After Alice

by Gregory Maguire

  “Then there’s nothing for it; Alice and Ada must have put their wicked heads together and decided to light out farther afield along the riverside than we’ve thought. If we find them, we’ll find Siam in tow, I hope. He’ll have caught up with them. They’ve had a good start and might have gone a distance. Shall we push on beyond the University Parks? It gives us something to do, anyway, while the men are finishing their meal.”

  Miss Armstrong plunged forward across the fields to the river path. She was a land-­borne ship in full sail, the large violet and ivory oblongs upon her plaid skirting a semaphore of maidenly distress. The fabric billowed and luffed about her. Lydia had to grip her own skirts in her fists and run to keep up.

  When they’d settled to a more sensible pace along the path, heading south, the governess said, “I’ve always approved of Ada’s friendship with Alice. Ada Boyce is frail and speculative where Alice is decisive. I fret for what life will deliver unto poor Ada, with that distortion in her skeletal structure.”

  “It has never seemed all that dreadful to me,” said Lydia.

  “The appliances that she wears perform adequately. But no one will have a young woman with a stoop and a gimp. No one respectable. I think it quite fine of Alice to overlook Ada’s shortcomings so nobly.” She glared this way and that, tendentiously. “We all have our shortcomings, it seems, though some are less visible than others.”

  About Miss Armstrong’s opinions of Lydia’s shortcomings, Lydia didn’t enquire. They fell into a silence more companionable than either of them expected. Something about the lull of the long noontime pulled them along the riverbank without further negotiation. They angled along Longwall Street and crossed the High. At the Botanic Gardens Lydia lunged in and peered, walked until she had seen the whole outlay and listened for give-­away sounds of laughter, and then returned. The two of them then kept a brisk pace into Christ Church Meadows. Only when a bell sounded again marking some quarter hour—­Lydia had lost track of where in the day they were—­only then did they pull up and reconsider. Were they going to walk all the way to London?

  “I suppose we must start back,” said Miss Armstrong. “But despite your protestations about Alice’s meekness, let us go out to St. Aldate’s and return through town. Perhaps the girls have emboldened each other to venture in that direction. Oh, Ada will get a good thrashing from her father if he ever catches wind of such impertinence! And your father will have to reconsider what is to be done about Alice. A convent school in France, perhaps.”

  Lydia was about to say that she herself was perfectly competent to tend to Alice, but then she’d been the one to lose sight of her. So, meekly, Lydia allowed herself to be pulled along toward the bulk of Christ Church College, hulking as it did beyond the meadows like a great stone creature in repose, possibly in senescence.

  As they neared the back of it, they saw a door swung ajar in a high garden wall. “Do you think the girls might have ventured there?” asked Lydia.

  “The colleges are not open to children, and most especially not to girl children.”

  “Alice is not one to notice prohibitions even when they’re posted. We may as well have a quick look.” Before Miss Armstrong could squawk, Lydia darted forward. She put her head into a small pretty cloister of a space, the sort where an afternoon garden party with croquet and lemonade might be held. Foxgloves and larkspur poked and swayed in abundance. A serene male sort of calm obtained. Then Lydia saw a fellow in a corner by a ground-­floor window. Its lower sash was flung up. He was patting a contraption of some sort as if to tame it. He was looking at his pocket-­watch with some distress. He caught sight of Lydia. He said, “Oh, heaven provides! Miss, M-­miss, might I ask you to perform m-­me a small favor?”

  “You may not go in there, Miss Lydia,” said Miss Armstrong, reaching the door in the wall.

  “It’s between t-­t-­terms and no one is about, and only for a m-­moment,” said the man. He was a student or a young fellow of some sort, agitated and twitchy. He made an arabesque in the air next to his equipment, which on closer inspection seemed to be a camera on legs. “I was set up to take a p-­portrait, you see, and my companion m-­must be detained. And the light is . . .” He mumbled. Had he said “delightful”?

  “We were looking for my sister,” said Lydia, cordially enough.

  “Come, whi-­which of you?—­It is to be a self-­p-­portrait, only I cannot release the shutter. H-­he was to do it and I cannot say where he has disappeared to.”

