Alice's Secret Garden

by Rebecca Campbell

  But still, she had nothing to wear.

  Water was splashed; teeth and hair were brushed.

  Kitty called out as she walked back to her room: ‘I’m in here. Come and see. Are your hands clean?’

  Alice never usually went into her mother’s room. Even as a child it had been a forbidden zone, full of things which must never be touched. Of course she had sneaked in more than once to finger the complex facets of the scent bottles, to caress the powder puffs and stroke the necklaces. But her favourite place had always been her father’s study. She remembered holding his leg as he typed reports with one finger, caressing her hair with his free hand.

  It was laid out on the bed. Alice thought she’d never seen anything so beautiful.

  ‘How …’ she said, ‘what …?’

  ‘Oh, my mother had it made for her in the twenties when he was all the rage, even here. I wanted to wear it for my coming out but she … she thought it wasn’t right for me. But I tried it on once and it made me feel like a work of art come to life. But that was back in the … well, a little while ago now.’

  ‘But surely it can’t fit me if you wore it.’

  ‘Nonsense. I was going through one of my plump phases. And anyway, it’s not exactly close-fitting, is it? But before we do anything else, I want to have a go at those eyebrows of yours. I’ve been meaning to for years now. Can’t have you going to the ball looking like a werewolf, can we now?’

  After half an hour of agonising plucking (Alice was an eyebrow virgin), Kitty seemed satisfied. It was the most intimate experience Alice had ever shared with her mother. Odd how pain, one inflicting, one suffering, had, if not brought them together, then brought them a little closer. But before she tried on the dress, there were some things that Alice wanted to say.

  ‘Mummy, do you remember I told you what I was going to do?’

  ‘Of course I remember. Do you think I’m senile? Now Mrs Solomon in number 45, she’s got the first signs. I spoke to her son, who I don’t believe is a doctor, and he said she couldn’t remember the name of her hairdresser.’

  ‘But do you think you’ll be all right? Because if you won’t be, then I can change my plans.’

  ‘Why wouldn’t I be all right? I think I’ve earned my freedom, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Alice. She thought she’d earned her freedom.

  It was all ruined for Andrew. He’d been looking forward to the party all year, and now it was going to be crap. He went to the bogs. There were two other people there: a Laughing (or was it Gay?) Cavalier, trying to stick on his fine, curling moustaches, and an angel, who Andrew presumed to be Gabriel hotfooting it to an Annunciation, but he couldn’t even guess at the painting or artist. Both Cavalier and Angel were exuberantly plumed.

  He stood in front of the mirror and took, from his jacket pocket, a rubber shark. To be precise it was two severed halves of a rubber shark, conjoined by eight inches of curved, springy metal. He weighed it in his hands for a few moments, considering whether it should go side to side, Napoleon style, or front-to-back like Wellington. He tried it on, both ways. Napoleon, definitely Napoleon.

  ‘Oh, very good. I say, yes. It’s that shark chappie, isn’t it? Daniel Hurst? Mmm, eh?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Andrew, back to the Cavalier. ‘And you’re Courbet’s Origin of the World, are you?’

  The night before Andrew had been talking over his ideas on the phone to Leo. He liked the Shark but suggested Courbet’s Origin.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘A big, hairy, to put no finer point on it, cunt. It’s in the d’Orsay, you heathen.’

  ‘Courbet’s what?’ said the Cavalier, looking worried. ‘No, the Laughing Cavalier, actually. Do you think people won’t realise? Did this Courbet fellow paint cavaliers?’

  ‘Big, hairy c … never mind.’

  But Andrew’s spirits had already started to lift again. By the time he hit the top of the sweeping stairway, he was raring to go. This may have been helped along somewhat by the fat line of coke he ineptly snorted after the Angel Gabriel and Laughing Cavalier (not looking very cheerful) had left. The coke was a birthday gift from an acquaintance, and was strictly against Andrew’s principles: he didn’t like what drugs did to the local economies of the producer countries; he didn’t like the fact that buying drugs meant, at some stage in the process, giving money to bad, or very bad, people; he didn’t like the general smugness and complacency of those who took them, perfectly encapsulated by the insistence on crisp new money as a siphon. He had only ever indulged twice, faintly boring himself on both occasions. But, when all was said and done, these were free drugs, and he was loath to throw them away: free stuff was not to be sniffed at. And so the tiny wrap stayed in his pocket for four months (did cocaine go off? Did it lose its potency? No, it transpired) until now finding its way, via the blood vessels in his nose, to the pleasure zones of his temporal lobes, or whichever crinkly part of the brain it was that dealt with that sort of thing.

