Gifted and Talented (14 page)

‘Pet care?’ Olly’s shrug was kind, but she could tell he didn’t think it a very good joke.

She drew back. There was no practical reason for telling him, after all. It was unlikely that he would have seen Coco. And having just found him again and re-established their relationship, perhaps even moved it on a bit, she was unwilling to risk Olly thinking badly of her. She gave one last despairing shake of her head about the column then pushed Amber and all her works determinedly out of her thoughts.

As she sipped her third – and then her fourth – glass, Isabel felt her appreciation of Olly growing. He wasn’t classically handsome but his regular, blunt features were pleasant and reassuring. She liked the broad strength of his build, his open face, his large, candid eyes. Here was someone who would never treat her badly, never deceive her, never reject her. She could tell all that just by looking at him.

Outside the Duchess of Cambridge, as Olly drew her towards him under the streetlight and began, at first with delicious deliberation, then with increasing fervency, to kiss her, Isabel surrendered enthusiastically.

Olly pulled back, battling to control the passion within. It felt like attempting to put out a house fire with a thimble, but it was the only decent thing to do. He could tell she would have surrendered, was keen to, even, but he didn’t want to take advantage of a woman who was clearly tiddly and vulnerable into the bargain. The last thing Isabel needed after what she had endured was to wake up amid the crumpled sheets and condensation-soaked windows of Station Road. With a hangover, and with the likes of Alfie Lintle letting rip in the room below.

When it happened – if it happened – it should be in a scented meadow with a blue sky above, or in a punt with champagne. Although that, depressingly, was months ahead, and there was a whole winter to get through first.

‘Can I see you again?’ he asked her, clasping her hands fervently, as if she might slip away and be lost to him. He realised too late how formal this sounded, almost ridiculous. He felt awkward, like some sweaty curate hopelessly importuning the heroine of a Sunday-night-TV, bonnets-and-shawls drama.

Something of this had transmitted itself to Isabel. She was blushing as she collected herself. The sharp, chill air outside was sobering; she felt rather shocked as she realised how nearly, how willingly, she had surrendered herself. ‘That would be very nice,’ she said politely.

Then they looked at each other and giggled.

‘I’ll walk you back,’ he said, smiling, his breath clouding in the sulphurous orange light under the lamppost.

‘It’s OK,’ Isabel assured him. ‘I’ll get the bus. I came down on it.’ All those hours ago, when she had felt so alone in the world. ‘It goes from the end of the street.’

He walked her there instead, and the bus came almost immediately. As she disappeared up the road, a waving arm silhouetted in the mud-spattered rectangle of light at the rear of the vehicle, he walked back to the Stringers’, his insides glowing with the fire of her hair, the warmth of her smile, the flash of her eyes. Was this, then, how love felt? A sort of divine central heating?

Something small and white was skittering about the front door, waiting for him. Return of the poodle, Olly thought. Escaped from the animal home, yet again. Happy from his recent experiences, ignoring the painful lessons of the past, Olly allowed himself feelings of generosity – pity, even – for a fellow creature out in the cold. He went so far as to put his hand out. ‘Here. Coco.’ It was Coco, wasn’t it?

Seconds later, the still end-of-October air rang with his sharp, angry cry. ‘You bastard!’ Olly seethed. ‘You’re going straight back to that bloody dog pound tomorrow.’

Flora Thynne had failed miserably. Richard had difficulty understanding quite how. In his experience, offering students free alcohol invariably resulted in a stampede of willing helpers. But Flora’s recruitment drive for the Big Ring-Round had not produced the required result. Very few students had come forward.

Secretly, Richard blamed the fact that Flora had lobbied them all online, through their personal e-mails. He knew himself that he hardly ever bothered with e-mails from Branston College, preferring always to read ones from scientific colleagues first. And if he didn’t look at them and he was the goddamn Master, why would the students bother? And that was always supposing Flora had got the e-mail addresses right, up-to-date and the rest of it. It seemed unlikely to Richard. That Flora was not a details person was obvious from her unbrushed hair.

A simple poster on the noticeboard would have been best, but both Flora and Clyde Bracegirdle had deemed this old-tech and insisted that viral approaches were better.

So much better, in fact, that the staff were now doing the Big Branston Ring-Round instead. Richard had protested at this, surely the whole point of the exercise was the eager youthful voice at the other end of the phone drawing the alumnus gently back down memory lane to golden times when the world and hope were young.

