Читать книгу Alice’s Secret Garden - Rebecca Campbell - Страница 10

‘Climb in,’ said Andrew, smiling brightly. It wasn’t one of his usual faces. Nor did it particularly suit the greasy grey skies, oozing drizzle like a fat man sweating over a meal.

Alice had been daydreaming. She’d been waiting on the pavement for ten minutes. Because she was by the busy road she saw, of course, the Dead Boy; saw him there for that second before he died, the second before she turned away. She had coping strategies now, and rather than cry out or turn away again, her face in her hands, she was able to drive out the bad thoughts by immersing herself in the Boy, breathing him like incense, drawing him in to her cells, until he was inside her and outside her and everywhere.

And now here was Andrew. In a car. And what a car.

It was perhaps fortunate that Andrew never had the chance to tell Ophelia about his car. Even Alice, who cared nothing for such things was vaguely aware that it was the sort of car that the kind of person who might be ashamed of having a crap car would be ashamed of. Andrew’s attitude to his car was deeply ambivalent. He had enough intelligence and awareness to see that it was a completely crap car. And not just because it was a bottom-of-the-range 1979 Vauxhall Chevette two-door saloon. There were other reasons.

First of all there was the colour. Andrew would occasionally try to pass it off as mahogany, or chestnut, or dark tan, or burnt almond, or sienna, but the truth is that it was brown, and more than that, shit brown. Then there was the filth. The outside had never been cleaned in the year and a half that Andrew had owned it. His reasons for this were logical, if short-sighted. ‘If I was going to be frying eggs on the bonnet, then I’d give it a wash,’ he’d say. ‘Or if I wanted to roll around on the roof wearing a cream linen suit. But I don’t like fried eggs and I haven’t got a cream linen suit.’ And so layer on layer of crust had formed over the brown core, giving it yet more of an excremental aspect. In places, some of the outer layers had liquefied in the rain, and formed swirling patterns, before drying again, giving the effect of a lava flow, glooping its way towards Pompeii. The inside was slightly less filthy, although the exoskeletal remains of sweet and savoury snack products were lodged in most of the car’s niches and inglenooks, and there was a faint vegetal aroma, unexorcisable by any number of pine-fresh car deodorisers, caused by a stray sprout, lost six months previously somewhere in the superstructure of the vehicle. The problem internally was more the décor, in particular the matching brown fun-fur seat covers, tufted and mangy now, but still able to drench a back in sweat in all climatic conditions short of a prolonged nuclear winter. Everything inside the car was ill-designed, adept only at spearing knees, jabbing kidneys, and catching and tearing clothing.

So yes, Andrew was aware of the fact that the car was a (barely) moving insult to all road users, a thing neither useful nor beautiful, a slovenly, casual V sign, thrown by the lazy seventies at the very William-Morris, utopian socialist, arts and crafts creed to which he felt most allegiance, indeed a thing both useless and ugly. But he loved it. He loved it not only because it was the physical manifestation of the fact that he had, after ten years of nervous trying, finally passed his test. But also because it needed him, because it was so bad. So he could insult it, hit it with sticks, spit at it in rage when it died at traffic lights or belched the black smoke that meant that yet again it was burning oil, but nobody else was allowed that privilege, and Andrew could be very unkind indeed to anyone who questioned the merits of the Merdemobile.

‘Just sling your bag in the back,’ he said, pointing to a rear seat overflowing with books and newspapers, but dominated by a headless porcelain dog, which Alice never got round to asking about. As she sank into the front passenger seat, her knees disconcertingly at about the same level as her shoulders, and her bottom gingerly aware, despite the intervening fun-fur, of individual springs, sprung all gone, he added, ‘Welcome to the Merdemobile.’

Alice won instant points by neither gagging, nor laughing, nor leaping straight back out and running screaming down the road, all common responses. She did smile, however.

‘Hello, Andrew. I really appreciate you collecting me. Why aren’t you wearing your glasses?’

‘I find it distracting if I can see too much when I’m driving.’

‘Ah.’

Alice was more than a little amused by the sight of Andrew hunched over the wheel, squinting through the porridge-coloured windscreen. Also touched. You could say lots of things about Andrew, many of them tending towards the neutral or even hostile, but you could never say that he measured his worth by the quality of his material possessions.

