But no, nothing. The only comment as she made her way slowly, like a bride, to her desk, was one of Pamela’s deafening whispers:
‘Alice, where have you been?’
Pamela, or Pammy, or Spam, as she was known with varying degrees of affection, had been there longer than anyone, and was seen as a sort of retaining wall which couldn’t be demolished without dire, if unspecified, consequences. Of course it was possible that she retained nothing at all, supporting only her own weight, which was considerable. Originally she had typed letters, but now that everyone did that for themselves her main responsibility was ordering the rubber bands which spilled and coiled in pointless abundance from every drawer, like intestines after a battle.
‘Mr Crumlish has been around. He’s got one of his faces on. You know, the one like Easter Island. He’ll be using one of those thingummy bobs … metaphors on you if you’re not careful.’
Mr Crumlish was then still part of the ill-defined strata of middle managers within Books, or, to give it its full title, Books, Manuscripts and other Printed Matter. Books was the smallest department in Enderby’s, the fifth biggest auction house in London, which is quite as unimpressive as it sounds. The office, an ornate Florentine palazzo, complete with dirty windows, and spluttering drains, and the grand statue of its founder, the buccaneering Mungo Enderby (1772–1861) in half armour, was the one relic of the glory days, back in the nineteen-twenties when Enderby’s was briefly acknowledged as one of the Big Three. But then came the scandals: the famous fraud case; the fake Canaletto; the 1949 public indecency charge against Ashley Enderby. And so eventually the Americans had come, or rather the Americans who ran the business for the Japanese bank which bought, at bargain basement rates, fifty-one per cent of Enderby’s. Ashley Enderby had died without issue, alone in Marrakech, befuddled with intoxicants, and the family share had gone to the Brooksbanks, obscurely related by marriage. The Brooksbanks, whose interests were principally rural, were content for the Americans and Japanese to take the decisions while they drew off what they could in the form of profit and prestige. Only one Brooksbank was still involved in any practical sense in the running of the company, and he only in the way that the froth is technically still part of the beer. But he was, at least, a link of sorts with the past.
‘Alice, where have you been?’ repeated Pamela, looking perplexed, the second of her two facial expressions after her more familiar vacuous jollity.
But Alice couldn’t think of anything to say back to Pamela, and nor could she meet her vacantly inquisitive stare. Where had she been? To heaven. To hell. Nowhere special.
To begin with not even Andrew, the closest thing she had to a friend at Enderby’s, noticed anything unusual. But he was preoccupied with his work that afternoon and was soon called in to a meeting, which lasted for the rest of the day. And of course Alice was still quite new then, and generally perceived to be a little strange. The problem had been summed up for her two months earlier, on a bright, cold February morning, by Mr Crumlish, whom Alice was destined never to call by his first name, Garnet. Mr Crumlish was showing Alice ‘the ropes’, a phrase he used with such relish she assumed he felt it to be an expression of thrilling vulgarity.
‘You see, if we leave aside dear, dear Spammy over there,’ – at this point Crumlish toodled with his fingertips over to where Pam was arranging paperclips; she burst into gales of girlish laughter, which set off curious seismic events in the various pendulous and drooping zones of her body: a small tremor about her middle; a major quake in the jowls; a volcanic eruption of spittle at the lips, and a devastating bust-tsunami – ‘everybody here is either a Toff or a Tart or a Swot. Oh. Are you allowed three “eithers”? I can’t remember. Anyway, I, of course, am a Toff. We don’t know very much, but the gentry do like one of their own to deal with. Not perhaps when it comes to going on a rummage: then they seem to prefer it if you act like staff, and you think yourself lucky if cook gives you a chipped mug in the kitchen. But when they bring in one of their gewgaws for a valuation they appreciate the rich and heady aroma of old money.’
Alice was clearly supposed to be shocked by Mr Crumlish’s performance. But she noticed that the people in the office, the twenty or so men and women arranged in clumps about the room, paid him no attention, despite the arch and actorly projection of his voice. She assumed that they had heard it all before; perhaps received the same initiation themselves.
‘Ophelia,’ continued Mr Crumlish, ‘is, as you can see, a Tart. Pretty, pretty, pretty.’
With each ‘pretty’, Mr Crumlish twitched the hem of his pin-striped suit, flashing the vivid lilac lining.
Alice quickly glanced in the direction that Mr Crumlish had flicked his thin wrist. She saw a young woman of astonishing, languorous beauty, playing idly with her long dark hair. She seemed to have nothing else to do. Alice instantly felt shabby: her own long hair was cheaply cut, underconditioned, and prone to acts of reckless rebellion; her clothes were ill-matched, picked up as the sales were entering the please please please don’t buy me phase.
‘The Tarts,’ continued Mr Crumlish, breaking the spell that Ophelia’s beauty had cast over Alice, ‘tend not to know very much either, but they are easy on the eye, and it’s so much cheaper than getting the decorators in. Anyway, what else would they do with their History of Art degrees? The Swots, on the contrary, know everything; not everything about everything, but everything about something. Couldn’t do without the Swots. Could do without the smell.’
‘The smell?’ Alice was mystified.
‘You know, the stale, composty, damp-tweed aroma, combined with the smell of a shirt worn for a second, or even third, day, mixed finally with the faint, sweet tang of distressingly recent onanism. I present to you Mister Cedric Clerihew.’ He pronounced Cedric ‘seed-rick’, which Alice hadn’t heard before. She had no way of knowing if Crumlish was being amusing. Clerihew certainly wasn’t going to put her right. He was a small round person, like a globule of some unappetising but not actively repulsive liquid. Like many round people, his age was difficult to estimate, but certainly above twenty and below forty. He was very neatly dressed, almost like a boy receiving his first Holy Communion. He smiled and sweated towards Alice, but Crumlish swept her on and away before he had the chance to speak to her, or reach out with his little hands, the fingers of which looked a knuckle shorter than the usual complement.
‘Poor boy,’ said Crumlish, this time in a voice that only Alice could hear, ‘one day he might, by pure good fortune, stumble upon the right posterior, but, until that happy time, he licks in vain.’
Alice giggled too loudly, hiding her wide mouth behind her hand. A couple of faces turned, Ophelia’s among them. She performed what must have been a very deliberate up-and-down look of dismissal. Anyone who’d cared to glance towards Clerihew would have seen him staring intently at his desk, his face red, his mouth set hard. Mr Crumlish, pleased with the response, moved Alice on through the large, book-splattered room.
‘But you, Alice, what are you? Not, obviously, one of the Tarts. I’m afraid your degree, what was it? Of course, Zoology of all things, suggests that. Not to mention your commendable lack of vanity.’
As was perhaps intended, Alice took the statement that she lacked vanity as a hint that she ought to rectify the deficit.
‘Nor, despite your name, which, between the two of us I don’t entirely believe, do you appear to be one of us … I mean a Toff. That only leaves the Swots. And, my dear Alice, you really are far too fragrant to be a Swot. I fear you may be sui generis, which is frightfully inconvenient for the … oh, what is the word? A putting-things-into-classes person?’
‘A taxonomist. Was that a test, Mr Crumlish?’
All the while they had been winding their way between the desks, each carrying its burden of computer and heavy reference books. In the far corner they finally came to two facing desks with a low partition between them. One was free, and the other occupied by a young man who might have been handsome had the frown lines been etched a little less deeply.
‘Oh,’