Alice's Secret Garden

by Rebecca Campbell

  ‘Who cares what she wants? No. What on earth would I be interested in Edward now for?’

  ‘Well, I presume for the same reasons you were interested in him before.’

  ‘Just how stupid are you? Why would I want Edward without the Audubon money? Do you think I want to spend my life working out ways to pay for things?’

  Alice couldn’t help but laugh again. ‘Is that really the only thing you were interested in?’ There was something delightful in Ophelia’s wickedness now that it could not touch Alice herself.

  ‘Look, Edward is a sweet enough guy, when he isn’t moping, but frankly there’s no money left in his estate. Not a penny. Six million pounds’ worth of birdy book would have changed all that. I’m sorry, but I have a market value, and now he can’t meet it.’

  ‘You really are some bitch, aren’t you,’ said Alice with a smile

  Now it was Ophelia who was laughing, with her hand to her mouth.

  ‘So, goody-two-shoes knows a dirty word. Look, I’m just honest. We all want the same things: a decent fuck in a decent bed in a decent house. Can’t see you getting any of those from your boyfriend.’

  Before Alice had the chance to ask what she meant by that, Ophelia’s face contorted in rage. Pamela was back. She had been following Ophelia around the party, throwing a heavy arm round her shoulders at every opportunity, and shrieking: ‘Could be sisters, couldn’t we!’ and no amount of unsisterly disdain could shake her off. Ophelia made to run for it, but Alice delayed her with a touch to her arm.

  ‘What will happen to Edward?’

  ‘Oh, he’ll be all right. After all, he’s got that village idiot woman of his.’

  ‘You know about Grace?’

  ‘Is that her name? Yes, I suppose it is. Of course I know about Grace. Doesn’t everybody?’ And with that she pulled roughly away.

  Andrew returned with refreshments.

  ‘Having a nice chat with Ophelia?’ he asked, and then, ‘Christ, look who’s coming. And what is that?’

  Alice looked to where Andrew was pointing. Oakley was pushing his way towards them. As far as she could see he was dressed as usual. It was only when he reached them that she could see that he was wearing a tie with a picture of Constable’s Haywain on it. But behind him she saw the second funniest thing she’d seen all day. Clerihew was following his leader. He had on a sort of loincloth and nothing else. Nothing else, except for several arrows stuck on with Sellotape, and now drooping forlornly. On his plump frame, moist and pink, and with his round tortoiseshell spectacles, he looked, well, like a fat little man with arrows Sellotaped to him.

  ‘Nice tie,’ said Andrew before Oakley opened his mouth.

  ‘Ah, yes, well, one likes to make an effort. Important to. Dorothea made the purchase in the National Gallery shop. Where it is. The painting. Turner’s ah, constable. His wagon.’

  ‘And you, Cedric,’ continued Andrew, shocking everyone by getting Clerihew’s name right, ‘really excellent. All that work. Did you apply the arrows yourself? Such craftsmanship. And I think what best illustrates the quality of the thinking that went into it, is that the very same idea occurred to our TV star art pundit: Doctor Terry, Richardson.’

  ‘What?’ said Clerihew, looking alarmed. ‘Where?’

  ‘Just over there discussing Classical mythology with Ophelia. Strange how this has turned into an evening of doppelgängers.’

  Alice looked with Clerihew. And there, across the room, stood Ophelia, talking intimately with the gorgeous Terence Richardson. They would have made a striking couple, even if they had not been dressed as they were. His sculptured torso cried out to be pierced by arrows, and his darts had been made, by some clever engineering, to stand proud and erect. He looked much more relaxed than Ophelia, who was once again being plagued by Pam, who loomed over her, messily eating a scotch egg. Ophelia tried to ignore Pam, as she fingered one of Richardson’s arrows. Alice thought, for a moment, that she was going to suck it.

  ‘Good God!’ said Clerihew. ‘I wonder if … I should never have told her about my costume. She’s obviously … I must have words.’ And with that he started to forge his way to the Venuses and the other St Sebastian, wincing two or three times as a jostle jagged one of his arrows into a soft part.

  ‘Bye bye,’ said Andrew, cheerfully. ‘What were you saying, Colin?’

  ‘I was telling you about the developments. After we had our meeting, that is, the meeting between you and I, at which we reached an understanding, I was called into another er meeting. With Mrs Illkempt, and certain others of the Board, as was. The end of the meeting. To be informed on behalf of Books.’