‘Sorry about the smell,’ he said once she was settled.

‘It’s okay. Can hardly notice it. Cabbage?’

‘Sprout actually. Lost one last Christmas in the back somewhere. Just dematerialised.’

Something about the car, and Andrew’s comically bad driving, put Alice at ease. Oddly comforted by the erratic choking of the engine, and the miscellaneous rattles and whistles coming from unseen corners of the interior, she stopped thinking about the Dead Boy, in either a good way or a bad way, and not thinking about the Dead Boy was something she hadn’t done for a long time.

Why hadn’t she taken the lift up to the fourth floor of the block of flats in Hackney, rung the bell, spoken to the family of her boy? Her memory of the trip was of watching herself as if in a film, from the outside. She saw herself standing in the busy street, looking up to where she thought the flat must be, the address clutched in her hand as it had been throughout the long and unfamiliar journey, by tube and bus. The block was one of the thirties, rather than sixties, kind: almost elegant in red brick and white plaster. But its poverty was palpable. Perhaps it had been the stench from the lift well that had put her off. No. She couldn’t blame that. The truth was that she feared what she might find, and even more she feared what she might lose.

And just standing there gave her a deep sensual fulfilment. This was the closest she had come since that day, the first day of her new life. Here the Boy had lived for those nine years before they came together. She felt his presence resonate through the walls and the earth and the air, like the huge silence after the death of a symphony. And standing there bathing in the glory of his resonance, Alice realised that one phase of her … madness … infatuation, was coming to an end. She felt a calm descend, a peace, a new clarity. The drug had been metabolised, had become part of her. It was certainly not that it had become less important: no, it had entered her more deeply; but that left her superficially more able to cope with the surface of things. Yes, she knew that he would always now be there, but the unimportant parts of herself had been set free, her waking, conscious, living side. The side that had to sit in traffic with Andrew Heathley on a dull October morning.

There was a certain amount of hassle, as there always is, in getting out of London. Andrew thrust a flaking A-Z onto Alice’s lap, and between them they managed to find every traffic cone in South-west London, but by the time they blundered onto the M3 they were laughing together in a way they hadn’t done since before The Disaster in the Park, since before the Dead Boy. Andrew had a packet of jelly babies in the glove compartment, and Alice found herself greedily devouring them.

‘Did I ever tell you about my friend Leo?’ asked Andrew.

‘I can’t remember. Maybe.’ So much of the past few months had passed through her consciousness without leaving a trace.

‘Well, he has this theory,’ he paused as they both winced over a gear change that sounded like the very gates of hell opening up right there in the car between them, ‘about jelly babies. To be honest, he has a theory about everything, but his jelly baby theory is quite good. You know how everyone likes the black ones best?’

Alice was about to say that she actually found that she preferred the red ones, but that would ruin the tale. ‘Yes.’

‘Well, have you ever wondered why they don’t just make them all black?’

‘No, I haven’t ever wondered that. But if it’s true that people prefer them, it’s surprising,’ Alice replied, trying to help out.

‘The thing is that apparently that’s just what they tried back in the seventies: all-black bags of jelly babies. And guess what?’

‘Nobody wanted them.’

‘Of course, nobody wanted them. And why’s that?’

‘Um … because people like variety?’

‘No, not that. At least not only that. This is the Leo bit. It’s because of structuralism.’

‘Oh, that’s nice,’ said Alice, unable to repress a reasonably naughty look.

‘Yeah, okay, just listen. You see according to structuralist linguistics, everything only has a meaning in relation to everything else in the system. The word bus only means bus because it doesn’t mean car, motorbike, elephant, whatever. There’s no natural link between the word bus and the thing bus. It’s just the way that language functions. You with me?’

‘I think so.’

‘So, with jelly babies, black ones only become nice in relation to the others, the yellows, oranges, greens and blues …’

‘I don’t think they have blue ones. Not in jelly babies.’

‘Yellows, oranges and greens, then, if you must.’

‘Sorry.’

‘… that are not nice, or not as nice. In isolation, there is nothing nice about the black ones. Put another way, on their own, without the signifying system of the whole jelly baby family, the black ones cannot mean nice. So, to enjoy, to understand the niceness of the black ones, you need the not niceness of the others. Okay, you can laugh now and call me whatever kind of arse you want. But remember, it’s not me but Leo who came out with all that bollocks.’

