The Queen's Margarine

by Wendy Perriam

  Just at that moment, the door was flung open by a striking-looking man – dark, dramatic, dishevelled and drenched through – who catapulted himself inside and strode up to the desk, showering raindrops in his wake.

  ‘Listen,’ he urged, in a deep yet ringing voice – a far cry from the muffled tones employed by many library-users. ‘I’ve just had this amazing dream! I was trapped in a cage of tulips – not ordinary tulips, but exotic ones with frilly petals in a fantastic orangey-yellow colour. I was tiny, like a manikin, and they were huge, like giants, so I was totally surrounded by them. It was as if they were prison-warders, ordered to guard me, day and night, though only for my good, you understand.’

  He paused for breath; rain plopping on to the desk from his shock of wild black hair. Despite the cold outside, he was wearing neither coat nor jacket, and his saturated shirt was clinging to his chest, revealing the outline of his ribs. Claire found herself distracted by his narrow-shouldered, slender figure – almost girlish, in a sense, although contradicted by highly masculine features: the scruff of not-quite stubble on his chin, the thick, emphatic brows, the vibrant Adam’s apple pulsing in his neck, as if it shared his own exuberance.

  ‘I just knew it was the subject of a poem, maybe a whole series. But, before I write it, I need to find out about the tulips – whether the ones I dreamed actually exist. Trouble is, my damned computer’s crashed, and I haven’t had a minute yet to call someone in to fix it. So I wondered if you could help.’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ Claire said, glancing with interest at his soaked and balding cords; their unusual shade of aubergine echoing the purple of his shirt, and pleased to see that this (apparent) poet fitted the Bohemian stereotype. Besuited gents like T.S. Eliot or Philip Larkin, whose photos had graced the display-board during the library’s Poetry Week, were less exciting altogether. ‘You’re welcome to use our computers. They’re over there, at the back. Hold on a sec – let me just check the booking-screen to see which ones are free.’

  ‘No, you don’t understand. I have to leave – right now! I’m giving a reading in Bristol and I’ll miss the train if I don’t get off sharp.’

  ‘Well, we’re open all day tomorrow.’

  ‘Tomorrow I teach. We poets have to earn a crust, and no one seems frightfully keen to pay us for actually writing the stuff.’ He smiled disarmingly, reaching out a slender hand – effeminate again, with long, pale, tapering fingers, at variance with the dark, tangled hairs on the wrist. ‘Would it be an awful cheek to ask you to do the work?’

  Not so much a cheek as slightly tricky. People were meant to do their own research, and Julia was a stickler for the rules. Library staff could help, of course: show customers the range of stock in the catalogue, along with any relevant periodicals, or arrange computer sessions for beginners, to explain the mysteries of the Internet. It was fine to hold their hands until they’d grasped the fundamentals but, after that, they were left to their own devices. ‘Never set a precedent,’ Julia was always saying. ‘If we start spoonfeeding one customer, we’ll end up spoon-feeding the lot.’

  Claire doubted it, in fact. This man was a one-off; seemed to possess the natural right to demand services and privileges denied to lesser mortals. And, frankly, she was grateful. One got bored with the usual punters: blue-rinsed matrons twittering over the latest Jilly Cooper; geeky nerds obsessing about arcane points of local history; run-of-the-mill enquirers checking holiday guides. No one had ever revealed their dreams to her before.

  ‘And if you could dig out a few tulip books, that would be fantastic. Big glossy ones, if possible, with close-up photographs, so I can see the details of the petals and the leaves. The leaves in the dream were sharp and pointed, and really rather lethal, towering over me like huge, green, unsheathed swords, but I haven’t much idea about what real tulip leaves are like. To be honest, I know zilch about flowers. But, since the dream, I feel inspired to find out everything, then weld the two together – the dream-world and the natural world, so that—’

  ‘My name’s Fergus, by the way,’ he said, suddenly interrupting himself. ‘Fergus Boyd Adair. Actually, you may have some of my books in stock – well, they’re only pamphlets, really, so, on second thoughts, probably not.’

