The Seed Collectors. Scarlett Thomas

James put them to bed for a change.’

      Bryony frowns. In reality, James will already have put the kids to bed. In fact, he puts the kids to bed almost every night because of Bryony doing her reading, or her valuation reports, or having drunk a bit too much.

      ‘He wouldn’t know how,’ she says.

      ‘No?’ Ollie shrugs. ‘OK, well, I’m going to go and have a drink anyway.’

      ‘Where do you even get a drink on campus at this time of night?’

      The bar is dark, uncomfortable and almost empty. All the furniture is cheap, sticky and has sharp, thin edges that would kill a toddler in less than five minutes. There’s football: Germany are playing Australia on a screen that covers most of one wall. Germany are winning, of course, but Bryony can’t see that from where she’s standing. Bryony wouldn’t be able to spot the German football team if they walked into this bar. She watched all England’s matches in the World Cup last year – yes, including the one against Germany where the ball went over the line but wasn’t a goal – and she even pretended to like it, and actually did understand the offside rule when Holly explained it to her, although she’s forgotten it now; but, really, football? Sometimes she has said to James that her love of fashion is like his love of football, and she has to admit that there is something gendered and therefore unfathomable about it all. Both football and fashion have beautiful patterns that you seem to need the right kind of chromosomes to see, although as James has repeatedly pointed out, fashion requires a lot of time and money and football just requires a subscription to Sky Sports or a nice local pub.

      Ollie hands Bryony her large white wine without looking at her and picks up his pint of IPA without looking at it. He looks, with the same expressionless expression he uses when looking at his phone, at the big screen. As Bryony follows him to a table, she can just about see that one of the teams has scored one goal, and the other has not scored any goals.

      ‘Nice to see Australia losing something,’ says Ollie.

      Bryony mumbles something indistinct that could be ‘That’s good’, but might equally be ‘That’s interesting’, or even, if you analysed the tone closely enough, ‘I really couldn’t give a shit.’

      ‘Shame the Germans don’t play cricket,’ Ollie says.

      ‘But then wouldn’t they beat England at that too?’ says Bryony.

      ‘Do you like sport?’

      Bryony can’t work out whether the emphasis in that sentence has fallen on the word ‘you’, the word ‘like’ or the word ‘sport’.

      ‘Not really. I quite like tennis, I suppose, but that’s only because of Holly.’

      She sips her wine. It’s too sweet and too warm. At home she has most of a bottle of 2001 Chablis in the fridge. It cost around thirty pounds, but that’s worth it, right, for a bottle of wine to drink at home, when you’d pay that for a bottle of really crap wine in a restaurant? Anyway, the Chablis is cool and crisp, of course, but with just a hint of hay bales in the early morning – don’t laugh – and, to be honest, well, just a touch of horse manure. Bryony loves wine that tastes of barnyards or stables. She’s been looking forward to that Chablis all day. Now she has 250mls of this crap, Pinot Grigio or something, to get through, and she feels slightly dizzy from not eating since half past five. Why the fuck did she order a large glass of white wine in the first place when all it’s going to do is get warmer and warmer? And she has to drive home. And not say anything stupid.

      ‘So I guess you’re not my teacher any more,’ she says to Ollie.

      ‘Yeah,’ he says. ‘Now we can fuck.’

      What? OK. Bryony has gone bright red. She must have done. Ollie is still looking at the football. She looks at what he is looking at. Someone in a white shirt kicks the ball to the goalkeeper. It’s all a bit blurry. He’s not trying very hard to . . . Oh, of course. It’s the goalkeeper on his own team. Bryony does not understand why people kick the ball to their own goalkeeper when surely they should be trying to get it to the other goal. But . . . Now someone’s blowing a whistle. Everyone stops running. It’s half time.

      Ollie looks at her. ‘Er, joke. Sorry.’

      ‘No, it’s OK. It’s . . .’

      ‘Anyway, what about the PhD? I’ll be supervising that, surely? You can’t fuck your supervisor. You’ve applied, right?’

      ‘What?’

      ‘Joke.’

      ‘I know.’

      ‘So?’

      ‘Yeah. I applied online at the weekend.’

      ‘And for funding?’

      Bryony frowns. ‘Yeah.’

      Ollie sips his IPA.

      ‘OK. Look, don’t take this the wrong way, but do you actually need funding?’

      ‘What?’

      ‘I mean, do you actually need funding more than, say, Grant, whose father lost his foot in an accident in a factory that won’t pay him any compensation? Or Helen, who grew up on a council estate in Herne Bay and whose head-teacher once had to buy her a coat because her parents spent all their dole money on smack? I mean, I don’t want to put you off or anything, but . . .’ He laughs. ‘Well, to be honest I do kind of want to put you off. I mean you guys are pretty minted, right, you and James?’

      Ollie says all of this as if it’s another joke. He even adds some ironic gravity to what he says about Grant and Helen so that Bryony knows that he knows that their narratives are just that, narratives, and that reality is so much more complex and dignified than tired old sob stories. The only thing is, it’s also obvious that he’s totally serious, so . . .

      ‘Well, actually . . .’

      ‘And of course – and I don’t mean to be harsh, but it’s happening, right, so we might as well admit it – there’s Great-Aunt Oleander’s estate to be divided up. What’s that house worth? A million or two? Plus the business.’

      ‘She’s probably left it all to Augustus,’ Bryony says. She has already had this conversation with James. What is it about men? Can people not just be sad for a few days before starting to talk about who gets what? But the fact is that, to be blunt, Bryony has spent most of what she inherited from her parents on clothes, wine, shoes and stuff for the kids, and she and James don’t have that much money any more. Well, they have some money. But not so much that Bryony can blow £950 in ten minutes in Fenwick on eye-shadow and moisturiser as she did on that hot, peculiar day last summer. They don’t have enough money to live like Augustus and Cecily, or Beatrix, of course, with all their property and bonds and God knows what. Bryony and James have enough money to go to the Maldives at Christmas, which is what Bryony wants to do, but not enough money to buy a forest just outside Littlebourne, which is what James wants to do. If Bryony does inherit part of Oleander’s estate, she has promised to buy James the forest on the basis that, yes, of everything a person could choose to do in the entire fucking world, she really wants to spend every summer in a dark, damp forest, picking poisonous toadstools and getting wet all the time and DYING. Even if she doesn’t die, her thighs will chafe, which people think is funny but is not funny. But maybe James will get a book out of it. And Bryony will be thin by the time they have to actually go to the forest, which means that everything will be different. She’ll be like a woodland nymph, dressed only in pure white cobwebs, and . . .

      ‘What are you and Clem going to do with your share? I mean, if there is a share, which I still think there probably won’t be.’

      ‘Probably a teaching buyout for me, so I can finish my book.’ Ollie finishes his IPA. ‘It’s just so fucking busy here all the time. Clem wants a pond in the garden. Wants