Читать книгу The Seed Collectors - Scarlett Thomas - Страница 9

Funeral

Imagine a tree that can walk. Yes, actually walk. Think it’s impossible? You’re wrong. It’s called the walking palm. Its thick dreadlocky roots rest on the ground rather than inside it, and when it has had enough of being where it is, it quietly uproots itself, like a long-wronged wife, and walks away, at a speed of just over one metre per year. In the time it takes the walking palm to flounce out, nations will fall, people will die of old age, ancient secrets will be told, and new-born babies will grow into actual people who . . .

Bryony and the children have gone, and Fleur is now listening to her friend Clem Gardener on the radio talking about the walking palm, Socratea exorrhiza, and the challenges of filming its journey. It took over ten years to film it walking just fifteen metres, out of the shadow of a recently erected logging station. On the time-lapse film it staggered along desperately like something that had just been born or was just about to die. But the walking palm certainly knows how to travel. It does not need tickets, or require transfers, or have to fill in visa forms. It does not put so much hand luggage in the overhead compartment that it falls on people. It just goes. Most species in Clem’s Academy Award-nominated documentary Palm find some way of travelling, of course. If they can’t move themselves around, then they produce seeds and get birds to move them, or animals, or us. And some plants have amazing ways of producing seed. The talipot palm, Corypha umbraculifera, which can live to over 100 years old and only flowers once in its life, produces the biggest inflorescence in the world, made of millions of flowers. Now there’s a real commitment to the next generation. Some of the 2,400 species of palms around the world are known to actually flower themselves to death. It’s called hapaxanthy . . .

‘You mean they commit suicide by flowering too much?’ says the presenter.

‘It’s quite common,’ says Clem, in her low, underwatery voice. ‘They put all their energy into flowering – or, in other words, attempting to reproduce – and there’s nothing left for anything else. Their roots wither and die.’

‘So it’s not just because it’s beautiful?’

‘Nothing in nature is “because it’s beautiful”, not really,’ says Clem.

Fleur is finishing her tea. It’s a homemade blend of dried pink rosebuds, passion flower, cinnamon and honey. It’s very soothing. Since Bryony and the children have gone, she has also added some of the opium she grows in the garden. She looks out of the window of the old dowager’s cottage that Oleander gave her on her twenty-first birthday and raises the antique teacup to the robin she has kept alive for the last seven winters. He cocks his head. Fleur is still in the cottage. If she goes out to do some gardening, there might be live worms, or the slugs that she sometimes puts in a saucer for him. But Fleur won’t garden today. He’ll have to make do with the dried fruit she put on his table yesterday.

‘Oleander is dead,’ she tells him through the window. ‘Long live Oleander.’

She drinks deeply from the cup.

The robin understands, and begins to sing his oldest and most sorrowful song.

‘Mummy?’

Bryony barely hears the word any more.

‘Mummy?’

‘Hang on, Holl.’

‘OK. But, Mummy, just quickly?’

‘I’m trying to listen to Clem, Holly. You should listen too. She’s your godmother.’

‘Yeah, I know, and she’s also like my millionth cousin, a thousand times removed.’

‘She’s your second cousin, once removed. My cousin.’

‘We could have stayed at Fleur’s to hear her.’

‘Yes, but I think Fleur wanted to be on her own for a bit. And anyway, we’ve got to get home. Daddy’ll be making dinner. And you’ve got homework to do.’

Bryony turns up the car radio, but Clem has stopped talking. Now there’s a guy who had to be rescued from somewhere, possibly Antarctic Chile, although Holly was Mummying over that bit. The format of this programme is supposed to be a group discussion, but Bryony knows that Clem probably won’t speak again. At school she had a habit of saying one clever thing in every class, and then drifting off to God knows where while Bryony highlighted all her notes in one of three fluorescent colours and Fleur learned mindfulness by stabbing herself with a protractor. Every so often the biology teacher said something about how sad it was that these three weren’t at all like their mothers. In fact, at fourteen, their mothers – frail, beautiful Grace, bold Plum and the legendary Briar Rose – had also been terrible students, interested only in the Rolling Stones, but no one remembers that, because it doesn’t fit the story of how they become famous botanists. Or famous-ish. Or famous-ish mainly for disappearing while on the trail of a miracle plant that probably never existed, or possibly killed them all.

‘Mummy? Am I a tree? She said that people aren’t like trees, but I am, in a way, aren’t I?’

‘Yes, Ash. You are, in a way.’

‘More than I’m a village anyway.’

Having a son called Ash, while living in a village called Ash, hadn’t seemed anything worse than a bit cute when they named him. There aren’t that many botanical names for boys, after all, and at least Ash could be short for Ashley if he ever wanted to get away from the plant thing. Bryony’s husband James was very keen on the old Gardener family tradition, though, and in the end it came to a toss-up between Ash and Rowan. Ash himself has since pointed out that they could have chosen Alexander, William or Jack (in-the-hedge). On that occasion – Ash’s eighth birthday, or perhaps it was his seventh – James told Ash he was lucky not to be called Hairy Staggerbush, Fried Egg Tree, Thickhead or Erect Lobster Claw, all of which are apparently real plants.

Bryony and James have no idea of the stupid conversations Ash has pretty much every day at school when someone asks him, yet again, why he’s called Ash when he lives in Ash, as if he named himself. Being named after a grandfather or a footballer or a TV character is fine. But a whole village? All kids know that no one should be named after the place they live, unless they are Saint Augustine or something, or Saint Stephen or Saint George – but in those cases you become famous first and then someone names a place after you. On his own, Ash likes being named after a tree that has magical powers. But he’s hardly ever on his own. He is dreading going to secondary school in Sandwich or Canterbury, where people will ask his name and where he comes from and both answers will be the same, which will make him sound retarded. He is already practising shrugging and saying ‘Oh, just some boring village’, but it’s not that convincing. Maybe the house will burn down, on some lucky day when there are no people or cats inside it (which is virtually impossible: there’s always life in Ash’s house), and they’ll have to move.

‘Clem doesn’t make cakes like Fleur,’ says Holly. ‘And she wears really weird clothes. But then I suppose that’s because she makes documentaries, and . . .’

‘Don’t you think Fleur wears weird clothes?’

‘No. Fleur’s pretty. She wears dresses. And interesting combinations of things.’

Bryony sighs. ‘Well, yes, I suppose everyone knows that dresses make you pretty.’

‘What does that mean, when you say it like that?’

‘Like what?’

‘Is it irony?’

‘How do you know about irony?’

‘Er, school? Anyway, Mummy, you wear dresses.’

It’s true. But while Fleur wears things you’d see in the thicker magazines, or on the size-zero celebrities she works for, Bryony usually wears a version of the clothes Holly wears but better cut and in darker colours: jersey dresses or big jumpers over leggings, all made by Backstage, Masai or Oska. What Bryony used to think of as fat people’s clothes. Yes, yes, of course all the styles come in S and even XS, but it remains unclear why thin people would need clothes with elasticated waists and asymmetric folds around the middle. Almost everything Bryony now wears goes in the washing machine at forty degrees and doesn’t need ironing. Bryony loves fashion, but it doesn’t love her. She’d like to be a Jane Austen heroine – or actually even one of the heroine’s shallow friends who only cares about fashion and won’t go out in the rain – but she’s way too fat for that. This season it’s all about clashing florals and colour blocking. You can clash florals if you’re a thin seventeen-year-old. If you do it at Bryony’s age you look as if you don’t own a mirror. If you colour block at Bryony’s size you look like a publicly commissioned artwork.

‘Mummy?’

‘I’m still trying to listen to this.’

‘Can’t you go on Listen Again later when you’re filling in your food diary?’ says Holly. ‘Anyway, Mummy?’

‘Hang on.’

‘Mummy? How many calories are there in a cake?’

‘What kind of cake?’

‘Like the cakes Fleur made.’

‘Did she make them? I thought she bought them. Or didn’t she say that Skye Turner sent them?’

‘No, Mummy, she said Skye Turner sent her cakes once. But they were like weird low-carb brownies or whatever. She made these ones. They were spicy and everything – not like stuff you can buy. Anyway, how many calories do they have?’

‘You shouldn’t be worrying about calories.’

‘I’m not worrying. I’m just interested.’

‘About two hundred, I think. They were quite small.’

‘So in a day, you could eat, like . . .’

In the rear-view mirror, Bryony can see Ash screw up his eyes like a little potato.

‘Don’t say “like”, Ash. Say “around” or “roughly” or something.’

‘Like, seven and a half cakes,’ says Ash. ‘Wow.’

‘Yeah, but only if you eat basically nothing else,’ says Bryony.

‘Awesome,’ says Ash, in something like a loud whisper.

‘Cake is for babies,’ says Holly. At the party all the girls made sugar sandwiches with white bread and huge slabs of butter and honey to help the sugar stick and the grown-ups didn’t even stop them. The grown-ups were too busy smoking at the bottom of the garden and talking about whether they would rather fuck a fireman or an anaesthetist and looking at pictures of holidays on someone’s phone. Holly’s insides now feel a bit gluey. And the thought of the butter she ate – yellow shiny poo – makes her want to vomit.

‘How many cakes does Fleur eat, Mummy, do you think, in a typical day? Or a typical week. Would you guess at closer to ten, fifty or a hundred? Mummy?’

‘As if anyone would eat a hundred cakes a day, you total spaz,’ says Ash.

‘Mummy?’

‘What? Oh, who knows? I think she makes a lot more than she eats. I think she likes the way they look more than the way they taste.’

‘Mummy?’ says Holly. ‘Is that why Fleur’s so thin in that case, if she only looks at cakes but doesn’t eat them?’

‘Who knows? Maybe she’s just got lucky genes. She’s always been thin.’

Lucky genes. Is that what it comes down to? Or maybe Fleur doesn’t eat family packs of Kettle Chips when no one is watching. Maybe she doesn’t add half a bottle of olive oil to a pot of ‘healthy’ vegetable soup like James and Bryony do, or use three tins of coconut milk (600 calories per can) in a family curry as James does. Maybe she’s still on the Hay diet, like Bryony’s grandmother Beatrix, who always talks of ‘taking’ food, never ‘eating’ it, and has given Bryony some kind of food-combining cookbook for the last three Christmases. Food combining means not eating protein and carbohydrates together. That would mean no Brie with crusty bread, no poached egg and smoked salmon on toast, no roast chicken and potatoes. Bryony feels hungry just thinking about it.

‘Mummy? Have I got lucky genes?’

‘Depends what you think is lucky.’

They have left Deal and are driving on the main road back towards Sandwich. It’s a warm day, and very bright. Spring is certainly coming. On the right, somewhere beyond the flat fields and the country park built on the old colliery slagheap, is the English Channel, with its wind turbines and ferries and migrating birds. On the left, more fields, full of scarecrows. In the distance Bryony sees the reassuring old Richborough Power Station cooling towers huddled together like three fat women on an eternal tea break. Then, in one of the fields on the left, she suddenly sees something hovering, perfectly balanced above the scarecrows.

‘Mummy, why are we stopping? Arrrgh . . .’

‘Oh. My. God. Mummy, you are even worse than Daddy.’

Both children wave their arms and legs about, pretending they are having a car crash, as Bryony pulls into a farm’s small driveway.

‘Look at that,’ she says softly.

‘At what exactly, Mummy?’

A huge bird of prey. Swooping. It’s beautiful, and it’s just . . . there. Bryony struggles to remember the names of local raptors that James has told her. Could it be a hen harrier? A marsh something-or-other? A kestrel? Or do you only see kestrels in Scotland? It doesn’t matter; she can look it up in the bird book when she gets home. Maybe they can all look together.

‘Oh, I must tell Daddy . . .’

She begins noting its features. And then she sees the wire holding it up.

‘What are we supposed to be looking at?’

‘Nothing.’ Bryony restarts the engine. How stupid. How could she not have seen the wire from the road? The raptor is a fake, like the scarecrows. Even the starlings aren’t fooled; hundreds of them are flying around everywhere.

‘Mummy, did you think that was a real bird?’

Ash and Holly start to giggle.

‘Mummy, you’re a right wally.’

Which is exactly what James will say.

‘So how was your swim today?’

‘Fucking awful.’

Clem is rooting around in the drawer for something. They have finished listening to the repeat of her radio programme and the kitchen is suddenly very quiet. Ollie is not going to try asking about Oleander again. Or if he does he will make sure he does not mention the inheritance, which made him sound like a total cunt before.

‘What have you lost?’

‘My vegetable peeler.’

Despite being married, they have separate vegetable peelers, just as they have separate gym memberships at separate gyms with different swimming pools.

Ollie shrugs. ‘I haven’t had it.’

Clem sighs. ‘What went wrong at the swimming pool this time?’

‘This time.’

‘What?’

‘Well, you say it as if I’m some kind of twat who can’t even go to the swimming pool without some major drama, and . . . What?’

‘Nothing.’ She has now found her vegetable peeler, that minimalist piece of stainless steel that looks as if it would slash your wrists in an instant. Ollie’s peeler has a sensible rubber grip. With Clem’s you can peel every which way, as if you were fencing, or literally doing battle with your vegetable, really fucking killing it. Ollie’s just peels sensibly. Clem starts killing something. It’s a butternut squash.

‘Anyway . . . ?’

‘Well, OK, so basically I’d just finished in the gym when the bus turned up. And – don’t look at me like that – I know this is going to sound cruel but I totally wasn’t in the mood for twenty – yes, twenty – and no, I’m not going to say the word “spaz”, or “flid”, OK? – people with “learning difficulties”. Obviously I’m sure they are all lovely and wonderful and I’d fucking hate their lives but they don’t have enough helpers. And they don’t wash them before they put them in the swimming pool. And that pool is disgusting enough to begin with, as you know. Like, for example, the clump of hair is still there. After a YEAR. Stop looking at me like that. And try not to slash your wrists with that thing. You think I’m exaggerating? OK. Right. One of them was literally a woman with a hunchback – WHICH I AM NOT JUDGING, OK – but she was also covered in hair. I mean she looked like a yeti. A hunchback woman yeti in my swimming pool. The guys are also all perfectly lovely, I’m sure, although my personal preference would be to have them wash before getting into a pool with me, but one of them not only does not wash, he wears these huge corduroy shorts that probably still have things – like used tissues, if he actually used tissues – in the pockets, and he goes to the deep end and just bobs up and down picking his nose while I’m trying to swim. And then there’s this other one who is huge and black – YES, I KNOW IT DOESN’T MATTER BUT I AM TRYING TO PAINT A PICTURE FOR YOU – who does this superfast front crawl which is quite impressive really, but he keeps his eyes shut and his head entirely underwater so he spends his whole time mowing down babies and the elderly while the yeti shakes with fear and sort of moos in the shallow end. I mean, can’t they just shave her?’

‘Can you pass me the Le Creuset roasting tin?’

Ollie goes to the wrong cupboard and gets the wrong tin.

‘I mean, is it unethical to shave a yeti-woman if you have one in your care?’

‘I am not responding to this.’ Does she almost smile then? Maybe not. ‘I mean, you don’t shave before you get in the pool.’

‘Ha! You have responded. The woman hath . . .’

‘You’ve got a hairy back. That’s the wrong tin.’

‘My back isn’t that hairy. And I’m a man. Which one do you want?’

‘The Le Creuset one.’

‘I don’t know what that means.’

‘Yes, you do.’

‘No. Unlike you I don’t carry an inventory of our bourgeois cooking equipment around with me in my head at all times. What does Le Creuset even mean?’

‘Don’t be a dick. It’s the one with the handles.’

‘If you mean the third-degree-burn pan, why don’t you say so?’

Clem sighs. Ollie gets the right roasting tin. And a beer.

‘They could wax her. How traumatic would that be? She could go to Femme Naturelle.’ Femme Naturelle is the beauty parlour that has just opened up around the corner from their house in Canterbury. If she’s in a good mood Clem sometimes jokes about going there for a Brazilian, or even a Hollywood. Her pubes are perfect as they are, of course: a little black triangle of something like AstroTurf or . . . The image is going wrong so Ollie abandons it. ‘Yeti Naturelle.’

