Alice’s Secret Garden

Alice’s mother never had a role in her memories. Alice’s mother was too much part of her present to belong to her past. The past was for the good and beautiful things, worn smooth with the years. The past was for the dead, the sacred dead. Alice could, however, remember her mother’s special friend, one of the patients, a boy called Gulliver. He was dying from some intractable strain of consumption. Alice remembered his glistening eyes, and the dark circles around them, and his long, straining neck and she feared him because on the only occasion Alice had seen him smile, his lips peeled back to reveal his bright red gums.

After the death of her father, Alice and her mother had moved to a small flat in St John’s Wood. Kitty was from a prosperous family, with what she always described as ‘good connections’, although to whom or what was never specified. She was sharp-faced, and had once been very pretty. Her marriage to the tall, handsome doctor seemed like a good one, until he decided to abandon London for draughty, remote prisons, millions of miles from theatres and restaurants and dinner parties.

She snatched at the opportunity to return to London, the opportunity wrought by his death. Using every penny that they had saved, she bought the little flat, back here, where the people were, where the life was. It was a shame that London had moved on so much in the ten years that she had been away. Her friends had new friends. The places were all different. The invitations wouldn’t come. The romance that she expected never happened, apart from one or two crooks out, she eventually convinced herself, to purloin what little money she had left. The years passed and she found herself becoming old.

At times she blamed dull, strange little Alice. She took her away from the expensive private school, little knowing that Alice had hated it, despising the catering and grooming skills it seemed intent on imparting, loathing the silly girls who talked of nothing but ponies and lacrosse. The fact that Alice actually seemed to enjoy the local comprehensive confirmed Kitty’s doubts about her, doubts amplified by the child’s interest in science, in the horrid creepy-crawly world of beetles and locusts and dissected rats. So like her father. Such a disappointment. And as Alice grew so Kitty shrank. She went out less and less, although she dressed immaculately for each evening in with the television and the dry martinis.

Alice could never blame her mother for being what she was; but nor could she love her. The sense of duty she had absorbed from her father prevented her from taking up the place at Cambridge, and she went instead to Imperial College, living all the while in the little flat. However much her mother pursed her lips, and rolled her eyes and criticised (‘How did I make such a dreary, dowdy thing as you?’), Alice could not leave her on her own. She cooked her meals, and paid, out of her meagre student loan, for a girl to come in twice a week during the day, ostensibly to tidy, but really to act as company. These acts of charity were undertaken not with the kind of glad and cheerful heart that would have made them glow in Alice’s own eyes, but with the sense of a heavy duty performed joylessly, and this deprived her even of that sense of wellbeing which comes from the knowledge of being virtuous.

Bizarrely it was Kitty who helped to get Alice the job at Enderby’s. Secretly fearing that Alice would leave her forever to go and pursue her vile zoophylliac interests in some shamingly out-of-the-way place, Kitty had roused herself, called all of her few surviving acquaintances, pulled whatever strings remained in reach, and arranged a lunch with a reasonably senior Enderby’s panjandrum. Alice well remembered the two hours of preparation (not including hair). Her attempts to help were met with screeches, and agonising nips from the long red talons. Kitty eventually emerged looking stretched and gaunt and frightening. Alice suspected that the combination of pearls and diamonds (Kitty still had some very old and, taken individually, rather beautiful jewellery) might have been wrong, but she knew better than to say anything.

The Enderby’s man was none other than Parry Brooksbank, a younger son of impeccable manners but limited intelligence, who existed principally for this sort of task. He had no idea of quite what he was in for when he found himself steered towards a lunch with ‘Old Crawley’s daughter, Kitty’ by one of his colleagues. He’d never heard of Old Crawley, and assumed the daughter was another more or less marriageable girl dangled before him as part of some Machiavellian plot by the Family, who seemed incapable of understanding that he was utterly, immovably and happily confirmed.

He was initially pleased to see the very definitely unmarriageable Kitty. ‘P-post p-post-menopausal, I’d have s-said,’ as he put it, a little unfairly, to his partner, Seamus. ‘Looked like Mrs Simpson after a night on the ch-cherry brandy.’