Alice had taken pleasure in the jelly baby tale and she wished that she could have made some more witty or clever contributions. She hated just sitting there and saying ‘oh’ and ‘ah’ and ‘really’ like the awe-struck wedding guest listening to the Ancient Mariner. The trouble was that although she felt more relaxed, less alienated than she had for many months, Alice had fallen out of the habit of conversation. At work, even with Andrew, she confined herself to mainly factual matters, relaying points of information, technical details, clear instructions. Apart, that is, from the occasional lapse into the ‘death is life’ kind of epiphany that so unnerved the office. Outside work she now hardly ever saw her old friends. She hadn’t even spoken to Odette for several weeks, not since the phone call when she had passed on the address of the Dead Boy. She’d meant to tell Odette about her failure, when so close, to contact the family, and of how the experience had helped a little in reconciling her to the world. She put it off because she felt that she had let Odette down in some way. They’d never met to talk tactics for Odette’s trip to Venice, or discuss how things were going with the preppy boyfriend. Had she gone already? She thought she must have done. When she finally got the courage up to telephone her, Odette’s work extension just went dead, and she hadn’t followed it up with a call to her flat. Thinking about it now, Alice felt a heavy pang of guilt and she made a firm mental note to call as soon as she was back from Somerset.

But even if she had seen Odette, sitting in quiet harmony with an old girlfriend was a very different thing to spending a three- or four-hour journey with a bright, prickly, funny, sensitive man like Andrew. And she found that she wanted to make him like her, wanted him to enjoy the journey. She stopped short of asking herself if perhaps this meant that she was waking from her dream of the Dead Boy; stopped because she knew that she didn’t really want to wake from the dream. But, for the journey at least, she would be awake.

Of course, questions. You asked questions. That would make her appear interesting without actually having to be interesting.

‘You never told me what your PhD was about.’

They had hit the countryside, or rather some larger areas of green between the sprawl. It was one of those days when there aren’t any clouds, but nor is there any sun, just a blanketing paleness.

‘Christ, I can hardly remember. Ah, yes, ahem, full title, The Sublime Machine, colon, all-important colon, have to have a colon, Conceptions of Masculine Beauty 1750–1850.’

‘Oh.’

‘Yeah, I know, it’s a killer, isn’t it. Fat lot of good it did me.’

‘Well, it got you into Enderby’s.’

‘That’s what I mean. You can’t believe how it’s destroyed my credibility. All those years of railing against things, and hating people for having cushy jobs, and then I go and get one. It’s ruined my life.’ He smiled pleasantly at her. ‘I do kind of half mean it though. It seems like such a frivolous thing that we do. Whenever I go home, back to Nottingham I mean, and I try to tell my parents what I do, they just don’t get it.’

‘I have the same sort of thing with my father.’

‘You know I remember when poor old Crumlish showed me round on my first day and it was say hello to … and then some noise, and I’d have to say, who? And then he’d say very clearly and loudly PYRRHOUS, or BYSSHE, or FULVIA, or whatever, and then do a little smirk. When I told my dad there was actually a person called Horace, he laughed so hard he spilled a bucket of maggots.’

‘Euw.’

‘Fish bait. Did I never tell you about the tackle shop? Hang on, your father? I thought your father was dead.’

‘He is, but I still talk to him.’

‘Oh.’

There was a pause. Andrew didn’t really think it was mad to talk to a dead parent, but he didn’t know what he was supposed to say next. Alice broke the silence.

‘Do you spend a lot of time thinking about male beauty?’ She was trying very hard, and succeeded in pulling off the naughty/innocent face she had once specialised in when talking to boys at college.

Andrew ignored the half tease. He’d been mocked about the feyness of his research too often for it to bother him, but no one ever thought he was gay. It rather annoyed him.

‘God no, not any more. Not that I ever did, really. There was just a gap in the research. You know, tonnes of stuff on changes in female beauty, but nothing academic on the blokes, despite the fact that, off and on, men have been just as much the focus of the adoring gaze as women, and just as likely to be described as beautiful.’

The adoring gaze. Yes, Alice knew about the adoring gaze.

‘So what do you think beauty is then, as you’re the expert?’