‘That was almost funny before you spoiled it.’

When they get in, Ash snuggles up in the conservatory with his nature book. Holly gets the spare laptop and loads a DVD onto it: something with a 15 certificate about bitchy schoolgirls that her uncle Charlie got her last Christmas. Bryony suggested this on the way home, mainly as a way to stop Holly pointing out every other fake bird that they drove past. The house smells of baking bread, as usual, and also chocolate. James must have made a cake too. So much cake in one day.

‘Why is she doing that?’ asks James, when he comes in from the garden.

‘Mummy,’ wails Holly from the conservatory. ‘Tell him you said I could.’

‘I said she could.’ Bryony kisses him. ‘How are you?’

‘I’m fine,’ says James. ‘Been baking.’

‘I can smell. Something lovely that I shouldn’t eat.’

‘Chocolate and beetroot brownies. Beetroot from the garden!’

Bryony doesn’t ask if it’s for a newspaper assignment. James bakes all the time: bread every day and cakes twice a week. Once James baked ‘the most calorific cake in Britain’ from a recipe in one of the tabloids so he could construct a witty piece about how he didn’t think his organic eco-kids would eat it, but of course they did. Holly was actually sick: brown and pink vomit all over her bedroom. Bryony can’t remember what caused the pink that time. Can’t have been beetroot. Must have been jam. And why has James used fresh early-season beetroot in brownies? Couldn’t he just have roasted it? Everyone loves roasted beetroot, and it roasts so quickly when it’s so fresh. He could also have put it in a salad.

‘Good to get more veg in the kids,’ Bryony says.

‘That’s what I thought. And you can have one, can’t you?’

She opens the fridge and gets out the Villa Maria Sauvignon Blanc she started last night. There’s only about a third of the bottle left, so she finds another white and puts it in the freezer just in case. She walks across the room and selects an unchipped Dartington Crystal glass from the dresser. It’s three minutes past six. The clocks went forward this morning, so in some way it’s really only three minutes past five.

‘Do you want one?’ she asks James.

‘No thanks.’ He looks at his watch. ‘How was your afternoon?’

‘All right. Ash still won’t go near the deep end when the wave machine’s on, after whatever it was that happened last week. The party was pretty boring. Poor Fleur’s in a state but not talking about it. Oh, and after we left Fleur’s Holly remembered she’d left her blue scarf behind so we had to go all the way back to Deal. A lot of toing and froing, and she’s basically had way too much sugar. Cake at the party of course, and some disgusting-looking sweet sandwiches, cake at Fleur’s . . . But I guess at least she’s eaten something. She’s pretty scratchy now, though.’

‘How is watching an unsuitable DVD going to help?’

How is giving her even more cake going to help? But Bryony doesn’t say this.

‘At least she’s quiet.’

Bryony pours the wine. What is it about the first sip of a crisp Sauvignon Blanc on a mild early spring day? It’s like drinking a field full of cold, slightly shivery flowers.

‘And you say Fleur isn’t good?’

‘Well, as usual she didn’t say anything at all about how she was feeling. I wish she wasn’t all alone in that huge cottage. It must be so stressful having to suddenly take all responsibility for Namaste House and all the therapy and yoga and everything. And all the famous people who are always hanging around there . . . Although I suppose whoever inherits the place will probably sell up quite quickly, but then what will she do? It’s all she’s ever known. Of course she owns her cottage, but presumably whoever inherits the house will do some kind of deal with her so that the estate can be sold whole . . .’

‘When’s the funeral going to be?’

‘A week on Thursday. They need time to get in touch with everyone. Potentially people could be coming from India, Pakistan, America . . .’

Bryony goes to the rack to find a bottle of red to open for dinner. Should she open two? No, one will be fine. But why not make it the 15.5% Tempranillo in that case? Get a bit of spice and warmth in her before the week ahead. She starts looking for the corkscrew, which is never where it last was. One of the things Bryony’s father taught her was that you should always open a bottle of red wine an hour before you want to drink it, or longer if it’s more than five years old. Bryony vaguely remembers the evenings when he used to open two bottles at once, and her mother would drink one of them by herself, before dinner, looking vampiric and oddly expectant. After dinner her father smoked hash and her mother drank the second bottle of wine and they talked about going back to the Pacific to continue their study of the Lost People while Bryony read Jane Austen and wished for the phone to ring.

‘Do you want to come and see something?’ James says.

‘What is it?’

‘Come and see.’

She sighs. ‘Hang on. I want to get this open. And I’ll have to change my shoes.’

Bryony uncorks the wine, takes off her boots and puts on a pair of dirty blue Converse trainers that she has set aside for gardening; not that she ever has time for gardening at the moment.

‘Holly? Ash?’ calls James. ‘Do you want to see what Daddy’s made?’

‘They’re all settled down,’ says Bryony.

‘Do we have to?’ calls Holly.

James sighs. ‘No, but you’ll miss something exciting.’

The kids put on their shoes and everyone walks to the bottom of the garden to admire the bird table that James has put together this afternoon, presumably between digging up beetroot and baking. Bryony doesn’t ask why he hasn’t been writing, and doesn’t say anything about the cats. She’ll have to get them bells. Then again, birds come to the garden anyway, and the cats kill them anyway, and she’s never actually bothered to get them bells before. Then there’s bird flu, although no one’s said anything about bird flu for ages. Why can’t she just like it? It does look nice where James has put it.

‘That’s lovely,’ Bryony says, kissing James again. ‘We can watch the birds from the kitchen. But you didn’t do it all today, as well as making brownies and digging up beetroot?’

‘You are so unbelievably gross,’ says Holly. ‘When will you be too old for kissing?’

‘Never,’ says Bryony. ‘We’ll still be kissing when we’re a hundred.’

‘It could be a lot worse,’ says James, raising an eyebrow at Bryony. ‘Eh, Beetle?’

‘Yuck! That’s even more gross. I know what you’re thinking, and I know what it means when you make your eyebrows do that. And when you call Mummy “Beetle”.’

The kids slink back off to the conservatory.

‘Remember the goldfinches?’ says James.

‘Oh God, yes. Of course. How could I forget something like that?’

How indeed? Although when you are working full-time and studying part-time it’s easy to forget things. But of course the goldfinches were amazing. One day last autumn – it must have been just before Halloween – ten of them turned up in the back garden. Given that there had never been any goldfinches in the garden this seemed to be something of a miracle. And they were so impressive with their bright red heads and wing flashes of pure gold, like peculiar little superheroes, all masked and caped. James declared them his favourite bird, and Holly said she thought they were too ‘bling’ but nevertheless ended up spending hours watching them through the binoculars that Uncle Charlie bought for her. The lunchtime after they arrived Bryony got chatting to the woman from Maxted’s who recommended sunflower hearts and niger seed, and a proper feeder for the niger seed, and a little hanging basket for the sunflower hearts, all of which Bryony bought. How unlike Mummy it was to come home with something that was not clothes, shoes, chocolate or wine! Anyway, these offerings also went down well with the goldfinches, and Bryony, James and the kids spent the next day trying without success to take just one good photograph, but the little buggers would not keep still, and . . .

Such strange, slow little birds, gathering their gold capes around them, pulling their red masks down over their eyes and settling down on the niger seed feeder for what seemed like hours, as if it was some kind of opium den. And the next day another ten showed up. And the same again for the next three days until there must have been fifty goldfinches regularly visiting their garden. They would all eat slowly and seriously for quite a long time, sometimes getting a bit flappy and knocking each other off the feeders but mainly just chompchomp-chomping like superhero-puppets controlled by very stoned puppeteers. Then they would all take off and fly bobbing and tweeting around the village sounding like the ribbon on an old cassette tape being rewound. This went on for about a week, and then they were gone. Bobbing and tweeting their way across the Channel to Europe in a group of over 350, according to the Sandwich Bird Observatory.

‘I want to be ready for them this year, if they come back.’

‘They were so beautiful.’

‘Like you.’ James strokes Bryony’s face. ‘It’s still light,’ he says, ‘and warmish. You could put on a cardigan and bring your wine out here. I’ll get one of the deckchairs out for you.’

James is always trying to get Bryony outside in the fresh air. Perhaps more fresh air will help her become more like ethereal, perfect Fleur, who has been known even to sleep outside when the moon is full. Although he has never said this, of course. He says Bryony is beautiful. He says Bryony is beautiful and then Bryony begins to think poisonous things like this. Anyway, James will bring one deckchair out and Bryony will sit in it alone, while James cooks dinner. That’s the offer. Is it a good offer or a bad offer? Would it be better if she decided that she wanted to come and sit outside and got the deckchair herself? Once James told her she made too much of things, adding meaning that was never there. Bryony laughed and reminded him that being an estate agent meant having to do that all the time and that she couldn’t help it if it was now in her nature to make cupboards sound like spare bedrooms. Although of course what he was objecting to was her tendency to make spare bedrooms sound like cupboards.

‘This isn’t for your column, is it?’ asks Bryony.

‘What?’

‘I don’t know. Making a bird table. I mean, the goldfinches won’t come back until October or November. If they come back at all. In the meantime are you going to write about how hilarious it is when one of the cats brings in a bird? How Daddy has to deal with it because Mummy’s too grumpy, or too squeamish, or late for a viewing, or at a seminar . . .’ Or hungover, but that sort of goes without saying these days.

James’s column is on page four of the glossy magazine of the biggest selling liberal weekend newspaper. It’s called ‘Natural Dad’. On the facing page there’s a column called ‘City Mum’. The idea is that James, once a well-known nature writer but now better known for his column, writes about living in the countryside with his two down-to-earth children and his increasingly bad-tempered wife. City Mum writes about her children’s friends’ ten-grand birthday parties in Hampstead, and wonders whether to buy her offspring shoes from Clarks like her parents did, or Prada, like her richest friends do.

‘Hey, chill, Beetle. What’s the matter?’

‘Nothing. Sorry, I . . .’

‘It’s not as if you have ever cleared up after the cats in your life.’

‘I do when you’re away. It’s horrible.’ She sighs. ‘Anyway, look, I don’t want to start anything. I’m sorry. I’m knackered, and upset about Oleander, and I’ve still got to do all my reading for Thursday.’ As well as being a partner in the estate agency, Bryony is doing a part-time MA in Eighteenth Century Studies. ‘I just worry that you spend too much time on that column. I want you to be able to do your serious work, that’s all.’

‘I know you do.’ James touches her arm lightly. ‘But work doesn’t always have to be serious. Come on, I’ll get you a deckchair. I’m making a Thai green chicken curry for dinner. And then of course there’s brownies. I’ll do the washing up and you can get on with your reading.’

‘Well, that’s enough of my boring life. How about you?’

Charlie frowns. ‘Well,’ he says, ‘where to start?’

Who goes on a blind date on a Sunday night? Even Soho has a kind of Sunday feeling, as if it has stayed in its pyjamas all day and just can’t be arsed with all this. Charlie looks at Nicola, sitting across from him in the too-trendy, contemporary Asian restaurant she probably booked online. The music’s too loud. She’s wearing a silky dress in a kind of wine colour that makes her look faintly leprous. She’s a mathematician doing a postdoc at King’s. At home Charlie has a new orchid book that came just before he left (no, there isn’t post on a Sunday: it was delivered to Mr Q. Johnson next door by mistake two days ago). He wishes he were at home reading it, with an espresso from his beautiful Fracino machine. He almost says something about the orchid book. He almost says that the thing about him, the main thing, really, although definitely not the thing you’d notice first, especially not if you happened to be blindfolded while he was fucking you, is that he loves seeing orchids in the wild in Britain. Apart from the bit about the blindfold, that would be a great line for a first date. Or maybe it all sounds a bit off-putting? The blindfold would be silk, and from Liberty, and – of course – handwashed between uses. He says nothing. He actually just wants to get this over with.

‘I’ll nip to the loo while you think about it,’ says Nicola.

She slips on a tiny cardigan that stops under her arms. She’s wearing very high heels. Every woman in here is wearing very high heels. She’s probably been here before, perhaps with an ex, or with students from her undergraduate days. Charlie sighs. He can’t be bothered with all this tonight. He sees a footballer he recognises walk in and joke with the doorman, who slaps him on the back. He picks up his phone and finds a text from his father telling him that his great-aunt Oleander is dead. Well, that’s . . . Gosh, poor Fleur. Charlie texts her. Then he texts his cousin Bryony to ask how she and the family are. Then he begins composing a text to his sister Clem that combines sadness about Oleander with congratulations on her radio thing. But it’s too hard, so he temporarily abandons it and flicks quickly to MyFitnessPal to add the carbohydrate grams he just accidentally had in his starter. Checks his hair in the reverse camera, not that he cares what Nicola thinks about his hair. Charlie often checks his hair when he is alone. It’s quite nice hair. He likes it. Especially this latest haircut, which . . .

Nicola’s back. Through the uncertain fabric of her dress he can see her knickers digging into the flesh of her otherwise OK bottom. Charlie likes a biggish bottom, but ideally on a much skinnier girl. How can she bear to be out in public like that? A thong would not solve the problem. He hates thongs. But there are lots of seamless knickers nowadays and . . .

‘So,’ she says.

Charlie puts his phone away. The main courses arrive. He has ordered halibut with Malaysian chilli sauce, which is probably full of sugar that will give him a headache and rancid vegetable oil that will give him cancer. She is having monkfish with Chinese leaf cabbage and jasmine rice. Charlie does not eat rice.

‘Well, obviously you know I work at Kew.’

‘That must be amazing. Do you get to go and hang out in the glasshouses whenever you want?’

‘In theory. But no one really does.’ And no one uses the libraries either, in case they bump into eager ethnobotany students who want to talk about different kinds of latex, which is the white gunge that comes out of some plants when you cut them, or be reminded whether it’s paripinnate or imparipinnate leaves that have a lone terminal leaflet. Charlie always buys his plant books from Summerfield, Amazon or Abe, and then no one else can touch them or make them dirty or try to talk to him about them. He often feels like a lone terminal leaflet himself. Quite an elegant one, naturally, and on a very rare plant.

‘So what do you do exactly? What’s your job title?’

‘I’m a family type specialist.’

‘What does that mean?’ She smiles. ‘I know nothing about plants, except sometimes from Izzy’s drunken ramblings. She’s always going on about mint and herbs and stuff.’

Izzy, aka Dr Isobel Stone, is the mutual friend who has set them up. She’s a world authority on Lamiales, the order of angiosperms that contains mint and herbs and stuff. Charlie first got talking to her in the tea room about a year ago after an incident involving a member of the public and a rather mangled herbarium specimen that turned out simply to be Lavandula augustifolia, one of the most common plants in the UK, if not the entire universe. The member of the public wrote around seventeen letters about his ‘mystery plant’, each one more offensive than the last, eventually accusing everyone at Kew of being ‘blind, intellectually stunted bastards’. Since then Charlie and Izzy have often had morning coffee and/or afternoon tea together, and Izzy has become the colleague that Charlie would never really fuck, but about whom he will masturbate if his fantasy happens to take place in a work setting. On Thursday Izzy gave him the address of this restaurant and a phone number and raised an eyebrow, and Charlie wondered if he could in fact fuck someone from work until Izzy said that her friend Nicola was expecting to meet him there at 8 p.m. on Sunday. It was all a bit awkward because Charlie had said he was available before he knew who he was meeting. And then Izzy told Charlie that Nicola had not stopped going on about him and his ‘great body and beautiful eyes’ since seeing him in a picture Izzy put on Facebook. Of course, desperate, fawning women of this type will often do anything. Which in one way makes the whole thing less . . . but in another way it becomes so . . .

‘Um,’ says Charlie, ‘well, say you’ve gone to the rainforest and collected a plant but you don’t know what it is and you send it to Kew for identification, I’m the person – or one of the people – who decides what family it’s in, and therefore which department it should go to for further identification. Like if its leaves are a bit furry and it smells of mint I send it to Izzy. Or one of her team.’

‘So you get mystery plants?’

‘Yeah, all the time. But mostly we solve the mystery quite quickly.’

