The Seed Collectors

  But anyway, even if half her journal is bullshit, he knows how she feels. He knows that she genuinely wants him to be a success – not as much of a success as her, of course – but enough of a success that he is no longer embarrassing. Can’t produce a book, can’t produce the right sort of sperm . . . Ollie imagines Clem in the swimming pool, in her red swimming cap with her turquoise goggles. That swimming cap . . . He imagines making love to her while she is wearing her swimming cap, and her sensible turquoise-and-white Speedo swimsuit. He’d pull the swimsuit to one side, as if they were both teenagers, perhaps leaning up against a tree . . . He’d get her to give him a blow job with her swimming cap on, and then he’d come on her head. Ollie’s erection subsides as he pisses for the last time before bed. Can he not even get a sexual fantasy right? He imagines telling her about it, and then Clem laughing, just once, and asking why she’d be leaning against a tree in her swimsuit and explaining where the whole fantasy had gone wrong. That bit about the swimming cap . . . But it’s rubber, isn’t it? Of course men are going to feel that way about rubber. But coming on my head? That’s a bit, well, a bit odd, wouldn’t you say? Especially as you’re infertile. I mean, who wants a load of dead spunk on their head?

  Clem yawns, and starfishes her legs under the covers.

  ‘So why did you go for a drink with Bryony?’

  ‘I totally persuaded her not to go for the scholarship. It was so easy, and . . .’

  ‘Isn’t that a bit immoral?’

  ‘Not if I get two PhD students for the price of one. Or three, if I can get Grant and Helen to split the scholarship between them. They can’t not promote me if I have three PhD students and loads more time to . . .’

  ‘How can they split a scholarship?’

  ‘The eighteenth-century one is like twenty-five grand a year. For that you could easily get two sets of tuition fees and two lots of rent with some left over for a Pot Noodle every so often, or some lime and soda down the pub. They’ll do some teaching. They won’t starve. I mean it’s not as if these . . .’

  ‘But isn’t the point of that scholarship to give a student a really good PhD experience because that’s what Esther would have wanted. I mean, didn’t her husband say . . .’

  Ollie rolls his eyes. ‘It’s great being dead, isn’t it? I mean, dictating what everyone . . .’

  Clem twists her hair around a finger. ‘Don’t be a fucking idiot.’

  Again, the way she says it. With a little lazy smile so he can’t get pissed off. Like when a beautiful cat scratches you and you can’t really be cross. Although Clem is not cat-like. She’s a mermaid. A smiling, singing, beautiful and deadly thing from the sea, twisting her hair around her finger like . . . Like, who does that during what could become a really exciting argument, with crying and everything?

  ‘Don’t call me a fucking idiot.’ And because of her, he can’t even say this the way he wants to say it and has to make it sound like something from a meditation tape. Ollie takes off his shoes, which should have been taken off downstairs. He drops his socks on the wooden floor, and his boxers on the yellow chair. He sucks in his stomach as he unbuttons the yellow shirt that Clem bought him. This goes in the washing basket, although the wrong one (there is one washing basket for delicates, to be washed only by Clem, which this shirt, costing £189.99, definitely is; and another washing basket for things which are not delicate and can therefore be washed by Alison, who puts everything on the Easycare cycle regardless of what any of the labels say). Ollie folds his jeans over the back of the chair, but they look wrong there, so he hangs them up. Then he puts his socks and boxers in the non-delicate washing basket and moves his yellow shirt to the right basket. Why is life so fucking complicated?

  ‘Anyway, didn’t her husband say that the bequest was to make sure a student could do a PhD without having to work as a waitress on roller skates, or whatever bizarre thing Esther had to do?’

  ‘Topless on wheels, selling her body for . . .’

  ‘Oh, come on.’ She sighs. ‘Don’t be such a dick.’

  ‘Well, she . . .’

  ‘She’s been dead for less than a year. She was our friend. Why does everything have to end up being about . . .’