‘Well, I certainly don’t think it’s any particular type of face, or shape of body. There’s been loads of scientific, or rather cod-scientific, research trying to pin beauty down in terms of facial geometry, and tie it all in to our genes, but it just hasn’t come up with anything persuasive.’

‘It’s funny, but I actually know quite a lot about this. The biological side.’

‘Really? Yeah, I suppose you might.’

‘You see there are various theories that suggest that being … nicely turned out, if you’re a bird, or a guppy, say, (Alice at this point remembered that she used, when much younger, to do a rather fetching guppy face, which never failed to amuse, even if no boy could ever truly fancy her again after seeing it. She quickly decided against doing it now) means that you’ve got strong, healthy genes, so you can get enough to eat, and haven’t got parasites. And as for things like peacock’s tails, well the fact that you’ve been able to carry that lot around with you for a while and not get eaten means that you must be pretty tough. So in either case, the lady guppy or peacock will want a piece of the genetic action.’

‘God, I love girls that know stuff! I can’t believe we have an overlap.’

‘Not much. Just one lecture’s worth. But back to beauty. If you don’t think it’s the gene thing, then what is it?’

‘Well, you’re not going to like this, being a science dolly …’

Alice did a head-on-one-side pretend pout, looking, Andrew thought, suddenly very, very kissable, weirdness and talking to dead dad notwithstanding.

‘… dolly … what was I saying? Oh yep. Well, it’s all just a way of talking. Oh, and writing, and painting. My view, I say my view, but I actually only got a handle on the theoretical side by talking it through with Leo. Did I mention that he was a genius?’

‘I think it was implied or suggested at some point.’

‘Well, our view is that beauty dwells in language: it’s a series of conventions, or clusters of ideas, that live and move in our culture, and determine how we think and talk about beauty.’

Alice made a polite but distinct scoffing noise.

‘So you’re saying that when you look at someone and think, mmmmm, then there’s no biological basis for that, it’s all just a cultural convention? You’re insane, or you’ve never been in love, or even … just fancied someone.’

Alice was enjoying the discussion; she could feel some of her old zest for ideas creeping back. She was also fairly sure that Andrew was talking rot. Behind the lightness, however, there was another, darker, reason for her pleasure. They were talking about beauty, and beauty meant talking about her Boy, her Dead Boy.

‘No, no, of course you’re right that even in humans, sexual attraction is biological, and you could probably trace it back to the need to reproduce, but what I’m talking about is what happens when we start to reflect on our … urges, to try to find meaning or structure. What happens as soon as you look at someone you find attractive?’

‘I …’

‘Yes, you give them a word, such as beautiful, and then wham, you find yourself smack in the middle of three thousand years of Western culture, you’re in Plato’s dialogues, you’re in the songs of the troubadours, you’re in Shakespeare, in Shelley, in Keats. Your thoughts and certainly your words aren’t yours any more, they’re part of the great conversation.’

‘Talking of the great conversation …’

‘What? Oh, damn, sorry, I’m ranting, aren’t I? I must have had a couple of years of thesis stuff pent-up inside.’

‘It’s okay. It’s an interesting subject, beauty. I just wish I had some.’

‘Oh come on!’

‘That probably sounded like false modesty. I know I’m not hideous, everything in the right place and things, but I’m not beautiful, not in the way that transforms everything, not in the adoring gaze way you were talking about.’

‘For heaven’s sake, Alice, you’re the …’ and Andrew only just stopped himself from saying ‘you’re the second most beautiful girl in the office’, which he knew was more than any girl could take, be she hunchbacked, begoitred, or scrofulous. Unfortunately, he couldn’t stop himself from quickly physically running through hunchbacked, begoitred, or scrofulous as he drove.

Alice laughed.

‘What were you doing?’

‘Eh?’

‘You did a funny thing with your back, and you pulled a silly face. You stopped yourself saying something, didn’t you?’

In the moment he had to gather his thoughts, Andrew realised that he couldn’t correct ‘second most’ even to ‘most’. It would sound either insincere (which he could live with) or desperate (which he’d rather do without).

‘I was just going to say that you’re not bad-looking for a geek. At least you haven’t got mad hair.’

Andrew’s hair was the thing he thought most about, after breasts and books.

‘Here we go!’ Alice had heard quite a lot about Andrew’s hair: he’d start most mornings by complaining about it over his coffee.

