Alice's Secret Garden

by Rebecca Campbell

  ‘Very nice flank-turning manoeuvre.’

  ‘Thanks, except that she just enjoyed it as a performance, and then went on to point out the logical flaws and false assumptions in my argument. I think it’s then that I fell in love with her.’

  ‘Steady!’

  Leo looked Andrew in the eye and said: ‘I mean it.’

  Andrew had never heard Leo use the four-letter L word before, at least not in relation to a person.

  Leo went on.

  ‘And then we had dinner together in Hampstead village. For the first time ever I didn’t want to get drunk when I was with a girl. I wanted to hear properly everything she said. She told me all about this mad scheme of hers, making Stonehenges for gardens, with some hairy artist, and I got a bit jealous, and she sensed it, and put me right without making it seem as though she was doing it for my sake or even doing it at all.’

  ‘Okay, I’ve got the message – she’s Miss Perfect, all tact and discretion and brains and good humour and pretty to boot. Let’s cut to the chase. Did you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You’re not holding out on me now, are you? Protecting the lady’s honour, and so on and so forth?’

  ‘Her honour did not need protecting. As soon as she let it be known that she was prepared to see me again I was satisfied. She was busy on the Sunday, visiting parents. She said they were about the only people who didn’t think she was mad to change direction so dramatically.’

  Leo continued his account with the nights of talk on Monday, Wednesday and Thursday. Friday, to Andrew’s relief, was declared a night of rest.

  ‘So,’ said Andrew, in awe at so much contact so early in the relationship, which itself explained the week without a word, ‘it’s been a whole two days since you’ve seen her. You must be pining. In fact I can’t believe you’ve wasted a night in the pub with me when you could have been discussing Third World development with the Perfect Woman.’

  Andrew had now become a little jealous and threatened by Odette, and tried to hide it by sounding a little jealous and threatened.

  ‘Come on, Andrew, it isn’t like that. Surely you can’t begrudge me a few scraps of contentment in my dotage?’

  Andrew smiled. ‘Okay, as long as it is only a few scraps. And at least you turned up tonight. I propose that we hunker down here till closing time to celebrate your new found bliss. Hang on, just to confirm, the deed of darkness, the beast with two backs …’

  ‘No, none of that. The beef dagger remains sheathed.’

  ‘Christ, you’re losing your touch.’

  ‘You know, Andrew, I never had that much of a touch.’ There was a pause, and the two men looked at each other. And then Leo continued, picking up the tone as if there had been no gap, ‘But as for tonight, I’m afraid that I actually, erm, have arranged to meet Odette. We’ve a table at …’ Leo couldn’t bring himself to speak the name of the restaurant, made famous as the site of the tryst between Gordon Brown and Tony Blair at which New Labour had been conceived, ‘… booked for nine. In fact I must be shuffling along.’

  He didn’t mention that Odette had said that he could, if he wanted, spend the night again at her flat, with something in her voice that let him know that this time he didn’t have to sleep on the sofa bed.

  ‘Oh,’ said Andrew, unable now to hide his sadness. Leo and he often began and ended a Saturday night drink relatively early, leaving time to get back for the football, or a late film, so he could see that there was no necessary slight involved in peeling off to meet what was, after all, a new and wondrous love. Still … still.

  ‘I know it’s playing the snake, I’m sorry. But I really wanted to see you tonight, to tell you everything. Odette suggested that, if things go well, I mean if we’re still …’

  ‘Yeah, I get it.’

  ‘Then perhaps you and me and Alice and Odette could get together.’

  Andrew perked up considerably at that.

  ‘Sounds pleasant enough. Certainly don’t want to meet you on your own again until some of the ardour has cooled. I had serious issues to discuss tonight, you know, my theory about … well, I can’t remember now, but I’m sure it was a good one … and instead I had to listen to you droning on about how lovely the world is, tra la la. It’s enough to make a grown man puke up his spleen.’

  Five minutes later they were outside.

  ‘I’m this way,’ said Andrew, aiming his thumb westward, down Upper Street, towards the Angel.

