The Seed Collectors (54 page)

James fills the vintage whistling kettle from the tap and puts it on the Aga.

‘I think I need a glass of wine.’

‘You do not need a glass of wine. I imagine you’ve had enough today.’

‘I don’t actually care about my health at this moment.’

‘This is not about your health. I want you to be able to listen to me.’

‘I can listen to you.’

James sighs loudly. ‘Right.’

‘Perhaps if you weren’t so controlling, then . . .’

‘I’m sorry? YOU are the alcoholic, but I am somehow controlling? This is all my fault? What the fuck, Bryony?’

Bryony goes to the fridge. There’s nothing there. What about the Wither Hills Sauvignon Blanc that was there yesterday? Surely she didn’t finish it? She goes to the wine rack. Empty. Now that is strange. She definitely didn’t drink all the . . . But OK, whatever, there is lots more wine in the cellar. But she finds it locked. Oh, great. What the fuck indeed.

‘When did you do this?’

James shrugs.

‘Good job I’ve been to Hercules, then, isn’t it?’

Bryony goes out to the car, her hands shaking. There in the boot is the box of wine that she meant to unload yesterday. But here’s the problem. A red will be a bit too cold to drink, and a white a bit too warm. Which to choose? If she puts a red by the Aga then maybe . . . She walks in with a Barolo. It cost thirty pounds, but this is turning into a thirty-pound-bottle-of-wine sort of day. James hasn’t thought to hide the corkscrew, so she opens the wine and pours a big glass while he watches.

‘I just cannot believe you are doing this.’

‘What, that I have chosen not to give up drinking on possibly the worst day of my life just because you’ve decided I should? I imagine you’re leaving me anyway. What do you care what I do?’

‘I didn’t say I was leaving you.’

‘But you will.’

‘Is that what you want?’

Bryony hesitates. ‘No.’

‘I need you to make a decision. I need you to pour that bottle of wine down the sink. I really, really need you to make a decision now. The wine, or me.’

The kettle begins to come to the boil. The whistle begins low and distant, like a faraway train in a long-forgotten film. Bryony could pour the wine down the sink, of course she could. She has plenty more in the car anyway. And it wouldn’t be the first time she has
poured a bottle of wine down the sink during an argument. But that has always been
her
idea, to make
her
point. There was that 1965 Exshaw Grande Champagne Cognac that Augustus gave her for her thirtieth. She loved pouring that down the sink in front of James when he suggested she’d had one glass too many. ‘See how much I don’t care about cognac?’ she had screamed at him. Where were the kids that night? Probably in bed. So it can’t have quite been a scream, even though that’s how she remembers it. After James went to bed that night Bryony ate a whole box of chocolate liqueurs. Are there any more chocolate liqueurs in the house? The kettle whistles more loudly now.

‘Well?’ James says.

Bryony takes her wine glass and sips from it. ‘I just need some space to think.’

‘Bryony, it’s the wine or me.’ James is now shouting to be heard over the kettle. Why doesn’t he just take it off the boil? ‘Choose.’

‘All right. I choose wine. Since you’ve forced the issue.’

‘What?’ He starts sobbing. ‘What is wrong with you?’

‘And please do something about that kettle. It’s going right through my . . .’

James picks up the kettle. ‘This is how you make me feel,’ he says, as he pours the boiling water over his head. At least, he gets halfway through the last word before he starts to scream. ‘Help me! Oh God, please help . . .’ And then he passes out, melting onto the floor like a piece of butter in a frying pan.

When Clem and the others have gone to bed Charlie and Fleur drink lapsang souchong tea, and Fleur tells him about her trip to the Outer Hebrides and the strange dreams she has had since going there. Her memory of everything that happened is a little hazy, but she remembers
being told how to do it again, except that it was impossible to get hold of the fluid, for obvious reasons, but then suddenly this box and the bottle . . .

She shows him the teacup. Tells him how dangerous the seed pod is. That she’s not sure about the liquid. It could actually be anything. But if it
is
an enlightened person’s tears, as the Prophet seemed to think, then . . .

‘Let’s do it,’ Charlie says.

And so they fly away together, on something that is either a first date or a last night on Earth, or perhaps both, high over the English Channel, not knowing where they are going, or if they will ever . . .