‘Well, it’s okay for you. At least all of yours is pulling in the same direction. You’re not being subtly undermined from within. You must have seen it – whenever I’m trying to be serious it deliberately looks silly, curling off in all directions, and making obscene gestures. And then when I’m trying to be funny, it goes all sensible, and makes me look like a fucking Mormon missionary. I hate my hair.’

Andrew’s hair was, in fact, quite silly.

‘I think your hair’s lovely,’ said Alice, which pleased Andrew for about ten miles.

‘I’ve just realised,’ said Andrew, after a long disquisition on why he’d stopped playing sport, in which his fear of mediocrity, the death of artistry, and the question mark hovering over his groin (‘I have the thighs of a Titan, but the groin of a weak-willed girl’ was how he put it) all featured, ‘that I’ve been talking about me and my stuff for hours. Unforgivable rudeness. And boring. It’s your turn.’

‘What, to be boring?’

He looked at her and smiled sweetly. ‘If that’s what you want, then go ahead and be boring. I’m all ears.’

‘That’s not fair. You can’t simply order someone to be boring just like that. What if I accidentally start being interesting?’

‘I’ll blow this whistle,’ said Andrew, holding up an invisible whistle by its invisible string. ‘Why don’t you tell me why you gave up science and became a slave in the temple of Mammary. I mean Mammon. I said Mammon.’

‘It was only ever meant to be a temporary thing. I still hope to go back to research, when, when …’ She thought for a moment about telling Andrew some of the truth. But this wasn’t the time. Instead she simply went off on another tack, explaining the joys of island biology, pointing out the paradox that islands are both fast-burning engines of evolution, churning out new species, and yet strangely impoverished when compared to similar sized areas within larger landmasses.

‘If you take an island of fifty square kilometres, it might have twenty species of bird found nowhere else, but that’s it. In a fifty kilometre section of Amazonian rainforest, you could have a thousand species. So islands are fascinating from an evolutionary perspective, but much less useful than continuous landmasses for biodiversity. I note that you haven’t blown your whistle yet for me being interesting. It’s lucky I haven’t told you about my M.Sc. thesis on the sub-varieties of land snails to be found in the Scilly Isles.’ They both laughed.

‘I can’t wait till I tell Leo about you and the snails. He’s already half obsessed with you and that’ll really get him going.’

Alice and Andrew exchanged glances. Andrew wasn’t sure if he’d deliberately suggested that the obsession was really his own. Couldn’t even say if she’d picked up any suggestion at all. But he did know that the sight of Alice’s face, calm and lovely amid the filth and litter all around her, made him want to pull over on to the hard shoulder and declare his adoration, quite possibly accompanied by weeping and the recitation of appropriate verses from the Romantic canon. Instead he scraped around for that elusive fourth gear, like Alice in being so close and yet so unobtainable, until the moment had passed.

Sometime during the fourth hour (an exit from the motorway was missed when Andrew stretched for the last of the jelly babies) as flat fields hunched into shoulders, and the road began to wind and dip, Andrew finally got round to talking tactics for the rummage.

‘Let’s go over it again. What do we know?’

‘About the seller or about the work?’

‘Let’s start with the work.’ Andrew’s apparently businesslike manner was at that point slightly undermined by a wild swerve to avoid some almost certainly imaginary obstruction in the road.

‘Christ! What was that? A hedgehog?’ he said.

‘I don’t think it was an anything,’ replied Alice, showing more savoir-faire than she felt. ‘Are you sure about not wearing your … never mind. Okay. Audubon’s Birds of America: first edition. Four hundred and thirty-um-five life-sized illustrations, double elephant folio – thirty inches by forty. Produced in four volumes, 1827 to 1838. Based on his watercolours, done partly in the field, partly in the studio.’ (Andrew glanced over to see if there would be any maudlin dreaminess here, and was relieved to find not. Alice had on her competent face, which was one of his favourites.) ‘No one was interested in America, where his lack of either scientific or artistic training was held against him, so came over here, and had his paintings and drawings engraved on copperplate and hand coloured. Still, most of them ended up in the States, with a few dotted around Britain and France. Cost a hundred and seventy-five pounds, or a thousand dollars, at the time, which meant that you had to be very wealthy to afford a set. Altogether maybe a couple of hundred sets in the world, last one sold in ninety-eight for seven million dollars.’

