Slave to Love Page 3

  Kitty snatched at the opportunity to return to London, the opportunity wrought by his death. Using every penny 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 didn’t come. The romance 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 spent with the television and the dry martinis.

  Alice could never blame her mother for being what she was, but neither could she love her. The sense of duty she had absorbed from her father prevented her from taking up a 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 criticized (“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 meager student loan, for a girl to come in twice a week during the day, ostensibly to tidy up 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 well-being which comes from the knowledge of being virtuous.

  Alice awoke. The dream of her father had turned into another dream. She had gone to sleep thinking about the beautiful boy, and he was here with her again now. It was an omen, and she knew it. The boy would be with her always, and the longer he stayed, the more entwined they would grow. From now on there was a different Alice, an Alice in love with a Dead Boy. She settled down into her pillows and closed her eyes and lay with him. Later, when she remembered that she had an appointment with Andrew, she got up and dressed like an automaton.

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

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

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

  But for Alice.

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

  “What’s that one called?” he said.

  “It’s a crane.”

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

  There was a pause before Alice registered what he’d said. “Strong enough?”

  “You know, to do all that lifting, for buildings and things.”

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

  The last thing Alice did as they parted was to repeat her greeting: “I’m sorry.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Odette and Alice

  ODETTE WAS WORRIED. This was unusual, because Odette Bach was not a worrier. Not that she was unnaturally cold or heartless (she was, in fact, a reliable source of solid, practical help to those in need), but she looked on worry as hopelessly inefficient, and nobody had ever doubted Odette’s efficiency. The tale is still told in her family of how, at one of the irregular Bach gatherings to celebrate a birth or a death or a marriage or an unexpected recovery from cancer, the young Odette (accounts vary as to whether she was seven, five, or a wholly unlikely three) had replied to the “And what do you want to be when you grow up?” question fired at her by an unwary aunt or uncle with “I’d like to be a merchant banker,” thereby greatly amusing the throng but dismaying her parents, a social worker and a music teacher, famed in the family for their shabby furnishings and interest in Culture.

  Unlike many women who did well in the world of finance, Odette neither ingratiated herself with her male colleagues by excessive drinking and swearing nor flirted and slept her way to promotion. She simply did everything that was asked of her supremely well. Nor did she work the insane hours that had become accepted as normal in the City. And those who saw her walk from her desk at six-thirty every night would feel not the customary superiority over a lightweight who couldn’t hack it but a cringing knowledge that they were left still toiling only because of their inefficiency.

  Odette had only three close friends: Frankie, a psychiatric nurse; Jodie, an all-kinds-of-things but currently an interior decorator; and Alice, the focus of her current, highly atypical concern.

  Alice had always, of course, been a little odd. It was part of her charm. She was the one who, when their little group met for a drink or a meal, would jolt them from their discussion of house prices and handbags with a dreamy soliloquy about beauty or truth or the extinction of a rare species of gaily colored mollusk, once indigenous to one of the scattered islands of the Indian Ocean but now gone forever.

  Odd, but not this odd.

  It had begun back in the spring, not too long after Alice had joined, to everyone’s amazement, that toffee-nosed auction house. She hardly ever said anything now, just sat and smiled. Or sat and didn’t smile. She’d recently missed two of their regular get-togethers, and when she came to the last meeting, coffee and cakes for lunch at Val’s in Soho, she sat throughout the hour and a half of gossip without saying anything to them beyond a blank “No, fine” when Jodie had asked her, without really thinking about it, sometime around the halfway point, if anything was the matter. More significant, Alice, normally an enthusiastic scoffer of pastries, had left untouched the tarte au citron she had murmuringly ordered.

  Among the four of them, Odette was the one who was known for missing the subtle (or not so subtle) moods of the others, failing to spot a new hair co
lor or romance. But it was she who said to the other two, once Alice slipped away (“I have work . . . I must go”), “There’s something wrong with Alice.”

