Alice’s Secret Garden. Rebecca Campbell

pint of Old Shagpiss? Or shall we try the guest ale, which this week, according to the board, is the famous old Bodkin and Feltcher’s Whale Gism, at 9.7 per cent proof?’

      The eight months that had passed since Alice had joined Enderby’s had been uncomfortably intense ones for Andrew. His brief account of how he came to be in quite so unsuitable (from his own perspective and background) a place as Enderby’s was accurate, as far as it went, but missed out the various psychodramas, failures, reversals that led up to it. Like Alice he was an only child, but there the resemblance ended. He was brought up in a small mining town in Nottinghamshire, where his father was a collier, until the pit closed, whereupon he opened a shop selling fishing tackle and buckets of maggots, which used up all of his redundancy without supplying any kind of adequate income.

      Like most miners, Andrew’s dad had a reverence for learning, and watched proudly as his son sailed through every exam he ever sat, and became the first boy from the town to go to Oxford. School had been easy for Andrew, not just because he was the cleverest boy in his or any other year – that, on its own could have been a fast track to getting his face punched on a more or less daily basis. No, what made Andrew’s life a joy was being a cricketing prodigy, as sporting prowess was the only sure way for a brainy kid to escape the regulation clattering. Every Saturday and Sunday of the summer season would see Andrew gliding across the little cricket pitches of the local villages and towns, hurling himself fearlessly on long slides around the boundary, or dancing down the wicket to flick and drive the quickest of the bowlers. Standing in the slips, he’d dream of catching the swallows that hawked for midges in the outfield as the sun burned red through the white plumes of mist billowing from distant cooling towers, and yet he’d still have time to take the real snicks and edges, to gasps of delight from his burly team-mates.

      It was in the concrete pavilion of the local ground that he lost his virginity to an older (and considerably larger) girl called Jan, who worked behind the counter in the bakery. He wasn’t entirely sure that he had lost his virginity, but she seemed confident enough, and forever after let him have an extra barm cake or free sausage roll whenever his mum sent him in for a loaf. In any case it at least gave him a start, and put him a notch above most of the other boys when he went, late that September, to college.

      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 sport. Nobody was interested in his kind of politics; nobody found him particularly clever or funny any more – there were too many semi-professionally 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 swotty girls he tended to consort of his circle, few of whom were prepared to go much beyond what he termed ‘moist digitation’.

      Life as a postgraduate 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 savour. For no very good reason he moved away from cosy Brighton and into one of the 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 to 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 which left his partners helpless and, more often than not, love struck. 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 towards Edwardianism in his pants, boots, and sideburns) and finally, through a careful monitoring of the office airwaves, got him the chance of 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 the 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 (or rather third, if we include Karen) piece of good fortune was that the pre-interview favourite, for whom Andrew and the other two anaemic boys on the shortlist 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 Bunties from the 1970s were no, sadly not worth any more than sentimental value, or that the ninth impression of Rider Haggard’s She was not a valuable collector’s 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-bumblingly-eccentric-but-also-quite-cool persona he’d perfected simply rendered him invisible to her. 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’s 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 clamour in Quaglino’s (‘I couldn’t believe it,’ Ophelia would say on her next visit to the hair-dresser’s, ‘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 MX1, but I told him that was really a girl’s sports car, so