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Olive was beginning to get very tired of going down to Wales with her mother on holiday every year and having nothing to do. It is a difficult trick to be tired of anything much when you are only fourteen and three-quarters years old, but Olive was just the sort of girl who could manage it. She would admit, if significantly pressed, that once or twice a summer it did not rain or drizzle or mist or thunder moodily, but never for long enough to do anyone a bit of good, and anyway, what is the use of having rain at all if the sun does not follow after? And now, Father Dear had left them for that pale, rabbity little heiress in London who they were only allowed to refer to as the Other One, and some damp, sheepy madness had taken hold of Darling Mother. She meant for them all to live here somehow, herself and Olive and Little George, mixing, presumably, among the scintillating society of shire horses and show-quality cucumbers.
Olive could have complained for England—it was her chief occupation in those drowsy silver afternoons and sopping woollen mornings. It was dreadful here. Even the potatoes and the ponies were depressed. There was only one pub and you weren’t allowed to dance in it. Her school friends got to go to Rome and Madrid and Mykonos on their holidays. If this place ever hosted so much as a knitting circle, the whole population would suffer simultaneous apoplexies from the scandal of it. She couldn’t even pronounce the name of the village in which Darling Mother had insisted on shipwrecking them. Pronouncing the name of the house was right out, and a more cramped and dreary paleo-lithic hut Olive had never dreamed of. It had never been planned nor built so much as p
iled up and given up on several times, leaving nothing anyone could properly call a house, but rather, a sort of rubbish bin full of bits of other houses lying on top of each other. Somebody had clearly once thought there was nothing so splendid in the world as Victorian moulding and crammed it in anywhere it would fit, and rather a lot of places it wouldn’t, including three hacked-off marble capitals meant to crown pillars in a grand bank or a Hungarian cathedral, which instead had to make themselves content with being mortared to the parlour wall without a single column to spare between them. The faucets leaked. The electricity could best be described as “whimsical.” The staircase groaned like it meant to give birth every time Olive so much as thought about mounting an upstairs expedition.
Worst of all, there were only twenty-one books in the library, and the landlord never changed them out because he was a perfectly slovenly old duffer who never could get all the buttons on his waistcoat closed at the same time. If they got fresh linens every fortnight, they ought to get fresh books, as well. It was only logic. Anything else was unhygienic.
Lingering in the Golden Gleam
He sees her first in the corner of Butler Library at Columbia University. It is late afternoon and it is 1932 and it is so hot the books blaze like a great knobbled furnace. He just rounds the corner and there she stands among the nonfiction stacks, adrift between The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire and The Golden Bough. She is wearing a long, unfashionably conservative blue dress and smart black boots. Her still-thick white hair huddles in a knot beneath a brown velvet hat. The skin beneath is pale and wrinkled as a crumpled page. He is also wearing blue, which he takes as a good omen. They match. They should match. Her dress is expensive, well-preserved, the sort of dress only brought out for occasions. Her hat is not. It is very shabby, with shabby silk violets clinging pessimistically to its shabby rolled brim. The soft, comforting sounds of idle chairs squeaking across polished floors and idle coughs squeaking out of polished lungs punctuate the long sentence of his silence, waiting behind her, waiting for her regard, waiting for her to notice him, as though he has not had his fill of being noticed in this life.
But suddenly he has not had his fill of it. He longs for her to turn around. He wills it to happen now. All right, then now. No matter. NOW. He is desperate for her to see him, desperate as thirst. She will know him at a glance, of course, as he knows her. They will talk. They will talk wonderfully, magically, their words spangled and glittering, sodden with meaning, a conversation worthy of being recorded in perfect handwriting, printed lovingly in leather and vellum, preserved like that blue dress, down to the last quotation mark. Unless she is not as he wants her to be. She might be awful, awful and bitter and angry and stupid and a dreadful bore. Anyone worthy, anyone special or sensitive in the least, would know by now that he was standing here like a bloody fool, would have turned around minutes ago, would feel the shape of him behind her like a shadow. Shouldn’t she glow? Shouldn’t she burn with the light of who she is? But of course, he does not. He never has. He scolds himself for his own expectations. It does not happen the way he wants it to. Nothing ever does anymore.
He clears his throat like a stage.
Now, Peter!
“Mrs. Hargreaves,” whispers the youngish man in the blue tie, “pardon the intrusion. My name is Peter. Peter Llewelyn Davies.”
She turns her back on the books and meets his eyes with a cool, sharp expression. She’s rather shorter than he imagined. But her eyes are far, far bluer than his dreams, bluer than her dress, his tie, the June sky outside the tall library windows. She holds out her hand. He takes it.