‘That’s so cool.’ She pours more wine. ‘So what’s a botanical family again? I last did biology at GCSE. Plants are too real for me.’

‘It’s a taxonomic category. One up from genus. From the top it’s kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species. Well, that’s the basic structure anyway. The rice you’re eating now has the Latin name Oryza sativa, which is its genus and species. Its family is Poaceae. Or, basically, grass.’

‘Rice is a type of grass?’

‘Yep.’

She sips her wine. ‘What’s a human a type of?’

‘Monkey. Well, great ape. Hominidae.’

‘Oh yes. Of course. I knew that. Everyone knows that. What about this cabbage stuff then?’ She holds up a forkful of wilted greens.

Charlie frowns. ‘You’re not going to make me identify the whole meal, are you?’

‘No. Sorry. I’m being silly.’ She smiles weakly. ‘Forget it.’

‘It’s probably Brassica rapa. Chinese cabbage. In the family Brassicaceae. The mustard family.’

She puts some in her mouth and chews. ‘Cabbage is a type of mustard?’

‘Yeah, kind of. The mustard family is sometimes known as the cabbage family.’

‘So cabbage is a kind of cabbage.’ She laughs. ‘Wow. Excellent. OK, next question. Where are you from?’

‘Originally? Bath.’

‘Oh, I love Bath. Gosh, all that lovely yellow stone – what’s it called, again? – and those romantic mists. Do you have any brothers or sisters?’

Charlie doesn’t tell her that Bath stone is called Bath stone. ‘I’ve got a sister. And a cousin I’m very close to. And, I guess, two half-sisters I hardly ever see, because . . .’ He doesn’t really know how to end this sentence, so he doesn’t bother. Instead, he looks at Nicola’s wrists. He tries imagining them bound with rope. Cheap, itchy rope. He imagines them bleeding. Just a little. Perhaps just a tiny blue bruise instead. One on each wrist from being held down and fucked. Face-fucked? No, just fucked. Obviously she’d have consented to all this, but it’s amazing how many women do. In fact, a lot of women have only slept with Charlie because he’s offered to tie them up. You know, as one of those jokes that aren’t really jokes. But he doesn’t really fancy Nicola, with or without rope etc.

There’s quite a long pause.

‘God, you’re hard work, aren’t you?’ She grins. ‘Don’t look so serious. I’m teasing. What are their names?’

‘Clematis. That’s my sister. We call her Clem. Bryony’s my cousin. My half-sisters are Plum and Lavender, but they’re just kids still. My father remarried after my mother went missing on an expedition . . .’ Nicola doesn’t respond to the missing mother thing, which is odd, so Charlie explains about the family tradition of giving a botanical first name to anyone not certain to keep the famous Gardener surname, although of course Clem kept the Gardener name anyway when she married Ollie. Then he explains about his great-great-grandfather, Augustus Emery Charles Gardener, who was a famous horticulturist, and his great-grandfather, Charles Emery Augustus Gardener, who was supposed to be overseeing a tea plantation in India but ended up falling in love with a Hindu woman and founding an Ayurvedic clinic and yoga centre in Sandwich, of all places. And then his grandfather, Augustus Emery Charles Gardener, who . . .

‘Can I tell you about the desserts?’

Nicola immediately looks up at the waiter, and Charlie realises he has been boring her. Good. Maybe she’ll leave and this will be over. He has had enough to eat, and definitely enough carbs, but agrees, after some pressure, to share an exotic fruit platter. He’ll have a bit of kiwi or something. But he insists on ordering a glass of dessert wine for her. He likes watching girls drinking dessert wine for reasons that would probably be disturbing if he ever thought about them. He has a double espresso, which won’t be as nice as the one he could have at home.

‘So why are you on a blind date?’ Nicola asks him.

Charlie shrugs. Right, well, if she doesn’t want to know any more about his family, she won’t hear about his great-aunt Oleander, who just died, and who used to be a famous guru who even met the Beatles. She also won’t hear about his mother, who is not just missing but presumed dead, along with both Bryony’s parents and Fleur’s terrible mother. And the deadly seed pods they went to find in a place called – really – the Lost Island, far away in the Pacific. And that’s Nicola’s loss, because it’s really a very exciting story, with loads of botany in it and everything. But then all girls like Nicola want to talk about is how many people you’ve slept with and what your favourite band is and how many children you want.

‘I don’t know,’ he says. ‘How about you?’

‘Izzy sort of took pity on me because I got dumped.’

‘Sorry to hear that.’

‘What’s your history . . . ? I mean, when did you . . . ?’

‘I got divorced about ten years ago.’

‘Mine was last month.’

‘Was it bad?’

She shrugs. ‘We’d only been together for three years.’

‘Yeah, but I mean, did you, were you . . . ?’

‘What, in love? Yes. Well, I was. How about you?’

‘I suppose I was. Yes. Just not with my wife.’

Nicola pauses. Sips her wine. Puts her finger in her mouth, and then in the bowl of salt on the table, and then back in her mouth again. Why on earth is she . . .

‘So who did you fuck instead?’

Charlie’s cock stirs ever so slightly at the sound of the word ‘fuck’ coming out of her full, quite posh, red-lipsticked mouth. She reapplied her lipstick when she went to the loo. He likes it when girls bother to do that.

‘It’s complicated.’

She sighs. ‘Right.’

‘How about you?’

‘What, did I fuck anyone else?’

Again, a very slight emphasis on the word ‘fuck’. The consonance of it. Another small stir.

‘Yes.’

She smiles. ‘I can’t tell you that. I hardly know you.’

Eyebrows. Smile. ‘We could change that.’

‘Really? How?’

‘Go out to the fire escape and take off your knickers.’

She pauses, looks shocked, but probably isn’t. Laughs. ‘What?’

‘You think I’m joking?’

‘I’m not sure. Er, most men wouldn’t quite . . .’

‘But what if I’m not?’

‘Surely we could find somewhere more comfortable to . . .’

‘But the excitement is all in the discomfort.’

‘Well . . .’

He looks at the door. His watch. ‘I mean, if you have other plans . . .’

‘Take off my knickers.’ She acts like this is a joke, could still just about be only a joke. ‘Right. OK. So I’m standing on the fire escape in the freezing cold with no knickers on. And then what?’

‘You put them in your mouth.’

‘I’m not doing that.’

‘Why not?’

‘Well, why should I?’

‘So that people are not disturbed by your moans of pleasure. Or pain.’

‘I’m going to feel really stupid anyway. I can’t . . .’

‘Well, just take them off then. I’ll pay and then come and join you in a second.’

‘And you won’t be long?’

‘No.’

She flushes a little and gets up. ‘OK. Don’t be long. I can’t believe . . .’

Is it always this easy? Yes, when you actually don’t care.

Afterwards, Charlie drives his green MG back to Hackney. The house is just off Mare Street on a long road of huge Victorian houses in various states of renovation. Charlie and his ex-wife Charlotte (how much fun that was when they met: ‘I’m Charlie,’ ‘Hey, so am I!’, although it became complicated later on when they started opening each other’s letters by accident and one of them was That Letter from Bryony) split the proceeds on their flat in Highgate in a way that only their lawyers understood, and he ended up with just enough for the deposit on the Hackney place. He worked out that unless he asked his father for money, he could just about afford to continue living in London only if he bought a tired old student let, did it up a bit, and advertised for some housemates. He took two weeks’ holiday and painted all eight rooms, including the ceilings, while a friend of a friend with a sander did the floors for a hundred quid. So now here he is, living with two art students, a fashion blogger and a jazz musician. The main problem with the place is that the previous owner, Mr Q. Johnson, who now lives next door, insists on Charlie still keeping garlic on all the windowsills to keep bad spirits out of the house, and drops in every few days to check that he does. He has also not changed his address with the Labour Party, Disability, Spin, Saga and various other companies, so most of the post that comes to Charlie’s house is for him. It seems particularly unfair that Charlie’s post often goes to Mr Q. Johnson for no reason at all, especially when it is clearly marked number fifty-six.

When Charlie gets in, the band is practising in the basement. He watches a bit of La Dolce Vita on BBC2, then makes a cup of fresh mint tea and takes it to bed. He should have left Nicola on the balcony without her knickers. It would have been a hilarious thing to tell Bryony next weekend. But, mainly out of politeness to Izzy, he gallantly went outside, stuffed Nicola’s knickers in her mouth and fucked her. She was quite pissed by then, so he managed to get his dick halfway up her arse before she realised what he was doing. But, again because of Izzy, he was super-polite and took it out like a nice, well-mannered boy and reinserted it in her vagina. Which is why he doesn’t understand the text message he now has from Izzy: How could you??? He texts back, Be more specific?, but does not get a reply.

It’s very complicated, trying to organise a wake. Fleur has no idea who is even coming to the funeral. But afterwards, everybody should be invited to Namaste House for food. Of course they should. But there could be ten people or a hundred. How is Fleur supposed to know who will come? If even Augustus and Beatrix are going to come then anything could happen. Oleander changed a lot of people’s lives over the years. But many of them must be dead now: dead, reincarnated and living completely new lives. Could you contact someone who . . . ? Fleur shakes her head. How stupid. Because it’s so complicated organising a wake she is watering all the plants in Namaste House for the second time today. This is something Oleander and Fleur used to do together each evening. Doing this makes Fleur feel almost as if she is Oleander, and of course you don’t have to miss someone if you are them, and . . .

The orangery is attached to the west wing. At this time of day it is filled with the soft colours of sunset with only a whisper of moonlight. Fleur has looked after the orchids in here since she was a teenager. Some of the ones she propagated are getting on for twenty years old, but there are others that are much older. Their roots reach out like the thin arms of the starving and desperate, although it’s all a big act because they know that Fleur knows exactly how they like to be misted, and when. Fleur waters the frankincense tree in the centre of the room, touches its bark, as she always does, her hand coming away smelling of the heat and damp of faraway places. The orangery is where the celebrities come to relax by day, to breathe air produced by rare plants and to look out at the orchard with its wise, old trees. The orangery is vast, but the celebrities won’t share it. If one celebrity finds another one already here then she, or more probably he – for some reason the residential ones are usually male – will instead go all the way to the east wing where they can choose the cool Yin room with the peppermint water fountain, the small, hot Yang room or the Dosha Den, full of black velvet cushions stuffed with down and dried roses.

Sometimes one of the newer celebrities will make an observation about the lack of a coherent spirituality in the house. The massages are Ayurvedic, because Ketki does them. Ish, Ketki’s husband, does both Ayurvedic and macrobiotic consultations, and is also a trained acupuncturist and cranial osteopath. The food is mostly Indian, sometimes Ayurvedic, and made by Ketki’s ancient aunt Bluebell. She specialises in kulfis – Indian ice creams made with condensed milk, cardamom pods and saffron – but which she often makes into the shape of Daleks. Everything else is a jumble of Buddhism, Taoism, Christianity, Hinduism, Wicca and who knows what else. Oleander famously believed in ‘everything’. There’s a tapestry halfway up the west-wing staircase with a profound religious significance that no one can quite pin down, not even the Prophet, who has an eye for such things.

After checking the first floor again, Fleur goes down the east-wing staircase – avoiding not just the tapestry but also the White Lady, who often comes out on a Sunday, or after someone has ‘moved on’ – and through the library with its huge peace lilies and rubber plants and that tarry, tobaccoey smell of old leather bindings, and she wonders where on earth Ketki could be. She checks the orangery again, and the kitchens, with their unmistakeable smell of fenugreek, coriander and, of course, the curry plants, which Fleur now waters for the third time today. All around are big Kilner jars of yellow split peas, red, brown and green lentils, four different types of rice, whole oats, sultanas and desiccated coconut. Silicone Dalek moulds, but no Bluebell. A half-drunk mug of Earl Grey tea, but no Ketki.

This is infuriating. There is, after all, so much planning to do. Ketki has said she’ll make curries for the wake if Fleur will help. She has also suggested that her two daughters might come up from their professional lives in London and do some cooking. Unlikely, frankly. And Fleur herself is actually going to be quite busy on the day of the funeral and . . . Fleur sighs. Goes up to the second floor, with its long corridor of guest suites with the original servant bells that she had mended years ago, and then to the third floor, to the original servants’ corridor where the ‘servants’ still live and in which the bells sometimes still tinkle, late at night, if one of the celebrities has overdosed, become enlightened or wants a cup of hot chocolate. Now, of course, it’s just Ketki, Ish and Bluebell up there, but years ago Fleur and her mother had their cramped little rooms at the north end of the servants’ corridor. And, after her parents’ disappearance, Bryony stayed in one of the old servants’ rooms for almost a year until James’s parents took her in. Ketki’s daughters – dramatically rescued from somewhere in the Punjab region, by Oleander, who saved them from almost certain abduction, rape and forced marriage – to Muslims, imagine – grew up in the house. They were joined at the south end of the servants’ corridor by their cousin Pi, who was himself rescued, but from something else entirely, quite a lot later.

Of course no one has suggested that Pi, who moved out of his tiny room years ago and is now a famous author in London, should come and make curries. No one has suggested that his eldest daughter should take time off from Vogue photo shoots to come and make curries. His wife never comes to Namaste House so at least that isn’t an issue. But anyway, why not get Clem, Charlie and Bryony – Oleander’s actual relations, who are presumably about to inherit everything – to come and make the curries? The Prophet has, to Fleur’s knowledge, never even been in the kitchen, but that doesn’t mean he couldn’t help in an emergency. But some things never change; however much time you spend with supposedly enlightened people, in a house so brimming and glowing with enlightenment it’s sometimes like being in one of those fish tanks that . . . Shut up, for God’s sake. Fleur closes her eyes. Enlightenment is so difficult and tiresome, and Fleur isn’t sure she’s going to get there in this lifetime, but she could really do with a stiller mind. As usual, when she tries to stop her thoughts, her ego goes into a sulk for about one second and there’s peace. Then the whole thing starts up again.

She eventually finds Ketki folding towels in Treatment Room 3. It’s almost as if the old woman has been avoiding her.

‘There’s still time to get it catered,’ Fleur says. ‘We’ve got the money.’

Indeed. Those packages that the Prophet still sends off. And Fleur’s big ideas, like those huge clouds floating above everyone until suddenly, splat, you are covered in rain. There’s absolutely no shortage of money. Even after the Inland Revenue came round a couple of years ago. Especially when one of them went away with his own mantra, a yin/yang necklace, a shaved head and a fondness for chickpeas.

‘I want to do this for Oleander,’ says Ketki. ‘She would have liked . . .’

‘She would have liked you to be able to relax and grieve for her in peace. We’ve got no idea who’s going to turn up for this. There’ll be the press as well. I mean, not in the house, obviously, but causing trouble around the place. You know what they’re like. I mean, let’s face it, Paul McCartney might come. He probably won’t, but . . .’

‘Paul McCartney.’ Ketki bobbles her head and almost smiles. She and her family arrived at Namaste House not long after George Harrison had been there, at least according to the tabloids, for a two-week meditation and yoga retreat with Oleander and some notorious wise-woman Fleur barely remembers but who used to live in the rooms looking down on the orangery that the Prophet now has. Fleur has a dim memory of patchouli oil, guitars and smoke, although most of her childhood was like that, especially before her mother disappeared. But by then there were mixing desks and DJs as well. The wise-woman grew the rare, impossible frankincense tree from seed, Fleur remembers. She put a spell on it, or said she did. If someone sold this place then what would happen to the frankincense tree? No one else would know how to look after it. Perhaps a botanical garden would take it, although moving it would probably kill it. Fleur will have to ask Charlie.

‘Well . . .’ says Ketki.

‘And I’ll have some people back to the cottage afterwards.’

‘What people?’

‘You know, Clem, Bryony, Charlie, if he comes. Pi. I guess just anyone who’s around and wants to stay up late chatting. I’ll do a small supper. That way we won’t disturb you, Bluebell and Ish.’

Ketki knows that ‘chatting’ means drinking too much, and ‘staying up late’ means having sex and taking drugs. She’s read her nephew’s novels. She knows what Fleur does in that cottage. She turns back to the towels.

