The Seed Collectors (32 page)

Halfway down Jura’s one road, Craighouse nestles in a beautiful bay with more sparkling blue water and an old stone jetty that curves back towards land like an elbow that someone has rested there while they have a long chat with their neighbour. The Small Isles poke out of the sea like pieces of something’s spine. They are, in all seriousness, and according to an information sign by the jetty, called Flat Island, Rabbit Island, Goat Island and Useless Island. Craighouse has a shop (closed on Sundays), a village hall, a hotel and the Jura whisky distillery. It’s very charming, but they are not staying.

‘But why not, Daddy?’ asks Holly.

‘Yeah,’ says Bryony. ‘We may as well have dinner here, surely?’

‘I think we should press on. Fleur said there were supplies at the house.’

‘Right, but Fleur’s idea of supplies is likely to be . . .’

‘And you must be curious to see it?’

‘I suppose so.’

‘Where is Fleur anyway?’

‘On some mad spiritual quest to the Outer Hebrides.’

‘Aren’t we in the Outer Hebrides, Mummy?’

‘Jura is the Inner Hebrides,’ says James.

Ash doesn’t say anything because he is asleep.

After everyone leaves, Fleur, Skye and Ina sit together in front of the peat fire. It’s impossible for Skye and Fleur to walk back, and Ina doesn’t have a car. Somehow she manages to survive on this vast shopless island with just a bicycle, and the bus. Skye is bathing her feet in hot salt water. Fleur has a blanket around her shoulders. It’s cold in the evenings here, even in July. Ina gets them each a nip of single malt.

‘So, I’ve really come about the book,’ Fleur says. ‘And, I suppose, the seed pods.’

‘The book?’

‘You gave it to me after the funeral.’

‘Oh, Oleander’s copy of
A Course in Miracles
. That makes sense, although it’s odd that you managed to find out about the retreat . . .’

‘The book was blank.’

‘What?’

‘The book wasn’t
A Course in Miracles
. It was blank.’

‘Can I see it?’

‘It’s back at the hotel. I should have brought it with me, but I didn’t realise . . .’

‘We’ll find someone to drive us over and get it once the retreat is over tomorrow. We’ll have a proper look at it. I mean, you’re absolutely sure?’

‘Yes.’

Did Bryony come here with her parents once, or did she just imagine it? No one is exactly clear how Jura House came to be in the family, except that Fleur seemed to think it had something to do with the Prophet. It wouldn’t have looked then as it does now. It’s been an extremely expensive holiday let for years. But even now it looks like something other than it is: it is a hyperreal vision of what someone in London thinks that someone coming on holiday here thinks that a hunting lodge should look like. And it’s all been put together with a slightly raised eyebrow, with, if Bryony’s honest, a bit of a metropolitan sneer that may even be very slightly camp. But you can analyse these things too much. Who really cares that the herbarium specimens hanging in the front parlour are written in French, and are from Southern France, rather than Scotland? And surely no one really minds that the boy riding the goat in the painting in the white bedroom is from a different century, country and socio-economic class, let alone family, from the ankle-socked girls in the large framed photographs in the dining room? It is all tremendous fun, as Granny might say. And now, she – well, she and James, or maybe let’s go back to she – owns a third of it.

‘How do you feel with all this God stuff going on?’

‘Kind of weird. How about you?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Oleander never did the God thing. The ego thing, yes. But not the God thing. But so much of what they are saying here is like the stuff she used to say, so how can she not have done the God thing?’

‘Maybe she just didn’t call it that in her head.’

‘Maybe . . .’

‘I mean, they talked a lot about “the universe”, right? What’s the difference between the universe and God?’

‘Yeah. Nothing.’

‘I keep thinking about that bird thing she used to say.’

‘What bird thing? Oh, the thing from the
Rig Veda
?’

‘Two beautiful birds living on the same tree . . .’

‘The
selfsame
tree, is how she put it . . .’

‘One eats the fruits of pleasure and pain . . .’

‘While the other just looks on.’

‘Yeah. I like that.’

‘Me too.’

‘I’d still rather be the one that eats all the crap though.’

‘Me too. Although . . .’

‘What?’

‘Maybe you’re supposed to be both? Like it’s the ego and the self together?’

‘Yeah, maybe. Oh well. Goodnight.’

‘Night.’

The plane banks slightly to the left, and Charlie can see that below him the landscape is beautifully wounded, as if it were a troubled teenager with a razorblade and a whole afternoon alone. In places the red is streaky or slightly clotted. But every so often there is a perfect square of it, and it is the most wonderful red you could ever imagine. It is actually far redder than blood. Can people make red
like that out of binary code or melted-down plastics? No. This is not Pantone 186 or 711. The only thing that is red like this is summer poppies. There are fields and fields of them, annihilating the wheat, and overdosing any insects stupid enough to try to eat them.

Charlie remembers being maybe twelve or so, which meant Clem, Bryony and Fleur would have been about ten. They were driving somewhere together. Perhaps it was someone’s birthday. Yes, perhaps Aunt Plum’s. Bryony’s mother. There was a two-car convoy: his father Augustus driving one and Uncle Quinn driving the other. He remembers a silly race down country lanes. Going over a small humpback bridge and at least one of the cars actually taking off and all the grown-ups laughing about it afterwards. Some village pub that he forgets, and perhaps a picnic in some woodland, although maybe that was another occasion altogether. But he particularly remembers coming around a bend on a high ridge and seeing below a huge, perfect square of red that at first looked like the roof of the biggest barn imaginable, but set at a funny angle. He remembers his mother and his sister begging Augustus to chase the red, to find out where and what it was, how it began and how it ended. At each bend they would either lose or find the red. And when they did glimpse it, magical and intense and always so maddeningly distant, his mother would sigh and say, ‘It’s poppies, darlings. Poppies everywhere.’

Doilies.

Lots and lots of doilies. Some of the doilies have little statues of the Buddha on them. Some of the Buddhas are covered in a kind of gold foil. Also covered in gold foil are the chocolates, which are arranged on various cake stands around the room. There are framed photographs of rainbows with angels superimposed on them. Mog and Joel have not come to Sylvia’s for the second part of the
workshop, and it is as if they have taken some light away with them. The remaining delegates, if that is what one would call them, all seem to be wearing polyester. There is a smell of sweat, and, vaguely, mostly from Stan’s direction, faint wafts of urine. Fleur goes into the kitchen to see if Sylvia wants help with the tea. Also to get away from the smell. Ina follows her.

‘It’s your own fault,’ says Ina, when Sylvia pops out to the car for more pink wafers.

‘I’m sorry?’ says Fleur.

‘If you actually believed anything at all that I have said, or that Oleander used to say, you would not have made all this so remote and, well, so unattractive and horrible. You’ve made it much worse today than it was yesterday. Why?’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘This is all an illusion, right? Your illusion. Sort it out.’

‘How would I do that?’

‘Forgive everyone. Forgive yourself.’

‘Right. Look. If I forgive everyone for being old, fat, smelly, boring and ugly then I won’t mind any more that they are old, fat, smelly, boring and ugly. So for all you know I might have already forgiven them.’

‘So then why are you making us have this conversation?’

Fleur sighs. ‘This is doing my head in.’

Sylvia comes back with the pink wafers.

‘So I read that midges are point six millimetres, which is obviously really tiny, right, but the things that keep biting me are’ – Bryony holds up her forefinger and thumb with approximately two centimetres between them – ‘this long. What are they?’