Alice's Secret Garden

by Rebecca Campbell

  She ordered another glass of wine. The waiters were ignoring her; not, she thought, through rudeness, but so as not to make her feel awkward about the non-arrival of the ‘friend’ she had said she was expecting. What unusual discretion. She’d tell Leo about it when he came.

  But he wasn’t coming, was he? Had she taken too conservative a line in that argument they had had about the City? She was only playing devil’s advocate. He must have known that. No, never the arguing over ideas: it was the air that he breathed. If he couldn’t like her … love her, it would be because she was too dull, too conventional in her thought. That must be it. She bored him, bored him, bored him.

  At ten o’clock she took a taxi home, holding back her head to try to keep in the tears.

  The next morning she woke early, her mind clear and refreshed. No time to be wasted on brooding or sulking. She brushed her hair, put on her comfortable clothes, a sweatshirt and jogging pants, walked briskly to the bagel place, where she bought three bagels (hungry after last night’s missed meal), picked up the Sunday papers, came back and settled down with a pot of fresh coffee. At eleven she took the bus – only a ten-minute wait, which was close to a miracle on a Sunday – up to Pond Street. From there she walked up on to the Heath and followed her usual route, enjoying the late autumn sunshine until it turned into early winter rain.

  She was home by two, hungry again. There was nothing much to eat in the flat, but she scavenged a meal of stale muesli and old yoghurt and the pear that had still refused to soften after a week alone in the fruit bowl. As she was eating, she saw the red light beating on her answerphone.

  ‘Er, hello. This is Andrew. We met the other night. I got your number from Alice. I hope you don’t mind. It’s a bit of an emergency. But don’t worry too much, it’s not that bad. Well, it is quite bad. Oh God, it feels all wrong saying this on the machine, but you should know. I was with Leo last night. He left me to go and meet you. There was a bit of a … well, he got into a bit of trouble. They took him to the Whittington Hospital. It’s the one up the Holloway Road, near, oh, what’s it called, the bit at the top … Archway. I think he should be okay for visitors by this evening. Um, bye. Sorry.’

  Odette played the message three times again. No need to panic. Not dead, not dying. What could ‘a bit of trouble mean?’ The idiot hadn’t left his number. She tried Alice. She got her mother.

  ‘Alice?’ came the voice, astonished and, it sounded, offended that anyone might want to speak to her daughter. Odette had heard it before. ‘No, not here. In the country. The country … What? Back when? No, I’ve no idea. Why should I know? She may have said something about coming back, but I can’t be expected …’

  Next she phoned the hospital She got a ward number from the switchboard, and was put through to a busy nurse who wasn’t able to say anything other than that no, he wasn’t critical, and yes, visitors were allowed, between the hours of 17.30 and 19.30.

  Odette wasn’t surprised or shocked to find, after a moment or two of introspection, that she was pleased. She did pause, for a moment, in awe that she could be so selfish, but no, it didn’t make her a monster, just human. She hadn’t been rejected or forgotten, and that was always good. Leo wouldn’t benefit from an emotional collapse now, brought on either by girlish horror at his plight, or some existential (if that was the right word – she’d check with him later) posturing about her feelings. He needed good, practical help. And that’s what Odette Bach was all about.

  The monkey nuts and hard-boiled eggs idea came to her in a flash. Yes, he’d like that. Anything else, anything he needed, could wait until she saw him and could assess the situation more thoroughly.

  And yes, when she found him, and gave him the bag, he did laugh. A sort of a laugh. He couldn’t open his mouth or his eyes, but he made a jolly, choking noise. Even Odette’s calmness had taken a buffet when she saw his face. He tried to speak, said something about … was it ugly? The effort sent a dribble of pink saliva running down the centre of his chin, which she gently wiped off with one of the coarse hospital tissues from the box by his bed.

  ‘Believe it or not, your handsome face was never the main attraction.’

