The Seeds of Poppies

A free story - and one of my favourites! (part one today, part two tomorrow)

The Seeds of Poppies (part one)

He is lost as soon as he drops the stone into the water. Lost to his childhood, thirty years evaporating just like that.

Downstream from the waterfall, where it is quieter, the river fragments somewhat, flexing to fit in with the geology of the place, lacking the will to do anything other than pursue the path of least resistance. Stepping across boulders that edged the main body of the river, he had discovered a small parallel spur running in isolation for a few yards and then gathering into a modest reservoir before leaking back to the parent flow. The shallow rivulet is no more than eight inches wide just above the pool, and it is here he pauses, mesmerised by the water’s surface as it jostles against stone. The loose rock, almost cuboid and about three inches wide, had been disturbed by his left foot. His bending to retrieve it was instinctive, yet his placing of it just where the pool began to be formed is more deliberate than not, stimulated by a desire to see how locating it there might affect the skin of water now forced to take a modified route. The resulting new eddies in the basin further captivate him, and for a moment he is transported to another place, back to another time.

Building a dam is the only possible next step. A common enough activity for young children, his memories take him back to Devon and the house they had lived in for those three magical years, and to the stream that ran through the woods beyond the end of their garden. He had been six or seven, Josh three years older, and together they had tried again and again to create a sticks-and-stones structure which would hold back the water; every time they succeeded in interrupting the flow, the shape of it, but always failed to achieve their signal goal. Between them, age-wise, Bernie sat in her favourite spot on the opposite bank, a little withdrawn, partly on their mother’s instruction and partly because she did not trust the tranquility of something that could shift so subtly, whose essence was invisible. It had been during those summers he first learned of the power of water and its fascination for him; years later Josh would tell him how he too had learned how precious it was, but that in his case he’d needed to be lost in a desert to be granted such knowledge. Looking around, he finds more loose stones of various sizes and assembles a collection, settling them on the boulder that separates his pool from the main stream. Then, crouching down as he had decades ago, he goes to work, a builder once again trying to exercise some kind of supremacy over the natural world.

Having placed two more stones, he looks up, half-expecting to see a figure watching from the far bank. Perpetually unsettled by her, back then he would often pause in his endeavours and look across the brook to where she sat.

“Will you write about this, Bernie?” he asked.

“Of course,” she said with a strange certainty that belied her age. “I write about everything.”

And she had. While he and Josh tried more and more elaborate devices to dam the water, Bernie - christened Bernadette but hating the length and complexity of the word - sat and watched, occasionally scribbling in her plain-covered notebook. At the point when they instinctively knew they were done, he and Josh would stand up only to realise she was no longer there, as if she had seen the end coming, almost foretold it. Back at the house, their socks and shoes inevitably drenched, Bernie would most likely be sitting at the kitchen table drinking lemonade or eating a biscuit, watching their mother as she prepared a meal, or cleaned, or unloaded their rudimentary washing machine. She would write about all of that too. It had been disconcerting when, years later, he had first read her fictionalised versions of them all, captured in black-and-white and immortalised between hardback covers as if they had been trapped in amber like prehistoric insects.

He looks down at this modern incarnation and his solo efforts thus far. There is more of a whirl on the surface now, the water having to climb over his recently placed stones before angling down into the pool via a narrower channel. It is different, but nothing like a dam. He thinks about stopping or taking a video with his phone but does neither. Bending once again to be close to the water, he lifts another small rock, trying to decide where it should go.

Their Devon idyll was brought to an end by a combination of death and sickness. The heart attack that claimed his paternal grandfather had taken them all by surprise, and although the children loved him in the way grandchildren are supposed to, they never really knew him as a person. Perhaps that is most often the way. Always preferring the practical, when the news came his father took stock of the situation and organised his troops accordingly. They would have to move. His own mother - the children’s ‘best granny’ - had been suffering with dementia for some time, and with her husband and primary carer now departed, the depth of her own illness was exposed to the rest of the family for the first time.