‘Indeed it is,’ Flora had concurred. ‘But no eager youthful voices have put themselves at our disposal, unfortunately.’

There was, Richard felt, a certain grim satisfaction in the way she said this, as if she had never expected any of them to and now she had been proven right.

Each member of what Flora called ‘the senior administration team’ had been given a wedge of print-out bearing the names and contact details of hundreds of past students and were urged to work through it in their spare time. Richard, handed his – ‘There you go, Master!’ – had considered shoving it straight in the bin but the knowledge that he – and Allegra Trott – had set this whole process in train stopped him. So, OK, he would make a few calls – but no more.

As he had been given names from
S
to
W
, Richard flicked through the pages to Allegra Trott. He would start with her; Branston’s new pro-active fundraising approach would presumably accord more with her swashbuckling views. She would, hopefully, hand over a fortune on the spot – the fortune she had been intending to hand over in the first place – and that would be that. Job done, Richard thought, stabbing the telephone number-pad. Then off to the labs.

The number on his list, however, connected to a secretary who explained that Allegra had left the company. She was on gardening leave and unobtainable. Branston had conclusively missed the boat.

It was not an encouraging start. But no scientist can afford to be put off by early defeat and Richard accordingly pressed on. His next call was to one Tenebris Hasp who had arrived at Branston in 1987, left three years later and was now living at an address in South London.

The phone rang and rang and Richard was just about to replace the receiver in relief when there was a crashing sound at the other end, accompanied by scrambling noises and a distant curse, as if someone had dropped the phone and snatched it up again.

‘Buster, don’t do that!’ the someone screamed. It was a male voice, very harrassed. ‘Django!’ it now yelled, with the under-breath appendix, ‘Oh, Christ, these kids. Buster! Django!’

‘Hello?’ Richard said briskly, keen to get the damn call over with. ‘Is this, um, Tenebris Hasp?’

There was an intake of breath and a change of tone. ‘Look, I appreciate we’ve slightly overborrowed but if you could just extend the overdraft again . . .’

Richard frowned. ‘It’s not the bank,’ he said. ‘I’m calling from Branston—’

Tenebris Hasp interrupted. ‘Oh, piss off!’ he roared into the Master’s eardrum. ‘Just go away!’

‘I’m sorry,’ Richard said stiffly. ‘I can see this is a bad time.’

‘I was talking to the kids,’ Hasp muttered. ‘They’re driving me round the effing bend. My wife thinks we should home-educate them but frankly it’s like trying to teach a couple of dogs to read and write . . .’ He stopped himself and took another deep breath. ‘Um, where were we? Oh yeah, you’re my personal business advisor, right? Look, extending the overdraft wasn’t the plan but the organic nappy delivery service business just didn’t take off as we imagined and—’

‘I’m not from the bank!’ Richard shouted.

But then came another crash, more distant cursing of invisible children. Tenebris Hasp’s attention was clearly elsewhere.

Richard had had enough. He put down the phone and shoved the alumni list aside. Grabbing his jacket from the back of his office door, he strode out into the corridor, bound for his bicycle and, afterwards, the labs. He had discovered a new short cut across the garden that would get him to the bike racks quicker. It would claw back only a few minutes of the time he had wasted, but it was something.

Diana, in the garden, was musing on her delphinium bed. It wasn’t yet the time of year to plant it but she could still think about it – plan it in relation to her designs for the garden in general. She felt that her original idea for the college front was still best. There it would stand full in the sunshine, a tiara of blue flowers, their colours from palest violet to deepest indigo working wonderfully against the plain grey concrete building.

That decided, Diana walked slowly back across the lawn. She noticed a movement and glanced up to see a tall, dark-haired man about her own age coming rapidly towards her over the grass. He seemed deep in thought. Diana muttered a polite, ‘Hello.’ He looked up, and she was surprised to see shock flash across his face. Alarm, even.

Diana looked back at him doubtfully. Something about him was familiar but she could not place him. She came across few tall, dark, spare and supercilious men in the normal course of things. ‘Hello,’ she said again, doing her best to smile. ‘I’m Diana Somers. I’m the Branston gardener.’

The dark and brooding brow pulled even closer together and his mouth became thinner. ‘I see. Well, I’m Professor Richard Black. Master of Branston College.’

Diana recognised the voice immediately, and the abrupt manner. Here was the man she had almost collided with on her first day at Branston. Rude, Sally had said. Short, she had said too, although Diana had taken this to refer to height. Perhaps, had Sally not used that word, she might have guessed earlier. Been better prepared.

