The Seed Collectors (40 page)

‘It’s so obviously because they added up their fish wrong.’

She rolls her eyes and starts packing away her things.

‘I mean, Theology is not known for its maths skills, is it? I mean, don’t they think the universe was created four thousand years ago or whatever?’

Here Megan should laugh or make a joke back. She doesn’t. She simply says, ‘See ya,’ in a flat, dead way, and then leaves.

When Ollie turns around, Frank and David have gone too. No one in the room is making eye contact with him. But he was just . . . Of course, someone had to . . . He imagines telling Clem later, and what
she might say, but then he realises he won’t tell Clem later, that he will never, ever tell anyone he did this.

The young couple are beautiful. Like something from an ad for jeans shown after 9 p.m. on Channel 4 or any time on MTV. But the big question is: will they fit into this village? Of course not; the whole idea is fucking ridiculous. But what does Bryony do about it? What can Bryony do about it? Of course, she wants to sell this house because she wants, and sort of needs, the commission. What she does not want is for a house to be under offer to two people who no doubt have no mortgage arranged and are going to end up as the weak link in a chain now probably also containing PEOPLE FROM MARGATE and at least one mobile home parked somewhere in the White Cliffs Holiday Park.

It’s 12.15. Bryony has had, so far today, three espressos and two and a half croissants from Allotment, the cute little organic shop that has just opened virtually next to her office. She has the remains of a latte in her car, and the remains of a breath mint in her mouth, and she is due to meet her business partner Emmy, to whom she hasn’t properly spoken for
days
despite their offices being next to each other, in the Black Douglas at 12.30, and she should really text her to say she’s going to be late, but if these two would just hurry up and realise that this village is full of white
Daily Mail
readers who are over seventy and they would not possibly ever fit in here then she might just . . .

‘Oh, babe. A real Aga.’

FFS. Bryony takes out her phone.

For the price of this house, a four-bedroom detached with a paddock and orchard in Worth, this couple could buy a fifteen-bedroomed house complete with ground-floor Chinese restaurant if only they would look in Margate or Ramsgate or Herne Bay. But no. Bryony
realises that the girl/woman half of the couple is wearing an actual Barbour and not the version you can get from Dorothy Perkins. This is serious. She texts Emmy.

Bryony met Emmy roughly ten years ago, when she and James were considering putting their house on the market and moving somewhere far away and rural so that James could write a different book from the one he is writing now. Or maybe it was sort of the same one. It was before he got the Natural Dad column, anyway, and before women started giving him That Look in the street and sometimes even writing to him to tell him how perfect he is and offering to take him off Bryony’s hands. On more than one occasion he has been asked to send women pictures of his biceps. His biceps! James has no biceps. Well, not real ones. Not like Ollie’s. Perhaps James should send women pictures of Ollie’s biceps. Or perhaps Ollie should just send . . . OK. One too many espressos. And that dream last night . . .

By the time Bryony gets to the Black Douglas it’s gone one. Given that it’s Friday, and given all the stress of just having to live through Monday to Thursday with staff appraisals and a broken photocopier, they get a bottle of Sancerre as a special treat. But after two glasses Bryony still looks sort of serious, and a bit . . .

‘God, babes, what’s up? You look tired.’

Bryony sips her wine. ‘Family problems.’

‘Really? Not with lovely James?’

‘Well . . .’

‘But you two are soulmates. I mean . . .’

What utter bollocks. When Emmy is pissed – in fact, she does not even have to be pissed – and within a five-mile radius of James she seeks him out and flirts with him so outrageously that people who have not seen it before tend to sit there open-mouthed – literally – and sometimes even say something. Last time Emmy came round for supper Fleur was there, and Clem and Ollie actually, and even Ollie
noticed Emmy nudging James and winking at him and announcing to the table, ‘We’ve got so much in common, me and James,’ and, ‘I adore poetry. James loves poetry too, don’t you, James?’ In fact, wasn’t that the night . . . ? Yes, that must have been the night when Emmy was in full flow, reminiscing about the time she and James first met, and how romantic it was, and of course it was just because she was really pissed – and yes, OK, she does obviously fancy James, but that’s flattering, right? – and so Bryony smiled and opened another two bottles of wine and let it all go until Ollie said, ‘Are you just going to let her fuck your husband then or are you going to do something about it?’ and then Clem got embarrassed and they left. Is that what happened? Did Bryony maybe dream it? No one tells you that once you pass thirty – or, say, your 3,000th bottle of wine – you begin to forget even important things like what music you had at your wedding and the date of your youngest child’s birthday, let alone what happened at a dinner party two years ago. Anyway, Emmy doesn’t mean it.

