After Alice (5 page)

 

CHAPTER 12

S
he left Rosinathorn and Rosadolorosa. There was nothing she could do for them. If they revive, let them learn to comfort one another with the language of flowers, she thought. Passion and Annihilation in the absence of Happiness. I have Alice to find.

She followed the Ace of Spades. She was just in time to see him arrive at the door in the sand. He located a key tied to a cord that looped through the handle of his wicker basket. He unlocked the door on the
OUT KEEP
side and went through, slamming it shut behind him. Ada had been calling to him, calling as in a dream, but her voice was small and lost in the wind. By the time she got to the door, it was locked again. When she walked around the door, the Ace of Spades and Rosa Rugosa were nowhere in sight.

She looked out to the horizon, puzzling. The sea was shrinking. The world on the other side of the ocean became visible. She'd always wondered where Noah's flood went when it was done. Now she knew. Underground.

This sea was gurgling with a murky slurp, as if draining into a section of the new London sewers. Everyone said they were such a miracle, those sewers, relegating the Great London Stink to history. Ada didn't know about that, but she was familiar with an ebb tide at the Isle of Wight. She expected a pungency of fish rot. She smelled only opodeldoc. The blur of the incoming world was a wave of forest, green heads of elm and oak a sort of leafy spume. I shall be crushed by a marauding wood, she thought. This did not terrify her. Something outlandish would be on the other side of that experience, another
O
UT KEEP
, no doubt.

Still, she made herself rigid in case the force of the green tide broke all her bones. She didn't want her limbs to be scattered so far apart as to make reassembly difficult. She understood that personal integrity was a matter of finding the proper cage; she'd been broken before, yet her iron corset had kept her contained.

The crowns of the trees reared back on all sides like the heads of stallions at dressage. The limbs of onrushing trees linked arms. The sea had become the size of a puddle and it was still shrinking. Ada peered, hoping that if it disappeared completely she'd be able to spy the drain. What could be under the underworld? But when there was hardly more than a cupful of salt water left in the sand, it resolved itself into the bowl of a teacup set upon a saucer. Tied to the porcelain handle was a tag. Words were written upon it.

Ada groaned at the effort of bending, but the groan was only habit; bending hardly hurt at all. Before she could lift the cup and saucer from the sand, however, a breeze blew the sand away, revealing a shiny disk. This turned into the glass top of a rosewood table that thrust itself out of a wooden floor much as a fountain rises when the spigots are first opened. The table grew to the height of a pergola, elevating the teacup far out of Ada's reach. In the shade of the closing forest, only a cup of ocean, and it was over her head.

I ought to be able to see what the tag says, even if it just says
NO BATHING F
OR THREE HOURS AFTER
LUNCHEON
,
thought Ada. Try as she might, she couldn't climb the pedestal of the table high enough to read the tag through the glass. She looked about to find some fallen tree limb that she might prop against the tabletop and thereby scale the slope to the glass plateau. Only now did she realize that, though the approaching forests had halted in time to keep from crushing her, they'd come dreadfully close. They'd boxed her into a sort of capacious coffin. And the forest was turning itself inside out. It assumed the look of an attractive beveled paneling that lined four sides of a windowless salon. She could find only one door in this long, high chamber, the previously isolated door that said
KEEP OUT
. It was now properly fitted into a wall. Snug, and no doubt still locked.

Overhead, what Ada had thought were intertwining boughs turned out to be a pale green ceiling, done over in a plaster molding that emulated the fan-­vaulting in Brasenose College Chapel. The effect was faintly pietistic. In the center of the ceiling, the branches twisted themselves into another instruction:
DON'T LOOK UP
.

 

CHAPTER 13

T
here is no earthly reason why I ought to stay here for the benefit of that Miss Armstrong, thought Lydia. If Ada falls into mischief through lack of supervision, her governess will be shown the door. Then that poor woman's struggles over her feelings for the Vicar will be a matter of the past. In any event, it isn't my duty to play watchguard for Ada Boyce. I'm nobody's servant.

So with a determination to be brusque and to enjoy it, she rose to her feet and turned back toward her own home.

