‘Like you.’ James strokes Bryony’s face. ‘It’s still light,’ he says, ‘and warmish. You could put on a cardigan and bring your wine out here. I’ll get one of the deckchairs out for you.’
James is always trying to get Bryony outside in the fresh air. Perhaps more fresh air will help her become more like ethereal, perfect Fleur, who has been known even to sleep outside when the moon is full. Although he has never said this, of course. He says Bryony is beautiful. He says Bryony is beautiful and then Bryony begins to think poisonous things like this. Anyway, James will bring one deckchair out and Bryony will sit in it alone, while James cooks dinner. That’s the offer. Is it a good offer or a bad offer? Would it be better if she decided that she wanted to come and sit outside and got the deckchair herself? Once James told her she made too much of things, adding meaning that was never there. Bryony laughed and reminded him that being an estate agent meant having to do that all the time and that she couldn’t help it if it was now in her nature to make cupboards sound like spare bedrooms. Although of course what he was objecting to was her tendency to make spare bedrooms sound like cupboards.
‘This isn’t for your column, is it?’ asks Bryony.
‘What?’
‘I don’t know. Making a bird table. I mean, the goldfinches won’t come back until October or November. If they come back at all. In the meantime are you going to write about how hilarious it is when one of the cats brings in a bird? How Daddy has to deal with it because Mummy’s too grumpy, or too squeamish, or late for a viewing, or at a seminar . . .’ Or hungover, but that sort of goes without saying these days.
James’s column is on page four of the glossy magazine of the biggest selling liberal weekend newspaper. It’s called ‘Natural Dad’. On the facing page there’s a column called ‘City Mum’. The idea is that James, once a well-known nature writer but now better known for his column, writes about living in the countryside with his two down-to-earth children and his increasingly bad-tempered wife. City Mum writes about her children’s friends’ ten-grand birthday parties in Hampstead, and wonders whether to buy her offspring shoes from Clarks like her parents did, or Prada, like her richest friends do.
‘Hey, chill, Beetle. What’s the matter?’
‘Nothing. Sorry, I . . .’
‘It’s not as if you have ever cleared up after the cats in your life.’
‘I do when you’re away. It’s horrible.’ She sighs. ‘Anyway, look, I don’t want to start anything. I’m sorry. I’m knackered, and upset about Oleander, and I’ve still got to do all my reading for Thursday.’ As well as being a partner in the estate agency, Bryony is doing a part-time MA in Eighteenth Century Studies. ‘I just worry that you spend too much time on that column. I want you to be able to do your serious work, that’s all.’
‘I know you do.’ James touches her arm lightly. ‘But work doesn’t always have to be serious. Come on, I’ll get you a deckchair. I’m making a Thai green chicken curry for dinner. And then of course there’s brownies. I’ll do the washing up and you can get on with your reading.’
‘Well, that’s enough of my boring life. How about you?’
Charlie frowns. ‘Well,’ he says, ‘where to start?’
Who goes on a blind date on a Sunday night? Even Soho has a kind of Sunday feeling, as if it has stayed in its pyjamas all day and just can’t be arsed with all this. Charlie looks at Nicola, sitting across from him in the too-trendy, contemporary Asian restaurant she probably booked online. The music’s too loud. She’s wearing a silky dress in a kind of wine colour that makes her look faintly leprous. She’s a mathematician doing a postdoc at King’s. At home Charlie has a new orchid book that came just before he left (no, there isn’t post on a Sunday: it was delivered to Mr Q. Johnson next door by mistake two days ago). He wishes he were at home reading it, with an espresso from his beautiful Fracino machine. He almost says something about the orchid book. He almost says that the thing about him, the main thing, really, although definitely not the thing you’d notice first, especially not if you happened to be blindfolded while he was fucking you, is that he loves seeing orchids in the wild in Britain. Apart from the bit about the blindfold, that would be a great line for a first date. Or maybe it all sounds a bit off-putting? The blindfold would be silk, and from Liberty, and – of course – handwashed between uses. He says nothing. He actually just wants to get this over with.
‘I’ll nip to the loo while you think about it,’ says Nicola.
She slips on a tiny cardigan that stops under her arms. She’s wearing very high heels. Every woman in here is wearing very high heels. She’s probably been here before, perhaps with an ex, or with students from her undergraduate days. Charlie sighs. He can’t be bothered with all this tonight. He sees a footballer he recognises walk in and joke with the doorman, who slaps him on the back. He picks up his phone and finds a text from his father telling him that his great-aunt Oleander is dead. Well, that’s . . . Gosh, poor Fleur. Charlie texts her. Then he texts his cousin Bryony to ask how she and the family are. Then he begins composing a text to his sister Clem that combines sadness about Oleander with congratulations on her radio thing. But it’s too hard, so he temporarily abandons it and flicks quickly to MyFitnessPal to add the carbohydrate grams he just accidentally had in his starter. Checks his hair in the reverse camera, not that he cares what Nicola thinks about his hair. Charlie often checks his hair when he is alone. It’s quite nice hair. He likes it. Especially this latest haircut, which . . .
Nicola’s back. Through the uncertain fabric of her dress he can see her knickers digging into the flesh of her otherwise OK bottom. Charlie likes a biggish bottom, but ideally on a much skinnier girl. How can she bear to be out in public like that? A thong would not solve the problem. He hates thongs. But there are lots of seamless knickers nowadays and . . .
‘So,’ she says.
Charlie puts his phone away. The main courses arrive. He has ordered halibut with Malaysian chilli sauce, which is probably full of sugar that will give him a headache and rancid vegetable oil that will give him cancer. She is having monkfish with Chinese leaf cabbage and jasmine rice. Charlie does not eat rice.
‘Well, obviously you know I work at Kew.’
‘That must be amazing. Do you get to go and hang out in the glasshouses whenever you want?’
‘In theory. But no one really does.’ And no one uses the libraries either, in case they bump into eager ethnobotany students who want to talk about different kinds of latex, which is the white gunge that comes out of some plants when you cut them, or be reminded whether it’s paripinnate or imparipinnate leaves that have a lone terminal leaflet. Charlie always buys his plant books from Summerfield, Amazon or Abe, and then no one else can touch them or make them dirty or try to talk to him about them. He often feels like a lone terminal leaflet himself. Quite an elegant one, naturally, and on a very rare plant.
‘So what do you do exactly? What’s your job title?’
‘I’m a family type specialist.’
‘What does that mean?’ She smiles. ‘I know nothing about plants, except sometimes from Izzy’s drunken ramblings. She’s always going on about mint and herbs and stuff.’
Izzy, aka Dr Isobel Stone, is the mutual friend who has set them up. She’s a world authority on Lamiales, the order of angiosperms that contains mint and herbs and stuff. Charlie first got talking to her in the tea room about a year ago after an incident involving a member of the public and a rather mangled herbarium specimen that turned out simply to be Lavandula augustifolia, one of the most common plants in the UK, if not the entire universe. The member of the public wrote around seventeen letters about his ‘mystery plant’, each one more offensive than the last, eventually accusing everyone at Kew of being ‘blind, intellectually stunted bastards’. Since then Charlie and Izzy have often had morning