Rebecca Campbell - Alice’s Secret Garden

‘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.