Alice's Secret Garden

by Rebecca Campbell

  Odette turned and found herself staring into the familiar buttocky face.

  ‘You,’ they said together.

  ‘But I didn’t know that you were married to this lady. I thought the woman on the plane, the woman with the beret …’

  ‘Oh God, and the nuts? But you were sitting between us. Why would you think … Never mind. This is a pleasant surprise. Let’s have some prosecco!’

  And to Odette’s astonishment, the evening was fun. Buttock Face … or rather Quentin, as Odette now forced herself to think of him, was a professor of Art History, a specialist in Byzantine and early Venetian architecture. He loved having a new person to lecture at, despite the heavy sighs and rolling eyes of his wife and children. And Odette found it all, if not fascinating, then at least diverting, especially as it was accompanied by heavy foot-petting from the exquisite Peter.

  On the plane home Odette thought about the strangeness of things. Venice had no logic, no reason, no rationality. It just was, and it had endured for over a thousand years, doing its smelly, watery stuff. Her loves, her life, had been one long struggle to make the world behave in ways that could be understood and controlled. But that control had been an illusion. And why had she sacrificed so much in order to work in a place that had no soul, no life, that existed solely to make money, to move money, joylessly? The relative failure of her trip had shown her the futility of her life in the City in a way that a conventionally, blissfully romantic trip could never have done. She decided to change it, but as yet she had no idea how. She knew that she ought to walk away from the City. She hadn’t had time to spend much of her income over the past few years, and she had more money than she knew what to do with in the bank, but she was too … too orthodox, too scared simply to walk away. Somehow she knew that she would stay in the City, her career proceeding according to plan, her life withering.

  She got into work at ten. Rather than the usual piss-taking, she found the team subdued and uncertain. Had they already heard about the disaster with Matt? Were they sorry for her? She forced some levity into her voice.

  ‘What’s happened to you lot? Look like you’ve all been investing in dot.com stock.’

  ‘If only,’ said Philip, one of the guys who normally led the way in the foul-mouthed banter that passed for office wit. ‘We’re fucked. We’ve been restructured. It was that cunt Matt. He was sent in to see who could be fucking rationalised out of the picture. It’s us, Odette. But you must have known about this. You were shagging him, weren’t you? Fat lot of fucking good it’s done you.’

  ‘So,’ said Odette, placidly, ‘me too?’

  ‘Yeah, you too.’

  ‘Well,’ said Odette, ‘that’s about it.’ The account she had given was shortened, but not censored.

  ‘And what about the boy … what was his name?’

  ‘Peter.’

  ‘Peter. I mean, will you see him again?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t think so. That’s better left as one of those perfect memories. I haven’t got many of them, and I wouldn’t want to spoil this one.’

  Alice looked carefully at her friend. She seemed younger. There was a lightness about her that she had never seen before: nothing dramatic, just a subtle sense of relaxation about the grey eyes, lips that eased into smiles, a calmness of the hands. Alice was pleased. Not, she was aware, the intense pleasure she would have felt before her own life had changed. She had lost that casual affinity with others. No, this was more the distant, passing pleasure on finding out that the earthquake in Lima, or the bomb in Cairo, or the oil spill in Alaska, had not been as serious as first reports suggested.

  Alice didn’t know what to make of it all; nor what the appropriate thing to say was. She felt horribly guilty about advising her friend to go to Venice, a trip that by any objective criteria looked like a disaster. And yet Odette exuded her new serenity.

  ‘Somehow you don’t seem particularly upset by it,’ she tried, in want of anything better to say. The ‘it’ could have been the Matt fiasco or the job catastrophe.

  ‘You know, the truth is, I’m not. I’ve always tried to take control in my life, but there’s something refreshing in being the hapless plaything of Fate. I didn’t realise how much I hated the job – no, not hated, was bored by – until it wasn’t there. And Matt was never the one. He was just a shell, and my love or my need crawled into it like a hermit crab.’

  ‘But what will you do?’

  ‘They’ve given me a great fat redundancy cheque. I’ll live on that for a while. But I have a few ideas. Well, one idea, really, but I think it’s a good one. Or maybe a mad one. I hope not: in fact I’ve already put it into operation.’

