‘Thank you, darling. I’ll put yours in the post. We keep forgetting.’
‘We do.’
‘I expect we’re very busy.’
Fleur smiles. ‘I expect we are.’
The afternoon tea arrives. When Augustus picks up his fork Fleur notices that his hands are shaking. He started growing opium to give to Cecily after her breakdown, but now he takes much more than she ever did. Much more than Fleur does. He says it helps his malaria, but who takes opium for malaria? The last time anyone seriously took opium for malaria in this country was in the sixteenth century. But at least it’s something they have in common. Some reason for choosing nice cards to send each other. Although Fleur isn’t allowed to sign hers with her own name.
‘So is this the fashion?’ he asks her, still looking at the dress. ‘I’ll have to tell Cecily.’
Fleur thinks about the story of the two celibate monks who come to a flooded piece of road. There is a beautiful woman there, and so one of the monks lifts her and carries her past the flood. The other one can’t believe he has done this, and sulks for miles. Eventually, he confronts his friend and asks him why he did it. His friend simply replies, ‘I put her down several miles ago but you, my brother, seem still to be carrying her.’
‘It’ll be over by the summer,’ says Fleur. ‘I wouldn’t bother.’
Actually, it won’t quite be over by the summer. According to Skye Turner’s stylist, colour is going to go on into Autumn/Winter and possibly even beyond into S/S12, although there’s also a sixties vibe in the air that she thinks may come to something. Maybe a pencil skirt thing. Fleur learned this earlier on when she was waiting for Skye to emerge from the larger of the two bathrooms in her hotel suite. There were handbags everywhere, about £30,000 worth, that Skye had been sent for free just that morning. She didn’t want any of them because one of them was named after a celebrity more famous than her. The stylist was going to take the lime green one for herself, but offered Fleur the yellow one. Fleur didn’t want it. Being surrounded by Hindus all the time makes leather kind of awkward. ‘Are you mad?’ the stylist said. ‘Take it and put it on eBay.’ But Fleur couldn’t be bothered. She probably should have got it for Bryony, though. Now she wants to stop this awkward conversation Augustus is planning to have before it even starts. Cecily, presumably, has her own ideas about clothes. Fleur sees her gardening painfully in white nightdresses at midnight, or visiting the doctor in linen trousers that sag around the arse, or grey asymmetrical dresses that make her look about twenty years older than she is. Fleur hears bits and pieces about her from Clem, who doesn’t really feel comfortable having a stepmother only five years older than she is, especially one who can barely walk and so must be pitied a little.
‘Really, fashion isn’t worth trying to keep up with.’
‘Well, you certainly seem to keep up with it.’
‘I don’t. I just wear what random stylists give me, or what gets left behind at the house. Honestly, being around celebrities all the time would turn anyone off fashion.’
‘How is the business?’ asks Augustus.
‘Good. Great, really. Although who knows what’s going to happen now that . . .’
‘But the place is making enough money?’
‘Yes, of course. For now. With Oleander gone I’m having to do a lot more of the one-to-one stuff, you know, like the therapy and the yoga and . . .’
And helping the Prophet make his parcels now that his one arm isn’t so good.
A bit of watering sometimes in the room above the orangery where no one goes.
Because if the universe didn’t want her to do this, then the universe would not have set it all up like this, and her mother would not have gone on that trip to meet the Lost People and would presumably not have become such a Lost Person herself. Although in some way she was always lost, which was what started it all. Fleur doesn’t know where the Prophet’s packages go; he has spared her that. But she’s been happy to bank the proceeds. But will they be enough? Because if Namaste House is sold then . . .
‘Don’t they say people aren’t spending money any more? I mean luxury spas and designer gurus are a bit, well . . . With the credit crunch and everything, surely people are cutting back?’
‘Celebrities will always spend money on feeling better about being sent thirty grand’s worth of handbags that are named after another celebrity.’
Augustus snorts. He’s not poor himself – far from it – but he looks down on people who make money from singing about having sex on the floor, or on the beach, even though he has had sex on lots of floors and also on the beach. In fact, sex on the beach was almost certainly what got him into this situation with Fleur in the first place.
‘No, I’m serious. It’s really hard to cope with a life that’s so absurd,’ Fleur says. ‘Imagine this. You’ve grown up on an estate in Folkestone, dirt-poor but beautiful. You’ve never had any money. You’ve been on one holiday with your mates to Ibiza that cost under a hundred quid and it was the best time you’ve had in your life. Your friends become hairdressers and waitresses. You get some work doing backing singing and save up to buy yourself one of those’ – Fleur points at the journalist’s Mulberry – ‘which costs eight hundred quid but then you realise that more famous models and actresses and pop stars are being given these things for free, because the companies want their stuff pictured with celebrities. Anyway, to cut a long story short, you make it. You become famous. You release an acclaimed album and you’re savvy enough to pick up a stylist as soon as possible and before you know it you’re walking for Dior even though you’re not a model. You do a duet with the most famous indie singer in the country. Now you get sent bags. You get flown first class. You stay in five-star suites. It’s great, but you realise you can never go back to Ibiza with your mates again. You can never get excited about earning enough money for a handbag again. The more money you earn, the less things you actually pay for. Everything becomes worthless. Meaningless. But you have to stay famous because the only thing worse than your current life would be to go back: back to poverty and having to take buses and buy frozen food and make your own doctor’s appointments. But nobody stays famous. Some people are famous for three years, but that’s about it unless you’re actually Tom Cruise.’
