A Bit of Earth (6 page)

Erica Grey knocked very lightly on the frame of the greenhouse door. The paint was peeling into sharp little flakes. Erica's knuckles were tough and shiny from summers of horse-riding and dry-stone walling, sailing and environmental projects, but she still had to suck a splinter out of her middle finger. Professor Misselthwaite didn't seem to hear her. He was staring hard out into the botanical garden. She followed his gaze, wanting to know exactly what it was that interested him. The wind was sighing in the bamboo. Two yellow wagtails were dipping at the edge of the stream. She would have loved to rig up a time-lapse video camera to record the growth
and collapse of that gunnera. Perhaps now one day she would.

She knocked lightly again. For some reason he had an old-fashioned, zinc-white alarm clock on the bench beside him. She stepped lightly around the side of the greenhouse and saw that his eyes were closed. He couldn't really be sleeping, sitting up like that. Erica knew that Professor Misselthwaite's wife had been killed in an accident. She would not intrude. She walked across the meadow and sat down on a bench to write him a note.

Dear Professor Misselthwaite,

I have been told that I have got the funding for my PhD.

Erica Grey.

So what was she going to do now? Tiptoe back in, leave the note on the bench, and possibly disturb and embarrass him? She might as well just send him an email and arrange to go and see him some time when he wasn't so, well, out of it.

Then the alarm clock went off. Too loudly. Anybody else, or a person in a cartoon, would have jumped a foot, but she saw him reach out slowly and switch it off. He rubbed his eyes and put the clock in his big leather bag, the one he always had at lectures. It was the sort of bag carried by doctors in story books.

Then he was coming across the meadow towards her. She got up and smiled.

‘Ah, Erica,' he said, ‘Erica Grey.'

‘The letter came today,' she said. ‘I got my funding.'

‘Oh, good. Well done. And where was it you were going?'

‘Here. I'm staying here.'

‘You are? Oh, that's excellent. I thought you would have wanted to go somewhere else, Cambridge, the States …' He seemed to have forgotten that he had helped her with the application. ‘Are you sure you want to stay here? It is a bit of a backwater in some ways.'

‘I like it here. Lots of freedom. No interference.' She looked around at the garden.

‘Good. Well, come and see me and we can talk about getting started. I have to go and collect my son. My watch is lost at the moment. You don't have the time, do you? I'm not sure if the clock I've got is very accurate.'

‘Five to three.'

‘I have to go. I'm late. I have to collect my son.'

She nodded.

She watched him go, up the zigzag path and towards the secret gate.

Before the accident Guy had made occasional forays to the shops if something had been forgotten or was needed last minute, especially when Felix was a baby. But he had left most of the shopping to Susannah. Now he wondered if maybe she had been bored out of her skull. All this constant needing of things. Surely it should be the case that you did things once, and then they didn't need doing again?

Not so, it seemed. Now that he had reached a point of thinking, at least a little, about what he was doing, rather than just crawling through the fog each day, he decided to
try to make his housekeeping as streamlined as possible. Really, the shops were full of things that nobody could possibly need. He would just zip round. He couldn't decide which was worse though, wasting precious work time whilst Felix was at school, or going with Felix in tow. Yes, he would zip round. This was what he resolved. Every time.

Somehow he would find himself snarled up in the Homewares section, staring at plastic racks to go on draining boards or DVD players for £39.99. Move on! Speed up! he told himself. If Felix was with him they would then get snagged at some unseasonal display of seasonal geegaws. It would take them half an hour even to make it as far as the fruit and veg.

Then one day Felix said, ‘Dad, why don't I have slippers any more? They have slippers here. Only £4.99.' And they were sunk.

He couldn't remember what size Felix's feet were. When Felix took off his shoes the insides were so worn that no number was visible. None of the slippers seemed to fit anyway. In the end they gave up.

‘Felix. We'll have to go to a proper shoe shop and get your feet measured.'

