Alice's Secret Garden

by Rebecca Campbell

  ‘Oh, so sorry, sir. Of course we’ve only spoken by telephone. I’m Colin Oakley; I’m in charge of Books, Manuscripts and Other Printed Matter.’ He laughed nervously. ‘Alice is one of my girls. A rising star. If you’d like to come and take tea in my office. Or coffee if you prefer. We can talk over the sale. And there’re some papers you might like to look at. To sign. Ha ha ha.’

  Alice wasn’t really paying attention, but she suddenly remembered Andrew’s complaints about the fact that Lynden hadn’t been asked to sign the contract that would indemnify Enderby’s if the Audubon were withdrawn. He had brought the matter up several times with Oakley. ‘That’s for the riffraff, not a man of this … stature,’ Oakley had responded complacently. ‘And he’s hardly going to run away when he stands to make six million pounds. No, he’s a gentleman and we have a gentlemen’s agreement. You really have a lot to learn, young man, about how to deal with the clients.’

  ‘But it’s standard procedure.’ One or two people in the office laughed at that. Andrew did, actually, sound a little ridiculous. It wasn’t like him to bother with such formalities. Alice wondered if he still felt resentful about Lynden.

  ‘Flexibility, thinking on your feet, that’s the new way. Surely you went to the seminar Madeleine Illkempt gave? We’re not a Stalinist bureaucracy anymore. Judgement and discrimination are what we need, not forms and fussing.’ He went back to his office, shaking his head and laughing, and Andrew blushed like a girl and called him a cunt twice under his breath.

  But, thought Alice, had Oakley changed his mind? Perhaps he’d panicked at the last minute. Or had the Slayer had a quiet word?’

  ‘I’m here to talk to Alice,’ said Lynden, quietly, but Alice could sense the barely controlled fury. He turned to her. ‘You said there was a room?’

  ‘Oh, of course,’ cut in Oakley. ‘I’m sure you have some preliminary … ah … some things to … And in due … um, we’ll see about it later, okay? Sir?’ But Alice and Lynden were already in the lift.

  TWENTY-ONE

  Declarations

  ‘You were going to tell me about Grace.’

  They’d been sitting silently in the bright bare little room for what felt like hours, but might have been a minute.

  Lynden was stretched out on a hard chair. He looked lean and gaunt and dangerous. A table was between them. Alice noticed with annoyance the brown sticky circles of coffee, and the grey dusting of ash. The room had no windows, and smokers would sometimes sneak in here when it rained outside. Despite the fierce suck of the whining air conditioner, the smell of them lingered. Alice’s head felt both full and empty, like a balloon: she had no space to think, no way of getting a perspective.

  ‘Yes. I was going to tell you about Grace.’

  And so, slowly, Lynden told Alice about Grace. He began falteringly, but soon his training and his innate sense of drama took hold. Perhaps even the hesitant beginning was part of the performance. Throughout the account he kept his eyes fixed on hers, and she lacked the willpower to pull away. He did not attempt to gain her sympathy, at least not by explicit pleading or obvious, self-serving distortions. The message was rather: this is what I did, I took a woman to my bed whom I did not love, and she stayed there through inertia and perhaps need, but now I have outgrown her and I want you. The bad things I have done were just the everyday bad things that people do; please don’t condemn me to unhappiness because of them.

  ‘You do know that I love you,’ he concluded, with simplicity and dignity. She did know, and she looked down.

  ‘I’m glad you told me all of this. I wish you had told me earlier.’ Alice still couldn’t think clearly. The words felt thick in her mouth. She wanted some water.

  ‘When? When I first offered you tea?’

  That made Alice smile for the first time, and then he smiled too. Alice noticed again that, despite the gauntness, he really was a very, very handsome man. She kept wanting to feel sympathy, even pity for him. She was by nature compassionate, and she felt powerfully for the suffering of others. But Lynden was a hard man to pity – his egotism and habitual belligerence would get in the way. Had she felt pity, although it would have been more difficult for her to dismiss him, as rejection would mean inflicting pain, it would also have meant anything other than rejection would have been impossible: Lynden could not exist for her both as an object of pity and of erotic interest.