The room smells of the oils Ketki uses in her massages. For a long time she made her own essential oils from flowers in the garden and grew marigolds to use in her aromatic face packs. In fact, once upon a time Fleur was her assistant, and learned how to make all the classic Ayurvedic plant remedies, massage oils and balms. Together they used to grind sandalwood and cinnamon sticks, and make their own besan flour from chickpeas, although Bluebell often insisted they use her flour, which was a bit more lumpy. They grew and harvested hibiscus flowers, marshmallow roots and chamomile. They even grew their own turmeric in one of the greenhouses. Now Fleur runs the whole show and insists that most of the oils and dried plants come by mail order, although she does still let Ketki help collect the rosebuds, lavender and rosemary. The only thing Fleur harvests is the opium which, yes, Ketki also knows about.

‘I suppose there’s James,’ Fleur says. ‘He’d probably help. He’s a good cook.’

‘Who is James?’

‘You know. James Croft. Bryony’s husband.’

James is just one of several people Ketki believes Fleur to be involved with, secretly.

‘Help with what?’

‘Make curries for the wake, if that’s what you really want to do.’

‘I just think that we should.’

Oleander always said that the word ‘should’ should always be ignored. Then she laughed until whoever she was talking to noticed the paradox.

‘OK,’ says Fleur. ‘I’ll do a big soup, then, as well.’

‘Lentil soup I think,’ says Ketki. ‘And several carrot cakes.’ She bobbles her head again, which means it’s all settled.

When Fleur leaves the room she thinks of going to see Oleander, and then remembers that Oleander isn’t there any more. She sighs. Ketki’s husband Ish is in the meditation area, reading the Observer. Fleur half tries to catch his eye, but he doesn’t look up. Ish doesn’t hear very well now, and it’s possible that he just has not sensed her in the room. Then he does look up.

‘Go easy on her,’ he says. ‘She has lost her oldest friend.’

‘I know,’ says Fleur. She does not add that she has now lost almost everyone, and is probably about to lose almost everything.

Here’s what Fleur’s ego says, stirred by these thoughts. It says, What about me? What about what I’ve lost? It also says, Lentil soup and carrot cake? But that’s what they make for the retreats. That’s what they make for the spa weekends. That’s what they always make, even though basically everyone who comes to Namaste House now requests a low-carb diet, and absolutely no one eats pulses of their own accord any more apart from Madonna and Gwyneth Paltrow. And anyway, Oleander is dead. She is dead. Can they not, just this once, do something different? Can they not have . . . (even the ego sometimes needs to pause and think, although this is often just for effect) cocktails and canapés? No. Of course not. Well, Fleur will have cocktails and canapés over at the cottage. She’ll cook aubergine and homemade paneer wrapped in poppy leaves and intricately flavoured with her homemade black spice blend, and then a fragrant pistachio korma with soft white rice, and little mousses made from bitter chocolate and quail’s eggs. In the cottage they will see off Oleander in style, whatever Ketki wants to do in the house. Fleur tells her ego to shut up. Of course she does. But she has to acknowledge that it has come up with a lovely menu. And it would be good to make the thing in the cottage different from the thing in the house. And have something for all the gluten-free, low-carb people like Skye Turner – if she comes – and Charlie – if he comes. She will hand-make some chocolates too. Rose creams, and hibiscus truffles.

Back in the cottage, she starts making a list, remembering what Oleander has been saying so much recently: on the level of form, nothing matters. In this world, you can do what you like. Doing is not what makes you enlightened. This is good, after all the things Fleur has done. She may have put off enlightenment for now, but she hasn’t put it off forever.

On Monday morning there’s a knock at Clem’s door. It’s Zoe.

‘Hey,’ she says. ‘You busy?’

‘I wish the university server would explode again,’ says Clem. ‘Or whatever it did last time it lost all my emails. Come in.’

Zoe comes in but doesn’t sit down. She is very tall and always has her blonde hair tied up in a ponytail that would make anyone else look eight, or a bit backward. Today she is wearing ripped jeans, cheap pink flip flops (even though it is only thirteen degrees outside) and a faded yellow Sonic Youth T-shirt. She has a ring through one nostril and never wears make-up unless there’s something official going on, like her job interview, for which she wore black eyeliner only on her top lids, sheer red lipstick and an oddly intoxicating perfume that smelled like a bag of sweets left in a men’s locker room for too long. She teaches screenwriting.

‘I’m just on my way to staff development,’ Zoe says. ‘Do you want me to steal you some Jammie Dodgers?’

‘What is it this time?’

‘Dignity in the workplace.’

‘How can anyone be dignified in any workplace?’

‘Yeah. I’ll definitely make that point.’

‘God.’ Clem stretches languidly and slowly spins her chair away from her computer. ‘I’m being smothered in family.’

‘In what way?’

‘Oh, sorry, don’t worry.’ She smiles, and shakes her head as if she had water in her ears. ‘Thinking out loud.’

‘No, go on. Your family is always interesting.’

‘Oh, OK, well, my great-aunt just died – no, don’t worry, it’s all right, I barely knew her. She’s the one who took in my cousin and my best friend when our mothers went missing – you know about that, right? And she used to hang out with the Beatles and everything . . . ? Anyway, my grandmother Beatrix, who’s about a hundred and fifty and should not know how to use email, is basically driving us all mad making arrangements for her and my father to come to the funeral, even though they totally hated her. They thought, or think, that Oleander – that’s my great-aunt – was responsible for the deaths of my mother, my aunt, my uncle and my best friend’s mother.’

‘Why? What did she do to them?’

‘No one knows. Back in the late eighties they went off to find a miracle plant and never came back. We think the plant has this seed pod that looks like vanilla and has supposedly magical or mystical properties – only no one knows how to get the good effects without dropping dead. Oleander wasn’t even there.’

‘Wow. Now there’s a screenplay.’

‘Or a nature documentary.’

Clem’s office smells lovely, but in a way that Zoe can’t quite fathom. It’s not any particular one of the lavender candles, or the large succulent plants, or even all of them together, although they probably contribute to it. Today there’s also a scuffed cardboard box containing small plants with white flowers, but they are new and the smell is always there. What is it? It could be Clem herself, perhaps. It’s damp forests, but in a good way. Perhaps a touch of the tropics. Clem is the only person in the department to have bare floorboards in her office instead of the institutional carpet. She has also had all the fluorescent lights removed from the office. Yes, removed, which is about a thousand times more weird and interesting than just deciding not to turn them on, which is what a normal person would do. Instead of the lights she has various old Anglepoise floor lamps that she says she found in a forgotten cupboard somewhere in the basement. And instead of having an institutional computer whirring away all day, she has a silent, beautiful, tiny laptop that she brings from home in a thin canvas bag. Sometimes she even puts it away in a drawer and works in sketchbooks instead. Zoe only started working at the university in September, and so far her office contains not much apart from the desk, chair and beige computer the department gave her. She has a bright orange carpet that, apparently, her predecessor actually chose. She aspires to something like Clem’s office, but with an iMac and a bit less sadness.

‘This place would be improved if there were fewer emails in general – like a ban on any emails from family, friends and partners, for a start. And, of course, students.’

‘Don’t let them hear you say that,’ Zoe says. ‘They love you.’

It’s true. The students do love Clem. They love the fact that she directs real documentaries, and therefore can tell them how to do it. Clem also replies to their emails, even if she often takes a couple of days – OK, sometimes a week – to get around to it. But some lecturers never reply to emails at all, which is pretty shit when you’re paying over three grand a year to do a course. Clem never tells anyone off for anything. She makes low-key jokes. She doesn’t patronise them. When she hears them talking about sex instead of lighting (‘Oh. My. God. You actually slept with her and no one told me? I don’t care. I’m SO happy for you’) she simply raises an eyebrow and watches them all explode into giggles. She has never been late for a class, and always gives them fun things to do, like those spoof nature documentaries where they get to do the worst possible voiceover to go with their footage of rabbits or blackbirds on campus (‘The blackbird is now surely thinking, Why is that Emo tosser pointing a camera at me?’). She’s old enough for them not to be aroused by her. She certainly doesn’t freak them out as much as Zoe, who is much closer to them in age and appearance and has worked on things they actually watch. Most of the students know that Clem was nominated for an Oscar, but they haven’t seen any of her documentaries, not even Palm. But several of the boys in the class have wanked themselves silly to things Zoe has written, especially that teen lesbian drama set in Wandsworth. It’s pretty crazy, being taught by someone whose words have made you, well, do that.

‘How have you even got time for staff development?’ Clem asks Zoe. ‘I mean, I hope you’re not being too stretched. I don’t remember this coming up in your probation plan.’

Zoe shrugs. ‘It’s new. Different. Defamiliarising, probably. I might get something to put in a screenplay. Also, of course, I’m working towards my Very Important Equal Opportunities Certificate.’

‘We should probably add that to your next probation report. It’ll look good.’

‘Yeah. Anyway, I just wanted to see if you’re maybe around for coffee later.’

‘What time does it finish?’

‘Four thirty, I think.’

‘A whole day?’

‘I believe there are case studies. And role play.’

‘OK, well, knock on my door when you get back. I’m sure I’ll still be here. At this moment I feel like I’ll be here forever.’

‘Cool. By the way, what’s in the box?’ Zoe asks.

‘Chilli plants. Do you want one?’

Zoe shrugs. ‘Sure. Well, I mean, are they hard? I so do not have green fingers.’

‘They’re easy. They’re just annuals, as well, so . . .’

‘What’s an annual?’

‘They just have one growing season and then they die. One of my PhD students needed them for his film so I brought some in. Now they’re looking for homes. They grow really nice chillies. Quite hot.’

‘I do love chillies.’

‘Yeah, I’m kind of addicted too. I’ll bring you one later.’

Cocks.

Hundreds and hundreds of cocks. Perhaps three of them are in fact birds with feathers and beaks and so on, looking rather ridiculous in this context. But the rest . . . Some of them are in men’s mouths. Some of them are in women’s mouths. Some of them are in teenagers’ mouths. Some of them are in men’s anuses. Some of them are in women’s anuses, hands, or stuffed between their breasts. Most of them are in women’s vaginas. Some women have one cock in their vagina and another in their mouth. Some have yet another cock in their anus. The images are accompanied by captions, for example, ‘Young teen gags on hot cock’ or ‘MILF takes it both ways’. Beatrix meant to type ‘clocks’ into Google Images, but here she is, looking at cocks. To be properly accurate, it was last month that Beatrix meant to type ‘clocks’ but actually typed ‘cocks’, at which point she was prompted about what level of safety mode she wanted. Since Beatrix has never much cared for being protected from things, she switched safety mode, whatever that even was, off. And. Well. That was a strange afternoon.

Today she meant to type ‘cocks’ (although if she was discovered, then, of course, ‘clocks’ was what she really meant . . . Very shocked indeed . . . Can’t imagine what sort of perverts would actually choose . . . Unmitigated filth . . . etc. etc.). In fact, for the last month she has been doing this almost every morning after early trading is over. It’s not ideal, though, now that she’s used to the images. She wants something more, but she doesn’t know what. There are too many black cocks on Google Images. Beatrix liked them at first, but now they seem vulgar, and she has realised that at least some of them must be fakes. Some of them are as long as an arm. Beatrix has discovered that she likes medium-sized white cocks: the kind of cock she imagines her husband would have had. She never saw it erect in all the years they were married. She felt it enter her and withdraw from her but she knew she shouldn’t touch it or acknowledge it in any other way. He did the minimal amount of touching needed to get it into her. She tried to manually stimulate him once, but he moved her hand away and she had the impression for some weeks afterwards that he thought she was some sort of . . . Well, some sort of whore.

Black whore. Asian Whore. Teenage whore. Whores gagging for it.

Cartoon whore.

Now they are strange.

Beatrix’s orgasm flutters through her like a tired goldcrest. Afterwards, she gets up and makes herself a pre-lunch gin and tonic. In the kitchen, the laptop showing one of her ADVFN stock-market monitors flickers blue, red and green. Mostly blue today, which is good, although that often means red tomorrow. Once the blood goes back to wherever it came from, Beatrix finds she can’t quite believe that she just looked at all those pictures of miserable looking people being, frankly, violated (she has to be honest with herself and admit that ‘in the moment’ she likes the miserable ones best, but anyway). Beatrix feels very flat at this time of day, around about the time she used to take Archie for his walk. She could still go on her own of course, but she doesn’t. At first she enjoyed seeing other people out with their dogs, but now she doesn’t. She used to feel like a dog-owner who had lost her dog (in relation to Archie she can’t say the word died, and even the word death, used so frequently about friends, relatives and even a husband, a word that she previously felt was clean, to-the-point and brave, is so wrong in this situation; just as it was about her beautiful daughter Plum) in some sort of temporary way, but now she doesn’t; now she’s just an old woman doddering about on her own, and it’s as if she never had a dog. It was two years ago when he . . . Well, anyway, it was not long after that when she began scrapbooking her investments (a strategy taught by that incredibly tall man at that strange seminar she went to in London), which was why she was looking for pictures of clocks, sort of, but never mind that. Beatrix can’t possibly hold the thought of what she just did at the same time as thinking, however fleetingly, about Archie. She sips from her drink and gets one of the scrapbooks down from the shelf. The tall man (what was his name?) had suggested scrapbooks based on sectors: travel and leisure, perhaps, or food and drug retailers. But grandchildren works for Beatrix. Not precisely as they are in real life, but . . .

This is her favourite one, really. In Clem’s scrapbook she is not married to ghastly Ollie. Clem is married to Bill Gates, who is not just rich and powerful but surprisingly easy to cut out. This gives Clem a potential budget of billions. What would she do with all that money? Quite clearly, she’d change her life completely. Of course she wouldn’t want simply to be Bill Gates’s trophy wife. In the scrapbook, Clem has decided to leave her lecturing job in London, get a PhD in Botany and set up her own botanical garden somewhere in the West Country. Her father Augustus, alone again after the sudden death of his young second wife Cecily – from something viral, Beatrix imagines, something old-fashioned and messy like Spanish flu – will pick up his gardening gloves again and become Chief Botanist. Yes, it’s based on the Eden Project, and that’s what Beatrix has used for her scrapbook, but in her mind it is much more beautiful, and is closed to the public on one day a week when Clem gives tea parties and talks about science and the latest plant research projects. Instead of going off to silly places in JEANS to film palm trees wandering about (which Beatrix doesn’t really believe in) Clem spends her days floating around orchid houses in perfect white dresses. She never has periods. Occasionally she gives press conferences in lemon Capri pants. The Capri pants are from Dior, of course. And from about 1982. But that doesn’t really matter. Sometimes Beatrix puts things in her scrapbooks simply because she likes them.

Beatrix has a copy of this month’s Vogue and a pair of scissors and is planning Clem’s outfit for the funeral on Thursday. There’s a Reiss dress worn by Kate Middleton that would work, although is it too cheap for someone married to Bill Gates? Then again, if it is too cheap for a billionaire, then maybe it’s within the range of a relatively well-off grandmother taking her granddaughters to London for shopping and lunch (Saturday) and art galleries (Sunday). Last time they went to an art gallery Clem made her look at a skull covered with diamonds and a sun made of dead flies. This time Beatrix will choose. Perhaps those botanical illustrations at the V&A. They won’t be able to get an outfit in time for the funeral, of course, but that’s fine; since Beatrix’s scrapbooks exist outside normal conceptualisations of time and space, the outfit can be added much later. And the scrapbooks are to help visualise investments anyway. Not that Reiss is listed on the Stock Exchange, but still. Maybe one day it will be. Beatrix wonders where a busy young woman like Clem – either the imagined version or the real one – might buy a funeral outfit in a hurry. Then she buys some shares in ASOS.