Brooksbank had begun affecting a stammer as a teenager in an attempt to appear more interesting. It was now more or less second nature, although he occasionally forgot which consonants he was supposed to have trouble with.

‘Marge?’

‘No, dear b-boy, the other Mrs Simpson.’

To Kitty herself he was, of course, the soul of charm. Entertaining wealthy eccentrics was just part of the job, and one (perhaps the only one) at which he excelled. He paid close, almost minute-taking, attention to the rambling anecdotes about people of whom he had never or only dimly heard. Most of the stories culminated in Kitty’s triumph over some enemy: a rival hostess or impertinent tradesman. He noted with little interest that all of her stories took place in the ancient or very recent past, with nothing filling the middle distance, and put it down to some sub-variant of senile dementia. However, once Brooksbank had established that Kitty was neither a potential threat to his mental or domestic equilibrium, nor, despite appearances, amusingly mad, his mind began to drift, helped along by the second bottle of surprisingly good Argentinian red (even Claridges were looking Westward now). Seamus, so broad, and yet so sweet; what a find he’d been. Really must go back to …

And then, with a start, accompanied by a quite-possibly audible click made by some intricately wrought cartilaginous structure at the back of his nose, Brooksbank realised, an hour into the lunch, that Kitty had reached The Point.

‘… and her degree was of the first class, you know, the only one they gave out that year. But after all I’ve told you about our history, you’ll admit that she shouldn’t be looking at molluscs and woodlice?’

Brooksbank, driving away other visions entirely, wondered what it might have been about the girl’s background that made such investigations inappropriate. Something to do with gardening, perhaps?

‘No, I quite see. Fearful creatures. Do terrible things to one’s radishes and lettuces.’

‘I’m so pleased you understand,’ said Kitty, looking at him as if he’d just started to caress his own nipples. ‘So you’ll be able to arrange it then?’

Arrange it? What could the ridiculous old hag be talking about?

‘Oh, I expect I’ll ah um,’ he said, playing for time as he scrolled through his longish list of meaningless and/or ambiguous platitudes. He was looking for one that would work something like: well, you could take it to mean yes, but equally, I could explain it back to you and if necessary the courts, at some stage in the future as, in no way, not at all, you must be joking, forget about it, couldn’t possibly do that kind of thing, against all the rules, more than my job’s worth. What came out was, ‘y-yes, yes, of course.’

‘Oh good! When will the interview be – I know it’s a formality you have to go through …’

‘You didn’t cave in did you, Parry?’ said Seamus that night as they lay together on the sofa watching Coronation Street.

‘Well,’ he replied, ‘as it happens there is a small recruitment exercise under way …’

‘You old softie.’

‘Anything for an easy life. P-pass the Maltesers.’

From Kitty’s perspective the lunch had been a triumph. The rather handsome, silver-haired fellow had obviously adored her.

‘You should have seen the far-away look in his eyes,’ she said to a not-really-listening Alice, whose eyes had something of the same character. ‘Nice to know I can still bedazzle. You know, before I was married …’

She was not in the least surprised when the letter came inviting Alice in for an ‘informal chat’. Alice, on the other hand, was astounded. She had only agreed to the idea on the assumption that Kitty’s project was doomed to failure. She wanted to do research in some aspect of island biogeography and had applied to Sheffield and Southampton, proposing to launch herself into field trips to the islands of Mauritius and Reunion, exquisitely isolated in the Indian Ocean. Why would she want to work in a silly office in London, selling old things to very rich people? There was a world of seething, replicating life out there to be studied, catalogued and understood. If it wasn’t her father’s work, it was at least work that he would comprehend and respect. What would he make of her dusting down ornate picture frames, or whatever else happened in a place like Enderby’s?

It was only when the issue of the great auk arose that Alice began to think that she might actually want the job and, more importantly, when the job began to think that it might want Alice.

‘What do you make of this?’

The man, tall and craning and unhappily bald (a baldness for which he tried vainly to compensate with one of the last heterosexual moustaches in London outside of the police and fire services), held out a large book open at a picture of an ungainly black and white bird, like a penguin painted by someone relying on second-hand witness accounts.

Alice, who had been bored by the questions about her experience and qualifications, almost leapt in the air.