“The house is plenty big enough,” he remembered his father explaining, “after all, I grew up there with my brothers and sisters! So you’ll each have your own room - probably bigger than your bedroom here - and there’s a huge garden and an orchard.” He tried to make it sound like a landed estate.

“But we’ll have to change schools,” Josh had protested.

“I know, son; but it can’t be helped. Granny needs us.”

He and Josh had exchanged glances.

“But what about the river?” he asked.

“The river!” Both his parents laughed, assuming it was a joke. “I’m afraid we can’t take it with us, Dobs.”

“I know that,” he said, then paused. “But is there a river at Granny’s house?”

His mother had walked to where he sat, the five of them round the kitchen table in a council of war.

“You know what granny’s house is like,” she said softly. “There isn’t a river near her garden like the one here. But I’m sure there must be one not so very far away. Isn’t that so?” She glanced at her husband who failed to reply.

After the meeting was over - the children’s reward for their attention being an ice-pop from the freezer - he and Josh went out into the garden to play and talk about the future. They agreed saying goodbye to the river would be hard. Bernie went up to her room and opened a notebook.

Based on a short holiday in the New Forest when he had been five, he had declared a passion for horses; he would, he announced, be a jockey or a vet or the most famous racehorse trainer in the world. Inevitably he had become none of those things. Josh had immediately christened him Dobbin, a name which - once it had been inadvertently adopted by his parents - became shortened to Dobs. And Dobs had stuck. They had chosen to christen him Jonathan, but as a child it was a name he never liked nor grew into. As he got older, his parents tried to move away from his childhood nickname, rotating through all the usual derivatives of Jonathan to see if any of them resonated. None did. Consequently they only tended to be used - Jon, Jonny or Jonathan itself - whenever he had done something wrong or was in trouble; and eventually the family stopped calling on them at all. Bowing to the inevitable, as a fast-maturing teenager he started introducing himself to new acquaintances as “Jonathan Wells, though my friends call me Dobs”. It had been a deliberate perpetuation he thought made him interesting, though one he was forced to abandon as soon as he started to earn a living, realising that ‘Dobs’ lacked professional credibility. Beginning with Jon, as his roles increased in seniority so he began to use longer versions of his name. If you walked up to him now, nearly twenty years later, bent over the water with a stone in each hand, he would introduce himself as Jonathan - and do so in a tone suggesting that something had come full circle.

Names had never been an issue for Josh. Devoid of a nickname - he was always Josh or Joshua - he joked that the Army gave him new ones anyway. When he entered Afghanistan he had been Lieutenant Wells; Captain Wells when he left. Later, once he had been demobbed, he came to think of those regimental names as being more statements of geography than anything else. Returning to his academic roots and his first love of forestry management, a few years later - walking through acres of pines in Northumberland - he told Jonathan that those appellations “belonged to a different place and a different person”.

“Don’t you think about the war?” his brother had asked him.

Josh had paused and looked up.

“I only think about trees,” he said, the soft accompaniment of their feet on pine needles closing the conversation.

Placing the stones in the water, Jonathan remembers that walk and the silence which followed it. In a strange way it had been the most eloquent Josh had ever been with him. Looking down, he wonders what that nine-year-old version of his brother would have done with the few rocks that remained. The first one he had set down had already been submerged as the water, persistent and undeniable, found new ways to reach its goal. He had changed the shape of it - and in places the pace of the flow - but that was all. He smiled to himself. It was that old lesson again; the one about invincibility and destiny.

Bernie always maintained her own destiny had been set from the start and that she had never deviated from it. Hers was a drive softened thanks to a blend of determination and compassion, present even when she was too young to really know what was actually going on. By the time he was nine, Jonathan had stopped asking “will you write about this, Bernie?” because she wrote about everything; the good and the bad, the sad and the happy. Once, when he was studying for his O-levels and struggling with Shakespeare, she had informed him that the only thing writers were trying to do - Shakespeare included - was to make sense of the world, and it was simply that some people were better at it than others.

“Better at making sense of the world?” Jonathan had sought to qualify.

Bernie laughed.

“No; writing, silly! No-one can really make sense of the world.”