After she has checked her email – nothing from Clem, Augustus or Charlie – and moved on to Bryony’s scrapbook – now there’s a problem – the Schubert begins again. It’s not that Beatrix does not like Schubert. She does like Schubert very much. Sometimes when she’s searching for c(l)ocks on the internet she does it with Schubert’s String Quintet in C Major playing on the stereo system that Augustus bought her for her ninetieth birthday. Schubert’s String Quintet in C Major is, to use a word that Beatrix has learned from the internet, ‘dirty’. It is also quite ‘rough’, the last movement in particular. But she likes to choose when she hears it. Not that the person upstairs ever plays the String Quintet in C. It’s always the piano sonatas. Because of the c(l)ocks, Beatrix has missed You & Yours on the radio, which is just a lot of old people moaning, really, but can be helpful when she is in the mood for shorting. But she has no intention of also missing The Archers. Would the kind of person who thinks it appropriate to listen to Schubert at full-blast at midday also be the kind of person who would remember to switch it off in time for The Archers? Perhaps not. Beatrix goes back to her study and Googles ‘spying on neighbours’. Around a million hits come up, but most of them are just more pornography.

‘Right, so here’s the dilemma. A colleague has made it clear that he has feelings for you, and you have made it clear that you don’t have feelings back. Then he gives you a gift. Is that harassment?’

‘What’s the gift?’

‘That’s what I said! They were all like, Yeah, this is total harassment, without even knowing what the gift was.’

‘I mean, if it’s the Kama Sutra, then yeah, I guess that’s probably harassment.’

‘But it could be like a Polo or something.’

‘Do people still eat Polos?’

‘Who knows? Also, what’s the context of the gift? Has he given lots of people gifts? I mean, you could just imagine some twat going to Human Resources to complain that this guy’s given her, I don’t know, a copy of his new film or something, even though he’s given it to everyone else in the department and put it on YouTube.’

‘Or it could be Christmas,’ Clem says.

‘What a long day.’ Zoe sips her soya latte. ‘My God.’

‘But you’ve got your certificate now?’

‘Yeah. But guess what? It needs updating every five years. I’m going to have to go through all this again before I’m thirty.’ She groans. ‘Obviously I’ll have to make it in Hollywood by then.’

‘Is that what you want to do?’

‘No. Well, sort of. I don’t know.’

The staff common room is almost empty. It has a strange old municipal feel to it despite the posh vending machines and bright red sofas. Zoe has taken her hair down and put on some sheer lipstick, because, well, it is conceivable that she might be meeting people afterwards. Between Clem and Zoe on the table is a chilli plant in a rolled-down Waitrose carrier bag.

‘So anyway, what do I do with this?’ Zoe asks Clem, touching the bag, but not the plant.

‘Put it on a sunny windowsill. Give it a lot of water – like twice a day. It’ll prefer being in the garden if you’ve got one, but aren’t you in a flat? Anyway, the only semi-complicated thing you’ll need to do if you keep it inside is hand-pollinate it. Don’t make a face. It’s easy. I’ll show you. You take your little finger like this and rub it in the flower gently and look, it’s covered with pollen. Then you rub the same finger – gently again – into another flower and that’s it pollinated. Now you want to go back to the first flower with pollen from the second. Then to a third flower. See? Keep doing it whenever you see flowers. It can be a bit random. Just pretend your finger is a bee.’

‘Don’t bees know what they’re doing, though?’

‘No. It’s completely accidental. They go to the flowers for nectar and accidentally pollinate the plants. A little finger is as good as a bee.’

‘And this pollen stuff? It’s not like poisonous, is it?’

Clem laughs. ‘It’s the plant’s version of sperm.’

‘Yuck,’ says Zoe, but she starts gently rubbing her finger in one of the flowers and smiles when it comes away covered in yellow dust. She gently pushes her finger into one of the other flowers. ‘Have I basically just enabled this plant to have sex?’

‘Yep. Exactly,’ says Clem.

Zoe pulls the plant towards her. ‘I’ll look after you,’ she says to it. ‘You’ll get to fuck all the time.’

‘Oh, guess what I heard today?’ Clem says.

‘What?’

‘They’re going to do the UK premiere of Palm at Edinburgh in June. And it’s up for their big documentary award. They sent me an email last week which I totally would’ve missed if I hadn’t had a good blitz today. Honestly, someone emailed earlier asking if he could come and do a PhD at our “illustrious universe”. And I’ve had another three from my grandmother since I saw you this morning. Apparently someone won’t stop playing Schubert in the flat upstairs from hers, and this is why she’s coming to the funeral in the end. It’s like . . .’ Clem sighs.

‘I know. Fucking family, right? But that’s amazing news, though.’ Zoe strokes a leaf on the chilli plant. ‘I mean about the award.’

‘Yeah. Thanks. And I’m going to be on the judging panel for the nature documentary prize while I’m there. Should be really interesting. Feel a bit like I’ve fallen behind with what people are doing at the moment. The last nature documentary I even watched was Heidi Cohen’s Snow. My god. That was actually last year. Shit. What happens to time?’

‘You go to the Oscars. You sit on planes next to plants.’

‘How do you know about that?’

‘You told me. It stuck in my head. What was it?’

‘An Echinacea. I’d completely forgotten. God, that guy who put his whole family in Economy and then sat in Business with his Echinacea plant on the seat next to him.’

‘Anyway, it’s all in the screenplay I’m writing about your life.’

‘Be serious.’

‘I am. I’ll ask for your permission when it’s done, obviously. And check all the plant names or whatever.’

‘God.’ Clem groans, but does not look displeased.

‘Anyway, all great for the REF. Esteem indicator thingies, or whatever. I mean award nominations and panels and stuff.’

The Research Excellence Framework is basically what the World Cup would become if academics organised it. It comes around every six or seven years in some form or other but it’s always changing its name and its rules. But essentially whoever publishes the most and best books and does the most glamorous things with the biggest audiences wins. What do they win? Government funding for their department. This has been so vastly reduced in recent years that even the maximum amount is not even worth getting any more, at least not if you’re in the arts or humanities. But the more funding the department gets, the better everyone thinks it is. The winners will always be Oxford and Cambridge so the pressure is on to get that third place, which last time went to the London School of Economics. Being on TV, as Zoe’s work has, is particularly good. But she’ll need to get at least one more film out before 2014. Clem has Palm, which is better than anything anyone else in Film has. Of course, she still needs to finalise her whole entry. She’ll put in Palm and that new documentary she’s working on, Life. And then she’ll probably have to write a couple of journal articles to make up her four outputs. Zoe can get away with two – maybe even one – because she is so new.

‘So are you going to celebrate with Ollie?’

‘What?’

‘The documentary award nomination.’

‘I don’t know. I’ve got my great-aunt’s funeral to go to next Thursday and by the time I’ve recovered from having all my family in one room at once it’ll probably be too late. Anyway, we celebrated the Academy Awards thing, and everything else. I’ve done too much celebrating this year.’ She downs the last of her double espresso. ‘Sorry, that makes me sound like an idiot.’

‘Invite me next time. I’ll help you celebrate properly.’

‘Yeah, I will. Thanks. But you know, at the moment it would just be great to have some peace and quiet. I mean, it’s been an amazing year with the film doing so well, but I just want to switch it off now. You must understand. You must have had that with Wet, for example?’

‘I didn’t almost win an Oscar for it.’

‘No, but still.’

‘You are happy, though, surely?’

Clem smiles at Zoe. ‘No, not really.’

Fleur is sitting on a huge sofa in the drawing room of the Soho Hotel doing an echo breath, which is where you breathe out, hold, and then breathe out some more. It’s supposed to help undo the ego. It hasn’t undone Fleur’s ego but at least it’s got rid of some of the stale crap from her lungs: a few atoms from Marilyn Monroe’s last breath, perhaps, which apparently we all have in our lungs at any given time. Fleur has just had what was supposed to be an hour with Skye Turner, but somehow turned into an hour and a half. Skye’s assistant had originally booked yoga and meditation, but in fact Skye just wanted to vent about her manager and so it became a kind of therapy session. Of course, that’s fine – listening to people vent is also what Fleur does – but she does get frustrated when people don’t follow her advice. It’s worst when she says something amazing that Oleander has said in the past to her – like ‘What does your heart say?’ or ‘What would Love do?’ – and it has no effect, or the other person just says, ‘I don’t know’.

People always know what their hearts say and what Love would do, even if they don’t want to admit it. Your heart might say ‘I want to fuck my neighbour’, or ‘I want to leave my job’, and you might not like it but it’s always a good idea to get it out, put it on the table and have a proper look at it. Your heart, not your mind, is what connects you to the universe. And maybe you should fuck your neighbour. After all, what you do on the level of form does not matter one little bit. Fleur said something like this to Skye Turner before and Skye suddenly stopped talking and her eyes went clear just for a moment and she got it. She was connected, just for a second. Then, poof. Skye Turner does sort of want to fuck her neighbour, as it happens, or at least her parents’ neighbour; but as her parents’ neighbour is on prime-time TV every Saturday night, Fleur is not sure it counts as a heart-universe situation, even though everything is supposed to be equal. Or maybe it was the neighbour’s son? She sighs.

Oleander was never impatient with people. Oleander realised that her clients might get stuck with the same problems for months or years or even lifetimes and she gently told them things that she accepted might not actually register for a very long time. Fleur is not a very good therapist really, and certainly isn’t a qualified one. She isn’t a qualified yoga teacher either, although she’s better at that, having taught classes at Namaste House since she was sixteen. Celebrities pay for her advice because she supposedly knows everything Oleander knows. She doesn’t know a tenth of what Oleander knew. Well, OK, she knows a lot about making tea. And Patanjali’s Eight Limbs of Yoga. But that’s it.

The man she is waiting for walks in, wearing faded boot-cut jeans, a pink shirt and an old black wax jacket. He looks both younger and older than his age: sixty-eight. He’s always been too thin and he has always walked too fast. He will have parked his silver Mercedes 300SL on Soho Square. He drives everywhere – also too fast – and always finds a parking space, despite all the terrible karma he believes he has.

‘Augustus. How are you?’ Fleur stands up and kisses him on both cheeks.

‘Fleur.’ He kisses her back. ‘You look very, well . . . very bright, to be honest, darling. You’d certainly stand out in a crowd.’

Fleur is wearing a dress that someone’s stylist gave her last week as a thank-you present. The top part is a block of cerise and the bottom part is a block of orange.

This, already. ‘You think we’ll be seen,’ she says to Augustus.

‘It would be very awkward if we were. Cecily’s not fantastic at the moment.’

She follows his eyes as he looks around the large room. A female journalist with a Mulberry Bayswater and old-fashioned Dictaphone is interviewing a young woman at one of the tables, but there’s no one else here. The doorway is on the far side of the room, and beyond that is the hotel lobby and the bar. People don’t come in here; although on the other hand, of course, they do. Last time Fleur was here there was a celebrity sitting on the opposite sofa playing Top Trumps with a boy of about ten. Fleur thought this boy was his son, and the large dark woman his wife, until it became clear that the woman was from a charity and the boy was terminally ill. The celebrity pledged £10,000 and rewrote a speech the woman had written all while Fleur was sitting there working out a daily yoga routine for the ex-wife of a rapper called The Zone. But celebrities don’t give a shit about other people; so, really . . .

‘I don’t think my dress is going to make any difference. We can go somewhere else if you’re not comfortable here. Not Blacks though because of Clem, so I don’t really know where else there is. Or maybe this is just a bad idea altogether . . .’ Fleur gets up. She didn’t used to be like this with Augustus but she is now. She feels as if she’s been stuck at the end of the cul-de-sac that is their relationship for a million years.

‘Don’t be silly. Sorry, darling, you know I get over-anxious. It’s on your behalf as well. And Cecily, like I said, isn’t . . . Anyway, sit down. Let’s have tea.’

Fleur sighs, sits down and breathes out some more. She looks at the menu. It’s beautiful. Everything in here is beautiful, which is why she comes. If she was on her own she would probably order a whole afternoon tea with savouries and scones and clotted cream. But Augustus wouldn’t understand her ordering all that and then taking three quarters of it home for the birds, so Fleur simply orders a plate of fruit and thé pétales. Oh, and some macarons, at least two of which she will sneak away for the robin, who is quite partial to them. Augustus orders a slice of fruit cake, an English Breakfast tea and a large glass of Bordeaux. He frowns when Fleur gets out her mini jar of pink Himalayan salt and her special herbs that she adds to everything.

‘Well,’ he says. ‘How are you?’

‘Sad. Very sad. Not surprised, of course. She’s been so ill. I’m still working but everything seems so different. How are you?’

‘The same.’

Augustus is always ‘the same’, whatever that even means. Fleur waits for him to say something about Oleander, but he doesn’t. He won’t. Fleur doesn’t even know why he and Beatrix are planning to come to the funeral, as they haven’t spoken to Oleander since 1989. Does he hope to inherit Namaste House? But that wouldn’t make sense, because . . . She closes her eyes and opens them again. Sees the frankincense tree first, and then for some reason all the cushion covers she and Ketki sewed.

Augustus frowns again. Rubs his eyes.

‘What’s wrong?’ Fleur asks.

‘Oh.’ He pauses. He smiles weakly. ‘Everything. The usual.’

How many years does it take to stop missing your first wife, your sister and your two closest friends who have gone missing in India – or possibly the Pacific – while you stayed at home with a bout of malaria? More than he’s had, that’s for sure.

‘Well . . . I’m sorry.’

‘Don’t worry, darling. How’s the garden?’

He really isn’t going to say anything else about Oleander.

‘Good. A bit bare in places. The poppies are coming up. And I actually remembered your seeds this time.’ Fleur pulls a small brown envelope out of her bag. ‘These are from the best one. Really deep purple. I can’t believe I actually let it seed. But then again . . .’

‘Thank you, darling. I’ll put yours in the post. We keep forgetting.’

‘We do.’

‘I expect we’re very busy.’

Fleur smiles. ‘I expect we are.’

The afternoon tea arrives. When Augustus picks up his fork Fleur notices that his hands are shaking. He started growing opium to give to Cecily after her breakdown, but now he takes much more than she ever did. Much more than Fleur does. He says it helps his malaria, but who takes opium for malaria? The last time anyone seriously took opium for malaria in this country was in the sixteenth century. But at least it’s something they have in common. Some reason for choosing nice cards to send each other. Although Fleur isn’t allowed to sign hers with her own name.

‘So is this the fashion?’ he asks her, still looking at the dress. ‘I’ll have to tell Cecily.’

Fleur thinks about the story of the two celibate monks who come to a flooded piece of road. There is a beautiful woman there, and so one of the monks lifts her and carries her past the flood. The other one can’t believe he has done this, and sulks for miles. Eventually, he confronts his friend and asks him why he did it. His friend simply replies, ‘I put her down several miles ago but you, my brother, seem still to be carrying her.’

‘It’ll be over by the summer,’ says Fleur. ‘I wouldn’t bother.’

Actually, it won’t quite be over by the summer. According to Skye Turner’s stylist, colour is going to go on into Autumn/Winter and possibly even beyond into S/S12, although there’s also a sixties vibe in the air that she thinks may come to something. Maybe a pencil skirt thing. Fleur learned this earlier on when she was waiting for Skye to emerge from the larger of the two bathrooms in her hotel suite. There were handbags everywhere, about £30,000 worth, that Skye had been sent for free just that morning. She didn’t want any of them because one of them was named after a celebrity more famous than her. The stylist was going to take the lime green one for herself, but offered Fleur the yellow one. Fleur didn’t want it. Being surrounded by Hindus all the time makes leather kind of awkward. ‘Are you mad?’ the stylist said. ‘Take it and put it on eBay.’ But Fleur couldn’t be bothered. She probably should have got it for Bryony, though. Now she wants to stop this awkward conversation Augustus is planning to have before it even starts. Cecily, presumably, has her own ideas about clothes. Fleur sees her gardening painfully in white nightdresses at midnight, or visiting the doctor in linen trousers that sag around the arse, or grey asymmetrical dresses that make her look about twenty years older than she is. Fleur hears bits and pieces about her from Clem, who doesn’t really feel comfortable having a stepmother only five years older than she is, especially one who can barely walk and so must be pitied a little.

‘Really, fashion isn’t worth trying to keep up with.’

