Читать книгу Alice’s Secret Garden - Rebecca Campbell - Страница 9

Andrew was sitting with his last surviving college friend, Leo Kurtz, in the Red Dragon of Glendower, a public house in Finsbury Park equally inconvenient for both of them but possessed of certain pleasant associations and, crucially, lacking a jukebox. The principal pleasant association was Zoë, a barmaid who’d worked there for one golden summer two years previously and who was, they both instantly decided, the most beautiful girl in London. Zoë had gone, returning to a course in Media Studies at Manchester University, but had left behind her a sweet white radiance which lifted the grimy old pub into a sort of Parthenon in their eyes.

Leo had a face made for swashbuckling villainy, long and slightly twisted, as if flinching from the light slap of a woman’s gloved hand. His hair, black and thick, stood proudly on his head like the bristles on a goaded boar. He wore a black polo-neck jumper, recklessly challenging all comers to fuck off and read Being and Nothingness before they thought to interrupt his flow. Both Leo and Andrew were nursing pints of soapy brown fluid, mumbled complaints against which took up approximately one-third of all their conversation. At the moment, however, the object of their discourse was the new quiz machine, installed by the brewery in an unwelcome attempt to move with the times. A large figure was hunched over the glowing screen, which was clearly visible to Andrew and Leo. Leo was in full flow, his long face oscillating between extreme animation and a sort of laminated inertia. His voice, when not deliberately made sinister or mocking, or contorted with bile, had a surprising depth and beauty.

‘It’s all to do with the compartmentalisation of knowledge. You see that fop’ – one of Leo’s commoner terms of abuse, not intended to suggest dandyism or effeminacy, merely irrelevance – ‘just got the right date for the Battle of Waterloo. He had the choice of 1066, 1745, 1815 and 1939. He’s probably played that thing a thousand times, and he’s tried all the other options, and he knows that the right answer, the answer that lets him carry on, is 1815.’

‘So what?’ Andrew was usually up for this sort of thing, but tonight his mind was occupied with other matters.

‘So what? So what? Don’t you see that 1815, one of the most crucial years in European, no, fuck it, in world history, has become nothing more than the answer to the question, What year was the Battle of Waterloo? All of the complex historical reality, the treaties, the lives, the pain, the power, it’s all gone. All that’s left is the simple question and the simple answer.’

‘So what?’

‘Don’t you get it? It’s the end of any kind of organic understanding of our society. All these facts are shaken loose of their true social setting and given a new context, the context of the quiz. What was the real context of the Battle of Waterloo? Revolution, the Terror, the rise of Napoleon, blahdy blah and then the restoration of the Bourbons, and the general crushing of dissent and reform up to 1848. But now how does that guy, and almost anyone else that ever comes up against the date 1815, see it?’

‘I strongly fear and suspect that I’m about to find out.’

Leo paused for a megalithic second, considered asking Andrew exactly what the fuck was the matter with him, and then compelled by the momentum of his analysis went on:

‘The setting now, the context is: which Spice Girl had the first solo number one? And, which Coronation Street character fathered an illegitimate baby in 1968? And which was the first English team to complete the FA Cup and League Double? You see, it’s all isolated fragments, cut out of their setting. That’s what trivia means. In the old days we had general knowledge, and it might have been the reserve of dullards, but at least it was all about connecting up. Now we have trivia and it’s all about …’

‘The trivial?’

‘Exactly. Look, just what the fuck is the matter with you?’

‘Me? Nothing, I’m just not in the mood to play tutorials. Save it for your students.’

‘Ah, I see. It’s chick-related. Is it still the weird girl in the office?’

‘What weird girl? There isn’t a weird girl.’

‘You know who I mean, the one you had the date with, the one with the eyes?’

Leo accompanied this question with a wiggling two-fingered gesture in front of his face, as if to suggest strange mystical powers in the organs under consideration.

Andrew, of course, knew exactly who Leo was talking about. He knew because he’d been talking about her himself for the best part of eight months.

‘It wasn’t a date, it was a disaster. And I wouldn’t call her weird. She’s just a bit …’

‘Mad?’

‘Mad? Maybe, a bit.’

‘Mad madness-of-King-George mad?’

‘God no, not madness-of-King-George mad.’

‘How boring. So you mean mad in the usual mad-woman mad way, the not getting your jokes kind of way, and suddenly saying out of the blue “why don’t we ever go to Venice” kind of way, and thinking that whenever you make a general point in an argument it’s somehow directed at them kind of way.’

‘No, no and no. She’s not mad like that. In fact the opposite. We used to have quite a laugh together, in the early days. Maybe I don’t mean mad at all. At least not in any of those ways. Maybe I just mean … strange.’

