‘What, to be boring?’
He looked at her and smiled sweetly. ‘If that’s what you want, then go ahead and be boring. I’m all ears.’
‘That’s not fair. You can’t simply order someone to be boring just like that. What if I accidentally start being interesting?’
‘I’ll blow this whistle,’ said Andrew, holding up an invisible whistle by its invisible string. ‘Why don’t you tell me why you gave up science and became a slave in the temple of Mammary. I mean Mammon. I said Mammon.’
‘It was only ever meant to be a temporary thing. I still hope to go back to research, when, when …’ She thought for a moment about telling Andrew some of the truth. But this wasn’t the time. Instead she simply went off on another tack, explaining the joys of island biology, pointing out the paradox that islands are both fast-burning engines of evolution, churning out new species, and yet strangely impoverished when compared to similar sized areas within larger landmasses.
‘If you take an island of fifty square kilometres, it might have twenty species of bird found nowhere else, but that’s it. In a fifty kilometre section of Amazonian rainforest, you could have a thousand species. So islands are fascinating from an evolutionary perspective, but much less useful than continuous landmasses for biodiversity. I note that you haven’t blown your whistle yet for me being interesting. It’s lucky I haven’t told you about my M.Sc. thesis on the sub-varieties of land snails to be found in the Scilly Isles.’ They both laughed.
‘I can’t wait till I tell Leo about you and the snails. He’s already half obsessed with you and that’ll really get him going.’
Alice and Andrew exchanged glances. Andrew wasn’t sure if he’d deliberately suggested that the obsession was really his own. Couldn’t even say if she’d picked up any suggestion at all. But he did know that the sight of Alice’s face, calm and lovely amid the filth and litter all around her, made him want to pull over on to the hard shoulder and declare his adoration, quite possibly accompanied by weeping and the recitation of appropriate verses from the Romantic canon. Instead he scraped around for that elusive fourth gear, like Alice in being so close and yet so unobtainable, until the moment had passed.
Sometime during the fourth hour (an exit from the motorway was missed when Andrew stretched for the last of the jelly babies) as flat fields hunched into shoulders, and the road began to wind and dip, Andrew finally got round to talking tactics for the rummage.
‘Let’s go over it again. What do we know?’
‘About the seller or about the work?’
‘Let’s start with the work.’ Andrew’s apparently businesslike manner was at that point slightly undermined by a wild swerve to avoid some almost certainly imaginary obstruction in the road.
‘Christ! What was that? A hedgehog?’ he said.
‘I don’t think it was an anything,’ replied Alice, showing more savoir-faire than she felt. ‘Are you sure about not wearing your … never mind. Okay. Audubon’s Birds of America: first edition. Four hundred and thirty-um-five life-sized illustrations, double elephant folio – thirty inches by forty. Produced in four volumes, 1827 to 1838. Based on his watercolours, done partly in the field, partly in the studio.’ (Andrew glanced over to see if there would be any maudlin dreaminess here, and was relieved to find not. Alice had on her competent face, which was one of his favourites.) ‘No one was interested in America, where his lack of either scientific or artistic training was held against him, so came over here, and had his paintings and drawings engraved on copperplate and hand coloured. Still, most of them ended up in the States, with a few dotted around Britain and France. Cost a hundred and seventy-five pounds, or a thousand dollars, at the time, which meant that you had to be very wealthy to afford a set. Altogether maybe a couple of hundred sets in the world, last one sold in ninety-eight for seven million dollars.’
‘Very good,’ he said, clapping, which was unwise, and very nearly fatal. Luckily the other vehicle, a tractor pulling a trailer of steepling manure, was slow moving.
If it sounded a little bit like a test, that’s because it was. Oakley had asked Andrew to report back to him on how well Alice performed on this trip. Andrew himself was under a lot of pressure. Garnet Crumlish’s post had never been filled: the vacancy was left open, partly to save money, partly to encourage commitment and compliance from those who might feel themselves to be in the running. Internally, Andrew, Clerihew, Ophelia and Alice, had all been tipped as hopefuls. The inclusion of Ophelia (useless) and Alice (newish) was a goad to Andrew and however much he downplayed his commitment to the job, he knew that there was precious little for him if he found his name on the next, no doubt long, list of those whose services, experience, knowledge and love were no longer required by Enderby’s. He imagined brushing bluebottles from the top of rows of cheap editions of the Waverley novels, or the collected works of Edgar Bulwer-Lytton, in a smelly secondhand bookshop in … where? After the failure to get the Audubon, the Bloomsbury dealers wouldn’t touch him, nor even the Charing Cross Road. What did that leave – Hampstead? Golders Green? Stoke-on-Trent? Hull? Inverness? Stockholm? Reykjavik?
‘Made Audubon a celebrity in Europe,’ Alice continued. ‘He met Scott and various other influential people. Granted membership of the Linnaean Society, that sort of thing. But the project wasn’t a great commercial success. Too many subscribers dropped out, or, like the King, never paid up.’
‘Which king?’
‘Oh God, I don’t know – one of the Georges?’
‘Aha! A weak spot.’
‘Does it matter? Anyway, you’re history and I’m science, remember. I’m not supposed to know.’
‘I think you’ll find,’ said Andrew rather sniffily, ‘that a William sneaked in between George III and Victoria.’
Alice ignored him and went on.
‘So, when Audubon went back to America, he set out on a cheaper octavo edition, this time lithographs, again hand coloured. Still a beautiful object.’
‘And worth?’
‘Forty thousand pounds. Perhaps fifty, with a following wind,’ said Alice in a subtle pastiche of Andrew’s way of talking.
‘And we don’t know which this is,’ he replied, making a mental note to pay her back for that.
‘And we don’t know which this is. All we got was a handwritten note from the seller, stating that he had a complete Birds of America, and some other books, and would we care to do a valuation.’
‘So that’s what we’ve come to look at – check out the Audubon, pray, but not dare hope, that it’s the double elephant, and have a sniff through the other rubbish he wants to dump. What do we know about the punter?’
‘Well, his name’s Lynden, and he’s a baronet.’
‘Which means?’
‘He’s the lowest rank of hereditary nobility, doesn’t get to sit in the House of Lords, but we call him “Sir”.’
‘Actually I try to avoid calling them anything. Saves embarrassment all round. What else?’
‘Seems to be a bit of a recluse. Nobody in the office had ever heard of him, except Ophelia who keeps tracks on those sorts of things. She didn’t spell it out, but she suggested that there was some sort of distant family connection there, although she may just have been … well, doing whatever it is that she does.’
Andrew pictured her doing whatever it was that she did, or rather something that he liked to think about her doing. It involved a shower and a bar of soap. ‘She,’ continued Alice, unaware, ‘said that Lynden’s