The day was continuing warm, indeed warm enough that showers might follow by tea-­time. A certain broodiness of cumulus out toward the Cotswolds as Lydia picked her way along the path. She avoided the eyes of strolling summer scholars and Saturday marketgoers, hustling by with their baskets and barrows, as assiduously as they attempted to catch hers.

Pater had said to keep out from underfoot until the guests left. She expected he had
meant
to say, “Keep Alice away, as she will only ask vexing questions.” Lydia wasn't certain, but in any case, she was hardly dragging Alice back before tea-­time. Lydia would slip in through the kitchen garden and disturb no one. If Alice had already come home and was interrupting affairs, Lydia could claim to have become lost with Theseus and Hippolyta in the forests around Athens. Pater would allow that much.

She made her way past the rangy yews and into the kitchen garden. Upon the margins of the grounds surrounding the house, newer neighborhoods were encroaching—­the elegant terrace houses in the crescents of Park Town were almost visible through the distant phalanx of trees. But, dating from some previous century, the Croft lingered on, lacking style and symmetry. An undistinguished stone farmhouse with halfhearted stucco chipped away in patchwork pieces to reveal glimpses of a frame timber construction, oak beams filled in with a crazy quilt of brick, rubble, stone. The house seemed to list in the sunlight. An effect of irregular eaves, perhaps. The back door was open. Hens were wandering about like ladies at a lyceum tea trying to find their friends before selecting their seats. The dovecote was silent. The heat made doves dozy.

Mrs. Brummidge was slapping dough on the pastry table. Great whuffs of flour paled the air. The room reeked of stewed celery and onion broth. “Thought you was Carter with that brace of hares, I did,” said the cook, wiping straying hairs away from her brow with the front of her wrist. “But it's the likes of Miss Lydia inspecting the kitchens, no less.” Her tone was less mocking than it may sound. She was, perhaps, a bit intimidated by the young mistress of the house. “Where's Alice at, then?”

“Isn't Alice at home?”

“If she's not with you, she's missing again. I worried as much to your father this morning, but then I decided she'd gone with you.”

“I expect she's wandered back. Must be loitering somewhere.”

“Miss Lydia, I made a jam pasty and left it steaming on the sill; that always draws Alice for a nibble if she's haunting a place. But she's not come around, I notice. Mayhaps the child has taken Dinah and her kittens up the back stairs to the nursery? My back has been turned what with a luncheon for guests to manage, so nothing is impossible. Nip up them steps and have a look-­see. If she's not crooning to the kittens, I'd say she's still out and about.”

Lydia gripped an unpainted chair and sat down. “If she's home, we'll hear her in good time. How are things in the parlor?”

Mrs. Brummidge gave Lydia a look the girl could not read, waited a moment before continuing. “You'd have to ask Rhoda. She's been doing the coming and going.”

Rhoda sat in the corner unthreading the runner beans. “Lot of talky-­talk in there, they had to open the windows to let the words out,” she said.

“How is the mighty Darwin? Is this part of a delayed victory lap?” The Great Oxford Debate several years ago, in which Darwin's theories had been attacked by Bishop Wilberforce (and defended by the family's distant cousin Thomas Huxley, among others), was by now old news but still fun. Even bootblacks, disagreeing about the proper practice of their trades, threatened to rent out the Oxford University Museum of Natural History to argue their positions. Still, those who regarded the book of Genesis as factual took the notion of transmutation from beast to mankind very seriously indeed. Sedition, calumny, apostasy. There were some who said Darwin would be ill-­advised to wander in dark Oxford lanes without a cosh and a pistol or, barring that, an agreeable gorilla to defend him against attacks from the spiritual thinkers of the day.

“I try not to overhear when I am retrieving the tray,” replied Rhoda, full of self-­admiration, as if listening to Darwin hypothesize on pre-­history might irritate her morals. “He has added inches and fullness to his beard since his last visit. I'll say no more.”

