After Alice

by Gregory Maguire

  Ada was not accustomed to thinking in such terms. Such aggressive equations.

  But crash they did not, or not so they noticed. The housemaid opened a button to let in some air. Though some peculiar sounds caught Ada’s attention, none of them seemed to be Jabberwockian, as she had come to think of it.

  “I always find a change of clothes so brightens the mood, don’t YOU?” asked the housemaid as she released Ada into the daylight. The child fell out of confinement onto her knees, which hurt like the dickens. It took her a moment to straighten up and turn around. In her new agility she still favored one leg.

  She found herself on a gravel walk. But for the housemaid, Ada was alone. “Where is this?”

  “The path you find yourself upon,” answered the housemaid.

  “What happened to the marionettes and to Humpty Dumpty?”

  “Oh, they were wanted at the garden party. They were afraid of being late. Humpty Dumpty didn’t want to be turned into a devil egg, which in the annals of kitchen science is the same thing as an angel egg. The Queen of Hearts has a robust temper, you see. And anger gives one an appetite. So her edible guests do try to keep her from losing her temper.”

  “But I wanted to go there, too,” said Ada. “I’m sure that’s where my friend Alice will be. She is ever one for a party, especially if there are charades, or games and prizes.”

  The housemaid had finished removing her seaweed robe. She was folding it into a small square, about the size of a pincushion. She popped it into her mouth. “How unfortunate if it starts to rain at the party, as I’ve just eaten my weather apparel,” she said. “Then again, seaweed gets so very wet in the rain.”

  Her voice was different than it had been. Ada realized that her young fresh face was now lined. She had turned pale. Her eyes blinked, rheumy and kind. She had shrunk, and her shoulders were hunched. She looked like the sort of aged matron who might be in charge of collecting tickets at a parish luncheon. “You’re not yourself,” said Ada.

  “Travel tires one, don’t you agree?” replied the old woman. “So I’ve changed my clothes. It seems to go on forever, life. Still, when I get home, no doubt I’ll feel sprightly again. Take my arm, dear, as I have trouble navigating over this treacherous gravel.”

  “Where are we?” asked Ada, looking about.

  “I have no idea. It seems perhaps to be a Zoological Plantation of some sort. I think we are the exhibit. Do you see the bars behind which we are caged?”

  The old woman indicated a set of low hoops, like croquet wickets, set in the ground along the edges of the path. They formed an airy, imbricated fringe between well-­kept lawns on either side.

  Ada said, “Those aren’t the bars of a cage. They are fences meant to keep us from walking upon the grass.”

  The old woman demurred. “They are for our own protection. Otherwise, visitors who come to stare at our peculiarities would pluck us to shreds and turn us into decorative items for their homes. What type of specimen are you?”

  “Begging your pardon, but I am no specimen.”

  “Oh, you most certainly are. I believe you may be a fine example of a Rogue Child. No one seems to be hunting after you to fetch you from this durance vile,” said the old woman. “As for me, I am a White Queen. Very rare in these parts. I frighten the natives. Quite often I frighten myself, but that is only for practice so I can do my job in the public mêlée.”

  Ada knew she ought to be polite to a member of the royalty. “I believe travel has made you confused. This is simply a garden path. We could step over that low ridge of iron hoops and trespass upon the grass whenever we wanted.”

  “Such ignorance in the young. If you think you are so free, try straying from your path. You should know the truth about captivity. Go ahead, my dear. Try.”

  Ada went to the edge of the walk and began to step over. The lifelong stiffness that had been absent since her fall through the shaft now seemed to afflict her in the hip, however, and she couldn’t raise her ankle more than a few inches. She turned to explain about her ailment to the White Queen, who smiled wincingly. Then the old woman directed her alabaster scepter toward her own feet. Ada saw that the Queen’s shoes were affixed to a dial of some sort, like a plaster stand.

  “Why, you’re a chess piece, more or less,” said Ada in amazement. “No wonder you are having a hard time walking.”

  “I glide but I do not jump. Shhhh, I believe we have company.” The White Queen cocked her head and rolled her eyes to one side meaningfully.

