Slave to Love Page 5

  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 sports. Nobody was interested in his kind of politics. Nobody found him particularly clever or funny anymore; there were too many semiprofessionally 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 brainy girls he tended to consort with, few of whom were prepared to go much beyond what he termed moist digitation.

  Life as a graduate student 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 savor. For no very good reason he moved away from cozy Brighton and into one of 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 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 that left his partners helpless and, more often than not, lovestruck.

  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 toward 1890s dandyism in his pants, boots, and sideburns), and finally, through a careful monitoring of the office airwaves, got him 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 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 piece of good fortune (third, if we include Karen) was that the pre-interview favorite, for whom Andrew and the other two anemic boys on the short list 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 Playboys from the 1970s had, sadly, no more than sentimental value, or that the ninth impression of Rider Haggard’s She was not a valuable collectors’ 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 bumbling-eccentric-but-also-quite-cool persona he’d perfected simply rendered him invisible. 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 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 clamor in Quaglino’s (“I couldn’t believe it,” Ophelia would say on her next visit to the hairdresser, “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 MX-One, but I told him that was really a girl’s sports car, so he bought a Mercedes Compressor the very next day, which I thought was overcompensating. 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.

  Unfortunately, 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 chili 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 online 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, mmpap, 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 that 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 favorite 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 toward Ophelia.

  AND THEN CAME the Audubon. As soon as word reached him that an elusive copy of The Birds of America was up for g
rabs, he knew 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 and B. It wasn’t that Andrew had any explicitly formulated plan of seduction. He just hoped that the simple fact of spending 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 always having 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.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Audubon Bound

  “CLIMB IN,” said Andrew, smiling brightly. It wasn’t one of his usual faces. Nor did it particularly suit the greasy gray 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 into 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 crappy car would be ashamed of. Andrew’s attitude toward his car was deeply ambivalent. He had enough intelligence and awareness to see that it was a completely crappy car. And not just because it was a bottom-of-the-range 1979 Vauxhall Chevette two-door sedan. There were other reasons.

  First of all there was the color. 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. In places, some of the outer layers of dirt had liquefied in the rain and formed swirling patterns before drying again, giving the effect of a lava flow, glooping its way toward Pompeii. The inside was slightly less filthy, although the remains of sweet and savory snack products were lodged in most of the car’s niches and crannies, and there was a faint vegetal aroma, unexorcizable by any number of pine-fresh car deodorizers,

  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. 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. 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 driving test, but 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 it was burning oil yet again, 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 around 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, he added, “Welcome to the Merdemobile.”

  Alice won instant points by neither gagging nor laughing nor leap-ing straight back out to run 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-colored windshield. Also touched. You could say lots of things about Andrew, many of them tending toward 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?”

  “Brussels sprout, actually. Lost one last Christmas in the back somewhere. Just dematerialized.”

  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, and 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 building was 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, she feared what she might find and, even more, she feared what she might lose.

  Just standing there gave her a deep sensual fulfillment. 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 realized that one phase of her infatuation was coming to an end. She felt a calm descend, a peace, a new clarity. The drug had been metabolized, 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 he would always be there now, 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 road atlas onto Alice’s lap, and between them they managed to find every traffic cone in southwest 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.

  And yet things were not as they had been. Alice soon realized that Andrew’s chatter had a manic edge to it; he was trying to avoid silences. She caught
him glancing nervously toward her, as if he were afraid that he might have said the wrong thing or offended her in some way. Nor could she be entirely normal. She hated just sitting there and saying oh and ah and really like the awestruck wedding guest listening to the Ancient Mariner. The trouble was that although she felt more relaxed and 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 mainly to factual matters, relaying points of information, technical details, clear instructions—apart, that is, from the occasional morbid epiphany that so unnerved the office. Outside work she now hardly ever saw her old friends. She hadn’t even spoken to Odette 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? Probably. When she finally got up the courage 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. 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 from spending a three- or four-hour journey with a bright, prickly, funny, sensitive man like Andrew. 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 she didn’t really want to wake from the dream. But for the journey, at least, she would be awake.