‘Good to get more veg in the kids,’ Bryony says.
‘That’s what I thought. And you can have one, can’t you?’
She opens the fridge and gets out the Villa Maria Sauvignon Blanc she started last night. There’s only about a third of the bottle left, so she finds another white and puts it in the freezer just in case. She walks across the room and selects an unchipped Dartington Crystal glass from the dresser. It’s three minutes past six. The clocks went forward this morning, so in some way it’s really only three minutes past five.
‘Do you want one?’ she asks James.
‘No thanks.’ He looks at his watch. ‘How was your afternoon?’
‘All right. Ash still won’t go near the deep end when the wave machine’s on, after whatever it was that happened last week. The party was pretty boring. Poor Fleur’s in a state but not talking about it. Oh, and after we left Fleur’s Holly remembered she’d left her blue scarf behind so we had to go all the way back to Deal. A lot of toing and froing, and she’s basically had way too much sugar. Cake at the party of course, and some disgusting-looking sweet sandwiches, cake at Fleur’s . . . But I guess at least she’s eaten something. She’s pretty scratchy now, though.’
‘How is watching an unsuitable DVD going to help?’
How is giving her even more cake going to help? But Bryony doesn’t say this.
‘At least she’s quiet.’
Bryony pours the wine. What is it about the first sip of a crisp Sauvignon Blanc on a mild early spring day? It’s like drinking a field full of cold, slightly shivery flowers.
‘And you say Fleur isn’t good?’
‘Well, as usual she didn’t say anything at all about how she was feeling. I wish she wasn’t all alone in that huge cottage. It must be so stressful having to suddenly take all responsibility for Namaste House and all the therapy and yoga and everything. And all the famous people who are always hanging around there . . . Although I suppose whoever inherits the place will probably sell up quite quickly, but then what will she do? It’s all she’s ever known. Of course she owns her cottage, but presumably whoever inherits the house will do some kind of deal with her so that the estate can be sold whole . . .’
‘When’s the funeral going to be?’
‘A week on Thursday. They need time to get in touch with everyone. Potentially people could be coming from India, Pakistan, America . . .’
Bryony goes to the rack to find a bottle of red to open for dinner. Should she open two? No, one will be fine. But why not make it the 15.5% Tempranillo in that case? Get a bit of spice and warmth in her before the week ahead. She starts looking for the corkscrew, which is never where it last was. One of the things Bryony’s father taught her was that you should always open a bottle of red wine an hour before you want to drink it, or longer if it’s more than five years old. Bryony vaguely remembers the evenings when he used to open two bottles at once, and her mother would drink one of them by herself, before dinner, looking vampiric and oddly expectant. After dinner her father smoked hash and her mother drank the second bottle of wine and they talked about going back to the Pacific to continue their study of the Lost People while Bryony read Jane Austen and wished for the phone to ring.
‘Do you want to come and see something?’ James says.
‘What is it?’
‘Come and see.’
She sighs. ‘Hang on. I want to get this open. And I’ll have to change my shoes.’
Bryony uncorks the wine, takes off her boots and puts on a pair of dirty blue Converse trainers that she has set aside for gardening; not that she ever has time for gardening at the moment.
‘Holly? Ash?’ calls James. ‘Do you want to see what Daddy’s made?’
‘They’re all settled down,’ says Bryony.
‘Do we have to?’ calls Holly.
James sighs. ‘No, but you’ll miss something exciting.’
The kids put on their shoes and everyone walks to the bottom of the garden to admire the bird table that James has put together this afternoon, presumably between digging up beetroot and baking. Bryony doesn’t ask why he hasn’t been writing, and doesn’t say anything about the cats. She’ll have to get them bells. Then again, birds come to the garden anyway, and the cats kill them anyway, and she’s never actually bothered to get them bells before. Then there’s bird flu, although no one’s said anything about bird flu for ages. Why can’t she just like it? It does look nice where James has put it.
‘That’s lovely,’ Bryony says, kissing James again. ‘We can watch the birds from the kitchen. But you didn’t do it all today, as well as making brownies and digging up beetroot?’
‘You are so unbelievably gross,’ says Holly. ‘When will you be too old for kissing?’
‘Never,’ says Bryony. ‘We’ll still be kissing when we’re a hundred.’
‘It could be a lot worse,’ says James, raising an eyebrow at Bryony. ‘Eh, Beetle?’
‘Yuck! That’s even more gross. I know what you’re thinking, and I know what it means when you make your eyebrows do that. And when you call Mummy “Beetle”.’
The kids slink back off to the conservatory.
‘Remember the goldfinches?’ says James.
‘Oh God, yes. Of course. How could I forget something like that?’
How indeed? Although when you are working full-time and studying part-time it’s easy to forget things. But of course the goldfinches were amazing. One day last autumn – it must have been just before Halloween – ten of them turned up in the back garden. Given that there had never been any goldfinches in the garden this seemed to be something of a miracle. And they were so impressive with their bright red heads and wing flashes of pure gold, like peculiar little superheroes, all masked and caped. James declared them his favourite bird, and Holly said she thought they were too ‘bling’ but nevertheless ended up spending hours watching them through the binoculars that Uncle Charlie bought for her. The lunchtime after they arrived Bryony got chatting to the woman from Maxted’s who recommended sunflower hearts and niger seed, and a proper feeder for the niger seed, and a little hanging basket for the sunflower hearts, all of which Bryony bought. How unlike Mummy it was to come home with something that was not clothes, shoes, chocolate or wine! Anyway, these offerings also went down well with the goldfinches, and Bryony, James and the kids spent the next day trying without success to take just one good photograph, but the little buggers would not keep still, and . . .
Such strange, slow little birds, gathering their gold capes around them, pulling their red masks down over their eyes and settling down on the niger seed feeder for what seemed like hours, as if it was some kind of opium den. And the next day another ten showed up. And the same again for the next three days until there must have been fifty goldfinches regularly visiting their garden. They would all eat slowly and seriously for quite a long time, sometimes getting a bit flappy and knocking each other off the feeders but mainly just chompchomp-chomping like superhero-puppets controlled by very stoned puppeteers. Then they would all take off and fly bobbing and tweeting around the village sounding like the ribbon on an old cassette tape being rewound. This went on for about a week, and then they were gone. Bobbing and tweeting their way across the