Four years of steady progress followed, with numberless trips to country houses, forced to sell the library to finance a new roof or fund a venture into bakewell tart mass-production, or poodle-rearing. Four years of inhaling dust and squinting at woodcuts. Four years of politely telling callers to Bond Street that their stack of Bunties from the 1970s were no, sadly not worth any more than sentimental value, or that the ninth impression of Rider Haggard’s She was not a valuable collector’s piece despite being over a hundred years old. Four years of looking for that rare first edition among the dross: a Casino Royale or a Brighton Rock in its dust jacket. But only one more year of Karen, who left, frustrated by both Andrew and Enderby’s.
When Alice arrived, Andrew was still heavily into his infatuation with Ophelia. None of his standard methods had worked with her: the looking-helpless-by-the-photocopier-bumblingly-eccentric-but-also-quite-cool persona he’d perfected simply rendered him invisible to her. His little puns and humorous spoonerisms sounded in her ears like the jabbering of an idiot, and his learning counted for nothing in her world, where a trip to the hairdresser’s lasted half the day and cost two hundred and fifty pounds, not including the coffee. Books meant nothing to her but the same could not be said for a title, and it was only when Andrew’s friends started using Doctor Heathley (the thesis, bibliography and all, having been submitted, defended and, with minor corrections, accepted) as a way of amusing themselves at his expense, that he finally appeared, a dim green glimmer, on her radar.
Their only date was predictably disastrous. Andrew had never been out with anyone completely stupid before. He’d had girlfriends who’d left school at sixteen and never read a book, but they could all crack two jokes to his one and fizzed and bubbled with words and thoughts and laughter. Ophelia had only two topics of conversation: the fashion follies of the other women in the office (‘I wouldn’t wear that face with that bum’ was one famous quip), and the cars driven by her boyfriends, or rather whichever clutch of management consultants, property developers and bankers were currently courting her. A typical exchange, screeched above the clamour in Quaglino’s (‘I couldn’t believe it,’ Ophelia would say on her next visit to the hair-dresser’s, ‘I mean Quaglino’s! You’d have thought it was 1997 or something’), ran:
‘What kind of car do you drive, Andrew?’
‘Well, actually I …’
‘Richard drove a Mazda MX1, but I told him that was really a girl’s sports car, so he bought a Mercedes Kompressor the very next day, which I thought was over-compensating. What did you say you drove?’
‘I was saying that …’
‘Phillip had a convertible Beetle that I couldn’t make up my mind about, you know, whether the convertible bit made up for the Beetle bit …’
There was no question of a kiss, let alone a night of inept, but heartfelt fumbling. In fact, the only physical contact Andrew obtained from the exercise was a very public crushing hug from Pam, who whispered loudly and wetly in his ear that Ophelia wasn’t good enough for him. Had anyone, he wondered, not heard about his humiliation? He did a quick calculation to work out how uncool the episode left him seeming to the eyes of Books and/or the world; the result came out at something close to the boiling point of lead, or, according to the traditional scale of one-to-ten, really very uncool indeed.
Yet more dishearteningly, the sure knowledge that Ophelia was one of the first division girls who would not be stooping to entertain a plucky second division contender only served to splash Tabasco on the hot chilli of his passion.
Nor did Alice’s arrival lead to an immediate or complete transference of affection. The wandering Tessa, it is true, no longer played a role in his fantasy life, although a candle long burned brightly for him down in the Internet division, where she did clever technical things to facilitate on-line auctions. The trouble was that Ophelia was simply too damn beautiful – actress beautiful rather than supermodel beautiful, which allowed for the discernible and delectable presence of hips and buttocks and breasts – not to be, however critically and/or hopelessly, adored. The way he put it to Leo was that he loved (‘don’t cringe you fucking long-faced, cynical wanker’) Alice, but fancied Ophelia, although he did allow for the possibility of a little bilateral seepage between the two (leer, plap, schleershp, mmpap, mmmpap, mmpap, from Leo).
