Alice's Secret Garden

by Rebecca Campbell

  But even if she had seen Odette, sitting in quiet harmony with an old girlfriend was a very different thing to spending a three- or four-hour journey with a bright, prickly, funny, sensitive man like Andrew. And she found that she wanted to make him like her, wanted him to enjoy the journey. She stopped short of asking herself if perhaps this meant that she was waking from her dream of the Dead Boy; stopped because she knew that she didn’t really want to wake from the dream. But, for the journey at least, she would be awake.

  Of course, questions. You asked questions. That would make her appear interesting without actually having to be interesting.

  ‘You never told me what your PhD was about.’

  They had hit the countryside, or rather some larger areas of green between the sprawl. It was one of those days when there aren’t any clouds, but nor is there any sun, just a blanketing paleness.

  ‘Christ, I can hardly remember. Ah, yes, ahem, full title, The Sublime Machine, colon, all-important colon, have to have a colon, Conceptions of Masculine Beauty 1750–1850.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Yeah, I know, it’s a killer, isn’t it. Fat lot of good it did me.’

  ‘Well, it got you into Enderby’s.’

  ‘That’s what I mean. You can’t believe how it’s destroyed my credibility. All those years of railing against things, and hating people for having cushy jobs, and then I go and get one. It’s ruined my life.’ He smiled pleasantly at her. ‘I do kind of half mean it though. It seems like such a frivolous thing that we do. Whenever I go home, back to Nottingham I mean, and I try to tell my parents what I do, they just don’t get it.’

  ‘I have the same sort of thing with my father.’

  ‘You know I remember when poor old Crumlish showed me round on my first day and it was say hello to … and then some noise, and I’d have to say, who? And then he’d say very clearly and loudly PYRRHOUS, or BYSSHE, or FULVIA, or whatever, and then do a little smirk. When I told my dad there was actually a person called Horace, he laughed so hard he spilled a bucket of maggots.’

  ‘Euw.’

  ‘Fish bait. Did I never tell you about the tackle shop? Hang on, your father? I thought your father was dead.’

  ‘He is, but I still talk to him.’

  ‘Oh.’

  There was a pause. Andrew didn’t really think it was mad to talk to a dead parent, but he didn’t know what he was supposed to say next. Alice broke the silence.

  ‘Do you spend a lot of time thinking about male beauty?’ She was trying very hard, and succeeded in pulling off the naughty/innocent face she had once specialised in when talking to boys at college.

  Andrew ignored the half tease. He’d been mocked about the feyness of his research too often for it to bother him, but no one ever thought he was gay. It rather annoyed him.

  ‘God no, not any more. Not that I ever did, really. There was just a gap in the research. You know, tonnes of stuff on changes in female beauty, but nothing academic on the blokes, despite the fact that, off and on, men have been just as much the focus of the adoring gaze as women, and just as likely to be described as beautiful.’

  The adoring gaze. Yes, Alice knew about the adoring gaze.

  ‘So what do you think beauty is then, as you’re the expert?’

  ‘Well, I certainly don’t think it’s any particular type of face, or shape of body. There’s been loads of scientific, or rather cod-scientific, research trying to pin beauty down in terms of facial geometry, and tie it all in to our genes, but it just hasn’t come up with anything persuasive.’

  ‘It’s funny, but I actually know quite a lot about this. The biological side.’

  ‘Really? Yeah, I suppose you might.’

  ‘You see there are various theories that suggest that being … nicely turned out, if you’re a bird, or a guppy, say, (Alice at this point remembered that she used, when much younger, to do a rather fetching guppy face, which never failed to amuse, even if no boy could ever truly fancy her again after seeing it. She quickly decided against doing it now) means that you’ve got strong, healthy genes, so you can get enough to eat, and haven’t got parasites. And as for things like peacock’s tails, well the fact that you’ve been able to carry that lot around with you for a while and not get eaten means that you must be pretty tough. So in either case, the lady guppy or peacock will want a piece of the genetic action.’

  ‘God, I love girls that know stuff! I can’t believe we have an overlap.’

  ‘Not much. Just one lecture’s worth. But back to beauty. If you don’t think it’s the gene thing, then what is it?’

