Barbara turned and lay beside him on the bunk; there was not enough room, and had the train stopped suddenly she would undoubtedly have fallen off.
“I should get to my bunk,” Hugh said. “There really isn’t enough room for two.”
She wanted him to stay, but it was impractical. “I wish you could stay,” she said. “Then we could lie here, carried sideways through the night, just as that poet didn’t like. What was his name?”
“Norman McCaig.”
“Yes, like him.”
“Unlike him. We’d like it.”
She sat up in order to allow him to get off the bunk. As she watched him move past her and cross to the narrow door into his own compartment, she felt a sudden pang of sorrow. It was a premonition of loss, she decided; she would lose him, this beautiful stranger. For that was what he was to her still, a stranger who had come into her life, a gift from somewhere else altogether. What if he died? People did, even the young; people died.
Barbara prepared herself for bed, and then slipped between the sheets. Trains were scruffy places usually, but the sleepers had clean, beautifully ironed sheets, slightly rough to the touch as good linen and cotton can be. Rupert Brooke wrote of the “rough male kiss of blankets”; and what did he say of sheets? “The cool kindliness of sheets, that soon smooth away trouble.” That was it.
She reached up and turned out her reading-light. Through the interconnecting door she saw that Hugh had done the same. She felt safe; the morbid thoughts of a few moments earlier, when she had imagined that she might lose him, had dissipated. She was safe.
He was saying something, muttering, and it suddenly occurred to Barbara that it was a prayer. It occurred to her, too, that she had never actually asked him whether he believed in God. Who asked such a question of a lover, even of a fiancé, these days?
She strained to hear the words. It was in fact not a prayer, but a poem.
Travelling northwards through the night
Heading to a Scotland
Of forbidding mountains, and poetry,
And sea; home to me, of course,
But to one whom I love
A place of unknown and unpronounceable names;
May the rain that will surely greet us
Be gentle; may the sky over Ardnamurchan
Allow a glimpse of islands, of Coll, perhaps,
Or Tiree; may she encounter kindness
And the things that kindness brings;
My wishes for her, now, the one I love,
As we are travel northwards through the night.
Barbara lay in complete silence. She could have slipped out of bed and embraced Hugh, hugged him, showered him with kisses of gratitude. But she did not do this, because she was awed by the moment. “My wishes for her, now, the one I love.” That’s me, she thought. That’s me.
Chapter 32: A Homeopathic Joke
Dee had discovered from experience that opening the Pimlico Vitamin and Supplement Agency on a Sunday brought particularly good results. She had made this lucrative discovery a couple of years earlier when she had gone into the shop on a rather dreary Sunday to do a stocktaking and had inadvertently turned the Closed sign to Open. This had resulted in a stream of customers, most of whom spent considerably more than the average. The average spend of her customers on weekdays was £6.38; on that Sunday it reached £18.76. A subsequent trial Sunday opening had resulted in an even higher spend of £23.43. That clinched matters, and from then on the Vitamin and Supplement Agency opened its doors at eleven on a Sunday morning and remained open until five in the afternoon.
She had tried to work out why Sunday should be so successful. It was not the case for every business – a nearby commercial neighbour who ran a small card shop sold practically nothing on a Sunday, and spent her Sundays tackling the more difficult weekend crosswords. Another trader at the end of the street, a dress shop for thirty-somethings, did a certain amount of business round about eleven in the morning, only to have these purchases almost invariably returned by five o’clock the same afternoon. The owner was puzzled, until the realisation dawned: her customers were buying the dresses purely in order to wear them to Sunday brunches and lunches at friends’ houses before returning them for specious reasons later in the afternoon. It was a radical solution to the complaint of having nothing to wear, or at least nothing that one’s friends had not seen several times before. Fashion for free, as one offender so honestly put it; one can, after all, be honest about dishonesty.
“We have become a thoroughly unscrupulous nation,” said the shopkeeper to Dee one day.
“Have we?” asked Dee.
“Oh yes. There’s been a survey, you know. And they – the scientists or whatever – found that fewer than half the men asked about this phenomenon of pretending to buy a dress thought that it was dishonest.”
“And women?” asked Dee.
“I remember the figure exactly. Eighty-eight-point-five per cent thought it was dishonest.”
“Well, there you are,” said Dee. “It shows that we aren’t all bad.”
The other woman disagreed. “Not at all. The fact that eighty-eight-point-five per cent of women thought it was a dishonest thing to do wouldn’t necessarily stop them doing it. They all do it – or most of them – even if they think it’s dishonest. They just don’t care.”
Dee sighed. She would never do it herself, but she suspected that the shopkeeper was right, most people now would do this sort of thing without hesitation. Look at the way people treat insurance companies, she thought; look at the way they think nothing of claiming for things that they haven’t lost. Fiddler nation, she thought.
