After Alice (19 page)

 

CHAPTER 47

M
iss Armstrong reclaimed her gloves from the table in the passage. It was time to put folly behind her. She had taken a false step somewhere early in the day, and she would pay for it for the rest of her life. She only hoped it would not come to pass that someone had seen her pursuing Ada, catching up with her, and tumbling the girl into deep water. If Miss Armstrong had done that—­had acted on her dreadful fantasy—­she could not recall it, and that much was true. The amnesia of the hysteric. She would say so to the magistrate, or the warden of the gaol at Oxford Castle. For now, there was nothing left awaiting her in the benighted Vicarage but the accusations and recriminations of a hard-­lived day. Another one. She left the Croft by the front door, unable to imagine she might return, and soon.

Lydia wandered out, too, through the kitchen garden. Darwin had been right; there would be no downpour. The afternoon was pulsing with the last energy of daylight, which had turned dry and flecked. It was the time of year when English evening can take three hours being absorbed into night-­time. But dusk was out there, ferrying in from Low Countries, halting and hovering off the coast of Essex, picking up strength from dark waters, gathering its moods and forces.

For the first time Lydia began to wonder, seriously, if she should be frightened for Alice. It would be a novel exercise, both because Lydia's capacity for raw emotion had been so overwhelmed in recent months that, until today, she'd imagined she could never feel anything deeply ever again; and also because, well. Alice.

Alice was immortal. Alice was immortal in a way their mother had not been. It had to do with Alice's strange gravitas, her unerring solidity. Death wouldn't come near her. It wouldn't dare. And mind, this was not the immortality that children demonstrate, blindly, children who, because they do not know they will die, behave as if it cannot happen. Sooner or later we grow into deserving our own deaths, somehow.

Alice was different. She was rectitude and curiosity and bravery; she was stubbornness and tolerance. Something of her childhood always seemed to slip out of her—as if through permeable membranes—as if she were one of Darwin's anomalous specimens. Alice was an ordinary child whose unordinary childhood seemed an infectious condition to those who came near. Lydia often felt like a bit player, a common sort of business, her own existence merely some adumbration ornamenting the life of her weird sister. The spider under the table at the Last Supper, the cat who looked at a King. The King is history; where the cat went next is not recorded.

And yet—­Lydia had been pacing along the path as she mused, and now she had reached the place on the riverbank where she had stopped earlier that day. Look, she'd dropped her book of commentary on Shakespeare's midsummer dream, and she'd never noticed: There it still lay in the meadow-­grass—­and yet, and yet. Who else to play the part of a bit player in the life of a child? What is a parent but a sort of valet to the royalty of innocent youth? With Mrs. Clowd gone, and Mr. Clowd lost in grief, Alice had no one else. And Lydia was all she had, and not enough.

Lydia paused and sat down, and leaned against the tree. She put her hands to her face. She didn't care to think about her mother. She wasn't ready. Unwelcome, indeed forbidden, a memory rose up through the flooring of the day, a memory of Jane Clowd. Lydia tried to resist it but memories are anarchic.

Some winter morning. A few years ago. Jane Clowd had come back from London. A visit to a surgery in Harley Street. Alighting from the carriage onto the glossy, ice-­slicked cobbles of the lane. Leaning to thank the driver and turning to greet her girls. Her hair had fallen out of its pins on one side. The bonnet was askew. Forsaking their December wear, the girls had pummeled down the path from the Croft, meaning to throw themselves in her arms. Against the cold, one hand was still immersed in a white muff of rabbit fur. The other hand, gloveless, was reaching toward her girls.

 

CHAPTER 48

A
da began to lunge toward Alice, to make sure she was not badly hurt, but a sound behind her made her turn. Everyone else was swiveling and pulling back at the same time. The playing cards built themselves into a kind of pyramid. The Queen of Hearts flew to the top, claiming the advantage. The Tin Ballerina and the Tin Bear tossed their kites into the air, and climbed the ascending strings like circus roustabouts. The Cheshire Cat allowed his tail to appear, flicking viciously and offering no doubt as to its owner's disapproval. The White Queen was gone, having retired into domestic ser­vice. The Duchess was trying to hide behind a fan made of a splayed hand of Clubs, a royal flush, who were objecting though to no avail. Having hopped upon the bench of the King of Hearts, the White Rabbit circled madly, crying, “Beware the Jabberwock, my son!” No one in the room, as far as Ada could tell, had a son or was a father. All told, this seemed a rather parentless set of circumstances. So she couldn't imagine whom he might be addressing.

Indeed, the only person not contorting or shrieking in alarm was Alice, because she was insensate against the plinth of the marble dodo.

“I do hope you don't mind,” said Ada to the White Knight, who had risen creakily to his feet. “I would like to climb upon your shoulders.”

“Fancy serving the likes of you. Mind your bony knees, sir. But be my guest.”