  “Half the world has gone missing today,” said Miss Armstrong. She entered the garden as if stepping into a tepid footbath, gingerly.

  “Show me,” said Lydia.

  The young man beckoned to the black fabric arranged on an armature of wires. A portable cloth cave set up in the middle of midsummer luxuriance. “Miss Lydia, you don’t dare,” said Miss Armstrong, but she was not Lydia’s governess. Lydia did indeed dare. She ducked into the black tent with the stammering student. It was warm and close. The mechanics of the camera looked faintly menacing, as if intended for the use of a surgeon.

  “You just look here, you see. I will call out when I am ready. You must press this b-­button all the way down, and stay qu-­quite still and do not jostle the delicate thing. All will-­will—­well, it just will,” he concluded. Lydia followed the instructions well enough. There was nothing thrilling about being in close quarters with him. He had all the electrical excitement of a suit of clothes upon a dressmaker’s armature. She had somehow hoped for more.

  There he went, out of the black envelope and across the lawn to the half-opened window. He perched himself against the frame, his buttocks slightly elevated on the stone sill, one leg gently uplifted. He might have been climbing into the window, or just perhaps leaving. In the square in which she peered, he looked tentative. Sweetly alert, and trembling. If he was after an expression of sobriety and scholarship, he was well wide of the mark. He looked as if he had just been slapped and perhaps had felt a rush of confused pleasure in the aftershock.

  “If you w-­would be so kind,” he said, “just now.”

  Huddled under the black cape, the misbegotten midnight, she saw him in the aperture, and pressed the button. A click and a whirr, and time seemed to stand still. He froze in his place, bland innocence masquerading as a young man. Perhaps into the room behind him someone had opened a door, for an imprecise glow briefly backlit a corner of the otherwise black glass. Against such correct rectitude it took the look of a hastening creature not intended to be caught by such a tool. The blur of a swift Siamese cat, perhaps, or an Angora rabbit.

  CHAPTER 35

  Lydia waited. He was caught now, but unless he stayed still for a full minute the effect would be compromised. She wasn’t to budge an inch for fear of jostling the box. The black tent was, for a moment, a shroud. She wondered if, for the dead, the life they had left behind seemed to them frozen the way this young scholar was frozen. The dead could no longer intervene, regardless of the need. But they could study, perhaps, the frozen past from which they’d been exiled. Look at the creases of the skin beside his eyes, the hesitant light in his face. Look at the creases in circumstance. Press up against everything that has happened exactly the way it had. Reconsider how forces actually work, and how one thing leads to another, until it is frozen, and all that is left is the intelligence of it, but not the living nub.

  “Highly irregular,” said Miss Armstrong, when they were done. The scholar stammered and apologized and was grateful. “The colleges are not arranged so that young women might be entrapped in the garden,” said Miss Armstrong ferociously. She turned on the young man as if she thought he must be lying when he said he had not seen Ada or Alice or Siam. Then all at once it occurred to her that she, too, was trespassing upon precincts forbidden her. She pulled Lydia away.

  Along St. Aldate’s, Miss Armstrong pressed Lydia on what it had been like to be cloistered in the dark with that stu
dent, as if there was a secret to be learned about huddling under a cloth with a young man. Lydia demurred.

  CHAPTER 36

  The White Queen and Ada continued along the path. They couldn’t step sideways, for the lawn edging prevented them from straying. Neither could they retreat, for when they looked back, they saw that the gravel path had retracted and formed a little loop like the eye of a needle. Should they bother to retrace their steps, they’d only be marching forward again in a moment.

  Ada was perturbed. “Let’s try to reverse ourselves—­”

  “Hard to do that without a looking-­glass,” interrupted the White Queen. “And why bother?”

  “Because,” Ada continued, “as far as we can see, this path only goes forward across the meadows, while the Sheep and the Lion and the Unicorn flew off in the opposite direction. They were going to the garden party, back that way, and we will be wanting to get there before long.”