‘Ah, strange-but-interesting-mad. The most dangerous sort. They suck you in, and they can appear enchanting to begin with, and sexy as anything, but in the end the mad bit always breaks through and then they come at you with a mattock or leave dog excrementia in your pyjama pockets.’

‘No, no, Alice isn’t like that. I can’t really see her with a mattock, whatever a mattock is. I shouldn’t have said mad at all, or strange. Scratch mad and strange. It’s more that when she’s there, she somehow isn’t really there. No, I mean the other way round – it’s we that aren’t really there, or we’re sort of semi-transparent and she sees through us to the things that are really there.’

‘So far so Neoplatonic. You’ll be giving us the parable of the cave next.’

‘And she sort of says stuff, stuff that should make you laugh in her face, but you can’t because … she’s got some kind of …’

Leo did his two-fingered eye-wiggling thing again, accompanied this time by a head wobble.

‘I’m not really getting it across, am I? I’ll give you a for-instance. You know how she deals with all the science and nature stuff?’

‘I think you might have mentioned it, like about a million times.’

‘Well, we’ve got a fucking massive, and I mean massive, job on. You’ve heard of John James Audubon?’

‘Yeah, I think so. Some kind of bird-watcher fellow.’

‘Yes, but also a pretty good artist. Anyway, there’s a reclusive aristo down in the Quantocks with a copy of Audubon’s Birds of America, which is, you know, the most expensive book in the world. We’re talking five million quid here. Apparently he wants to sell, and if we can get it, then it might just be enough to stop the Americans from sacking us all. So we’re heavily into the research. As I said, it’s Alice’s area, but I’m in as well, because she’s still pretty junior, and she sort of comes under me.’ (Here Leo contemplated one of his famous leers, complete with the sound of moist membranous flesh plapping and slithering, but decided that this was not the time.) ‘We’re looking at some repros of the plates, which are about the size of a duvet. A few of the others have gathered round, because they know how hot the whole thing is. We’re looking at something called the Carolina parrot, but Alice says it’s actually a lorikeet. And, you know, although it’s not my period, or subject matter I could see it wasn’t bad – plenty of energy and panache in the execution, and certainly a notch up from the Lewis Birds of Great Britain and Ireland …’

‘Mmmnyaah,’ said Leo, drawing deeply on a phantom briar pipe.

‘Okay, I’ll get on with it. But then Alice says, and believe me it was one of those times when you didn’t know if it was going to end in us all laughing till our tonsils fell out or in a group hug and years of counselling, she says, “You know why they are so alive, don’t you, the Audubon plates?” And I thought she was going to talk about the vibrancy of the watercolours, or the grace of the line, or whatever, but she says, “It’s because Audubon painted them in death. He shot the birds and had them stuffed and mounted …”’ (At this point Leo couldn’t stop himself and about two-sevenths of a leer emerged, along with a solitary plap, but Andrew was too fervid to notice.) ‘“… and that is why they are so intense, so perfect, so alive. You see it is only because they were dead that they could be authentically, mesmerically alive.” And nobody knew what to do, and then everyone drifted off, leaving just the two of us. Thank Christ Ophelia turned up to wave her hair around, or God knows what I’d have done.’

‘You know I really think we are talking madness-of-King-George mad after all,’ said Leo, because he knew it was expected of him. And then, because it was time, ‘Another pint of Old Shagpiss? Or shall we try the guest ale, which this week, according to the board, is the famous old Bodkin and Feltcher’s Whale Gism, at 9.7 per cent proof?’

The eight months that had passed since Alice had joined Enderby’s had been uncomfortably intense ones for Andrew. His brief account of how he came to be in quite so unsuitable (from his own perspective and background) a place as Enderby’s was accurate, as far as it went, but missed out the various psychodramas, failures, reversals that led up to it. Like Alice he was an only child, but there the resemblance ended. He was brought up in a small mining town in Nottinghamshire, where his father was a collier, until the pit closed, whereupon he opened a shop selling fishing tackle and buckets of maggots, which used up all of his redundancy without supplying any kind of adequate income.

Like most miners, Andrew’s dad had a reverence for learning, and watched proudly as his son sailed through every exam he ever sat, and became the first boy from the town to go to Oxford. School had been easy for Andrew, not just because he was the cleverest boy in his or any other year – that, on its own could have been a fast track to getting his face punched on a more or less daily basis. No, what made Andrew’s life a joy was being a cricketing prodigy, as sporting prowess was the only sure way for a brainy kid to escape the regulation clattering. Every Saturday and Sunday of the summer season would see Andrew gliding across the little cricket pitches of the local villages and towns, hurling himself fearlessly on long slides around the boundary, or dancing down the wicket to flick and drive the quickest of the bowlers. Standing in the slips, he’d dream of catching the swallows that hawked for midges in the outfield as the sun burned red through the white plumes of mist billowing from distant cooling towers, and yet he’d still have time to take the real snicks and edges, to gasps of delight from his burly team-mates.