  “Alice?” said Frankie. “Yes, of course there is. She’s fucking mental.” One of Frankie’s things was to throw around unpleasantly derogatory terms for the mentally ill. “It’s why we love her.” She smiled her smile, defiantly showing the gap between her two front teeth. She was dressed in her usual costume of long flapping skirt and batlike membranous top, a combination that emphasized her enormous presence. Her nails were painted deep purple, a shade lighter than was normal for her (“just felt like something sunshiny today”). Frankie had chosen her career in nursing largely because it would annoy her parents, Oxford academics who could never see the point of sullying themselves with anything that happened outside college life. Frankie was huge—not overweight, just impressively tall and wide and looming—and her personality succeeded in entirely filling her frame. Her dark-blond hair writhed and squirmed over her shoulders, with occasional forays skyward. She’d been amusing them all (but for Alice) with another story about her complex and adventurous love life; like all her stories, it had ended with Frankie face down in a gutter, moaning and railing, legs splayed, knickers nowhere to be found. She’d used the opportunity to say again that if Odette was the brains of their little group, Alice the heart, and Jodie the pretty little sling-back mules, she, Frankie, was its pelvis.

  “No, not wrong in general,” said Odette, “wrong now. And not just now. For months.”

  “You mean because she’s been quiet?” said Jodie, delicately wiping the corner of her mouth with a little finger. “But you know she just is quiet sometimes.”

  Jodie was a chameleon, able to look at home wherever she found herself. She was wearing a simple blue dress that might easily look cheap and cheerful to anyone not used to spending a thousand pounds on an outfit. But those who knew, knew.

  “Not quiet like this.”

  “Well, I suppose she was a bit funny, even for her. I know, she’s in love!” That was Frankie’s explanation for everything, except when people really were in love, in which case she would cynically invoke lust or economics.

  “If it’s love, it doesn’t seem to be making her very happy.”

  “Does it ever, for anyone?” said Jodie wistfully, although it had, in fact, made her perfectly happy, coming as it did in her case with a pretty house in Sevenoaks and an angst-free Platinum Amex.

  “I think she’d have told us about it if there was someone new. I mean, someone at all. It’s not as if there’ve been many,” said Frankie. She immediately regretted saying that, as it could apply equally to Odette, and she certainly hadn’t meant to be bitchy.

  Odette picked up her bag. “I don’t think it’s love. Not the ordinary sort, anyway. I’m going after her.”

  “She’ll be long gone, you’ll never catch her,” said Jodie or Frankie, or both together; Odette wasn’t listening.

  Running from the café, she turned left toward Piccadilly. Luckily, she caught sight of Alice’s dark hair bobbing down the street.

  “Hi, Alice,” she said, when she reached her, a little out of breath. “I thought I’d walk this way with you.”

  Alice looked at her with what might have been suspicion in her eyes. It was something Odette had never seen there before.

  “Well . . . I was just . . . yes, walk with me, of course.”

  “Alice, there’s something wrong. You’re behaving so strangely. I’m worried.”

  That wasn’t supposed to have happened: She’d meant to be subtle. But something about Alice made strategies useless.

  “You shouldn’t worry.”

  “Look, Alice, I have to get back to work, but can’t we meet one evening? Just the two of us—not the others. You know, the thing is, I’d like to talk, to get your advice about something. If it’s easier for you, I can come to your flat—”

  “No! Not there. Sorry, I didn’t mean to . . . I don’t mind where we meet.”

  Odette named a wine bar in neutral territory, and they arranged to meet in two days. They kissed stiffly as they parted.

  PERHAPS ODETTE’S GREATER than usual sensitivity was a consequence of the recent developments in her own love life; these developments had been the main talking points of the girls over the coffee and cakes. The key to Odette’s career success had been the ruthless excision of the superfluous. She had trimmed from her life all that was not central—anything frivolous, wasteful, unproductive, or weak—and among those things abandoned as inessential was romance. There had been a single unsatisfactory relationship at university with a lecturer, drawn by her intensity and unexpected willingness to be educated. Since then nothing, unless you were to count a single date with a man who claimed to make scale models of Stonehenge to sell as garden furniture.

  But now, at twenty-eight, Odette decided it was time to act. Her group outside work, sensibly shod Alice and the other girls, and the few helpless boys she knew, busy trying to be Something in the Arts, offered nothing promising; she abhorred the idea of a milksop. She wanted a man whose ideas would challenge her own, someone who would stand up to her, someone who could make her proud and, yes, perhaps even a little fearful. Someone with a cock ramrod hard and piston fast. Well, not perhaps the last, which Frankie had helpfully added to her list.