And no, after The Disaster in the Park, he never got up the courage to ask Alice out on another date: the deepening, mystifying, otherness which enveloped her made it impossible. How do you ask the Sphinx out for a curry? What chat up lines can you use on Astarte, everyone’s favourite Phoenician goddess of life and death? So, for eight months from February to September, Andrew yearned: and it was a yearning without respite, because to look away from Alice meant to look towards Ophelia.
And then came the Audubon. As soon as word reached him that an elusive copy of The Birds of America was up for grabs, he knew that it was his big chance, not only to increase the incline of his modest career graph, but also to spend time, no, more than time, to spend a night with Alice. In theory the Quantocks trip could be done in a day, but what if something unexpected cropped up? What if the deal was about to be closed and they had to rush off to catch the last train? Lord whoever-it-was might feel offended if he received a mere single day of flattery and cajoling. And for all they knew, the Other Place might already be on the trail, offering the usual inducements: the pretty girls (or boys), the promise of secret buyers, and fabulous wealth. No, this was a two-day job, with a night in (consulting the relevant page from the atlas), Nether Stowey or Crowcombe or Spaxton, assuming any of those hamlets could supply a comfy B&B. It wasn’t that Andrew had any explicitly formulated plan of seduction. He just hoped that the simple fact of spending the time together would somehow meld them, or work some other magic. He got as far in his head as a boozy night with her in a thatched hostelry, hung with antique farming machinery (turnip spanglers, hay thrummers, perhaps even a many-bladed pig splayer), and there drew back, hoping vaguely that she might blurt out something about having always fancied him, no, dammit, loved him. That would see off the Ophelia problem.
Just love me back, my strange, my precious Alice, he thought, and I’m yours forever.
SIX
Quantock Bound
‘Climb in,’ said Andrew, smiling brightly. It wasn’t one of his usual faces. Nor did it particularly suit the greasy grey skies, oozing drizzle like a fat man sweating over a meal.
Alice had been daydreaming. She’d been waiting on the pavement for ten minutes. Because she was by the busy road she saw, of course, the Dead Boy; saw him there for that second before he died, the second before she turned away. She had coping strategies now, and rather than cry out or turn away again, her face in her hands, she was able to drive out the bad thoughts by immersing herself in the Boy, breathing him like incense, drawing him in to her cells, until he was inside her and outside her and everywhere.
And now here was Andrew. In a car. And what a car.
It was perhaps fortunate that Andrew never had the chance to tell Ophelia about his car. Even Alice, who cared nothing for such things was vaguely aware that it was the sort of car that the kind of person who might be ashamed of having a crap car would be ashamed of. Andrew’s attitude to his car was deeply ambivalent. He had enough intelligence and awareness to see that it was a completely crap car. And not just because it was a bottom-of-the-range 1979 Vauxhall Chevette two-door saloon. There were other reasons.
First of all there was the colour. Andrew would occasionally try to pass it off as mahogany, or chestnut, or dark tan, or burnt almond, or sienna, but the truth is that it was brown, and more than that, shit brown. Then there was the filth. The outside had never been cleaned in the year and a half that Andrew had owned it. His reasons for this were logical, if short-sighted. ‘If I was going to be frying eggs on the bonnet, then I’d give it a wash,’ he’d say. ‘Or if I wanted to roll around on the roof wearing a cream linen suit. But I don’t like fried eggs and I haven�
�t got a cream linen suit.’ And so layer on layer of crust had formed over the brown core, giving it yet more of an excremental aspect. In places, some of the outer layers had liquefied in the rain, and formed swirling patterns, before drying again, giving the effect of a lava flow, glooping its way towards Pompeii. The inside was slightly less filthy, although the exoskeletal remains of sweet and savoury snack products were lodged in most of the car’s niches and inglenooks, and there was a faint vegetal aroma, unexorcisable by any number of pine-fresh car deodorisers, caused by a stray sprout, lost six months previously somewhere in the superstructure of the vehicle. The problem internally was more the décor, in particular the matching brown fun-fur seat covers, tufted and mangy now, but still able to drench a back in sweat in all climatic conditions short of a prolonged nuclear winter. Everything inside the car was ill-designed, adept only at spearing knees, jabbing kidneys, and catching and tearing clothing.