  ‘I’m …’ said Leo, angling head and neck the other way, in the direction of Highbury and Islington station. ‘I’ll call you in a couple of days to maybe arrange times and places for the weekend.’

  ‘Alice willing.’

  ‘Odette’ll sort that. She’s good at sorting.’

  ‘I gathered that.’

  And then they shook hands, which they never did.

  It was only a five-minute walk to Granita. Odette had cheekily suggested the restaurant following a lengthy rant by Leo about the death of politics.

  ‘At least in the eighties,’ he’d said, aware that it was not an original line, but impelled to continue, ‘you had a real socialist party you could love and despair of and some proper fuck-off Tories to loathe, as well as a melt-in-the-mouth centre. Now what do we have?’

  ‘Prosperity and growth?’ tried Odette.

  ‘All we have now is the melt-in-the-mouth centre, and policies dictated by what the spin doctors find easiest to sell to the news editors when they meet for gazpacho at …’

  Yes, Granita.

  There was a noise ahead. No not just ahead – ahead and off to the left. Upper Street was busy as always and he couldn’t see what was happening. He got to a turn-off, a narrow street leading to a leafy square. In the street he saw two people. One was an old Asian man, bearded and wearing some kind of hat, vaguely ethnic in feel. For no good reason Leo thought he might be Bangladeshi. And about six inches from his face, another face, the face of a white youth, a face contorted with rage. The skull attached to the face was shaven close, nicked and scabbed here and there. Despite the season, he was wearing nothing but a white tee-shirt on his torso, which was knotted and lean. His fists were clenched by his sides. The youth was shouting into the face of the old man, who seemed unable to move. His words were as indecipherable as a drill sergeant’s screams on the parade ground.

  Walk on, said Leo to himself. It’ll blow over. It’s not a mugging: muggers don’t scream. Just a thug shouting at a man. He’ll stop, the man’ll go home shaken, and with another good reason to hate white English youths, but otherwise unharmed. It was the line other people were adopting. Men and women glanced down the road as they walked along Upper Street, and then hurried by, choosing not to see. A couple began to approach from the other end of the road, and would have had to walk right past the screamer and old man, but they turned back and took another route. They were old themselves, and Leo didn’t blame them.

  Walk on, he said, but he knew from the moment that he saw what was happening that he would not be walking on. Beyond that he didn’t know anything. And then his legs decided for him, and took him slowly down towards the conflict. The youth was too focussed on his victim to notice Leo. The first he knew of it was when Leo stepped in between the two of them, forcing the old man out of the way. The youth had had to crane down at the old man, who was at least six inches shorter than he. Leo was shorter still.

  The youth’s eyes opened wide in astonishment.

  ‘What the fuck are you?’ he said, his voice cracked and breaking. ‘What the fuck are you?’

  Leo couldn’t think of anything to say. He was terrified. He had no plan. He didn’t want to fight the youth. He just hoped vaguely that he might go away. It nearly worked. He could see the rage in the youth’s eyes fade, replaced by amusement. There was a sublime incongruity in Leo’s mute, miniature challenge to the skinhead that even the skinhead was aware of. If Leo could have thought of one of the jokes he’d used at school to make the bullies laugh, then maybe
they could all have walked away unharmed. But he couldn’t. He just stared back up at the skinhead, meeting his eyes, not thinking that this was to issue a challenge.

  The youth’s eyes hardened again.

  ‘Go away, you little cunt,’ he said, quietly.

  Leo did not move. He heard the old Bangladeshi man mumbling something behind him. What was it, a prayer?

  Then the head-butt came. It landed not, as the skinhead intended, on Leo’s nose, but on his forehead. Worse still, for the skinhead, it was so ill-executed that his own nose took much of the force. It began to bleed. Some of the drops, mixed with mucus, fell on Leo. Disgusted, he took a step back and, emitting a gagging shriek, he slapped the skinhead full in the face.