‘Well, you certainly seem to keep up with it.’

‘I don’t. I just wear what random stylists give me, or what gets left behind at the house. Honestly, being around celebrities all the time would turn anyone off fashion.’

‘How is the business?’ asks Augustus.

‘Good. Great, really. Although who knows what’s going to happen now that . . .’

‘But the place is making enough money?’

‘Yes, of course. For now. With Oleander gone I’m having to do a lot more of the one-to-one stuff, you know, like the therapy and the yoga and . . .’

And helping the Prophet make his parcels now that his one arm isn’t so good.

A bit of watering sometimes in the room above the orangery where no one goes.

Because if the universe didn’t want her to do this, then the universe would not have set it all up like this, and her mother would not have gone on that trip to meet the Lost People and would presumably not have become such a Lost Person herself. Although in some way she was always lost, which was what started it all. Fleur doesn’t know where the Prophet’s packages go; he has spared her that. But she’s been happy to bank the proceeds. But will they be enough? Because if Namaste House is sold then . . .

‘Don’t they say people aren’t spending money any more? I mean luxury spas and designer gurus are a bit, well . . . With the credit crunch and everything, surely people are cutting back?’

‘Celebrities will always spend money on feeling better about being sent thirty grand’s worth of handbags that are named after another celebrity.’

Augustus snorts. He’s not poor himself – far from it – but he looks down on people who make money from singing about having sex on the floor, or on the beach, even though he has had sex on lots of floors and also on the beach. In fact, sex on the beach was almost certainly what got him into this situation with Fleur in the first place.

‘No, I’m serious. It’s really hard to cope with a life that’s so absurd,’ Fleur says. ‘Imagine this. You’ve grown up on an estate in Folkestone, dirt-poor but beautiful. You’ve never had any money. You’ve been on one holiday with your mates to Ibiza that cost under a hundred quid and it was the best time you’ve had in your life. Your friends become hairdressers and waitresses. You get some work doing backing singing and save up to buy yourself one of those’ – Fleur points at the journalist’s Mulberry – ‘which costs eight hundred quid but then you realise that more famous models and actresses and pop stars are being given these things for free, because the companies want their stuff pictured with celebrities. Anyway, to cut a long story short, you make it. You become famous. You release an acclaimed album and you’re savvy enough to pick up a stylist as soon as possible and before you know it you’re walking for Dior even though you’re not a model. You do a duet with the most famous indie singer in the country. Now you get sent bags. You get flown first class. You stay in five-star suites. It’s great, but you realise you can never go back to Ibiza with your mates again. You can never get excited about earning enough money for a handbag again. The more money you earn, the less things you actually pay for. Everything becomes worthless. Meaningless. But you have to stay famous because the only thing worse than your current life would be to go back: back to poverty and having to take buses and buy frozen food and make your own doctor’s appointments. But nobody stays famous. Some people are famous for three years, but that’s about it unless you’re actually Tom Cruise.’

Augustus puts three, no, four, lumps of sugar in his tea. Fleur continues.

‘So one day your assistant books you an economy plane ticket by mistake and they won’t let you in the executive lounge. You protest and are removed. You try to upgrade but there are no available seats left on that flight. You don’t even know how to buy a plane ticket any more. You actually use the dreaded words that you used to joke about with your mother: “Do you know who I am?” They don’t. Well, they do, but they’re not going to upgrade you now your mascara is running. And there was that thing in Grazia last week, and you’ve put on a couple of stone since you stopped touring. You want to kill your assistant, really kill her, but instead you fire her by text message. You sit in the economy cabin sobbing because for the next three hours you are going to be normal. You may as well be dead. Your lowest point is when you go to use the business-class toilet – because that’s the one you’ve always used before– and the cabin crew politely but firmly steer you back to economy.’ Fleur pauses. ‘That’s where you find spirituality. Right in that moment. That’s when you are most ready to be filled with light.’

‘You are so like her.’ Augustus shakes his head. ‘It’s uncanny. But be careful, though, darling. Make sure you’re prepared for all the stories to surface again now that she’s dead.’

Fleur almost says, ‘Yes, Daddy.’ But she’s never called him that.

‘Anyway, how’s everything in Bath? How’s the malaria?’

Augustus frowns. ‘Painful. Unpredictable. The same. My mother sent me to an acupuncturist last week. It didn’t help. It just hurt.’

‘I don’t think it’s supposed to hurt. Did you say something?’

‘No. That kind of thing never works on me anyway. There’s no point.’

‘So why did you go?’

‘You know my mother . . .’ Actually, Fleur did not. But she knew all about her.

‘How’s Cecily? And the girls?’

‘Cecily’s the same. On a new medication, but can’t get up before midday and still won’t speak to my mother. Beatrix has made quite an effort lately, but it hasn’t made any difference. And the girls, well, Plum’s delightful. Reminds me a lot of Clem when she was that age. Lavender’s dreadful. I don’t know what to do any more. She wants things all the time and sulks if she doesn’t get them. Sometimes I wish we’d stopped with Plum. I mean, in terms of Cecily’s health, we should have stopped at Plum, or even before.’

‘It must be a phase,’ Fleur says. ‘I’m sure Holly went through something similar. Didn’t Plum? I mean, marketing to children is such a huge industry now.’

‘It’s the way Lavender asks for things, though. That’s what gets me. She sits on my lap and looks into my eyes like some sort of prostitute – I’m sorry, but that’s exactly what it reminds me of. “Darling daddy, please,” she says, all fluttering eyelashes as if she was Marilyn Monroe or something. Where on earth did she learn to do that? It’s just embarrassing.’

Maybe it’s the effect of the atoms. Or maybe she was Marilyn in a previous life.

‘Does she have friends?’

‘Yes, of course.’

‘Do they have sleepovers?’

‘Sometimes. I think they’re too young, but Cecily says it’s normal.’

‘So she saw another girl do it to her father. Or she saw it on Nickelodeon or a Hollywood film. She’s probably trying to impress you. Show you how grown up she is. Show you how much she knows about the world.’

‘Yes, but then there’s this awful wailing when I say no.’

Fleur shrugs. ‘I guess that’s just what it’s like having kids.’

‘You were no bother,’ Augustus says.

No. No, Fleur wasn’t any bother to Augustus. He quietly paid her school fees and kept his distance and may never even have admitted he was her father if he hadn’t thought she was about to have sex with Charlie – her actual brother. He never changed her nappies, and he never bought her a birthday present and she never sat on his lap. Not once.

The third-floor seminar room is windowless and hot. If there were windows you would definitely be able to see Canterbury Cathedral from up here. Seeing the cathedral is one of the top three reasons people come to this university, but once here students usually find themselves in these poky windowless rooms looking not at the cathedral and the pretty town around it but instead at the incomprehensible notes that the seminar leader before theirs has left on the whiteboard. The large dining room downstairs has a perfect view of the cathedral but this view is usually screened off. There doesn’t seem to be any reason to screen it off, except perhaps because students sitting there eating their £3.40 meals are deemed unworthy of something so aesthetically pleasing and must have it removed in case it ruins them in some way. Or before they ruin it. Before class Bryony went there for a snack, and she walked around the screens and sat there looking at the cathedral and waited for someone to come and stop her. They did not.

The group is arguing about a piece of dialogue from Northanger Abbey. Ollie lets them go on for far too long, as usual, and is not even definitely listening. At this moment the group isn’t even supposed to be discussing this passage, but should be finding instances of metafiction in the text. Helen, dreadlocked, dungareed, bisexual, argumentative, thinks it’s highly insulting that Henry Tilney tells Catherine Morland what flowers she should like, and finds him, and in fact the whole novel, highly condescending. Grant, the big-chested American scholarship student, says that in his opinion Henry is trying to liberate Catherine, and other women, by getting them to see beyond the simply domestic. Helen thinks women don’t need liberating by annoying toffs, thank you very much. And so on.

Bryony doesn’t join in. She simply reads the lines again. ‘But now you love a hyacinth. So much the better. You have gained a new source of enjoyment, and it is well to have as many holds upon happiness as possible. Besides, a taste for flowers is always desirable in your sex, as a means of getting you out of doors, and tempting you to more frequent exercise than you would otherwise take. And though the love of a hyacinth may be rather domestic, who can tell, the sentiment once raised, but you may in time come to love a rose?’ Bryony sighs. Who wouldn’t fall in love with a man who teased you as gently and sweetly as that? Who wouldn’t fall in love with a man who could see such different things in a hyacinth and a rose? Henry Tilney knows that loving a hyacinth and loving a rose are two entirely different things. He’s really talking about two different seasons, not just the indoors and the outdoors. He’s really talking about darkness and light and . . .

But Bryony would rather die than join in one of these discussions. Sometimes she imagines herself saying something, and it’s like when you give yourself vertigo by imagining falling off something very high. Everything fizzes up – her heart, her legs and, for some reason, embarrassingly, even her sexual organs – and in a way it’s almost enjoyable because she knows that this is a private fantasy, like throwing herself off a cliff, or sleeping with Ollie, and she would never do anything about it. Bryony tells herself that she doesn’t really want to sleep with Ollie. It’s just because he’s her seminar leader. She always wants to sleep with anyone in authority; it’s fine. She never does it. Although of course they did sleep together once, a long time ago, when she and James had a bad patch and before Ollie and Clem were together. Long before the children, or anything that really mattered. But no one knows about that, and it could never happen again. She’s too fat, for one thing. And he’s married to Clem.

And of course there’s still James. James knows the difference between a hyacinth and a rose. James would understand this passage. For a moment, Bryony aches for him, his too-sweet curries and the way he stirs his penis into her as if she were just another concoction bubbling in one of his cast-iron pans – not that he puts his penis in the pans of course – and how that is also too-sweet, as if he’d once read that this is the way women really like it and does it to please her. Bryony can’t bear to tell him that she hates it, that she wishes he would just pin her down on the bed and fuck her like a real man. Would Ollie fuck her like a real man? Unlikely. He’d probably do that stirring thing now too. Clem probably likes it. Does Henry Tilney fuck Catherine Morland like a real man? Now there’s a seminar discussion. Bryony thinks that he would. He wouldn’t be too dominant though; he would simply be assertive, although possibly a little brisk. And as for Darcy . . . To be properly fucked by a real man you’d need Darcy who, to be honest, would probably go down on you as well. First, of course. In his damp shirt. Oh . . .

Bryony stays behind after everyone else has gone. She stays behind most weeks to ask Ollie something or other, even if it’s just how Clem is. She hasn’t seen Clem much lately and is worried about her. Is she working too hard? But Ollie never says much. Ollie doesn’t even acknowledge her until all the other students have left the room. Even then, it can take a few seconds to get his attention. He is often busy rolling a cigarette, or checking his email – or whatever it is he does – on his phone. And then he’s always in such a hurry to get away.

‘Of course, next week I won’t be here, so . . .’ she begins.

Ollie puts his iPhone into the inside pocket of his soft brown leather briefcase. The screen of the phone is cracked, and has been since the beginning of term. Sometimes when Ollie gives them some activity to do he sits there looking at things on it with no expression on his face at all. Bryony has wondered why he doesn’t get his screen repaired. Surely he’d have had it insured? Or maybe he likes it like that.

‘Do the reading anyway, if you can,’ he says. ‘I think you’ll enjoy it.’

How can Ollie have any idea of what she enjoys or doesn’t enjoy now? She never says anything in class, and hasn’t taken up her supposedly compulsory tutorial. She and James haven’t socialised – well, not properly – with Clem and Ollie for quite a long time. Everyone’s just so busy. Bryony enjoys – just about – standing in a classroom like this with Ollie, with nothing between her and the door, knowing she can leave at any time. The idea of sitting in a room with him for fifteen minutes? No. What if she blushed? What if she broke his chair? What if she suddenly said something like ‘Can I see your penis?’ instead of what she actually meant to say? Not that she wants to see his penis (again); it is smallish, mushroom-coloured and rather crooked, but . . .

‘Will the class still be going ahead?’

‘What, without you and your insightful contributions?’

Bryony blushes. ‘No, of course I didn’t mean . . .’

‘Well, I’m not going to the funeral, so . . .’

‘Oh. OK. Well . . .’

He sighs and looks up from his briefcase. ‘I did offer. But Clem doesn’t need me to come. Turns out I’m good for buying flowers for Grandmother Beatrix’s Grand Arrival, but not required at the funeral itself.’ He smiles wanly. ‘I never said that, of course. I realise – as I’ve been reminded – that if I had normal reading weeks like everyone else this wouldn’t have been a problem. But then again, reading weeks are supposed to be for reading, not going to funerals.’ At the University of Canterbury, where Ollie works, and the University of Central London, where Clem works, it is usual to have reading weeks in the middle and at the end of the autumn and spring terms. But this term Ollie decided to cancel the one in Week 24 so that his students could discuss eighteenth-century philosophy in the light of Derrida. Bryony isn’t that sorry to be missing it. She has tried to read Derrida before. It’s very interesting, of course, and who doesn’t love Derrida? But it takes her around an hour to read a paragraph and by the time she gets to the end of it she’s forgotten what was at the beginning and sort of wants to go to bed. When Jane Austen says something clever, everyone – or almost everyone – can understand it, even after a few glasses of wine. Why can’t Derrida be more like Jane Austen?

More pertinently: why is Ollie confiding in Bryony? It frightens her. He frightens her, with his slightly cold eyes and the new flashes of silver electrifying his hair and his stubble. He and Clem are both greying stylishly of course. Despite now living in Canterbury, they both still go to their old hairdresser in Shoreditch who gives them jagged, asymmetrical cuts that somehow emphasise their wisdom, rather than their age. Bryony is sure that Clem still books all Ollie’s hair appointments. She probably pays for them too.

‘I’d better go,’ she says, looking at her watch.

‘I’m off to the bar. Fancy a drink?’

‘I can’t. I mean, I’d love to, obviously. But, you know, the kids.’

‘Let James put them to bed for a change.’

Bryony frowns. In reality, James will already have put the kids to bed. In fact, he puts the kids to bed almost every night because of Bryony doing her reading, or her valuation reports, or having drunk a bit too much.

‘He wouldn’t know how,’ she says.

‘No?’ Ollie shrugs. ‘OK, well, I’m going to go and have a drink anyway.’

‘Where do you even get a drink on campus at this time of night?’

The bar is dark, uncomfortable and almost empty. All the furniture is cheap, sticky and has sharp, thin edges that would kill a toddler in less than five minutes. There’s football: Germany are playing Australia on a screen that covers most of one wall. Germany are winning, of course, but Bryony can’t see that from where she’s standing. Bryony wouldn’t be able to spot the German football team if they walked into this bar. She watched all England’s matches in the World Cup last year – yes, including the one against Germany where the ball went over the line but wasn’t a goal – and she even pretended to like it, and actually did understand the offside rule when Holly explained it to her, although she’s forgotten it now; but, really, football? Sometimes she has said to James that her love of fashion is like his love of football, and she has to admit that there is something gendered and therefore unfathomable about it all. Both football and fashion have beautiful patterns that you seem to need the right kind of chromosomes to see, although as James has repeatedly pointed out, fashion requires a lot of time and money and football just requires a subscription to Sky Sports or a nice local pub.

Ollie hands Bryony her large white wine without looking at her and picks up his pint of IPA without looking at it. He looks, with the same expressionless expression he uses when looking at his phone, at the big screen. As Bryony follows him to a table, she can just about see that one of the teams has scored one goal, and the other has not scored any goals.

‘Nice to see Australia losing something,’ says Ollie.

Bryony mumbles something indistinct that could be ‘That’s good’, but might equally be ‘That’s interesting’, or even, if you analysed the tone closely enough, ‘I really couldn’t give a shit.’

‘Shame the Germans don’t play cricket,’ Ollie says.

‘But then wouldn’t they beat England at that too?’ says Bryony.

‘Do you like sport?’

Bryony can’t work out whether the emphasis in that sentence has fallen on the word ‘you’, the word ‘like’ or the word ‘sport’.

‘Not really. I quite like tennis, I suppose, but that’s only because of Holly.’

