Alice’s Secret Garden

I dreamt it last night that my true love came in, So softly he entered, his feet made no din;

He came close beside me, and this he did say ‘It will not be long love, love, till our wedding day.’

Based on ‘She Moved Through the Fair’

– Padraic Colum

The last and best Cure of Love Melancholy is, to let them have their Desire.

Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Epigraph

ONE: She Moved Through the Fair

TWO: The Secret Garden of Alice Duclos

THREE: The Death of a Boy

FOUR: Odette and Alice

FIVE: The Prior History of Andrew Heathley

SIX: Quantock Bound

SEVEN: A Cave of Ice

EIGHT: The Sublime Machine

NINE: Drinking it Over

TEN: Odette in Venice

ELEVEN: Drink to Me Only with Thine Eyes, or The Quest for the Historical Noddy

TWELVE: Country Pleasures, Suck’d on Childishley

THIRTEEN: Thanks, Rosencrantz and Gentle Guildenstern

FOURTEEN: The Return of the Gothic

FIFTEEN: Of Monkey Nuts and Hard-Boiled Eggs

SIXTEEN: Ghostly Limbs

SEVENTEEN: The Hand that Rocked the Cradle

EIGHTEEN: The Dead Boy

NINETEEN: The Sadness of Everything

TWENTY: Preparations

TWENTY-ONE: Declarations

TWENTY-TWO: Love for Sale

TWENTY-THREE: Complicity

TWENTY-FOUR: The Last Party

TWENTY-FIVE: Two Interesting Occurrences

TWENTY-SIX: The Mitre

TWENTY-SEVEN: A Death at Heathrow

Keep Reading

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

ONE

She Moved Through the Fair

Alice had been thinking about the Dead Boy for nearly six months before anyone else at Enderby’s found out about him. And that was funny, because for those six months the Dead Boy was the most important thing in Alice’s life: more important than her job in the Book Department, looking after Natural History; more important than her mother in the tiny flat in St John’s Wood; more important than her friends, her living friends, scattered around London.

Alice had never spoken to the Dead Boy. She had never felt, as she longed to feel, the fine dense blackness of his hair as it swept with such sensuous, careless, charm across his face, across her face. She had never touched the full Slavic lips that fell so easily into a pout – not the pout of a spoilt child or of a sulking teenager, but a little ‘o’, a pout of pure surprise, surprise at the onrush of death. She had never brushed her own lips against those high cheekbones, cheekbones which would have looked cruel, tyrannical, implacable, had they not slid into the fine smiling lines around the eyes. The eyes, to Alice, were something of a mystery. No matter how many times she replayed the incident, winding backwards and forwards, slowing it down or speeding it up, panning back to take in the whole street, or the whole of London, or zooming into ultra close-up, she could not settle on the colour of the eyes. It was not even the precise shade that was in question – it was not some unimportant semantic quibble about hazel or chestnut or rowan – it was that Alice could not even decide if they were blue or brown, dark or light. Sometimes they would burn through her with an intense cobalt light, or dazzle with shimmering bright crystal; at others they would fold in on themselves in wave after wave of growing darkness, like evening falling on a forest.

Had Alice known the Dead Boy for more than four seconds, or had she never gone for that seemingly harmless stroll, but rather sat on the imposing steps at Enderby’s with Andrew that lunchtime, as she often did, to eat a sandwich and breathe in the petrol fumes, while they talked about the oddness of people, and he tried to think of something clever and nice to say that wouldn’t trumpet his devotion in her ear like an elephant in musth, then everything would have been different.

Back in the office that afternoon, the afternoon when everything changed, Alice was surprised to find that nobody noticed anything different about her. It seemed that none could see the penumbra of light around her, or sense the dramatic transformations that had taken place within her.

But no, nothing. The only comment as she made her way slowly, like a bride, to her desk, was one of Pamela’s deafening whispers:

‘Alice, where have you been?’

Pamela, or Pammy, or Spam, as she was known with varying degrees of affection, had been there longer than anyone, and was seen as a sort of retaining wall which couldn’t be demolished without dire, if unspecified, consequences. Of course it was possible that she retained nothing at all, supporting only her own weight, which was considerable. Originally she had typed letters, but now that everyone did that for themselves her main responsibility was ordering the rubber bands which spilled and coiled in pointless abundance from every drawer, like intestines after a battle.

