It was little wonder, when there came no response from Jeremy even after repeated hammerings, and the soldier shrinks Duncan and Kevin and Caitlin were reluctantly, and now on wobbly legs, dragooned into breaking down the door, that Sir Magnus’s grand plan met its fruitless end.
“Come out, come out, you bastard, wherever you are,” he called.
And called. And called. But to no avail.
“Even the bally pig’s gone,” grumbled Sir Magnus, striding around the barn, tossing hay bales hither and thither.
Following in behind him, Sophie tugged at her platinum-dyed hair and wept.
“Oh, my poor Jeremy,” she snuffled hypocritically. “Where have you gone?”
Mind you, she calmed down a bit after a couple of puffs on the spliff Caitlin offered her.
Sir Magnus didn’t calm down at all though, far from it. Stamping up and down, he fired all his “trick cyclists” and “military men” on the spot, and then, swearing he’d come back with sniffer dogs, stalked off in a huff, banged on the roof of his waiting midnight-blue Bentley 4x4, opened the passenger door, and told the driver—Boris, a distant cousin of Nina’s—to hit the road.
Which would have made for a powerful and dramatic exit for Sir Magnus had Boris’s idiomatic English been up to scratch. But, while having an excellent command of the regular everyday aspects of the language, Boris hadn’t bothered much with idioms and, interpreting his new master’s order literally, leapt from the driver’s seat and took to beating the asphalt and shale with his fists, thereby rendering Sir Magnus’s departure even less powerful or dramatic.
His by-now pretty well stoned mishmash of shrinks and actors loved it. Even Friedrich, Carl and Marcus linked arms and punched air, while Milly, Caitlin, Duncan, and Kevin hopped about in Kevin’s idea of The Dance of the Clowns in the last act of Midsummer Night’s Dream. Sophie joined in too, leaping about in a manner she considered balletic. Until she fell flat on her face and had to be helped up by Milly.
Understandably, Sir Magnus was apoplectic.
“Get back in the fucking car and stopping hitting the road, you fucking foreigner,” he shrieked xenophobically. Sir Magnus was a devoted Brexiteer, except when he could hire foreign labour on the cheap, that was.
“What I do wrong?” Boris wanted to know, lifting himself from his knees.
“Just get back in the fucking car and goose the fucking gas,” Sir Magnus told him.
“Goose the…?” said Boris, flapping his arms a bit.
Which was when Caitlin, still in faux battle dress, marched over, slung an arm around Boris’s shoulders and told him not to worry, everything would be fine if he joined her friends behind her. Pointing at the still cavorting Dance of the Clowns people. So off Boris happily went. He liked dancing.
Then Caitlin turned her fire on Sir Magnus.
“About time you fucked off, knobhead,” she told him. “Drive your own fucking car.”
Sir Magnus blustered a bit as is the way with blusterers, but left with little option other than ignominy, climbed into the Bentley’s driving seat and slammed the door.
“But I’ll be BACK,” he hollered through the open window before flooring the accelerator and spraying shale all over the place.
Six
While his host had been off in his tiny kitchen fetching the burdock brandy and fiddling with glasses, Jeremy experienced the first of the many surprises Barry had on offer. Wide-eyed, he stood before the floor-to-ceiling shelves lined with tomes from Plato to Bertrand Russell, and even including works—in French—by Frenchie thinkers such as Barthes, Derrida, Baudrillard, Foucault and Cixous normally poo-pooed by the British academy. Although Jeremy had been more interested in the economics part of his Oxford PPE programme than the philosophy or politics, at least he could tell a logical positivist from a poststructuralist. But what was a humble gardener doing with such heavyweights in his meagre home? And this was just the philosophy section. Jeremy hadn’t had time to check out the poetry and fiction.
It was close to one a.m. when they took to swigging at the burdock brandy, but after their adventure with the wheelbarrow, neither felt sleepy, although Shirley and Pete had already snuggled down together in Shirley’s super-size dog bed at her invitation. You know how it is with animals. When it gets dark, they go to sleep till it gets light again, then they wake up and start all over. If the humans wanted to stay up and chat, that was their business, meanwhile Shirley and Pete were getting their normal shuteye.
“Didn’t know you were a…” said Jeremy, carefully avoiding any reference to humility or gardeners but nodding nonetheless at the bookshelves.
“Reader?”
“Um… well… yes.”
“As opposed to just a humble gardener?”
Barry smiled, uncorked a fresh bottle of burdock brandy, and refilled their glasses.
“An understandable confusion,” he said in a quite different register from the one he’d used while working on Jeremy’s estate. “I have lived a number of lives already, and have yet to reach the government’s new retirement age.”
“How old…?”
“Am I? Sixty-eight.”
“You don’t look it.”
“Thanks. Flattery will get you everywhere.”
“And listen, when I mentioned the books, I didn’t mean to imply…”
“Of course you didn’t, old chap, so don’t beat yourself up over it. You were what you were, and I was the gardener. Okay, I was also “Bazza,” for fun. Yet I am still the gardener, albeit in a perhaps more metaphorical sense.”
Jeremy blinked. “And the books?”
“Are my best friends, possibly my only friends. Seen me through some tricky times, those fellows have. Ever read any Voltaire?”
Jeremy shook his head as Barry levered himself from his chair and headed to the Vs in his carefully alphabetised philosophy section.
“Ah, here it is. My old pal Candide.” He chuckled, taking down the ancient hardback, blowing off the dust and flicking to the last page.
“Many troubles the poor fellow had to endure in his young life: The Seven Years War, the seventeen fifty-five Lisbon earthquake. But what does he conclude? That ‘Il faut cultiver notre jardin.’ Not quite the Leibnizian optimism he started out with, but still a way forward, eh? In any case, you may think of this as my own take on life’s messiness. Mine, and that of my old mate Voltaire. And so it is, as I said, that I was and still am a gardener.”
“And you were?”
“A professor of philosophy at the very university you once attended, old man. But that was only during the second of my lives and didn’t last very long. In feline terms, I’m now nearing my seventh, so we shall see what happens by the time I get to my ninth, eh? It’s never too late to learn a new trick or two. And, as I said, if I can help you along the way at all, you’d be most welcome. A top-up of the burdock?”
While Pete and Shirley slept the sleep of the innocent, Jeremy and Barry talked through the night. Unaccustomed although he had long been to conversations of an even vaguely abstract or personal nature—all bankers ever talked about was spread sheets, targets, and numbers—it was surprisingly Jeremy who kicked off this part of the conversation. After all, he remembered having confessed his choosing/chosen conundrum to Barry who had seemingly understood, so now it was perhaps Barry’s turn to offload.
“And what made you quit Oxford?” he asked.