“Perhaps he means to serve as a walking exhibit of Early Man before Tonsorial Parlors.” Lydia had her hands full with her own talents, appetites, delusions, and curiosities about life as it was lived in high June of 186_. Pre-­history to a fifteen-­year-­old girl child means nothing further back in time than the courtship of her parents. “I don't suppose Alice is in there with them? Rhoda?”

“No; just the master, and Darwin, and an associate visiting from Philadelphia or Boston, I believe, and his little black beetle.”

“Another specimen to examine? Is it pricked into a page with pins?”

“We don't gossip in my kitchen,” snorted Mrs. Brummidge. Rhoda bent ostentatiously to her work. Lydia, included in the condemnation, felt chafed under instruction. She was imagining a campaign of insurrection, though had not settled on a strategy, when a knock sounded on the door from the passage.

“Goodness, could they not
ring
when they need attention?” hissed Mrs. Brummidge. “And me not done up proper to conduct a tour through the operations.” She adjusted her apron. She wiped some apple peels from where they'd clung to the cloth. She added, “The master is bringing Darwin through to examine lower life-­forms, Rhoda. Straighten your spine or you'll be mistook for a mollusk.”

“Maybe it's Alice's nurse, back early,” said Lydia.

“Miss Groader has gone to Banbury to deal with her ailing mother. She won't return until the morrow. That's why
you
were to be looking after Alice.” Arriving at the door to the passage, Mrs. Brummidge opened it with a brusque gesture, part genuflection and part defensive crouch.

It was neither beardy Darwin nor the master, after all, but a younger gentleman in fine enough clothes to make both Rhoda and Lydia sit up. “Ah, I've come to the right place,” he said. “Always an exercise in temptations, which closed door to approach.” He spoke in one of the American accents; Lydia couldn't distinguish among them. To her they all sounded dry and tinny. Almost quack-­like.

“What can I do for you sir.” Mrs. Brummidge was immune to the charms of a well-­fitting waistcoat upon a trim male form if the form was a foreigner. The visitor had removed his coat, as the parlor took the morning sun punishingly. In his shirt-­sleeves and buttoned vest he seemed the very grocer.

“I wondered if you might have some milk.”

Lydia stood and folded her hands together so the full impact of her juliette sleeves might register. “I'm Lydia. The mistress of the house, more or less.”

“I beg your pardon.” He bowed and blushed. “I'd been told you would not be at home today, and I assumed—­how foolish of—­” He all but swallowed his collar. “Mr. Winter, at your ser­vice.”

So now, an impasse. No further conversation was possible. Lydia despite her status in the household was no more than a hostage standing in the center of this flour-­strewn flagstone floor. This was Mrs. Brummidge's domain.

The cook sniffed. “We don't hold with milk drinking in this house unless there is a sick child. Too many vile particules. I could supply you with a glass of nut ale. Or a barley water. Take your choice. Unless the child is sick?”

“Child?” said Lydia. Affecting too maternal a tone would be a strain, and unconvincing; she tried merely for the investigative.

“Barley water would do nicely. Miss Lydia,” said Mr. Winter, and bowed. “Cook.” He glanced over at Rhoda and gave up, and disappeared.

“
Child
?” said Lydia, turning to Mrs. Brummidge with lifted nostrils, suggesting outrage at not having been informed. But of course: Hadn't Miss Armstrong mentioned another young scalawag on the premises today?

“You do
such
a job keeping track of Alice,” retorted Mrs. Brummidge. “How mortifying, was you to lose a visiting child in the bargain. And one traveling with His Noxiousness Mr. Darwin, no less.” (Mrs. Brummidge did not care to imagine chimpanzees swinging from the branches of
her
family tree.)

“I'll take the lemon barley through when it is ready,” said Lydia.

“I wouldn't hear of it. A scandal. Rhoda, off your rump and look smart.” Though the
Mrs.
was an honorific, Mrs. Brummidge maintained a matron's sense of decorum. She enjoyed wielding it as a weapon. It was more effective than irony.

 

CHAPTER 14

A
da sat and leaned against the pedestal of the table. To judge by the solitary piece of furniture, she seemed to be in a hall for giants. Yet she could spy no entrance for them. The
KEEP OUT
door in the baseboard looked like one from a writing-­desk cubby. Ada felt very small indeed. But agile, like a mouse, not like a broken toy lost under the settee. Surely she could worry her way through that door somehow? It seemed to be the only exit.

