Rebecca Campbell - Alice’s Secret Garden

‘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. Which 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.

She then realised that a pun had been staring her in the face for a while without her fully noticing.

‘Of course,’ she said, a little shy smile making her look as pretty as she ever would, which was really quite pretty, ‘we’d have to wait to see what it actually reached at … auk-shun.’

There was a worrying moment or two, in which Alice seriously contemplated simply walking out, before the panel decided to laugh, but once underway the general chortle acquired enough momentum to last for a good ten seconds.

‘It’d be handy having a scientist around. You know, for facts and suchlike.’

The panel were having a final round-up.

‘Mmm, she certainly knew her stuff when it came to auks.’

‘And seemed to have a reasonable sense of humour.’

‘For a scientist.’

‘Not bad-looking either.’

‘For a scientist.’

‘And of course there’s Old Crawley to think about.’

‘Crawley, of course.’

‘Ah yes, good Old Crawley.’

So Alice got the job, despite the fact that none of the panel members ever had a clear idea of who or what Old Crawley might have been.

Alice approached the body that had agreed to fund her research. She half wanted them to say that no, they really couldn’t defer her award, and who did she think she was anyway, even to ask. But in the event they were horribly decent and agreed that her funding was available for any time over the next year, after which she would have to reapply. It made her think of the tutor who’d first suggested that she stay in research. ‘They always like to have a girlie or two on their books,’ she’d said with minimal bitterness. ‘Makes it look like they have a decent equal opps policy.’

So Alice told herself that she could do the job for a year, save some money, have some fun, and then carry on with her research. After all, she was only twenty-four. Mauritius wasn’t going anywhere. And just how many species of snail could go extinct in a mere twelve months?

The plan, had it not been for the intercession of the Dead Boy, might well have worked out. As it was, everything changed when Alice entered her dreamtime.

Why her? Why then? Why the Dead Boy? The questions drifted through her mind but never pressed her to answer, never forced the issue. If someone had taken her face in their hands with gentle pressure and implored her to say what it was about her, Alice Duclos, that had made her vulnerable to this obsession, then she might have tried to say something about her father, something about the rotten, death-filled, loveless cavity where he had been, that marked his loss. She might have said something about the bitter wilderness, the tedium, the endless ache of her life with Kitty. She might have said those things, or she might only have pulled away, her eyes empty.