‘Mr Crumlish has been around. He’s got one of his faces on. You know, the one like Easter Island. He’ll be using one of those thingummy bobs … metaphors on you if you’re not careful.’

Mr Crumlish was then still part of the ill-defined strata of middle managers within Books, or, to give it its full title, Books, Manuscripts and other Printed Matter. Books was the smallest department in Enderby’s, the fifth biggest auction house in London, which is quite as unimpressive as it sounds. The office, an ornate Florentine palazzo, complete with dirty windows, and spluttering drains, and the grand statue of its founder, the buccaneering Mungo Enderby (1772–1861) in half armour, was the one relic of the glory days, back in the nineteen-twenties when Enderby’s was briefly acknowledged as one of the Big Three. But then came the scandals: the famous fraud case; the fake Canaletto; the 1949 public indecency charge against Ashley Enderby. And so eventually the Americans had come, or rather the Americans who ran the business for the Japanese bank which bought, at bargain basement rates, fifty-one per cent of Enderby’s. Ashley Enderby had died without issue, alone in Marrakech, befuddled with intoxicants, and the family share had gone to the Brooksbanks, obscurely related by marriage. The Brooksbanks, whose interests were principally rural, were content for the Americans and Japanese to take the decisions while they drew off what they could in the form of profit and prestige. Only one Brooksbank was still involved in any practical sense in the running of the company, and he only in the way that the froth is technically still part of the beer. But he was, at least, a link of sorts with the past.

‘Alice, where have you been?’ repeated Pamela, looking perplexed, the second of her two facial expressions after her more familiar vacuous jollity.

But Alice couldn’t think of anything to say back to Pamela, and nor could she meet her vacantly inquisitive stare. Where had she been? To heaven. To hell. Nowhere special.

To begin with not even Andrew, the closest thing she had to a friend at Enderby’s, noticed anything unusual. But he was preoccupied with his work that afternoon and was soon called in to a meeting, which lasted for the rest of the day. And of course Alice was still quite new then, and generally perceived to be a little strange. The problem had been summed up for her two months earlier, on a bright, cold February morning, by Mr Crumlish, whom Alice was destined never to call by his first name, Garnet. Mr Crumlish was showing Alice ‘the ropes’, a phrase he used with such relish she assumed he felt it to be an expression of thrilling vulgarity.

‘You see, if we leave aside dear, dear Spammy over there,’ – at this point Crumlish toodled with his fingertips over to where Pam was arranging paperclips; she burst into gales of girlish laughter, which set off curious seismic events in the various pendulous and drooping zones of her body: a small tremor about her middle; a major quake in the jowls; a volcanic eruption of spittle at the lips, and a devastating bust-tsunami – ‘everybody here is either a Toff or a Tart or a Swot. Oh. Are you allowed three “eithers”? I can’t remember. Anyway, I, of course, am a Toff. We don’t know very much, but the gentry do like one of their own to deal with. Not perhaps when it comes to going on a rummage: then they seem to prefer it if you act like staff, and you think yourself lucky if cook gives you a chipped mug in the kitchen. But when they bring in one of their gewgaws for a valuation they appreciate the rich and heady aroma of old money.’

Alice was clearly supposed to be shocked by Mr Crumlish’s performance. But she noticed that the people in the office, the twenty or so men and women arranged in clumps about the room, paid him no attention, despite the arch and actorly projection of his voice. She assumed that they had heard it all before; perhaps received the same initiation themselves.

‘Ophelia,’ continued Mr Crumlish, ‘is, as you can see, a Tart. Pretty, pretty, pretty.’

With each ‘pretty’, Mr Crumlish twitched the hem of his pin-striped suit, flashing the vivid lilac lining.

Alice quickly glanced in the direction that Mr Crumlish had flicked his thin wrist. She saw a young woman of astonishing, languorous beauty, playing idly with her long dark hair. She seemed to have nothing else to do. Alice instantly felt shabby: her own long hair was cheaply cut, underconditioned, and prone to acts of reckless rebellion; her clothes were ill-matched, picked up as the sales were entering the please please please don’t buy me phase.