‘Very good,’ he said, clapping, which was unwise, and very nearly fatal. Luckily the other vehicle, a tractor pulling a trailer of steepling manure, was slow moving.

If it sounded a little bit like a test, that’s because it was. Oakley had asked Andrew to report back to him on how well Alice performed on this trip. Andrew himself was under a lot of pressure. Garnet Crumlish’s post had never been filled: the vacancy was left open, partly to save money, partly to encourage commitment and compliance from those who might feel themselves to be in the running. Internally, Andrew, Clerihew, Ophelia and Alice, had all been tipped as hopefuls. The inclusion of Ophelia (useless) and Alice (newish) was a goad to Andrew and however much he downplayed his commitment to the job, he knew that there was precious little for him if he found his name on the next, no doubt long, list of those whose services, experience, knowledge and love were no longer required by Enderby’s. He imagined brushing bluebottles from the top of rows of cheap editions of the Waverley novels, or the collected works of Edgar Bulwer-Lytton, in a smelly secondhand bookshop in … where? After the failure to get the Audubon, the Bloomsbury dealers wouldn’t touch him, nor even the Charing Cross Road. What did that leave – Hampstead? Golders Green? Stoke-on-Trent? Hull? Inverness? Stockholm? Reykjavik?

‘Made Audubon a celebrity in Europe,’ Alice continued. ‘He met Scott and various other influential people. Granted membership of the Linnaean Society, that sort of thing. But the project wasn’t a great commercial success. Too many subscribers dropped out, or, like the King, never paid up.’

‘Which king?’

‘Oh God, I don’t know – one of the Georges?’

‘Aha! A weak spot.’

‘Does it matter? Anyway, you’re history and I’m science, remember. I’m not supposed to know.’

‘I think you’ll find,’ said Andrew rather sniffily, ‘that a William sneaked in between George III and Victoria.’

Alice ignored him and went on.

‘So, when Audubon went back to America, he set out on a cheaper octavo edition, this time lithographs, again hand coloured. Still a beautiful object.’

‘And worth?’

‘Forty thousand pounds. Perhaps fifty, with a following wind,’ said Alice in a subtle pastiche of Andrew’s way of talking.

‘And we don’t know which this is,’ he replied, making a mental note to pay her back for that.

‘And we don’t know which this is. All we got was a handwritten note from the seller, stating that he had a complete Birds of America, and some other books, and would we care to do a valuation.’

‘So that’s what we’ve come to look at – check out the Audubon, pray, but not dare hope, that it’s the double elephant, and have a sniff through the other rubbish he wants to dump. What do we know about the punter?’

‘Well, his name’s Lynden, and he’s a baronet.’

‘Which means?’

‘He’s the lowest rank of hereditary nobility, doesn’t get to sit in the House of Lords, but we call him “Sir”.’

‘Actually I try to avoid calling them anything. Saves embarrassment all round. What else?’

‘Seems to be a bit of a recluse. Nobody in the office had ever heard of him, except Ophelia who keeps tracks on those sorts of things. She didn’t spell it out, but she suggested that there was some sort of distant family connection there, although she may just have been … well, doing whatever it is that she does.’

Andrew pictured her doing whatever it was that she did, or rather something that he liked to think about her doing. It involved a shower and a bar of soap. ‘She,’ continued Alice, unaware, ‘said that Lynden’s great grandfather bought the title from Lloyd George, and given that he only ran to a baronetcy, it suggests the family wasn’t that wealthy, which in turn suggests the second, or subsequent edition, rather than the original. Oh, and there’s the house, which is famous.’

‘Oh, what is it? Tudor? Palladian? Victorian gothic? Ranch-style bungalow? Wigwam?’

‘Do you really not know, or is this still part of my … assessment?’

‘Oh, um ah,’ burbled Andrew. Alice wasn’t meant to know about the reporting-back side of things. Would she think him a snitch? ‘No, I really don’t know about the house. I know we’re always supposed to see if it’s in Pevsner, but I can never be bothered. I just wing it, and talk about new cures for deathwatch, and the best grade of rubber for a Wellington boot, and how to shift dried-on pigshit from the rear axle of the Range Rover.’

‘Well, let’s leave it as a surprise then.’