Alice's Secret Garden

by Rebecca Campbell

  Alice now was in shock. Her mind struggled clumsily to absorb and process what the woman was saying. She began to shiver. The flat was icy cold.

  ‘But his parents – you said they were dead.’

  ‘Dead, yes. A bomb from a gun, a mortar, if that is the right word, killed them in their bed on the first night of the war. That is why I sent my Matija to shoot the dogs. He had been the champion of his school, and had represented his region in the competitions at shooting.’

  ‘And how did he escape?’ Alice spoke, but the voice came from miles away. ‘You said the Croats killed everyone in the building.’

  ‘My boy was not working on that day. He was with me, buying bread. He carried my bags, always such a good boy. But I knew that it was all finished for us in this town. They exploded our beautiful bridge, do you know? It was our symbol of everything. And because his mother and father were dead it was possible for us to become legal refugees, not like these people who sneak here, that I see on the television, brown and yellow and all colours.’

  Alice stood up. ‘Thank you for your time,’ she said, struggling to stay calm. ‘I have to go now.’

  The woman herself was now entirely normal again: the fervour and fierce pride had passed away.

  ‘I hope it was of help to you to hear about my boy. It is my tragedy to be alive and alone now. Such a silly way to die, on a road like that. After all of the danger he lived in our town. Now it is quieter we could go back. But our bridge is still just stones in the water. I might go back myself. Just stones in the water.’

  Alice couldn’t look at the old woman. She wanted desperately to get out of there, out into the cold air of the street. But there was something she wanted to know.

  ‘The other boy. The one Majita shot in the leg. The one with the bright training shoes. What happened to him.’

  ‘Oh pah,’ said the woman, angrily, making a dismissive gesture with her hand. Alice noticed for the first time that it was knotted and twisted with arthritis. ‘What do I care for that boy? He lay there in the road behind the car, with the dog and the bitch, until it was dark, and then they took him away.’

  ‘Was he still alive?’

  ‘More alive than my poor Majita is.’

  At the door she said ‘Well, goodbye. If you would like to come again, please do. I enjoyed our talk.’

  Alice couldn’t bring herself to reply.

  Alice didn’t know where to go, but she knew it wasn’t home. She walked blindly through the streets of Hackney, crowded now with people setting out on their Saturday night adventures. Pubs were filling up. Raucous laughter seemed to come at her from every angle.

  He was a monster.

  He was a monster.

  He was a monster.

  The boy she had loved so completely had killed women and children, just shot them dead. Dogs, the woman kept saying. Shot them like dogs. But where did people shoot dogs like that? She looked for a rise of feeling, for the overcoming of love by hate: she wanted to feel it surging in her, flushing out the contamination. Hadn’t she sought this, or at least something like this? She had finally faced her ghost limb, seen it as a lie, as a phantasm, as a ghoul. Shouldn’t everything now be all right?

  But there was nothing. The stone she dropped into the well of her heart gave no reassuring plop. Street lights and gaudy neon signs leered at her. People flowed around her, speeding up and slowing down in time to some weird flaw in her consciousness. They weren’t really there, they were the fictions of her senses, bundles of colours and forms conjured by the operation of neurones and chemical transmitters in her brain. No, there was nothing, nobody, just the swirl and flux of meaningless sensation.

  And then a shape more solid than the others appeared to her. He was back. The Dead Boy was back. She didn’t want him back: his presence, once so enthralling, was poison to her now. She tried to squeeze him out, to block his aura. But he came on. She saw his face, his eyes, his special eyes, the woman had said.

  She saw the smile.

  She saw the complete acceptance of death.

  At the time, and ever since, she had thought that his acceptance was simply supreme grace, absolute courage, impossible coolness. But now she could see it as something else.

  The boy that she had loved could never really have been a monster. He was a boy whose parents had died, and who was then told to kill by people older than he; people who wanted to use him as a weapon.

  A lost boy.