‘The Tarts,’ continued Mr Crumlish, breaking the spell that Ophelia’s beauty had cast over Alice, ‘tend not to know very much either, but they are easy on the eye, and it’s so much cheaper than getting the decorators in. Anyway, what else would they do with their History of Art degrees? The Swots, on the contrary, know everything; not everything about everything, but everything about something. Couldn’t do without the Swots. Could do without the smell.’

‘The smell?’ Alice was mystified.

‘You know, the stale, composty, damp-tweed aroma, combined with the smell of a shirt worn for a second, or even third, day, mixed finally with the faint, sweet tang of distressingly recent onanism. I present to you Mister Cedric Clerihew.’ He pronounced Cedric ‘seed-rick’, which Alice hadn’t heard before. She had no way of knowing if Crumlish was being amusing. Clerihew certainly wasn’t going to put her right. He was a small round person, like a globule of some unappetising but not actively repulsive liquid. Like many round people, his age was difficult to estimate, but certainly above twenty and below forty. He was very neatly dressed, almost like a boy receiving his first Holy Communion. He smiled and sweated towards Alice, but Crumlish swept her on and away before he had the chance to speak to her, or reach out with his little hands, the fingers of which looked a knuckle shorter than the usual complement.

‘Poor boy,’ said Crumlish, this time in a voice that only Alice could hear, ‘one day he might, by pure good fortune, stumble upon the right posterior, but, until that happy time, he licks in vain.’

Alice giggled too loudly, hiding her wide mouth behind her hand. A couple of faces turned, Ophelia’s among them. She performed what must have been a very deliberate up-and-down look of dismissal. Anyone who’d cared to glance towards Clerihew would have seen him staring intently at his desk, his face red, his mouth set hard. Mr Crumlish, pleased with the response, moved Alice on through the large, book-splattered room.

‘But you, Alice, what are you? Not, obviously, one of the Tarts. I’m afraid your degree, what was it? Of course, Zoology of all things, suggests that. Not to mention your commendable lack of vanity.’

As was perhaps intended, Alice took the statement that she lacked vanity as a hint that she ought to rectify the deficit.

‘Nor, despite your name, which, between the two of us I don’t entirely believe, do you appear to be one of us … I mean a Toff. That only leaves the Swots. And, my dear Alice, you really are far too fragrant to be a Swot. I fear you may be sui generis, which is frightfully inconvenient for the … oh, what is the word? A putting-things-into-classes person?’

‘A taxonomist. Was that a test, Mr Crumlish?’

All the while they had been winding their way between the desks, each carrying its burden of computer and heavy reference books. In the far corner they finally came to two facing desks with a low partition between them. One was free, and the other occupied by a young man who might have been handsome had the frown lines been etched a little less deeply.

‘Oh,’ said Mr Crumlish. ‘I’ve got it all wrong. There’s a fourth category. As well as the Tarts and the Toffs and the Swots, we’ve recently acquired our first Oik. And look, he’s to be your intimate desk chum. How affecting. Alice, meet Andrew Heathley. I suspect his mates call him “Andy”. Andrew, this is Alice Sui Generis. Be gentle with her.’

Andrew scowled yet more heavily, and Alice was convinced that a brute impulse to hurl a profoundly unacceptable insult in the face of Mr Crumlish had been forced down into some subterranean chamber of the mind. She doubted it would be lonely.

‘Hello,’ he said, smiling the frowny smile which was soon to become so familiar to Alice.

‘Hello,’ replied Alice, a little intimidated by Andrew’s apparent seriousness.

‘You’ve had the tour from Crumlish. I presume you got the Tarts and Toffs stuff. I had that when I joined. I suppose I ought to be flattered that I’ve entered the pantheon.’

‘Are you really an Oik? Whatever an Oik is.’

‘I think he means I’m a socialist. From the “North”.’

‘Seems like a funny sort of place for a socialist to be working. If you are. I mean a socialist, not working.’

‘It is. A bloody funny sort of place.’

‘How did you come to be here?’

‘Oh Christ, life story time already. Well, I was doing a PhD on … oh, stuff, but I ran out of funding. There was a girlfriend who worked here. A vacancy came up. They never advertise them: there’s usually one of Crumlish’s Toffs grown in a pod in the basement ready to step in. Somehow they screwed up and I got the job.’