  Odette’s scheme, briefly told, involved investing a fair chunk of her redundancy money in financing the long-ago ex-boyfriend’s business manufacturing garden ornaments. The ex-boyfriend, called Gerald, was actually a perfectly competent, if excessively hairy, artist, specialising in monumental sculptural works. However, with neither a trust fund nor a Tory patron, and lacking the necessary crudity or showmanship to attract prizes or commissions, he had hit, in desperation, on the idea of putting stone circles in suburban gardens. It was a world he knew: his father had managed a garden centre in Woking, a place where Gerald still worked occasionally, and where Odette had met him on a special trip to buy shrubs for her balcony. He’d made his play while loading her Golf with a tightly bound lemon tree and another stripy-leafed thing she’d bought. It had seemed unnecessarily callous to turn down a drink, and besides, he had a muscly, salt of the earth feel to him. She didn’t know then about the art.

  ‘Listen, babe,’ he’d said on that first and only date, drawing audibly on four millimetres of roll-up, ‘people like spending their money on their gardens. It’s fucking mental, but it’s a fact. I don’t believe they actually want gnomes and what have you. It’s just that there’s not much else, once you’ve got the bird bath and the cartwheel and the sundial. And you know, I believe that people have a suppressed yearning for the spiritual. The more materialistic you are, the deeper the yearning.’

  ‘I hate that kind of logic, the finding of evidence for something in the very absence of evidence.’

  ‘Stone circles concentrate energy. You ever screw in Avebury?’

  ‘Um, no.’

  ‘Fucking cosmic. By the way, I don’t use condoms. It’s a vibe thing.’

  She hadn’t slept with him, but had found him agreeable enough to keep up the relationship on an occasional phone call basis. So she knew that the stone circle business was hobbling along, keeping him in high-grade Moroccan red, but that was about it.

  ‘Well,’ said Odette to Alice, ‘I’m not sure that it’ll ever make us millionaires, but it’s all quite … stimulating. We have brainstorming sessions where we decide what to make – I’ve just had the idea of trying a range of glass-topped coffee tables, you know, over the top of the stone circle, and Gerald wants to move into the European market by using selected bits of Carnac, which is the French Stonehenge, only bigger and more straggly. Okay, more Avebury than Stonehenge. Then he goes off and makes the things: a stone original, chiselled out of granite, which he then mass produces in resin, and I do all the marketing and the officey things he can’t cope with, being an artist. God, I know the more I tell it the madder it sounds, but I love it. There’s no one to suck up to, no one to bitch about, and there’s that faint feeling that even if we aren’t doing anything especially virtuous, then at least we aren’t doing any harm.’

  ‘And what about you and Gerald? The old spark back?’

  ‘No, not at all. There wasn’t ever an old spark to come back. He lives with a woman who weaves shawls. Very nice in a tenty way.’

  ‘The shawls?’

  ‘No, her.’

  ‘And you’re still on for this drinks thing at my work? I know it sounds terrible, in fact, probably will be terrible, but I’ll be so much happier if you can be there.’

  ‘I’m actually rather looking forward to it. Quite interested i
n meeting this Andrew chap of yours.’

  Alice looked at Odette with wide eyes.

  ‘Of course! Why didn’t I think of it? You’d be perfect.’

  ‘I didn’t mean like that,’ said Odette, blushing and laughing gawkily. But she did, really.

  ELEVEN

  Drink to Me Only with Thine Eyes, or The Quest for the Historical Noddy

  ‘You look nice,’ said Alice. And she meant it. Andrew was wearing a blue velvet suit, nattily cut. It went very prettily with his mauve shirt and lilac tie. Perhaps the sideburns could have done with a bit of a trim, but then Andrew was always reluctant to do that, citing both the fact that his strength lay, Samson-like, in their luxuriance, and, more plangently, the difficulty in getting a straight bottom line when having to do it for yourself.

  ‘Thanks.’ They were having a mid-morning tea break, and Andrew took a long, loud (comically loud, he hoped) slurp at his tea. Tea was one of the few remaining areas where Andrew still pretended to be working class or ‘of the people’ as he usually put it. Hence the ochre-staining, mouth-puckering strength; hence the noise. ‘You too.’ Andrew also meant it. Alice looked less bag lady than normal. He detected another hand at work.

  ‘My friend Odette has been helping me with clothes.’