‘OK, Dad.' Felix looked longingly at the slippers, their bright, brushed-nylon colours and motifs of animals and cartoon characters. He would have loved some of the frog ones.

A week or so later they would get a pair of the most boring shoes in the history of the world and some brown checked slippers like the ones old men had on TV. These slippers would dwell for all eternity unworn under Felix's bed. He would never ask for slippers again.

Distractions like the slippers came up every week. It was no wonder that they ended up hardly buying any food, and often they would get home and Guy wouldn't be able to think of anything much for tea.

There had been another time when Felix had said that Marmalade had been stolen out of the trolley. They had spent twenty-five minutes queuing at Customer Services to fill out a form, and then been too tired to do much shopping. When they got back (without eggs, milk or Cheerios), Marmalade had mysteriously magicked himself back home and was sitting on the stairs.

They would often meet people Felix knew from school who said hello to them; at least the parents said hello. The children seemed to have a policy of not even acknowledging each other's existence, although when he quizzed Felix later it would emerge that this was some child he sat next to in Literacy, or opposite in Numeracy, or on the same table with at lunchtime.

Even so, just meeting a person who said hello at the supermarket made Guy feel, at least temporarily, that he had a footing in the real world, and was perhaps a real person. He didn't get the same feeling from dealings with his students at all. He could barely remember their names. They were all getting younger and they all looked the same. It was lucky that Erica, his PhD student, was taking on some of the teaching. She was very friendly to Felix too, whenever he was hanging around in the garden or the lab. She would chat to him and sometimes play a game of boxes or hangman. Guy had seen them fishing in the stream with bits of bamboo.

The other day Guy had seen Erica walking across the campus, her tall figure, like a young poplar, striding along,
talking animatedly with some young fellow who was even taller than she was. They were both carrying motorbike helmets, swinging them as they walked. Perhaps she had other reasons for staying around. No, he thought, she's far too sensible to be swayed by anything like that. Watching them walk away made him remember a damp holiday he and Susannah had once taken. Why on earth had they wanted to go to Herefordshire? All he could remember about it now was the chill of the mattress and the line of poplars that marked the boundary of the farm. Had they been happy? He had thought so. Perhaps he had been too preoccupied, his thoughts as usual elsewhere, to notice. And had Susannah been happy? She had seemed it. He had never been in the habit of asking her. Did that mean that she was? Was that a sign of a good marriage, or of happiness, not having to ask these things?

Professor Judy Lovage sat in her office looking through some of the year's applications for undergraduate places. Of all the extra duties one had to undertake, this was one of those she minded the least. There were so many dreadful committees and sub-committees that one might be manoeuvred onto instead.

Each year she was surprised at how recently her potential students had been born. It was interesting to see how names came into and then fell out of fashion. She always found some of the forms touching. Unfortunately plenty of others would be irritating. Surely somebody at each candidate's school could take it upon themselves to check their students' grammar and spelling? Talk about
not putting your best foot forward. At the moment the department received far more applications than there were places. She had to be scrupulously fair. Here was one from a Madeleine Jones. So many of the students came from Sussex and Surrey …

Madeleine Jones tried to imagine Gatwick as being glamorous. There were posters from about a hundred years ago of an aerodrome and people in flying jackets and silk scarves. Her mum had told her how, when she'd been a teenager, they'd gone there in the evenings to drink delicious freshly squeezed orange juice and eat ice cream from the new American café that had thirty-six flavours and gave you free tasters on little spoons. Her mum couldn't remember if it had been called something like Dayvilles or Baskin Robbins. Anyway, it had been exciting.

London Gatwick. How could they call it London Gatwick? It was a million miles from London, a halting train ride through sodden Surrey fields. She hated the stupid way that cows didn't stare when a train went by. But Gatwick was all right sometimes.