  And not, when she knew him, a boy anymore. A man. A man who could look back and see what he had done. Understand it as a man. See again the flash of sunlight on the trainers; see the thigh, the knee, the ankle, caught in his cross hairs. See the mother. See the father. See them, perhaps, every night. See them, as she saw him, whenever he closed his eyes. Saw them all, and was forced to live it again and again through the heartless glee of the grandmother. Might it not be the case, then, that he longed for an end of it? Yes, he said to death. My turn now.

  All the time she had thought that he had looked into her and felt the wonder as she felt it. But now, as she replayed it again, it seemed that he wasn’t looking at her, wasn’t smiling at her. He was already somewhere else. She was just a thing in his line of vision, as insubstantial to him as these shapes passing around and through her were insubstantial.

  And at last the feeling came: She held on tight to a lamp-post but it wasn’t enough and she sank down to her knees, still hugging the wet metal trunk. She had cried a lot this year, but we never run out of tears, just the feelings that make them. People stopped. An old Rasta man touched her on the shoulder and asked if she was okay.

  ‘Be careful of your purse, lady,’ he said in heavy Jamaican. ‘It’s showing in your bag. This isn’t a good place to be havin’ a sit down.’

  But all she could do was to shake her head and sob and sob and sob at the sadness of everything.

  TWENTY

  Preparations

  At 9 a.m. on Friday 22nd of December a giant took hold of the Enderby building and gave it a violent shake, throwing everything and everyone within it into confusion, turmoil, and flurry. If our giant had peered through one of the narrow, leaded windows above the gothic doorway, he would have seen frantic figures scurrying through the public rooms, some carrying chairs, some with huge, ornate mirrors, others with unidentifiable decorations, elaborate clusters of foliage or objets d’art. Disorder ruled, and chaos was disorientingly immanent. Nobody seemed entirely sure of what was supposed to be done, except for the redoubtable Pamela, Pammy or Spam, who stood halfway up the grand stairway in the still magnificent reception hall, directing, cajoling, chastising, her soft bulk energised and thrumming with the joy of it all, like a jellyfish zapped by an electric eel. The hallway, really a magnificent atrium, and the public gallery next to it, called, on this one day of the year, the ballroom, were the twin focuses of the energy and one could just tell, if one squinted and used all of one’s imagination, that something wonderful would be happening there.

  The frenetic activity was not primarily a consequence of the Audubon sale, quite possibly the most important event in the two hundred year history of Enderby’s. That had, of course, made its contribution to the bustle and excitement, but most of the preparations had been made, the main auction room readied, the links for the telephone bids established, the invitations sent, the press alerted, well in advance. No, the commotion was mainly to do with the famous Christmas party, and Pam was its presiding genius. The Americans, ignorant of or uncaring for tradition, had tried to change the date, and had even proposed cancelling Christmas, but Parry Brooksbank, for the first time in his career, had put down his foot, invoked what moral, historical, and financial authority he had, and insisted that the Enderby party was to be, as it had ever been, on the last Friday before Christmas week, and that was that. The Slayer, making quick calculations, accepted that the hassle of running the two events on the same day was probably less than the potential trouble, sulking, and bad blood that would result from sto
pping the party. She closed her heavy-lidded eyes and numbed the pain of defeat with thoughts of revenge in the form of tiny redundancy cheques.

  For twelve years Pam had been in charge of the annual party. She acted as Secretary of the Party Committee, the ten members of which were elected from the various departments, and who would in turn elect a Chair. The Committee would decide on the overall theme, source the fine wines and other refreshments, haggle endlessly over trivial details (the proportion of vegetarian to other buffet items had proved particularly troublesome this year – yes, Clerihew was representing Books), break up in rancour, reform, sample the fine wines, and finally dissolve itself and pass its full authority on to Pam, the Executive to its Legislature. The power invested in her by the Committee made Pam, for the week or so of preparation, the most important, loud, annoying, overbearing, ubiquitous and essential person in the whole of Enderby’s. Hers was the task of making sure that everyone properly entered into the spirit of the thing, offering costume suggestions to the unimaginative, and playing Cupid (this her own idea) to potential office couplings, given that, as she insisted on telling anyone who’d listen, ‘What’s Christmas without a little scandal?’ But this all came to a head on the morning of the party, when the stage had to be set, scenery moved, pumps primed and mistletoe artfully arranged.