  ‘How very interesting. But as you can see we were just about to go and talk to someone else before you arrived so if you don’t …’

  ‘I’m afraid this is of interest. You see the loss of the Audubon sale was in the way of a final, er, curtain, um straw, breaking the camel’s, as it were, back. For the Americans. They’ve withdrawn, in some sense. Money, it seems, has been haemorrhaging, in their expression.’

  ‘Hang on. You’re saying the Americans are pulling out? You mean the Japanese?’

  ‘Withdrawing. Entirely. Yes.’

  ‘But does that mean we’re going under?’

  ‘Not necessarily. A new Board has been formed, and there’s a new stand-in Chairman.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Mr Brooksbank. Which those of us with a sense of history and family can only applaud.’

  ‘Brooksbank, eh? Always seemed harmless enough to me. Bit dim though. What do you make of all this, Alice?’ It had occurred to Andrew that Alice had been uncommonly quiet throughout the exchange.

  ‘It doesn’t really concern me.’

  ‘That’s the spirit! Fuck ’em. Doesn’t matter which bunch of tossers decides what colour bog roll we’re going to have. We do the real work.’

  ‘That isn’t what I meant. I’ve been trying …’

  ‘Oh look,’ said Andrew. ‘Here they come now. Late to their own funeral.’

  Madeleine Illkempt, flanked by Butch and Sundance, was making her heavy-haunched way down the stairs. Behind them, looking altogether more satisfied with life, came Brooksbank and a handful of other Enderby stalwarts. Unlike the Americans, these had made an attempt to get into the party spirit. Brooksbank himself was wearing a squiggly, Jackson Pollock-print tee-shirt. One man had donned a large cardboard cut-out of a drooping Dali watch. A middle-aged woman, whom Andrew knew as being vaguely ennobled, had on a pleasing, sixties-looking dress in Mondrian squares of primary colours.

  News of the startling changes at Enderby’s had quickly worked its way around the room, intensifying the levels of chatter. The new group’s movements were watched with rapt attention. They split up, the Slayer’s team going grumpily towards a long table by the wall, stacked with high-grade nibbles. It so happened that Andrew, Alice and Oakley were the first to be visited by Brooksbank.

  ‘Ah, Doctor Heathley,’ he said to Andrew, ignoring Oakley who was straining forwards. ‘Fine work on the Audubon catalogue. D-damn shame about the cock-up.’

  Andrew was surprised and a little embarrassed to be picked out by the man who held, albeit temporarily, the reigns of power.

  ‘Yeah, well. I suppose these things happen.’

  ‘No, dear b-boy, I don’t think things do just happen,’ said Brooksbank, sagely. ‘Things happen because people make them happen. Or sometimes because p-people stop them from happening.’ At that point he looked at Oakley.

  ‘Yes, sir, well, that’s as may be, but in this case as Andrew, um Doctor Heathley, can confirm …’

  ‘I’m sure he could, sure he could. B-But I may as well tell you now that we’ve b-begun work on a reorganisation, which makes all this seem a little, p-posthumous.’

  ‘A reorganisation? Ah, I quite see that some structure streamlining … flatter management … ah … structures was, is, called for.’

  ‘Yes. It was rapidly agreed that your talents were largely wasted up
in Books. We really feel that you were more in your element down in the documents basement.’ The eager, thrusting look that Oakley habitually aimed at his superiors changed. His face now wore the blank puzzlement of a severed head, the moment after the axe falls. ‘N-naturally,’ continued Brooksbank, with remorseless cheerfulness, ‘we can’t guarantee you your old post back as Head of Document Storage. But I’m sure we’ll find something appropriate.’

  ‘Might I ask,’ said Oakley in the dismal tones of defeat, ‘who will be taking over my position in Books?’

  ‘Yes you may. You see I recalled that several months ago we had effectively dismissed one of the leading experts in the Books department, a man with an exemplary record of both connoisseurship and good business sense, on the grounds, reading between the lines of the report I received, that he had formed what is often referred to these days as a same-sex attachment. Of course that was never explicitly stated: no one was quite foolish enough to make that mistake. But the implication was clear. Well, I’m afraid that I find that entirely unacceptable, and now I am in a position to do something about it. I have made an offer and it has been accepted.’