She fought to claw back lost ground. ‘Perhaps,’ she suggested, trying not to appear flustered, ‘you’d like me to show you round the garden? Explain what it is I’m trying to do. I’ve just been thinking about my delphinium border . . .’

He clenched his fists, took a deep breath. ‘If you must,’ he growled, ungraciously.

‘He
hated
all my ideas,’ Diana wailed to Debs afterwards. ‘He hated every single thing I was doing.’

Debs’ response was to tut and hold out the plate of biscuits.

‘Doesn’t he like gardens?’

‘Obviously not,’ Diana groaned. She sniffed hard as the tears pressed her lids. He had loathed her ideas. He did not want her scented climbing roses, or the jasmine and orange blossom, which Diana had planned to cascade over the walls like a peal of bells and radiate perfume on summer evenings.

He had waved away her plans for a white border of campanula, foxglove and valerian. Her introduction of roses and primulas to the pond edge was something else he wanted to stop in its tracks. But far more hurtful even than this was his derailing of her delphiniums. It emerged that, of all the plants in world, they were his least favourite.

‘So what,’ Debs mused, biting into a Bourbon, ‘did he want?’

Diana snorted so hard it hurt her nose. Richard Black’s ideas, she explained to her neighbour, were as dark and miserable as his name. He didn’t even want the bulbs she had ordered – the pheasant’s-eye narcissus, the sapphire and pink-tinged hyacinth, the golden tête-à-tête. He wanted all that cancelled and a new one put in for acidic daffodils and uncompromisingly scarlet tulips, a combination reminiscent of municipal planting in the nineteen-seventies. ‘The only amazing thing,’ Diana groaned, ‘was that he didn’t ask for a floral clock.’

‘Have another biscuit,’ said Debs, proffering the plate.

He had gone over the top, Richard knew. He hated himself. He had been uncharitable about her ideas, downright rude in fact, and the reasons were not her fault. She could not have known that delphiniums were Amy’s favourite flower and that it would be painful for him to see them. Or that anything suggestive of the planting schemes she liked – soft colours and scents – were out of the question. Brash, basic flowers were all he felt that he could bear.

He went into the hallway of the Master’s Lodge, wondering, not for the first time in recent days, what was different about it. Perhaps it was that he could see. Thanks to the vine dangling over the one long, high window, entering the hall had been like entering a mine. Now, however, you could actually make things out. The white walls of the room were suffused with something soft and pink – light, basically. He could see the graphics on the cover of
Scan,
one of many neurological publications he subscribed to and which lay in its plastic wrapping on the low, modernist hall table.

Ex tenebris lux
, Richard thought. Yes, someone had definitely trimmed the ivy. That woman gardener, presumably. What did she say her name was?

He stared into a corner of the newly exposed, ultra-simple sitting room fireplace, his dark brows drawn together and his long lips pressed tight. Yes, whichever way you looked at it, he had definitely been rough on that woman.

He went to the window. He could see why the newly admitted light was pink; a spectacular sunset was raging behind the darkening façades of the carved buildings, like black lace against the evening sky.

The beeches across the lawn had lost their leaves now and an explosion of fiery opal exposed the dark silhouettes of the naked tree branches. Richard thought again of his wife, who had adored rainbows and sunsets and would have loved this one, streaked and patched like a fantastical silky cloak of dusky purples, coral oranges, greeny blues and lemon yellows.

Diana. Her name slipped into his mind so suddenly it surprised him. While he knew it had emerged as a result of various neuronal and synaptic impulses, the impression lingered that someone had said it aloud. Had Amy, from wherever she was, spoken it? He blinked. But why would she? What on earth had made him think that? Was she, from wherever she now was, coming to the defence of a fellow gardener?

This was fanciful, ridiculous. He had to stop thinking like that; it would drive him round the bend. Stop thinking at all, come to that. He went into his office and tried to concentrate on his e-mails about his research, from colleagues all over the world. But Richard was tired after a day at the lab and the letters and symbols danced meaninglessly before his eyes. The one still thing he could see was Amy’s reproachful face, a ghost-memory of it, transposing itself between him and the screen. Alternating with it was Diana’s, her eyes wide with disappointment as he attacked her delphinium border.

Eventually Richard stood up, walked to the window and pressed his brow to the cool lead of the panes. He had got the message. He must seek Diana out and say sorry. When he could bear to, when he had gathered the courage necessary to face her. But until then he should be more pleasant to everyone.