  ‘Well, you’re not going to like this, being a science dolly …’

  Alice did a head-on-one-side pretend pout, looking, Andrew thought, suddenly very, very kissable, weirdness and talking to dead dad notwithstanding.

  ‘… dolly … what was I saying? Oh yep. Well, it’s all just a way of talking. Oh, and writing, and painting. My view, I say my view, but I actually only got a handle on the theoretical side by talking it through with Leo. Did I mention that he was a genius?’

  ‘I think it was implied or suggested at some point.’

  ‘Well, our view is that beauty dwells in language: it’s a series of conventions, or clusters of ideas, that live and move in our culture, and determine how we think and talk about beauty.’

  Alice made a polite but distinct scoffing noise.

  ‘So you’re saying that when you look at someone and think, mmmmm, then there’s no biological basis for that, it’s all just a cultural convention? You’re insane, or you’ve never been in love, or even … just fancied someone.’

  Alice was enjoying the discussion; she could feel some of her old zest for ideas creeping back. She was also fairly sure that Andrew was talking rot. Behind the lightness, however, there was another, darker, reason for her pleasure. They were talking about beauty, and beauty meant talking about her Boy, her Dead Boy.

  ‘No, no, of course you’re right that even in humans, sexual attraction is biological, and you could probably trace it back to the need to reproduce, but what I’m talking about is what happens when we start to reflect on our … urges, to try to find meaning or structure. What happens as soon as you look at someone you find attractive?’

  ‘I …’

  ‘Yes, you give them a word, such as beautiful, and then wham, you find yourself smack in the middle of three thousand years of Western culture, you’re in Plato’s dialogues, you’re in the songs of the troubadours, you’re in Shakespeare, in Shelley, in Keats. Your thoughts and certainly your words aren’t yours any more, they’re part of the great conversation.’

  ‘Talking of the great conversation …’

  ‘What? Oh, damn, sorry, I’m ranting, aren’t I? I must have had a couple of years of thesis stuff pent-up inside.’

  ‘It’s okay. It’s an interesting subject, beauty. I just wish I had some.’

  ‘Oh come on!’

  ‘That probably sounded like false modesty. I know I’m not hideous, everything in the right place and things, but I’m not beautiful, not in the way that transforms everything, not in the adoring gaze way you were talking about.’

  ‘For heaven’s sake, Alice, you’re the …’ and Andrew only just stopped himself from saying ‘you’re the second most beautiful girl in the office’, which he knew was more than any girl could take, be she hunchbacked, begoitred, or scrofulous. Unfortunately, he couldn’t stop himself from quickly physically running through hunchbacked, begoitred, or scrofulous as he drove.

  Alice laughed.

  ‘What were you doing?’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘You did a funny thing with your back, and you pulled a silly face. You stopped yourself saying something, didn’t you?’

  In the moment he had to gather his thoughts, Andrew realised that he couldn’t correct ‘second most’ even to ‘most’. It would sound either insincere (which he could live with) or desperate (which he’d rather do without).

  ‘I was just
going to say that you’re not bad-looking for a geek. At least you haven’t got mad hair.’

  Andrew’s hair was the thing he thought most about, after breasts and books.

  ‘Here we go!’ Alice had heard quite a lot about Andrew’s hair: he’d start most mornings by complaining about it over his coffee.

  ‘Well, it’s okay for you. At least all of yours is pulling in the same direction. You’re not being subtly undermined from within. You must have seen it – whenever I’m trying to be serious it deliberately looks silly, curling off in all directions, and making obscene gestures. And then when I’m trying to be funny, it goes all sensible, and makes me look like a fucking Mormon missionary. I hate my hair.’

  Andrew’s hair was, in fact, quite silly.

  ‘I think your hair’s lovely,’ said Alice, which pleased Andrew for about ten miles.

  ‘I’ve just realised,’ said Andrew, after a long disquisition on why he’d stopped playing sport, in which his fear of mediocrity, the death of artistry, and the question mark hovering over his groin (‘I have the thighs of a Titan, but the groin of a weak-willed girl’ was how he put it) all featured, ‘that I’ve been talking about me and my stuff for hours. Unforgivable rudeness. And boring. It’s your turn.’

