I dreamt it last night that my true love came in, So softly he entered, his feet made no din;
He came close beside me, and this he did say ‘It will not be long love, love, till our wedding day.’
Based on ‘She Moved Through the Fair’
– Padraic Colum
The last and best Cure of Love Melancholy is, to let them have their Desire.
Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy
Contents
ONE: She Moved Through the Fair
TWO: The Secret Garden of Alice Duclos
FIVE: The Prior History of Andrew Heathley
ELEVEN: Drink to Me Only with Thine Eyes, or The Quest for the Historical Noddy
TWELVE: Country Pleasures, Suck’d on Childishley
THIRTEEN: Thanks, Rosencrantz and Gentle Guildenstern
FOURTEEN: The Return of the Gothic
FIFTEEN: Of Monkey Nuts and Hard-Boiled Eggs
SEVENTEEN: The Hand that Rocked the Cradle
NINETEEN: The Sadness of Everything
TWENTY-FIVE: Two Interesting Occurrences
TWENTY-SEVEN: A Death at Heathrow
Alice had been thinking about the Dead Boy for nearly six months before anyone else at Enderby’s found out about him. And that was funny, because for those six months the Dead Boy was the most important thing in Alice’s life: more important than her job in the Book Department, looking after Natural History; more important than her mother in the tiny flat in St John’s Wood; more important than her friends, her living friends, scattered around London.
Alice had never spoken to the Dead Boy. She had never felt, as she longed to feel, the fine dense blackness of his hair as it swept with such sensuous, careless, charm across his face, across her face. She had never touched the full Slavic lips that fell so easily into a pout – not the pout of a spoilt child or of a sulking teenager, but a little ‘o’, a pout of pure surprise, surprise at the onrush of death. She had never brushed her own lips against those high cheekbones, cheekbones which would have looked cruel, tyrannical, implacable, had they not slid into the fine smiling lines around the eyes. The eyes, to Alice, were something of a mystery. No matter how many times she replayed the incident, winding backwards and forwards, slowing it down or speeding it up, panning back to take in the whole street, or the whole of London, or zooming into ultra close-up, she could not settle on the colour of the eyes. It was not even the precise shade that was in question – it was not some unimportant semantic quibble about hazel or chestnut or rowan – it was that Alice could not even decide if they were blue or brown, dark or light. Sometimes they would burn through her with an intense cobalt light, or dazzle with shimmering bright crystal; at others they would fold in on themselves in wave after wave of growing darkness, like evening falling on a forest.
Had Alice known the Dead Boy for more than four seconds, or had she never gone for that seemingly harmless stroll, but rather sat on the imposing steps at Enderby’s with Andrew that lunchtime, as she often did, to eat a sandwich and breathe in the petrol fumes, while they talked about the oddness of people, and he tried to think of something clever and nice to say that wouldn’t trumpet his devotion in her ear like an elephant in musth, then everything would have been different.
Back in the office that afternoon, the afternoon when everything changed, Alice was surprised to find