Alice wondered at the strange way Andrew referred to ‘a’ girlfriend, but she could hardly ask any more personal questions on her first day. Months later when she asked about the girlfriend, Andrew replied only that she was tall, and had gone to the other place, by which he meant, she supposed, Christie’s, rather than heaven or the House of Lords.

As for Andrew, as soon as he saw Alice walking towards him, looking charmingly flustered by the Crumlish routine, he knew that he was going to fall for her. Just how far he couldn’t even guess, although he had a brief and blurry vision of precipices. Not that having Andrew fall for you was particularly difficult. At that time he was principally (and hopelessly) in lust with Ophelia and subordinately (and, had he but known it, more promisingly) keen on a girl called Tessa, who would occasionally wander through Books on unspecified errands.

‘You know, I haven’t much of a clue what I’m supposed to be doing,’ said Alice, once she had sat down and unpacked her pencil case and reached around on both sides in vain pursuit of the computer’s on button.

‘Oh don’t worry, nobody does to begin with. Or sometimes ever. I can show you where the canteen is, and where to make tea, and where the bogs are. You’ll pick up everything else as you go. You’re our new Science and Natural History bod, aren’t you?’

‘Mm. I think they want me to do some Travel as well, but I don’t know much about that.’

‘Well, you’re not quite what I was expecting. Usually the … people on the Science side are … well, you know. I can help you a bit with the Travel.’

‘Is Travel your main responsibility?’

‘Yes, no. Well, I do everything, really. An expert generalist. Or a general expert. And, by the way, when Crumlish says “recently acquired”, he means I’ve been here for less than ten years, not that I joined last week.’

Andrew was losing his focus a little. Alice, although not quite beautiful, had the kind of face that made you want to look at it, that made you think that things would be all right, or at least a little better, if you spent another minute or so just looking. Andrew had to struggle hard against the urge to stare baldly at her. He broke loose by looking at her clothes. Most of the younger Enderby girls were Vogue perfect. Not Alice. He couldn’t quite put his finger on what was wrong, but he knew that either the right sort of directed intelligence, or the time, or the money was missing. It made him like her more by, in his own reckoning, about seven per cent. It also made him feel more comfortable: at least she wasn’t perfect like Ophelia, and soon they were chatting about nothing in particular, which was how most days were spent in the Books department.

And so Alice’s first day at Enderby’s had been only mildly traumatic and if she never did quite fit in, she at least, in those two months before she fell in love with the Dead Boy, found a place as one of those who were officially permitted not to fit in.

The same, alas, could not be said for Mr Crumlish who, for all his protestations, was not a Toff, but an Edinburgh council-estate boy, whose brilliance and taste had doomed him to alienation from his own people, and yet never quite achieved for him acceptance in the world to which he aspired, the world of the beautiful and the clever and the rich. Perhaps it was the name, Garnet, that had sealed his fate. His father, a merchant seaman, had brought one of the semi-precious stones back from a distant port for his wife, and she had so loved its profound crimson opacity that she had insisted that the unborn child should carry the name. Had he been a simple John, or Davey, or Robert, then a different life might have been his.

It was the Americans who insisted on his dismissal. They acted, of course, through Oakley, the Head of Books.

Oakley had been promoted from the documents basement, where he acted as a Cerberus to its Hades. No one in Books (or anywhere else in Enderby’s), with the exception of those unfortunate clericals who’d been forced to request a document from storage, had ever heard of Oakley. He had, however, one asset which, from the American perspective, set him aside from, or rather above, his more knowledgeable, refined, cultured, eloquent, sophisticated, amusing and able colleagues: a qualification in Business Studies. That qualification, vaguely defined as a ‘diploma’, had been awarded by the Llandudno Business School, an institution which usefully allowed itself to be abbreviated to the LBS, and thereby readily confused with other, possibly more august institutions. On his elevation to Head of Books, Oakley had become simultaneously more English and more American; the former accomplished by the rapid purchase of a pin-striped suit, and the latter by a studied replacement of the word ‘arse’ by ‘ass’ in his vocabulary. Alice would eventually come to agree with the general view of those who worked in Books that he was a fawning toady to those above him at Enderby’s and a ruthless tyrant to those below; a snob and a fool.

