobbing down the street.

  ‘Hi, Alice,’ she said when she reached her, a little out of breath. ‘I thought I’d walk this way with you.’

  Alice looked at her with what might have been suspicion in her eyes. It was something that Odette had never seen there before.

  ‘Well … I was just … yes, walk with me, of course.’

  ‘Alice, there’s something wrong. You’re behaving so strangely. I’m worried.’

  That wasn’t supposed to have happened: she’d so meant to be subtle. But something about Alice made strategies useless.

  ‘You shouldn’t worry.’

  ‘Look, Alice, I have to get back to work, but can’t we meet one evening? Just the two of us – not the others. You know, the thing is, I’d like to talk … to get your advice about something. If it’s easier for you I can come to your flat …’

  ‘No! Not there. Sorry, I didn’t mean to … I don’t mind where we meet.’

  Odette named a wine bar in neutral territory, and they arranged to meet in two days. They kissed stiffly as they parted.

  Perhaps Odette’s greater than usual sensitivity was a consequence of the recent developments in her own love life – these developments had been the main talking points of the girls over the coffee and cakes. The key to Odette’s career success had been the ruthless excision of the superfluous. She had trimmed from her life all that was not central: anything frivolous, wasteful, unproductive, weak, and among those things abandoned as inessential was romance. There had been a single, unsatisfactory relationship at university with a lecturer, drawn by her intensity and unexpected willingness to be educated. Since then nothing, unless you were to count the single date with a man who claimed to make scale models of Stonehenge to sell as garden furniture.

  But now, at twenty-eight, Odette decided that it was time to act. Her group outside work, sensibly-shoed Alice and the other girls, and the few helpless boys she knew, busy trying to be Something in the Arts, offered nothing promising: she abhorred the idea of a milksop. She wanted a man whose ideas would challenge her own, someone who would stand up to her, someone who could make her p
roud and, yes, perhaps even a little fearful. Someone with a cock ramrod hard and piston fast. Well, not perhaps the last, which Frankie had helpfully added to her list.

  It had to be work. That was where the agreeably packaged testosterone lived. But she had to choose carefully. Anyone superior was out of the question: she could not bear the thought that the office gossips would say she was finally using her sex as a crowbar. She knew most of her close colleagues far too well to make them interesting in that way. And anyone too junior would create all kinds of moral and aesthetic problems.

  But then there had arrived the new boy, Matthew Mindbrace, the one who everyone had difficulty in placing precisely. He was spoken of as a loose cannon, or rogue elephant, or sometimes as a loose elephant. It was rumoured that he may have been brought in to ‘sort the wheat from the chaff’. He still carried with him the fresh bloom of Harvard Business School. Bright, everyone agreed on that. Carefully cut unruly hair, forever loosening itself from the imprisoning gel, which suggested a passionate nature only with difficulty suppressed. He’d smiled a shy, dimply smile at Odette on his first day, and she responded with her own modest work smile, a smile in which the corners of her mouth turned very slightly down, rather than up.

  ‘Hi, I’m Matt,’ he’d said, in an accent that was impossible to pin down, but may have been English. ‘I’m told you’re the Oracle. Or is it the Sybil? I get confused with my Greeks and Romans.’

  Odette wasn’t sure if she was being laughed at. What was the Sybil? She had a feeling it may have been some kind of hag. She thought about making a witty reply, and then said, ‘If it’s a matter of orientation, I should go to Mr Henshaw,’ before returning her attention to the yen.

  But that had been two months ago, and now she found that she wanted a boyfriend.

  ‘Matt,’ she wrote in her email, ‘I’d like to discuss some issues with you in the Blackfriar tonight at seven.’

  The evening was awkward, despite the wine. Matt turned out to have a surprisingly inadequate bladder, and kept disappearing to the gents, leaving Odette alone in the busy pub. But at eleven o’clock they went back to her flat in Putney and made love twice, painfully.

  All things considered, a comparatively successful first date.

  She’d mentioned Matt in passing during the lunch, half hoping that one of the girls would pick up on it, as she didn’t want to make any ‘I’ve got a new boyfriend’ type public declarations, just in case things didn’t work out. And of course Jodie did, to good-natured whoops of encouragement, and crude (ironic-crude, naturally, rather than crude-crude) suggestions. She’d downplayed the weak bladder.

  But joking with the whole gang wasn’t quite what she wanted, and the quiet meeting with Alice seemed like a much better opportunity to talk through strategies and feelings and fears. It would also, she surmised, help to draw out Alice, giving her the opportunity to share her thoughts reciprocally, rather than have them extracted by emotional dentistry.

  The wine bar was studiedly neutral, any suggestion of character or individuality rigorously bleached away. They were both on time. This was quite usual for Odette, who despaired at the modern idea that half an hour late didn’t count as late at all. Alice had always (even in her pre-Dead Boy period) been more erratic, as likely to arrive pointlessly early as extravagantly late. Odette immediately sensed that something – she shied away from the term, which was very unOdettish, but it kept coming back to her – something momentous was going to take place. She ran through the possibilities: Alice was gay; Alice was taking the veil; Alice was dying from a rare blood disease. They ordered a bottle of something white and sat down. Odette squeezed Alice’s hand, and decided to begin by sharing her feelings.

  ‘Do you mind if I tell you about my boy?’

  Alice’s eyes opened a little more widely, as if she’d just seen some unexpected nudity in the middle of a Jane Austen adaptation.