  It took two seconds for the skinhead to respond. His first move was to raise his hand almost gently to his cheek. His second was to punch Leo, this time landing the blow squarely on his nose. He then brought his knee up into Leo’s stomach. With Leo bent double, he smashed the same knee back up into his face. Leo staggered back, and the skinhead stepped forward, grabbed a fistful of his hair and threw him face down on to the ground. Without hurrying, the youth put a knee into Leo’s back, took again a fistful of hair and ground his face into the grit of the pavement.

  What happened next remained in dispute. The youth claimed, and it was later to form the mainstay of his partially successful plea of self-defence, that Leo had reached behind him and pulled the long knife from his belt. It may have been that Leo, calling on some primeval instinct, had made a fumbling attempt to draw the knife; it may merely have been an involuntary twitch; or perhaps the youth had found the knife and made up the story about Leo’s movement. Moments before, the old man had hurried away, terrified not only of the brutal violence, but also of becoming involved with police and courts and questions. Leo himself would never be able to answer the riddle.

  But what followed had a witness.

  Andrew felt that the drink had ended on the wrong note. He wanted to go and tell his friend that everything was fine between them, that Odette did sound like a cracker, that it might well give him his best chance with Alice. He’d run back down the street, and reached the turn-off in time to see the two figures caught in the atmospheric glow thrown by an old corporation street lamp. Something about the shape of the one on the ground, perhaps the neat cut of his jacket, perhaps just its very smallness, told Andrew that it was Leo. For a second he couldn’t make out what was happening. The other person, the big man, was crouched above Leo, holding his head tenderly in his arms. Christ, thought Andrew, again only for a second, he’s having a shag in an alleyway with a sailorboy. And then he saw the long knife in the man’s hand. And he saw the man lift back Leo’s chin. And he saw the knife drawn quickly, smoothly across his throat. And then again.

  Finally he managed to shout out, feebly:

  ‘Hey, you, stop.’

  Even at the time he realised how pathetic an intervention it was. But at the shout the stooped figure looked up towards Andrew. Andrew saw that the front of his tee-shirt was covered in blood, in Leo’s blood. Then he threw away the knife and bolted away towards the square, keeping low like a sprinter from the blocks. Andrew ran the twenty feet to where his best friend lay silent, face down on the ground. He began to whimper.

  ‘Oh God, Leo. Oh God.’

  As gently as he could he turned him over.

  Blood, blood everywhere. His hands were covered in it, rich and thick and hot. He tried to wipe it off on his trousers.

  ‘Oh God, Leo. Oh God.’

  FOURTEEN

  The Return of the Gothic

  At last dinner was over. It had been the longest meal of her life, what with Alex Conradian dropping hints about Lynden that he never followed up, and Johnny Twogood beaming at her from across the table and Jeremy Thingy looking at her strangely, and all the time Ophelia plying her trade with Edward so many miles away, over mountain ranges of silver and porcelain.

  At least, as Alice had secretly dreaded, there was to be no separation, the women ‘going through’ to talk of dancing masters over needlepoint, while the gentlemen discussed politics and porn. Instead it was all on to another room, a new one, where they were served coffee by one of the village girls, who, from her worn face and bent posture, now looked as though she were suffering from a prolapsed womb.

  ‘Dear old Alice,’ said Ophelia, surprising her with an approach from the blind side. ‘You must come and meet Mummy.’

  Mummy was, in fact, right there.

  ‘Hello, Mrs …’ Oh God, what was Ophelia’s surname? Remember, remember … Andrew had some joke … Ophelia Beautifully Mounted … Beaumont! Beaumont! ‘Beaumont. It’s very nice to meet you.’

  ‘Dear child, Offie tells me you’ve been working here with Edward.’

  ‘Yes, we’re …’

  ‘I’ve known him,’ she said imperiously, and impossibly, ‘since before he was born. He used to give Offie horsy rides on his back around the paddling pool.’

  ‘Mummy,’ said Ophelia, sounding human for the first time since Alice had met her.