  She thought again about Grace Harbour, and was taken back to the moment that she realised that Lynden was sleeping with her. Why had she reacted so violently? Lynden had made no promises to her, told no lies. And they had never slept together. Never even, she realised, properly kissed. How strange. She felt as though they had been lovers, and yet they had never even approached intimacy, apart from the time he had rescued her from the inept clutches of Johnny Twogood. He had kissed her then, on the cheek. But hadn’t she turned her face for a moment and brushed his lips? Was it that she had felt betrayed? No, somehow that didn’t catch it. It was something … less than that. Something smaller. She thought hard. And then she spoke to him.

  ‘There are things that I haven’t told you, either. Important things about me.’

  ‘Only a fool would think that there weren’t important things about you that needed to be told.’

  They both looked puzzled for a moment about his syntax, but this wasn’t the time to dwell.

  ‘Do you remember,’ she continued, ‘when we first met?’

  ‘Do I remember?’ he said loudly, almost angrily, as if he had been insulted. And then, more quietly, he said again, ‘Do I remember?’

  She took it all as a yes.

  ‘Didn’t you wonder about how I behaved? The fainting. All of that?’

  ‘Yes, of course I wondered. But back then, and even now, you seemed a strange thing; a thing not of our time. You looked like you might be the kind that would faint, or swoon for that matter. For all I knew it was your third of the day.’

  ‘Well I’m not – I mean the kind that would faint, or swoon. And it was my first of the day. My first ever. It was because I thought you looked like someone.’ She had been, despite herself, nettled by the accusation that she was an habitual swooner, and the explanation had come out more directly than she had intended.

  ‘I used to get that all the time. They said the resemblance to the young Olivier was striking.’

  Was he joking? It was hard to tell. She took it at face value.

  ‘Not a famous person. You see, some time ago, I saw a boy killed in a road accident. A … beautiful boy. And just before he was hit by the car, he looked at me. Or I thought he did. And I fell in love with him. And I thought he fell in love with me. It was an experience that changed everything for me.’

  This was now the fourth time she had told the story. The first was to Odette; the second to Andrew; the third to the Dead Boy’s grandmother. And now Lynden. Something so secret, so private, and yet now so public. Part of her wished that she had never told anyone, that she had let it burn and glow like radium inside her. And what if it had driven her mad? Weren’t there worse things than madness? Suddenly she looked up from her own thoughts. She had forgotten about Lynden. What could he make of this? He looked curious; a little wary perhaps, but not … well, of course she hadn’t finished.

  ‘And this boy …?’

  ‘He looked like … I mean you looked like him. For a moment, lying in your chair. You see, I had become … I suppose obsessed is the only way to put it. There is some resemblance, but not profound. Perhaps just the look of, I don’t know, anguish that you both seemed to have. But anyway, seeing you, him, there, it was … a shock.’

  And now, as the meaning found its way home, Lynden did begin to react. How could he not? She had told him that the impact he had had on her was solely because he happened to look like the boy she was in love with. A dead boy. How could a man of his arrogance respond to that?

  He began to laugh. She had seen him smile but never heard him laugh. The sound was rich and fruity: a thea
trical laugh, but not thereby necessarily false.

  ‘The Dead,’ he said, still half laughing.

  Alice thought he was referring to the Dead Boy, and his humour seemed misplaced.

  ‘I don’t see what’s funny about … it. A person died.’ Again her tone felt wrong, and she feared she sounded priggish. She hadn’t meant to be.

  ‘No, no. The Dead: it’s a story by James Joyce. I acted in a radio dramatisation, back years ago. There’s a party, and a bumbling, hearty fellow has a rare old time, and there’s a pretty wife who seems happy enough with him. But then back home she gazes out of the window, through the falling snow over the hill and the fields to the grave of the boy she’s always loved, and the poor lump of a husband just there … Well, you see how it all fits.’

  ‘Not really. Well, perhaps, partly.’