  ‘You’re talking about Crumlish? Garnet Crumlish?’ said Andrew, who was already in a state of such intense physical and mental bliss that he felt he might have some kind of emission. He looked at Alice who also wore a huge smile. Alice Sui Generis, she was thinking. We’ve recently acquired our first Oik. And look, he’s to be your intimate desk chum. How affecting. The same delicious thought occurred to Alice and Andrew at the same time: Crumlish had been elbowed out on the trumped up grounds that he had sexually harassed Clerihew. Now he was being brought back to life because Brooksbank thought he was a gay martyr.

  ‘Quite,’ said Brooksbank.

  ‘But those rumours …’ began Oakley, only to trail off. Brooksbank looked at Oakley, waiting for him to finish. But what, thought Andrew, could he say? ‘Those rumours were baseless, and made up by myself and my cocksucking lickspittle, Clerihew?’ Oh, the joy, the joy. Oakley seemed to physically shrink before them, melting like a salted slug.

  Brooksbank chatted a little more with Alice and Andrew, telling them a few juicy details about the fall of the Americans, and their Japanese puppet masters. He made little effort to keep the snobbish contempt from his voice. It seemed that all of the innovations introduced, and in particular the online auction and other internet-based projects, were more responsible for the collapse than the Audubon failure. A little nipping and tucking, he thought, would return them to modest profitability in no time. But that wasn’t what ‘they’ wanted, no glory in modest profits and a stable share of the market, and so off they had gone.

  ‘Well,’ he said, after a few minutes, ‘must be doing my rounds. N-noblesse oblige and all that. Frightfully nice conversing.’

  Then he was gone. Gone too was Oakley. How had that happened? He had simply disappeared. Dragged down, Faust-like, by devils, thought Andrew, to his subterranean document hell. Alice squeezed his hand.

  ‘I’ve arranged to meet Odette and Leo in the Mitre,’ she said.

  ‘What, now? But things have hardly got going here. All that free champagne. And I’ve got to go and gloat. Tonight will be a night of gloating. Don’t you see? Nearly all the baddies have been beaten. How often does that happen in real life?’

  ‘We … you can always come back. It’s … I’ve got to talk about … about something important. With all of you. I’ve been trying to tell you all day.’

  At long last Andrew was listening to her.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘I’ll tell you in the Mitre.’

  ‘You can’t do that. Tell me now.’

  ‘Let’s go. We’ll be there in a minute.’

  On the way out they passed the Slayer and her acolytes. Andrew, now worried and annoyed by Alice, but still exultant over the humiliation and downfall of Oakley, could not resist swaying over towards them.

  ‘I’ve got it!’ he said in a loud and friendly voice. ‘I was wondering all evening, and now I see it. Very clever.’

  ‘What are you talking about,’ Illkempt replied, glowering at him with her black eyes from beneath her heavy lids. She was only slightly incommoded by the presence of most of a vol-au-vent in her large mouth.

  ‘Your … costume. You’ve come as Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. Genius, sheer genius. Can’t have too many Picassos.’

  He had no time to wait for a reply, or even to see if understanding dawned, before Alice pulled him away, anxious not to keep Odette waiting.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Two Interesting Occurrences

  Leaving the party when they did meant that Alice and Andrew were to miss two interesting occurrences. The first was the return of Garnet Crumlish, elegantly dressed in a top hat and tails, his patent shoes glittering with the lights of the chandeliers.

  ‘The Degas people will think I’m from a Manet, and the Manet from a Degas,’ he’d said as his wife, Jessie, fussed over him, sprucing and defluffing. ‘Anyway, what do they expect with such short notice?’

  The months had not been easy for Crumlish, or for his wife. He’d made a little money from casual book dealing, but somehow the faintly sordid trailing through house clearances and charity shops on the look out for first editions, felt like one step up from vagrancy. The looks of recognition he got from former trade contacts, the quasi-tramps in frayed shirts and stained ties who’d come in to Enderby’s with thirty or forty quid’s worth of books, was more than he could take. Would he soon look like them, smell like them? Yes, of course he would.

  So why not embrace it? He took to whiling away afternoons in the park with a bottle of British sherry, the carnation in his lapel slowly browning.

  Jessie could do nothing for him. They weren’t soul mates; she looked after him, and there was no way to iron or clean or cook a way out of this disaster. Another year and he might well have been dead.