  Along the grass on the other side of the hooped edging strolled a Lion, a Unicorn, and an elderly Sheep. The Sheep was trailing some undone knitting out of a carpetbag.

  “Don’t look now,” said the Unicorn, “but the most revolting creatures are on display over there. Don’t look. Don’t.”

  All three of them turned and rushed to the edge of the path and leaned over, making faces at Ada and the Queen.

  “Just ambling along as if it owned the road. I call that sass!” said the Lion.

  The Sheep adjusted a pince-­nez. “I recognize a Queen when I see one in captivity. Would that all Queens met the same fate!” Her companions laughed halfheartedly but sent glances over their shoulders to make sure such sedition had not been overheard. “But what in nature or out of it could that other revolting thing be?”

  “It’s a mere trifle, no less,” said the Lion. “Either that or a plum pudding.”

  “I never saw a plum pudding with such a foul expression on its face. I do believe it’s not a comestible at all,” said the Unicorn. “It’s a mythical creature, I suspect. It doesn’t exist. It’s a child.”

  “We saw a child just a little while ago,” the Lion reminded him. “She existed.”

  “Ah, but where is she now?” The Unicorn shrugged. “Imaginary, I tell you. A matter of legend and superstition with no basis in fact. So is this one. Swords and swordfish, but it’s an ugly brute.”

  “I am not,” said Ada.

  “It thinks it’s talking!” said the Sheep. “Isn’t that droll, isn’t it queer! Hello, whiddle whillikums, how is your hawwible life today? Blah blah, it replies, as if it can understand us!”

  “Was the mythical creature you saw called Alice?” asked Ada.

  “It thinks it knows all about our lives. Did its owners give it a pamphlet to study before prodding it out of its Creature House to parade its ugliness before the paying public?” asked the Unicorn.

  “I think it’s rather dear,” said the Sheep. “I should like to take it home and hang its head on the wall above my occasional table.”

  “What is your occasional table when it occasionally is something else?” asked the White Queen politely, as if trying to change the subject from Ada to something less offensive.

  “I choose not to recognize it when we pass in the street,” replied the Sheep. “Sometimes it is an ornamental iron fawn in a dubious coiffure, sometimes a wheelbarrow putting on airs. I cut it severely.”

  “I like that one,” said the Lion, pointing. “Here, Queeny Queeny, if I point a stick at you will you snap at it with your little royal dentures?” He could see no stick at hand so he grabbed the Unicorn around the neck. With swiping motions he thrust the horn of his friend over the side of the path at Ada and the White Queen.

  “I’ll make a pudding of you,” said the White Queen. “When I hang my crown up, I spend my leisure time as a housemaid, so I have learned many tricks of the kitchen, believe me! I’ll thank you to mind your manners.”

  “It’s so real, yet so banal,” said the Sheep.

  “Let go of my horn,” said the Unicorn. “It’s ticklish.”

  “Did you fail to board the Ark? And did you drown?” Ada asked of the Unicorn. “Did Noah even try to save you?”

  “Rescue is a myth. Don’t believe a word of it,” said the Unicorn.

  “We mustn’t linger,”
said the Lion, releasing the Unicorn. “Zoos are a form of happy diversion, but the light is lengthening. We ought to push on. I hope you still have the invitation to the party?” he asked the Sheep.

  “Oh, dear, yes,” she said. “I understand there is to be an execution.”

  “What is to be executed?” asked the Lion.

  “Manners and fine taste, among other things. Let’s hurry along.”

  “Tell Alice!” cried Ada. “Tell Alice I am coming for her!”

  “Aren’t children so like real life?” said the Lion as they all opened up parasols and began to ascend in the breeze. “And yet so not, too.”

  “I still think it’s a trifle,” said the Unicorn.

  CHAPTER 30

  It is an ordinary day in Oxford, just one midsummer day in the early 1860s. The clock has struck one. Mrs. Brummidge has finished laying out the luncheon. She has let her employer know the table is set. She has dumped the water used for boiling the pudding into the stones of the soakaway, and she has sat down in the shade outside the kitchen doorway. She is sucking on a horehound drop.