  ‘Yes, of course. I’d like that.’ Alice hadn’t taken part in the discussion during lunch, but she’d picked up that Odette had a new lover.

  ‘I work with him. I like him. I don’t know, but I think he might be … well, I hate to use the cliché, but you know sometimes you have to … the one.’

  Alice smiled. ‘What’s he like?’

  ‘Well, he’s American, but he was brought up in England. Or English and brought up in America. I’ve been trying to piece it together, but he doesn’t talk much about himself. It’s one of his better qualities. He’s very good-looking, in that preppy kind of way I don’t like, except with him. He’s quite funny. You know, observationally funny, not jokes or anything.’ All that came out at breakneck speed.

  ‘Oh, Odette, I’m really pleased. You’ve been waiting so long for this.’

  ‘I haven’t really. I mean, been waiting. That implies I was just hanging round, twiddling my thumbs like a desperate spinster until Mr Right showed up. That’s not me; that’s the opposite of me. It’s only been the past couple of months that … well, you know, biological clocks and all that. Or maybe just boredom. There’s got to be more to life than spreadsheets and ER. I’d forgotten about how exciting it, you know, sex, can be, how it takes your mind off all the everyday crap. I so don’t care if the yoghurt’s past its sell-by date, or if Starbucks have messed up my morning latte, or if my mum’s said something stupid. It’s wonderful. But I’d also forgotten about the fear.’

  ‘The fear?’ Alice spoke as though she knew something about fear.

  ‘Yes, you know the losing-them fear. I was fine before without him, but now … well, it’d be awful to have to go back to … to what I did … I had before.’

  Alice felt little electric jolts whenever something Odette said connected with her own feelings. Electric jolts separated by an ugly void. Alice knew that she was in danger of failing in friendship, failing to see the other as anything but an echoing chamber for her own obsessions. It was partly her horror and revulsion at this failure that had driven Alice further towards reclusion: better, surely, to inch herself out of the world of human love and friendship than to stand damned for her emotional autism? And she had a place to which she could retreat: into the dark arms of her boy, her demon lover, ageless in his underworld.

  But it was different with Odette. At some level she realised that Odette’s declaration was part of an attempt to reach out to her, an invitation to join in with a revelation of her own. And how she wanted to share. She looked at Odette’s sensible, boyish, pretty face and succumbed to a sudden surge of love, which subsided to leave the tips of her fingers thrumming gently.

  ‘Odette, you’re such a wonderful person. Why should this boy …’

  ‘Matt.’

  ‘… this boy, Matt, ever want to leave you? You’re the cleverest, sensiblest … prettiest person I know.’

  The prettiest may not have been strictly correct, but it had, for Alice, an emotional truth.

  ‘That’s incredibly sweet of you, Alice. But the trouble is that no man ever stayed with a woman because she was sensible or clever …’

  ‘You’re leaving out pretty.’

  Odette brushed it away. ‘Whatever. And somehow I feel that he’s not really committed to me. That makes it sound as though I want … well. All I mean is that I can’t help feeling he just sees me as a bit of a fling, as a way of keeping his hand in until something or someone else comes along. There. Oh God, I sound like a typical female whiner. I’ll be writing to Marie Claire next.’

  Alice laughed. ‘Don’t worry, being in love … oh, I didn’t mean to assume that you love him, I just meant …’

  ‘It’s all right, go on; we’ll use “love” as a general term covering all emotional, romantic or sexual feelings directed towards another person. Scientific enough for you?’

  ‘Quite scientific enough. Everyone’s allowed to go a bit mad when they’re in love. I know … I know that I have.’

  There it was. She’d said it. They both knew that once the first words had been spoken, the whole story would inevitably eme
rge. But Odette was anxious not to ruin things by forcing the issue. She waited for a few seconds to see if anything would emerge, and when it didn’t, she said:

  ‘So then, what do you think I should do?’

  ‘You mean to … what? Help things along a little?’

  ‘Yes, I think that’s what I mean.’

  Alice’s eyes came alive. She was delighted to have been asked for her advice, especially by Odette, to whom she had always ever so slightly looked up.

  ‘Perhaps you don’t have to do anything. Perhaps you’re already doing exactly what you should be doing. Just being you.’

  ‘I know that’s sensible. It’s exactly what I’d say to you … to someone else in the same situation. But you must trust me: that won’t work here. Something needs to be injected, some, I don’t know, glamour, or something. Something urgent … special … magical.’

  ‘Heavens, Odette,’ said Alice, laughing again. ‘You’ve so come to the wrong person for advice about that sort of thing. I know even less, I mean less than you, about love and boys and things.’

  ‘But I think you know about magic.’

  They both paused and looked at each other, glasses symmetrically raised at chin height. Then Alice had an inspiration.

  ‘Oh, if it’s magic you want, why not take him to Venice?’

  ‘Venice! I’ve never been. Isn’t it a huge cliché?’

  ‘Well, I’ve only been once, but it’s just so miraculously beautiful, treated as an object. And I don’t even mean the galleries, although you shouldn’t miss the Academia. I went with the school. The canals were smelly, and horrid men pinched your bottom, and leered, but nothing could take away from the wonder of it. If it’s romance and magic you want, Venice has to be the place.’

  ‘Well, it’s certainly an idea. And what else am I supposed to spend my bonus on? It may just be that you’re a genius, Alice Duclos. You must know more about love than you claim.’