The Seed Collectors (9 page)

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 . . .