Alice's Secret Garden

by Rebecca Campbell

  However, once through a cleverly concealed gateway in a thick hawthorn hedge, a smooth tarmac driveway, elegantly lined with poplar, led on. But to where? No house, grand or otherwise, appeared at the end of the driveway, just another Quantock ridge.

  ‘Follow the road,’ said Alice, in a knowing way, which Andrew would have resented, if he’d thought about it more. As it was he was too concerned with the coming trials. Would it be the rare first edition of the Audubon, engraved on copperplates in Edinburgh and London, or just the very nice American lithographs of the octavo? Worse still, perhaps it was one of the subsequent editions of the octavo, tinkered about with by Audubon’s sons after his death. Not worthless, but certainly not career-making.

  Career bum. Andrew hated thinking about a career. How he still longed, when he allowed himself the indulgence, for that vanished ivory tower. Long lovely hours daydreaming in the Bodeleian. Discussing Edmund Burke over tea and crumpets with a pretty student. Delivering his paper on the influence of Burke on Winckelmann (or was it the other way round?), at a conference in Milan; oh yes, the Milan conference, with all the free drinks they pour down you, and the tasty nibbles (Andrew made a fetish of nibbles), and then the dramatic quasi-perverse sex with Steffi, the Swedish professor of what? yes, Pneumatics. Ha! But that wasn’t to be, and now he’d made his bed, and now he’d rather like Alice to lay in it. Or Ophelia. Or both together. Stop it.

  Fuck.

  House.

  The Merdemobile had seemed to be heading over the ridge, where they would fall, for all Andrew knew, for a thousand feet to the canyon floor below. He stopped himself from making the explosion noise he’d perfected twenty-five years ago when blowing up bridges behind enemy lines. But the road dipped and curved, and suddenly they found themselves facing a wall of glass.

  ‘Jesus,’ said Andrew, ‘it’s a fucking cave of ice.’

  ‘Wonderful, isn’t it?’

  ‘I suppose. If you’re a modernist goldfish. Or the Snow Queen,’ he said, peering through the windscreen. ‘No, I can’t be too curmudgeonly about it; it’s amazing. God I hate the rich.’

  The house had been built partly into the side of the hill, facing a broad wooded valley with a suggestion, if not quite the actual presence, of the sea somewhere beyond. The initial impression of pure and solid glass dissolved after a moment into a more complicated pattern of facets and angles, with panes of varying opacity intercut by steel panels and weathered concrete pillars. There was an area of polished granite slabs, like a pool of impossible calm, in front of the house, dimly reflecting the glittering walls and the sky above.

  ‘Who is it, Frank Lloyd Wright?’ Andrew was pleased that he remembered the name of any architect, and was silently ecstatic when Alice said:

  ‘A pupil of his, actually. Funny how you could tell when it’s so different from anything Wright ever built.’

  ‘Ah, yes, em, it’s all to do with the, you know, the use of space, and, er material,’ said Andrew, anxious to move on before he became more exposed. ‘Anyway, how the hell do you know about this sort of stuff? Your land snails I can see, but I never had you down as a Country Life subscriber.’

  ‘Mummy gets the magazines. They’re always around. And I am, after all, a girl.’

  That got Andrew’s biggest laugh of the day. He was still smiling as he asked, ‘Well, Miss Girlie-Girl Alice Duclos, just how the hell do you get into this place?’

  Finding the entrance proved a little easier, for Alice, than extracting herself from the car, which took a series of increasingly violent rocking movements, and a final inelegant lunge. They walked gingerly across the polished granite to a tall thin door of beaten metal. Andrew rang the bell. They waited. Andrew rang the bell again. They waited some more.

  ‘You did phone and tell him we were coming?’ asked Alice, trying not to sound too sceptical.

  ‘Someone did. I didn’t. I might have asked Ophelia to do it. But yes, of course he knows we’re coming.’ Andrew sounded nervous. ‘Shall I try the door? Perhaps they can’t hear us in the West …’ waving vaguely, ‘whatever.’

  Before Alice had time to say ‘no’, the door opened, apparently by itself, as no head appeared level with their own.

  ‘What do you want?’ came a voice from groin level.