It had been a correction delivered without malice or meanness, and - given how often she fell to correcting him at that time - he assumed with a kindness that must have been a constant challenge for her. Only later did he realise it was just another manifestation of how she was made, someone whose mission was to help others see what was right before their eyes.

Standing upright once again, he feels a slight twinge in his back, his right arm finding the guilty spot as if doing so will resolve the issue. “It’s just age,” he tells himself. The question about what to do next, whether or not to carry on, is simultaneously answered, and he looks down at the remapped rivulet and wonders if he has made any difference. It is a question which - in its most wide-ranging sense - has come to haunt him more and more. Even though he doesn’t talk about it, Jonathan assumes Josh made a difference of some kind during the war in Afghanistan. And he knows Bernie has. Casting another glance across to the far bank, he hears her voice as it came to him through the telephone.

“I wanted you to know from me,” she had said.

“Know what?”

“About the book. That I’ve written about you.”

He laughed.

“You were always writing about me, about us.”

“But now there’s a book, Dobs. A proper book. A cover, a publisher and everything.”

How old had they been? Early thirties?

“And I’m in it?”

“Yes and no.” She paused. “It’s a fiction, of course, but part of it is based on our time in Devon when we were children. And there are characters in it that look a little bit like us. You, me, Josh.” She paused again. “I wanted you to know, for you to not be surprised. In case you ever read it.”

Bernie had never let them read anything she wrote; even her essays from school she kept distanced from her parents. It was as if she had a store of treasure she was intent on building up and keeping secret. He recalls once seeing a pile of notebooks on her bed before she ushered him out of the room.

“So I am in it?”

She laughed.

“Only bits of you.”

“I hope the good bits,” he joked. She said nothing. “What’s it called, this book of yours?”

“‘The Seeds of Poppies’ by Bernadette Wells.”

“‘Bernadette’?”

“My publisher said I needed to use my proper name for it to be clear that I was a woman. ‘Bernie’ clouded the issue, he said. And anyway, we each have them don’t we?”

“What, issues?”

“No.” He could tell from her laugh that she was perhaps as happy as she had ever been. “Our professional names: Captain, Jonathan, Bernadette. See?”

“Okay.” As much as he had longed to, what she had just said felt like a stone he was instantly disinclined to turn over. “And what’s it about, ‘The Seeds of Poppies’?”

“Oh, about how people are always not the same people they once were…”

Was that true? He walks away from the great slabs of rock that corralled the river, the memory of her words echoing in his head. It seemed a little disingenuous to question whether Bernie was correct, that they had indeed become different people. One of the few truisms in his life was that ninety-nine times out of a hundred Bernie was right. For example, how many times had Josh changed from the brother with whom he had built dams in Devon? When he went to college? When he went to war? And again when he came back? Jonathan wonders what Josh would have been like if he had not enlisted, or had not been sent to the desert. Would he still be living his hermit life in Northumberland, a loner communing with trees? And what about himself?

As he reaches the path proper and heads back up the side of the valley towards his parked car, he realises he doesn’t want to think about the Jonathan Wells he has become; so instead he tries to focus on Bernie, the sister who seemed to have gone from being a no-one to a someone overnight - at least as far as the rest of the world was concerned. The book had been well received. It had been picked up and promoted heavily by Waterstones in the UK and Barnes and Noble in the States, her publisher doing his job exceptionally well. Sales exceeded expectations; it was nominated for an award; they issued a paperback with a modified cover, the words “One of the best debut novels in a generation” emblazoned on it. Sales spiked again. There were rumours about The Booker though these never materialised into anything concrete. She sent him a copy with two kisses drawn beneath her name on the title page - her equivalent of a signature. He had been astonished by her work, enthralled, seeing elements of the three of them in the characters she had drawn, portrayals so perceptive that at times she had made him want to cry.

“Tell me,” the interviewer had asked during her first public exposure, a small slot on a Radio 4 book programme, “the title. Why ‘The Seeds of Poppies’? It’s not about the First World War, after all.”