Augustus puts three, no, four, lumps of sugar in his tea. Fleur continues.
‘So one day your assistant books you an economy plane ticket by mistake and they won’t let you in the executive lounge. You protest and are removed. You try to upgrade but there are no available seats left on that flight. You don’t even know how to buy a plane ticket any more. You actually use the dreaded words that you used to joke about with your mother: “Do you know who I am?” They don’t. Well, they do, but they’re not going to upgrade you now your mascara is running. And there was that thing in Grazia last week, and you’ve put on a couple of stone since you stopped touring. You want to kill your assistant, really kill her, but instead you fire her by text message. You sit in the economy cabin sobbing because for the next three hours you are going to be normal. You may as well be dead. Your lowest point is when you go to use the business-class toilet – because that’s the one you’ve always used before– and the cabin crew politely but firmly steer you back to economy.’ Fleur pauses. ‘That’s where you find spirituality. Right in that moment. That’s when you are most ready to be filled with light.’
‘You are so like her.’ Augustus shakes his head. ‘It’s uncanny. But be careful, though, darling. Make sure you’re prepared for all the stories to surface again now that she’s dead.’
Fleur almost says, ‘Yes, Daddy.’ But she’s never called him that.
‘Anyway, how’s everything in Bath? How’s the malaria?’
Augustus frowns. ‘Painful. Unpredictable. The same. My mother sent me to an acupuncturist last week. It didn’t help. It just hurt.’
‘I don’t think it’s supposed to hurt. Did you say something?’
‘No. That kind of thing
never works on me anyway. There’s no point.’
‘So why did you go?’
‘You know my mother . . .’ Actually, Fleur did not. But she knew all about her.
‘How’s Cecily? And the girls?’
‘Cecily’s the same. On a new medication, but can’t get up before midday and still won’t speak to my mother. Beatrix has made quite an effort lately, but it hasn’t made any difference. And the girls, well, Plum’s delightful. Reminds me a lot of Clem when she was that age. Lavender’s dreadful. I don’t know what to do any more. She wants things all the time and sulks if she doesn’t get them. Sometimes I wish we’d stopped with Plum. I mean, in terms of Cecily’s health, we should have stopped at Plum, or even before.’
‘It must be a phase,’ Fleur says. ‘I’m sure Holly went through something similar. Didn’t Plum? I mean, marketing to children is such a huge industry now.’
‘It’s the way Lavender asks for things, though. That’s what gets me. She sits on my lap and looks into my eyes like some sort of prostitute – I’m sorry, but that’s exactly what it reminds me of. “Darling daddy, please,” she says, all fluttering eyelashes as if she was Marilyn Monroe or something. Where on earth did she learn to do that? It’s just embarrassing.’
Maybe it’s the effect of the atoms. Or maybe she was Marilyn in a previous life.
‘Does she have friends?’
‘Yes, of course.’
‘Do they have sleepovers?’
‘Sometimes. I think they’re too young, but Cecily says it’s normal.’
‘So she saw another girl do it to her father. Or she saw it on Nickelodeon or a Hollywood film. She’s probably trying to impress you. Show you how grown up she is. Show you how much she knows about the world.’
‘Yes, but then there’s this awful wailing when I say no.’
Fleur shrugs. ‘I guess that’s just what it’s like having kids.’
‘You were no bother,’ Augustus says.
No. No, Fleur wasn’t any bother to Augustus. He quietly paid her school fees and kept his distance and may never even have admitted he was her father if he hadn’t thought she was about to have sex with Charlie – her actual brother. He never changed her nappies, and he never bought her a birthday present and she never sat on his lap. Not once.
The third-floor seminar room is windowless and hot. If there were windows you would definitely be able to see Canterbury Cathedral from up here. Seeing the cathedral is one of the top three reasons people come to this university, but once here students usually find themselves in these poky windowless rooms looking not at the cathedral and the pretty town around it but instead at the incomprehensible notes that the seminar leader before theirs has left on the whiteboard. The large dining room downstairs has a perfect view of the cathedral but this view is usually screened off. There doesn’t seem to be any reason to screen it off, except perhaps because students sitting there eating their £3.40 meals are deemed unworthy of something so aesthetically pleasing and must have it removed in case it ruins them in some way. Or before they ruin it. Before class Bryony went there for a snack, and she walked around the screens and sat there looking at the cathedral and waited for someone to come and stop her. They did not.
The group is arguing about a piece of dialogue from Northanger Abbey. Ollie lets them go on for far too long, as usual, and is not even definitely listening. At this moment the group isn’t even supposed to be discussing this passage, but should be finding instances of metafiction in the text. Helen, dreadlocked, dungareed, bisexual, argumentative, thinks it’s highly insulting that Henry Tilney tells Catherine Morland what flowers she should like, and finds him, and in fact the whole novel, highly condescending. Grant, the big-chested American scholarship student, says that in his opinion Henry is trying to liberate Catherine, and other women, by getting them to see beyond the simply domestic. Helen thinks women don’t need liberating by annoying toffs, thank you very much. And so on.
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?