She scurried forward and tried the knob again, in case it had changed its mind and wanted to open. It did not. But this time she thought to look through the keyhole.

What began as undifferentiated sheen organized itself into patches of green and blue. A lawn of some sort, a sky. A wall of topiary hedge clipped into the shapes of domesticated hens, as far as Ada could tell. Along came the Ace of Spades with the basket containing Rosa Rugosa, who was trailing her roots through the grass in a most unladylike display. Ada cupped her hands around the keyhole and called, “Hallo, over here! Open the door!” But the Ace of Spades, if he even heard Ada, kept traipsing. His head was down, possibly to find a burying plot for Rosa.

Until now, Ada had been drifting through this unusual day with disregard for what she'd left behind and for what might lie ahead. Had it occurred to her to ask the question—­
what is this adventure like?
—­she might have concluded that her visit seemed like a story or a dream. In any case, it didn't correspond to life as she had known it so far.

A story in a book has its own intentions, even if unknowable to the virgin reader, who just lollops along at her own pace regardless of the author's strategies, and gets where she will. After all, a book can be set aside for weeks, or for good. (Burned in the grate.) Alternatively, a story can be adored for centuries. But it cannot be derailed. A plot, whether abandoned by a reader or pursued rapturously, remains itself, and gets where it is headed even if nobody is looking. It is progressive and inevitable as the seasons. Winter still comes after autumn though you may have died over the summer.

As for dreams, they are powered by urgent desire, even if that desire is only to escape the quotidian. Ada, who lived with a sense of disappointment and failure, thanks to her misshapen form, suffered from a flat dream-­life, one that seemed poorly differentiated from her waking hours. As a stolid child, her dreams were of static things, almost still-­lifes: a lump of cheddar on a board, a goat roped to a tinker's cart, a curving road.

Now, however, Ada no longer felt like the passive observer of an unfolding fiction or of a dream daguerreotype. Something new rose in her, a thrill of ambition. She had to get into that garden. She
would
get into that garden. She didn't know why she felt so strongly about it. Usually she didn't much care for gardens. The garden at the Vicarage was a mess, what with the monkey-­puzzle tree needing pruning and the orange hawkbit colonizing the verge. But this garden looked entrancing, something like a college garden glimpsed through forbidding gates. Such Oxford gardens would remain off-­limits to the likes of Ada, both for her gender and for her crab-­gaited form. And probably for her latent sinfulness. All the more important that she gain access to this paradise in the keyhole.

She peered again. Beyond the door, the lawn was shorn and rolled to Pythagorean precision. The clouds were perfect, neither too many nor histrionic. As she watched hungrily, the cumuli began sliding down the side of the world and changing places with the lawn. This proved disconcerting, like a picture in a book turned upside down. Why, there was the Ace of Spades digging a hole in the lawn-­sky, and stuffing Rosa Rugosa root-­first into the green-­fringed heaven hovering over a blue eternal sky-­sea. It was amusing to see the Ace of Spades sprinkle water upward. “This
is
a day I'm having,” said Ada to herself.

“No, it's not,” said a voice behind her. “It's a day
I'm
having. You're only decoration. A sort of mousy, apprentice Erinys detached from her clot of spectres, I imagine. Lose your way?”

She turned and discovered a lopsided crescent moon hanging above and to one side of the glass tabletop. “Did you speak?” she asked it. “You, moon?”

The moon distorted itself to answer. “You were expecting a Pantagruel come through for his cup of ocean? The instructions tell you: Don't look up.”

“I was always taught to look a person in the eye when addressing them. Though it's difficult to do now. Your eyes are invisible.”

The moon-­mouth said, “I'm feeling hungry, but harpy or mouse, you are extremely odd-­looking. I hope you don't taste untoward.”

“I am no mouse. I am a little girl.”

