The Seed Collectors

by Scarlett Thomas

  ‘Can you pass me the Le Creuset roasting tin?’

  Ollie goes to the wrong cupboard and gets the wrong tin.

  ‘I mean, is it unethical to shave a yeti-woman if you have one in your care?’

  ‘I am not responding to this.’ Does she almost smile then? Maybe not. ‘I mean, you don’t shave before you get in the pool.’

  ‘Ha! You have responded. The woman hath . . .’

  ‘You’ve got a hairy back. That’s the wrong tin.’

  ‘My back isn’t that hairy. And I’m a man. Which one do you want?’

  ‘The Le Creuset one.’

  ‘I don’t know what that means.’

  ‘Yes, you do.’

  ‘No. Unlike you I don’t carry an inventory of our bourgeois cooking equipment around with me in my head at all times. What does Le Creuset even mean?’

  ‘Don’t be a dick. It’s the one with the handles.’

  ‘If you mean the third-degree-burn pan, why don’t you say so?’

  Clem sighs. Ollie gets the right roasting tin. And a beer.

  ‘They could wax her. How traumatic would that be? She could go to Femme Naturelle.’ Femme Naturelle is the beauty parlour that has just opened up around the corner from their house in Canterbury. If she’s in a good mood Clem sometimes jokes about going there for a Brazilian, or even a Hollywood. Her pubes are perfect as they are, of course: a little black triangle of something like AstroTurf or . . . The image is going wrong so Ollie abandons it. ‘Yeti Naturelle.’

  ‘That was almost funny before you spoiled it.’

  When they get in, Ash snuggles up in the conservatory with his nature book. Holly gets the spare laptop and loads a DVD onto it: something with a 15 certificate about bitchy schoolgirls that her uncle Charlie got her last Christmas. Bryony suggested this on the way home, mainly as a way to stop Holly pointing out every other fake bird that they drove past. The house smells of baking bread, as usual, and also chocolate. James must have made a cake too. So much cake in one day.

  ‘Why is she doing that?’ asks James, when he comes in from the garden.

  ‘Mummy,’ wails Holly from the conservatory. ‘Tell him you said I could.’

  ‘I said she could.’ Bryony kisses him. ‘How are you?’

  ‘I’m fine,’ says James. ‘Been baking.’

  ‘I can smell. Something lovely that I shouldn’t eat.’

  ‘Chocolate and beetroot brownies. Beetroot from the garden!’

  Bryony doesn’t ask if it’s for a newspaper assignment. James bakes all the time: bread every day and cakes twice a week. Once James baked ‘the most calorific cake in Britain’ from a recipe in one of the tabloids so he could construct a witty piece about how he didn’t think his organic eco-kids would eat it, but of course they did. Holly was actually sick: brown and pink vomit all over her bedroom. Bryony can’t remember what caused the pink that time. Can’t have been beetroot. Must have been jam. And why has James used fresh early-season beetroot in brownies? Couldn’t he just have roasted it? Everyone loves roasted beetroot, and it roasts so quickly when it’s so fresh. He could also have put it in a salad.

  ‘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 coul
d 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 Channel to Europe in a group of over 350, according to the Sandwich Bird Observatory.

  ‘I want to be ready for them this year, if they come back.’

  ‘They were so beautiful.’

  ‘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. I
t’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.