“No, it isn’t.” Jonathan had recognised the slight catch in her voice, the tell that said she was needing to be patient; patient and kind. It was a tone he had heard often enough. “But isn’t it true that the devastation, turmoil and carnage of the First World War surfaced poppy seeds that had long been dormant, and that a year or two later they had flowered, were suddenly everywhere? Well I believe people are like that. That we each of us have a myriad of seeds within us that are waiting to be awoken, and once they are they flower and things change.”

“But not because of war?”

“Of course not. It could be anything. The simplest of things - or the grandest and most complex. A smile; playing by a river; seeing a bird in the sky. Or a birth or death, a wedding or divorce. Anything. And at any time. Or all the time. And each of the things we do or say, that we see or hear, that is said to us or done to us, releases one or more of these little dormant seeds, changes who we are, what we do next, what people see, how they feel about us. And how we feel about ourselves.”

“Nature or nurture?” the interviewer had asked, trying too hard to sound intellectual.

“I don’t know,” Bernie had said, somewhat flatly, “you tell me. I believe that when we are born we could achieve anything, be anything, and what we eventually become depends on which of those little seeds germinate. And which do not. Sometimes we do things or don’t do things or have things done to us that means some seeds will lie dormant. Forever.”

Jonathan had assumed that during their time in Devon the three of them had been planting rather than harvesting, but he now knew Bernie was right. He pauses to look back down the path to where, out of sight, the river flowed. He had been drawn to the water, compelled to try and build a dam once again, not because the seed had been planted in Devon, but because already present, there it had germinated.

Thinking of Devon, he recalls seeing Josh a few months after Bernie’s book had been published.

“You’ve read it?” he asked his brother.

“I have not,” Josh said, slipping into the vaguely military tone he tended to adopt when he wanted to avoid the emotional.

“Why not? It’s truly wonderful - and I’m not saying that because Bernie’s our sister.”

“I’m sure it is.” He had paused for a moment. “You know, Dobs,” it sounded like the beginning of a confession, “I’ve never doubted her. Never. I’ve always thought that there was something special about her, that she had been touched by something the likes of you and I could only dream of. A gift perhaps. Stardust. All that writing. All that seriousness. It was never going to be for nothing, not for Bernie.”

“So will you read it?”

“I will not.”

“Why not?”

“Because Mum hated it.” He waited long enough for silence to fill the gap between them. “She read it as soon as it was out, of course; and of course she’s as proud as it’s possible for a mother to be. And I’m proud of Bernie too. And humbled, in a way. But Mum felt the book was some kind of betrayal; of the life we led back then, of us as individuals. I think she saw it as a criticism of her. Even though she knew it was a story, she could see too many things in Bernie’s characters that reminded her of us and exposed what we were like and what we did - and in her reading, through her lens, too little of that was positive. For her it was a critique that wasn’t fiction at all.”

It had perhaps been the longest speech Josh had ever made - except when Jonathan had forced him to be Best Man at both his weddings.

“Really?” Jonathan tried to recall the relevant sections of the book. Josh waited. “Maybe I can see where she’s coming from - but you’d have to want to read it in that way… I guess once the idea’s in your head you’re stuck with it.” Was that all he needed to say? “But that’s not the book I read; not my interpretation of it. Not at all.”

Josh nodded almost imperceptibly. Message received.

“You don’t want to make up your own mind?”

Josh shook his head.

“I’m just happy being happy for Bernie. And unbelievably proud of her. Please don’t assume I’m not. But I have no desire to find out if Mum’s right or wrong. That would abandon me in no-man’s-land, either way. So I’m going to leave it where it is. You tell me it’s brilliant, Dobs, and I believe you because I trust your judgement. You know more about these sorts of things than I do. And to be honest, you telling me that confirms an assumption I’d already made.”

So there they all were, Jonathan thought, the four of them perpetually linked through Bernie’s book. One way or another. All that writing, all those notebooks; she had made use of the material they had collectively gifted her just by being and doing. And now, whether she’d intended to or not, she had held up a mirror of sorts to them all. As he reaches his car, he finds he is still unable to reconcile his mother’s view with his own, a gulf seeming to exist between their two positions. Ever since his conversation with Josh he has wanted to ask her about it, to hear it from her own lips, but he has deliberately avoided the subject, not wishing to upset her. He would have to defend his position, the book, Bernie too perhaps, and that might end up serving no positive purpose whatsoever. Josh’s stance is understandable.

