The Seed Collectors

by Scarlett Thomas

  Beatrix has a copy of this month’s Vogue and a pair of scissors and is planning Clem’s outfit for the funeral on Thursday. There’s a Reiss dress worn by Kate Middleton that would work, although is it too cheap for someone married to Bill Gates? Then again, if it is too cheap for a billionaire, then maybe it’s within the range of a relatively well-off grandmother taking her granddaughters to London for shopping and lunch (Saturday) and art galleries (Sunday). Last time they went to an art gallery Clem made her look at a skull covered with diamonds and a sun made of dead flies. This time Beatrix will choose. Perhaps those botanical illustrations at the V&A. They won’t be able to get an outfit in time for the funeral, of course, but that’s fine; since Beatrix’s scrapbooks exist outside normal conceptualisations of time and space, the outfit can be added much later. And the scrapbooks are to help visualise investments anyway. Not that Reiss is listed on the Stock Exchange, but still. Maybe one day it will be. Beatrix wonders where a busy young woman like Clem – either the imagined version or the real one – might buy a funeral outfit in a hurry. Then she buys some shares in ASOS.

  After she has checked her email – nothing from Clem, Augustus or Charlie – and moved on to Bryony’s scrapbook – now there’s a problem – the Schubert begins again. It’s not that Beatrix does not like Schubert. She does like Schubert very much. Sometimes when she’s searching for c(l)ocks on the internet she does it with Schubert’s String Quintet in C Major playing on the stereo system that Augustus bought her for her ninetieth birthday. Schubert’s String Quintet in C Major is, to use a word that Beatrix has learned from the internet, ‘dirty’. It is also quite ‘rough’, the last movement in particular. But she likes to choose when she hears it. Not that the person upstairs ever plays the String Quintet in C. It’s always the piano sonatas. Because of the c(l)ocks, Beatrix has missed You & Yours on the radio, which is just a lot of old people moaning, really, but can be helpful when she is in the mood for shorting. But she has no intention of also missing The Archers. Would the kind of person who thinks it appropriate to listen to Schubert at full-blast at midday also be the kind of person who would remember to switch it off in time for The Archers? Perhaps not. Beatrix goes back to her study and Googles ‘spying on neighbours’. Around a million hits come up, but most of them are just more pornography.

  ‘Right, so here’s the dilemma. A colleague has made it clear that he has feelings for you, and you have made it clear that you don’t have feelings back. Then he gives you a gift. Is that harassment?’

  ‘What’s the gift?’

  ‘That’s what I said! They were all like, Yeah, this is total harassment, without even knowing what the gift was.’

  ‘I mean, if it’s the Kama Sutra, then yeah, I guess that’s probably harassment.’

  ‘But it could be like a Polo or something.’

  ‘Do people still eat Polos?’

  ‘Who knows? Also, what’s the context of the gift? Has he given lots of people gifts? I mean, you could just imagine some twat going to Human Resources to complain that this guy’s given her, I don’t know, a copy of his new film or something, even though he’s given it to everyone else in the department and put it on YouTube.’

  ‘Or it could be Christmas,’ Clem says.

  ‘What a long day.’ Zoe sips her soya latte. ‘My God.’

  ‘But you’ve got your certificate now?’

  ‘Yeah. But guess what? It needs updating every five years. I’m going to have to go through all this again before I’m thirty.’ She groans. ‘Obviously I’ll have to make it in Hollywood by then.’

  ‘Is that what you want to do?’

  ‘No. Well, sort of. I don’t know.’

  The staff common room is almost empty. It has a strange old municipal feel to it despite the posh vending machines and bright red sofas. Zoe has taken her hair down and put on some sheer lipstick, because, well, it is conceivable that she might be meeting people afterwards. Between Clem and Zoe on the table is a chilli plant in a rolled-down Waitrose carrier bag.

  ‘So anyway, what do I do with this?’ Zoe asks Clem, touching the bag, but not the plant.