So yes, Andrew was aware of the fact that the car was a (barely) moving insult to all road users, a thing neither useful nor beautiful, a slovenly, casual V sign, thrown by the lazy seventies at the very William-Morris, utopian socialist, arts and crafts creed to which he felt most allegiance, indeed a thing both useless and ugly. But he loved it. He loved it not only because it was the physical manifestation of the fact that he had, after ten years of nervous trying, finally passed his test. But also because it needed him, because it was so bad. So he could insult it, hit it with sticks, spit at it in rage when it died at traffic lights or belched the black smoke that meant that yet again it was burning oil, but nobody else was allowed that privilege, and Andrew could be very unkind indeed to anyone who questioned the merits of the Merdemobile.
‘Just sling your bag in the back,’ he said, pointing to a rear seat overflowing with books and newspapers, but dominated by a headless porcelain dog, which Alice never got round to asking about. As she sank into the front passenger seat, her knees disconcertingly at about the same level as her shoulders, and her bottom gingerly aware, despite the intervening fun-fur, of individual springs, sprung all gone, he added, ‘Welcome to the Merdemobile.’
Alice won instant points by neither gagging, nor laughing, nor leaping straight back out and running screaming down the road, all common responses. She did smile, however.
‘Hello, Andrew. I really appreciate you collecting me. Why aren’t you wearing your glasses?’
‘I find it distracting if I can see too much when I’m driving.’
‘Ah.’
Alice was more than a little amused by the sight of Andrew hunched over the wheel, squinting through the porridge-coloured windscreen. Also touched. You could say lots of things about Andrew, many of them tending towards the neutral or even hostile, but you could never say that he measured his worth by the quality of his material possessions.
‘Sorry about the smell,’ he said once she was settled.
‘It’s okay. Can hardly notice it. Cabbage?’
‘Sprout actually. Lost one last Christmas in the back somewhere. Just dematerialised.’
Something about the car, and Andrew’s comically bad driving, put Alice at ease. Oddly comforted by the erratic choking of the engine, and the miscellaneous rattles and whistles coming from unseen corners of the interior, she stopped thinking about the Dead Boy, in either a good way or a bad way, and not thinking about the Dead Boy was something she hadn’t done for a long time.
Why hadn’t she taken the lift up to the fourth floor of the block of flats in Hackney, rung the bell, spoken to the family of her boy? Her memory of the trip was of watching herself as if in a film, from the outside. She saw herself standing in the busy street, looking up to where she thought the flat must be, the address clutched in her hand as it had been throughout the long and unfamiliar journey, by tube and bus. The block was one of the thirties, rather than sixties, kind: almost elegant in red brick and white plaster. But its poverty was palpable. Perhaps it had been the stench from the lift well that had put her off. No. She couldn’t blame that. The truth was that she feared what she might find, and even more she feared what she might lose.
And just standing there gave her a deep sensual fulfilment. This was the closest she had come since that day, the first day of her new life. Here the Boy had lived for those nine years before they came together. She felt his presence resonate through the walls and the earth and the air, like the huge silence after the death of a symphony. And standing there bathing in the glory of his resonance, Alice realised that one phase of her … madness … infatuation, was coming to an end. She felt a calm descend, a peace, a new clarity. The drug had been metabolised, had become part of her. It was certainly not that it had become less important: no, it had entered her more deeply; but that left her superficially more able to cope with the surface of things. Yes, she knew that he would always now be there, but the unimportant parts of herself had been set free, her waking, conscious, living side. The side that had to sit in traffic with Andrew Heathley on a dull October morning.