He pauses before starting the car. He wonders what his father would have made of ‘The Seeds of Poppies’, whether his view would have aligned with their mother’s or his own. Treacherous or brilliant? Or both, perhaps. But of course this is a question that cannot be asked, a conversation that cannot be had. Having died nearly five years ago now, Jonathan still wonders who misses him most, knowing it is not him. It would be easy to assume that it was his mother, but he isn’t sure. Perhaps it is Josh, as their father had been instrumental in steering his eldest son toward The Army. Perhaps Bernie - or then again maybe least of all Bernie. Had their father’s death actually freed her to undertake the book? Would it have been impossible for her to write - never mind publish - if he had still been alive? It was not beyond the realms of possibility that the reason their mother had so taken against it was that she regarded ‘The Seeds of Poppies’ as a posthumous attack on him - even though it wasn’t. Maybe his mother had adopted anger on his behalf. “People are always not the same people they once were” Bernie had said; and even though her characters were fictional, perhaps she was challenging them all - herself included - to say “look at what we were - and what we have become”.

Had it been posed as a direct question, of all of them Josh would surely have been best placed to answer. Perhaps that was why he never talked about his experience in The Army because it had forced him to be someone different, someone else. And only he could know if what he had become - solitary and so resolutely independent - had been as a result of Afghanistan or as a defence mechanism, a kind of self-protection. He confessed himself ‘content’ with his life, though Jonathan struggled to align the word’s meaning with what he saw. As he pulls out from the car park and onto the road, he wonders if Bernie has seen him since the book had come out. Indeed, when had she seen him last - sequestered in his forested world - and had she written about it? Jonathan smiles. The second part of that particular question is entirely superfluous of course. Then it strikes him that perhaps Josh was being economical with the truth when it came to his reason for not wanting to read her book. Might it have been that he didn’t want to recognise in those old selves the person he had once been? Such a reminder would surely have brought into even stronger relief how much he had changed. As such, it was most likely a recollection to be avoided at all costs.

*

“So how are you?” She tries to find a tone of light-hearted concern, even though it does not come naturally to her.

“Checking up on me?” he asks in reply, the monotone flatness of his voice exaggerated by the phone and by her not being able to see him.

She is momentarily annoyed that he sounds so disinterested.

“Aren’t I allowed to check-in on my big brother?”

The lockdown had begun two weeks earlier. The streets and roads were deserted which only enhanced the sense that a plague had descended upon them all.

“I may be taller than you, but strictly speaking I’m not your big brother.”

“I know that,” she says, “but if there’s one person who’s going to be okay at the moment it’s Josh; he was already in his own kind of lockdown. I doubt he’ll have noticed the difference.”

“Don’t you think that’s a tad unfair?”

“Probably,” she feigns to agree, even though she doesn’t. She knows both her brothers will be alone right now, the difference being that Jonathan has never quite been able to come to terms with it, whereas for Josh it’s simply the status quo. And all the while he has his trees he won’t really be alone. “Can you work from home?”

“Just about, I suppose.” There is resignation in his voice. “All the meetings are virtual of course, phone and video; I don’t think I’ve ever spent so much time on my computer. But it has it’s benefits.”

“Such as?”

“Oh, when I need to I can concentrate on things, if I need to write a report or something, or prepare a presentation.”

She tries to process the notion of giving a presentation without a real audience, then gives up both preparation and performance as pointless exercises.

“And who are you spending lockdown with?”

It is a question she was not expecting, as if he shouldn’t have needed to ask it.

“No-one of course. Why?”

“No reason. I just wondered if Guy was holed-up with you.”

She can’t imagine being ‘holed-up’ at all, never mind with Guy. It is one of the blessings with what she does: she can be anywhere she chooses to be.