It was in the concrete pavilion of the local ground that he lost his virginity to an older (and considerably larger) girl called Jan, who worked behind the counter in the bakery. He wasn’t entirely sure that he had lost his virginity, but she seemed confident enough, and forever after let him have an extra barm cake or free sausage roll whenever his mum sent him in for a loaf. In any case it at least gave him a start, and put him a notch above most of the other boys when he went, late that September, to college.

There was no good reason for his relative failure at Oxford. The failure was not academic: he was still able, despite doing the bare minimum to escape censure, to pick up a First in PPE. It was more that he passed through the University without making an impact, without finding himself in any exciting group, or movement, or even mood. He gave up sport. Nobody was interested in his kind of politics; nobody found him particularly clever or funny any more – there were too many semi-professionally funny and clever people around. Ditto beauty. His friends were all pleasant, and helped to pass the time, but he never fell in love with any of them, nor with the frizzy-haired swotty girls he tended to consort of his circle, few of whom were prepared to go much beyond what he termed ‘moist digitation’.

Life as a postgraduate in Brighton was a little better, largely because of his success, by virtue of taking some tutorials, in bedding a slightly foxier class of student. Nevertheless, when his money ran out and it became clear that there were few, if any, jobs available to which his thesis, even if he ever managed to submit it, was likely to prove a passport, life again seemed to lose its savour. For no very good reason he moved away from cosy Brighton and into one of the two attic rooms in a large falling-down house in Crouch End, where he worked fitfully at his bibliography, living principally off whichever type of cereal happened to be open in the kitchen.

Karen, the Tall Girl, who lived in the other attic room, rescued him in more ways than one, and it was only partially to Andrew’s credit that he was sorry to have treated her so badly (part of the badness related to a failed attempt to palm her off on to the ever-eager Leo). Andrew’s appraisal of his own appeal was fair, if perhaps a little stern. He estimated that he was at the top of the second division of attractiveness, which meant that he could count on the second, third and fourth division girls and had a fighting chance of picking off the odd slumming first-divisioner, particularly if he happened to be in one of his world-conquering moods, when a spurt of self-confidence would lend his tongue wings and provide a handy thermal on which to soar. It was certainly the case that by any objective measure he was a poor lover, prone to an analyst’s dream of dysfunctions and fiascos, from outright no-shows, through prematurity, to hopelessly elongated dry runs. Yet somehow sexual intimacy lent him a sweetness and vulnerability and charm which left his partners helpless and, more often than not, love struck. Karen assisted with the bibliography, tidied his room, advised on how to move on from his now dated student-trendy look without ironing out too many of his ‘endearing’ idiosyncrasies (for example the faint, though discernible, tendency towards Edwardianism in his pants, boots, and sideburns) and finally, through a careful monitoring of the office airwaves, got him the chance of the interview in the Enderby’s Books department, where she worked. Despite a good degree in history, Karen was stuck in the secretarial grade at Enderby’s, from which it was almost impossible to escape into the hallowed realm of the Expert.

Two further pieces of good luck were necessary to Andrew’s unexpected success before the panel. The first was that he happened to have one of his better, thermal-borne days. He managed to persuade the three wise men and one foolish virgin that his protestations of ignorance about deciphering eighteenth-century handwriting and his confusion about roman numerals beyond XV were the product of excessive modesty and he made two good book-related jokes, only one of which he’d prepared in advance. The second (or rather third, if we include Karen) piece of good fortune was that the pre-interview favourite, for whom Andrew and the other two anaemic boys on the shortlist were supposed only to be makeweights, turned up wearing a cloak and a floppy hat, which he refused to take off.

Four years of steady progress followed, with numberless trips to country houses, forced to sell the library to finance a new roof or fund a venture into bakewell tart mass-production, or poodle-rearing. Four years of inhaling dust and squinting at woodcuts. Four years of politely telling callers to Bond Street that their stack of Bunties from the 1970s were no, sadly not worth any more than sentimental value, or that the ninth impression of Rider Haggard’s She was not a valuable collector’s piece despite being over a hundred years old. Four years of looking for that rare first edition among the dross: a Casino Royale or a Brighton Rock in its dust jacket. But only one more year of Karen, who left, frustrated by both Andrew and Enderby’s.