  ‘Oh, right. And now you’re going to pretend you were really close to Oleander too.’

  ‘Ollie . . .’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Why are you being such a dick today?’

  Of course she calls him a dick, rather than a cunt, because her cunt works and his dick does not work. At least, his dick works, on the rare occasions when it is given the chance, but his balls are a tangled mess and because of that . . .

  ‘Why is it always me?’

  ‘I don’t know why it’s always you.’

  ‘Oh, so you won’t even admit . . .’

  ‘I think I’m going back to sleep now.’

  ‘I see, so you won’t even . . .’

  ‘Goodnight.’

  And how does she do that? She just rolls over and goes to sleep. Just like that. Like a seal or something, rolling over in the water, or into the water from a grassy bank or wherever seals go when they’re not in the water. She doesn’t even moan about having to get up so early in the morning because she WORKS IN LONDON when they LIVE IN CANTERBURY. And it is quite late, after all. It’s 23.15 and she likes to be asleep by half past ten. Can you lose an argument on the basis of simply not scoring enough points? Or is going to sleep in the middle of it basically a KO against the person who is still awake?

  Somewhere in the grounds of Namaste House, a pop star is loose. Not Paul McCartney, who evidently couldn’t make it. It’s only Skye Turner, nowhere near as famous as Paul McCartney of course but currently a respectable number 7 on the Top 40 compiled from iTunes and Spotify figures (but not YouTube, where she has yet to make her mark). She is not just loose but lost and alone in the white garden, which is not yet white. She has been to the house thousands of times but has never made it beyond the orangery and into the grounds. And now Oleander is gone. About half an hour ago Skye Turner saw a copper sculpture of a horse that she would like to buy. It was standing in the middle of something called the ‘wildflower meadow’, although there are no wildflowers yet. Would such a thing be for sale? You don’t know unless you ask. But now she can’t find it again. At first the sculpture horrified her: it was half horse, half skeleton. But now she would like to buy it. She would like to buy it, but she can’t find it. And now Oleander is gone.

  Who was Skye Turner crying for, at the funeral this morning? Was she crying for Oleander, who was old and had not been in much pain and in any case not only believed in reincarnation but did not want to be reincarnated, which is a win-win, really? Or was she crying for herself, for what she had lost? There’s Fleur, of course, Fleur remains, but . . . Skye Turner sighs. Oleander was a mystical recording studio, and all the tapes that Skye Turner made there are now lost. Burned. Erased.

  She walks through an old wooden door and finds herself in a small walled garden. In the centre of the garden is a stone plinth with another copper sculpture on it: a toad. Facing the sculpture is a moss-covered bench with a robin on it. The robin stops digging around in the moss and starts watching her. The dried remains of last year’s poppies – even Skye Turner can recognise a poppy – are scattered around like faded decorations from a long-ago party. And there are green shoots everywhere. Things are growing, despite the cold. There is a faint smell of chamomile. She turns again and is no longer lost: there is Fleur’s cottage, looking like something from a book, with its big, sleepy-eye windows and huge, sad door. Ivy beards it all over like a green man’s face. And there’s Charlie Gardener, the great-nephew, hovering. He is thin, angular, slightly wizard-like. A young, dark magician who might see her and chase her through the tangled forest where she would fall and . . . Skye Turner moves away, back towards the white garden, followed by the robin, who is singing something that sounds like, but can’t be . . .

  How exactly does a pop star come to be
in the garden of a house on the very edge of England, in a slow, small medieval town that, long ago, was a busy port before the sea curled up like an old woman with no lover and became a tiny, shallow river with little boats and moorhens and samphire growing on its banks? You can take a helicopter, which is what the Beatles did all those years ago. You can land at the small airport a couple of miles away. But the more normal route is two trains and a taxi. It takes forever. On a map Sandwich looks close to London. It is in Kent, for goodness sake, a county that bleeds into London, is right next to it. But it takes Skye almost as long to get here as it takes to get to her parents’ place in Devon, which is almost five counties from London, the way the train goes. From here to her parents’ place in Devon it’s roughly seven hours. And then there’s Greg somewhere in the middle.