  The once so expressive face was unreadable now – it was a landscape transformed by some terrible natural disaster. Had she gone too far? In their week together, Odette had divined something of Leo’s great anguish about his looks. It was a pain that she could see without truly understanding: she had never been on the inside of an anxiety like that. She had felt that the best way to approach it would be by simply showing Leo how much she loved him in his entirety, as a complete person, how she desired him as a whole. And part of that total love would be a lightness directed to where he was most serious. But she was operating by guesswork, by intuition, and these were not Odette’s strengths.

  There was a noise.

  Bliss: again, the gurgling, choking laugh.

  And then Odette, sitting on the red plastic chair by Leo’s bed, with seven other beds arranged at jaunty angles around the ward to make it seem less institutional, carrying their burden of the old and the dying, mouths hopelessly dentureless, hair awry, pyjamas done up wrong, tubes and drips ascending and descending, bringing in sustenance and taking away the products of decay, Odette had her vision. It was a vision that she knew would stay with her for the rest of her life, its clarity making it simple to compare it with reality, ticking off the points of resemblance, smiling over the details that had not proved accurate. It was a vision of a house in the country, not grand, not even picturesque, but perfect in its way; of a garden thick with flowers, but planted also with useful fruits and herbs, redcurrants bright as arterial blood, sweet basil, rosemary, the never-fruiting lemon tree. And children were in the garden, and Leo playing horsey, one, two, three on his narrow back, all scrambling, all crying for their turn, and Leo, with still something of that choked, hospital laugh, begging for mercy. And again, more years flying and new children, two, blond as angels, and the little girl asking why granddad laughs so funny. And then forward again to the end of laughing, with the garden overgrown, and the ghosts of the children and of Leo playing horsey between the trees, and of her, sitting in a deck chair, in a straw hat, but the cold coming on, and sleeping.

  And Leo was sleeping now. She bent over the bed and kissed his swollen eyelids as softly as she could, but still his breathing paused for a second, and his face relaxed beneath the pain, and she knew that he knew.

  SIXTEEN

  Ghostly Limbs

  Andrew had a habit of mumbling as he typed.

  ‘Flyleaves mounted on free endpapers … occasional handling creases (predominantly marginal)… pale offsetting on versos.’

  Alice smiled. Andrew sensed it and looked up over the top of his computer monitor.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Am I … doing that thing again?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter. I like it as long as I’m not trying to concentrate, or work, or anything.’

  ‘Ah. It’s just that I’ve got to get this exactly right. I know you always find it faintly amusing whenever I get serious about work, but this is all I’ve got. It’s okay for people like …’ Alice thought that he was going to say ‘you’, but he shied away from it. ‘People like them.’ Andrew gave a circular wave of his head taking in most of the room, but seeming to concentrate itself in the direction of Ophelia and Clerihew. ‘Nothing ever really goes wrong for you if you’re posh enough. There’s always a safety net, always the next good thing that’ll come along. But if I fuck up here, then what can I do?’

  Mentally, Alice and Andrew took the well-travelled bookshop path to Hampstead, Golders Green, Stoke-on-Trent, Hull, Inverness, Stockholm and Reykjavik.

  ‘And after the various um debacles – the Leo performance at the drinks and me calling Clerihew a cunt …’

  ‘Wasn’t it a fuck?’

  ‘Whatever … well, you get my point: I need a gold star for this one. Anyway,’ he continued in his best pompous voice, ‘people’ll stil
l be reading this catalogue in fifty years’ time. Can’t have any split infinitives or misdescriptions. Not after all the fuss.’ He smiled at Alice and she grinned back.

  ‘They won’t really, will they?’ she asked.

  ‘It’s never properly sunk in with you, has it, Alice? I mean just how important this all is. I don’t only mean to me, or the Book Department, or to Enderby’s as a whole, I mean, well, historically. A new Audubon only crops up once in a blue moon. We could be looking at ten million here.’

  ‘I do know, it’s more that I don’t really care. Not about the money, anyway.’

  ‘Don’t let Oakley hear you talking like that. But I shouldn’t have mentioned the money. I agree that’s not the important thing. It’s the object itself – its rarity, its beauty. And beyond that, it’s a sort of symbol for America, for an idea that America has about itself. Savage, free, untamed. That kind of bullshit.’