  ‘Ah! I thought … That’s the one coming tonight?’

  ‘Yes. You’ll like her. She’s very sensible. Oh God no! I didn’t just say sensible. What I said was glamorous and exciting.’

  ‘If that was meant to undo the bad work done by sensible, I’m afraid it’s failed. All you’ve done is add “very” before “sensible”.’

  Alice laughed. She’d been doing more of that recently, which both pained and pleased Andrew.

  ‘It really isn’t fair. Odette used to be famously sensible in our gang.’

  ‘You have a gang?’

  ‘Not really a gang. Just a couple of friends. But then, in one fell swoop, she stopped being sensible and became eccentric.’

  Alice went on to give brief accounts of the Venice expedition (leaving out anything that put Odette in a bad light), the sacking, and the rebirth as hippie entrepreneur.

  ‘Okay, I’ll gladly give you back your sensible,’ said Andrew, faintly impressed. ‘And um er what does she …’

  ‘Look like?’

  ‘Oh, well, that puts it rather brutally. Yeah, what does she look like: moose or maid?’

  ‘Andrew, I don’t find that way of talking amusing. Certainly not when you’re talking about my friend. Is that really how you see us? Black and white, beautiful or ugly?’

  Andrew was a little taken aback by Alice’s response. ‘Sorry,’ he said, genuinely embarrassed. ‘Just, you know, talking.’ He wouldn’t normally have taken such a po-faced rebuke so passively. But then he wasn’t normally in love with the po-faced rebukers. He thought about explaining that she was entirely wrong about the black and white, that he actually had a tremendously complicated and (to his mind) subtle system of classification based on the Football League, but held back on the almost certainly correct grounds that it would just make things worse.

  Happy to have made her point, Alice answered Andrew’s question.

  ‘Pretty,’ she said.

  ‘Oh,’ said Andrew, looking generally around, before paying particular attention to a frail wisp of cobweb the cleaners had missed in the corner of the ceiling. Had missed, in fact, and gone on missing, since Andrew had joined Enderby’s. ‘Good.’

  By mid-afternoon something akin to excitement was beginning to stir in Books. Each year the whole of Enderby’s would throw itself into a fancy-dress Christmas party, but that, with the exception of the desultory Friday drinks different departments might or might not go in for, was, socially speaking, that. Hence the elements of the carnivalesque: Pam had on a new set of curtains; Ophelia’s lips had acquired a gloss that could have deflected the high-powered lasers of anything other than the most advanced of alien civilisations; Clerihew had specially buffed his brogues and burnished his leather elbow patches to the point at which you might well, had you wished and been prepared to hunker down, been able to see your face in them. Periodically, Oakley would stride purposefully from his office to chivvy and encourage with ill-judged compliments and oily banter.

  At five, Andrew said to Alice, ‘How about you and me slip off quickly for a pre-drinks drink.’

  ‘If you like, but it seems a bit, well, indulgent.’

  ‘Don’t be such a square. It always pays to hit the ground running, I find.’

  ‘Okay then,’ she added, looking around, her gaze taking in Ophelia and Clerihew, among others. ‘Shouldn’t we ask …’

  ‘No,’ said Andrew hurriedly, pulling the sort of face he might pull should a nineteen-stone Turkish masseur produce the house’s antique anal dildo.

  The Mitre, the usual venue for Friday drinks, was an old-fashioned sort of pub, replete with inglenooks and etched glass and complicated lighting arrangements, vaguely suggestive of, without being remotely connected to, gas. The whole thing dated to 1997. Alice hadn’t been through its swinging doors for a long time. She’d forgotten how strangely comforting a place it was, as long as you avoided the toilets.

  ‘What’ll you have?’ asked Andrew, bending companionably towards her, before adding, ‘Holy ger-shite, you really couldn’t wait, could you?’

  Startled, Alice looked at Andrew, and then followed his line of sight to the bar, where a darkly dressed, slightly hunched man was sitting. The figure turned from his beer and bent his face into what Alice assumed was a smile, although the arrangement of features could almost have easily stood in for a range of other expressions: horror; rank disgust; rage; coital disappointment. The voice, when it came, changed entirely her perception. It was like cello music.

