“No. A book.”
Ted Sholt waves his hands. “I like cake. Chocolate, with butter cocoa icing. Golden syrup. It takes time to set, of course, but a man once told me time’s a figment.”
“Ted? I have the book. The book and everything.”
Sholt peers at him, scratches his stomach. Under the sou’wester, he seems to be wearing a skirt made of sackcloth.
“Well, that would be lovely.” And then the focus comes again, so quick and so strong as to be alarming. His hand shoots out, locks around Joe’s arm. “You have it? Here? Now? How long do we have? Come on, man, they won’t be far behind!”
“Who won’t?” But Joe Spork is already moving, old instinct demands it: when someone says “they’re coming” you go out the back first and get details later.
“All of them! Sheamus, for sure. Jasmine, maybe. Others, so many others, even if you haven’t seen them! And I’m mad and useless. Not to mention bloody old. God, how did it take this long? Come on, come on!” He grabs Joe by the hand. “Did you say Joe Spork? Spork like Daniel? Spork the Clock? Yes? Where is it? Please! We have to be quick!”
“You knew Daniel? He was my grandfather—”
“No time! Reminisce later. Family stories by the fire, yes, and cake. You’re buying! But not now, not now, now is the time, before it passes! This was supposed to happen decades ago… So late. Come on!” Wiry hands grasping and clutching, hauling Joe into motion. “No time!”
Ted Sholt does not, thankfully, smell the way he looks. He gives off an odour of wax, sap, and soil. He stops a yard from the car, pointing.
“Who’s that?”
“Billy. He found me the job.”
“Billy as in William. Don’t know any Williams.”
“He’s a friend.” Unintentional, and an old joke, that one. Sholt doesn’t know, hops into the back of the car. Billy starts from a doze and shouts “Jesus!” and Ted lunges forward and shouts back that “Jesus was the mother of Mary, and Mary met Gabriel at the crossroads, and the crossroads is where the ivy meets the gorse, where we fall down into the dark, where Frankie made angels in a tree,” which does not calm the situation down at all. Billy twists around in his seat to see his enemy better and Ted lurches away from him, trapping himself in the corner of the rear windscreen and shouting at the top of his voice, “Angelmaker, angelmaker!”
Joe, for the first time in several years, is forced to shout. “Billy! Billy! Billy, it’s okay, this is Ted, he’s a bit mad but he’s our client, or our client’s representative, all right?”
“Joseph, he is mad as a coot. And he’s wearing a dress.”
“It’s a robe,” Ted Sholt replies with wounded dignity. “I’m a man of the cloth.” Which is so surprising and so weirdly plausible that none of them says anything at all for a moment. Then Ted gestures. “Further down. It was back aways from the cliff, you see. So it didn’t fall in.” He raises his arm, and for a moment his face contorts in agony, so that Joe finds himself asking whether it’s physical pain, rather than ordinary madness, which makes him wander.
Ted Sholt’s home really is a greenhouse, but it’s a greenhouse in the Victorian style, a great sprawling thing with two floors and transparent walls. There’s a light on somewhere on the upper level, and Joe can see a makeshift bed and what might be a desk. The panes are cracked and taped, and yes, the whole place is wrapped in strands of invading ivy. As they get closer, Joe leans down to look at it, and yes, now that he sees it close to, it is somehow sinister, hungry tendrils slithering over a great wounded beast to reach the innards. He steps back rather quickly, and finds Ted next to him, bright eyes quick and head nodding.
Inside, it’s warm. The glass and the ivy between them make the place airtight, or near enough, and hot-water pipes run around and about in a gasworks bundle. Ted removes his sou’wester, but not his green boots. His feet make a soft flapping noise against the wood floor. Blittblattblittblatt. Joe stares at the boots. It must be his imagination, but they do seem awfully large. He wonders why Ted doesn’t take them off now that he’s inside. Perhaps he doesn’t have other shoes. It would be ludicrous to imagine he might have webbed feet.
“Do you ever swim?” he hears himself ask as he follows Ted up the stairs. “In the sea, I mean. In the summer. I hear people do. On Boxing Day, even.” Oh, bloody Hell, if the old place did actually go into the sea, could that have been a bit more tactless? He glances at Billy: Help me, I’m drowning. Billy stares back, mouth open: You did this one to yourself, mate.
Ted doesn’t answer. Perhaps he didn’t hear or perhaps he has decided to ignore the question, as a privilege of being mad. Instead he grasps Joe by the arm. “Come! Come!”
Joe and Billy follow him to the back of the house.
The back room is improbably enormous. It gives onto a set of open ironwrought doors over the sea, and Joe finds himself wondering again how this entire place doesn’t simply shatter in the winter gales. It surely ought to. Even now he can see the glass panes bowing to the wind, hear the whole structure creak and moan. An alarming image fills his mind’s eye, of all these glass walls bursting inward at once, a windstorm of razors.
Obviously, it hasn’t happened yet. Perhaps the ivy protects the glass. Perhaps it’s the gorse bushes or the short, stumpy trees in along the ridge. Perhaps the glass is some sort of legacy of the Second World War, a laminate, a pilot’s cockpit glass. Perhaps he’s never been safer in his life.
“This way,” Sholt cries, “this way, this way, yes, we must go up! Up and over!” And up they go, out of the doors and onto a spiral stair which belongs inside a stone keep rather than outside a glass house on the edge of a cliff. The wind is treacherous, plucking and pushing. Joe finds himself regretting his big overcoat: it flaps and fills like a giant batwing.
Sholt draws him up the last of the steps, and they’re on a sort of sheltered roof terrace on top of the main building, scattered with the odd detritus of decades: a handmower, two tyres, rolls of wire and fence posts. Billy Friend scowls into the biting chill, then yips as he treads on what appears to be a pile of human limbs. He stares down, and heaves a sigh as closer examination shows it to be a stack of mannequin’s arms. “What’s all this?” he demands.
“Waste not, want not,” Sholt says piously, and leads them across the roof to a sort of tower.
There’s a cool draught blowing through the room, and a strange smell of dry leaves, sugar, and turpentine, and now, above the sounds of the house and the wind, and the roar and rush of the waves, he can hear another sound, a deep orchestral twang which comes from all around. Or, actually, from tall, narrow boxes in neat rows.
“My bees,” Ted Sholt says. “Live ones,” as if this were in doubt. “I rather like them. They’re simple. Uncomplex. They require care, of course. Although ironically what they mostly require is leaving alone. And the honey is good. They make heather honey, round here, and gorse. Sometimes other things in the mix. I trade it with Mrs. Tregensa. For eggs and such. I had three hives die last summer. Two the year before. The bees are not well. The Americans are having a terrible time. Some keepers have lost all of them. The bees are dying, Mr. Spork. All over the world. Do you know what percentage of the world’s food production is based on bees?” he asks.
“No.”
“About one third. If they die, the human effects will be appalling. Migration. Famine. War. Perhaps more than that.” He shakes his head. “Appalling. But we don’t see it, do we? We never see it.” He’s veering off again, into his own world, and his gaze slides from Joe’s. “Another sign, I suppose. It’s time, and past time. So…” He threads between the hives to a lump in the middle of the room, covered by a cloth. “Camouflage, you see? Where would you hide a tree? In a forest, of course. So… where to hide this? Amid a forest of bees!”