  And now Oleander is gone.

  Skye Turner walks on, through the small forest and around to a larger path lined with trees. From here she can see Namaste House: big, red, old; perhaps slightly wiser than the sad cottage next door? The large white door with the crescent-moon steps leading up to it. The orangery to the right. All the flowerbeds and kitchen gardens and greenhouses and the old brass sundial. There are flowers everywhere in this part of the garden. Skye Turner can’t name most of them, but in the summer they are delicate purple things and fragile red things and trembling blue things and things that climb up without checking what the way down might be. Clinging to the side of the house is a plant that could be clematis, with large buds. And inside, she knows, through the white door, there will be the faint smell of chlorine from the indoor pool and the hum of the generator – or whatever the hell it is – that runs the sauna and steam rooms. The pale ceramic jugs of lemon water everywhere: alkaline, purifying. Curries for lunch. Wholemeal cakes. And then through the library and up some stairs and there she always was. Oleander, wearing something ridiculous – a robe covered with stars and planets once and a silver shell suit another time – with a sweet, deep warmth that was like something you’d drink if you were really ill, and of course Skye Turner was really ill when she first came here and . . .

  And now Oleander is gone.

  The doorway to Fleur’s cottage smells of lapsang souchong, black cardamom and roses, which is a bit how Fleur herself smells, although with Fleur there are layers and layers of scents, each one more rare and strange than the last. Her perfume, since they discontinued Givenchy III because of something to do with the oak moss in it, is Chanel’s 31 Rue Cambon. She is peppery, woody . . . She is the essence of chypre. She is deep, green, magical: something you’d find naked by a remote lake. Something that would let you, no, encourage you, to do whatever you . . . Beyond the doorway, where there are pre-dinner smells of chocolate, fruit and fresh spices, Charlie can hear someone crying, probably Bryony. His sister Clem never cries. And then Fleur’s voice.

  ‘I had to let you know as soon as possible, basically.’

  ‘It’s just, I mean, I’m thrilled for you. But why?’

  ‘I think . . . I mean, I do feel a bit awkward.’

  ‘But let’s face it, though, our husbands would want to sell it.’

  ‘James wants a bloody forest.’

  ‘Ollie doesn’t know what he wants, really. Or what I want. But he definitely wants money.’

  ‘I do think that’s probably why.’

  So Fleur has inherited Namaste House. Well. Oleander must have known, then. She must have known that Fleur is Augustus’s daughter. But why not give a share to anyone else? Charlie can see Fleur biting her lip in that way she does, trying to explain, trying to find a way of telling her oldest friends that she is unbelievably rich and they are not, when it was supposed to be the other way around. But they must appreciate that she has worked there for free for almost fifteen years, using her strange, quiet instinct for business to take the place out of danger of bankruptcy. And . . . well, actually, for God’s sake, why has no one ever seen it? The family resemblance is so striking it is almost embarrassing. Or it would be if anyone bothered to look. She and Charlie resemble twins found huddled together approximately twenty years after being abandoned in a remote jungle. Or maybe Harrods. In any case, if you left twins together for that long, alone, perhaps it’s inevitable that they would . . . But anyway, they are hardly together any more, and everyone else is so wrapped up in themselves that it’s likely that no one will ever notice, and no one will ever know. Which hurts Charlie in a way he can’t quite . . .

  ‘What, because Ollie’s such an idiot?’

  ‘No! Of course not! But yeah, I guess I will keep the whole thing going and look after Ketki and Ish, and Bluebell, and the Prophet, for the rest of their lives. Oleander knew I’d do that. I’ve been trained to do that for, like, forever. I’m not going to sell up because running Namaste House is literally the only thing I know how to do.’

  ‘But she gave you no idea she was planning . . .’