It was all very interesting, if depressing, but it did not address the issue of why Sunday should be such a good day for selling vitamins. The answer, she suspected, had to do with what some people got up to on Saturdays. If people behaved in a virtuous way on a Sunday – and Dee was firm in her conviction that the buying and taking of vitamins was an entirely virtuous activity –it was entirely possible that they were compensating for having behaved in a vicious way on the Saturday night. And to a large extent, people did. They drank too much; they ate to excess; they stayed up too late. With the result that on Sunday, if they walked past a vitamin shop, their consciences pricked them like a thorn.
Now, sitting at the till of her shop, reading the latest copy of Anti-oxidant News, she kept half an eye on a couple of customers huddled at the back of the shop in the flower remedies section. In general, her customers did not steal; on Sundays at least, they were clean-living types, with consciences as clear as their lower intestines (or that was the case for those who underwent regular colonic irrigation, anyway). No, she need not worry too much about shoplifting.
But there was something that did worry her. She was reading a report in Anti-oxidant News to the effect that a new study purported to show that homeopathic remedies achieved no better results than placebos. This worried Dee. Principally, she doubted it were true; everything in her rebelled against the thought that mere evidence-based medicine should seek to debunk an entire section of her shop, for that, indeed, was what she had, half a wall of homeopathic remedies, designed to deal with a wide range of those ills to which the mortal flesh was heir.
She read on. “The authors of this so-called study” – that was fighting talk, thought Dee, with approval – “argue that the very small dilutions of the active ingredient cannot possibly have an effect on the human body. They forget succussing, of course. So many critics of homeopathy forget about succussing.”
“Exactly,” muttered Dee. “Succussing changes everything.”
“There is ample proof,” continued the article, “that the act of striking the container of the dilution ten times or more on a firm surface makes all the difference to the molecular properties of the water. So why do these allegedly dispassionate scientists ignore something as significant as that?”
Why indeed, thought Dee. Because they don’t want to find out the truth? Because they
don’t want homeopathy to work? Talk about homeophobia!
Succussing: it was a most peculiar thing, but she was convinced of its efficacy. Only last night, a friend had given her a gin and tonic as a treat, and Dee had found herself succussing the glass against the arm of her chair. The drink had been delicious, and she was sure that it had been much more potent as a result of the succussing. Perhaps that was why James Bond called for his martini to be shaken, not stirred. It was for homeopathic reasons.
She was reflecting on the so-called study, her outrage growing, when she saw a tall man in his early thirties enter the shop. Many of her customers she already knew, but not this one; she was sure she would have noticed him before now.
He came to the cash desk. “You telephoned me,” he said. “Richard Eadeston.”
She looked at him blankly. “Did I?” And then she remembered. Of course she had. This was Richard Eadeston, the man who described himself as a venture capitalist. She looked at him with renewed interest. So this was what a venture capitalist looked like. Rather dishy. An adventure capitalist, perhaps!
“Can I make you a cup of tea?” she offered. “Peppermint? Ginger? Mixed fruit?”
“I rather like peppermint,” he said. “It’s so refreshing. Thank you.”
“10x dilution?” said Dee, and then laughed. “Just a little homeopathic joke. Nothing serious.”
Chapter 33: Further Examination
“Delicious,” said Richard Eadeston, savouring his peppermint tea. “So delicate.”
“And it helps you concentrate,” said Dee. “You could take it when juggling figures, or whatever it is that you do.”
“Indeed.”
He looked at her over the rim of his teacup. She was not in the usual mould of his clients but she had an interesting face, he thought. Plucky. A risk-taker – in a rather fuzzy Age of Aquarius way, of course. There had been lots of girls like her when he had been an undergraduate at the University of Sussex. It was something to do with the air down there – Brighton and Glastonbury and places like that attracted these people.
“You weren’t at Sussex, were you?” he asked. “At university there, I mean.”
Dee showed her surprise. “Yes, I was, as it happens. How did …?”
“Oh, I just wondered,” said Richard. “There’s a Sussex look. I was there too, you know.”
They sized one another up wordlessly, discreetly computing ages. Yes, they might have been contemporaries.
He broke the silence. “Remember that pub? What was it called again?”
“The Shaggy Dump?”
“That’s the one! I wonder if it’s still there.”
Dee nodded. “Yes. I went down to see somebody there last month. A friend who lives in Kemp Town. And there was the Shaggy Dump – unchanged. That chap with the ring in his nose, remember him? He’s still running it. He had all those kids, each with a ring in the nose as well. I saw one or two of them too. It was just like the old days.”
Richard laughed, and thought, and now I’m a venture capitalist.
