Alice drained her glass and looked down at the polished wooden table.
‘Odette, when you asked the other day if I was okay, if anything was wrong, I should have told you about the … thing that happened.’
‘Alice darling, you know you don’t have to tell me anything you don’t want to. You don’t owe me a confidence because I told you about Matt.’
‘I know. It isn’t that. I think I do want to tell you. I can’t talk to Mummy about it. Not yet. Probably not ever. And there’s nobody else. The thing is that I’m in love with a dead boy. I saw him killed. He was knocked down close to the office. We looked at each other just before the car hit him. He smiled and closed his eyes. It sounds insane, but I know that he loved me in those moments before he died. His face was so peaceful, so beautiful. Odette, I can’t ever forget him. Every night I dream about him. Whenever I close my eyes, he’s there. I know him better than I know any living person. He’s in me like blood.’
The noise, even the light, from the bar were instantly shut out. The table became the centre of a tiny universe, with nothing but the two of them centred there. Odette tried hard to keep the shock from showing in her face. This explained everything. And so was Alice genuinely mad after all? This kind of obsession was so far beyond her experience, her understanding. But Alice seemed to be able to function perfectly well, apart from the distance, the growing isolation. And wasn’t her love for this dead boy just an extreme form of the kind of intoxication they all felt when in love? Oh God, what to do, what to do? For Alice’s sake, she must be sensible, she must be practical.
‘Did you ever try to find out who he was?’
‘Try? … No. How could I? Why should I?’
‘Perhaps it might help?’ What Odette meant was perhaps it might help to get him out of your system. It wasn’t much, but it was something.
Alice’s thoughts went on a different track. Help, perhaps, to know him more. Help to deepen and strengthen her love.
‘But I don’t know how to find things out about people, about people who …’
‘I don’t think it’s very hard. I have a friend, an acquaintance really, a journalist. I’m sure she could find out. It’s the sort of thing they do. When and where did he … was the accident?’
Alice told her, unhesitatingly. The date, the time, the place: all were cauterised in her memory.
And so it was agreed that Odette would ask her journalist to find out what she could about the Dead Boy. Alice felt a curious and not unpleasant numbness, the sort of vagueness she felt after her exams, but before the results had come out. It carried her through the next two weeks, until Odette called her.
Kitty answered the phone, and called out a simple, brutal ‘You,’ before leaving the phone dangling in the hall.
‘He was a refugee from Bosnia. He came in 1991 as a fifteen-year-old, and so he was twenty-four. There’s an address and a phone number. I don’t know how Sarah managed to get that; boy, she’s good.’
Alice wrote everything down in her red velvet address book.
‘Thank you, Odette. This … matters a lot to me.’
‘What will you do?’
‘I don’t know. What did you do about Venice?’
‘Venice? Well, I’ve booked it! It was such a great idea. I’d love to talk tactics with you.’
But before they had the chance to speak, Kitty called out: ‘Alice, you’ve been gossiping for long enough. I am expecting a very important call.’ Alice knew that she wasn’t; or at least that the expectation was false. But it was futile to argue.
‘Yes, tactics. We’ll talk tactics.’
FIVE
The Prior History of Andrew Heathley
Andrew was sitting with his last surviving college friend, Leo Kurtz, in the Red Dragon of Glendower, a public house in Finsbury Park equally inconvenient for both of them but possessed of certain pleasant associations and, crucially, lacking a jukebox. The principal pleasant association was Zoë, a barmaid who’d worked there for one golden summer two years previously and who was, they both instantly decided, the most beautiful girl in London. Zoë had gone, returning to a course in Media Studies at Manchester University, but had left behind her a sweet white radiance which lifted the grimy old pub into a sort of Parthenon in their eyes.