  “You may want that,” said the White Queen. “I want peace among all nations. Either that or a lemon drop, I can’t decide.” Still, she fed her arm through Ada’s. They began to traipse along the return path, which curved neatly to join up with where they’d been. The exercise had taken a quarter of a minute, but it had been so much fun, or so little trouble, that they started out again along the loop. The White Queen said, “Who is this Alice about whom you keep chattering about who is the girl about whom you keep mentioning?”

  “Everyone knows Alice, it seems,” said Ada. “She’s been all through these parts. Yet we’re having such a time catching up with her.”

  “I don’t know the girl of whom you refer, referring that is to the girl about whom you keep referring. Whom I don’t know.”

  “Do you feel quite all right? Is this making you dizzy?” Ada asked the White Queen as they began their fourth circuit. “We could stop if you like. There’s no need to continue.”

  “To whom much is given, much is expected of those to whom much is given,” replied the White Queen uncertainly. “I expect.”

  “You’re talking in circles,” said Ada. “Let’s go on.”

  But the path seemed to have so enjoyed their company that it now limited itself to no more than this single loop around a small hummock of grass. There was no backward or forward, no horizon of past or future, just a circle around.

  “We are in a zoo,” said Ada. “Look, we’re caged in a pen, with the open world all around us, a temptation and a paradise, but forbidden.”

  “No, that’s the zoo.” The White Queen pointed. “That enclosed circle of grass, around which we are now tottering around, and around, and around which we round with nearly tottering competence with which we totter around.” She looked ill.

  Ada patted her alabaster elbow. “You hush now and save your breath. We may be on this road quite some time. I shall tell you about Alice, since you asked. She is a friend of mine. Well, in actual fact she is my only friend.”

  “Why—­is that why is that? Why?”

  “I have not been lucky in my limbs,” said Ada. “They are not frisky enough. I frighten the other little girls. They run away.”

  “Who who who who who who?” The White Queen’s eyes were wide and dreadful, filled with terror either at the collapse of her power of speech or at the thought that Ada scared little children.

  “Everyone except Alice,” said Ada. At once the thought of sensible, stoic Alice filled her heart and her breast to bursting. How queer that inscrutable child was. How beloved of so many. For the first time since slipping into the hole in the riverbank, Ada felt alarmed. Would she be stuck in this wonderland forever, always chasing after Alice, never catching up? And was Alice all right? Ada began to cry. She was well-­bred enough to know that crying was undignified. She tried to hide it from the White Queen, but the old creature noticed.

  “Now, then,” said the White Queen with great effort. “Now, then, now, then, now, then. There, there. There there there there there. Now, then now, then now. Now.” Though her face was rigid with stress, the White Queen leaned down. She creaked out a crooked smile. The old potentate was carved of ivory crazed all over with craquelure. Her expression, a rictus of caring concern, might have seemed a caricature of senile dementia. But Ada responded with brave gratitude. At least in her regard for a young companion, the White Queen is like Miss Armstrong Headstrong, she thought. If not half so highly strung.

  “It’s all right,” Ada managed. “Alice, you see, is the reason I am here.”

  “Hear, hear,” said the White Queen, or maybe that was “Here, here.”

  “She’s the only one who—­who—­” Ada didn’t know if she was stuttering from sudden emotion or if they had been around the loop so often that she was going loopy, too. “Who—­”

  “Who,” said a voice that was not Ada’s or the White Queen’s.

  The girl and the White Queen looked up. The mound around which they’d been walking had turned into a mushroom, and upon this spongy fungus lounged a Caterpillar, one distinguished by a vigorous ugliness. “Who,” said the Caterpillar, “are you?”

  “Well, that’s easy enough to answer, now that you ask it, and it’s high time somebody did,” jabbered the White Queen. She hopped up and down with joy, relieved of her verbal paralysis. The white pedestal upon which she stood made impressions in the gravel. “I am the White Queen, of course, any fool can see that—­”

  “I am no fool,” replied the Caterpillar, “and so it follows that I cannot see any such thing. You a White Queen? You appear to be a migrating finial afflicted by a poor conversational technique. In any case I wasn’t speaking to you. I was addressing the slug-­like child at your side. Who,” he said again, drawing out the syllable like an elocution master, “are you?”