  This story is spattering along on unregistered reaches of the edges of the famous town. The town hardly acknowledges the likes of Mrs. Brummidge. For her part, Mrs. Brummidge knows nothing, and will never know anything, about Charles Ryder and Sebastian Flyte and Zuleika Dobson, Harriet Vane and Lyra Belacqua and Jay Gatsby, George Smiley and James Bond, or even Captain Jas. Hook. They are yet to be imagined. In any case, Mrs. Brummidge doesn’t read fiction. She hasn’t the patience for it.

  It might be worth considering for a moment if the built landscape inspires in authors the invention of romantic individuals. Of course, architecture is impervious to rants, petitions, to shrieks of rape and the murder of martyrs and all the other human noise. But is one of the satisfactions of carved space—­that is, massive stone laid just so—­that it calls out for the creation of heightened characters to live up to it? Even if those outsize characters are ourselves, our own cleansed, resolved natures? The ancient Greeks may have thought so. (Drama was perhaps invented by the natural amphitheatre, and not the other way round.) The medieval masons of Chartres and Reims built windowed bluffs that laddered light into heaven; and peasants, in perceiving their own rights to salvation, began to imagine other rights, too. So Oxford, at its inception a huddle of theologicians and divines, grew into a city of dreams, and much good may come of that. Little surprise that Middle-­earth and Narnia were both discovered here.

  Yet this story takes place outside of the most famous sites. No murder in the Sheldonian, no undergraduate lust in the reading room of the Radcliffe Camera, no academic intrigue in the Senior Common Room of Balliol, no capering over the leads of Christ Church, no spicy infidelities in the back passage at the Ashmolean, no spiritual remorse before William Holman Hunt’s The Light of the World. Most of this story takes place on Oxford’s margins, the area where the maps of famous buildings and renowned sites tend to pale and give out. The undifferentiated reaches marked HC SVNT DRACONES. Beyond the old town walls. You won’t identify the exact mile of riverbank that ties together the lives of those in the Vicarage and the Croft. The river changes its course by grains of mud every day, imperceptibly. A rural district yields indifferently to development, plot by plot. And once the colleges open to women, fifteen, twenty-­five years hence, the late-­Victorian houses of Norham Gardens and the like, those anxiously fanciful, tall brick ships moored behind their garden gates up and down each lane, will obliterate this scrap of unsanctified north Oxford. It will remain only here, on these pages.

  Perhaps we love our Oxford because it seems eternal, and we can return arm in arm; while our private childhoods are solitary, unique to each of us alone, and lost. We cannot point them out to one another. Only, sometimes, in the text of a book here and there, we tap the page with a finger and say, “This is what my lost days were like. Something like this.” But even as we turn to the fellow in the bed beside us to say, “Yes, this passage here,” whatever it is we recognized has already disguised itself, changed in that split instant. There is no hope that our companion can see what we, just for a moment, saw anew and hailed with a startled, glad heart. Literary pleasure, and a sense of recognition and identification, real though they are, burn off like alcohol in the flame of the next heated moment.

  CHAPTER 31

  So, yes, the luncheon is set, and the great man is brought to table. He is not sat at the foot, for that was Mrs. Clowd’s place and will never be used again. He is placed at Mr. Clowd’s right hand. Mr. Josiah Winter sits at Mr. Clowd’s left. Rhoda brings forward the first course, a mock turtle soup. She retires to hover in the pantry. She listens to spoons clink upon porcelain. The men speak intermittently, affably, but without the race of competitive chatter Rhoda knows from meals at the boardinghouse in Jericho where on her off-­days she sometimes shares a meal with her sister, who is in ser­vice to an addlepated old cleric hunkered down among the other rubbishy types there.

  Rhoda has nothing to do with the disappearance of Alice. She has paid little attention to the child. The little girl, a bit of a pill. Rhoda pulls up Alice’s bedding every morning and wonders at the doll left on the chest. Alice never sleeps with a doll as other girls might. Was she always this rigid, Rhoda wonders, or am I only seeing her as she is today, these months after the passing of her mother?

