The Seed Collectors (51 page)

‘No! I just wonder if you can tell things about a person by what plants they like.’

‘Maybe it’s more relevant if you work with plants, and . . .’

‘Roses are quite obvious, I suppose. But then Nicola is a bit . . .’

‘Most people don’t really know what roses are. I mean, Rosales? Yes, I’m fond of Rosales.’

‘The whole order?’

‘Yep. All that lovely fruit. Sloe berries and figs and . . . My sister does this thing with her students where she gets them to work out the connection between apples and roses – like, greeting-card roses in a vase,
Rosa damascena
or whatever – and apparently most of them can’t get it. They don’t know that apples are also part of the Rosaceae family, don’t understand that an apple tree grows flowers that look like roses before they fruit. I mean, apparently they don’t even know that flowers do fruit. Oh, there they are over there.’ There, indeed, in the Rosales section is a painting of three hyperreal-looking apples. They set off diagonally, leapfrogging quite a few evolutionary steps. But then there are the spathes of the
Philodendron muricatum
which make them stop again.

‘I do love Margaret Mee.’

‘So do I. Her plants always look sort of evil . . .’

‘You know that one’s pollinated by scarab beetles?’

‘Nice.’

‘They go inside the spathes and mate all night long.’

‘Like little sex booths.’

‘So many flowers are basically little sex booths.’

‘Of course that’s actually an inflorescence, not a . . .’

‘Shut up. We’re like completely off duty.’

There is no one else in the gallery. It is late, and wet, and grey, and Tuesday. Who goes to look at botanical paintings on a wet Tuesday?

‘Right.’

There is a jangle of keys and the bloke from the gift shop comes through.

‘I’m going to knock off if it’s all right with you guys,’ he says. ‘I’m sort of on a promise, and, well . . .’ He looks at the door leading to the way out.

‘You’re joking,’ says Izzy. ‘But we just got here. And it’s so wet outside, and . . .’

He smiles. ‘You both work at Kew, right?’

He leaves them the keys with such little fuss that for a second Charlie wonders if Izzy actually . . . But no, all Izzy wants to do is talk about Nicola. The last time Charlie saw Nicola was Friday night. She turned up at his place covered in gold sparkle and Guerlain perfume and offered to take him clubbing in Soho. In the end, though, they couldn’t be bothered to leave the house. Nicola had some weed with her and so they got stoned instead. Charlie remembers her annoying him by finishing his sentences – wrongly, each time – and then trying to gatecrash the jazz band’s practice by claiming to be an experienced blues singer. He still fucked her, of course, but he pretended she was the cave girl from what has become his regular morning wank fantasy, and persuaded her to put her hair in bunches for him to hold while he . . .

‘So you’ve got a list of attributes your perfect girlfriend would have?’

‘It’s from when I was like eighteen or something.’

That’s right. He showed Nicola his list too. He shows all women his list at some point. He has a box of ‘amusing stuff from the past’ that contains things like his school photo from when he was nine, and a certificate for competence in, of all things, gymnastics. Then there’s the list, written in turquoise ink on yellow paper. Both the ink and the paper were given to him by Fleur. The whole list is obviously about Fleur, well, more or less. But basically the list never describes the woman to whom it is shown, which, now he thinks about it, must sort of be the point and . . .

‘What’s the worst thing on it?’

‘Oh, um, quite a detailed description of how firm her bum should be.’

‘Oh, Charlie. You should be ashamed of yourself!’

‘I was eighteen!’

‘So how firm should her bum be?’

And here’s the problem. Izzy has exactly the bum he described back then. Basically Fleur’s bum, which Fleur still has of course, but that Charlie can never see or touch or think about ever again. How does Izzy know? Why is she doing this? Is this all a complete coincidence, or . . .

‘I suppose it is basically your bum,’ he says, shrugging.

‘Really?’ she says, taking a step closer.

After the graduation ceremony, Bryony meets the others in the Abode Hotel Champagne Bar for drinks. Ollie was supposed to text everyone to tell them where to meet but he’s fucked it up somehow and so only Grant, Helen and Bryony make it. After two bottles of champagne – paid for by Bryony, even though they got the PhD scholarships and all she inherited was a bit of cold mansion a million billion miles away, Grant
and Helen drift off to the house they share with a poet and a postcolonial theorist. Once Bryony is ninety-five per cent sure that Ollie is not coming she switches to a table at the back of the bar, drinks a glass of red wine, eats two omelettes and a large salad, and then leaves.

Without the others she feels strange in her gown, with the beautiful red dress rustling underneath. There is drizzle in the air, and even the Caribbean market stall looks grey and desolate. A fruit seller is trying to flog off the last of his local Cox apples for ninety-nine pence a bag. Schoolchildren trail around soggily in their polyester school blazers, all heading for McDonald’s or the bus station. Perhaps Bryony should have taken her kids out of school and insisted that James bring them to her graduation. But then of course she wouldn’t have been able to get pissed with Ollie, which she has been looking forward to since they talked about it at the triathlon. Not that there is any Ollie. He was there in the cathedral; she saw him as she walked past: a blur of jeans, stubble, white shirt, crooked tie, cracked iPhone . . . Was he texting during the ceremony? But where is he now? They were definitely, definitely going to meet for drinks.