  ‘No. Well, not exactly. You know what she was like. But then she didn’t tell me that she was going to give all of us a seed pod each either. Or that Quinn left a journal. And then of course there’s that amazing hunting lodge on Jura. I didn’t even know we – she – even owned that. You and Charlie will have to work out what you’re all going to do with it. I mean it’s got to be worth loads as well, right? It looked way bigger than Namaste House. It must be so exciting! So we’ve all done OK really, not that we should see it in that way, because of course we’d all rather have Oleander back and everything. It’s just so strange the way that . . .’

  It is strange, Charlie thinks. But Oleander must definitely have known. She knew all about Augustus and Briar Rose and their secret daughter. No one thought it was odd when Oleander let Fleur stay on in the house after her mother disappeared. Fleur had grown up in that place after all. Where else was she supposed to go? And where was Oleander going to get another yoga teacher that she wouldn’t have to pay? But now all the extra responsibility she gave Fleur makes sense. And of course the huge gift of the cottage. She must always have known Fleur was one of the family; that Fleur had Gardener blood in her. But leaving Namaste House – the whole operation – to her? What the fuck is that about? Charlie is pleased for Fleur, of course he is, but what are Beatrix and Augustus going to say? And what in God’s name are they all – the younger generation, the ones left behind – supposed to do with a seed pod each? What was Oleander trying to say there? Go kill yourselves? Will there be something in Quinn’s journal that explains further? But if Oleander had things and knew things that were important then why hide them for the last twenty-odd years? Clem has already asked to read the journal, and Bryony has shrugged and said yeah, for sure, but she just wants to read it first, as Quinn was her father after all. Which basically means no. And as for this hunting lodge on Jura, which he, Clem and Bryony now own, and which Fleur is still trying to make sound exciting and even better than Namaste House, no one knows how that came to be in the family at all. They’ll go and visit it in July, they have decided. It’s two plane rides away in the depths, if such a thing exists, of the Inner Hebrides, off the west coast of Scotland. And then to make things even more confusing there is this woman lurking about called Ina who turned up at the funeral from the Outer Hebrides . . . She was saying something about the frankincense tree before and . . .

  Fleur’s voice has long since trailed off. There’s a long pause followed by the sound of a teaspoon hitting bone china just slightly too hard.

  ‘Will you have to get some kind of qualification now? I mean, if you’re going to take over running all the therapy and yoga and everything?’

  ‘Bryony!’

  ‘Well, she’s talked about it often enough. And I’ve really enjoyed going back to uni. I just thought . . .’

  Charlie pushes the open door and calls ‘Hello?’ to let them know he’s coming, and to give the impression that he’s only just arrived and hasn’t been listening to their conversation for the last ten minutes. His Vans don’t make any sound on the black-and-white Victorian tile
s in Fleur’s entrance hall. He wore a suit for the funeral itself but has since been back to Bryony’s and changed into his favourite Acne faded corduroy trousers and a white T-shirt with a yellow Alexander McQueen cardigan over the top. ‘You look like an old person,’ is what Holly said when she saw him. So he tried the Acne blazer that was his second choice but a bit matchy-matchy with the trousers. ‘You look like you’ve been to Debenhams,’ she said. ‘You are basically an old person who goes to Debenhams, and even has lunch there, with slimy peas and gravy.’ She sort of had a point; he could see that. But maybe you have to be over eleven to understand that fashion is not only – or even – about looking good. At eleven it is impossible to understand why grown-ups wouldn’t want to be happy all the time and go around in ball gowns drinking fruit juice and eating chocolates and spending their wages on puppies, kittens, board games, picnics, trips to the cinema and visits to the donkey sanctuary. Charlie supposes that if Holly were ever in charge of a budget there’d have to be a tennis court too. And cut flowers. He suddenly sees her holding vast bunches of pale pink peonies, weighing more than she does, probably, with early-summer sunlight glinting off her almost-black hair.