After Alice (15 page)

 

CHAPTER 36

T
he White Queen and Ada continued along the path. They couldn't step sideways, for the lawn edging prevented them from straying. Neither could they retreat, for when they looked back, they saw that the gravel path had retracted and formed a little loop like the eye of a needle. Should they bother to retrace their steps, they'd only be marching forward again in a moment.

Ada was perturbed. “Let's
try
to reverse ourselves—­”

“Hard to do that without a looking-­glass,” interrupted the White Queen. “And why bother?”

“Because,” Ada continued, “as far as we can see, this path only goes forward across the meadows, while the Sheep and the Lion and the Unicorn flew off in the opposite direction. They were going to the garden party, back that way, and we will be wanting to get there before long.”

“
You
may want that,” said the White Queen. “
I
want peace among all nations. Either that or a lemon drop, I can't decide.” Still, she fed her arm through Ada's. They began to traipse along the return path, which curved neatly to join up with where they'd been. The exercise had taken a quarter of a minute, but it had been so much fun, or so little trouble, that they started out again along the loop. The White Queen said, “Who is this Alice about whom you keep chattering about who is the girl about whom you keep mentioning?”

“Everyone knows Alice, it seems,” said Ada. “She's been all through these parts. Yet we're having
such
a time catching up with her.”

“I don't know the girl of whom you refer, referring that is to the girl about whom you keep referring. Whom I don't know.”

“Do you feel quite all right? Is this making you dizzy?” Ada asked the White Queen as they began their fourth circuit. “We could stop if you like. There's no need to continue.”

“To whom much is given, much is expected of those to whom much is given,” replied the White Queen uncertainly. “I expect.”

“You're talking in circles,” said Ada. “Let's go on.”

But the path seemed to have so enjoyed their company that it now limited itself to no more than this single loop around a small hummock of grass. There was no backward or forward, no horizon of past or future, just a circle around.

“We
are
in a zoo,” said Ada. “Look, we're caged in a pen, with the open world all around us, a temptation and a paradise, but forbidden.”

“No, that's the zoo.” The White Queen pointed. “That enclosed circle of grass, around which we are now tottering around, and around, and around which we round with nearly tottering competence with which we totter around.” She looked ill.

Ada patted her alabaster elbow. “You hush now and save your breath. We may be on this road quite some time. I shall tell you about Alice, since you asked. She is a friend of mine. Well, in actual fact she is my only friend.”

“Why—­is that why is that? Why?”

“I have not been lucky in my limbs,” said Ada. “They are not frisky enough. I frighten the other little girls. They run away.”

“Who who who who who who?” The White Queen's eyes were wide and dreadful, filled with terror either at the collapse of her power of speech or at the thought that Ada scared little children.

“Everyone except Alice,” said Ada. At once the thought of sensible, stoic Alice filled her heart and her breast to bursting. How queer that inscrutable child was. How beloved of so many. For the first time since slipping into the hole in the riverbank, Ada felt alarmed.
Would
she be stuck in this wonderland forever, always chasing after Alice, never catching up? And
was
Alice all right? Ada began to cry. She was well-­bred enough to know that crying was undignified. She tried to hide it from the White Queen, but the old creature noticed.

“Now, then,” said the White Queen with great effort. “Now, then, now, then, now, then. There, there. There there there there there. Now, then now, then now. Now.” Though her face was rigid with stress, the White Queen leaned down. She creaked out a crooked smile. The old potentate was carved of ivory crazed all over with
craquelure
. Her expression, a rictus of caring concern, might have seemed a caricature of senile dementia. But Ada responded with brave gratitude. At least in her regard for a young companion, the White Queen is like Miss Armstrong Headstrong, she thought. If not half so highly strung.

“It's all right,” Ada managed. “Alice, you see, is the reason I am here.”

“Hear, hear,” said the White Queen, or maybe that was “Here, here.”

“She's the only one who—­who—­” Ada didn't know if she was stuttering from sudden emotion or if they had been around the loop so often that she was going loopy, too. “Who—­”

“Who,” said a voice that was not Ada's or the White Queen's.

The girl and the White Queen looked up. The mound around which they'd been walking had turned into a mushroom, and upon this spongy fungus lounged a Caterpillar, one distinguished by a vigorous ugliness. “Who,” said the Caterpillar, “are you?”

“Well, that's easy enough to answer, now that you ask it, and it's high time somebody did,” jabbered the White Queen. She hopped up and down with joy, relieved of her verbal paralysis. The white pedestal upon which she stood made impressions in the gravel. “I am the White Queen, of course, any fool can see that—­”

“I am no fool,” replied the Caterpillar, “and so it follows that
I
cannot see any such thing. You a White Queen? You appear to be a migrating finial afflicted by a poor conversational technique. In any case I wasn't speaking to you. I was addressing the slug-­like child at your side. Who,” he said again, drawing out the syllable like an elocution master, “are
you
?”