“That,” she says, trying to inject a little humour into the conversation, “would require something of a change in the status of our relationship which, although Guy might be keen to explore it, I most certainly am not. No, like everyone else my lockdown is punctuated by glimpses of the postman, distanced conversations with delivery drivers, and faces in little Zoom squares.”

“Indeed.” He pauses, she waits. “Are you writing?” When she can’t help but laugh, she finds herself hoping it is not in any way a cruel laugh. “Silly question, I know.”

“No, not silly at all.” She tries to sound reassuring. “In fact it’s a very good question - though it should be prefixed with ‘what’.” Has that done the trick? “My publisher is keen for me to be working on a follow-up to ‘Poppies’ to prove I’m not a ‘one-hit-wonder’. He says the second book is always the hardest.”

“And is it? I mean, is he right do you think?”

“Not really. Well, not in my case anyway.”

“That’s good then, isn’t it?” There is something in his voice that suggests he is struggling to keep up his side of the conversation. “What’s it about?”

“I don’t think I can say just yet - not because I don’t want to, but because I haven’t settled on anything totally final.”

If it is a lie - even a partial one - she can tell it has been delivered successfully, a brief silence suggesting he wants to change the subject of the conversation. She senses - partly because Dobs is her brother but also because she has a knack for such things - that what he wants to talk about most of all is himself, the silence carrying the weight of his loneliness.

“Have you spoken to Mum?” He beats her to the draw.

“Have you?” It is another way of saying ‘no’, though she is sure he will not pick up on it, preferring to accept the literal.

“A couple of days ago. She seems fine. As you say, it’s all posties and the man who drives the Tesco van - though I think in her case she also has a group of friends who seem to be supporting each other; you know, phone calls, conversations over garden fences. It sounds like they’re being a little renegade at times.”

The use of the word ‘renegade’ impresses her. It is, she realises on hearing it, a wonderful word and one she must use.

He carries on.

“And I’ve spoken to Josh too. He is, as you say, pretty much unaffected, unfazed. Probably just about ‘un’ anything.”

She laughs, briefly.

“What was the last interesting thing you did before we were all confined to barracks, Dobs? Tell me.” The mention of Josh subconsciously informs her simile. She makes a mental note of that too.

“Me? Nothing too dramatic.” There is a short hiatus; ‘thinking time’. “A walk probably. Not too far from here there’s a waterfall. Have I ever taken you there? Nothing too grand or dramatic - we don’t do grand or dramatic do we? - but pleasant enough.” Bernie wonders who he means by ‘we’. “It was funny. I went down to the water’s edge. There was a little part of the stream that had broken away - just a tiny sliver really - and I found myself trying to build a dam with stones and things.”

“A dam?”

“I know!” He picks up on the note of surprise in her voice, though misinterprets the reason for it being there. “Just like we did in Devon when we were kids - though the location and circumstances were obviously different. But that’s what I did. It made me think about us.”

“Us?”

“You know; you, me, Josh. How we were when we were younger, you writing everything down. And then your book and how wonderful it was. Stuff like that.”

Knowing he is expecting a response, some kind of affirmation, she takes her time. It seems strange it should take an event like that for him to think about important things when she feels as if she is doing so all the time. In a way, such a walk would have been interesting for her only if it had allowed her not to think, or analyse, or dissect.

“That does sound fun. And were there any conclusions?”

“Conclusions?”

“To your thinking; what you thought about. Were you struck by a flash of inspiration or enlightenment? Was anything suddenly clear?”

“Clear? Not really. In fact there just seemed to be more questions to be answered. Or rather questions for me to answer, I suppose. Nothing earth-shattering, just ‘life stuff’.”

Later she thinks about the nature of questions. It was typical of Dobs that he should be either inventing or uncovering them. As far as she could see, his life had been ruled by uncertainty; there was always something he didn’t know or didn’t understand. Was it any wonder that both his marriages had failed, corrupted by his indecisiveness? He and Bernie were opposites, of course: where he raised queries, she saw her mission to provide answers - even to questions that had yet to be asked. She liked to think that she observed, rarely questioned. What was the point? The sky was blue, the sun shone, people married, divorced, loved, betrayed, died. She could do nothing about any of that. So she had chosen to interpret and to replay, to offer lenses through which people could look and maybe glimpse answers to some of their own questions.

