reading it, with an espresso from his beautiful Fracino machine. He almost says something about the orchid book. He almost says that the thing about him, the main thing, really, although definitely not the thing you’d notice first, especially not if you happened to be blindfolded while he was fucking you, is that he loves seeing orchids in the wild in Britain. Apart from the bit about the blindfold, that would be a great line for a first date. Or maybe it all sounds a bit off-putting? The blindfold would be silk, and from Liberty, and – of course – handwashed between uses. He says nothing. He actually just wants to get this over with.
‘I’ll nip to the loo while you think about it,’ says Nicola.
She slips on a tiny cardigan that stops under her arms. She’s wearing very high heels. Every woman in here is wearing very high heels. She’s probably been here before, perhaps with an ex, or with students from her undergraduate days. Charlie sighs. He can’t be bothered with all this tonight. He sees a footballer he recognises walk in and joke with the doorman, who slaps him on the back. He picks up his phone and finds a text from his father telling him that his great-aunt Oleander is dead. Well, that’s . . . Gosh, poor Fleur. Charlie texts her. Then he texts his cousin Bryony to ask how she and the family are. Then he begins composing a text to his sister Clem that combines sadness about Oleander with congratulations on her radio thing. But it’s too hard, so he temporarily abandons it and flicks quickly to MyFitnessPal to add the carbohydrate grams he just accidentally had in his starter. Checks his hair in the reverse camera, not that he cares what Nicola thinks about his hair. Charlie often checks his hair when he is alone. It’s quite nice hair. He likes it. Especially this latest haircut, which . . .
Nicola’s back. Through the uncertain fabric of her dress he can see her knickers digging into the flesh of her otherwise OK bottom. Charlie likes a biggish bottom, but ideally on a much skinnier girl. How can she bear to be out in public like that? A thong would not solve the problem. He hates thongs. But there are lots of seamless knickers nowadays and . . .
‘So,’ she says.
Charlie puts his phone away. The main courses arrive. He has ordered halibut with Malaysian chilli sauce, which is probably full of sugar that will give him a headache and rancid vegetable oil that will give him cancer. She is having monkfish with Chinese leaf cabbage and jasmine rice. Charlie does not eat rice.
‘Well, obviously you know I work at Kew.’
‘That must be amazing. Do you get to go and hang out in the glasshouses whenever you want?’
‘In theory. But no one really does.’ And no one uses the libraries either, in case they bump into eager ethnobotany students who want to talk about different kinds of latex, which is the white gunge that comes out of some plants when you cut them, or be reminded whether it’s paripinnate or imparipinnate leaves that have a lone terminal leaflet. Charlie always buys his plant books from Summerfield, Amazon or Abe, and then no one else can touch them or make them dirty or try to talk to him about them. He often feels like a lone terminal leaflet himself. Quite an elegant one, naturally, and on a very rare plant.
‘So what do you do exactly? What’s your job title?’
‘I’m a family type specialist.’
‘What does that mean?’ She smiles. ‘I know nothing about plants, except sometimes from Izzy’s drunken ramblings. She’s always going on about mint and herbs and stuff.’
Izzy, aka Dr Isobel Stone, is the mutual friend who has set them up. She’s a world authority on Lamiales, the order of angiosperms that contains mint and herbs and stuff. Charlie first got talking to her in the tea room about a year ago after an incident involving a member of the public and a rather mangled herbarium specimen that turned out simply to be Lavandula augustifolia, one of the most common plants in the UK, if not the entire universe. The member of the public wrote around seventeen letters about his ‘mystery plant’, each one more offensive than the last, eventually accusing everyone at Kew of being ‘blind, intellectually stunted bastards’. Since then Charlie and Izzy have often had morning coffee and/or afternoon tea together, and Izzy has become the colleague that Charlie would never really fuck, but about whom he will masturbate if his fantasy happens to take place in a work setting. On Thursday Izzy gave him the address of this restaurant and a phone number and raised an eyebrow, and Charlie wondered if he could in fact fuck someone from work until Izzy said that her friend Nicola was expecting to meet him there at 8 p.m. on Sunday. It was all a bit awkward because Charlie had said he was available before he knew who he was meeting. And then Izzy told Charlie that Nicola had not stopped going on about him and his ‘great body and beautiful eyes’ since seeing him in a picture Izzy put on Facebook. Of course, desperate, fawning women of this type will often do anything. Which in one way makes the whole thing less . . . but in another way it becomes so . . .
‘Um,’ says Charlie, ‘well, say you’ve gone to the rainforest and collected a plant but you don’t know what it is and you send it to Kew for identification, I’m the person – or one of the people – who decides what family it’s in, and therefore which department it should go to for further identification. Like if its leaves are a bit furry and it smells of mint I send it to Izzy. Or one of her team.’
‘So you get mystery plants?’
‘Yeah, all the time. But mostly we solve the mystery quite quickly.’
‘That’s so cool.’ She pours more wine. ‘So what’s a botanical family again? I last did biology at GCSE. Plants are too real for me.’
‘It’s a taxonomic category. One up from genus. From the top it’s kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species. Well, that’s the basic structure anyway. The rice you’re eating now has the Latin name Oryza sativa, which is its genus and species. Its family is Poaceae. Or, basically, grass.’
‘Rice is a type of grass?’
‘Yep.’
She sips her wine. ‘What’s a human a type of?’
‘Monkey. Well, great ape. Hominidae.’
‘Oh yes. Of course. I knew that. Everyone knows that. What about this cabbage stuff then?’ She holds up a forkful of wilted greens.
Charlie frowns. ‘You’re not going to make me identify the whole meal, are you?’
‘No. Sorry. I’m being silly.’ She smiles weakly. ‘Forget it.’
‘It’s probably Brassica rapa. Chinese cabbage. In the family Brassicaceae. The mustard family.’
She puts some in her mouth and chews. ‘Cabbage is a type of mustard?’
‘Yeah, kind of. The mustard family is sometimes known as the cabbage family.’
‘So cabbage is a kind of cabbage.’ She laughs. ‘Wow. Excellent. OK, next question. Where are you from?’
‘Originally? Bath.’
‘Oh, I love Bath. Gosh, all that lovely yellow stone – what’s it called, again? – and those romantic mists. Do you have any brothers or sisters?’
Charlie doesn’t tell her that Bath stone is called Bath stone. ‘I’ve got a sister. And a cousin I’m very close to. And, I guess, two half-sisters I hardly ever see, because . . .’ He doesn’t really know how to end this sentence, so he doesn’t bother. Instead, he looks at Nicola’s wrists. He tries imagining them bound with rope. Cheap, itchy rope. He imagines