“Well, I'm Ada Boyce, if you please,” said Ada, “and I hate to rush matters along, but—­”

“And if I don't please?” asked the Caterpillar, puffing upon a pipe of Oriental workmanship. “Who are you then?”

“I'm still Ada,” said the child. “Whether I please you or not, I'm still Ada. Even if you run away from me like some I know, I'm still Ada.”

“Caterpillars seldom run,” he replied loftily, “unless pressed by the clamor of a devoted public. You were asking after Alice?”

“Well, I hadn't done that yet,” said Ada.

“You said to rush matters along, so I am anticipating. If you would like to ask
before
Alice, you are too late. She has come and gone.”

“Was she quite all right?” asked her friend.

“It seemed to me she had some growing up to do,” replied the Caterpillar. “Or some growing down. I can't remember. Memory is unreliable, anyway.”

The White Queen said, “I have a fine memory myself. I can remember when I licked an envelope to seal it. The envelope stuck to my tongue. I had to walk the envelope all the way to the Queen of Hearts myself. I was replying affirmatively to her kind invitation.”

“Her kind invitation?” asked the creature. “What kind of invitation?”

“A garden party, as it happens.”

“And that is where Alice is going,” said the Caterpillar. “Perhaps she has already arrived and been sentenced to death. If you want to catch the fun, I shouldn't linger here. In fact, I want to see the proceedings, and
I
shouldn't linger here. And I shan't.” At this, he turned into a butterfly. Ada hadn't known butterflies could manage to be so ugly. The Caterpillar lifted from the mushroom cap like an angel of death off an ottoman. It whisked itself away with a speed and a sense of destination hitherto unknown to its species. Just as it disappeared, it called, “Don't eat the mushroom. You don't know if it is poisonous!”

“Do
you
know?” called the White Queen, but the insect had disappeared.

“Look,” said Ada, “the garden path has vanished. We're free.”

“It's dangerous to stray from the garden path, they say, but when the garden path itself takes to straying, that's horticultural mutiny,” replied the White Queen. “Look, bits of this mushroom have teeth marks in them. It can't be poisonous or the ground would be littered with corpses.” She reached up and broke off two pieces the size of dinner plates just as a voice cried out in alarm. It was neither the Caterpillar's voice nor the Sheep's, nor, in fact, was it much like any other of the peculiar characters Ada had met so far. The girl turned.

A boy came stumbling out of the woods. He waved his arms to dissuade them. He looked like the boy in the Sunday lesson book, from the page about Afric's pagan interior. “Might do you harm,” he panted. “A mushroom that virile. Best take no chances.”

“Who,” said Ada, imitating the vowels of the departed Caterpillar, “are you?”

“You sound a big old hoot owl,” he said. “I'm Siam, I am.”

“I'm Ada,” she replied. She turned to introduce the White Queen. But it was too late. The White Queen had taken a mouthful of mushroom. She had frozen into a statue of herself. At least her expression looked pleased, as if her last meal had met with her approval.

 

CHAPTER 37

T
he shadow of Tom Tower had retracted from St. Aldate's. It was concentrated solely upon the cool tunnel of Tom Gate below it. The doors stood open as if, in a grand parade, scouts were about to march through with buckets and brooms, six dozen strong. Through the blue tunnel could be seen a fountain and a still, green lake of lawn. Various distracted dons and a few gentlemen wafted about as if by the strengthening breeze, apparently so lost in labyrinths of their own scholastic minds as not to have noticed that Trinity term had already concluded. Otherwise the streets were emptying. “Does it seem that a storm is coming?” asked Miss Armstrong.

“I wouldn't know.”

“Whatever might the time be?” One of Oxford's unhurried bells rang the half hour obligingly, but of which hour was it the half? The city seemed to have become unmoored. “Did you know that at night Great Tom rings five minutes later than the hour in London? Oxford being that degree west of Greenwich?”

“Does that mean that at night it takes longer to get from London to Oxford than it does to get from Oxford to London? Or shorter?”

“Oxford is the beginning and the end of all nonsense. Don't be foolish,” said Miss Armstrong. “I don't know what it means, I'm just jabbering.” On they pressed, toward Cornmarket. In the heat, the Saturday morning market was already disbanding. The streets were emptying as luncheons were being laid, cheese slapped upon the boards, shutters going up for an afternoon break and perhaps a slumber in the back room or a little something nicer if the wife felt overheated enough to remove her skirts. A dog padded across the junction at Carfax with all the insouciance of a gypsy tinker at the gates of a bishop's palace.