  ‘Put it on a sunny windowsill. Give it a lot of water – like twice a day. It’ll prefer being in the garden if you’ve got one, but aren’t you in a flat? Anyway, the only semi-complicated thing you’ll need to do if you keep it inside is hand-pollinate it. Don’t make a face. It’s easy. I’ll show you. You take your little finger like this and rub it in the flower gently and look, it’s covered with pollen. Then you rub the same finger – gently again – into another flower and that’s it pollinated. Now you want to go back to the first flower with pollen from the second. Then to a third flower. See? Keep doing it whenever you see flowers. It can be a bit random. Just pretend your finger is a bee.’

  ‘Don’t bees know what they’re doing, though?’

  ‘No. It’s completely accidental. They go to the flowers for nectar and accidentally pollinate the plants. A little finger is as good as a bee.’

  ‘And this pollen stuff? It’s not like poisonous, is it?’

  Clem laughs. ‘It’s the plant’s version of sperm.’

  ‘Yuck,’ says Zoe, but she starts gently rubbing her finger in one of the flowers and smiles when it comes away covered in yellow dust. She gently pushes her finger into one of the other flowers. ‘Have I basically just enabled this plant to have sex?’

  ‘Yep. Exactly,’ says Clem.

  Zoe pulls the plant towards her. ‘I’ll look after you,’ she says to it. ‘You’ll get to fuck all the time.’

  ‘Oh, guess what I heard today?’ Clem says.

  ‘What?’

  ‘They’re going to do the UK premiere of Palm at Edinburgh in June. And it’s up for their big documentary award. They sent me an email last week which I totally would’ve missed if I hadn’t had a good blitz today. Honestly, someone emailed earlier asking if he could come and do a PhD at our “illustrious universe”. And I’ve had another three from my grandmother since I saw you this morning. Apparently someone won’t stop playing Schubert in the flat upstairs from hers, and this is why she’s coming to the funeral in the end. It’s like . . .’ Clem sighs.

  ‘I know. Fucking family, right? But that’s amazing news, though.’ Zoe strokes a leaf on the chilli plant. ‘I mean about the award.’

  ‘Yeah. Thanks. And I’m going to be on the judging panel for the nature documentary prize while I’m there. Should be really interesting. Feel a bit like I’ve fallen behind with what people are doing at the moment. The last nature documentary I even watched was Heidi Cohen’s Snow. My god. That was actually last year. Shit. What happens to time?’

  ‘You go to the Oscars. You sit on planes next to plants.’

  ‘How do you know about that?’

  ‘You told me. It stuck in my head. What was it?’

  ‘An Echinacea. I’d completely forgotten. God, that guy who put his whole family in Economy and then sat in Business with his Echinacea plant on the seat next to him.’

  ‘Anyway, it’s all in the screenplay I’m writing about your life.’

  ‘Be serious.’

  ‘I am. I’ll ask for your permission when it’s done, obviously. And check all the plant names or whatever.’

  ‘God.’ Clem groans, but does not look displeased.

  ‘Anyway, all great for the REF. Esteem indicator thingies, or whatever. I mean award nominations and panels and stuff.’

  The Research Excellence Framework is basically what the World Cup would become if academics organised it. It comes around every six or seven years in some form or other but it’s always changing its name and its rules. But essentially whoever publishes the most and best books and does the most glamorous things with the biggest audiences wins. What do they win? Government funding for their department. This has been so vastly reduced in recent years that even the maximum amount is not even worth getting any more, at least not if you’re in the arts or humanities. But the more funding the department gets, the b
etter everyone thinks it is. The winners will always be Oxford and Cambridge so the pressure is on to get that third place, which last time went to the London School of Economics. Being on TV, as Zoe’s work has, is particularly good. But she’ll need to get at least one more film out before 2014. Clem has Palm, which is better than anything anyone else in Film has. Of course, she still needs to finalise her whole entry. She’ll put in Palm and that new documentary she’s working on, Life. And then she’ll probably have to write a couple of journal articles to make up her four outputs. Zoe can get away with two – maybe even one – because she is so new.