  Alice and Andrew looked down into a child’s face. Six? Seven? Andrew was always rubbish at guessing ages. But a girl, even he could tell that. She had black, very straight hair, and black eyes with grown-up dark smudges beneath them.

  ‘We’ve come to see Mr Lynden,’ said Alice, once more taking control as Andrew wavered.

  ‘He’s my daddy.’

  ‘Is he at home?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Can we see him?’

  ‘He’s playing music.’

  ‘I think he wanted to see us.’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘I promise. He wrote me a letter. He wants me to have a look at some books.’

  ‘What books?’ She looked at Alice as though she had come to extradite her Barbie annual.

  ‘A bird book.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Look, little girl,’ said Andrew with an unconvincing severity, ‘why don’t you go and tell your daddy that we’re here.’

  ‘I told you, he’s playing music. If I go in he’ll shout at me.’ The girl’s serious face lightened for a moment, before she went on, ‘You can go in and see him, if you want.’

  ‘It’s a trap,’ whispered Andrew in Alice’s ear.

  ‘Well, it’s that or stand out here for the rest of our lives. And it’s started to rain. Will you show us the way?’ she said to the girl. ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Semele. What’s yours?’

  ‘I’m called Alice and this is Andrew.’

  The girl nodded. ‘Do you see that door? Go through it, and then carry on in a straight line, going through each door directly in front of you. If you do that you’ll get to Daddy. Don’t dare go off on either side, or go through any other door.’ Semele then walked calmly away in the opposite direction.

  ‘Creepy or what,’ said Andrew.

  ‘She’s just a little girl. He sounds like a monster.’

  ‘Let’s go and find out.’

  They went through the door that Semele had indicated. It led into a large square room with one wall of ribbed, opaque glass, two of white painted concrete, and an enormous single glass plane showing the valley beyond. It was difficult not to gasp. Black massy clouds had begun to form. I bet Alice knows what they’re called, thought Andrew. Cumulo-Nympho. The room was sparsely furnished with a single chrome and white leather sofa.

  ‘What do you do in a room like this?’ said Andrew.

  ‘Watch the clouds, I suppose,’ replied Alice, with her first hint of dreaminess in ages.

  They moved on. Each room opened directly onto the next with no linking corridors. All were furnished in the same way, with a bleak, unwelcoming good taste. Chairs to look at, not to sit on. Coffee tables that would never taste coffee. There was no indication that a child had ever played in any of the rooms; no warming human presence whatsoever. The only decoration on any of the white walls was a single picture of a white wall without any decoration.

  Three rooms later they found him. Andrew’s eyes were immediately drawn to the hi-fi. It was something to behold. Each piece was formed of organically shaped glistening metal, as though of flowing mercury. But there was no music. A figure was slumped in a low cream leather and cherrywood chair in the middle of the room, with his back to them, facing the valley. The glass wall had disappeared, sliding invisibly into some recess, and the wind carried some of the fine rain mixed with larger drops into the room where it misted and splashed on the polished wood floor. The wind caught some strands of the man’s long hair, blowing it behind him. He was wearing headphones, connected to the hi-fi by a long snaking lead. Andrew and Alice looked at each other. Andrew wanted to laugh.

  ‘His flashing eyes, his floating hair,’ he said quietly to
himself.

  Alice looked puzzled. Andrew cleared his throat. Instantly Lynden sprang to his feet, with a look like rage on his face. Several things then happened very quickly. The cord from the headphones was pulled from the jack in the hi-fi. Music blasted out from the speakers, placed high in the corners of the room. And Alice fell down. Andrew recognised Wagner, the sweeping, aching chords, wracked with love and death, but didn’t know that it was the ‘Vorspiel und Liebestod’ from Tristan und Isolde. Before he could move, Lynden had leapt towards them. For a moment Andrew thought he was going to attack them, but he bent down and picked up Alice, seemingly without effort, and put her down in his chair, all the time with the music swelling louder. It was then that Andrew realised that Lynden’s face was not contorted with rage. His face was streaked with tears. He’d been weeping.

