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,