  ‘So are you going to celebrate with Ollie?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The documentary award nomination.’

  ‘I don’t know. I’ve got my great-aunt’s funeral to go to next Thursday and by the time I’ve recovered from having all my family in one room at once it’ll probably be too late. Anyway, we celebrated the Academy Awards thing, and everything else. I’ve done too much celebrating this year.’ She downs the last of her double espresso. ‘Sorry, that makes me sound like an idiot.’

  ‘Invite me next time. I’ll help you celebrate properly.’

  ‘Yeah, I will. Thanks. But you know, at the moment it would just be great to have some peace and quiet. I mean, it’s been an amazing year with the film doing so well, but I just want to switch it off now. You must understand. You must have had that with Wet, for example?’

  ‘I didn’t almost win an Oscar for it.’

  ‘No, but still.’

  ‘You are happy, though, surely?’

  Clem smiles at Zoe. ‘No, not really.’

  Fleur is sitting on a huge sofa in the drawing room of the Soho Hotel doing an echo breath, which is where you breathe out, hold, and then breathe out some more. It’s supposed to help undo the ego. It hasn’t undone Fleur’s ego but at least it’s got rid of some of the stale crap from her lungs: a few atoms from Marilyn Monroe’s last breath, perhaps, which apparently we all have in our lungs at any given time. Fleur has just had what was supposed to be an hour with Skye Turner, but somehow turned into an hour and a half. Skye’s assistant had originally booked yoga and meditation, but in fact Skye just wanted to vent about her manager and so it became a kind of therapy session. Of course, that’s fine – listening to people vent is also what Fleur does – but she does get frustrated when people don’t follow her advice. It’s worst when she says something amazing that Oleander has said in the past to her – like ‘What does your heart say?’ or ‘What would Love do?’ – and it has no effect, or the other person just says, ‘I don’t know’.

  People always know what their hearts say and what Love would do, even if they don’t want to admit it. Your heart might say ‘I want to fuck my neighbour’, or ‘I want to leave my job’, and you might not like it but it’s always a good idea to get it out, put it on the table and have a proper look at it. Your heart, not your mind, is what connects you to the universe. And maybe you should fuck your neighbour. After all, what you do on the level of form does not matter one little bit. Fleur said something like this to Skye Turner before and Skye suddenly stopped talking and her eyes went clear just for a moment and she got it. She was connected, just for a second. Then, poof. Skye Turner does sort of want to fuck her neighbour, as it happens, or at least her parents’ neighbour; but as her parents’ neighbour is on prime-time TV every Saturday night, Fleur is not sure it counts as a heart-universe situation, even though everything is supposed to be equal. Or maybe it was the neighbour’s son? She sighs.

  Oleander was never impatient with people. Oleander realised that her clients might get stuck with the same problems for months or years or even lifetimes and she gently told them things that she accepted might not actually register for a very long time. Fleur is not a very good therapist really, and certainly isn’t a qualified one. She isn’t a qualified yoga teacher either, although she’s better at that, having taught classes at Namaste House since she was sixteen. Celebrities pay for her advice because she supposedly knows everything Oleander knows. She doesn’t know a tenth of what Oleander knew. Well, OK, she knows a lot about making tea. And Patanjali’s Eight Limbs of Yoga. But that’s it.

  The man she is waiting for walks in, wearing faded boot-cut jeans, a pink shirt and an old black wax jacket. He looks both younger and older than his age: sixty-eight. He’s always been too thin and he has always walked too fast. He will have parked his silver Mercedes 300SL on Soho Square. He drives everywhere – also too fast – and always finds a parking space, despite all the terrible karma he believes he has.

  ‘Augustus. How are you?’ Fleur stands up and kisses him on both cheeks.