  ‘Crying you mean,’ said Leo, doing haughty contempt mingled with cunning. ‘Whenever people say weeping I want to reach for my loofah. No, okay that’s not funny and not clever; I won’t use it again. And fainted? Nobody really faints. It’s always an act. Maybe in the days when a girl’s corset was rupturing her spleen, you might have got the odd genuine swoon, but when that happens for real, the first thing you do when you pass out is piss and shit your knickers, and the first thing you do when you wake up is vomit. Jesus, I just can’t believe you mix with the kind of people who weep and faint.’

  ‘I’m not saying she completely passed out. She just went all floppy.’

  Andrew and Leo were inappropriately drunk in the middle of the day. Andrew was going to have to go back to the office in half an hour, and Leo had already missed the tutorial he was supposed to be giving on the influence of Hegel’s master-slave dialectic on later Romantic literature (there wasn’t any). Andrew had explained all about the journey and arrival.

  ‘I thought it must be nerves, or some kind of woman-trouble thing,’ he continued. ‘Lynden shouted to his daughter to fetch some water, and Alice seemed to recover a bit. But I noticed that she didn’t look at him.’

  ‘Must have fancied the bloke. What did he look like?’

  ‘Oh, you know. Sort of swarthy type. Old acne scars. Long greasy hair. That cheekbone thing. I don’t know. Looked like a miserable fucker to me.’

  ‘Jealousy, thy name is Andrew Heathley.’

  Andrew ignored the comment. ‘So Alice picked herself up and we got to work. The library wasn’t bad. It was the only room with proper walls. He had some good things that he wasn’t selling. Mainly early twentieth-century small press stuff. A Nonesuch Dickens set with one of the original printing blocks. Always fancied one of those myself.’

  ‘What about the birdy book? Good or bad?’

  ‘Oh, good. Very good. It was the Lizars-Havell edition. Unbound loose sheets, rather than the usual four bound volumes.’

  ‘What a shame.’

  ‘Not at all. Makes it, if anything, more valuable. Able to flog off the prints individually, sacrilege though that be.’

  ‘And how did you hit it off with the Gyppo?’

  Andrew thought seriously about challenging his friend over the lazy racism of that, but he knew he would just fall back on the irony defence. He hated the irony defence.

  ‘Surprise surprise, he seemed mainly interested in Alice. He was selling the Audubon so he could do up that greenhouse of his. Or at least stop it falling down. Not much of a business head. Had no idea what it was worth. Didn’t get the impression he’d ever had much of a real job, apart from the looking tragic and moping about the place. We checked the provenance, of course, not that there was any doubting it. I don’t know how the hell you’d go about faking a monster like that: you’d need a team of fucking great artists and several years to play with, and if you ever managed it, then good luck to you, you’ve earned your seven million. But all the papers were there – Lynden’s granddad bought it in 1920 for five hundred quid. But anyway, the first bit all went well. The little brat even brought us tea on a tray.’

  ‘Where’s the mother?’

  ‘No idea. Couldn’t exactly wade in with a “so, wife left you? Or is she dead?” could I? But the way he was sniffing round Alice made it clear whoever the mother was, she wasn’t currently co-domiciled with the … with Lynden. So yeah, all went well. We had our preliminary look, and then went off to Nether Stowey for the night.’

  ‘And this is where the Heathley Love Machine swings into action?’

  ‘Well, that was plan A.’

  ‘And I’m surmising that plan A didn’t quite come off. Gallipoli?’

  ‘Fucking Bay of Pigs.’

  ‘Arse.’

  ‘Arse squared. Alice had obviously been holding herself together by the skin of her teeth.’

  ‘Conjures an image. Not sure it would work, anatomically.’

  ‘But by the time we got into the car she was trembling. I kept asking her what the matter was, and she just kept shaking. When we reached the hotel I practically had to carry her to her room. God knows what they thought on reception. It probably looked like I’d just given her a backstreet abortion. She managed to say that she needed a lie down, and that she’d be okay later. It was about six by then, and I said I’d come up and collect her for dinner. So I hit the bar and had a think. Obviously something about Lynden had set her off.’

  ‘I’ve already said: she fancied him.’

  ‘No, it’s not that simple. You don’t faint and shake and cry because you fancy someone.’

  ‘Happens all the time, in books.’