  He had to be from work. That was where the agreeably packaged testosterone lived. But she had to choose carefully. Anyone her superior was out of the question; she could not bear the thought that the office gossips would say she was finally using her sex as a crowbar. She knew most of her close colleagues far too well to make them interesting in that way. And anyone too junior would create all kinds of moral and aesthetic problems.

  But then there had arrived the new boy, Matthew Mindbrace, the one whom everyone had difficulty in placing precisely. He was spoken of as a loose cannon, a rogue elephant; sometimes as a loose elephant. It was rumored that he may have been brought in to “sort the seed from the chaff.” He still carried with him the fresh bloom of Harvard Business School. Bright, everyone agreed on that. Carefully cut unruly hair, forever loosening itself from the imprisoning gel, which suggested a passionate nature only with difficulty suppressed. He’d smiled a shy dimply smile at Odette on his first day, and she responded with her own modest work smile, a smile in which the corners of her mouth turned very slightly down, rather than up.

  “Hi, I’m Matt,” he’d said, in a voice that was impossible to pin down but may have been English. “I’m told you’re the oracle. Or is it the Sybil? I get confused with my Greeks and Romans.”

  Odette wasn’t sure if she was being laughed at. What was the Sybil? She had a feeling it may have been some kind of hag. She thought about making a witty reply and then said, “If it’s a matter of orientation, I should go to Mr. Henshaw,” before returning her attention to the Japanese yen.

  But that had been two months ago, and now she found she wanted a boyfriend. “Matt,” she wrote in her e-mail, “I’d like to discuss some issues with you in the Blackfriar tonight at seven.”

  The evening was awkward, despite the wine. Matt turned out to have a surprisingly inadequate bladder and kept disappearing to the Gents, leaving Odette alone in the busy pub. But at eleven o’clock they went back to her flat in Putney and made love twice, painfully.

  All things considered, a comparatively successful first date.

  She’d mentioned Matt in passing during the lunch, half hoping that one of the girls would pick up on it, as she didn’t want to make any public “I’ve got a new boyfriend” declarations, just in case things didn’t work out. And of course Jodie did, to good-natured whoops of encouragement and crude (ironic-crude, naturally, rather than crude-crude) suggestions. She’d downplayed the weak bladder.

  But joking with the whole gang wasn’t quite what she wanted; a quiet meeting with Alice seemed like a much better opportunity to talk through strategies and feelings and fears. It would also, she surmised, hel
p draw Alice out, giving her the opportunity to share her thoughts reciprocally rather than have them extracted by emotional dentistry.

  THE WINE BAR was studiedly neutral, any suggestion of character or individuality rigorously bleached away. They were both on time. This was quite usual for Odette, who despaired at the modern idea that half an hour late didn’t count as late at all. Alice had always (even in her pre–Dead Boy period) been more erratic, as likely to arrive pointlessly early as extravagantly late. Odette immediately sensed that something—she shied away from the term, which was very un-Odettish, but it kept coming back to her—momentous was going to take place. She ran through the possibilities: Alice was gay; Alice was taking the veil; Alice was dying from a rare blood disease. They ordered a bottle of something white and sat down. Odette squeezed Alice’s hand and decided to begin by sharing her feelings.

  “Do you mind if I tell you about my boy?”

  Alice’s eyes opened a little more widely, as if she’d just seen some unexpected nudity in the middle of a Jane Austen adaptation.

  “Yes, of course. I’d like that.” Alice hadn’t taken part in the discussion during lunch, but she’d picked up that Odette had a new lover.

  “I work with him. I like him. I don’t know, but I think he might be . . . well, I hate to use the cliché, but you know sometimes you have to . . . the one.”

  Alice smiled. “What’s he like?”

  “Well, he’s American, but he was brought up in England. Or English and brought up in America. I’ve been trying to piece it together, but he doesn’t talk much about himself. It’s one of his better qualities. He’s very good-looking, in that preppy kind of way I don’t like, except on him. He’s quite funny. You know, observationally funny, not jokes or anything.” All that came out at breakneck speed.