  For a second he thought about launching himself into the throng, like a rock star body surfing over the mosh pit. But no. This wasn’t that sort of crowd, whatever the coke was telling him. It was, in fact, quite a spectacle. From up here the initial impression was one of vibrant colour and restless activity, unified yet complex. Like a section through a psychedelic beehive. The spirit of the beehive, the spirit of the beehive. Running swiftly down the stairs he soon found the pattern breaking up into individual units. A young Bacchus, smacking, Andrew surmised, of Caravaggio, his head wreathed in vine leaves, a fake leopard (not, surely, a pyjama case? Yes, surely a pyjama case) over his shoulder, was talking to a plain woman with short hair, in a straight, brown dress, her face made-up to look ghastly and sunken. As he passed her she put her hands to her cheeks and opened her mouth in a silent, haunting scream. Andrew laughed so much he fell down the last three steps, tumbling into a St George. George good-naturedly caught Andrew, and complimented him on the shark.

  ‘Where’s the dragon?’ asked Andrew.

  ‘He’s lighting up outside.’

  ‘Who are you by?’

  ‘Ucello.’

  ‘Bless you,’ said Andrew, and wheeled away, laughing at his own crappy joke.

  He spied Tessa, looking … well, he wasn’t sure, but probably quite nice, as a Degas ballet dancer. He decided to go and talk to her, but before he reached her a large man in a strange, misshapen bull mask beat him to it, took her by the hand and led her through to the ballroom, where a DJ dressed as a DJ was playing Abba records. Guernica, thought Andrew.

  He found that he was holding two glasses of champagne. How had that happened? Not for long. One. Two. Where’s the man with the tray? Before he found him Andrew became aware that the attention of the party had switched, with the weird togetherness of a flock of starlings wheeling through the evening sky, to the top of the stairs. A collective sigh, a lovely sound, came from them. And from Andrew, also. He hadn’t needed this to show him that Alice was sublime but now he felt he knew how the mortal heroes of ancient Greece must have felt when visited by the divine Aphrodite, or wise Athena, or rosy-fingered Dawn. Rosy-fingered what! he had time to think to himself, scornfully, before he felt himself drawn back up the stairs to meet Alice.

  And yes, the dress was magnificent. It was difficult to say exactly which Klimt painting it was taken from. It had something of the iridescent intimacy of The Kiss, and more of the languor and sensuality of the The Virgin. It suggested to some the flagrant sexuality of Danaë, ravished by gold. But whatever the particular work, all those there who witnessed it knew that it was Klimt. Leaping headlong up the stairs to meet her, Andrew was with those who favoured The Kiss, and he knew what he must do. He reached her. He gazed for a moment into her eyes. There were flowers in her hair, daisies, he thought, and small blue things. Why didn’t he know the names of flowers? Alice would teach him. He felt the eyes of the world upon him, but they acted not to restrain, but to carry him higher. Her dress, dazzling in cobalt and crim
son and gold, seemed to cover everything and yet reveal everything. He wanted to be inside it with her. He took the last step up to her and put his hand on her waist. His eyes were half closed. Yes, he was going to kiss her, to taste those lips, to breathe her essence like cool incense.

  And then her laughter, her uncontrollable laughter.

  ‘That is just brilliant.’

  ‘What?’ He opened his eyes.

  ‘That shark.’

  ‘Oh, yeah.’

  ‘And it’s really clever the way it sends up modern British art.’

  ‘Yeah. Sends up modern British art. What?’

  ‘How it’s all about having a fairly amusing idea, that you don’t need any skill or intellect to realise. Shoddy, shallow, empty. I love it!’

  ‘Alice, you look completely amazing.’

  ‘You know, I think I do. It was my mother’s dress. I mean my grandmother’s. She had it made to look like she was painted by Klimt. Do you think people will get it? I don’t want to have to go around explaining myself.’