She scrabbled up and peered over the heads of various hedgehogs, lollygagging sarsen stones, gossiping potatoes, a walrus, and some roses that looked vaguely familiar but turned snootily away. The back of the room, as if unable to shake off a habit of recidivism, had returned to forest. The wall was junglefied, hung with vines, lurid with unseemly fruits and lascivious flowers. Shrieking gibbons and toucans conversed in an unfamiliar patois. The floor of the forest remained tiled in black and white squares, but those tiles were being tossed forward like flotsam on a storm-­hurried tidal surge. Soil from beneath the floor spat up. The Jabberwock was approaching from below.

“An underworld beneath this one?” said Ada to the White Knight. “Has it no shame?”

He answered, “Did you seriously believe you would ever understand all that there is to be known?”

Then a roar shook the room. It was like the collapse of a textile mill into a dry riverbed. The King of Hearts replied,
“Silence!”
in the most timid, mouse-­like voice he could manage. “If you please.” The Jabberwock, sandy dirt streaming from its iron jaws, clawed its way up from some unimaginable tomb.

“Oh, you,” said Ada. “I might have known.”

“You are on speaking terms with this monstrous threat?” cried the Queen of Hearts.

“In a manner of speaking. I mean, in a manner of non-­speaking.”

The Jabberwock finished dragging its clawed grips from below. It stood flexing its skeletal wings. There was rather little head, so one had to be impressed that it could manage to roar at all. The circlet of neck brace, which buckled in front, seemed to serve as the mouth, for as it contorted in slits and ovals, an assortment of enraged industrial sounds was heard. The rib cage had grown iron extensions. They unfolded into pinions, like the skeleton of a bird. Where its knuckled, prehensile feet had come from, Ada could not imagine. They looked something like bundles of fish forks.

“
You've
had yourself quite the adventure, I see,” said Ada.

The Jabberwock developed a ­couple of grommets on its upper brow and blinked them at her. She wondered if it would recognize her now it had grown so grand.

“I'm afraid the excursion is over,” she told it. “It's time we returned.”

“If you mean to take your little pet home, now would be the proper moment,” said the King of Hearts, quaveringly.

“Off with its head,” added the Queen of Hearts, though without conviction, as it really didn't have much of a head.

The Jabberwock flexed its wings and circled above the crowd in the courtroom, snatching at a sleeping dormouse. It deposited the dormouse into its open maw, but the dormouse simply dropped through and landed into a barrister's starched wig, snoring all the while. Ada thought, Is that all that happens by walking into the mouth of doom?

“For a creature with a magnificent wingspan, it doesn't seem to be able to attain any useful altitude,” said the King of Hearts, diving flat upon the judge's bench to avoid being taken for a ride.

“Naturally,” said the Tin Ballerina. “Its wings are merely an armature. The air goes right through them, providing no lift. It needs skin, it needs an area of resistance. Like the cloth of a kite.”

“I have just the thing,” said Ada. She took off her shoe and removed the seaweed cloak. It was none the worse for compression. As Ada began to unfold the triangle of material, she said, “Come here and behave; it's time for you to knuckle down and accept correction. It's for your own good, mark my words. You'll never be much, but you can be better than you are now.” The sentiment wasn't hers but Miss Armstrong's, retailed of a morning after shucking Ada of her nightgown and submitting her to a brisk scrub. Hateful words, but they came in use now. The Jabberwock settled docilely enough upon the head of Humpty Dumpty, who held still and kept his eyes squeezed shut, pleading that the iron claws did not clench, or the yolk would be on him.

“I'm fried,” he whimpered. “This is it. I'm finally cracking up. All the King's horses and all the King's men won't be able to put me back together again.”

“Shhh,” said Ada. “Don't worry. Why the King's horses and men? I'm sure the Queen's attendants are much more capable when it comes to managing eggs, but no one ever mentions
them
.” She nimbled upon the helmet of the White Knight and flung wide the unfolded cloak.

“This will only take a moment,” she said to the Jabberwock. “There. That's much better, don't you agree?”

The Jabberwock turned its head this way and that to regard its wings, newly fledged with seaweed. It fit perfectly, as if it were custom cut by a Parisian seamstress. Oysters in a crate began to shriek in joy and beg to be taken for a ride.

“We've no time for that now,” she told the oysters. “Come, now, Jabberwock; we must be off.”

“Must you leave so soon?” asked the White Rabbit. “Can't you leave sooner?”

“It'll be as if I was never here at all,” promised Ada. She stood still. The Jabberwock came forward and settled itself around her. Ada buckled the strap about her neck and another about her waist. She fit her arms into the rings that clamped tight in her armpits. The Jabberwock had grown, but so had she, it seemed. The fit was even keener than it had been this morning. Of course, Ada was accustomed to being shucked into the apparatus below her clothing, and now it was overlaid, and public, like a suit of armor, but she had no intention of stripping to her smalls in a court of law, however deranged the audience.