  ‘Shame they wiped out so many of them. The passenger pigeon, the prairie hen, the great auk, the Carolina …’

  ‘That’s another reason it’s so precious. It’s a record of all that’s gone. And then there’s John James Audubon himself. As long as you don’t look too closely he seems like the very model of a brave frontiersman, travelling through the wilderness …’

  ‘Shooting things.’

  ‘I thought you liked all that? Death transfigures life into art, I believe you once said.’

  They looked at each other again. As so often in their conversations lately, they seemed to be on the verge of something … Just friendship, he told himself. A better friendship. That was all.

  ‘I think I’m different now.’

  Andrew returned his gaze to the computer. The catalogue was almost finished. He had one or two corrections to make on the proofs, and then it would be away to the Reprographic Unit, who would do whatever it was that they did (no one seemed to know) and then, in turn, send it out to be printed. It was a joy to lose himself in the detail, casting the fine mesh of scholarship over these planes of colour, wider than his outstretched arms. He’d relished everything from checking the watermarks (J Whatman, with dates from 1827 to 1838) to finding the precise terms to cover the condition of each print. Plate 366, for example, had ‘some light spotting, minor marginal soiling, title lightly rubbed and a few small ink flecks on the blank area of the image’.

  And yet, another part of his mind knew that this description completely missed the point of Audubon’s design for the Iceland, or Ger Falcon: the drama of the male, its ghostly paleness flecked with black, hurtling down to ravish the prone, yet still feisty female; the flashing white and black of their feathers, electric against the glowering skies behind. And how did ‘colours very fresh, palest spotting in lower margin’ come close to the glorious vulgarity of plate 431, the American Flamingo, so like one of those prematurely tall schoolgirls in its gawky elegance? The flamingo had taken him back to the visit to the park with Alice and he found, to his astonishment, a tear in the corner of his eye.

  And he knew that Alice had made a sacrifice for him.

  It was two weeks prior to this, on the Monday following her trip to the country, that she had marched in to Oakley’s office. It was the way she swung the door shut behind her that made people take notice: not a slam, no, not quite a slam, but more than a clunk. About, Andrew calculated, what you’d get if you dropped a large dictionary – say one of the two volumes of the Shorter Oxford, or the more compact, but massier Collins – from three feet on to a wooden desk. Andrew had no idea what was going on: Alice had dumped her bag, smiled a ‘good morning’, and gone straight to Oakley.

  ‘What was that all about?’ he asked when she reappeared ten minutes later.

  ‘I had to tell Mr Oakley about my weekend with Edward Lynden.’

  ‘I see; so he’s your big confidante now, is he?’ It was only a tease, but Andrew did genuinely feel uncomfortable. They hadn’t had the chance to talk over the events of the weekend themselves yet.

  ‘Not confidante, no, I wouldn’t say confidante.’ Andrew noticed a hardness in Alice’s soft brown eyes that he hadn’t seen before. Not a cruel hardness, but more a resolve, a determination. He found it ever so slightly arousing. ‘It was business,’ she continued, unaware of her effect on Andrew. ‘But look, we’re talking nonsense and you haven’t told me about Leo yet.’

  And so Andrew told Alice everything he knew, which helped to fill out the sketchy account he had given her the day before when he had called her to get Odette’s number. Alice still hadn’t spoken to Odette, who was immovably lodged beside Leo. Alice, of course, wanted to know about Leo, and even more so about Leo and Odette, but she was also pleased that her conversation with Oakley had slipped down the agenda.

  ‘Oh, Alice,’ Oakley had said when she burst into his office, ‘please sit …’ thump went the door ‘… down.’

  ‘Andrew does the catalogue or I resign right now. And if I resign, then my guess is that Lynden will pull out of the sale.’

  She didn’t need to add that without that sale then not only would he lose whatever credibility he might have with the Americans, but the very future of Enderby’s itself would be thrown into doubt.

  ‘This is … all … I’m not used to people …’ Oakley was trying to crank up his indignation levels, and failing. His bully’s confidence always collapsed when confronted with resistance, and he knew that Alice had the beating of him. For now.

