Alice's Secret Garden Read online

  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.

  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. Whic
h 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.