  Definitely not, she corrected silently. Their meagre poetry section didn’t stretch to pamphlets. In fact, his name meant nothing to her, but it struck her as exactly right, with its air of cheeky bravado, not only for a poet, but for this one in particular. All three names were Scottish, although he spoke with no trace of an accent. Indeed, his voice was almost plummily English – rich and deep and sensuous, as if composed in equal parts of honey, brandy and buttermilk.

  ‘Look, give me a piece of paper and I’ll draw the tulips for you, shall I? Then you’ll have something to go on.’

  She passed a sheet across, relieved that it was Bill’s day off, and that Julia was out of sight, still busy shelving books. Her two colleagues shared the view that if you gave anyone an inch, he or she would inevitably take a mile. She saw things rather differently: give people an inch and they might transform it into a mile, through their own talents and initiative.

  And this man did have talents – that was obvious from his drawing: a powerful and professional sketch, yet completed in a scant three minutes. If his poetry matched his artistic skills, he might soon be on the road to fame. After all, many poets had to struggle at the outset for any sort of recognition, let alone a living wage. Although, with a reading in Bristol, he must already have a public, so perhaps she was at fault for never having heard of him.

  ‘See,’ he said, leaning over the desk to point out details on his sketch, ‘the petals are double and sort of ruffled at the edges, as if they’ve been snipped with pinking shears. Where I’ve shaded them is orange, and those unshaded bits are yellow. And the insides of the petals are streaked and speckled pink, which I’ve indicated here with little dots. Do you get the general idea?’

  She nodded, still on the watch for Julia, who would want to take control, and was bound to shush his loud, insistent voice, which seemed to echo round the building; even carry to the street outside. Actually, no one in the library was either studying or browsing, so a little noise was surely not a problem. Julia, however, was such an ancient fossil, she would label it as ‘racket’ and ‘intrusion’.

  ‘Shit!’ he said, glancing at the clock. ‘I’m going to miss that train if I don’t get off in two seconds flat. Look, will you be here on Friday?’

  ‘Er, yes.’

  ‘Great! I’ll call in then, and see what you’ve come up with.’

  ‘Ask for Claire – that’s me.’

  ‘OK, Claire, see you on Friday, for definite. And thanks a million. You’re an angel – no, an archangel!’

  As he scorched out of the building, she seemed to sprout great feathered wings and began soaring up to some vast celestial sphere, where everything was marble-white and shimmering; the air itself a lighter, purer blend. Alas, a swift descent was necessary, since Julia chose that moment to stride back to the desk.

  ‘Who was that moron?’ she asked disparagingly. ‘I’ve never heard anyone make such an awful din! And he more or less cannoned into me in his rush to get away, and didn’t have the manners to apologize.’

  His mind was probably on tulips, Claire didn’t say. As was her own, in fact. She was determined to track down his ‘dream-flower’, and unearth every book on tulips the library possessed. ‘He’s doing a … a research project and needs some specialist stuff. I’ll just check the catalogue.’

  As she’d hoped, there were several interesting items held in their Reserve Stock. She decided to go up to the stockroom and fetch them right away. She needed to be alone, in order to bottle his vital essence before it dissipated; stick in her mental scrapbook the dark disorder of his hair and blaze of his compelling, burnt-toast eyes; the saturated shirt and trousers brazenly delineating every angle of his body. In just ten minutes, she had changed from library assistant to arch
angel; from tame mother-of-two-teenagers to swoony adolescent, already fatally besotted.

  ‘Mum!’ Susanna shouted down the stairs. ‘What have you done with my clean shirt?’

  ‘In the drawer,’ Claire shouted back. ‘Where it’s meant to be.’

  ‘It’s not. There’s not one single shirt there.’

  With a stab of guilt, she suddenly recalled that Susanna’s shirts (not to mention Rodney’s) were still piled up in the laundry basket, waiting to be ironed. The tulip research had driven all else from her mind. ‘I’ll bring one up, OK?’

  ‘Well, quick – or I’ll be late.’

  Hastily, she set up the ironing board, wondering, as so often, why she was the one who always did the ironing. Admittedly, with three A-levels on the near-horizon, her daughter’s life was pressured, but there was no excuse for Rodney. She worked as hard as he did, so he ought to help out in the house, but his mother had brought him up to believe that such division of the chores was undignified, if not emasculating.

