Rebecca Campbell - Alice’s Secret Garden

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.’