  This was another new Alice for Andrew. Young and gushing and silly and girly. It set up a charming tension with the ancient eroticism of the dress. He wanted so much to squeeze her.

  ‘Everyone will get it. Except the people who wouldn’t get it if you came as the Mona Lisa and carried round a big placard saying “I’ve come as the Mona Lisa – that’s a painting by Leonardo da Vinci”.’ Somehow the thrill of seeing Alice like this had burnt off the false effervescence of the cocaine. He felt like some more authentic bubbles. ‘Let’s get some champagne. It’s fantastic stuff, yeasty and biscuity. Bet this is the last of the good stuff from the old days. Be Cava next year I expect.’

  ‘Snob.’

  ‘Peasant.’

  ‘Ha!’

  ‘Not that you look much like a peasant. More like some queen in a fairy tale. Maybe even one of the evil-but-beautiful-queens.’

  ‘You should see what’s coming.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I was in the loos with Ophelia. She’s really pulled out all the stops. No one’s going to remember me when they see her.’

  Alice pouted, and Andrew couldn’t make up his mind if it was a joke, or if she really was annoyed. Either way, he liked it.

  ‘What’s she come as?’

  ‘You’ll have to wait and see.’

  By now they were back in the crowd. Several people had already come up to them to admire and touch Alice’s dress. A Toulouse-Lautrec prostitute from Fine Arts made a half-joking suggestion about swapping over later on, thereby conjuring all kinds of wickedly enchanting images in Andrew’s mind, which he blinked away only with much effort. Whistler’s mother was a bit sniffy, but Magritte’s pipe broke off briefly from telling people that he wasn’t a pipe to blow ecstatic smoke rings around her.

  ‘I think I like parties,’ said Alice. She’d decided it was time to tell Andrew. ‘Pity really; I don’t suppose they’ll have them …’

  ‘Holy Mother of God!’ said Andrew, and for the second time the entire party turned to gaze in wonder towards the sweep of the stairway.

  Who else but Venus? And which Venus other than Botticelli’s, rising serenely from a scallop like a pearl coracle? No hint from Botticelli of her engendering: no place here for the scythed testicles of Chronos, or Uranus, or whoever it was, tossed to foam in the waves, which then gave forth this Venus. No hint of that barbarity, perhaps, but wasn’t there just the suggestion somewhere in all that serenity that this was going to be the world’s greatest fuck?

  Too obvious now, thought Andrew. Why didn’t I guess? Alice was absolutely right about no one remembering what she wore after seeing this. The illusion of complete nakedness lasted only for a couple of seconds, but it imprinted itself on Andrew’s brain, and was sufficient to induce a sudden, dismaying surge of blood to his pelvis, resulting in what he swiftly calculated was three sevenths of an erection. But of course it was a miraculous, tight-fitting bodysuit in some diaphanous, but opaque, substance. Was she naked beneath it? Andrew had encountered invisible, seamless bras and knickers before, but he believed that beneath the gauze, true nakedness prevailed. He ticked off another seventh of turgidity. The wig provided at least some pretence at modesty: Ophelia’s black hair lay concealed beneath flowing red locks, with thick strands pinned across and covering her breasts and what Courbet called The Origin of the World.

  Ophelia paused for a few moments at the top of stairs, basking in the wonder, bathing in the arousal, glorying in the jealousy. How could she not have done so? It was simply in her nature. As well suggest to a rose that this year it might be tactful not to bloom.

  And yet that pause proved to be her downfall. She had emerged from the entrance to the right as the crowd looked. But the stairway divided, and another curve went to the left. From that door, quite as grand as the one to the right, there now came a bustle, a flurry, quite palpable before anything could be seen. And then the door opened and Venus was born for the second time that evening.

  Pamela, or Pammy, or Spam, as she was known with varying degrees of affection.

  Again there was some kind of bodysuit in a flesh, or near-flesh coloured material. But this was denser stuff, suggesting in its wrinkles and folds, the tights of a nineteenth-century circus strongman. There was also a wig, although this one did not fall in endless waves and ringlets but sprang stoutly out, as wiry and fibrous as pubic hair. Each mammoth breast was covered by a comically huge scallop shell, made, Andrew thought, from papier-mâché. Another, even larger, covered the Origins of the World. Beneath her bodysuit Andrew could clearly make out the lines of a pair of giant knickers and, lower down, the ridges of surgical support bandages over her right knee and left ankle.

