The Devil's Garden by Nigel Barley Page B

into occupation of the chair of the Gardening Club and finally the Orchid Club had fallen to her. She now paused on the bottom stair of the Raffles Hotel and shouted across the forecourt, unwilling to step out into sunshine.
    â€˜Dr Pilchard! Come here!’ She waved her bag. ‘At once! I have been trying to contact you. My monkey cups have sprung a leak—some disease I think. My urgent calls have gone unanswered for several months.’ Pilchard paused and considered. If everyone felt ill all the time, as he did now, the world would be a very different place. Perhaps saints were just men with a good digestion. He might just walk on and ignore her and her monkey cups or pitcher plants. Or there was no reason, now that the world had ended, not to tell the old cow to just get thoroughly and joyfully stuffed. The occupation could yet prove liberating. No reason except a lifelong experience of being taught to seek to please. No reason except that unpredictable Japanese companion who was sucking the debris of terrible English fruit cake out of his teeth, had that haunted look that men often had around Erica and might well want to let out his rage and frustration in slaps and kicks. He sighed and crossed the forecourt, bowed low to him in appeasement though she would think it was to her.
    â€˜I’m so sorry, Mrs Rosenkrantz. I’m afraid I was quite literally detained.’
    She pouted. and looked at his legs, devoid of the long white kneesocks that alone made men’s legs decent. He was gripped by a momentary fear that she might be admiring them but that, after Changi diet, was mercifully impossible.
    â€˜Oh please don’t explain’, she crowed. ‘Nowadays it seems everyone has excuses. Excuses are always so boring.’ She flapped her sequined bag like a fan, chasing excuses away as you might an irritating wasp. ‘I am sure someone might have given you a message. It is scarcely providing a proper service to the public to just wander off and abandon your post.’
    â€˜I expect you have been overwatering them—your pitcher plants, monkey cups.’ It was the catch-all answer to all public enquiries about plants, undeniable since ‘over’ was meaningless. Nepenthes were amongst the most inept of Nature’s plants, given to rot and dehydration, endless trouble to cultivators in their unceasing demands. It was only appropriate that Erica had conceived a predatory empathy for them, enticing victims with their sticky secretions and then devouring their dead flesh. If rumour was to be believed, the presence of an absent husband or, rather, the absence of a present one did nothing to deny Erica a vigorous sexual life. She had scandalously acquired much younger Chinese dance-partners that she had taken openly to the Germania club, there to foxtrot interracially. Such astonishing behaviour had been made comprehensible to the expats by the rumour that she was really from the Italian end of Austria and Neopolitans—as all British and Austrians knew—were scarcely European at all. Her Japanese companion, tired of being ignored in a foreign language, clicked his heels and inclined his head cautiously.
    â€˜Oishi, Captain.’
    â€˜Pilchard, Lieutenant, but different army.’
    Erica raised her index finger to her mouth then held it up like a sailor testing the wind and did one of her puckish little-girl-having-sudden-idea expressions. ‘I think, Dr Pilchard, given the inconvenience the Captain has been put to, it would be the least you could do to offer him a personal tour of the museum. My car is just here.’
    They were sated with cake and tea, maybe they even had a stimulating cocktail or two under their belts, cooled and rested. Pilchard was hungry, weary, hot and not very well. As the sun beat down with swimming heat on his bare head, the world began to lurch and spin with craziness and the effort of holding things steady was abruptly just too much.