  Alice? Eager to put every foot right, to live every moment correctly, to balance or redress that slashing crime perpetrated by an unfeeling universe? Or to forestall it happening again? Strange little Alice, playing in the penumbra of her father’s moral consternation. She can’t help but absorb some of the stress of that man’s grief. Put plainly: If we aren’t made of eternal stuff by a Creator who bent low upon the earth to fashion us, how can we hope for an eternal soul that might return to Him? And how can we hope for the promised reunion of souls when this created universe has run its course?

  Of course Rhoda doesn’t put Alice’s situation like this. She thinks, scatteredly, Peculiar mite, that Alice. Whatever haze of apprehension attends the thought of the missing child is quickly dissipated. In the moments before the soup bowls must be removed—­they dine à la Russe, in stages, unlike the hobbledehoyfreeforall ser­vice at the boardinghouses—­Rhoda goes to soak the tea towels in an enamel basin. She studies her own cuticles. She has moved on from any further reflection about Alice’s character.

  Mrs. Brummidge and Rhoda: These two ­people are here, too, in the story, along with the newborn Boy Boyce, that squalling infant, the presence of whom first sent his sister Ada hustling out of the Vicarage with a jar of marmalade. The dropsical Mrs. Boyce, the distractible Vicar; they inhabit their own Oxfords. They don’t realize that they might remember this day for the rest of their lives. The fatal day rarely announces itself, but comes disguised as midsummer.

  Our private lives are like a colony of worlds expanding, contracting, breathing universal air into separate knowledges. Or like several packs of cards shuffled together by an expert anonymous hand, and dealt out in a random, amused or even hostile way.

  CHAPTER 32

  Lydia wasn’t hungry. It was too hot, she thought. Still, Mrs. Brummidge would report to Mr. Clowd if Lydia neglected to eat anything. So she sat at the kitchen worktable with a hunk of bread and some cheese. She didn’t care for soup, but Mrs. Brummidge delivered a portion to her regardless. Lydia was put out at not having been invited to dine with the gentlemen, but in truth, Mr. Darwin scared her a little. And Mr. Winter probably would have ignored her over the joint and the peas, or been condescending. So perhaps it was best she stayed in the kitchen. With the residual heat of the oven, however, she felt dizzy and not entirely herself.

  “We can’t get rid of you, it seems,” said Mrs. Brummidge in a here’s-­trouble voice. Lydia looked up. She wasn’t surprised to see Miss Armstrong once more. That woman seemed yoked to this household today by a gum-­rubber cord. She lowered her parasol
and entered without invitation.

  “I am on the edge of being alarmed.” In the absence of a gesture of welcome, she sat down.

  “Only on the edge?” replied Lydia. “Is there any way I can help . . . ?”

  But the woman was calmer than she’d been earlier. Perhaps Mr. Winter had soothed a few of her separate hysterias. She accepted a bowl of soup and dandled the spoon above it, preparing her strategic remarks before beginning her meal. It’s the spoon of Damocles, thought Lydia.

  “I went across the river. No luck. Then I returned to the Vicarage. Ada is still gone,” she said. “I didn’t make a fuss as there was another medical moment going on. I’m surprised you aren’t more distressed at your sister’s continued absence.”

  “You don’t know Alice very well.”

  Lydia was glad Mrs. Brummidge was collecting something from the larder, so missing this exchange; otherwise she’d have charged into this conversation. Lydia went on. “Alice lives in a queer no-­man’s-­land, Miss Armstrong, as far as we can tell. She isn’t capable of malice and she hasn’t discovered deviousness. No doubt you’re wise to become exercised over the disappearance of Ada. But for this household to do the same over Alice’s adventures would be ill-­advised. Alice will return when she does. Likely, Ada will be with her. I think you are rather overwrought today.”

  “It’s hardly your place to say so,” snapped Miss Armstrong. Still, she was a guest here, and Lydia was as much as the Croft could boast in the way of a proper hostess, so Miss Armstrong scooped some soup as a gesture of closure. When she had swallowed the first mouthful she continued. “Mr. Winter waited with me while the boatman finished his lunch. Until Mr. Winter felt he must return to attend Mr. Darwin, I learned a great deal about the new work Darwin is considering.”