  ‘We’ve discussed the issue, and it seems clear enough. There’s really no need to drag anyone else into it. After all it’s not as if we’re talking about the Ladybird Book of Garden Birds, is it? Not that we aren’t very grateful, you mustn’t think that we aren’t, and I’m sure that the preparatory work was competently carried out. And of course Edward insisted, and it would have been …’

  Alice was very drunk; her teeth seemed to have subtly shifted position, making speech difficult; and people’s heads had increased alarmingly in size; objects were nearer or further away than she expected; but some of Mrs Beaumont’s meaning came through. She must be talking about the Audubon. So, what?

  Wait, wait. Surely Edward couldn’t be thinking of handing the project over to Ophelia? Insisting on her to the management? It would be insane. Even forgetting any … obligations he might have to Alice, Ophelia was totally incapable of performing adequately the tasks that remained to be done: writing the catalogue and organising the sale.

  In particular her written work was notorious. Verbless sentences. Sentences that rambled and straggled and ranged on needlessly, detouring to visit irrelevant byways, often comically misusing technical jargon in an attempt to show the intertextuality of her praxis, giving, perhaps, along the way, the life history of a minor player in the provenance of the book, who’d been lost, say on a doomed polar mission, before inexplicably swinging back in what might have been the right direction, if anyone had still been paying attention, but still without ever making or sometimes stopping just before it seemed they were going to reach the. Everything she wrote had to be rewritten by somebody else – usually Clerihew, who substituted his own crabbed and fussy style for her rank illiteracy.

  Of course the catalogue and the sale itself were the showiest bits of the whole process, the ways in which one might gain the attention of the senior management at Enderby’s. If Ophelia did take over, then the success of the whole project would be ascribed to her brilliance. Alice didn’t care so much for herself; it was Andrew for whom she felt. She had forgiven him his indiscretion with Leo. She knew it wasn’t out of malice that he had told his friend about her secret love, and with his helplessness, his charm, his yearning to be liked, she found that she simply could not carry a grudge. And after his recent setbacks he needed some good PR. They had agreed that he would do the catalogue – he was acknowledged as the best stylist in Books – and she would organise the sale. They were a team and would share the glory. But with Ophelia in the driving seat, she and Andrew would be frozen out.

  But this didn’t seem to connect with Alice’s view of Ophelia. Wasn’t she always studiedly indifferent to her career prospects? Perhaps the whole thing was simply a ruse to get closer to Lynden. Her mind spun with the effort, not to mention the cocktails, the wine and now, served after the coffee (which had helped only to speed the whirring inside her head), the brandy.

  The faces all aroun
d her had begun to change as the drink had worked its alchemy. Features were both more animated and yet slacker, eyes flickering but dull. Conversation subsided and then leapt into spluttering life, as people laughed loudly at jokes that weren’t funny. Alice was relieved that she wasn’t quite the drunkest person there: Miranda, the student, had passed out on a sofa. In repose she looked about twelve years old, which gave a faintly disturbing quality to the fact that her head was resting on the knee of Alex Conradian.

  Within the space of five minutes both Johnny and Jeremy came up to her. Johnny told her to beware of Jeremy: ‘absolutely fantastic chap that he is, he is a complete and utter snake, although I must say what a fantastic chap he is.’

  Jeremy helpfully pointed out that Johnny was an ‘ass’, who, ‘couldn’t get hold of the right end of a one-ended stick with a big sign saying “hold this end”.’ At least that’s how Alice translated his drawl, drawn out to the point now very nearly of abstraction, and which had sounded like: ‘Ghoooud ghold ryetend one nedded stick wibeg sigh seng hhhhhh old thissen.’

  The snake and the ass, thought Alice. Sounds like a parable. And the snake saith unto the ass partake of the carrot and not of the worm, and the ass replieth eeyore, eeyore.

  ‘What?’

  It was Lynden, standing close beside her. Alice smiled, not as embarrassed as she should have been, which was one effect of her anger.

  ‘I think I may have said “eeyore”. Nevermind.’

  ‘I suspect the Pomeroy – it affects people in very different ways. Look, Alice, I wanted to say how sorry I am about today.’

  ‘Which part – the ignoring me all day to flirt with Ophelia? Or the fact that you’ve told her she can take over all my hard work on the Audubon, making me look completely incompetent to the … oh I don’t really care.’