  But the story did resonate with her. The way minds come up against each other, seem to touch, seem to connect, to communicate, but then you realise that all along the glass was a mirror and not a window; that you were talking to yourself; that the world had closed in around you and you were alone.

  And then Lynden’s laughter died in his throat.

  ‘But no,’ he said. ‘I don’t understand any of it. Did you ever love me? Want me? Want me for myself? And if you didn’t, why were you so concerned about Grace?’

  At last Lynden had hit on the heart of it. Alice’s instinct was to be kind. And the pity of it, of him, now had come. She wanted to say something that would make him happy, or at least take away his pain. She wanted to give him hope. But that hope would be a lie.

  ‘I don’t know what I felt for you, for you as yourself. The tragedy, the grandeur, and now I know that it was a false tragedy, a fake grandeur, well, you became so mixed up with them, with him, with it all, that I could never have teased them apart. And I cannot say that the idea of your beautiful house, and the wildness, and … the wealth, did not attract me. But somehow the illusion, the grandeur were shattered when I thought of you with Grace. You became small in my eyes. I wouldn’t even say sordid, more just ordinary. What you did was not what I thought my Dead Boy would do. The link with him had been what had captivated me, and now the link was broken. In a way it was because you became real, became yourself, that I lost interest.’

  She thought for a moment of trying to explain further the appalling irony of it all: that aching gap between her Dead Boy and the real Matija Abdic; if only his worse crime had been the seduction of a serving girl, and the petty evasions and lies consequent upon it. But explanations were pointless, or worse. How would it help Lynden to know that the person he had failed to emulate was himself a sham and a shadow?

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, as flatly as she could, ‘I know all this hardly puts me in a good light, but it’s the way it was. I think.’

  ‘I don’t care about any of that. I don’t care about your Dead Boy or whatever madness you were under, all I care about is now and what you want to do.’

  ‘But surely you must see … after what I’ve just said …’

  ‘You haven’t really said anything about me.’

  ‘I said that you became ordinary, that I lost interest.’

  ‘But that was before I explained to you about Grace, explained my feelings.’

  ‘Just because you feel something doesn’t mean that the world will bend itself to accommodate you.’

  ‘Tell me that you don’t love me.’

  Alice smiled. The lapse into cliché, particularly one so manipulative, made things easier.

  ‘Okay. I don’t love you. I never loved you. I have things to do now. I’ll see you at the sale later on. I’m taking phone bids with Andrew. Goodbye.’

  Before she reached the door it was thrown open and Ophelia stood there, as vibrant and glorious as an Audubon watercolour.

  ‘Oh good, I thought I might find you here. Mr Oakley asked me to look for you both. He asked if I wouldn’t mind taking care of Edward until the sale. And he suggested you go and do whatever it is you do with your telephone lines, Alice. Apparently you’re dealing with Japan. Or is it Europe? It isn’t America, anyway, because Andrew’s doing that.’

  Throughout, Lynden’s face was frozen into blankness. But now he started to laugh again. Once more the laugh was theatrical, but now rather than the richness of a joke shared, the laughter was the laughter of a stage lunatic, of a ghoul, of a vampire, of a lost soul.

  TWENTY-TWO

  Love for Sale

  It had all gone wrong. Not horribly wrong. Just wrong. Alice realised, as she left the room and wandered through the high corridors back to Books and her desk, that she had craved a dramatic last encounter with Lynden. She had wanted him to beseech; she had wanted to be tempted, and wanted to resist heroically that temptation. And she knew that it was wicked of her to want these things. It smacked, in its vanity and folly, of Kitty. Nevertheless, she had felt the need for an elaborate endpaper to signal the conclusion of her involvement with Lynden. What she did not want was whatever it was she had just experienced – a clumsy, awkward, embarrassing mess: no grandeur, no tragedy, not even an approach at closure, no satisfying clunk. She had imagined something like the moment of pure silence at the end of a symphony, after the last cymbal crash had died and before the eager chokers had time to insert their braying coughs. The part of her that could lose itself in fiction still thought that life ought to have a pattern, that people could, at least sometimes, say the right thing – right both in bearing some adequate relationship to their thoughts, and right in the more formal sense of sounding good. But the rational core in her knew that it was as well to try to paint white lines on the sea as to try to force life into the straitjacket of meaning.