  ‘I’ve no idea what kind of manoeuvring there’s been,’ Alice said, ignoring Oakley’s guppy-like flapping and gulping, ‘and I don’t care. Nor do I want to organise the auction: you can throw that scrap to Ophelia and Cedric, if you like. But Andrew must do the catalogue. It’s fair, and it’s for the best.’

  Alice had never before acted with such purpose, clarity and courage. The world had become a strange and complicated place. Odette and Leo, the Dead Boy, Edward Lynden – she couldn’t begin to arrange her thoughts or compose a plan of action; but as for the ridiculous idea that Clerihew and Ophelia should just walk in and garner the glory for the Audubon, well no, that she could and would stop. She didn’t know quite what she was going to say when she first marched into Oakley’s office, nor even did she know what tone she would adopt. She had considered simply resigning, but that would have sacrificed her one bargaining chip without gaining anything in return. She was secretly thrilled with what had emerged.

  Oakley carried on blathering: ‘We … I had no intention of … I was told that Mr Lynden had requested that you and Andrew be replaced. I was merely …’

  ‘Misinformed.’

  ‘Ah.’ Oakley calculated. He had promised the catalogue to Clerihew and the organisation side to Ophelia. He could split things up, keep everybody happy. ‘You can all work together on this,’ he said, trying desperately to sound authoritative. ‘You organise the sale with Ophelia, and Cedric can do the catalogue.’ Surely that would keep the girl quiet. She looked as if she might be on the verge of …

  ‘Are you deaf? I said I don’t care about my involvement. In fact, given the choice, I’d rather have nothing to do with it. Andrew’s been committed to this project from the beginning, and he should see it through.’

  In the end, Oakley agreed; Oakley had to agree: Andrew, whom he hated and feared with a burning, churning passion of the sort that all insecure managers feel for those below them capable of doing their job better than they themselves, would do the catalogue, with Ophelia and Cedric, his protégés, doing the sale.

  And Alice mollified, until she could be dealt with effectively.

  Andrew was, of course, incandescent when he finally managed to eke out of Alice at least part of what had happened. Two factors prevented him from mashing Clerihew’s face into the chromium desk fan he’d insisted upon to help drive away the sheen of moisture that habitually coated his visible parts. The first was the relief he felt at still being in on the project, still doing the cataloguing job he loved. The sale itself was of only passing interest to him, and he wouldn’t
have to have much contact with the evil duo. The other was Alice’s evident lack of concern: she clearly didn’t mind being thrown off the case. Seemed relieved, if anything. And there was always, as a third and supplementary deterrent, the faint possibility that Clerihew’s boast about being a black belt in karate might actually be true. Andrew pictured himself pinned to the floor, one arm hanging loose and broken, as Clerihew, kneeling on his back, screamed: ‘Clerihew Emperor of the World – say it! say it!’

  Alice didn’t tell Andrew about Grace. She just said, ‘It’s over. It never really got going, and now it’s over.’

  Andrew would have been happier if he hadn’t detected an aftertaste of regret in her words.

  On the Friday lunchtime they had gone together to see Leo in hospital. On the way out Andrew told Pam they were going to a meeting, and might well be out for a couple of hours, which ought to cover them in case Oakley came a-sniffing.

  On the ward, Alice felt a wave of revulsion when she saw his face. If anything it was more grotesque now, almost a week after the attack. The swelling was still there, but new colours had been added to the shades of purple. He looked, as Andrew said, like a maniac had taken a sledgehammer to a fruit stall.

  ‘At least I don’t wear glasses, you specky fuck,’ said Leo in return, his voice now fully audible, but still strange, as if he were being accompanied by a distant kazoo.

  Odette was sitting by the bed reading a newspaper when they came in. She and Alice embraced warmly, and kissed on the lips, which made Andrew say, ‘Steady on, girls, we don’t want Leo bursting his stitches.’

  Odette pulled away laughing and said, ‘He hasn’t got any stitches down there.’ After a second of mildly shocked silence, they all laughed, and any awkwardness about the Odette-Leo situation dissolved before it had the chance to form.