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I can’t help feeling he just sees me as a bit of a fling, as a way of keeping his hand in until something or someone else comes along. There. Oh God, I sound like a typical female whiner. I’ll be writing to Marie Claire next.’

      Alice laughed. ‘Don’t worry, being in love … oh, I didn’t mean to assume that you love him, I just meant …’

      ‘It’s all right, go on; we’ll use “love” as a general term covering all emotional, romantic or sexual feelings directed towards another person. Scientific enough for you?’

      ‘Quite scientific enough. Everyone’s allowed to go a bit mad when they’re in love. I know … I know that I have.’

      There it was. She’d said it. They both knew that once the first words had been spoken, the whole story would inevitably emerge. But Odette was anxious not to ruin things by forcing the issue. She waited for a few seconds to see if anything would emerge, and when it didn’t, she said:

      ‘So then, what do you think I should do?’

      ‘You mean to … what? Help things along a little?’

      ‘Yes, I think that’s what I mean.’

      Alice’s eyes came alive. She was delighted to have been asked for her advice, especially by Odette, to whom she had always ever so slightly looked up.

      ‘Perhaps you don’t have to do anything. Perhaps you’re already doing exactly what you should be doing. Just being you.’

      ‘I know that’s sensible. It’s exactly what I’d say to you … to someone else in the same situation. But you must trust me: that won’t work here. Something needs to be injected, some, I don’t know, glamour, or something. Something urgent … special … magical.’

      ‘Heavens, Odette,’ said Alice, laughing again. ‘You’ve so come to the wrong person for advice about that sort of thing. I know even less, I mean less than you, about love and boys and things.’

      ‘But I think you know about magic.’

      They both paused and looked at each other, glasses symmetrically raised at chin height. Then Alice had an inspiration.

      ‘Oh, if it’s magic you want, why not take him to Venice?’

      ‘Venice! I’ve never been. Isn’t it a huge cliché?’

      ‘Well, I’ve only been once, but it’s just so miraculously beautiful, treated as an object. And I don’t even mean the galleries, although you shouldn’t miss the Academia. I went with the school. The canals were smelly, and horrid men pinched your bottom, and leered, but nothing could take away from the wonder of it. If it’s romance and magic you want, Venice has to be the place.’

      ‘Well, it’s certainly an idea. And what else am I supposed to spend my bonus on? It may just be that you’re a genius, Alice Duclos. You must know more about love than you claim.’

      Alice drained her glass and looked down at the polished wooden table.

      ‘Odette, when you asked the other day if I was okay, if anything was wrong, I should have told you about the … thing that happened.’

      ‘Alice darling, you know you don’t have to tell me anything you don’t want to. You don’t owe me a confidence because I told you about Matt.’

      ‘I know. It isn’t that. I think I do want to tell you. I can’t talk to Mummy about it. Not yet. Probably not ever. And there’s nobody else. The thing is that I’m in love with a dead boy. I saw him killed. He was knocked down close to the office. We looked at each other just before the car hit him. He smiled and closed his eyes. It sounds insane, but I know that he loved me in those moments before he died. His face was so peaceful, so beautiful. Odette, I can’t ever forget him. Every night I dream about him. Whenever I close my eyes, he’s there. I know him better than I know any living person. He’s in me like blood.’

      The noise, even the light, from the bar were instantly shut out. The table became the centre of a tiny universe, with nothing but the two of them centred there. Odette tried hard to keep the shock from showing in her face. This explained everything. And so was Alice genuinely mad after all? This kind of obsession was so far beyond her experience, her understanding. But Alice seemed to be able to function perfectly well, apart from the distance, the growing isolation. And wasn’t her love for this dead boy just an extreme form of the kind of intoxication they all felt when in love? Oh God, what to do, what to do? For Alice’s sake, she must be sensible, she must be practical.

      ‘Did you ever try to find out who he was?’

      ‘Try? … No. How could I? Why should I?’

      ‘Perhaps it might help?’ What Odette meant was perhaps it might help to get him out of your system. It wasn’t much, but it was something.

      Alice’s thoughts went on a different track. Help, perhaps, to know him more. Help to deepen and strengthen her love.

      ‘But I don’t know how to find things out about people, about people who …’

      ‘I don’t think it’s very hard. I have a friend, an acquaintance really, a journalist. I’m sure she could find out. It’s the sort of thing they do. When and where did he … was the accident?’

      Alice told her, unhesitatingly. The date, the time, the place: all were cauterised in her memory.

      And so it was agreed that Odette would ask her journalist to find out what she could about the Dead Boy. Alice felt a curious and not unpleasant numbness, the sort of vagueness she felt after her exams, but before the results had come out. It carried her through the next two weeks, until Odette called her.

      Kitty answered the phone, and called out a simple, brutal ‘You,’ before leaving the phone dangling in the hall.

      ‘He was a refugee from Bosnia. He came in 1991 as a fifteen-year-old, and so he was twenty-four. There’s an address and a phone number. I don’t know how Sarah managed to get that; boy, she’s good.’

      Alice wrote everything down in her red velvet address book.

      ‘Thank you, Odette. This … matters a lot to me.’

      ‘What will you do?’

      ‘I don’t know. What did you do about Venice?’

      ‘Venice? Well, I’ve booked it! It was such a great idea. I’d love to talk tactics with you.’

      But before they had the chance to speak, Kitty called out: ‘Alice, you’ve been gossiping for long enough. I am expecting a very important call.’ Alice knew that she wasn’t; or at least that the expectation was false. But it was futile to argue.

      ‘Yes, tactics. We’ll talk tactics.’

FIVE

       The Prior History of Andrew Heathley

      Andrew was sitting with his last surviving college friend, Leo Kurtz, in the Red Dragon of Glendower, a public house in Finsbury Park equally inconvenient for both of them but possessed of certain pleasant associations and, crucially, lacking a jukebox. The principal pleasant association was Zoë, a barmaid who’d worked there for one golden summer two years previously and who was, they both instantly decided, the most beautiful girl in London. Zoë had gone, returning to a course in Media Studies at Manchester University, but had left behind her a sweet white radiance which lifted the grimy old pub into a sort of Parthenon in their eyes.

      Leo had a face made for swashbuckling villainy, long and slightly twisted, as if flinching from the light slap of a woman’s gloved hand. His hair, black and thick, stood proudly on his head like the bristles on a goaded boar. He wore a black polo-neck jumper, recklessly challenging all comers to fuck off and read Being and Nothingness

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