  The problem was that Lynden had not played his part. He just wouldn’t stay in the role to which he had been allotted. As this thought materialised and presented itself to her in all of its absurdity, she stopped and let out a snorting laugh. It was the crudest noise she had made since she was a schoolgirl. That made her laugh even more. When she finally reached her desk she was wiping the tears away from her flushed cheeks.

  ‘I shit you not, I will have that fucker,’ said Andrew, looking at her and trembling with rage. ‘What has he done? What has he done?’

  Alice hadn’t even noticed that he was there, so bleary with laughter were her eyes. His chivalrous bluster was now more than she could take and she sank to her knees, unable even to reach the chair two feet away.

  ‘People think because I work here that I must be some kind of nancy boy, but they don’t know where I come from. And I don’t care how craggy he is, I’ll have him. Oh.’ Andrew realised that the sobs were laughter, not weeping. ‘Okay. What’s the joke?’

  Alice finally dragged herself up and sat on her chair. All her hard work in front of the mirror had been undone, and she looked, with her hair and face all a-scramble, like a Lapith ravished by a Centaur.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I think I’ve just had what I think you’d probably call an epiphany.’

  ‘What? Would I?’

  ‘The thing is, I had my talk with Edward, and I was all set up for a tragic, dramatic denouement, and then it never happened. Well, it may have happened for him, a bit. But it just all stopped looking sad to me. And then I sort of saw myself from the outside, and I realised that I looked funny. You know, silly. I don’t understand how. I mean all of the facts are the same, but now everything’s different.’

  ‘Mmm. Like the duck-rabbit. Gestalt shift. All that. Come on, it’s your field. When you have a picture of a duck looking to the left, and then suddenly you see it as a rabbit looking right, with the beak becoming its ears. Stop laughing.’

  ‘Can’t help it. Yes, just like the duck rabbit.’

  At the repetition of duck rabbit, Andrew started laughing as well.

  ‘You won’t, um, mention about the, um, you know, threats to, um …’

  ‘Have him?’

  ‘Yeah. But, well, I was … I thought that he’d been horrid t
o you, or something.’

  ‘No, I won’t tell anyone. And I thought it was sweet of you.’

  ‘Well, well,’ said Oakley, who’d snuck up unawares, ‘I do like a good laugh and a joke at work, but there’s lots to be doing. Eleven now, sale kicks off in half an hour. Are the lines checked?’ He wore a forced smile and looked tense.

  ‘Yes, lines all checked,’ said Andrew, soberly. ‘I just popped back up here to do a last scan of the email.’

  ‘And yours, Alice?’

  ‘I’m …’ she began, before Andrew cut in.

  ‘Yes, all checked.’

  Oakley looked uncertainly from face to face. ‘Good. Well, better get down there. And Alice, perhaps you could have a quick freshen up – you look like you’ve been dragged through a … and there’re news cameras and crews and so forth. Lots of attention. First Audubon sale in the UK for … since … let’s all get down there, eh?’

  The main auction room was filling up nicely. Andrew was always interested and amused by the startling variations in type and quality of punter attracted to the different kinds of sale – although of course it would have been strange had they remained constant. Fine art pulled in the trendies to watch and the institutions to buy; pretty girls were not at all uncommon, although horribly outnumbered by grey men bidding for banks. Even within fine art there was a steady change in population, and he could usually tell the period of the sale by spectacles alone: large steel-rimmed for the Renaissance, tortoiseshell for Victorian, rimless for modern. Furniture was older: blue-rinsed and tweedy. The men had port-reddened faces and small, black, shiny, expensive shoes; the women talked in voices like Roedean-educated klaxons. And naturally there’d be a few of the South Coast gays, up from Brighton for a day or two to snaffle a bureau for the shop at Enderby’s, and then perhaps to squeeze in a quick shag with a pliant boy in Soho, before retreating back to the grumpy long-term partner, whose looks and sphincters really weren’t what they were.