When asked, at his first monthly round-up, by the American management to give an appraisal of his ‘team’, Oakley had initially replied that they were all ‘top drawer’, which he hoped would reflect well on himself.

‘But what about that guy Crumlish?’ asked Madeleine Illkempt, aka The Slayer. ‘All he seems to do is file expenses claims and make inappropriate personal remarks. And to be frank, we don’t care at all what you people do in private but his kind of open … display in the work environment just isn’t efficient.’

‘Ah, Mr Crumlish,’ said Oakley, rapidly assessing what it was that The Slayer wanted to hear. ‘Well, I did feel it was my duty to … protect … to … but of course, yes, there have been one or two … problems.’ And if there weren’t, he knew how to go about manufacturing some.

And so Alice never got to call Mr Crumlish, Garnet. But she had liked him, and she never forgot that the Books department at Enderby’s auction house was made up of Toffs, Tarts and Swots, or that she was sui generis.

TWO

The Secret Garden of Alice Duclos

Alice was in the garden again. She looked back and saw the low arch and the little green door through which she must have entered. The garden was her special place. Its high brick wall kept out the wind and the world. Its paths wove complicated patterns, which, once deciphered, would tell her the answers to all of her questions. The roses, always in bud and never blooming, dwelt partly in the garden, and partly in fairytales, guarding princesses, holding the impure or the unwary forever in their gauzy tangles. At the heart of everything stood the dead stone fountain and the dark green pool.

She reached up and felt her father’s soft hands; felt with her fingertips for his smooth, clean nails. The sensation filled her with excitement and yet soothed her.

‘Daddy, can we go to the fish?’ she said, but she knew he would not answer. And then she was looking down through the shadows to where the long lazy goldfish slid and turned amid the darker green of the weeds. She could see the shape of her father reflected in the water, but the details were lost in the murk and silt.

‘Don’t the fish get cold, Daddy?’ she asked, but again she knew that there would be no answer. She looked up to where his face should have been, but the sky was pure white and dazzled her eyes after the darkness of the water. She would close her eyes in the dream to shut out the light and, as her dream eyes closed, so her waking eyes would open onto the world.

It was a dream, but not a dream. She could summon the vision when she was awake, sometimes as she lay in bed at night, sometimes as she sat and stared at the computer screen on her desk at work, and once in the garden she would try to drive the dream on to the point at which she would see her father’s face, and know him again. The dream was a dream of love and a dream of loss. But then so was the other dream. The dream of the Dead Boy.

The garden of Alice’s dream was a distillation of the many gardens of her early childhood. Her father, Francis Duclos, was a doctor, specialising in infectious diseases. The fever hospitals he moved between all had huge grounds, acres of parkland with great horse chestnut and yew trees and lines of dense privet. But the killers of the past: diphtheria, measles, scarlet fever, even TB, had vanished or been attenuated, and so the long wards and the open grounds and secret gardens were empty. Duclos found himself in a branch of medicine without a future, and yet for him it was the only medicine, the only life there could be. He wanted to grapple with the invisible enemy, to fire his magic bullets at the tenacious and merciless microbes.

Around the core of the dream-memory, other memories would form: less vividly hyper-real, perhaps, but more soundly based in hard, nuggety reality. She remembered collecting conkers for their beauty. There were no other children allowed in the grounds and so, but for the occasional foray over the wall by the local urchins, she had the trees and their fruit to herself. She could still remember the intense biscuity smell of the newly opened chestnut and its dark iridescence. Her father showed her how to twist off the shell, and would have taught her how to string them, and ready them for warfare, but she could not allow their irregular organic perfection to be destroyed by the awl. She remembered cutting her wrist when she and an older cousin, come from France for the holidays, broke a pane in the hospital greenhouse to plunder tomatoes. The cousin burst into tears at the sight of her blood, and Alice had to guide him home. She remembered her father making her wrist better, calmly sewing the edges of the cut together. She saw again the white fingers working the needle, and she remembered that she had not been afraid, but she forgot that she had cried from the pain. She remembered living in a big old house that was always cold. There were better memories of a room in the nurses’ home; memories of running through the long corridors pretending to be Tarzan (who, after all, would ever want to be Jane?) with a toy knife stuck in her green knickers.