“You are either a
very
little girl or an indecisive Fate or an argumentative and dissembling mouse.” The sliver-­moon began to seem more like a cat's mouth. Ada was glad the rest of the cat wasn't present, as a cat that size would scarcely leave room for her.

“Do you know how to get into the garden?” she asked, to change the subject.

“Through the door, of course. When it's ajar.”

A guttural hiss or a purr, Ada couldn't decide which, rumbled from behind the smiling moon-­mouth. Then a tongue emerged from between pin-­teeth. It angled to lick some invisible part of the implied cat. When Ada realized that the cat was probably bathing its particulars, she was glad the body was absent. Gigantic feline organs of any variety weren't included in the list of classic panoramas she might hope to glimpse before she died.

She thought it would be polite to divert attention from the practice of hygiene. “The garden beyond that door is circling itself somehow.”

“No it isn't,” said the cat-­mouth. “It's the keyhole that's rotating.”

Ada looked again. Sure enough, the keyhole was moving in a clockwise direction, one complete rotation to the minute. “I met a gardener who had a key. But he's already inside. Is there another key?” she asked.

“There may be, or may not be, but either way it means nothing to me. This is my day, after all, not yours. I have no interest in attending a garden party.”

“I should think we share the day equally,” ventured Ada.

“Impossible,” came the reply. “I'm much larger than you are. So we can't share anything equally. Grow up a little and you'll see what I mean.”

“I would like to know what the tag on the teacup says. Since you are much more lofty than I, you could read it and tell me.”

One orange cat-­eye appeared, and squinted at the tabletop. “It says:
DRINK ME
.”

“I find that hard to believe.”

A bit more of the cat appeared, nearly its whole face, including a pair of twitching ears. A mask floating against walnut wainscoting. “I could carry you in my mouth and deposit you on the tabletop if you like, and you could see for yourself if I'm lying.” The smile now looked like a leer.

Ada was afraid if she walked into the cat's mouth she might fall out the other side. What would Miss Armstrong say? “I'd better not,” she said. “I know a little bit about the damned crowding into Charon's boat, but I don't know much about ghosts, including ghost cats. There might be some contagion, and I don't think I'm ready to be a ghost.”

“No time like the present. Can't I interest you in a little bite?” The mouth loomed. “I think you are wearing a tag that says
EAT ME
, but you have hidden it in your clothes. That's why mice shouldn't wear clothes.”

Ada said, “I have only one life. I need to take care of it.”

“Very well said. Off and away with the fairies, indeed.
That
was a smart move.” Ada couldn't tell if the spectral cat was mocking her. It continued. “They buried
me
under the Iffley yew. A new grave was open and they packed me on top of a coffin before they filled in the hole. It's true cats have nine lives, you know. But cats can't count. So I don't know where I am.”

“I don't know where I am either. But I know where I want to be. Won't you please tell me where I can find another key?”

The cat-­head didn't reply, but set to licking the ocean out of the teacup. As it beaded up on the cat's whiskers, it no longer looked like drops of salty sea, but like cream. “Since this is
my
day, by and large, I have no reason to satisfy the urges of the most peculiar mouse I have ever met. Still, I'm feeling fat and satisfied.
Do
climb into my mouth, my dear. More than one way to get into that garden, you know.”

At great speed, the mouth dipped very close to her. The smile looked less hungry than kind, but Ada stepped back. “I am too timid,” she said, “and we've hardly been introduced. Another time, perhaps.”

The haunted mouth began to fade. “Very well. I can wait. May I give you a bit of advice?”

“Please do.”

“Don't take the advice of anyone you meet here. We're all mad.”

Ada thought about it. I've just met
you,
and your advice is not to trust you. If I
don't
take your advice, then I
should
trust you. I guess I have to trust you and not trust you. Your advice wheels about like the keyhole. There's no way in.

Watching the cat-­head dissolve much as daylight does, by unnamable degrees, Ada's eyes fell again on the words in the ceiling tracery.
DON'T LOOK UP
. Why trust
that
advice? Noticing that the plaster tracery had sent tendrils down the paneling, and that they were beginning to take root in the floor, she found a foothold and then a second. She began to climb toward the green heaven.