  While she waited for the iron to heat, her thoughts returned to last night’s dream – a peculiar, surreal dream, in which she was being born from a tulip’s cup; expelled into the world by gently pulsing, pushing, orangey-yellow petals. She knew Fergus would be fascinated; maybe even use it for one of the poems in his series, which meant she’d be immortalized.

  ‘Something’s burning,’ Rodney observed, venturing into the kitchen, with his usual worried frown.

  She dashed from ironing board to stove – too late. ‘Your kipper!’ she exclaimed, removing from the grill-pan its black disintegrating skeleton.

  ‘I’m not bothered,’ Rodney shrugged. ‘To tell the truth, kippers feature on the menu rather too often for my taste.’

  ‘They’re good for you – that’s why. And you refuse to take fish oil in capsule form, so I have to get it down you somehow.’

  ‘You shouldn’t believe all that rubbish you read. One minute, they’re pushing fish oil as the super-food to beat all else, then they change their minds and it’s pomegranates or wheat-grass, or some other damn-fool thing.’

  ‘Shit! What a smell!’ Daniel exclaimed, screwing up his nose in disgust, as he torpedoed in to join them, his hair uncombed; the laces of his trainers trailing loose.

  ‘Daniel, don’t say “shit”. You know Dad doesn’t like it. And why are you wearing jeans to school?’

  ‘It’s “Jeans for Genes Day”. I told you twice, last night, but you weren’t listening to a word I said.’

  Another surge of guilt. She had been glued to the computer, totally absorbed in the long, intriguing history of the tulip.

  ‘I don’t actually agree with it,’ Rodney remarked, seating himself at the table, oblivious to the fact that it hadn’t yet been laid. ‘Just because some businesses go in for this “Dress-down Friday” nonsense, it doesn’t mean that schools should be allowed to follow suit.’

  ‘That’s different, Rodney,’ Claire put in, trying to make amends to her son. “Jeans for Genes” is a charity thing and—’

  ‘Which reminds me, Mum,’ Daniel interrupted, ‘have you got a pound? We’re expected to cough up, as soon as we arrive, and I’m completely stony-broke.’

  ‘I don’t know why you children are always short of money,’ Rodney snapped, ‘when we give you huge allowances each month.’

  ‘They’re not huge, and we’re not children. I’ll be leaving school in two years’ time.’

  ‘Over my dead body! You’ll stay till you’re eighteen.’

  ‘Oh, don’t start that again,’ Claire groaned. ‘I thought we’d agreed we’d wait till your next birthday before deciding anything. Daniel, get the cereals out, please, and the marmalade and stuff. I’m terribly behind today.’

  ‘You’re telling me! Where’s Sue?’

  ‘Waiting for her shirt.’ Claire raced back to the ironing board, wondering what to wear herself. It might be Jeans-for-Genes day for Daniel, but certainly not for her. It was imperative that Fergus should notice her as woman, and not just as library assistant. On Tuesday, she’d been a chrysalis, clad in dreary brown, but today she was proposing to emerge as a brilliant butterfly. And if Julia’s gimlet eye registered the transformation, well, she’d better pretend she was going on to a party after work and wouldn’t have time to—

  ‘Mum!’

  ‘Coming!’ Having handed over the still only half-ironed shirt, she deliberately refrained from nagging Susanna about the state of her room. She couldn’t imagine Fergus wasting precious energy on such footling things as discarded clothes piled ankle-deep on the floor, or dressing-tables covered in spilt make-up. Odd how one brief meeting with a man still a virtual stranger should have influenced her attitudes; made her less concerned about the usual tedious daily round: had they run out of toilet rolls; did Daniel need new shoes?

  ‘Mum, are you OK? What’s wrong? Won’t you be late for work?’