“You must call me Alice, Mr. Davies. Everyone does, whether I invite them to or not.”
I Am not Myself, You See
Olive dutifully kept up her soliloquy of despair during business hours, with short breaks for lunch and tea. But she didn’t mean more than an eighth of it on any given day. It was all a kind of avant-garde improvisational theatre staged for the benefit of Darling Mother.
The unhygienically unchanging books were a real problem, but she knew very well that the village of Eglwysbach was pronounced egg-low-is-bach, which always made her imagine the German composer running around a chicken pen in a powdered wig and speckled wings, crowing for his lost babies. The house went by the name of Ffos Anoddun. As that was nearly too Welsh to bear, Olive assumed it was something to do with fairies or a hillock or a puddle or all three together, and fondly referred to it as Fuss Antonym, which sounded reasonably similar, and comforted her, for to her mind, the opposite of a big fuss was a small contentment. Olive loathed all her school friends and most other people, and couldn’t have given a toss where they went on holiday, even if they’d ever think to confide that sort of thing in her direction. She felt rather affectionate toward the quiet, as it meant hardly anyone came round insisting on being other people at them. Olive liked knitting, and shire horses, and electricity was rather a lot of bother, when you thought about it. It was 1948. People had gotten along well enough without lightbulbs for nearly the whole history of everything.
And she especially loved the three capitals on Fuss Antonym’s parlour wall. She would sit beneath them of an afternoon in the big musty mustard-coloured wingback chair with silk horseradish-green cord whipping and whirling all over it and imagine the poor odd stone wolf and wild hare and raven heads in their curling pale ferns were holding the whole world up, and herself the only person ever to have guessed the truth.
It was safe, you see, to complain around Olive’s sole remaining parent. It was the expected thing. Darling Mother was a complainer in good standing herself. Misery was, she always said, the natural resting state of the young. It was only the old who could not bear unhappiness. Only the old who buckled beneath the hundred million pound weight of it all. As long as Olive kept up her whitewater torrent of disinterest and disaffection and discontent, Darling Mother judged her a Normal Girl, and therefore safe to abandon, never once asking what she was really thinking, or feeling, or wanting, or doing with her time, which suited Olive like a good coat. Little George never complained a bit, even when a sheep ate all his paintbrushes, and Darling Mother practically murdered him with concern and attention.
But she did guess at the shape of her child’s actual innards, occasionally. When some change in the weather troubled the meagre seams of maternal ore that ran deep within the mine of Darling Mother’s heart, she did grope after some connection. She changed the books once. She left a Welsh dictionary on Olive’s bedside table. And once, when she returned from one of her hungry scourings of antique dealers and auctions for more gloomy Victorian rubbish to weigh down the house, she paid a couple of the local boys to drag something silver and heavy and covered with a stained canvas into the parlour. She waved her thin, elegant hand and they left it leaning against the sooty mantel.
“I snatched it up just for you, Daughter Mine. I know you love all this sort of crusty ancient knick-knackery deep down, don’t let’s pretend otherwise. It’s a looking glass. I found it down in Llandudno at an estate sale. Give the old dear a good seeing-to, won’t you?”
Child of Pure unclouded Brow
“Alice, then,” he says.
The New York sun lights up his untidy brown hair, turns it into a golden cap, the opposite of Perseus, the opposite of himself.
The old woman touches her hat self-consciously. “Alice then; Alice now. Alice always, I’m afraid.”
“And I’m Peter.”
He is repeating himself, and feels foolish. But repetition is a very respectable literary device. As old as dirt and debt and Homer. She will forgive him. Probably.
“Aren’t you just?” laughs Alice. “Well, let’s have a look at you. One head, two shoulders, a couple of knees, rumpled suit, and half a day’s beard. Honestly, Peter, how could you come calling on me without a fetching green cap and pointed shoes? I think I deserve at least that, don’t you?”
Peter looks stricken. His throat goes dry and in all his days he has never wanted whiskey so badly as in this awful moment, and in all his days he has wanted whiskey very badly and often indeed. She did know him, then.
“Oh, I am sorry. I am sorry, Peter, that was unkind. Oh, I am a dreadful beast! It’s what comes of not mixing in company apart from cats and cups, you know. Don’t look quite so much like you’ve just been shot, dear, it doesn’t become. People have done it to me so many times, you see. I couldn’t pass up a chance to do it to somebody else, just the once! And who else in all this sorry world could I do it to but you? Allow an old woman her indulgences.”
“It’s quite all right. I’m used to it.”
Alice Pleasance Liddell-Hargreaves squares her shoulders, bracing as if for a solid punch to the chest. “You may pay me back, if you like.”