  ‘Now there is only one person in the entire world that you could be, given that this is the world of concrete and plastic and junk food and aerosols and boy bands and Lycra. If we were in the world of poesy, you could, of course, as readily be Eloise or Laura or the divine Francesca.’

  As he spoke he slid along the bar slowly towards Alice, his motion curiously, but not creepily, serpentine, his black eyes fixed intently on hers, threaded, she suddenly thought, upon one double string. And then he broke off the gaze. ‘Will that do you, Andy old chum?’ He turned back to her again. ‘He said to lay it on thick.’

  ‘I was thinking more of tempora, rather than stucco. Poesy? Christ, Leo, sometimes I wonder.’

  Alice found that she was smiling. ‘So you’re the famous Leo. Nice to meet you. Have you ever thought about getting a cloak?’

  ‘What? Oh. Some kind of humourism. Best leave those to the experts. As I seem to be nearest the bar, why don’t I get them in?’

  In the hour before the others began to arrive, Andrew and Leo engaged in the sort of competitive male bantering that Alice had only ever seen before from a distance. Most of their jokes were only just penetrable to an outsider, and they made few allowances for the fact that she might not be intimately acquainted with the triumphs of Leo’s love life or the disasters that seemed comically to litter Andrew’s. It was expected that she would have read (or at least heard of) the books that they had read, and equally expected that she would find their ‘insights’ into these works appropriately insightful. At no stage did it appear that she was expected to contribute anything beyond admiring gasps, enthusiastic nodding, or appreciative laughter.

  Although it was far from boring, indeed flattering, as she could sense that the performance was for her sake, her mind did begin to wander; not so much away from the boys, as above them. She decided to try to think scientifically about the phenomenon, and thinking scientifically was a habit she had lost during her time at Enderby’s, so it took some effort. She considered the enchanting bower birds, where the male, rather than dressing himself in gaudy plumes, would make intricate structures from stones and twigs and woven grasses, which the female, like a cultured critic, would study and assess before tipping the wink to the
winner. She thought about lions, killing and devouring the young of their deposed rivals to ensure the lionesses would come on heat and allow them to further their genetic ambitions. She thought about the frantic promiscuity of chimps, and the contrasting melancholy brooding of male gorillas, never quite sure when their nuclear family would be hijacked by a bold nephew or an interloping silverback from the next valley.

  But it was all no good. How did it help her to understand these two men, so companionable and yet so competitive, each prepared to ridicule and embarrass the other just to gain her favour? All you could ever find in nature were analogues: bits of behaviour that looked similar, and which might tempt you into seeing a common cause at work. But what you really needed were homologues – evidence of the related genes doing the same job across the two species.

  And then, as her mind ran through the alternatives, racing back through her deliberations to fill in the complicating and contradictory arguments, Alice felt the sudden, burning wish to be back in the sphere of scientific research, back in a world where knowledge mattered, where problems could be solved if only you devoted enough time and effort, where there were more important things than empty titles and country houses and exquisite old books. It hadn’t happened for a year. Pain and longing and anguish had suffocated her science, but here it was gasping and stuttering back to life.

  ‘Spade-no-tash.’ Andrew had said it, suddenly, dramatically.

  ‘What?’ said Alice, although it didn’t seem to have been aimed at her.

  ‘Arse!’ said Leo, with feeling.

  ‘I’m sorry, what’s happening?’ Alice was entirely perplexed.

  ‘Oh, it’s just a game we play.’ Andrew looked a little shame-faced. The cry of ‘spade-no-tash’ appeared to be involuntary, and hadn’t been part of the showing off. ‘You tell her, Leo.’

  ‘Look, it’s quite simple. The aim is to spot people with beards but no moustaches. A full Flemish Ruff, also known as the Belgian Bum Brush, or a BBB, scores one whole point, plus a lot of kudos, the more so if the desporter is, in fact, a Flem. The classic, fell-walker’s chin-cosy still gets you a point and a decent laugh, but hasn’t quite got the flourish, the panache, that extra showmanship, that goes with a BBB. A “fashion” quasi-goatee, still, of course, tashless, scores a third of a point. A spade-no-tash worn for ethnic or religious reasons, and generally here we’re talking about the followers of Mohammed, scores two-thirds of a point. A false cry of “spade-no-tash” loses you half a point. The games are first to three points, and there are five games in a set and three sets in a match. Got that?’