Was that right, though? Had she ‘chosen’ to undertake that role? Actually it didn’t matter. Just another irrelevant question. The fact is that is who she is and that’s what she’s doing; it is her purpose. She has no other. To that extent she is ‘sorted’ in a way that Jonathan could never be - though in turn she suspects she might never be as resolved as Josh. Not only did he no longer ask questions, he didn’t feel the need to seek answers either. She recalls an earlier conversation with him. It had been brief and dissatisfying, almost as if they had been speaking a different language; there had been no connection, two people who had inadvertently collided for the briefest of moments, arriving from parallel universes, worlds where how things worked were the antithesis of each other. In his case she had no doubt almost everything he was or thought or felt could be explained by his experiences in the war in Afghanistan. Josh’s PTSD had manifested itself in a definite way, driving him into the protective shell of his hermit-like existence, taking as companions the silent trees which surrounded and protected him. He has no need of either questions or answers, and because of that she suspects he would hate Poppies and the people in it - not just because the family were all there to some extent, but because in Josh’s eyes her characters would be too weak, too fallible, too needy. Yet wasn’t that how the vast majority of people were?

An image of Guy pops into her head, though she has no clear idea of the word which has provided the bridge between he and Josh. They are ‘chalk and cheese’ - though to be fair that could be said about Josh in comparison with just about anyone. Guy remains as he has always been: tall, professional, charming. He is polite, dresses well (but is not too showy), is considerate, attentive, respected. Perhaps what speaks the most - or the least - for him is the fact that her mother had been bowled over by him the first time they had met, he and Bernie on a flying visit to the West Country and dropping in to see her at her retreat on the edge of the Quantocks. In many respects Guy’s constancy is the exception which proves Bernie’s rule that everyone is always changing; he is now, quite simply, almost entirely as he had been when she met him. Perhaps that had been part of his attraction. Their father had just died and Bernie had settled on the theme, plot and structure of her book. Knowing there would be dark writing days ahead, she had wanted companionship of some kind, a shoulder to cry on; but simultaneously, she needed to avoid unnecessary distraction. Guy had offered her all of that, her judgement of him as accurate as it tended to be about most people. With a twinge of guilt, the word she most now associates with him is ‘adequate’. Yet from their earlier time together she’d had no complaints. And though he appears not to have changed at all in the last three years, she sees subtleties beneath the surface that other people would miss, shifts in his attitude towards her that only materialise when they are alone.

Whether it is due to the passage of time or - if she is being cruel - the impact of her ‘arrival’ on the literary scene and all that might imply, Guy has become increasingly serious about their relationship. The word he now uses with more noticeable regularity - ‘us’ - portends to a future in which she has little interest. Poppies has not only changed her life, but inevitably - and not ironically! - changed her too. If she is honest with herself, she feels the need to move beyond ‘adequate’. And Guy is not the man for that particular job.

What to do next as far as he is concerned is a conundrum she would like to share with someone else, to debate, to chase ideas down rabbit holes before abandoning them; but she knows none of the candidates at her disposal are up to the task. Jonathan wouldn’t have the capacity - intellectual or emotional - to keep up with her; and Josh either wouldn’t understand or wouldn’t care. Possibly both. Her mother disqualifies herself on the basis that she would undoubtedly bat on Guy’s behalf and be entirely happy for Bernie to settle for ‘adequate’ - not that she settled for average herself, at least not in the early days. Perhaps having children changed her perspective. All their father’s rough edges had been sanded down by the time the three of them were old enough to get to know him, but even then Bernie caught glimpses of the man he’d once been - bold, adventurous, challenging. That earlier version - had she been able to tap into it - would certainly have provided her with a viable option for a confidant, if only he hadn’t managed to get himself riddled with the cancer that had been quietly growing inside him, a legacy from his youth as a heavy smoker and general ‘bon viveur’. Perhaps it had been his marginal encroachment on a life of ‘sex, drugs and rock-and-roll’ that had seduced her mother back in the day. Bernie had included hints of that mythological man in one of her book’s main characters - probably one of the reasons she was sure her mother had taken against it.