‘It’s an auk, the great auk! It’s so sad.’

The panel members exchanged a variety of smiles, raised eyebrows and ear-wiggles.

‘Well it is, actually,’ said the moustache. ‘Very good. But we’re more interested in what you make of the plate, and the book, if you take my meaning, in which it appears. Could you give us your impressions as to value, for example?’

This was an extraordinary piece of luck, although whether ultimately good or bad Alice would never be able to say. A request for practical information about almost any other book would have left Alice perplexed. She loved books – not just the scientific works in which she lived, but also the wider humanist canon that she had absorbed (a little erratically) through her father. But books as objects didn’t much interest her, beyond a vague desire, which she recognised as feminine weakness, to arrange them according to colour rather than subject matter or author.

The great auk, however, did interest her. It was the world’s unluckiest animal. It had the misfortune, first of all, to taste (to half-starved codfishermen battered by arctic storms) good. Its eggs were large and delicious. You could squeeze a useful, if smelly, oil from its flesh. It lived in places taxing, but not impossible, to reach. It had a trusting and gentle demeanour, making it simple to harvest. It had once nested in millions, but the cliffs and islands where it waddled were gradually stripped by hardy sea folk (and later scientific egg collectors, eager to bag an auk shell before the creature went the way of the dodo) until the very last survivors clustered together on one rocky islet off the coast of Iceland. Which happened to be a volcano. Which happened to blow up. Alice came across the story in her research on island biodiversity, and had to leave the library to go for a good cry in the park.

The question had been a trick one, contravening one of the unwritten rules of interviewing. But then that was Colin Oakley, who liked to show his masters how ruthless he could be in their cause. The plate was a reproduction of an old watercolour of the auk, but the book was relatively new. New, but printed privately as a limited edition. Would Alice fall into the trap of overestimating the value based on a false assumption of age? Or would she take it to be a worthless modern work, of some interest, perhaps, to auk-enthusiasts, but none at all to book collectors? Well neither, as it turned out. She had read an article in a Sunday newspaper about the author, and his lonely, monomaniacal interest in the auk. She knew that the book was a modern limited edition. She knew its approximate value. She made the right sort of cautious noises about checking just how limited the edition was, and having to scan the internet for any information on recent sales, but when pressed for a number, hit happily on exactly the figure the panel had before them.

She then realised that a pun had been staring her in the face for a while without her fully noticing.

‘Of course,’ she said, a little shy smile making her look as pretty as she ever would, which was really quite pretty, ‘we’d have to wait to see what it actually reached at … auk-shun.’

There was a worrying moment or two, in which Alice seriously contemplated simply walking out, before the panel decided to laugh, but once underway the general chortle acquired enough momentum to last for a good ten seconds.

‘It’d be handy having a scientist around. You know, for facts and suchlike.’

The panel were having a final round-up.

‘Mmm, she certainly knew her stuff when it came to auks.’

‘And seemed to have a reasonable sense of humour.’

‘For a scientist.’

‘Not bad-looking either.’

‘For a scientist.’

‘And of course there’s Old Crawley to think about.’

‘Crawley, of course.’

‘Ah yes, good Old Crawley.’

So Alice got the job, despite the fact that none of the panel members ever had a clear idea of who or what Old Crawley might have been.

Alice approached the body that had agreed to fund her research. She half wanted them to say that no, they really couldn’t defer her award, and who did she think she was anyway, even to ask. But in the event they were horribly decent and agreed that her funding was available for any time over the next year, after which she would have to reapply. It made her think of the tutor who’d first suggested that she stay in research. ‘They always like to have a girlie or two on their books,’ she’d said with minimal bitterness. ‘Makes it look like they have a decent equal opps policy.’

So Alice told herself that she could do the job for a year, save some money, have some fun, and then carry on with her research. After all, she was only twenty-four. Mauritius wasn’t going anywhere. And just how many species of snail could go extinct in a mere twelve months?

The plan, had it not been for the intercession of the Dead Boy, might well have worked out. As it was, everything changed when Alice entered her dreamtime.