  ‘Well this wasn’t in books. And if you’ll give me a minute I’ll tell you what it was all about, because now I know, sort of. So I had a couple of beers in the bar, feeling sorry for myself. It had all gone so well on the way there. She was funny and normal, almost. It was like when she first joined. And you know, I’d swear she was flirting. Not gagging for it, that’s not her way. Just letting me know that she thought I was all right, and that if I made some kind of move …’

  ‘A lunge?’

  ‘Anything short of a lunge, she might not slap my face. And then after she sees Lynden, it’s back to square one, or rather square minus one. Goodbye cool smiley Alice, hello mad shaky Alice, plus all of the not-quite-there Alice we’d had to get used to. So, a couple or three drinks later – and Christ, I’d forgotten how they screw you for drinks in hotels, even out there – I went up to her room. She’d calmed down a bit, and we went to a local pub for dinner – I had a strange yearning for chicken in a basket.’

  ‘Getting back in touch with your proley roots.’

  ‘Mm. And I sensed that she might want to talk, which was a new thing, because the cut-off Alice of old never gave that impression. And so after not very much persuasion, and a couple of large gins, she told me the weirdest story.’

  ‘Is this going to involve her darkest, deepest desires?’

  ‘Well, yes and no. No in the way that you mean.’

  ‘Pity.’

  ‘Apparently after a couple of months at Enderby’s she saw an accident.’

  ‘What some old git fall over a Ming vase?’

  ‘Hate to be po-faced, but this isn’t actually funny, Leo. She saw a boy, a youth, killed on the road near the office.’

  ‘Fuck.’

  ‘And she said that she couldn’t get him out of her head.’

  ‘No. Understandable. Must have made a mess.’

  ‘Partly that, but a bit more. It wasn’t just the horror of it. It was that she’d, to use her words, fallen in love with this boy. Some kind of erotic fixation. No, that’s not quite right. A romantic obsession. Dreamed about him every night. Sort of took possession of her. And oh yes, this all happened the day before our ill-fated date in the park.’

  Leo now was serious, and interested.

  ‘So what did you say to all this? Did you give her any big-brotherly advice?’

  ‘Nothing that wasn’t written in the Great Book of Cliché. I was going to suggest that she find out more about this youth, confront her demons. She told me that she
’d already done that. A friend of a friend had traced his family. He was some kind of refugee or asylum seeker from Bosnia. She got the address, but couldn’t actually face seeing them.’

  ‘Yeah, it might seem a bit freaky, some strange woman turning up unannounced and saying she was obsessed with their dead son. All helps to explain how she was: all that not quite there stuff.’

  ‘Exactly. And the whole thing was all made worse, maybe even partially triggered, by her dad.’

  ‘Dad? Where does he fit in? We’re not talking Freud here, are we?’

  ‘Not a million miles away, but sadder than that. He’d died when she was quite young. Alice and her father were incredibly close. A sort of pact against the mother, who’s half mad, half bad. But despite all that, she said she was trying to pull herself out of it, the weirdness, although I could see that in some ways she was still completely in it, and at some level actually … relishing it. But at least she was trying, which was why she’d seemed more normal on the way to the Quantocks. And then she sees Lynden. And guess what?’

  Leo did an exaggerated ‘I don’t know’ shrug, but he had, in fact, guessed.

  Andrew carried on: ‘This Lynden looks exactly like the boy. Or rather like the boy as a man.’

  ‘Hence the faint.’

  ‘It was amazing really that she managed to function at all.’

  ‘So she told you all this in the pub?’

  ‘Yeah. It was pretty intense. And although I was half pissed off about the fact that I clearly didn’t figure large in her world view right then …’

  ‘Like at the end of The Dead, when the guy realises his wife’s spent their entire marriage thinking about what’s his name, with the snow falling on his grave.’

  ‘Yeah, a bit like that. But I was also kind of pleased that she’d felt able to talk to me about it after all. There was a new intimacy between us, albeit premised on her greater intimacy with …’

  ‘The Dead.’

  ‘The Dead.’

  ‘So you didn’t shag her then?’

  Andrew smiled, sadly. He was lucky to have got even the eight or so minutes of seriousness out of Leo.