Leo had a face made for swashbuckling villainy, long and slightly twisted, as if flinching from the light slap of a woman’s gloved hand. His hair, black and thick, stood proudly on his head like the bristles on a goaded boar. He wore a black polo-neck jumper, recklessly challenging all comers to fuck off and read Being and Nothingness before they thought to interrupt his flow. Both Leo and Andrew were nursing pints of soapy brown fluid, mumbled complaints against which took up approximately one-third of all their conversation. At the moment, however, the object of their discourse was the new quiz machine, installed by the brewery in an unwelcome attempt to move with the times. A large figure was hunched over the glowing screen, which was clearly visible to Andrew and Leo. Leo was in full flow, his long face oscillating between extreme animation and a sort of laminated inertia. His voice, when not deliberately made sinister or mocking, or contorted with bile, had a surprising depth and beauty.
‘It’s all to do with the compartmentalisation of knowledge. You see that fop’ – one of Leo’s commoner terms of abuse, not intended to suggest dandyism or effeminacy, merely irrelevance – ‘just got the right date for the Battle of Waterloo. He had the choice of 1066, 1745, 1815 and 1939. He’s probably played that thing a thousand times, and he’s tried all the other options, and he knows that the right answer, the answer that lets him carry on, is 1815.’
‘So what?’ Andrew was usually up for this sort of thing, but tonight his mind was occupied with other matters.
‘So what? So what? Don’t you see that 1815, one of the most crucial years in European, no, fuck it, in world history, has become nothing more than the answer to the question, What year was the Battle of Waterloo? All of the complex historical reality, the treaties, the lives, the pain, the power, it’s all gone. All that’s left is the simple question and the simple answer.’
‘So what?’
‘Don’t you get it? It’s the end of any kind of organic understanding of our society. All these facts are shaken loose of their true social setting and given a new context, the context of the quiz. What was the real context of the Battle of Waterloo? Revolution, the Terror, the rise of Napoleon, blahdy blah and then the restoration of the Bourbons, and the general crushing of dissent and reform up to 1848. But now how does that guy, and almost anyone else that ever comes up against the date 1815, see it?’
‘I strongly fear and suspect that I’m about to find out.’
Leo paused for a megalithic second, considered asking Andrew exactly what the fuck was the matter with him, and then compelled by the momentum of his analysis went on:
‘The setting now, the context is: which Spice Girl had the first solo number one? And, which Coronation Street character fathered an illegitimate baby in 1968? And which was the first English team to complete the FA Cup and League Double? You see, it’s all isolated fragments, cut out of their setting. That’s what trivia means. In the old days we had general knowledge, and it might have been the reserve of dullards, but at least it was all about connecting up. Now we have trivia and it’s all about …’
‘The trivial?’
‘Exactly. Look, just what the fuck is the matter with you?’
‘Me? Nothing, I’m just not in the mood to play tutorials. Save it for your students.’
‘Ah, I see. It’s chick-related. Is it still the weird girl in the office?’
‘What weird girl? There isn’t a weird girl.’
‘You know who I mean, the one you had the date with, the one with the eyes?’
Leo accompanied this question with a wiggling two-fingered gesture in front of his face, as if to suggest strange mystical powers in the organs under consideration.
Andrew, of course, knew exactly who Leo
was talking about. He knew because he’d been talking about her himself for the best part of eight months.
‘It wasn’t a date, it was a disaster. And I wouldn’t call her weird. She’s just a bit …’
‘Mad?’
‘Mad? Maybe, a bit.’
‘Mad madness-of-King-George mad?’
‘God no, not madness-of-King-George mad.’
‘How boring. So you mean mad in the usual mad-woman mad way, the not getting your jokes kind of way, and suddenly saying out of the blue “why don’t we ever go to Venice” kind of way, and thinking that whenever you make a general point in an argument it’s somehow directed at them kind of way.’
‘No, no and no. She’s not mad like that. In fact the opposite. We used to have quite a laugh together, in the early days. Maybe I don’t mean mad at all. At least not in any of those ways. Maybe I just mean … strange.’
‘Ah, strange-but-interesting-mad. The most dangerous sort. They suck you in, and they can appear enchanting to begin with, and sexy as anything, but in the end the mad bit always breaks through and then they come at you with a mattock or leave dog excrementia in your pyjama pockets.’