Can she go to his house? Why not? It’s only round the corner.

But if he’d wanted to have drinks he would have gone to Abode, surely?

Unless something came up.

Bryony walks to Ollie and Clem’s place and knocks on the door. Nothing. Her phone rings. That’ll be Ollie now. Although he never rings her and . . . But no, weirdly it’s Clem. Bryony declines the call. She can catch up with Clem later. Talking to Clem right now when she is knocking on her front door looking for her husband would be . . . But this is totally innocent, of course. It’s really mainly a time thing, and . . .
Knock, knock, knock
. This is just desperate now. Her phone buzzes a message just as she closes the wrought-iron gate behind her and heads back into town.

Fleur knocks on the Prophet’s door. There’s no reply, but she goes in anyway.

‘Hello?’

He’s there, with an old Fila shoebox on his lap.

Fleur is holding the scraps of paper he gave her. Which took poor Holly all night to type, apparently.

‘This is basically your life story,’ she says. ‘It’s not for Oleander’s book. It’s for me. I mean, all that stuff about my birth and . . . I sort of understand what you’ve done, I think. But why?’

The Prophet closes his eyes. Scratches behind his ear. Opens his eyes again.

‘You may as well be with the bloke you love.’

‘You’re very kind. Really . . . But I was like fourteen or something when you first knew my mother, right? There’s no way you could be my father. Although I liked the bit about being born at the end of a rainbow, that was really beautiful. And . . .’

‘Look, it doesn’t matter who spunked in who. There’s more to life than that.’

Fleur laughs. ‘Well, when you put it that way . . .’

‘Your mother . . . I mean, anyone could have been your father. No offence.’

‘I just look so much like a Gardener.’

The black hair they all have because of Gita, the beautiful bride that great-grandfather Charles brought back from India and whose portrait hangs in Fleur’s bedroom. Fleur looks just like her, which is one of the reasons the portrait has been hidden from the rest of the family for all these years. It’s how Oleander knew.

‘There was a woman, all right, back in the early seventies. Maybe seventy-three. She was exactly like your mother. Same red hair, pale face and everything. I thought Briar Rose
was
her when I came here. I mean, that’s why I chased after her so much. One of the reasons. I’d heard that this other girl got knocked up around the time that I
knew her. And for a long time I did think you were mine. I wanted to think it. Thought I’d found you. Like you’d been a princess sent in a basket down a river or something. It’s not that far-fetched.’

‘But my mother and Augustus . . .’

‘Yeah, if you want a loaded father then he’s the one to choose.’

‘
Was
.’

A low cackle. ‘I give all my money away.’

‘To me.’

There’s a pause. The robin flies in, gets his bit of seed pod and flies out again.

The Prophet shrugs. ‘All right, well, you’ll have to do it this way.’

‘Do what which way?’

‘You spoken to Piyali lately?’

This is not a bad question. Everyone knows they are ‘together’ now. It’s even sort of accepted in the house. But do they speak? Not that much. He’s now offering Yoga for Athletes and two new reading groups. He’s started learning Malayalam and Sanskrit. He’s become too busy to speak to Fleur. Except to occasionally criticise the way she runs the house.

‘No.’

‘He’s going back to India, apparently. To find himself.’

‘Oh . . .’ Fleur is not as disappointed as she would have thought. ‘I suppose I had begun to realise that . . .’

‘So there’s going to be nothing stopping you from having a go with the bloke you really love.’

‘Except the fact that he’s my brother.’

The Prophet sighs. ‘I don’t think that matters.’

‘Everyone else would think it does, though.’

He gives her the shoebox.

‘This was meant to be for you anyway. For the “right time”.’

Fleur opens the box. Inside, it contains a tiny glass bottle of clear fluid lying in a nest of shredded newspaper.

‘Doesn’t stay that potent in sunlight,’ he says. ‘So I’d keep it in there until you’re ready.’

And then, through the front window of Abode, Bryony sees Ollie.

‘Thought I’d missed you,’ he says when she joins him.

He did remember. But he is obviously quite drunk. How long has he been here? It can’t be longer than an hour, because Bryony was here an hour ago.

‘Thought I’d missed
you
.’

‘Not sure I’m going to be very good company, though.’

‘Why not?’

‘Everything’s a bit fucked up, TBH. Clem’s left me. And I’ve been suspended from the university.’

Not only is he drunk, he has obviously been crying.

‘Shh,’ says Bryony. ‘It’s OK. Tell me everything.’

What follows is a jumble of stuff about how much he loves Clem and something about a fishing game, and then some video made by a student, but one of Ollie’s students, not one of Clem’s students, which was all quite hard to untangle, and how the video is on YouTube, just like Skye Turner’s video was on YouTube, and, in fact, this one was partly
inspired
by Skye Turner’s video, and shows that Ollie offered to give her fifteen more marks on her essay if . . .