  He entered quietly, acknowledging with polite nods those of his acquaintance who stared at him in astonishment. With each step he took, he gained in confidence, and by the time he plucked his first glass of champagne from a passing tray, performing as he did, an elegant half turn, he felt almost as if he had never been away. His careful eye took in the splendour around him, the glory and chaos of costume, the intricate infrastructure of friendships, alliances, feuds, manifest in the pattern of bodies around him. He saw immediately, the isolated group of Americans, and touched his hat brim with the silver boss on his cane. Illkempt champed, and looked away.

  The same careful eye could hardly fail to spot the extraordinary group made up of … What? Two Sebastians, obviously: couldn’t miss those arrows, and, yes, two Venuses, judging by the beauty of one, and the scallops of the other.

  ‘Pam,’ he murmured, smiling to himself. ‘You really are a genius.’ But he looked sadly at the plumper of the two Sebastians.

  He carried in his pocket a bundle of love letters, rather earnest and imploring, craving only that he should think to look the way of his devoted slave, and promising a range of delights almost certainly beyond the young man’s abilities to deliver. Crumlish brought them with him not for the purposes of blackmail, or even to support his reinstatement. That all seemed quite adequately taken care of. Of course Brooksbank was an idiot, but at least he was one of our idiots. No, he brought them to return them to the sender, in case he should suffer unnecessarily. Garnet had more than earned his reputation as a wit; perhaps even that of a bitch; but his swordplay, like that of Zorro (a childhood hero), was designed only to leave his monogram cut into the clothing of the victim, and never to eviscerate. He had no intention of harming poor Clerihew.

  Nor did he ever get the chance to return the letters, for Clerihew was shortly to be at the centre of the second interesting occurrence. On leaving Andrew, Alice and Oakley, he had gone to stand close beside Richardson, Ophelia, and Spam, where Crumlish now found him.

  Richardson was even more annoyed than Ophelia at having a comedy double, and
was rather better equipped for dealing with it. When Pam had stopped her good-natured pointing, ooing, and cackling at the new arrival, and when it had become clear that he wasn’t about to go of his own accord, he turned smilingly towards Clerihew, whose jaw was clamped tightly shut.

  ‘Exactly which St Sebastian are you?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Well, you are a little … limp for either of the Mantegna’s: I thought myself about coming as the Louvre Sebastian – the one in the Kunsthistorisches in Vienna gets a horrid shaft in the face …’

  ‘I’m just a Sebastian. I don’t know which one. But it was my idea before yours. You stole it.’

  ‘Please, young man, I haven’t finished yet. You really can’t be the Perugino, or the wonderful Puget bronze in Vienna. The Hans Holbein altarpiece? No, really, no. What about the Hendrick Terbrugghen? Could be, could be. He has a certain … earthiness. But, again, no. You haven’t quite the … delineation.’

  Richardson’s performance had, by this time, attracted a small but appreciative audience. Garnet Crumlish was among them, drawn into the circle, although he declined to join in with the tittering. The victim had blushed a deep scarlet, and Crumlish was perhaps the only one there who saw it as the mark not of embarrassment, but rage: a consuming, destructive fury. Did Clerihew notice Garnet there, among the crowd? Could that have added to the tempest of emotions bringing him to the brink of action? One would need access to his medical notes, or to the psychiatric report prepared for his trial, to give a firm answer to that question.

  ‘I have it,’ said Richardson, finally, ‘you’re the Antonio del Pollaiuolo Martyrdom of St Sebastian, painted in tempera on wood in 1475, and hanging in our own dear National Gallery. Am I right?’

  ‘I told you I’m not …’

  ‘Yes,’ said Richardson, playing now to the crowd by walking around Clerihew like a tour guide, ‘I see now the fluidity of the forms, the graceful integration of the loincloth with the supple sensuality, and might I say suggestive fecundity of the loins. And, remember, the Pollaiuolo Sebastian is set on a high post, and so the archers and crossbowmen must shoot upwards, which helps to explain the curious lack of … turgidity, in the shafts themselves. But most of all we have the magnificent head: serene, beatific, safe in the knowledge that, as the first Christian martyr, he is also the first soul to be saved, the first mortal being to be guaranteed everlasting glory in the presence of God.’