‘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 to make a film about it.’ He looks at Bryony’s wine. ‘You want another one? I’m going to get another one.’
Bryony shakes her head. He goes to the bar. Bryony wants to pee, but she can’t leave while Ollie is at the bar. Perhaps he’d think that she’d walked out on him because of what he said about fucking, or about the scholarship. Perhaps then he’d leave too. Would that be such a terrible thing? Then Bryony could go home and start again on her evening, and drink the Chablis instead of this Pinot Grigio and love James like a real wife would. There are 165 calories in this glass of wine, but Bryony won’t log it in her food diary later because it isn’t very nice and she didn’t really mean to have it. When she gets home she’ll have 250mls of Chablis and she’ll log that instead. She also won’t log the sausage roll and chips she had in the dining hall before this evening’s class, because, after all, she wouldn’t normally have something like that, and now that term is more or less over she is confident that she will never even go to the dining hall any more, and after all where else would you find sausage rolls and chips? Fuck it. She just won’t fill in her food diary at all today. She’ll start afresh tomorrow. That means she can drink all the Chablis when she gets home. And she could have a packet of crisps now. Could she eat a packet of crisps in front of Ollie? No. Well, maybe. Actually, what Bryony really wants is a cigarette, but that would just be nuts. She gave up for the last time over three years ago. No calories in fags, of course. But James hates her smoking, and so do the kids. Last time Bryony smoked, Holly cried all night and threatened to kill herself.
Ollie comes back with a pint of IPA and a medium glass of white wine.
‘Here,’ he says. ‘Sorry I’m being a bit of a cunt. It’s been a long day.’
175 ml. Another 130 calories. And it will be warm by the time she gets to it. Warmer. What she should do, what she should really do, is wait for Ollie to go outside for a cigarette and then tip the rest of the large glass away somewhere and start again on the slightly cooler and smaller new glass. OK, how would she actually do that? She could just take it back to the bar. She could take it back to the bar and explain that she really shouldn’t drink this because she’s driving and could they just get rid of it for her, please, but in such a way that the man she’s with doesn’t see? Or she could just return it because it’s shit. She could go up to the bar and say, ‘Your wine is too shit even for students,’ or something cleverer that she would think of. But then they’d just give her more of something else. It’s so hard to lose weight when all the time people are giving you things full of calories. Ollie starts rolling a cigarette.
‘Actually,’ she says, ‘can you do me one of those as well?’
The football is back on. Improbably, Australia scores a goal.
‘Fuck me,’ he says. ‘Game on. You coming?’
They smoke by the university duck pond. Bryony wants to vomit, but she has to admit that once she is over the initial nausea, the cigarette tastes amazing. She feels mellow, all of a sudden, almost the way she felt that time she made tea from the wrong caddy at Fleur’s cottage. She’d forgotten it was like this. She was thinner when she smoked as well. How could she have ever stopped doing it? Smoking was like having a best friend who always listens and never judges you.
‘It would be nice to have a garden pond,’ she says. ‘I guess now the kids are a bit older, but they’re so expensive and . . .’
‘If you get a scholarship you could afford a pond.’
‘That’s not what I mean.’ She sighs. ‘Anyway, yes, all right, fine. I’ll pull out. I don’t need the scholarship as much as Grant and Helen need it. Point taken. But the main thing is that they’re better students than me, so why would I waste my time going up against them?’ She sighs again. And draws deeply on the cigarette.
Ollie screws up his face. ‘Why do you think they’re better students than you?’
‘They say more.’
‘You got the top mark for your essay.’
‘Did I?’
‘Yeah. So you’d probably get the scholarship. But they need it more. And they won’t come without it, so you’d basically be doing them out of their doctorates. You’ll come anyway, of course.’
‘I guess so. Well, no pond then.’ And no forest. ‘Never mind. Hope you get yours.’
‘No kids to drown in ours,’ Ollie says. ‘Never will be.’ He throws his cigarette end in the duck pond. ‘And because of that, my wife has started hating me. But you’ll know all about that.’
Bryony does not have any idea what he’s talking about.
‘I don’t have any idea what . . .’
‘Look, ignore me. I’m being a total cunt. Sorry. Fuck it. Let’s go back.’
Inside, Australia have scored another goal. A penalty. It’s 2–1.
‘Well,’ Ollie says. ‘Miracles do happen.’ He goes