When she was properly corrected, she said to the White Rabbit, “You're the time-­keeper here. What time is it?”

He looked at his pocket-­watch. “It's very late indeed.”

“Then there is no time like the present to say good-­bye.” With this Ada flexed her new wings and pushed her way to the front of the room. Humpty Dumpty exhaled sulfurously. Ada knelt below the bust of the marble dodo. “Alice, my dear, it's time to go home.”

Her friend was breathing nicely enough. She didn't stir. She was lost in some dream-­world. With the strength allowed by iron reinforcement, Ada reached down and collected Alice beneath her armpits. She hugged her close, as if she were a tender mother, or even an older sister, and Alice a child who had fallen asleep under the dining room table.

Rising, Ada cast a glance toward the door to the garden, but the door was closed now, Siam behind it, and the sign that had said

KEEP OUT.

now said

KEEP IN.

and there was no longer a keyhole.

Those who are roped into bed at night often fall into delusions of flight. Though usually a dreamer of commonplace notions, once in a while Ada had enjoyed dreams of flying. So she was hardly surprised to find herself not only capable but skilled at this exercise. The wings of her iron cage flexed mightily. She moved upward in a spiral, leaving behind without regret all those creatures, their idiocies and affections. She disobeyed earlier advice and looked up rather than down. She could see in the underside of the glass tabletop a reflection of the impossible wonderland, a looking-­glass simulacrum that could entice without either endangering or offering reward. On the other side, above the glass, which had widened to roof all of this underworld, rested the key. If she could leave with the key she could, perhaps, come back someday and rescue Siam. When he was ready to allow it.

As she was pumping her iron wings to batter against the glass ceiling and claim the key for once and for all, a hoary old tench drifted above this world. He waggled his brown fins at her. He swallowed up the key, tag and all. He swam away.

She felt a sudden rage. The ascent of the human creature—­one has to fight to be born, after all. She bashed against the glass with every ounce of her might. She would break through, she would. So she did, being a child with more force of intention that she'd previously allowed herself to acknowledge. The tabletop split with a jagged line. The glass shattered. An ocean of water rolled over Ada and Alice. Whatever was below the wave was lost to view. Anything that might be above it could not be imagined. There is a limit to the nonsense even a dream can attempt.

 

CHAPTER 49

G
asping for air, Ada pulled Alice safely into the shallows. The bank was low. Though Alice was limp and heavy, Ada felt in herself the strength that accompanies terror. She saw Lydia still sitting by the tree, though the light had shifted across horizons, and the air had lost its morning warmth. Lydia had nodded off over a boring text. Good. The tracks of a few tears showed on her cheek. Ada was able to hoist Alice the several feet to the trunk of the tree. Alice murmured something that Ada couldn't quite make out, but Alice's voice even in nonsense syllables sounded like herself. Ada believed she would be all right.

She turned to look in the river to see if she could find that damnable tench. If he was in there, taunting her, she would come back another day with a fishing pole and a handful of bait stolen from the larder. She'd go to work to rescue Siam. There was always a key somewhere. One only needed to know where to start looking.

For a moment the river seemed to cease its endless motion. Perhaps Ada was having a dizzy spell of some sort. She leaned over the surface, which was as still as a waxed tabletop. She caught sight of her bemused face. Her hair was drenched and bedraggled. She had lost the perfect form of the ringlets that Miss Armstrong always tortured into her hair. But a fierce light rain was beginning to fall (no matter what Darwin had predicted). Ada would seem only to have got caught in a downburst.

She glanced back. Alice was already beginning to stir. She had crawled nearer and placed her head in her sister's lap, and murmured her sister's name. In her own somnolence, Lydia had let her hand fall over Alice's outrageous brow, comforting.

Ada looked back at her reflection again, to see if she could find on her face any trace of what she had been through, the details of which were beginning to fade. She could not. All she could see, drifting in the water now like the wreck of a dressmaker's dummy, were the struts and buckles of her closest companion, drowned for good. If it had once worn a seaweed skin, all that was dissolved away.

She left it there. She straightened up—­straighter than she'd ever managed before—­and wondered which way in this fantastic world to turn.

A girl, even a clumsy one, who had managed to rescue her best friend might prove qualified to serve as a big sister.

A white rabbit hopped out from a stand of grass. It was that hour when rabbits feed, though they don't often come out in the damp. It twitched at something appealing, but then turned to look at Ada. It had no waistcoat or pocket-­watch. Still, it stood upright, as if a lone member of some honor guard. Then, without possible doubt, the rabbit pointed at the path toward Alice's home.

So Ada gave a curtsey, the first real curtsey she'd ever managed in her life, and set off at a startling clip to surprise Mr. Clowd and Mrs. Brummidge, and whomever else might be lingering at the Croft of a summer evening, and to apologize for having lost a gift of marmalade, somehow, along the way.