  ‘What, to be boring?’

  He looked at her and smiled sweetly. ‘If that’s what you want, then go ahead and be boring. I’m all ears.’

  ‘That’s not fair. You can’t simply order someone to be boring just like that. What if I accidentally start being interesting?’

  ‘I’ll blow this whistle,’ said Andrew, holding up an invisible whistle by its invisible string. ‘Why don’t you tell me why you gave up science and became a slave in the temple of Mammary. I mean Mammon. I said Mammon.’

  ‘It was only ever meant to be a temporary thing. I still hope to go back to research, when, when …’ She thought for a moment about telling Andrew some of the truth. But this wasn’t the time. Instead she simply went off on another tack, explaining the joys of island biology, pointing out the paradox that islands are both fast-burning engines of evolution, churning out new species, and yet strangely impoverished when compared to similar sized areas within larger landmasses.

  ‘If you take an island of fifty square kilometres, it might have twenty species of bird found nowhere else, but that’s it. In a fifty kilometre section of Amazonian rainforest, you could have a thousand species. So islands are fascinating from an evolutionary perspective, but much less useful than continuous landmasses for biodiversity. I note that you haven’t blown your whistle yet for me being interesting. It’s lucky I haven’t told you about my M.Sc. thesis on the sub-varieties of land snails to be found in the Scilly Isles.’ They both laughed.

  ‘I can’t wait till I tell Leo about you and the snails. He’s already half obsessed with you and that’ll really get him going.’

  Alice and Andrew exchanged glances. Andrew wasn’t sure if he’d deliberately suggested that the obsession was really his own. Couldn’t even say if she’d picked up any suggestion at all. But he did know that the sight of Alice’s face, calm and lovely amid the filth and litter all around her, made him want to pull over on to the hard shoulder and declare his adoration, quite possibly accompanied by weeping and the recitation of appropriate verses from the Romantic canon. Instead he scraped around for that elusive fourth gear, like Alice in being so close and yet so unobtainable, until the moment had passed.

  Sometime during the fourth hour (an exit from the motorway was missed when Andrew stretched for the last of the jelly babies) as flat fields hunched into shoulders, and the road began to wind and dip, Andrew finally got round to talking tactics for the rummage.

  ‘Let’s go over it again. What do we know?’

  ‘About the seller or about the work?’

  ‘Let’s start with the work.’ Andrew’s apparently businesslike manner was at that point slightly undermined by a wild swerve to avoid some almost certainly imaginary obstruction in the road.

  ‘Christ! What was that? A hedgehog?’ he said.

  ‘I don’t think it was an anything,’ replied Alice, showing more savoir-faire than she felt. ‘Are you sure about not wearing your … never mind. Okay. Audubon’s Birds of America: first edition. Four hundred and thirty-um-five life-sized illustrations, double elephant folio – thirty inches by forty. Produced in four volumes, 1827 to 1838. Based on his watercolours, done partly in the field, partly in the studio.’ (Andrew glanced over to see if there would be any maudlin dreaminess here, and was relieved to find not. Alice had on her competent face, which was one of his favourites.) ‘No one was interested in America, where his lack of either scientific or artistic training was held against him, so came over here, and had his paintings and drawings engraved on copperplate and hand coloured. Still, most of them ended up in the States, with a few dotted around Britain and France. Cost a hundred and seventy-five pounds, or a thousand dollars, at the time, which meant that you had to be very wealthy to afford a set. Altogether maybe a couple of hundred sets in the world, last one sold in ninety-eight for seven million dollars.’

  ‘Very good,’ he said, clapping, which was unwise, and very nearly fatal. Luckily the other vehicle, a tractor pulling a trailer of steepling manure, was slow moving.