Why her? Why then? Why the Dead Boy? The questions drifted through her mind but never pressed her to answer, never forced the issue. If someone had taken her face in their hands with gentle pressure and implored her to say what it was about her, Alice Duclos, that had made her vulnerable to this obsession, then she might have tried to say something about her father, something about the rotten, death-filled, loveless cavity where he had been, that marked his loss. She might have said something about the bitter wilderness, the tedium, the endless ache of her life with Kitty. She might have said those things, or she might only have pulled away, her eyes empty.

Whatever it was, Alice’s plans dried and shrivelled and blew away, and she stayed at Enderby’s. It certainly wasn’t that she’d fallen in love with her job; it was more that her life came to a kind of a stop when she saw the Dead Boy; everything became frozen, petrified. She didn’t want change; she most emphatically didn’t want Sheffield. What she wanted was to think about her boy, to imagine his life, to invent a life together with him. Working at Enderby’s was a link to the Dead Boy, because that’s where she was when she found him, but it also left her with the time to live in her imaginary world. She wasn’t stretched or tested. Her colleagues presented no real difficulties or challenges, and she found that she could function perfectly well with only a fraction of her consciousness above the surface, in the waking, office world.

The main problem had been Andrew. At some point during the two months of innocence before things changed, she had gradually become aware that he might like her, although she never fully admitted it to herself. And he was nice. Well, no, not nice, but funny and interesting. They’d even had a sort of a date.

‘I hate parks,’ Andrew said one afternoon. Alice had brought him a mug of tea, as it was her turn. They had a little running joke about how terrible her tea was – too milky, and not brewed for long enough. ‘You’ve got to shqueeze the bag,’ he’d say in a comical version of his northern accent, and she’d pretend to get huffy about his ingratitude.

‘What’s wrong with parks? I don’t think I could survive in London without them. It’s the only way to escape the clamour and rush.’

‘Yeah, well, that’s the cliché, but it’s just a thing that people say without meaning it, or thinking about it at all. Parks are full of weirdos, and people doing t’ai chi, and old codgers with nowhere to go, and dogs, and pigeons with gammy legs, and people snogging as if nobody can see them. The ground’s always wet, and there’re trees and shrubbery and stuff all over the place. When did anyone ever have a decent conversation in the park? No, parks are for losers. There’s that Larkin poem, you know, about turning over your failures by some bed of lobelias.’

Alice was laughing.

‘Have you ever actually been to a park?’

‘Yeah, loads.’

‘Which ones?’

‘You know, just parks. The regent thing. And that other one, the green one. No, not really. I told you, I don’t like them, I prefer to get drunk sitting down in the corner of a pub, not standing up with a can of Special Brew, and a gang of old men with bandaged heads, and piss stains down the front of their trousers.’

‘There’s a beautiful one that I used to go to when I was young. We used to bunk off from PE lessons and sit in the grass and eat ice cream. It saved me, in a way, because I used to live in the country when I was very little, and London was … difficult. I still go there sometimes. I think even you’d like it. It has an aviary, and an enclosure with wallabies, and an old-fashioned bandstand. It’s not really a Special Brew kind of park. More cream tea.’

Now Andrew was laughing, but his eyes had narrowed. He’d suddenly realised that this was the fabled shot-to-nothing, the freebie, the chance to ask Alice out without actually seeming to ask her out. No declaration of intent was needed, no fear of rejection, no embarrassment at all. This could all be passed off as an innocent trip to the park. A mere matter of friendship. But still, how to ask her. Words. What happened to them when you needed them? And anyway, it wasn’t true that there was nothing to lose. What if she didn’t even want to be friends? Wasn’t that worse than not wanting to go out with him? (On balance, he decided that it wasn’t worse, but only by between six and eleven per cent, depending on other variables.)

‘Wallabies,’ he said, after a few moments of computation. ‘You’re winding me up. No? Well, if you say so. I’ve always liked the idea of wallabies. Little kangaroos. Charming fellows. Mmmm. It is, you know, on this plane of existence, isn’t it?’

Alice already had a reputation for being a little dreamy, which Andrew used occasionally to tease her with, staying, he hoped, on the right side of being an arse.

‘Yes, Golders Hill Park. It’s a sort of offshoot of Hampstead Heath. But without the men having sex with each other in the bushes.’