She sips her wine. It’s too sweet and too warm. At home she has most of a bottle of 2001 Chablis in the fridge. It cost around thirty pounds, but that’s worth it, right, for a bottle of wine to drink at home, when you’d pay that for a bottle of really crap wine in a restaurant? Anyway, the Chablis is cool and crisp, of course, but with just a hint of hay bales in the early morning – don’t laugh – and, to be honest, well, just a touch of horse manure. Bryony loves wine that tastes of barnyards or stables. She’s been looking forward to that Chablis all day. Now she has 250mls of this crap, Pinot Grigio or something, to get through, and she feels slightly dizzy from not eating since half past five. Why the fuck did she order a large glass of white wine in the first place when all it’s going to do is get warmer and warmer? And she has to drive home. And not say anything stupid.

‘So I guess you’re not my teacher any more,’ she says to Ollie.

‘Yeah,’ he says. ‘Now we can fuck.’

What? OK. Bryony has gone bright red. She must have done. Ollie is still looking at the football. She looks at what he is looking at. Someone in a white shirt kicks the ball to the goalkeeper. It’s all a bit blurry. He’s not trying very hard to . . . Oh, of course. It’s the goalkeeper on his own team. Bryony does not understand why people kick the ball to their own goalkeeper when surely they should be trying to get it to the other goal. But . . . Now someone’s blowing a whistle. Everyone stops running. It’s half time.

Ollie looks at her. ‘Er, joke. Sorry.’

‘No, it’s OK. It’s . . .’

‘Anyway, what about the PhD? I’ll be supervising that, surely? You can’t fuck your supervisor. You’ve applied, right?’

‘What?’

‘Joke.’

‘I know.’

‘So?’

‘Yeah. I applied online at the weekend.’

‘And for funding?’

Bryony frowns. ‘Yeah.’

Ollie sips his IPA.

‘OK. Look, don’t take this the wrong way, but do you actually need funding?’

‘What?’

‘I mean, do you actually need funding more than, say, Grant, whose father lost his foot in an accident in a factory that won’t pay him any compensation? Or Helen, who grew up on a council estate in Herne Bay and whose head-teacher once had to buy her a coat because her parents spent all their dole money on smack? I mean, I don’t want to put you off or anything, but . . .’ He laughs. ‘Well, to be honest I do kind of want to put you off. I mean you guys are pretty minted, right, you and James?’

Ollie says all of this as if it’s another joke. He even adds some ironic gravity to what he says about Grant and Helen so that Bryony knows that he knows that their narratives are just that, narratives, and that reality is so much more complex and dignified than tired old sob stories. The only thing is, it’s also obvious that he’s totally serious, so . . .

‘Well, actually . . .’

‘And of course – and I don’t mean to be harsh, but it’s happening, right, so we might as well admit it – there’s Great-Aunt Oleander’s estate to be divided up. What’s that house worth? A million or two? Plus the business.’

‘She’s probably left it all to Augustus,’ Bryony says. She has already had this conversation with James. What is it about men? Can people not just be sad for a few days before starting to talk about who gets what? But the fact is that, to be blunt, Bryony has spent most of what she inherited from her parents on clothes, wine, shoes and stuff for the kids, and she and James don’t have that much money any more. Well, they have some money. But not so much that Bryony can blow £950 in ten minutes in Fenwick on eye-shadow and moisturiser as she did on that hot, peculiar day last summer. They don’t have enough money to live like Augustus and Cecily, or Beatrix, of course, with all their property and bonds and God knows what. Bryony and James have enough money to go to the Maldives at Christmas, which is what Bryony wants to do, but not enough money to buy a forest just outside Littlebourne, which is what James wants to do. If Bryony does inherit part of Oleander’s estate, she has promised to buy James the forest on the basis that, yes, of everything a person could choose to do in the entire fucking world, she really wants to spend every summer in a dark, damp forest, picking poisonous toadstools and getting wet all the time and DYING. Even if she doesn’t die, her thighs will chafe, which people think is funny but is not funny. But maybe James will get a book out of it. And Bryony will be thin by the time they have to actually go to the forest, which means that everything will be different. She’ll be like a woodland nymph, dressed only in pure white cobwebs, and . . .

‘What are you and Clem going to do with your share? I mean, if there is a share, which I still think there probably won’t be.’

‘Probably a teaching buyout for me, so I can finish my book.’ Ollie finishes his IPA. ‘It’s just so fucking busy here all the time. Clem wants a pond in the garden. Wants to make a film about it.’ He looks at Bryony’s wine. ‘You want another one? I’m going to get another one.’

Bryony shakes her head. He goes to the bar. Bryony wants to pee, but she can’t leave while Ollie is at the bar. Perhaps he’d think that she’d walked out on him because of what he said about fucking, or about the scholarship. Perhaps then he’d leave too. Would that be such a terrible thing? Then Bryony could go home and start again on her evening, and drink the Chablis instead of this Pinot Grigio and love James like a real wife would. There are 165 calories in this glass of wine, but Bryony won’t log it in her food diary later because it isn’t very nice and she didn’t really mean to have it. When she gets home she’ll have 250mls of Chablis and she’ll log that instead. She also won’t log the sausage roll and chips she had in the dining hall before this evening’s class, because, after all, she wouldn’t normally have something like that, and now that term is more or less over she is confident that she will never even go to the dining hall any more, and after all where else would you find sausage rolls and chips? Fuck it. She just won’t fill in her food diary at all today. She’ll start afresh tomorrow. That means she can drink all the Chablis when she gets home. And she could have a packet of crisps now. Could she eat a packet of crisps in front of Ollie? No. Well, maybe. Actually, what Bryony really wants is a cigarette, but that would just be nuts. She gave up for the last time over three years ago. No calories in fags, of course. But James hates her smoking, and so do the kids. Last time Bryony smoked, Holly cried all night and threatened to kill herself.

Ollie comes back with a pint of IPA and a medium glass of white wine.

‘Here,’ he says. ‘Sorry I’m being a bit of a cunt. It’s been a long day.’

175 ml. Another 130 calories. And it will be warm by the time she gets to it. Warmer. What she should do, what she should really do, is wait for Ollie to go outside for a cigarette and then tip the rest of the large glass away somewhere and start again on the slightly cooler and smaller new glass. OK, how would she actually do that? She could just take it back to the bar. She could take it back to the bar and explain that she really shouldn’t drink this because she’s driving and could they just get rid of it for her, please, but in such a way that the man she’s with doesn’t see? Or she could just return it because it’s shit. She could go up to the bar and say, ‘Your wine is too shit even for students,’ or something cleverer that she would think of. But then they’d just give her more of something else. It’s so hard to lose weight when all the time people are giving you things full of calories. Ollie starts rolling a cigarette.

‘Actually,’ she says, ‘can you do me one of those as well?’

The football is back on. Improbably, Australia scores a goal.

‘Fuck me,’ he says. ‘Game on. You coming?’

They smoke by the university duck pond. Bryony wants to vomit, but she has to admit that once she is over the initial nausea, the cigarette tastes amazing. She feels mellow, all of a sudden, almost the way she felt that time she made tea from the wrong caddy at Fleur’s cottage. She’d forgotten it was like this. She was thinner when she smoked as well. How could she have ever stopped doing it? Smoking was like having a best friend who always listens and never judges you.

‘It would be nice to have a garden pond,’ she says. ‘I guess now the kids are a bit older, but they’re so expensive and . . .’

‘If you get a scholarship you could afford a pond.’

‘That’s not what I mean.’ She sighs. ‘Anyway, yes, all right, fine. I’ll pull out. I don’t need the scholarship as much as Grant and Helen need it. Point taken. But the main thing is that they’re better students than me, so why would I waste my time going up against them?’ She sighs again. And draws deeply on the cigarette.

Ollie screws up his face. ‘Why do you think they’re better students than you?’

‘They say more.’

‘You got the top mark for your essay.’

‘Did I?’

‘Yeah. So you’d probably get the scholarship. But they need it more. And they won’t come without it, so you’d basically be doing them out of their doctorates. You’ll come anyway, of course.’

‘I guess so. Well, no pond then.’ And no forest. ‘Never mind. Hope you get yours.’

‘No kids to drown in ours,’ Ollie says. ‘Never will be.’ He throws his cigarette end in the duck pond. ‘And because of that, my wife has started hating me. But you’ll know all about that.’

Bryony does not have any idea what he’s talking about.

‘I don’t have any idea what . . .’

‘Look, ignore me. I’m being a total cunt. Sorry. Fuck it. Let’s go back.’

Inside, Australia have scored another goal. A penalty. It’s 2–1.

‘Well,’ Ollie says. ‘Miracles do happen.’ He goes to buy another drink.

Bryony should have left by now. She hasn’t even texted James to tell him she’ll be late. Why has she not even done that? She could have done that while Ollie was at the bar, or while he was outside smoking, if she hadn’t been outside smoking with him. She should do it now. When she gets in she’ll have to clean her teeth before saying hello to anyone. That might sort of fool the kids, but it won’t fool James. Whatever she does now, he’ll know she’s been drinking, and smoking. At this rate she won’t even be able to finish the lovely Chablis because James will probably be in bed reading, and what kind of wife sits up drinking while her husband lies in bed reading?

She quickly texts him now: End of term drinks. No reception until now, sorry. Home soon as I can get away. Love you. Somebody, probably Fleur, was telling Bryony recently about an app people get that writes their text messages for them. In order to do this, it has a database of the things people always say in text messages. Sorry. See you soon. Leaving now. I love you. It must have been Fleur. Yes, it was over tea on Sunday while they were not talking about Oleander’s death and how Fleur felt about it. One of the celebrities had told Fleur about this app, expecting her to disapprove. But for Fleur there was no difference, not really, between an app supplying the words ‘I love you’ and one’s fingers typing what are essentially just words anyway. Bryony surprised herself by saying something back about Derrida, and arguing that it’s not that words are meaningless: quite the opposite. Words separate things. They create meaning. Without words we wouldn’t know the difference between a table and a planet. Without words, would anything exist at all? Then Fleur, being Fleur, said there’s no difference between a table and a planet anyway because the whole universe is just an illusion. Then Holly rolled her eyes and said, ‘OK, you are both officially mad.’

‘Clem doesn’t hate you,’ she says to Ollie when he comes back. ‘How could she? I mean, you’re very attractive – I’m saying that objectively, of course – and your book is going to be amazing, and . . .’ Bryony touches Ollie’s arm in a way that is supposed to be reassuring. Bryony doesn’t touch many men’s arms, at least not any more. She is surprised to find how firm this one is. Ollie’s biceps are incredible: rocks the size of tennis balls. Bryony’s intellectual mind retreats into what could be an endless ellipsis while her vaginal walls immediately start producing fluid. Biology is such an easy lay.

‘Maybe she thinks she doesn’t,’ he says. ‘But underneath, she does.’

‘No. That’s not right. She’s lucky to have you.’

He sighs. ‘I don’t know.’

He’s probably right. Bryony was the lucky one, getting James. He has already texted her back: No hurry. Hope you have fun. Kids in bed. Drive safely. Love you forever.

When Ollie gets in, Clem is asleep. Or pretending to be asleep to make him feel bad about staying out. Or perhaps some mixture of the two. He shits in the spare toilet before joining her. Here’s the game: he is being REALLY, REALLY quiet so as not to disturb her because she is so clearly REALLY, REALLY asleep. She cracks first.

‘Hello.’

And he does love her. That’s the thing. He adores her.

‘Hello.’

‘Are you having an affair? Do I need to start shaving my legs more or something?’ She yawns. ‘Please tell me it’s not a student.’

‘No, no. You’re quite safe. I was out romancing Frying Pan.’

This is what he calls Bryony. How do these nicknames start? Well, Bry rhymes with Fry, obviously. Bryony and frying pan have the same number of syllables. They are both dactylic, which means that the stress falls on the first syllable of the three. The nickname is also metonymic, because Bryony is fat, and frying pans represent, or in some way stand for, fat. But you can analyse these things too much. Clem knows who he means, and while she never joins in his nicknaming, she doesn’t stop him doing it either. It’s basically because she must still believe that he is taking the piss out of himself when he does it, and not the other person. And his nicknames aren’t that good, to be honest. If Clem comes up with something it’s brilliant. If Ollie does it’s usually just a bit weird. Like all his book proposals.

‘God, I must give Bryony a ring about next Thursday.’ Clem rolls onto her back. ‘How was your class?’

‘Fucking awful.’

Ollie can see Clem’s Forever Fish swimming bag neatly packed for the morning on the yellow wooden chair on her side of the room. The neatness is partly to spite him, just as the neatness all around the house is partly to spite him. The yellow wooden chair on his side of the room is empty. It is empty because their cleaner, Alison, insists on putting everything away. Anything that is left out is dumped, hidden or imprisoned in whatever cupboard or on whatever shelf happens to be nearest. Ollie looks and finds yesterday’s gym shorts hanging up in the wardrobe. This is stupid because, first, who hangs shorts in a wardrobe? Second, they stink. Ollie would report this to Clem, but she would just lazily say something about how he isn’t a child and can he put his shorts in the washing basket if he wants them washed rather than put away. Under the reign of Alison, these are the only two things that can happen to objects in this house: they are either washed, or they are put away. Clem has no qualms about telling Ollie off, but will never mention how she really feels to Alison. But of course, if Clem feels really strongly about something she never actually says it to anyone. This is why Ollie reads her journal. And because she knows he reads her journal, she never writes what she really feels in it (and sometimes goes so far as to actually lie, for example all that stuff about how she REALLY, REALLY loves him).

But anyway, even if half her journal is bullshit, he knows how she feels. He knows that she genuinely wants him to be a success – not as much of a success as her, of course – but enough of a success that he is no longer embarrassing. Can’t produce a book, can’t produce the right sort of sperm . . . Ollie imagines Clem in the swimming pool, in her red swimming cap with her turquoise goggles. That swimming cap . . . He imagines making love to her while she is wearing her swimming cap, and her sensible turquoise-and-white Speedo swimsuit. He’d pull the swimsuit to one side, as if they were both teenagers, perhaps leaning up against a tree . . . He’d get her to give him a blow job with her swimming cap on, and then he’d come on her head. Ollie’s erection subsides as he pisses for the last time before bed. Can he not even get a sexual fantasy right? He imagines telling her about it, and then Clem laughing, just once, and asking why she’d be leaning against a tree in her swimsuit and explaining where the whole fantasy had gone wrong. That bit about the swimming cap . . . But it’s rubber, isn’t it? Of course men are going to feel that way about rubber. But coming on my head? That’s a bit, well, a bit odd, wouldn’t you say? Especially as you’re infertile. I mean, who wants a load of dead spunk on their head?

Clem yawns, and starfishes her legs under the covers.

‘So why did you go for a drink with Bryony?’

‘I totally persuaded her not to go for the scholarship. It was so easy, and . . .’

‘Isn’t that a bit immoral?’

‘Not if I get two PhD students for the price of one. Or three, if I can get Grant and Helen to split the scholarship between them. They can’t not promote me if I have three PhD students and loads more time to . . .’

‘How can they split a scholarship?’

‘The eighteenth-century one is like twenty-five grand a year. For that you could easily get two sets of tuition fees and two lots of rent with some left over for a Pot Noodle every so often, or some lime and soda down the pub. They’ll do some teaching. They won’t starve. I mean it’s not as if these . . .’

‘But isn’t the point of that scholarship to give a student a really good PhD experience because that’s what Esther would have wanted. I mean, didn’t her husband say . . .’

Ollie rolls his eyes. ‘It’s great being dead, isn’t it? I mean, dictating what everyone . . .’

Clem twists her hair around a finger. ‘Don’t be a fucking idiot.’

Again, the way she says it. With a little lazy smile so he can’t get pissed off. Like when a beautiful cat scratches you and you can’t really be cross. Although Clem is not cat-like. She’s a mermaid. A smiling, singing, beautiful and deadly thing from the sea, twisting her hair around her finger like . . . Like, who does that during what could become a really exciting argument, with crying and everything?