  If it sounded a little bit like a test, that’s because it was. Oakley had asked Andrew to report back to him on how well Alice performed on this trip. Andrew himself was under a lot of pressure. Garnet Crumlish’s post had never been filled: the vacancy was left open, partly to save money, partly to encourage commitment and compliance from those who might feel themselves to be in the running. Internally, Andrew, Clerihew, Ophelia and Alice, had all been tipped as hopefuls. The inclusion of Ophelia (useless) and Alice (newish) was a goad to Andrew and however much he downplayed his commitment to the job, he knew that there was precious little for him if he found his name on the next, no doubt long, list of those whose services, experience, knowledge and love were no longer required by Enderby’s. He imagined brushing bluebottles from the top of rows of cheap editions of the Waverley novels, or the collected works of Edgar Bulwer-Lytton, in a smelly secondhand bookshop in … where? After the failure to get the Audubon, the Bloomsbury dealers wouldn’t touch him, nor even the Charing Cross Road. What did that leave – Hampstead? Golders Green? Stoke-on-Trent? Hull? Inverness? Stockholm? Reykjavik?

  ‘Made Audubon a celebrity in Europe,’ Alice continued. ‘He met Scott and various other influential people. Granted membership of the Linnaean Society, that sort of thing. But the project wasn’t a great commercial success. Too many subscribers dropped out, or, like the King, never paid up.’

  ‘Which king?’

  ‘Oh God, I don’t know – one of the Georges?’

  ‘Aha! A weak spot.’

  ‘Does it matter? Anyway, you’re history and I’m science, remember. I’m not supposed to know.’

  ‘I think you’ll find,’ said Andrew rather sniffily, ‘that a William sneaked in between George III and Victoria.’

  Alice ignored him and went on.

  ‘So, when Audubon went back to America, he set out on a cheaper octavo edition, this time lithographs, again hand coloured. Still a beautiful object.’

  ‘And worth?’

  ‘Forty thousand pounds. Perhaps fifty, with a following wind,’ said Alice in a subtle pastiche of Andrew’s way of talking.

  ‘And we don’t know which this is,’ he replied, making a mental note to pay her back for that.

  ‘And we don’t know which this is. All we got was a handwritten note from the seller, stating that he had a complete Birds of America, and some other books, and would we care to do a valuation.’

  ‘So that’s what we’ve come to look at – check out the Audubon, pray, but not dare hope, that it’s the double elephant, and have a sniff through the other rubbish he wants to dump. What do we know about the punter?’

  ‘Well, his name’s Lynden, and he’s a baronet.’

  ‘
Which means?’

  ‘He’s the lowest rank of hereditary nobility, doesn’t get to sit in the House of Lords, but we call him “Sir”.’

  ‘Actually I try to avoid calling them anything. Saves embarrassment all round. What else?’

  ‘Seems to be a bit of a recluse. Nobody in the office had ever heard of him, except Ophelia who keeps tracks on those sorts of things. She didn’t spell it out, but she suggested that there was some sort of distant family connection there, although she may just have been … well, doing whatever it is that she does.’

  Andrew pictured her doing whatever it was that she did, or rather something that he liked to think about her doing. It involved a shower and a bar of soap. ‘She,’ continued Alice, unaware, ‘said that Lynden’s great grandfather bought the title from Lloyd George, and given that he only ran to a baronetcy, it suggests the family wasn’t that wealthy, which in turn suggests the second, or subsequent edition, rather than the original. Oh, and there’s the house, which is famous.’

  ‘Oh, what is it? Tudor? Palladian? Victorian gothic? Ranch-style bungalow? Wigwam?’

  ‘Do you really not know, or is this still part of my … assessment?’

  ‘Oh, um ah,’ burbled Andrew. Alice wasn’t meant to know about the reporting-back side of things. Would she think him a snitch? ‘No, I really don’t know about the house. I know we’re always supposed to see if it’s in Pevsner, but I can never be bothered. I just wing it, and talk about new cures for deathwatch, and the best grade of rubber for a Wellington boot, and how to shift dried-on pigshit from the rear axle of the Range Rover.’

  ‘Well, let’s leave it as a surprise then.’

  SEVEN

  A Cave of Ice

  The house was very easy to miss, although not, perhaps, the four times that Andrew managed to miss it, as he drove up and down the same stretch of B-road, squinting and cursing and swerving around hedgehogs, weasels, gnomes, and sprites, ignoring Alice’s good advice about turn-offs.

  ‘I can’t see how this house can be famous, except for invisibility. It must be some kind of fucking shed, hidden away like this.’