  ‘You there,’ she bellowed to a swarthily handsome man in a long black coat, who stood in the midst of the maelstrom. His stillness could have been the result either of confusion, indecision or passivity. ‘If you’ve nothing better to do, could you help Trevor and Tony with that torso, please? Mmm? Yes?’

  As the general public, carrying their useless nick-nacks and gewgaws, their chewed teddy bears, their childhood Bunty Albums, for valuation by the bored experts were not allowed into the building before ten, it was perhaps understandable that Pam should have mistaken Edward Lynden for an Enderby toiler in need of direction.

  ‘Actually I’m here to see someone,’ he replied, with unaccustomed mildness. But Pam had already refocussed her attention elsewhere.

  Edward Lynden had known for a long time that his life had been a failure, measured by the only rule that counted: what use have you made of your talents? He knew that he had been endowed with abilities that, if not great, were considerable. He knew that he could have been a good stage actor. He knew that he had the looks and the raw charisma to have made it as a star of at least middling magnitude in the film industry. Everything had been in place: there had been no disadvantaged background to hold him back: the opposite. There had been the trouble with his father, but then doesn’t everyone have trouble with their father? Not even in his weakest, blackest moments, could he blame the old fool for his inadequacies.

  So yes, for a long time Lynden had perceived that his life had been wasted. But it was only when he told the story to Alice, back in the library, lifetimes ago, that he fully realised the unattractive self-pitying ring to it. When, how, had he become a whiner? He wanted that to stop; he wanted to change. And in his mind Alice became the agent for that change. Her simplicity and directness made her seem like the rock on which he could build a new self. He saw a new life, he saw the chance to slough off the tired old skin. And, of course, she was beautiful: not with the glamorous, head-tossing, show-stopping beauty of Ophelia, or some of the other women he had known, but with a hidden, burning beauty, like a secret shared.

  He had even managed to forget, for a while, the other thing.

  Grace Harbour had first come into his life after his mother died when he was thirteen. She was barely twenty then. His father wanted someone there all the time to help with cooking, and some other jobs that fell through the cracks. She had never been particularly pretty, but she brimmed with joy and life, and her laughter filled the Cave of Ice. His adolescent fantasies soon took and twisted her into sensuous shapes, only dimly related to the real Grace. In the school holidays he would sit alone in the library or one of the other cold rooms, waiting for her appearances. But he was always too shy to speak to her.

  And then, at fifteen, home from school, he had found her unexpectedly in the kitchen, washing dishes. The sunlight came through the window and turned her brown hair to gold. And more than that, its touch gave a transparency to her cheesecloth blouse. He saw the fullness of her breast, and with a groan he realised that she wasn’t wearing a bra. Trembling, he stood next to her to fill a glass with water. They touched at the shoulder and hip, and he had to spin away to hide his erection. And then he turned to face her, the blood loud in his ears, and lunged, or fell, towards her clutching with his inexperienced hand for that breast. His lips were on her neck, and then her mouth. She pushed him away, laughing, and he ran from the kitchen and on to his bedroom where, with three savage strokes he came, shatteringly, finally.

  And what had most astonished him in the encounter was the knowledge that she had wanted it too, had delayed the push and the laugh just long enough so that she could feel and enjoy the force of his erection against her thigh, and taste his eager tongue deep in her sweet mouth, soft as risen dough, yet cool as rainwater.