Sometimes she stayed on the train through Gatwick, all the way to Brighton. Ideal destination, as her mum put it, for a bit of bunking off. (Her mum used to bunk off to Brighton too.) But when Madeleine got there, she wandered the Lanes, and each time she couldn't quite believe that she had found it all, that that was it. She had a feeling that there were a whole lot of other Lanes she couldn't find or was being denied admittance to. She always seemed to get caught in the same loop, going past the same antique shops
(closed) and clothes shops where she couldn't have afforded anything, the same cafes, and the same bars. She always ended up in the proper shopping centre, looking at the same things she had looked at in the same shops (but nearer home) the weekend before. Sometimes she bought an ice cream and ate it in the garden of the Brighton Pavilion (she was doing the Regency for A level). What she needed was more money. Then she could really buy stuff.

The next time she had a day off she just got the train as far as Gatwick. Loads of people at college worked there. There were signs in almost every window. She could have her pick of jobs. She would never do anything fast food. She quite fancied Lush but maybe the smell would get to her after a while. A few years ago she'd imagined that every branch of Lush had people out the back making all the scrubs and soaps and stuff. She would have loved doing that, she really liked cooking. No, if she worked at Lush it might put her off nice things.

How about Accessorize? She really liked Accessorize. Her mum would love it if she had a staff discount there. But there had been that time in the Croydon branch. She'd been about to put a pair of earrings up her sleeve when Raquel Palmer had been caught putting some gloves into her bag. They'd taken all of their names, and they probably had a database. She didn't want to work anywhere that sold shortbread and Union Jack stuff. What she should really do was go round and see where they paid the most. She went into BagelExpress to think about it over a Danish. There were only two other people in there, and the guy behind the counter who looked like Dr Kovac, her favourite doctor in
ER
.

This one might be all right.

Dr Kovac gave her an application form, and she filled it out there and then. The manager was on his break.

The manager had rung her on her mobile before she even got home. Yes, she could do Saturdays and some Sundays, even some evenings. She could do bank holidays and school holidays. Would she go for an interview on Saturday and maybe start then too if it all went well?

When she went on the Saturday she thought it must be Dr Kovac's day off. It turned out that he'd left. Her shifts seemed to coincide with those of two Dutch students. They were quite nice, but they kept lapsing into their private language. She and the Dutch girls were very clean, but she kept wondering about all the stages before them, and all the stages before any food anywhere reached anybody. Imagine all the processes, the ingredients, the production, refrigeration, the transport. Too many people involved; and yet the customers ate up every scrap.

Then she got bored. She kept accidentally going shopping in her breaks and spending almost as much as she was earning. Sometimes she hardly had anything left for shopping with her friends. Her mum said that she shouldn't be working so many shifts, and that she should be saving up, anyway. She kept saying that Madeleine would earn much more in the long term if she went to university. And she'd meet some really nice people. And somebody special.

Madeleine Jones's application was very average, but ‘Visiting the Brighton Pavilion' was listed as an interest, and even
though it came after ‘jazz dance' and ‘baking', Professor Lovage put it on the ‘Offers' pile.

It was around this time that somebody on the Estates and Grounds Sub-Committee thought of the botanical garden. Funding had been identified and sponsorship was in the process of being secured for the new sports science facilities; facilities that would include a 400-station gym and a sports injuries treatment centre. There was nobody from the department of Botany on the committee, nobody on the committee who even knew of the department of Botany's interest in the garden; so when the garden was suggested as a potential development site, there was nobody there to raise a hand or even a word in protest. Minutes were taken and sent up to be ratified. A working party was formed of members of the Acquisitions, Developments and Maintenance Committee. Professor Swatridge (Modern History) was to chair it. The wheels began to turn.

Felixno longer remembered the phase he'd gone through when his globe had been new. Every bedtime, after his story, he'd begged his mum or dad, ‘Show me some things on the world.'

He had really wanted to know, it hadn't just been a way of making them stay, and keeping the light on for a few more minutes.

‘Show me some things on the world!'

‘Where do komodo dragons live?' they'd ask. ‘Where do pangolins live?' ‘Where do polar bears live? And penguins?' Felix would point to the place and get it right every time.