The Queen's Margarine (4 page)

‘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.

‘I suppose you're keen to get off to your party.'

‘Party?'

‘You told me you were going to a—'

‘Oh, yes. Of course. It slipped my mind.' Her ‘party' gear now seemed a shade ridiculous. Julia was right, in fact – orange
wasn't
a wise choice of colour. Acceptable for tulips, but not for a plumpish, blondish (and probably past it) human female, who looked better dressed in inconspicuous beige.

Between customers, she gazed out of the window at the brilliant April sunshine, which seemed to mock her sense of crushing disappointment. These last few days, the weather had been as mercurial as her moods; switching from serene to stormy and back again, with perverse and spiteful glee.

‘Are you sure that man didn't come in?' she asked again, returning to the desk, after helping a reader locate the gardening section. Gardens had reminded her of tulips – not that she needed a reminder.

‘Look, I've told you twice,' Julia snapped, ‘he didn't. Anyway you've been here yourself all day, apart from an hour or so running the group.'

‘Yes, but weren't you out at lunch then?'

‘No. Do we
have
to keep going over the minutiae of where I was, and when?'

Yes, Claire murmured soundlessly, we do. She needed to be absolutely certain that Fergus hadn't come and gone without anybody noticing. Unlikely. He wasn't a shrinking violet who would shuffle in and huddle in a corner. Besides, Olwen, too, had been keeping a lookout for him, whilst setting up the display of ‘Great Inventors'. Maybe the whole thing was a hoax. Fergus Boyd Adair was probably Joe Bloggs in reality – a plumber or estate agent – or certainly no more of a poet than
she
was the Queen of Hearts. But what would be the point of such deception? – it didn't make the slightest sense. And, anyway, he'd seemed completely genuine; enthusiastic, eager for her help, and envisaging a whole new poetic project.

‘Hey, you at the desk, are you deaf or something?'

Claire suddenly noticed a woman standing waiting: a stiffcoiffed matron, tut-tutting in impatience.

‘Did you hear what I said?' she barked aggressively.

‘Er, no. I do apologize.'

The woman gave an exaggerated sigh. ‘I don't know why we pay our rates, when you people are so useless.'

Claire switched on a placatory smile, although inwardly alarmed by her own peculiar mental state. Could an obsession with a poet actually make you blind and deaf? ‘How can I help?' she asked, endeavouring to sound brisk and on the ball.

The woman seemed slightly mollified; her glare changing to a frown. ‘I'm looking for a book, but I don't know what it's called or who wrote it.'

‘Well, can you give me some idea of what it's about?'

‘No, I can't. You see, I had it out before – last year – but never got round to reading it. All I can remember is that it was big and blue – I think – with a picture of a church on the front.'

Claire ran through a mental repertoire of books: church architecture, ecclesiastical history, or some novel, perhaps, set in a country parsonage. ‘Was is fiction or non-fiction?'

The woman didn't appear to know the difference, which made things still more difficult, yet, a mere ten minutes later, the book had been miraculously located (on the trolley by the returns desk), and a grudging ‘Thank you' had even escaped the woman's lips. Once she'd shuffled off, Claire allowed her mind to migrate back to Fergus. Perhaps he'd never returned from Bristol – been killed in a train crash or mown down as he crossed the street. Or was simply too ill to come out: laid low with flu, or stricken with consumption, like Keats or D.H. Lawrence. Writers had notoriously bad health, and poets in particular seemed alarmingly accident-prone. Shelley had drowned at thirty; Byron died of fever in some Greek campaign or other, again pitifully young. She should be wearing black, not orange, and certainly her mood was dark as she prepared to help the other staff usher out the last remaining customers and get ready to lock up. Tomorrow was her Saturday off, and the place was shut on Sundays, so the earliest she might lay eyes on Fergus was a good sixty hours away – too achingly distant to provide a shred of comfort.

Then, suddenly, the dreary, dying library exploded into life, as a tall, dark, dashing figure swooped full-pelt through the door and bounded up to the desk.

‘Sorry! Terribly late! Meant to come hours ago, but words were gushing out of me and I didn't want to stop the flow.'