‘Why don’t you show me round it? You know, the wallabies and the cream teas?’

With sublime ease the date was arranged for the next day, Saturday. Andrew’s pleasure at this was dulled after he became aware that the divine and/or profane Ophelia had been listening to the conversation. Although he didn’t have the nerve to look directly at her, he could easily picture the aspect of disdain into which her exquisite features so easily fell. For a moment his mind projected Ophelia’s contemptuous sneer onto Alice’s open and innocent face, where it curled like an obscene wound. The vision made him hate Ophelia, but he would still have given a month’s salary for the chance to pin her down on an unmade bed and …

‘I’ll meet you by the flamingos,’ said Alice.

And it was that lunchtime, Friday 14th April, that she found the Dead Boy.

Andrew couldn’t put his finger on what had changed, but it was clear that things were different as soon as he saw her. He would have noticed the difference if he hadn’t had meetings on the Friday afternoon, and he deliberately spent the time in between appointments away from his desk, just in case Alice should change her mind. After all, that’s what girls did, sometimes, didn’t they?

He’d been watching the flamingos for about ten minutes, thinking what ugly organisms they were, close up, with their birth-defect, upside-downy faces, and trying to work out why they would want to stand on one leg. Something to do with heat conservation? Showing off to lady flamingos? Just because they could? And then Alice appeared, wordlessly. Her eyes wouldn’t meet his, which wasn’t like her at all, and she was dressed in something beyond her usual endearing simplicity in a combination of heavy top and light skirt and idiot-grade, lumpen brown shoes.

‘Alice, hello,’ he said. ‘Lucky you got here. The flamingos were starting to get bored with my conversation. And to be honest even I can only take so much small talk about whatchacallit, plankton.’

There was a profoundly disconcerting pause before Alice said, ‘I’m sorry.’ Andrew couldn’t think what she was apologising for, but it seemed a strange sort of greeting. The park was, as Alice had said, very pretty. There really were wallabies, or one at least, accompanied by what Alice said without looking was a capybara, a big brown thing like a guinea pig on steroids. There was a bandstand with a large sign warning people to stay away. Although it was a chilly April morning, the sun shone in its weak-willed way, and it ought to have been fun.

But for Alice.

Andrew became increasingly frantic in his attempts to break through her … her what exactly? Reserve? No, she’d never been reserved, and that wasn’t it now. Veneer? God no. A cloud. For some reason Andrew remembered the derivation of ‘glamour’ which was originally a Scots word for an enveloping, obscuring cloud or mist, conjured up by a spell. So that was it: here in her mad-auntie clothes, Alice had acquired a glamour. Having a word for it didn’t help. His capering produced one brief smile, one moment of flickering recognition in her eyes. They were walking slowly around the aviary when Andrew was confronted by a tastelessly plumed, gangly bird, about a yard high, with a frill of what looked like 1960s eye make-up around its head.

‘What’s that one called?’ he asked.

‘It’s a crane.’

‘A crane! Amazing. It doesn’t look strong enough.’

There was a pause before Alice registered what he’d said.

‘Strong enough?’

‘You know, to do all that lifting, for buildings and things.’

She crystallised for a second, before deliquescing back into some unreachable place, behind the cloud, behind the glamorous cloud.

The last thing Alice said to him as they parted was, ‘I’m sorry.’

THREE

The Death of a Boy

Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lay open to the sky. From up here she could see the whole of the great city stretching away from her on every side: glass pyramids, skyscrapers in gleaming, beaten bronze and bright chromium, towers of intricate wrought iron, ecstatic arcs of light, bridging gulfs and chasms. And lower down, miles below her, acre after acre of teeming tenements rich, like a coral reef, with life, blooming and billowing in the clear currents of air. Lower still, she could just make out the network of placid brown canals, with their longboats, and oared Venetian barges, crusted with gold and sugar icing, laden with aromatic cargoes of spice and opium. Blue airships, borne on plumes of white canvas, sailed serenely above and between the towers, and she could see the children waving from the small windows, giddy and hectic with the thrill of flight. From here there was no noise, none of the roar and throb of the city, just the sighing of the cirrus clouds and the blood murmuring in her ears.