  The incident was not repeated. Years passed. He went to drama school. Gudrun. India. The wife and the child. All the time Grace stayed on in the house, looking after the old man. And then he died. Lynden returned, lost, brooding, shattered. On the first night she came into his bed, plumper now at thirty, but still an attractive woman; and there, on and off, she had stayed. Not even the short-lived marriage had done much to change the course of their lives. The woman had come; she had her baby; she left. Grace learnt to feel some affection for the child. Soon things were as they had ever been.

  He had never made any promises to her; had never hidden his other affairs or infatuations. Perhaps it was his very honesty, the refusal to offer her the chance to dream, that had so dulled her over the years, taking her vivacity and replacing it with a stoicism and rigidity. She had sacrificed everything, and asked for nothing in return; all she had was the cold dark presence, and the weight of him, the weight of him.

  She had known, even as Lynden knew, that Alice was different, that Alice might take away even the weight.

  ‘I’m going back now,’ she had said, just when he thought that happiness might be within reach. Before she had time to say ‘How long has Grace Harbour been your mistress?’ he had seen the resolution in her face: a resolution mixed with contempt and scorn. Had she somehow found out about the old intimacy between him and Alex Conradian? But that was drama school: who did not experiment a little there, back in those louche days? Surely she couldn’t object?

  But no. He knew.

  And then she asked the question. With the question came the end of everything. For an hour he wandered through the blighted estate, past broken fences and barren fields. He felt nothing at all. Somehow he found himself in the village pub. He drank beer, and then he drank whisky, and then he drank beer again. At last some feelings came. When he arrived back home, soaking and chilled, the house was silent. He went to the woman, and fucked her out of hatred, fucked her till she cried out in pain, and then ecstasy. When they were finished, Grace pushed him off.

  ‘Go to the bitch,’ she said. ‘I don’t want you.’ There was blood on her neck.

  He put on his clothes and left the room. The Cave of Ice was always at its most beautiful on clear nights, when the stars and the moon would glitter through the glass walls. But tonight there were no stars and the corridors and rooms were dense with darkness. He found his way to the library and sat at the desk that had always lived there. He put on the lamp, opened a drawer and pulled out a chequebook. He wrote the name Grace Harbour, and then the sum of five hundred thousand pounds. He paused over the date. How long would it take for the money to come into his account from the sale? He dated the cheque for a week ahead, and then scored it out and made it a month, carefully initialling the change. He put the cheque in an envelope and sealed it. He then turned out the lamp and moved to the table where, for so many years, the Audubon volumes had been kep
t. The table at which Alice had sat, so patiently. He put his cheek to the old wood, and tears flowed from his eyes, although he made no noise. And then he slept for a little while. At dawn he went to the Land Rover and drove into London, where he booked into his usual room at the RAC Club (his membership was a curious family heirloom), and there he’d stayed ever since.

  Pam looked unconvinced by the excuse.

  ‘Do they know?’ she asked, accusingly. Lynden was spared having to answer by the arrival of Alice, who swept past Pam, and then paused on the last step. It was another of the days when she was paying attention to her appearance. Insisting that she needed something nice for the sale, Odette had helped her to choose a skirt and top that didn’t hate each other, and for once her hair looked like it had been cut by scissors rather than secateurs. Alice was self-conscious about the top, which made the best of her neat waist and full cleavage, and she pulled nervously at the neckline, inching it higher. She was even more conscious of the attention they were attracting

  ‘Hello, Edward,’ she said, evenly. He looked even wilder than she remembered, and more gaunt. The long black coat was obviously expensive, but it was splattered with mud. ‘I’ve booked a meeting room. It’s probably easiest to take the lift.’

  At that moment the lift door opened and Oakley stepped out. He bustled over to Lynden, and reached down to grasp his reluctant hand.

  ‘So pleased to meet you at last, sir. What an honour this is; really what an honour. I’m so sorry I wasn’t here to greet you at the door. It was only good fortune that allowed me to discover that you were here at all.’ He looked back over his shoulder at Alice, his fawning turning to disdain on the way. Clerihew or Ophelia must have told him that Alice had been called down to the lobby, and why.

  ‘Who are you?’ said Lynden.