Alice’s Secret Garden. Rebecca Campbell

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.

      ‘Oh don’t worry, nobody does to begin with. Or sometimes ever. I can show you where the canteen is, and where to make tea, and where the bogs are. You’ll pick up everything else as you go. You’re our new Science and Natural History bod, aren’t you?’

      ‘Mm. I think they want me to do some Travel as well, but I don’t know much about that.’

      ‘Well, you’re not quite what I was expecting. Usually the … people on the Science side are … well, you know. I can help you a bit with the Travel.’

      ‘Is Travel your main responsibility?’

      ‘Yes, no. Well, I do everything, really. An expert generalist. Or a general expert. And, by the way, when Crumlish says “recently acquired”, he means I’ve been here for less than ten years, not that I joined last week.’

      Andrew was losing his focus a little. Alice, although not quite beautiful, had the kind of face that made you want to look at it, that made you think that things would be all right, or at least a little better, if you spent another minute or so just looking. Andrew had to struggle hard against the urge to stare baldly at her. He broke loose by looking at her clothes. Most of the younger Enderby girls were Vogue perfect. Not Alice. He couldn’t quite put his finger on what was wrong, but he knew that either the right sort of directed intelligence, or the time, or the money was missing. It made him like her more by, in his own reckoning, about seven per cent. It also made him feel more comfortable: at least she wasn’t perfect like Ophelia, and soon they were chatting about nothing in particular, which was how most days were spent in the Books department.

      And so Alice’s first day at Enderby’s had been only mildly traumatic and if she never did quite fit in, she at least, in those two months before she fell in love with the Dead Boy, found a place as one of those who were officially permitted not to fit in.

      The same, alas, could not be said for Mr Crumlish who, for all his protestations, was not a Toff, but an Edinburgh council-estate boy, whose brilliance and taste had doomed him to alienation from his own people, and yet never quite achieved for him acceptance in the world to which he aspired, the world of the beautiful and the clever and the rich. Perhaps it was the name, Garnet, that had sealed his fate. His father, a merchant seaman, had brought one of the semi-precious stones back from a distant port for his wife, and she had so loved its profound crimson opacity that she had insisted that the unborn child should carry the name. Had he been a simple John, or Davey, or Robert, then a different life might have been his.

      It was the Americans who insisted on his dismissal. They acted, of course, through Oakley, the Head of Books.

      Oakley had been promoted from the documents basement, where he acted as a Cerberus to its Hades. No one in Books (or anywhere else in Enderby’s), with the exception of those unfortunate clericals who’d been forced to request a document from storage, had ever heard of Oakley. He had, however, one asset which, from the American perspective, set him aside from, or rather above, his more knowledgeable, refined, cultured, eloquent, sophisticated, amusing and able colleagues: a qualification in Business Studies. That qualification, vaguely defined as a ‘diploma’, had been awarded by the Llandudno Business School, an institution which usefully allowed itself to be abbreviated to the LBS, and thereby readily confused with other, possibly more august institutions. On his elevation to Head of Books, Oakley had become simultaneously more English and more American; the former accomplished by the rapid purchase of a pin-striped suit, and the latter by a studied replacement of the word ‘arse’ by ‘ass’ in his vocabulary. Alice would eventually come to agree with the general view of those who worked in Books that he was a fawning toady to those above him at Enderby’s and a ruthless tyrant to those below; a snob and a fool.

      When asked, at his first monthly round-up, by the American management to give an appraisal of his ‘team’, Oakley had initially replied that they were all ‘top drawer’, which he hoped would reflect well on himself.

      ‘But what about that guy Crumlish?’ asked Madeleine Illkempt, aka The Slayer. ‘All he seems to do is file expenses claims and make inappropriate personal remarks. And to be frank, we don’t care at all what you people do in private but his kind of open … display in the work environment just isn’t efficient.’

      ‘Ah, Mr Crumlish,’ said Oakley, rapidly assessing what it was that The Slayer wanted to hear. ‘Well, I did feel it was my duty to … protect … to … but of course, yes, there have been one or two … problems.’ And if there weren’t, he knew how to go about manufacturing some.

      And so Alice never got to call Mr Crumlish, Garnet. But she had liked him, and she never forgot that the Books department at Enderby’s auction house was made up of Toffs, Tarts and Swots, or that she was sui generis.

TWO

       The Secret Garden of Alice Duclos

      Alice was in the garden again. She looked back and saw the low arch and the little green door through which she must have entered. The garden was her special place. Its high brick wall kept out the wind and the world. Its paths wove complicated patterns, which, once deciphered, would tell her the answers to all of her questions. The roses, always in bud and never blooming, dwelt partly in the garden, and partly in fairytales, guarding princesses,