There was a certain amount of hassle, as there always is, in getting out of London. Andrew thrust a flaking A-Z onto Alice’s lap, and between them they managed to find every traffic cone in South-west London, but by the time they blundered onto the M3 they were laughing together in a way they hadn’t done since before The Disaster in the Park, since before the Dead Boy. Andrew had a packet of jelly babies in the glove compartment, and Alice found herself greedily devouring them.
‘Did I ever tell you about my friend Leo?’ asked Andrew.
‘I can’t remember. Maybe.’ So much of the past few months had passed through her consciousness without leaving a trace.
‘Well, he has this theory,’ he paused as they both winced over a gear change that sounded like the very gates of hell opening up right there in the car between them, ‘about jelly babies. To be honest, he has a theory about everything, but his jelly baby theory is quite good. You know how everyone likes the black ones best?’
Alice was about to say that she actually found that she preferred the red ones, but that would ruin the tale. ‘Yes.’
‘Well, have you ever wondered why they don’t just make them all black?’
‘No, I haven’t ever wondered that. But if it’s true that people prefer them, it’s surprising,’ Alice replied, trying to help out.
‘The thing is that apparently that’s just what they tried back in the seventies: all-black bags of jelly babies. And guess what?’
‘Nobody wanted them.’
‘Of course, nobody wanted them. And why’s that?’
‘Um … because people like variety?’
‘No, not that. At least not only that. This is the Leo bit. It’s because of structuralism.’
‘Oh, that’s nice,’ said Alice, unable to repress a reasonably naughty look.
‘Yeah, okay, just listen. You see according to structuralist linguistics, everything only has a meaning in relation to everything else in the system. The word bus only means bus because it doesn’t mean car, motorbike, elephant, whatever. There’s no natural link between the word bus and the thing bus. It’s just the way that language functions. You with me?’
‘I think so.’
‘So, with jelly babies, black ones only become nice in relation to the others, the yellows, oranges, greens and blues …’
‘I don’t think they have blue ones. Not in jelly babies.’
‘Yellows, oranges and greens, then, if you must.’
‘Sorry.’
‘… that are not nice, or not as nice. In isolation, there is nothing nice about the black ones. Put another way, on their own, without the signifying system of the whole jelly baby family, the black ones cannot mean nice. So, to enjoy, to understand the niceness of the black ones, you need the not niceness of the others. Okay, you can laugh now and call me whatever kind of arse you want. But remember, it’s not me but Leo who came out with all that bollocks.’
Alice had taken pleasure in the jelly baby tale and she wished that she coul
d have made some more witty or clever contributions. She hated just sitting there and saying ‘oh’ and ‘ah’ and ‘really’ like the awe-struck wedding guest listening to the Ancient Mariner. The trouble was that although she felt more relaxed, less alienated than she had for many months, Alice had fallen out of the habit of conversation. At work, even with Andrew, she confined herself to mainly factual matters, relaying points of information, technical details, clear instructions. Apart, that is, from the occasional lapse into the ‘death is life’ kind of epiphany that so unnerved the office. Outside work she now hardly ever saw her old friends. She hadn’t even spoken to Odette for several weeks, not since the phone call when she had passed on the address of the Dead Boy. She’d meant to tell Odette about her failure, when so close, to contact the family, and of how the experience had helped a little in reconciling her to the world. She put it off because she felt that she had let Odette down in some way. They’d never met to talk tactics for Odette’s trip to Venice, or discuss how things were going with the preppy boyfriend. Had she gone already? She thought she must have done. When she finally got the courage up to telephone her, Odette’s work extension just went dead, and she hadn’t followed it up with a call to her flat. Thinking about it now, Alice felt a heavy pang of guilt and she made a firm mental note to call as soon as she was back from Somerset.
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