‘No, no, Alice isn’t like that. I can’t really see her with a mattock, whatever a mattock is. I shouldn’t have said mad at all, or strange. Scratch mad and strange. It’s more that when she’s there, she somehow isn’t really there. No, I mean the other way round – it’s we that aren’t really there, or we’re sort of semi-transparent and she sees through us to the things that are really there.’
‘So far so Neoplatonic. You’ll be giving us the parable of the cave next.’
‘And she sort of says stuff, stuff that should make you laugh in her face, but you can’t because … she’s got some kind of …’
Leo did his two-fingered eye-wiggling thing again, accompanied this time by a head wobble.
‘I’m not really getting it across, am I? I’ll give you a for-instance. You know how she deals with all the science and nature stuff?’
‘I think you might have mentioned it, like about a million times.’
‘Well, we’ve got a fucking massive, and I mean massive, job on. You’ve heard of John James Audubon?’
‘Yeah, I think so. Some kind of bird-watcher fellow.’
‘Yes, but also a pretty good artist. Anyway, there’s a reclusive aristo down in the Quantocks with a copy of Audubon’s Birds of America, which is, you know, the most expensive book in the world. We’re talking five million quid here. Apparently he wants to sell, and if we can get it, then it might just be enough to stop the Americans from sacking us all. So we’re heavily into the research. As I said, it’s Alice’s area, but I’m in as well, because she’s still pretty junior, and she sort of comes under me.’ (Here Leo contemplated one of his famous leers, complete with the sound of moist membranous flesh plapping and slithering, but decided that this was not the time.) ‘We’re looking at some repros of the plates, which are about the size of a duvet. A few of the others have gathered round, because they know how hot the whole thing is. We’re looking at something called the Carolina parrot, but Alice says it’s actually a lorikeet. And, you know, although it’s not my period, or subject matter I could see it wasn’t bad – plenty of energy and panache in the execution, and certainly a notch up from the Lewis Birds of Great Britain and Ireland …’
‘Mmmnyaah,’ said Leo, drawing deeply on a phantom briar pipe.
‘Okay, I’ll get on with it. But then Alice says, and believe me it was one of those times when you didn’t know if it was going to end in us all laughing till our tonsils fell out or in a group hug and years of counselling, she says, “You know why they are so alive, don’t you, the Audubon plates?” And I thought she was going to talk about the vibrancy of the watercolours, or the grace of the line, or whatever, but she says, “It’s because Audubon painted them in death. He shot the birds and had them stuffed and mounted …”’ (At this point Leo couldn’t stop himself and about two-sevenths of a leer emerged, along with a solitary plap, but Andrew was too fervid to notice.) ‘“… and that is why they are so intense, so perfect, so alive. You see it is only because they were dead that they could be authentically, mesmerically alive.” And nobody knew what to do, and then everyone drifted off, leaving just the two of us. Thank Christ Ophelia turned up to wave her hair around, or God knows what I’d have done.’
‘You know I really think we are talking madness-of-King-George mad after all,’ said Leo, because he knew it was expected of him. And then, because it was time, ‘Another pint of Old Shagpiss? Or shall we try the guest ale, which this week, according to the board, is the famous old Bodkin and Feltcher’s Whale Gism, at 9.7 per cent proof?’
The eight months that had passed since Alice had joined Enderby’s had been uncomfortably intense ones for Andrew. His brief account of how he came to be in quite so unsuitable (from his own perspective and background) a place as Enderby’s was accurate, as far as it went, but missed out the various psychodramas, failures, reversals that led up to it. Like Alice he was an only child, but there the resemblance ended. He was brought up in a small mining town in Nottinghamshire, where his father was a collier, until the pit closed, whereupon he opened a shop selling fishing tackle and buckets of maggots, which used up all of his redundancy without supplying any kind of adequate income.