Everyone looked up – Bill and Olwen with interest; Julia in distaste.

‘Claire, you look sensational!' Leaning right across the desk, he gazed at her with undisguised admiration. ‘I adore the orange. It's exactly the same colour as the tulips in my dream. What a weird
coincidence. And, talking of tulips, I don't expect you've had a minute to find out anything about them.'

‘Well, actually—'

‘Though I'm praying that you have, because they're coming out of my ears – or at least tulip poetry is. It's funny, you know, you can ignore a subject all your life – I mean, I hardly know a tulip from a daffodil – then, all at once, the world is full of tulips. They're the only flower in the world for me at present.'

Yes, she agreed.
And
for me.

‘Well, did you find a book or two?' he asked, still scrutinizing her outfit. ‘Listen, forgive me being personal, but I can't believe how you've changed. You should always wear bright colours, you know. They make your eyes look bluer and—'

‘We're about to close,' Julia put in; her voice as strident as a piece of chalk rasping on a blackboard.

‘Yes, I'm keeping you all. Most inconsiderate. But I'll be gone in a sec – I promise. Just tell me, Claire, did you find some books?'

‘I found twenty-two, in fact. Not all of them exclusively about tulips, but including books on art and nature, a few useful ones on Holland and the bulb-fields, lots of gardening books, of course, and even—'

‘He can't take out more than eight at a time,' Julia interrupted. ‘If he wants the others, he'll have to bring the first ones back.'

No problem. The more often he came in, the more delighted she would be. But what about her research? It would take ages to explain all the different sources she'd consulted, and the tulip's use in medicine and cooking, as well as in trade and garden-design, and a host of other areas. She was also dying to convey to him how, although she'd once viewed tulips as comparatively low in the hierarchy of flowers (neither romantic like red roses, nor exotic like camellias; not highly scented like freesias, or even endearingly bizarre like red-hot pokers), that had changed entirely now. Indeed, she could almost understand the crazy sums paid at the height of tulipomania. The flower had come to be regarded, then, rather like a work of art: a thing of such rare beauty it was, in essence, priceless. Yet how could she discuss such matters in any sort of depth, when Julia was already glaring at the clock? Besides, they were sitting within a few feet of each other, so her colleague
was bound to eavesdrop on any personal chat. And undoubtedly remind her (should she herself ‘forget') that readers had to pay for printed matter, extorting every last penny of the cost.

Fortunately, just at that moment, one of the last stragglers suddenly rushed up to the desk with three DVDs to rent, and, while Julia was ringing them up on the till, she quickly took her chance, lowering her voice to a whisper.

‘I do have more information, Fergus – print-outs from a whole variety of sources. The problem is—'

‘It's lock-up time.' He completed the sentence for her, now speaking equally softly; his usual trumpet blare muted to a lyre. ‘Don't worry, I understand. Tell you what – why don't I walk you home?'

Walk her home? Impossible! She might run into Susanna, coming back from netball practice, or her evil neighbour, Ruby, might be snooping, as so often. Given her predilection for
mischief-making
, Ruby could easily inflate a simple tête-à-tête into an adulterous affair, then regale the entire street with tales of her debauchery.

‘Yes, good idea,' she said, with studied nonchalance. Any risk, however ill-advised, simply had to be discounted for the thrill of this man's company.

‘Who in God's name's that?' Rodney groped out a hand for the alarm clock, peering at its illuminated figures.

‘I'll get it,' Claire said sleepily, rolling out of bed. ‘Maybe it's the milkman.' She had an uneasy feeling she hadn't paid his bill for several weeks, so he was probably on the warpath.

‘Well, tell him not to wake us up so early – especially not on Saturday.'

She grabbed her dressing-gown and tiptoed down the stairs, hoping the shrill peal of the doorbell hadn't woken the kids.

Her ‘pacify-the-milkman' smile changed into an expression of astonishment as she came face to face with an enormous bunch of flowers: orangey-yellow tulips, with ruffled, frilly petals, and pink streaks in the insides. The man holding them was a total stranger – not that much of him was visible, half-concealed as it was by his booty.