  Andrew rapidly lost his five sevenths of an erection.

  Pam did not see Ophelia standing opposite her. What she did see was the faces, gazing, rapt, up towards her. With her great, bubbling laugh she cavorted down the stairs, waving, and miming hellos.

  Ophelia. Andrew looked at Ophelia. Surely she must realise what had happened. Even before Pam’s appearance Andrew had begun to think that Ophelia’s get-up, for all its glory, was a huge, tasteless mistake. She was thrusting her beauty needlessly, humourlessly into your face. But would she now see that Pam had made her look ridiculous? Not only was her vanity cruelly exposed by Pam’s colossal, good-natured joke, but somehow she had been dragged in as one half of a comedy double act. She was now Pam’s straight man, feeding her the lines, and contaminated with the silliness of it all. She was absurd, absurd, absurd.

  But her face betrayed none of this. She stared blankly down at Pam. She saw that no one now was looking at her. She pouted. She tutted. She came down the stairs. So yes, she had missed entirely the brilliance of Pam’s unintended deconstruction of her. And yet there was also a magnificence there, the glory of an ego raised to the stature of a goddess.

  Alice and Andrew looked at each other. Their eyes shone with the glory of it all. She took his hand and squeezed it. They both said: ‘I hate Abba,’ at exactly the same time. And so went to dance.

  The ballroom was crowded, but Andrew didn’t mind as it forced them together. They were jostled by sunflowers and a clumsy Campbell’s soup can. Andrew threw some shapes, which made Alice laugh. He was relieved to find that she was a perfectly competent dancer, without excelling. He thought again how rare it was to find a girl who simply couldn’t dance in the way that so many men simply couldn’t dance; indeed in the way that he couldn’t dance. He’d spent long hours agonising whether the correct thing to do, if you can’t dance, is to dance or not to dance. He’d finally come down on the side of dancing after concluding that it was better to garner the laughs and instant popularity than to preserve one’s cool.

  Alice leant over and shouted in his ear: ‘I need to talk to you. Can we go and sit down for a minute.’

  ‘After this one. It’s the only really great song they ever did.’

  SOS was playing.

  ‘
What’s so good about it?’

  ‘It’s the combination of the tragic lyric with the rousing exuberance of the music. What a fucking fantastic chorus.’ He joined in, throwing more comically dramatic shapes, and getting the words hopelessly muddled. ‘If you hear me baby don’t you fear my S-O-S.’

  It stopped. Dancing Queen came on. ‘I hate this,’ said Andrew, vehemently. ‘Apart from SOS it’s all camp kitsch cack. Or is that cack camp kitsch. Either way it’s shit. “When you’ve left”,’ he said, conversationally, ‘“how could I possibly attempt to carry on?”’

  ‘What?’ How could he …

  ‘Fantastic lyric. Suicidal. But all the time with the best upbeat pop tune they ever wrote. It’s as if Hamlet were rewritten as a limerick. What did you want to say? But hang on, let me grab some more champagne before these posh fuckers swig it all.’

  While he was away, Alice found herself next to Ophelia, in her simulacrum of nakedness. Her features, beneath the wig, were still expressionless and perfect. Alice smiled at her, and a muscle or two twitched in Ophelia’s face. A smile returned? Or a sneer called back? Or simply boredom sending out a random ripple?

  ‘Fun party,’ said Alice.

  ‘Really? You think so? Brave of you to hide your pain so well.’

  ‘What pain?’

  ‘No need to pretend with me, Alice. All girls together here. Did I say how sweet I thought your … thing looked?’ She gestured dismissively at Alice’s dress.

  Alice still looked perplexed.

  ‘You’re hardly,’ Ophelia continued, ‘the first girl to fail to hold on to Edward, you know.’

  Oh that. Alice laughed. And she really couldn’t be bothered correcting Ophelia. In fact she was sure that Ophelia knew the truth of the matter.

  ‘I suppose,’ said Alice, ‘that you’ll be … renewing your interest in Edward now yourself. I’m sure it’s what your mother would want.’ It was said without bitterness, for Alice found that she felt none.