‘He just . . . I just . . .’ But how do you explain to a single person the intricate tiny fuck-ups in a married life? And how would she even begin on all the stuff with Holly? Like for example when James was pouring his homemade lemonade yesterday – and this is something Holly will actually drink, possibly because it tastes sour and faintly medicinal – he gave Ash almost twice the amount he gave Holly. Why on earth all the men in Holly’s life are conspiring to starve her is a bloody mystery in any case, and . . .

‘Are you fucking regularly? That’s the main thing.’

‘Regularly as in once a year?’

Big eyes. Huge eyes. ‘Nooooo? You’re not serious?’

‘No. It’s not quite that bad. But . . .’

‘Maybe you need new underwear? Trip to Fenwick’s?’

‘Selfridges, darling.’

This is why people have affairs. Yeah, Bryony could buy new underwear. But if she does it’ll be another one or two hundred quid that
could have been spent on the children, or put aside for repairing the dishwasher, or put towards the fucking forest fund, which still somehow exists even though Clem, Bryony and Charlie have decided not to sell the house on Jura this year. Why encourage your actual wife to buy new underwear when you could just install her in a forest and then go out and get a whole new person with a whole new wardrobe full of clothes you have never seen before, that you do not resent in any way because none of them were bought at your expense, and none of them cost twice what you get for your column and in any case if they did it would be exciting, not threatening, and . . . But James won’t have an affair. He’d be too scared.

‘A man goes to the doctor. “Well,” says the doctor, looking grave. “I’m afraid this is serious. The best thing you can do for your health is to give up smoking, drinking and fatty food, and to take up some exercise.” The man looks concerned. “I hear you, doc,” he says. “So what’s the second best thing?”

‘That one is
almost
funny, Uncle Charlie.’

‘You are very hard work sometimes.’

‘Are we there yet?’

A plane comes in to land overhead. ‘Yep. We must be close.’

‘Are we lost?’

‘Of course not. I know London like . . .’

‘Yes, I know, like the back of your hand.’

‘Actually, I’ve got something else that Oleander said to me when I was feeling guilty once.’

‘Go on.’

‘OK, so it wasn’t long after my mother disappeared, and I’d taken on loads of jobs at Namaste House to make sure that I was indispensable and wouldn’t get thrown out. Anyway, one of the things I thought of as my “job” was feeding the birds. Silly really, because I’m not sure Oleander even noticed the birds. But I definitely felt that having a garden full of real birdsong would be extra relaxing for the clients and just, well, beautiful. I wanted to make everything beautiful then.’

‘You still do.’

‘Mmm. I suppose so. Anyway, at the start I didn’t really think about the birds or know anything about them. I was just feeding them for my own reasons. And they did pretty well out of it. So we were all happy. And they sang and sang, and I carried on feeding them, for several years. But then I started forming relationships with individual birds, particularly a robin – he still comes, actually. Anyway, feeding the birds gradually began to feel like an obligation. One week, I suppose a couple of years ago now, I went to London on business – ooh, maybe even to see you! – and didn’t feed the birds at all and when I came back I felt so guilty. I didn’t see the robin for a couple of days and I was so scared he’d starved to death. I shared these fears with Oleander. This is what she said to me: “How do you know what the birds want?” I looked at her, a bit bemused. I said something about how all animals want to survive and how in the winter the birds need quite a lot of food, and then she just cut in, looked me right in the eyes and said, “How do you know the birds wouldn’t rather be dead?”

‘That should definitely go in the book.’

Holly is windscreen-wipering the ball with her Wilson Steam 25 racquet. Her opponent, who is called either Alice or Grace, does not know how to windscreen-wiper the ball, which means her shots are weak and flat and pathetic and often kind of slicey in a bad way. Her
opponent also stands in no man’s land pretty much all the time, which means that all Holly has to do is land the ball at her feet and with all that topspin of course she can’t hit it and the whole thing is totally predictable – 15–0 and 30–0 and 40–0 – and actually also really embarrassing, and on the first day here, when Holly didn’t let her opponent get at least one game, the other girls at the David Lloyd Tennis Centre called her a lesbian and a fucktard and didn’t tell her you needed to change out of your tennis clothes for dinner, which meant she was the only spaz at dinner still in her whites.

Holly windscreen-wipers the ball really hard into the net on purpose.

Forty–fifteen. She serves and the other girl stumbles. It’s an unintentional ace.