  ‘Yes … I’d better get a move on.’ She stole a glance at her daughter, envying her flawless skin. It seemed unfair, if not perverse, that she, the forty-something mother should have broken out in spots, while eighteen-year-old Susanna had a perfect, peachy complexion. But stress always gave her flare-ups, and the last few days had been more than usually busy, as she added hours of tulip research to her already hectic schedule. There had been definite compensations, though, as the tulip slowly metamorphosed from a common-and-garden flower, to status symbol, luxury item and priceless trading product – a prima donna, in short. At the height of the tulip mania, or so she’d discovered yesterday, one single tulip bulb had sold for 6,000 Dutch florins, when the average annual income was a paltry 150.

  She couldn’t wait to share such facts with Fergus, and kept wondering when he’d appear today – first thing, she hoped, otherwise the sheer strain of anticipation would reduce her to a wreck.

  ‘Claire, sorry to be a pain, but I’ve just been called away to cover for someone in Bedford. Which means you’ll have to run the Reading Group, at two.’

  ‘Oh, no!’

  ‘What’s the problem?’ Bill asked, obviously surprised. As the one who’d first suggested the Reading Groups, she was viewed as their natural champion.

  ‘It’s, er, not a problem.’ She could hardly explain that, having waited all morning for Fergus to breeze in, it would be intolerable to miss him should he show up in the early afternoon. ‘It’s just that … I looked out some books for a reader and said I’d—’

  ‘Can’t Julia take care of it?’

  ‘Yes, I suppose so.’ She could just imagine Julia’s reaction if she handed over her sixty-eight-page print-out. She had prepared it with the greatest devotion, but Julia would condemn it as misspent time and a shocking waste of paper. ‘We can’t mollycoddle people like this, or we’ll be accused of favouritism – raising expectations we can’t meet for other readers’. The wretched woman was also certain to insist that Fergus paid the standard fee for photocopying, which, at 15p a sheet, would probably clean him out. Since she’d done most of the work at home, she’d intended giving it to him for free – and on the quiet.

  ‘So is that OK, Claire?’ Bill was asking.

  ‘Yes, of course. I just wish you’d given me a bit more notice.’

  ‘I couldn’t, I’m afraid. This thing came out of the blue. Apparently, one of their staff was carted off to hospital, just half an hour ago. And since we’re the nearest branch to them, I could hardly refuse to help out in a crisis.’

  ‘All right, fair enough. What book is it they’re doing?’

  ‘The Lovely Bones. You know it backwards. And the room’s prepared – chairs out, posters up. And, if you don’t mind me saying, Claire, you do look very decorative today.’

  Julia had been less flattering. Hadn’t she ‘rather overdone the blusher?’ (Yes, an attempt to conceal the spots.) And was ‘orange a wise choice of colour?’ (Maybe not, but her aim was to match the tulips, even down to ruffles.)

  She returned to the desk, where Julia was stamping books.
Once she was free, Claire entrusted her with the first twelve pages only – of the print-out, then gestured to the stack of books, piled up on the shelf behind. ‘Could you say I’d like to see him? There are certain things I need to explain, so perhaps he could hang around a while, or pop back later on.’

  ‘Can’t I explain them, Claire?’

  ‘Not really. It’s, er, complicated.’

  She left it at that. Members of the Reading Group were beginning to arrive, which meant she should be in the upstairs room, ready to run the show. Once there, she found Thelma and Michelle already involved in heated discussion.

  ‘I don’t know how you can say it’s uplifting, Thelma, when it’s all about some ghastly girl who’s brutally raped and murdered, and then relates her story from a realm beyond the grave. I found it unutterably bleak from start to finish.’

  ‘Well, in that case, you read it wrong. There’s a definite note of hope at the end, which changes the whole spirit of the thing.’

  ‘Good afternoon, ladies,’ Claire said brightly. ‘It’s great that you’re already exchanging views, but shall we wait till everyone’s here? Otherwise you’ll have to repeat yourselves.’

  Grumbles of assent. Claire braced herself for further arguments. This particular group were notorious for their conflicting views, and, on one occasion, had even come to blows. The dissension she could handle: what she couldn’t face was the prospect of missing Fergus. She hadn’t spent an agonizing hour dolling herself up in orange flounces for the sake of supercilious Thelma and truculent Michelle.

  ‘You’re very fidgety,’ Julia observed.

  ‘Not at all,’ Claire mumbled, with yet another glance at the clock. Fifteen minutes to closing time.