Oleander was never impatient with people. Oleander realised that her clients might get stuck with the same problems for months or years or even lifetimes and she gently told them things that she accepted might not actually register for a very long time. Fleur is not a very good therapist really, and certainly isn’t a qualified one. She isn’t a qualified yoga teacher either, although she’s better at that, having taught classes at Namaste House since she was sixteen. Celebrities pay for her advice because she supposedly knows everything Oleander knows. She doesn’t know a tenth of what Oleander knew. Well, OK, she knows a lot about making tea. And Patanjali’s Eight Limbs of Yoga. But that’s it.
The man she is waiting for walks in, wearing faded boot-cut jeans, a pink shirt and an old black wax jacket. He looks both younger and older than his age: sixty-eight. He’s always been too thin and he has always walked too fast. He will have parked his silver Mercedes 300SL on Soho Square. He drives everywhere – also too fast – and always finds a parking space, despite all the terrible karma he believes he has.
‘Augustus. How are you?’ Fleur stands up and kisses him on both cheeks.
‘Fleur.’ He kisses her back. ‘You look very, well . . . very bright, to be honest, darling. You’d certainly stand out in a crowd.’
Fleur is wearing a dress that someone’s stylist gave her last week as a thank-you present. The top part is a block of cerise and the bottom part is a block of orange.
This, already. ‘You think we’ll be seen,’ she says to Augustus.
‘It would be very awkward if we were. Cecily’s not fantastic at the moment.’
She follows his eyes as he looks around the large room. A female journalist with a Mulberry Bayswater and old-fashioned Dictaphone is interviewing a young woman at one of the tables, but there’s no one else here. The doorway is on the far side of the room, and beyond that is the hotel lobby and the bar. People don’t come in here; although on the other hand, of course, they do. Last time Fleur was here there was a celebrity sitting on the opposite sofa playing Top Trumps with a boy of about ten. Fleur thought this boy was his son, and the large dark woman his wife, until it became clear that the woman was from a charity and the boy was terminally ill. The celebrity pledged £10,000 and rewrote a speech the woman had written all while Fleur was sitting there working out a daily yoga routine for the ex-wife of a rapper called The Zone. But celebrities don’t give a shit about other people; so, really . . .
‘I don’t think my dress is going to make any difference. We can go somewhere else if you’re not comfortable here. Not Blacks though because of Clem, so I don’t really know where else there is. Or maybe this is just a bad idea altogether . . .’ Fleur gets up. She didn’t used to be like this with Augustus but she is now. She feels as if she’s been stuck at the end of the cul-de-sac that is their relationship for a million years.
‘Don’t be silly. Sorry, darling, you know I get over-anxious. It’s on your behalf as well. And Cecily, like I said, isn’t . . . Anyway, sit down. Let’s have tea.’
Fleur sighs, sits down and breathes out some more. She looks at the menu. It’s beautiful. Everything in here is beautiful, which is why she comes. If she was on her own she would probably order a whole afternoon tea with savouries and scones and clotted cream. But Augustus wouldn’t understand her ordering all that and then taking three quarters of it home for the birds, so Fleur simply orders a plate of fruit and thé pétales. Oh, and some macarons, at least two of which she will sneak away for the robin, who is quite partial to them. Augustus orders a slice of fruit cake, an English Breakfast tea and a large glass of Bordeaux. He frowns when Fleur gets out her mini jar of pink Himalayan salt and her special herbs that she adds to everything.
‘Well,’ he says. ‘How are you?’
‘Sad. Very sad. Not surprised, of course. She’s been so ill. I’m still working but everything seems so different. How are you?’
‘The same.’
Augustus is always ‘the same’, whatever that even means. Fleur waits for him to say something about Oleander, but he doesn’t. He won’t. Fleur doesn’t even know why he and Beatrix are planning to come to the funeral, as they haven’t spoken to Oleander since 1989. Does he hope to inherit Namaste House? But that wouldn’t make sense, because . . . She closes her eyes and opens them again. Sees the frankincense tree first, and then for some reason all the cushion covers she and Ketki sewed.
Augustus frowns again. Rubs his eyes.
‘What’s wrong?’ Fleur asks.
‘Oh.’ He pauses. He smiles weakly. ‘Everything. The usual.’
How many years does it take to stop missing your first wife, your sister and your two closest friends who have gone missing in India – or possibly the Pacific – while you stayed at home with a bout of malaria? More than he’s had, that’s for sure.
‘Well . . . I’m sorry.’
‘Don’t worry, darling. How’s the garden?’
He really isn’t going to say anything else about Oleander.
‘Good. A bit bare in places. The poppies are coming up. And I actually remembered your seeds this time.’ Fleur pulls a small brown envelope out of her bag. ‘These are from the best one. Really deep purple. I can’t believe I actually let it seed. But then again . . .’
‘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