Having drawn a blank in terms of sounding-board candidates available to her - and having no suitable close friends, male or female - Bernie has chosen to invent one. She has begun a fictional dialogue into which she has inserted herself alongside a gender-neutral ‘Pat’ to see if they can work out what she is going to do about Guy. Pat has two major advantages: their opinion is not clouded by an overlay of sex, and they know Guy as well as Bernie does. Indeed, Bernie wonders if it might just prove that they know her better than she does herself. The motion to be debated is a more complex question than simply deciding on how to remove Guy from the picture; she needs to know whether she is going to replace him, and if so, what - in the broadest sense - she should be looking for. With her new best friend already displaying an acute understanding of the dilemma faced - their debut pronouncement unequivocally stating that Guy’s departure must be the first priority - Bernie has growing confidence that Pat will help her find a solution.

*

- ‘Moving on’. That’s so crass and common; I apologise for burdening you with it.

- There’s no need to apologise, B; really. And remember, you can make me say whatever you want to… But you’re right.

- I’m ‘white’?!

- Now who’s playing games!

- Shall we get back to the task in hand?

- Now that you’ve surgically removed Guy the Gorilla from the scene.

- Isn’t that a little unkind, Pat?

- Not at all, B. Guy the Gorilla was a well-loved inmate of London zoo for many years. The star attraction, perhaps.

- And you’re drawing a parallel how, exactly?

- You misunderstand me. Or yourself.

- Hmmm. But was Guy’s ‘removal’ - as you call it - particularly ‘surgical’? The man, not the gorilla. I thought I let him down gently enough.

- You could be right; don’t forget, you’re the wordsmith here… Perhaps I would have said ‘efficient’ rather than ‘surgical’. Or ‘economical’. It was quick and decisive. I would also like to think there was some kindness in your approach. Even so, afterwards he could have had no doubt it was all over, could he?

- That was the intention, Pat.

- So, mission accomplished then.

- Now it’s all about what next.

- And you’re sure there has to be a next?

- What do you mean?

- Couldn’t you could take some ‘time out’ (my turn to be vulgar!), treat yourself to some semi-splendid isolation. Remove all external distractions while you focus on book number two.

- I’m not my brother, Pat.

- Which one? Because from certain perspectives, they both qualify.

- I was thinking of Josh.

- The obvious one. Of course there’s a story there; I mean, all alone in his dark forest, completely uninterested in any meaningful interactions with the outside world.

- I’m not sure that’s fair.

- You said it, kiddo.

- You forget what he’s been through.

- I forget what he’s been through?! Why are you laughing, B?

- This feels like our first row. Interesting.

- Isn’t it?

- Anyway, what about Jonathan. From whose perspective does he ‘qualify’?

- Yours, B. And the fact that he is, in his own way, just as isolated as Josh. Two failed relationships - at least -

- That’s unfair.

- Perhaps; but not necessarily untrue. So two failed relationships; drifting along somewhat aimlessly. An uninspiring sort of life. Not that’s what I’m advocating for you, of course. Just painting a picture. Drawing a thread.

- A thread?

- She always had a soft spot for you, you know.

- Who did?

- Dobs’ wife.

- Greta?

- The scourge of Europe? Don’t be daft! No, Pammy; his first failure.

- No-one called her Pammy.

- Well not yet anyway. Doesn’t she still send you cards at Christmas and for your birthday.

- So what?

- So I was wondering if a little ‘exploration’ might be on the cards. A dalliance, if you like - purely for research purposes.

- You’re not suggesting…

- If I were you I wouldn’t completely buy into Jonathan’s narrative about why they broke up. Two sides to every story and all that. And just ask yourself, why hasn’t she shacked-up with some other bloke in the last, few years? Nothing serious. Or long-term. Maybe nothing at all.

- You don’t mean?

- I’m just saying, B. You’re the one who does all the ‘meaning’…