When Alice arrived, Andrew was still heavily into his infatuation with Ophelia. None of his standard methods had worked with her: the looking-helpless-by-the-photocopier-bumblingly-eccentric-but-also-quite-cool persona he’d perfected simply rendered him invisible to her. His little puns and humorous spoonerisms sounded in her ears like the jabbering of an idiot, and his learning counted for nothing in her world, where a trip to the hairdresser’s lasted half the day and cost two hundred and fifty pounds, not including the coffee. Books meant nothing to her but the same could not be said for a title, and it was only when Andrew’s friends started using Doctor Heathley (the thesis, bibliography and all, having been submitted, defended and, with minor corrections, accepted) as a way of amusing themselves at his expense, that he finally appeared, a dim green glimmer, on her radar.

Their only date was predictably disastrous. Andrew had never been out with anyone completely stupid before. He’d had girlfriends who’d left school at sixteen and never read a book, but they could all crack two jokes to his one and fizzed and bubbled with words and thoughts and laughter. Ophelia had only two topics of conversation: the fashion follies of the other women in the office (‘I wouldn’t wear that face with that bum’ was one famous quip), and the cars driven by her boyfriends, or rather whichever clutch of management consultants, property developers and bankers were currently courting her. A typical exchange, screeched above the clamour in Quaglino’s (‘I couldn’t believe it,’ Ophelia would say on her next visit to the hair-dresser’s, ‘I mean Quaglino’s! You’d have thought it was 1997 or something’), ran:

‘What kind of car do you drive, Andrew?’

‘Well, actually I …’

‘Richard drove a Mazda MX1, but I told him that was really a girl’s sports car, so he bought a Mercedes Kompressor the very next day, which I thought was over-compensating. What did you say you drove?’

‘I was saying that …’

‘Phillip had a convertible Beetle that I couldn’t make up my mind about, you know, whether the convertible bit made up for the Beetle bit …’

There was no question of a kiss, let alone a night of inept, but heartfelt fumbling. In fact, the only physical contact Andrew obtained from the exercise was a very public crushing hug from Pam, who whispered loudly and wetly in his ear that Ophelia wasn’t good enough for him. Had anyone, he wondered, not heard about his humiliation? He did a quick calculation to work out how uncool the episode left him seeming to the eyes of Books and/or the world; the result came out at something close to the boiling point of lead, or, according to the traditional scale of one-to-ten, really very uncool indeed.

Yet more dishearteningly, the sure knowledge that Ophelia was one of the first division girls who would not be stooping to entertain a plucky second division contender only served to splash Tabasco on the hot chilli of his passion.

Nor did Alice’s arrival lead to an immediate or complete transference of affection. The wandering Tessa, it is true, no longer played a role in his fantasy life, although a candle long burned brightly for him down in the Internet division, where she did clever technical things to facilitate on-line auctions. The trouble was that Ophelia was simply too damn beautiful – actress beautiful rather than supermodel beautiful, which allowed for the discernible and delectable presence of hips and buttocks and breasts – not to be, however critically and/or hopelessly, adored. The way he put it to Leo was that he loved (‘don’t cringe you fucking long-faced, cynical wanker’) Alice, but fancied Ophelia, although he did allow for the possibility of a little bilateral seepage between the two (leer, plap, schleershp, mmpap, mmmpap, mmpap, from Leo).

And no, after The Disaster in the Park, he never got up the courage to ask Alice out on another date: the deepening, mystifying, otherness which enveloped her made it impossible. How do you ask the Sphinx out for a curry? What chat up lines can you use on Astarte, everyone’s favourite Phoenician goddess of life and death? So, for eight months from February to September, Andrew yearned: and it was a yearning without respite, because to look away from Alice meant to look towards Ophelia.

And then came the Audubon. As soon as word reached him that an elusive copy of The Birds of America was up for grabs, he knew that it was his big chance, not only to increase the incline of his modest career graph, but also to spend time, no, more than time, to spend a night with Alice. In theory the Quantocks trip could be done in a day, but what if something unexpected cropped up? What if the deal was about to be closed and they had to rush off to catch the last train? Lord whoever-it-was might feel offended if he received a mere single day of flattery and cajoling. And for all they knew, the Other Place might already be on the trail, offering the usual inducements: the pretty girls (or boys), the promise of secret buyers, and fabulous wealth. No, this was a two-day job, with a night in (consulting the relevant page from the atlas), Nether Stowey or Crowcombe or Spaxton, assuming any of those hamlets could supply a comfy B&B. It wasn’t that Andrew had any explicitly formulated plan of seduction. He just hoped that the simple fact of spending the time together would somehow meld them, or work some other magic. He got as far in his head as a boozy night with her in a thatched hostelry, hung with antique farming machinery (turnip spanglers, hay thrummers, perhaps even a many-bladed pig splayer), and there drew back, hoping vaguely that she might blurt out something about having always fancied him, no, dammit, loved him. That would see off the Ophelia problem.

Just love me back, my strange, my precious Alice, he thought, and I’m yours forever.