“What did you do at uni?” he asked.
“Anthropology and Turkish,” said Dee.
He was not sure what to say. So he smiled, and said, “Cool.” Awesome would perhaps have been a shade too strong.
“And you?”
He had done business studies, although he usually called it economics; now he renamed it development studies.
Dee gestured towards the loaded shelves. “As you can see, now I’m involved in vitamins,” she said.
“And you’ve had an idea, too. Which is why you phoned me, I assume.”
She nodded. “You must get some real crackpots.”
“Oh, we do. Lots of them. Probably nine calls in ten are from nutters of one sort or another. But we take them seriously. That’s why we call ourselves Alternative Vision Capital.”
“Some of them are good ideas then?” She pointed to the teapot. “More peppermint?”
“Yes, please.” He passed her his cup. “Yes, we get some very interesting ideas. And we don’t turn up our noses just because somebody doesn’t look as if they’re straight out of the business pages.”
Dee smiled. “Like me?”
“Well, you’re not … Yes, like you. Why not? Look at Richard Branson. When he started that record shop or whatever it was he could hardly have looked less like the stereotypical capitalist, could he? The beard and the casual clothes and so on. And look what he’s achieved.” He paused, holding out his hands in an all-embracing gesture. “We’re open to ideas. Any ideas.”
Dee nodded. They were seated behind the cash desk and a customer now approached bearing a small bottle of pills. Dee indicated to Richard that she would be a moment attending to the customer. Afterwards he asked, “What did she buy?”
“Just magnesium,” she said.
“Magnesium? Do we need magnesium?”
Dee’s eyes widened. “Do we need magnesium? Boy, do we need magnesium! Did you know that there are over three hundred – yes, three hundred – bodily chemical reactions that require magnesium?”
Richard shrugged. “I didn’t. But I don’t take magnesium pills and I’m still—”
Dee cut him short. “You get it in your diet. Or should do.” She looked at him in a way that suggested she was assessing his magnesium levels. “Do you eat many nuts?” she asked. “Or whole grains?”
Richard shook his head. “Not really.” He patted his stomach. “Nuts are fattening, aren’t they? I love those big fat ones – macadamias. They’re seriously good. But eat too many of those and you begin to look like a macadamia nut yourself – you know, big and fat and round.”
Dee’s answer came quickly. “There are other nuts. Almonds, for example. Pine nuts are full of magnesium too.” She paused. “You’ve probably got a magnesium deficiency, you know. Do you get tired?”
“I suppose so. Who doesn’t?”
She did not register his question. “And do you suffer from sleeplessness? Wake up at odd times?”
He nodded. He had not slept well the previous night. There had been a barking dog somewhere down the road; a magnesium-deficient dog, probably.
“I’ll give you a magnesium supplement,” she said. “Try it for a few weeks and you’ll see the difference.”
He thanked her. “But I think we should talk about your proposition. You said that you had a new product you want to develop.” He took out a notebook. “Tell me about it.”
Dee looked at him doubtfully. “You wouldn’t … take the idea, would you? I’m sorry to sound distrustful, but obviously …”
He held up a hand. “No, don’t apologise. Not for natural caution. Of course you have to be careful. Intellectual property gets stolen every day. You come up with a good idea and the next minute it’s in production somewhere else. And it’s not your name on the packet.”
“Oh.”
“Yes. But I assure you, you’re safe with us. We’d never do something like that.”
There was a silence, another one of those periods of unspoken mutual assessment that occur when we weigh up another person and choose between trust or natural, self-protective suspicion. What do I know about him? thought Dee. The University of Sussex – a shared background there. The Shaggy Dump – a shared pub. What else? He liked peppermint tea and he likely had a magnesium deficiency. That was all the information she had.
She made her decision. “There’s a substance called Ginkgo biloba,” she said. “We sell a lot of it, particularly to people who are worried about memory loss or failing brain power.”
“Who isn’t?” he asked.
“Exactly. And I think that it helps. I really do.”
“And?”
Dee reached for a small bottle from a display on the counter. “See this?” she asked. “This is echinacea. It’s a very common, popular remedy for toning up the immune system. But here it’s being sold as a pill to protect you from germs on aircraft. You take one before you board. People love it. We all know that we’re bre
athing the same air as a hundred other passengers when we’re on a flight. So we take a pill. And I happen to believe it works.”
Richard was watching her closely. She noticed that he had a slight tic in his right eye. It twitched slightly, almost imperceptibly. “I see where you’re going,” he said quietly. “And I like it. So what are you wanting to sell this Gingko stuff as?”
“A Sudoku remedy,” said Dee. “Improve your Sudoku performance with a pill.”
Richard sat back in his chair. He was beaming.
Chapter 34: Among the Rosbifs