  “Well, I’m Ada Boyce, if you please,” said Ada, “and I hate to rush matters along, but—­”

  “And if I don’t please?” asked the Caterpillar, puffing upon a pipe of Oriental workmanship. “Who are you then?”

  “I’m still Ada,” said the child. “Whether I please you or not, I’m still Ada. Even if you run away from me like some I know, I’m still Ada.”

  “Caterpillars seldom run,” he replied loftily, “unless pressed by the clamor of a devoted public. You were asking after Alice?”

  “Well, I hadn’t done that yet,” said Ada.

  “You said to rush matters along, so I am anticipating. If you would like to ask before Alice, you are too late. She has come and gone.”

  “Was she quite all right?” asked her friend.

  “It seemed to me she had some growing up to do,” replied the Caterpillar. “Or some growing down. I can’t remember. Memory is unreliable, anyway.”

  The White Queen said, “I have a fine memory myself. I can remember when I licked an envelope to seal it. The envelope stuck to my tongue. I had to walk the envelope all the way to the Queen of Hearts myself. I was replying affirmatively to her kind invitation.”

  “Her kind invitation?” asked the creature. “What kind of invitation?”

  “A garden party, as it happens.”

  “And that is where Alice is going,” said the Caterpillar. “Perhaps she has already arrived and been sentenced to death. If you want to catch the fun, I shouldn’t linger here. In fact, I want to see the proceedings, and I shouldn’t linger here. And I shan’t.” At this, he turned into a butterfly. Ada hadn’t known butterflies could manage to be so ugly. The Caterpillar lifted from the mushroom cap like an angel of death off an ottoman. It whisked itself away with a speed and a sense of destination hitherto unknown to its species. Just as it disappeared, it called, “Don’t eat the mushroom. You don’t know if it is poisonous!”

  “Do you know?” called the White Queen, but the insect had disappeared.

  “Look,” said Ada, “the garden path has vanished. We’re free.”

  “It’s dangerous to stray from the garden pat
h, they say, but when the garden path itself takes to straying, that’s horticultural mutiny,” replied the White Queen. “Look, bits of this mushroom have teeth marks in them. It can’t be poisonous or the ground would be littered with corpses.” She reached up and broke off two pieces the size of dinner plates just as a voice cried out in alarm. It was neither the Caterpillar’s voice nor the Sheep’s, nor, in fact, was it much like any other of the peculiar characters Ada had met so far. The girl turned.

  A boy came stumbling out of the woods. He waved his arms to dissuade them. He looked like the boy in the Sunday lesson book, from the page about Afric’s pagan interior. “Might do you harm,” he panted. “A mushroom that virile. Best take no chances.”

  “Who,” said Ada, imitating the vowels of the departed Caterpillar, “are you?”

  “You sound a big old hoot owl,” he said. “I’m Siam, I am.”

  “I’m Ada,” she replied. She turned to introduce the White Queen. But it was too late. The White Queen had taken a mouthful of mushroom. She had frozen into a statue of herself. At least her expression looked pleased, as if her last meal had met with her approval.

  CHAPTER 37

  The shadow of Tom Tower had retracted from St. Aldate’s. It was concentrated solely upon the cool tunnel of Tom Gate below it. The doors stood open as if, in a grand parade, scouts were about to march through with buckets and brooms, six dozen strong. Through the blue tunnel could be seen a fountain and a still, green lake of lawn. Various distracted dons and a few gentlemen wafted about as if by the strengthening breeze, apparently so lost in labyrinths of their own scholastic minds as not to have noticed that Trinity term had already concluded. Otherwise the streets were emptying. “Does it seem that a storm is coming?” asked Miss Armstrong.

  “I wouldn’t know.”

  “Whatever might the time be?” One of Oxford’s unhurried bells rang the half hour obligingly, but of which hour was it the half? The city seemed to have become unmoored. “Did you know that at night Great Tom rings five minutes later than the hour in London? Oxford being that degree west of Greenwich?”