  ‘Fleur.’ He kisses her back. ‘You look very, well . . . very bright, to be honest, darling. You’d certainly stand out in a crowd.’

  Fleur is wearing a dress that someone’s stylist gave her last week as a thank-you present. The top part is a block of cerise and the bottom part is a block of orange.

  This, already. ‘You think we’ll be seen,’ she says to Augustus.

  ‘It would be very awkward if we were. Cecily’s not fantastic at the moment.’

  She follows his eyes as he looks around the large room. A female journalist with a Mulberry Bayswater and old-fashioned Dictaphone is interviewing a young woman at one of the tables, but there’s no one else here. The doorway is on the far side of the room, and beyond that is the hotel lobby and the bar. People don’t come in here; although on the other hand, of course, they do. Last time Fleur was here there was a celebrity sitting on the opposite sofa playing Top Trumps with a boy of about ten. Fleur thought this boy was his son, and the large dark woman his wife, until it became clear that the woman was from a charity and the boy was terminally ill. The celebrity pledged £10,000 and rewrote a speech the woman had written all while Fleur was sitting there working out a daily yoga routine for the ex-wife of a rapper called The Zone. But celebrities don’t give a shit about other people; so, really . . .

  ‘I don’t think my dress is going to make any difference. We can go somewhere else if you’re not comfortable here. Not Blacks though because of Clem, so I don’t really know where else there is. Or maybe this is just a bad idea altogether . . .’ Fleur gets up. She didn’t used to be like this with Augustus but she is now. She feels as if she’s been stuck at the end of the cul-de-sac that is their relationship for a million years.

  ‘Don’t be silly. Sorry, darling, you know I get over-anxious. It’s on your behalf as well. And Cecily, like I said, isn’t . . . Anyway, sit down. Let’s have tea.’

  Fleur sighs, sits down and breathes out some more. She looks at the menu. It’s beautiful. Everything in here is beautiful, which is why she comes. If she was on her own she would probably order a whole afternoon tea with savouries and scones and clotted cream. But Augustus wouldn’t understand her ordering all that and then taking three quarters of it home for the birds, so Fleur simply orders a plate of fruit and thé pétales. Oh, and some macarons, at least two of which she will sneak away for the robin, who is quite partial to them. Augustus orders a slice of fruit cake, an English Breakfast tea and a large glass of Bordeaux. He frowns when Fleur gets out her mini jar of pink Himalayan salt and her special herbs that she adds to everything.

  ‘Well,’ he says. ‘How are you?’

  ‘Sad. Very sad. Not surprised, of course. She’s been so ill. I’m still working but everything seems so different. How are you?’

  ‘The same.’

  Augustus is always ‘the same’, whatever that even means. Fleur waits for him to say something about Oleander, but he doesn’t. He won’t. Fleur doesn’t even know why he and Beatrix are planning to come to the funeral, as they haven’t spoken to Oleander since 1989. Does he hope to inherit Namaste House? But that wouldn’t make sense, because . . . She closes her eyes and opens them again. Sees the frankincense tree first, and then for some reason all the cushion covers she and Ketki sewed.

  Augustus frowns again. Rubs his eyes
.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ Fleur asks.

  ‘Oh.’ He pauses. He smiles weakly. ‘Everything. The usual.’

  How many years does it take to stop missing your first wife, your sister and your two closest friends who have gone missing in India – or possibly the Pacific – while you stayed at home with a bout of malaria? More than he’s had, that’s for sure.

  ‘Well . . . I’m sorry.’

  ‘Don’t worry, darling. How’s the garden?’

  He really isn’t going to say anything else about Oleander.

  ‘Good. A bit bare in places. The poppies are coming up. And I actually remembered your seeds this time.’ Fleur pulls a small brown envelope out of her bag. ‘These are from the best one. Really deep purple. I can’t believe I actually let it seed. But then again . . .’