‘Um,’ says Charlie, ‘well, say you’ve gone to the rainforest and collected a plant but you don’t know what it is and you send it to Kew for identification, I’m the person – or one of the people – who decides what family it’s in, and therefore which department it should go to for further identification. Like if its leaves are a bit furry and it smells of mint I send it to Izzy. Or one of her team.’
‘So you get mystery plants?’
‘Yeah, all the time. But mostly we solve the mystery quite quickly.’
‘That’s so cool.’ She pours more wine. ‘So what’s a botanical family again? I last did biology at GCSE. Plants are too real for me.’
‘It’s a taxonomic category. One up from genus. From the top it’s kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species. Well, that’s the basic structure anyway. The rice you’re eating now has the Latin name Oryza sativa, which is its genus and species. Its family is Poaceae. Or, basically, grass.’
‘Rice is a type of grass?’
‘Yep.’
She sips her wine. ‘What’s a human a type of?’
‘Monkey. Well, great ape. Hominidae.’
‘Oh yes. Of course. I knew that. Everyone knows that. What about this cabbage stuff then?’ She holds up a forkful of wilted greens.
Charlie frowns. ‘You’re not going to make me identify the whole meal, are you?’
‘No. Sorry. I’m being silly.’ She smiles weakly. ‘Forget it.’
‘It’s probably Brassica rapa. Chinese cabbage. In the family Brassicaceae. The mustard family.’
She puts some in her mouth and chews. ‘Cabbage is a type of mustard?’
‘Yeah, kind of. The mustard family is sometimes known as the cabbage family.’
‘So cabbage is a kind of cabbage.’ She laughs. ‘Wow. Excellent. OK, next question. Where are you from?’
‘Originally? Bath.’
‘Oh, I love Bath. Gosh, all that lovely yellow stone – what’s it called, again? – and those romantic mists. Do you have any brothers or sisters?’
Charlie doesn’t tell her that Bath stone is called Bath stone. ‘I’ve got a sister. And a cousin I’m very close to. And, I guess, two half-sisters I hardly ever see, because . . .’ He doesn’t really know how to end this sentence, so he doesn’t bother. Instead, he looks at Nicola’s wrists. He tries imagining them bound with rope. Cheap, itchy rope. He imagines them bleeding. Just a little. Perhaps just a tiny blue bruise instead. One on each wrist from being held down and fucked. Face-fucked? No, just fucked. Obviously she’d have consented to all this, but it’s amazing how many women do. In fact, a lot of women have only slept with Charlie because he’s offered to tie them up. You know, as one of those jokes that aren’t really jokes. But he doesn’t really fancy Nicola, with or without rope etc.
There’s quite a long pause.
‘God, you’re hard work, aren’t you?’ She grins. ‘Don’t look so serious. I’m teasing. What are their names?’
‘Clematis. That’s my sister. We call her Clem. Bryony’s my cousin. My half-sisters are Plum and Lavender, but they’re just kids still. My father remarried after my mother went missing on an expedition . . .’ Nicola doesn’t respond to the missing mother thing, which is odd, so Charlie explains about the family tradition of giving a botanical first name to anyone not certain to keep the famous Gardener surname, although of course Clem kept the Gardener name anyway when she married Ollie. Then he explains about his great-great-grandfather, Augustus Emery Charles Gardener, who was a famous horticulturist, and his great-grandfather, Charles Emery Augustus Gardener, who was supposed to be overseeing a tea plantation in India but ended up falling in love with a Hindu woman and founding an Ayurvedic clinic and yoga centre in Sandwich, of all places. And then his grandfather, Augustus Emery Charles Gardener, who . . .
‘Can I tell you about the desserts?’
Nicola immediately looks up at the waiter, and Charlie realises he has been boring her. Good. Maybe she’ll leave and this will be over. He has had enough to eat, and definitely enough carbs, but agrees, after some pressure, to share an exotic fruit platter. He’ll have a bit of kiwi or something. But he insists on ordering a glass of dessert wine for her. He likes watching girls drinking dessert wine for reasons that would probably be disturbing if he ever thought about them. He has a double espresso, which won’t be as nice as the one he could have at home.
‘So why are you on a blind date?’ Nicola asks him.
Charlie shrugs. Right, well, if she doesn’t want to know any more about his family, she won’t hear about his great-aunt Oleander, who just died, and who used to be a famous guru who even met the Beatles. She also won’t hear about his mother, who is not just missing but presumed dead, along with both Bryony’s parents and Fleur’s terrible mother. And the deadly seed pods they went to find in a place called – really – the Lost Island, far away in the Pacific. And that’s Nicola’s loss, because it’s really a very exciting story, with loads of botany in it and everything. But then all girls like Nicola want to talk about is how many people you’ve slept with and what your favourite band is and how many children you want.
‘I don’t know,’ he says. ‘How about you?’
‘Izzy sort of took pity on me because I got dumped.’
‘Sorry to hear that.’
‘What’s your history . . . ? I mean, when did you . . . ?’
‘I got divorced about ten years ago.’
‘Mine was last month.’
‘Was it bad?’
She shrugs. ‘We’d only been together for three years.’
‘Yeah, but I mean, did you, were you . . . ?’
‘What, in love? Yes. Well, I was. How about you?’
‘I suppose I was. Yes. Just not with my wife.’
Nicola pauses. Sips her wine. Puts her finger in her mouth, and then in the bowl of salt on the table, and then back in her mouth again. Why on earth is she . . .
‘So who did you fuck instead?’
Charlie’s cock stirs ever so slightly at the sound of the word ‘fuck’ coming out of her full, quite posh, red-lipsticked mouth. She reapplied her lipstick when she went to the loo. He likes it when girls bother to do that.
‘It’s complicated.’
She sighs. ‘Right.’
‘How about you?’
‘What, did I fuck anyone else?’
Again, a very slight emphasis on the word ‘fuck’. The consonance of it. Another small stir.
‘Yes.’
She smiles. ‘I can’t tell you that. I hardly know you.’
Eyebrows. Smile. ‘We could change that.’
‘Really? How?’
‘Go out to the fire escape and take off your knickers.’
She pauses, looks shocked, but probably isn’t. Laughs. ‘What?’