Of course Ollie takes the pod from the time-lapse film set Clem has rigged up in the spare bedroom, and which is still recording. After all, there are not many nature documentaries that end with the suicide of the filmmaker’s husband by ingestion of the very plant that is the subject of the documentary. Perhaps Clem really will win an Oscar for this one. Ollie hasn’t seen the plant for a while. He should have been interested, but has not been interested. When was he last interested in anything about Clem apart from how she reacts to him? Anyway, it certainly now has fruit. Or what botanists call ‘fruit’. It is really more of a bean pod. Like a vanilla pod, perhaps, but larger and not yet as shrivelled. Ollie remembers some dinner party with Clem talking about vanilla coming from an orchid,
Vanilla planifolia
, that Madagascan farmers have to pollinate themselves, because it is just too complicated or tiresome for the plant to do it itself. The vanilla orchid flowers in the morning and if it is not pollinated by the end of the day the flower simply drops off and dies.

Does Clem have any idea how much she has broken Ollie’s heart with her words? The one that keeps going through his mind is ‘boring’.
Boring, boring, boring
. And after trying so hard
not
to be boring. After trying to make life anything
but
boring. But life without a job, without Clem and of course without any children could well become boring. Could Ollie become a priest? No. He is boring, and also not a Catholic. He could adopt, of course, but his children will probably come to hate him as much as Clem does. They will spend all their time with their birth certificates in their hands, trawling the internet in search of their ‘real’ parents, the people who made them from slime rather than love. The only person who has ever been impressed by him is Bryony. Even she does not know the real, boring him. She just uses him as a screen on to which to project her own fantasy. But then, of course, he does the same thing to Clem. Is that all romantic love is?

Ollie has not yet really looked at the plant’s only flower, but he does so now. It is a sort of dark, minky grey and off-white with some spots of black and two peculiar holes. He pulls off the pod containing the seeds and puts it in his jeans pocket. The flower vibrates and then comes to rest. Without Clem here to pollinate it, it will probably just die. The dry calyx at the tip of the pod crackles faintly against the denim. He becomes aware of a scent, perhaps a little chocolatey, a touch of nutmeg or something spicy like cardamom, but also quite otherworldly and impossible to describe. He almost stops everything he is doing, almost manages to stop thinking for a second, because it is the most beautiful thing he has ever smelled. He knows the scent is coming from the pod. Is he sure about this? He sighs. Walks back to the door and opens it. Turns to switch off the light. But does not switch off the light because there, hanging onto the plant, is a ghostly image of his own face. He couldn’t see it close up, but now it is obvious. There, spectrally, improbably, insanely, is his high forehead, and his hollow cheeks and even his stubble, marked out in little black dots. The holes, of course, are his eyes. It hangs there for a moment and then drops to the floor.

It is 07.17.

And it’s impossible to describe in words what is on the other side. There are no words on the other side. But on the brink, in this cosmic edgeland, you can see eternities of people coming and going. You can see the last moments of individual souls before they melt into the oneness that from the outside seems eternally boring but inside is orgasmic. Ollie pauses now, on this precipice, and sighs long and deeply because he finally knows what real love is. He has left his body behind but calls on his lips, or the great lips of the universe, for just this one final kiss. Who with? Time moves so oddly in this barely-there place with its clocks only faintly ticking that he is able, finally, to make insane cosmic love to Clem without any resistance, indeed with her loving him back, pulling him into her and sweating and crying out for him. At the same time as this he finds he is kissing and stroking Bryony and calling her ‘my darling’ and ‘my love’ and breathing out again, long and deep, as every atom leaves his lungs and then his body and the three of them merge into one, into all lovers everywhere and finally into love itself. Holly, who arrives a long way behind them, has kept her whole body, plumper now and brimming with sparkle, has resurrected it in child form, because, as she hangs out on this strange, multidimensional, fizzing edge, she will get to have her perfect hit with Melissa again, for all eternity and beyond, until they merge into one another and into the silence that comes only when the last ball in the universe has bounced for the very final time.

Into this silence they will all go, eventually. Here comes a small, elderly robin, flying steadily, his red breast out, leading the way for his beloved Fleur, hand in hand with Charlie at last. And everyone arrives here in the end, rapists and murderers and liars and cheats, and all their victims, and they laugh and cry with joy because all the rapes and murders and lies and games do not exist any more. None of it really happened. It was, after all, just a horrible dream. The
unraped, the unmurdered, the unbound, the uncriminalised, the unpoor, the unguilty: everyone cries with joy and relief because there is no addiction here, and no economies, and no plants of any kind, and nothing that everyone does not know and share. All the drama in the world begins to fade out as this once tragic universe yawns deeply and prepares for its long sleep. When Holly has finished her tennis she runs towards the very edge of everything and in her final instant becomes every little girl who ever lived: blonde and black in jeans and a sari and a gingham dress and pigtailed and glittered and hatted and gloved and socked and naughty and dirty and clean and good and bad but strangely wise, and as Ollie, the last, flickering blink of Ollie, looks at her, at the cosmic little girl, he realises that he is not only now her father, but the great father of everything.