Like most miners, Andrew’s dad had a reverence for learning, and watched proudly as his son sailed through every exam he ever sat, and became the first boy from the town to go to Oxford. School had been easy for Andrew, not just because he was the cleverest boy in his or any other year – that, on its own could have been a fast track to getting his face punched on a more or less daily basis. No, what made Andrew’s life a joy was being a cricketing prodigy, as sporting prowess was the only sure way for a brainy kid to escape the regulation clattering. Every Saturday and Sunday of the summer season would see Andrew gliding across the little cricket pitches of the local villages and towns, hurling himself fearlessly on long slides around the boundary, or dancing down the wicket to flick and drive the quickest of the bowlers. Standing in the slips, he’d dream of catching the swallows that hawked for midges in the outfield as the sun burned red through the white plumes of mist billowing from distant cooling towers, and yet he’d still have time to take the real snicks and edges, to gasps of delight from his burly team-mates.
It was in the concrete pavilion of the local ground that he lost his virginity to an older (and considerably larger) girl called Jan, who worked behind the counter in the bakery. He wasn’t entirely sure that he had lost his virginity, but she seemed confident enough, and forever after let him have an extra barm cake or free sausage roll whenever his mum sent him in for a loaf. In any case it at least gave him a start, and put him a notch above most of the other boys when he went, late that September, to college.
There was no good reason for his relative failure at Oxford. The failure was not academic: he was still able, despite doing the bare minimum to escape censure, to pick up a First in PPE. It was more that he passed through the University without making an impact, without finding himself in any exciting group, or movement, or even mood. He gave up sport. Nobody was interested in his kind of politics; nobody found him particularly clever or funny any more – there were too many semi-professionally funny and clever people around. Ditto beauty. His friends were all pleasant, and helped to pass the time, but he never fell in love with any of them, nor with the frizzy-haired swotty girls he tended to consort of his circle, few of whom were prepared to go much beyond what he termed ‘moist digitation’.
Life as a postgraduate in Brighton was a little better, largely because of his success, by virtue of taking some tutorials, in bedding a slightly foxier class of student. Nevertheless, when his money ran out and it became clear that there were few, if any, jobs available to which his thesis, even if he ever managed to submit it, was likely to prove a passport, life again seemed to lose its savour. For no very good reason he moved away fr
om cosy Brighton and into one of the two attic rooms in a large falling-down house in Crouch End, where he worked fitfully at his bibliography, living principally off whichever type of cereal happened to be open in the kitchen.
Karen, the Tall Girl, who lived in the other attic room, rescued him in more ways than one, and it was only partially to Andrew’s credit that he was sorry to have treated her so badly (part of the badness related to a failed attempt to palm her off on to the ever-eager Leo). Andrew’s appraisal of his own appeal was fair, if perhaps a little stern. He estimated that he was at the top of the second division of attractiveness, which meant that he could count on the second, third and fourth division girls and had a fighting chance of picking off the odd slumming first-divisioner, particularly if he happened to be in one of his world-conquering moods, when a spurt of self-confidence would lend his tongue wings and provide a handy thermal on which to soar. It was certainly the case that by any objective measure he was a poor lover, prone to an analyst’s dream of dysfunctions and fiascos, from outright no-shows, through prematurity, to hopelessly elongated dry runs. Yet somehow sexual intimacy lent him a sweetness and vulnerability and charm which left his partners helpless and, more often than not, love struck. Karen assisted with the bibliography, tidied his room, advised on how to move on from his now dated student-trendy look without ironing out too many of his ‘endearing’ idiosyncrasies (for example the faint, though discernible, tendency towards Edwardianism in his pants, boots, and sideburns) and finally, through a careful monitoring of the office airwaves, got him the chance of the interview in the Enderby’s Books department, where she worked. Despite a good degree in history, Karen was stuck in the secretarial grade at Enderby’s, from which it was almost impossible to escape into the hallowed realm of the Expert.
Two further pieces of good luck were necessary to Andrew’s unexpected success before the panel. The first was that he happened to have one of his better, thermal-borne days. He managed to persuade the three wise men and one foolish virgin that his protestations of ignorance about deciphering eighteenth-century handwriting and his confusion about roman numerals beyond XV were the product of excessive modesty and he made two good book-related jokes, only one of which he’d prepared in advance. The second (or rather third, if we include Karen) piece of good fortune was that the pre-interview favourite, for whom Andrew and the other two anaemic boys on the shortlist were supposed only to be makeweights, turned up wearing a cloak and a floppy hat, which he refused to take off.
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