‘Don’t call me a fucking idiot.’ And because of her, he can’t even say this the way he wants to say it and has to make it sound like something from a meditation tape. Ollie takes off his shoes, which should have been taken off downstairs. He drops his socks on the wooden floor, and his boxers on the yellow chair. He sucks in his stomach as he unbuttons the yellow shirt that Clem bought him. This goes in the washing basket, although the wrong one (there is one washing basket for delicates, to be washed only by Clem, which this shirt, costing £189.99, definitely is; and another washing basket for things which are not delicate and can therefore be washed by Alison, who puts everything on the Easycare cycle regardless of what any of the labels say). Ollie folds his jeans over the back of the chair, but they look wrong there, so he hangs them up. Then he puts his socks and boxers in the non-delicate washing basket and moves his yellow shirt to the right basket. Why is life so fucking complicated?

‘Anyway, didn’t her husband say that the bequest was to make sure a student could do a PhD without having to work as a waitress on roller skates, or whatever bizarre thing Esther had to do?’

‘Topless on wheels, selling her body for . . .’

‘Oh, come on.’ She sighs. ‘Don’t be such a dick.’

‘Well, she . . .’

‘She’s been dead for less than a year. She was our friend. Why does everything have to end up being about . . .’

‘Oh, right. And now you’re going to pretend you were really close to Oleander too.’

‘Ollie . . .’

‘What?’

‘Why are you being such a dick today?’

Of course she calls him a dick, rather than a cunt, because her cunt works and his dick does not work. At least, his dick works, on the rare occasions when it is given the chance, but his balls are a tangled mess and because of that . . .

‘Why is it always me?’

‘I don’t know why it’s always you.’

‘Oh, so you won’t even admit . . .’

‘I think I’m going back to sleep now.’

‘I see, so you won’t even . . .’

‘Goodnight.’

And how does she do that? She just rolls over and goes to sleep. Just like that. Like a seal or something, rolling over in the water, or into the water from a grassy bank or wherever seals go when they’re not in the water. She doesn’t even moan about having to get up so early in the morning because she WORKS IN LONDON when they LIVE IN CANTERBURY. And it is quite late, after all. It’s 23.15 and she likes to be asleep by half past ten. Can you lose an argument on the basis of simply not scoring enough points? Or is going to sleep in the middle of it basically a KO against the person who is still awake?

Somewhere in the grounds of Namaste House, a pop star is loose. Not Paul McCartney, who evidently couldn’t make it. It’s only Skye Turner, nowhere near as famous as Paul McCartney of course but currently a respectable number 7 on the Top 40 compiled from iTunes and Spotify figures (but not YouTube, where she has yet to make her mark). She is not just loose but lost and alone in the white garden, which is not yet white. She has been to the house thousands of times but has never made it beyond the orangery and into the grounds. And now Oleander is gone. About half an hour ago Skye Turner saw a copper sculpture of a horse that she would like to buy. It was standing in the middle of something called the ‘wildflower meadow’, although there are no wildflowers yet. Would such a thing be for sale? You don’t know unless you ask. But now she can’t find it again. At first the sculpture horrified her: it was half horse, half skeleton. But now she would like to buy it. She would like to buy it, but she can’t find it. And now Oleander is gone.

Who was Skye Turner crying for, at the funeral this morning? Was she crying for Oleander, who was old and had not been in much pain and in any case not only believed in reincarnation but did not want to be reincarnated, which is a win-win, really? Or was she crying for herself, for what she had lost? There’s Fleur, of course, Fleur remains, but . . . Skye Turner sighs. Oleander was a mystical recording studio, and all the tapes that Skye Turner made there are now lost. Burned. Erased.

She walks through an old wooden door and finds herself in a small walled garden. In the centre of the garden is a stone plinth with another copper sculpture on it: a toad. Facing the sculpture is a moss-covered bench with a robin on it. The robin stops digging around in the moss and starts watching her. The dried remains of last year’s poppies – even Skye Turner can recognise a poppy – are scattered around like faded decorations from a long-ago party. And there are green shoots everywhere. Things are growing, despite the cold. There is a faint smell of chamomile. She turns again and is no longer lost: there is Fleur’s cottage, looking like something from a book, with its big, sleepy-eye windows and huge, sad door. Ivy beards it all over like a green man’s face. And there’s Charlie Gardener, the great-nephew, hovering. He is thin, angular, slightly wizard-like. A young, dark magician who might see her and chase her through the tangled forest where she would fall and . . . Skye Turner moves away, back towards the white garden, followed by the robin, who is singing something that sounds like, but can’t be . . .

How exactly does a pop star come to be in the garden of a house on the very edge of England, in a slow, small medieval town that, long ago, was a busy port before the sea curled up like an old woman with no lover and became a tiny, shallow river with little boats and moorhens and samphire growing on its banks? You can take a helicopter, which is what the Beatles did all those years ago. You can land at the small airport a couple of miles away. But the more normal route is two trains and a taxi. It takes forever. On a map Sandwich looks close to London. It is in Kent, for goodness sake, a county that bleeds into London, is right next to it. But it takes Skye almost as long to get here as it takes to get to her parents’ place in Devon, which is almost five counties from London, the way the train goes. From here to her parents’ place in Devon it’s roughly seven hours. And then there’s Greg somewhere in the middle.

And now Oleander is gone.

Skye Turner walks on, through the small forest and around to a larger path lined with trees. From here she can see Namaste House: big, red, old; perhaps slightly wiser than the sad cottage next door? The large white door with the crescent-moon steps leading up to it. The orangery to the right. All the flowerbeds and kitchen gardens and greenhouses and the old brass sundial. There are flowers everywhere in this part of the garden. Skye Turner can’t name most of them, but in the summer they are delicate purple things and fragile red things and trembling blue things and things that climb up without checking what the way down might be. Clinging to the side of the house is a plant that could be clematis, with large buds. And inside, she knows, through the white door, there will be the faint smell of chlorine from the indoor pool and the hum of the generator – or whatever the hell it is – that runs the sauna and steam rooms. The pale ceramic jugs of lemon water everywhere: alkaline, purifying. Curries for lunch. Wholemeal cakes. And then through the library and up some stairs and there she always was. Oleander, wearing something ridiculous – a robe covered with stars and planets once and a silver shell suit another time – with a sweet, deep warmth that was like something you’d drink if you were really ill, and of course Skye Turner was really ill when she first came here and . . .

And now Oleander is gone.

The doorway to Fleur’s cottage smells of lapsang souchong, black cardamom and roses, which is a bit how Fleur herself smells, although with Fleur there are layers and layers of scents, each one more rare and strange than the last. Her perfume, since they discontinued Givenchy III because of something to do with the oak moss in it, is Chanel’s 31 Rue Cambon. She is peppery, woody . . . She is the essence of chypre. She is deep, green, magical: something you’d find naked by a remote lake. Something that would let you, no, encourage you, to do whatever you . . . Beyond the doorway, where there are pre-dinner smells of chocolate, fruit and fresh spices, Charlie can hear someone crying, probably Bryony. His sister Clem never cries. And then Fleur’s voice.

‘I had to let you know as soon as possible, basically.’

‘It’s just, I mean, I’m thrilled for you. But why?’

‘I think . . . I mean, I do feel a bit awkward.’

‘But let’s face it, though, our husbands would want to sell it.’

‘James wants a bloody forest.’

‘Ollie doesn’t know what he wants, really. Or what I want. But he definitely wants money.’

‘I do think that’s probably why.’

So Fleur has inherited Namaste House. Well. Oleander must have known, then. She must have known that Fleur is Augustus’s daughter. But why not give a share to anyone else? Charlie can see Fleur biting her lip in that way she does, trying to explain, trying to find a way of telling her oldest friends that she is unbelievably rich and they are not, when it was supposed to be the other way around. But they must appreciate that she has worked there for free for almost fifteen years, using her strange, quiet instinct for business to take the place out of danger of bankruptcy. And . . . well, actually, for God’s sake, why has no one ever seen it? The family resemblance is so striking it is almost embarrassing. Or it would be if anyone bothered to look. She and Charlie resemble twins found huddled together approximately twenty years after being abandoned in a remote jungle. Or maybe Harrods. In any case, if you left twins together for that long, alone, perhaps it’s inevitable that they would . . . But anyway, they are hardly together any more, and everyone else is so wrapped up in themselves that it’s likely that no one will ever notice, and no one will ever know. Which hurts Charlie in a way he can’t quite . . .

‘What, because Ollie’s such an idiot?’

‘No! Of course not! But yeah, I guess I will keep the whole thing going and look after Ketki and Ish, and Bluebell, and the Prophet, for the rest of their lives. Oleander knew I’d do that. I’ve been trained to do that for, like, forever. I’m not going to sell up because running Namaste House is literally the only thing I know how to do.’

‘But she gave you no idea she was planning . . .’

‘No. Well, not exactly. You know what she was like. But then she didn’t tell me that she was going to give all of us a seed pod each either. Or that Quinn left a journal. And then of course there’s that amazing hunting lodge on Jura. I didn’t even know we – she – even owned that. You and Charlie will have to work out what you’re all going to do with it. I mean it’s got to be worth loads as well, right? It looked way bigger than Namaste House. It must be so exciting! So we’ve all done OK really, not that we should see it in that way, because of course we’d all rather have Oleander back and everything. It’s just so strange the way that . . .’

It is strange, Charlie thinks. But Oleander must definitely have known. She knew all about Augustus and Briar Rose and their secret daughter. No one thought it was odd when Oleander let Fleur stay on in the house after her mother disappeared. Fleur had grown up in that place after all. Where else was she supposed to go? And where was Oleander going to get another yoga teacher that she wouldn’t have to pay? But now all the extra responsibility she gave Fleur makes sense. And of course the huge gift of the cottage. She must always have known Fleur was one of the family; that Fleur had Gardener blood in her. But leaving Namaste House – the whole operation – to her? What the fuck is that about? Charlie is pleased for Fleur, of course he is, but what are Beatrix and Augustus going to say? And what in God’s name are they all – the younger generation, the ones left behind – supposed to do with a seed pod each? What was Oleander trying to say there? Go kill yourselves? Will there be something in Quinn’s journal that explains further? But if Oleander had things and knew things that were important then why hide them for the last twenty-odd years? Clem has already asked to read the journal, and Bryony has shrugged and said yeah, for sure, but she just wants to read it first, as Quinn was her father after all. Which basically means no. And as for this hunting lodge on Jura, which he, Clem and Bryony now own, and which Fleur is still trying to make sound exciting and even better than Namaste House, no one knows how that came to be in the family at all. They’ll go and visit it in July, they have decided. It’s two plane rides away in the depths, if such a thing exists, of the Inner Hebrides, off the west coast of Scotland. And then to make things even more confusing there is this woman lurking about called Ina who turned up at the funeral from the Outer Hebrides . . . She was saying something about the frankincense tree before and . . .

Fleur’s voice has long since trailed off. There’s a long pause followed by the sound of a teaspoon hitting bone china just slightly too hard.

‘Will you have to get some kind of qualification now? I mean, if you’re going to take over running all the therapy and yoga and everything?’

‘Bryony!’

‘Well, she’s talked about it often enough. And I’ve really enjoyed going back to uni. I just thought . . .’

Charlie pushes the open door and calls ‘Hello?’ to let them know he’s coming, and to give the impression that he’s only just arrived and hasn’t been listening to their conversation for the last ten minutes. His Vans don’t make any sound on the black-and-white Victorian tiles in Fleur’s entrance hall. He wore a suit for the funeral itself but has since been back to Bryony’s and changed into his favourite Acne faded corduroy trousers and a white T-shirt with a yellow Alexander McQueen cardigan over the top. ‘You look like an old person,’ is what Holly said when she saw him. So he tried the Acne blazer that was his second choice but a bit matchy-matchy with the trousers. ‘You look like you’ve been to Debenhams,’ she said. ‘You are basically an old person who goes to Debenhams, and even has lunch there, with slimy peas and gravy.’ She sort of had a point; he could see that. But maybe you have to be over eleven to understand that fashion is not only – or even – about looking good. At eleven it is impossible to understand why grown-ups wouldn’t want to be happy all the time and go around in ball gowns drinking fruit juice and eating chocolates and spending their wages on puppies, kittens, board games, picnics, trips to the cinema and visits to the donkey sanctuary. Charlie supposes that if Holly were ever in charge of a budget there’d have to be a tennis court too. And cut flowers. He suddenly sees her holding vast bunches of pale pink peonies, weighing more than she does, probably, with early-summer sunlight glinting off her almost-black hair.

The women are in the drawing room on the right. Charlie breathes deeply, as he always does when he enters this room, as if to actually take it into his body: the polished oak floorboards; the Sanderson Grandiflora wallpaper in eggshell and bronze; the antique sofas that Fleur reupholstered herself using various old Liberty fabrics, all with botanical, slightly otherworldly prints. The large vase of pussy willow on the apothecary-style coffee table. Fleur herself is sitting in the rocking chair, which has a print of dark pink and purple organisms that are almost, but not quite, recognisable flowers. Clem and Bryony are sitting together on the pinker of the two George Walton sofas. In front of them Charlie is pleased to see the Wedgwood Golden Bird tea set he bought Fleur for her thirtieth birthday. He, of course, is still wearing the labradorite pendant she made for him all those years ago. They’ve hardly spoken for months after that argument about Pi last July, although of course they saw each other earlier at the funeral, but from opposite ends of a row. Now here he is.

‘Hello,’ says Fleur. ‘I’d offer you a cup of tea but actually we’re due to have cocktails in half an hour when the others arrive so unless you’re desperate . . .’

The smell of Fleur’s lapsang souchong blend. But . . .

‘I’m fine. Can I help with anything?’

‘Yes, actually,’ says Fleur. ‘Come and help me pick some mint.’

There is a frost on the morning after Oleander’s funeral. When the robin wakes up, his wings are glary and frozen, and he has to shake himself for several seconds to free them before he can even think about flying. When he gets to the large stone birdbath he finds that there is no water, just a large slab of ice that he can’t drink or bathe in. But there is something on his table, at least: not dried mealworms; not slugs. The robin likes spelt pastry but does not like smoked salmon because it tastes of fire and danger. Norman Jay does not like smoked salmon either, and the no-name woodpecker doesn’t even come to the bird table. The bad-luck magpie will have to eat it when he comes later in the morning, or else the bigfat pigeon will have it, or his mate will.

After he has eaten several poppy seeds and the remainder of his pink macaron, the robin flies to the other birdbath on the steps leading up the side of the cottage, where it is warmer. He drinks slowly, and then washes, his lacklustre wingflap signifying that he does not want what is coming soon: finding a mate, nesting, providing. He is tired: it is his eighth spring. Through the bedroom window he can see that Fleur is nesting. Fleur often nests. But she never lays any eggs. That man in her nest has made it yblent. Did he make Fleur put out the firedangerfish? Did he eat the other macarons? Did he make her cry out in the night, as she so often does now? The robin heard nothing, so perhaps this is the one who makes her silent. The one with feathers like a blackbird, although he has not been in Fleur’s nest for years. The robin suddenly wants to be alone, so he flies to the top of the holly tree, puffs out his chest and sings his most violent song. The song, roughly translated, tells of hard beaking, in both a sexual and non-sexual way. It has woodness, but also intense fertee.

Fleur is not asleep. Fleur is not really awake either. She is wondering about the Scottish woman, and all those things she said. And how she wants to give her something in the morning, which is more or less now. She said she had something else from Oleander, that Oleander couldn’t give Fleur while she was still alive. Fleur can hear the robin singing something deep and far away. The woman – Ina, her name obviously the end of something else, hopefully not Nina, for obvious reasons – had travelled from her croft on the Isle of Lewis, in the Outer Hebrides. Oleander used to go on mysterious ‘Scottish trips’, setting off on a sleeper train roughly twice a year. But she never talked about who she saw or what she did. Fleur had imagined her in Edinburgh, Miss-Jean-Brodieing around castles and tweedy shops before meeting sad, wildered celebrities in hotel suites or mansions overlooking the Firth of Forth. She was wrong.