They turned into the Broad. In the light and dust the street looked as if lined by buildings made from skillfully carved oat bread. The spirits of Miss Armstrong and Lydia Clowd lifted at the sight of two girls emerging from Blackwell's, but those girls started to run away. “Oh, Ada could never lift her limbs like that,” said Miss Armstrong. She slackened the pace that had quickened in hope. An older woman, a grandmother sort, next emerged from the shop. Her squawkeries were lost in the breeze. The girls paid no heed. They rushed on, laughing merrily.

Miss Armstrong and Lydia Clowd pushed east. The colleges, barricaded against the two females in favor of faith and reason, stood stolid in the strengthening wind. A squidge of something got into Miss Armstrong's eye, or so she said. She dabbed at her face with a cloth. Lydia turned to examine the reddening eye with a gallows mercy. “A bit of grit, a midge, a fly, a plank, a mote, what does it matter?” Miss Armstrong snapped at Lydia.

“Whatever it is, blink quickly to flush it out, for if I'm not mistaken—­”

Lydia was not mistaken. The Vicar was bearing down upon them from across the Broad. He was heading in the same direction they were, but faster. Miss Armstrong flinched. “Reverend Boyce, sir,” she began as they seemed about to collide upon the pavement.

“You're far afield, Miss Armstrong, but I daren't stop to pass the time. The doctor has sent me to collect a new bromide suitable for the infant. We expected you back to help when you'd collected Miss Ada from the Croft. Have you given yourself leave for a perambulation? It won't do, Miss Armstrong! And in this heat! Watch out, weather's coming. Or, forgive me, perhaps you are on an errand for Mrs. Boyce, did she send you out for—­?” The Vicar caught himself in time. Family secrets stayed within the household. He pivoted. “Good day to
you
, Miss Lydia. I hope you and your family are keeping as well as can be expected in this season of sorrow.” He didn't pause to see if his hopes were being met; he cannonaded away. The various demands of Mrs. Boyce and the Baby Boykin got the better of him. Apparently he didn't know that his clumsy Ada was lumbering about God's good creation without the benefit of a chaperone. Lydia elected not to summon him back to clarify. For this she received a wordless moue of gratitude from the beleaguered governess. In a moment the Vicar had disappeared beyond where the Broad became Holywell.

In a low voice, Miss Armstrong said, “Oh, what are we failing to consider, Miss Lydia? Where can they
be
? If they are lost, I am lost, too. I shall never get a position supervising children again. I shall have to go below-­stairs.”

“How sad for you,” said Lydia. “And of course,
they
may be dead. That's even more below-­stairs than household staff.”

“You are cruel and then you are kind and then you are cruel beyond compare. I do not understand you, but there is no time to try. I ought to have told the Vicar. But he sends me into such a tizzy. He doesn't know the half of it!”

“Which half does he know? That you are incompetent, or that you are sentimentally excitable? Or is there a third half buried in there somewhere that even I can't detect?”

“Who taught you to bruit words about like a barrister? It is unnatural and unbecoming in any female. In a girl of your slender years it is demonic.” Was that a spatter of rain, or drops from a mop shook out an upper window? “I do not put my heart onto a table in the operating theatre so that a young
voyeuse
like you can dissect it and see how it works or fails to thrive.”

Lydia fell silent. Not wanting to follow the Vicar, they took an alternate route, and turned into the Parks Road. Before long the University Museum gathered its stone haunches in the distance and grew larger as they approached. “If you are let go, you could get a job dusting the bones of the great lizards dug up in the desert. Dinosaurs,” said Lydia. “Those creatures are already dead, so you could do them no harm.” But perhaps she had only thought those words, as Miss Armstrong did not rise to her own defense. Lydia tried again. “Did you ever see that claw of a dodo, and the painting some Dutch master made of it?”

“The Vicar does not approve of his household visiting such a place. It only strengthens the temptation to doubt. I understand the painting is famously vile, in any case. Such a creature deserves to be extinct.”

“Were ugliness the criterion for extinction, we'd be freed of a great many matrons stopping to call and to console my father. Dodos, the lot of them.”

On they passed, across the University Parks, toward the Cherwell, toward home, past Park Town, where the university's dons, forbidden marriage, were said to lodge their female companions. Once or twice Lydia thought she saw the hastening figure of the Vicar emerging from the plunging shadows of an elm, becoming faint in the light. But from this distance that could be anyone hurrying home before the storm.

Were a dark boy standing in those shadows, thought Lydia, we might not even see him.

Then through the lane this time, hoping that the lagging girls and the stray boy might have turned up under their own authorities. But Lydia knew how everyone lingered under a death sentence. Postponing it with prayers and promises was as ineffectual as pleading upon a star, or throwing a copper into a wishing well. You lost your copper as well as your faith in wishes, and prayers.