Alice’s Secret Garden. Rebecca Campbell

these developments had been the main talking points of the girls over the coffee and cakes. The key to Odette’s career success had been the ruthless excision of the superfluous. She had trimmed from her life all that was not central: anything frivolous, wasteful, unproductive, weak, and among those things abandoned as inessential was romance. There had been a single, unsatisfactory relationship at university with a lecturer, drawn by her intensity and unexpected willingness to be educated. Since then nothing, unless you were to count the single date with a man who claimed to make scale models of Stonehenge to sell as garden furniture.

      But now, at twenty-eight, Odette decided that it was time to act. Her group outside work, sensibly-shoed Alice and the other girls, and the few helpless boys she knew, busy trying to be Something in the Arts, offered nothing promising: she abhorred the idea of a milksop. She wanted a man whose ideas would challenge her own, someone who would stand up to her, someone who could make her proud and, yes, perhaps even a little fearful. Someone with a cock ramrod hard and piston fast. Well, not perhaps the last, which Frankie had helpfully added to her list.

      It had to be work. That was where the agreeably packaged testosterone lived. But she had to choose carefully. Anyone superior was out of the question: she could not bear the thought that the office gossips would say she was finally using her sex as a crowbar. She knew most of her close colleagues far too well to make them interesting in that way. And anyone too junior would create all kinds of moral and aesthetic problems.

      But then there had arrived the new boy, Matthew Mindbrace, the one who everyone had difficulty in placing precisely. He was spoken of as a loose cannon, or rogue elephant, or sometimes as a loose elephant. It was rumoured that he may have been brought in to ‘sort the wheat from the chaff’. He still carried with him the fresh bloom of Harvard Business School. Bright, everyone agreed on that. Carefully cut unruly hair, forever loosening itself from the imprisoning gel, which suggested a passionate nature only with difficulty suppressed. He’d smiled a shy, dimply smile at Odette on his first day, and she responded with her own modest work smile, a smile in which the corners of her mouth turned very slightly down, rather than up.

      ‘Hi, I’m Matt,’ he’d said, in an accent that was impossible to pin down, but may have been English. ‘I’m told you’re the Oracle. Or is it the Sybil? I get confused with my Greeks and Romans.’

      Odette wasn’t sure if she was being laughed at. What was the Sybil? She had a feeling it may have been some kind of hag. She thought about making a witty reply, and then said, ‘If it’s a matter of orientation, I should go to Mr Henshaw,’ before returning her attention to the yen.

      But that had been two months ago, and now she found that she wanted a boyfriend.

      ‘Matt,’ she wrote in her email, ‘I’d like to discuss some issues with you in the Blackfriar tonight at seven.’

      The evening was awkward, despite the wine. Matt turned out to have a surprisingly inadequate bladder, and kept disappearing to the gents, leaving Odette alone in the busy pub. But at eleven o’clock they went back to her flat in Putney and made love twice, painfully.

      All things considered, a comparatively successful first date.

      She’d mentioned Matt in passing during the lunch, half hoping that one of the girls would pick up on it, as she didn’t want to make any ‘I’ve got a new boyfriend’ type public declarations, just in case things didn’t work out. And of course Jodie did, to good-natured whoops of encouragement, and crude (ironic-crude, naturally, rather than crude-crude) suggestions. She’d downplayed the weak bladder.

      But joking with the whole gang wasn’t quite what she wanted, and the quiet meeting with Alice seemed like a much better opportunity to talk through strategies and feelings and fears. It would also, she surmised, help to draw out Alice, giving her the opportunity to share her thoughts reciprocally, rather than have them extracted by emotional dentistry.

      The wine bar was studiedly neutral, any suggestion of character or individuality rigorously bleached away. They were both on time. This was quite usual for Odette, who despaired at the modern idea that half an hour late didn’t count as late at all. Alice had always (even in her pre-Dead Boy period) been more erratic, as likely to arrive pointlessly early as extravagantly late. Odette immediately sensed that something – she shied away from the term, which was very unOdettish, but it kept coming back to her – something momentous was going to take place. She ran through the possibilities: Alice was gay; Alice was taking the veil; Alice was dying from a rare blood disease. They ordered a bottle of something white and sat down. Odette squeezed Alice’s hand, and decided to begin by sharing her feelings.

      ‘Do you mind if I tell you about my boy?’

      Alice’s eyes opened a little more widely, as if she’d just seen some unexpected nudity in the middle of a Jane Austen adaptation.

      ‘Yes, of course. I’d like that.’ Alice hadn’t taken part in the discussion during lunch, but she’d picked up that Odette had a new lover.

      ‘I work with him. I like him. I don’t know, but I think he might be … well, I hate to use the cliché, but you know sometimes you have to … the one.’

      Alice smiled. ‘What’s he like?’

      ‘Well, he’s American, but he was brought up in England. Or English and brought up in America. I’ve been trying to piece it together, but he doesn’t talk much about himself. It’s one of his better qualities. He’s very good-looking, in that preppy kind of way I don’t like, except with him. He’s quite funny. You know, observationally funny, not jokes or anything.’ All that came out at breakneck speed.

      ‘Oh, Odette, I’m really pleased. You’ve been waiting so long for this.’

      ‘I haven’t really. I mean, been waiting. That implies I was just hanging round, twiddling my thumbs like a desperate spinster until Mr Right showed up. That’s not me; that’s the opposite of me. It’s only been the past couple of months that … well, you know, biological clocks and all that. Or maybe just boredom. There’s got to be more to life than spreadsheets and ER. I’d forgotten about how exciting it, you know, sex, can be, how it takes your mind off all the everyday crap. I so don’t care if the yoghurt’s past its sell-by date, or if Starbucks have messed up my morning latte, or if my mum’s said something stupid. It’s wonderful. But I’d also forgotten about the fear.’

      ‘The fear?’ Alice spoke as though she knew something about fear.

      ‘Yes, you know the losing-them fear. I was fine before without him, but now … well, it’d be awful to have to go back to … to what I did … I had before.’

      Alice felt little electric jolts whenever something Odette said connected with her own feelings. Electric jolts separated by an ugly void. Alice knew that she was in danger of failing in friendship, failing to see the other as anything but an echoing chamber for her own obsessions. It was partly her horror and revulsion at this failure that had driven Alice further towards reclusion: better, surely, to inch herself out of the world of human love and friendship than to stand damned for her emotional autism? And she had a place to which she could retreat: into the dark arms of her boy, her demon lover, ageless in his underworld.

      But it was different with Odette. At some level she realised that Odette’s declaration was part of an attempt to reach out to her, an invitation to join in with a revelation of her own. And how she wanted to share. She looked at Odette’s sensible, boyish, pretty face and succumbed to a sudden surge of love, which subsided to leave the tips of her fingers thrumming gently.

      ‘Odette, you’re such a wonderful person. Why should this boy …’

      ‘Matt.’

      ‘… this boy, Matt, ever want to leave you? You’re the cleverest, sensiblest … prettiest person I know.’

      The prettiest may not have been strictly correct, but it had, for Alice, an emotional truth.

      ‘That’s incredibly sweet of you, Alice. But the trouble is that no man ever stayed with a woman because she was sensible or clever