One Hundred Names (Special Edition)
suddenly felt right because of the arrival of a little soul in Paris.
But now, looking at Bob, Kitty could see the Bob without Constance and he was almost like a body without a soul. A little light had gone out.
‘Bob,’ Kitty said gently, placing a hand on his shoulder.
‘Yes,’ he straightened up, came to, as if suddenly remembering he had company.
‘Why don’t I make the coffee, you sit down and relax?’ she said casually, moving him aside gently and opening cupboards to get the coffee started.
‘Yes, yes, indeed,’ he said, distracted by who knew what memory or sudden thought he’d had, and sat in the only armchair free of a pile of newspapers and magazines.
Kitty opened the cupboards and was faced with books, crammed in as a regular bookshelf would be. Every single shelf in every press was filled; not a cup or saucer or plate, or even food was in sight. She frowned, searching for the coffee pot, for the cups, but failed. Trying to use Constance and Bob’s logic, she made her way to the living room to search the bookshelves for mugs but there weren’t any. No logic and no mugs, but plenty more books. Giving up momentarily on the mugs, she moved on with her task but there was no sign of a coffee pot, or of coffee granules, just a lone kettle that had once been their piggy bank of coins.
‘Bob,’ she said, a laugh catching in her throat, ‘where do you usually keep the coffee?’
‘Oh,’ he said suddenly as though the thought had never occurred to him. ‘We usually go out for coffee but Teresa is always drinking something from a mug. We must have something in there.’
Kitty looked around the cluttered kitchen. The calendar for that year was a Kama Sutra calendar. Stuck to the fridge with sticky tape, it displayed position number five for May: ‘Raised Missionary’. Kitty opened the fridge and was disappointed to find it empty; she had been hoping for something exciting after the presentation on the door. ‘Maybe she brings her own …’ She surveyed the empty shelves.
‘We have wine in the evenings.’ Bob spoke on behalf of himself and the empty armchair before him.
Which made sense. Constance was known to have at least a bottle of red wine every evening, and right now it sounded like a much better idea than coffee to Kitty.
‘And where would the wine bottles be hiding?’ Kitty smiled at Bob fondly.
He met her smile and the light returned to his eyes. ‘Ms Green Fingers herself liked to store them in the potting shed.’
Kitty wandered out to the still bright evening, across the grass to the potting shed, unslid the lock and stepped inside. It smelled of damp and soil. She switched on the stark white light, which dangled dangerously from a thin wire in the centre of the ceiling, and was faced with shelves of single bottles of red wine, each sitting in a terracotta pot of soil.
‘She liked to keep them warm,’ Bob said suddenly, appearing behind her. ‘She insisted they all have their own beds, kept to a temperature of no less than ten degrees.’
Kitty laughed. ‘But of course. And what are these?’ She examined the dozens of other pots with Post-it notes impaled by sticks stuck into the soil.
‘Her ideas.’
Kitty frowned. ‘I thought her ideas were all in the filing cabinet.’
‘They were the developed ones. Most of them began here. She called them her little seeds. As soon as they would pop into her head she would write them on a Post-it note and skewer them into these pots. Then occasionally, when she was short of an idea or two, she would come out to the shed to see if her ideas had grown.’
Kitty looked at him in surprise. ‘Why did I never hear about this?’
‘Because, my love, if I told anybody about this, Constance would be in a mad house.’
‘She already was in a mad house, Bob. With you.’ They both smiled. ‘So perhaps there’s something about her “Names” story here …’ She moved along the line of potted Post-its, reading the messy scrawled animated words and feeling an overwhelming urge just to be with Constance, to see her, to touch her.
‘There wouldn’t be anything here about that if it was in the filing cabinet. It may have started here first as one name, or five names or maybe not even a name at all. If it was in the filing cabinet, it had become something. This was the nursery for them all.’
‘Her babies,’ Kitty smiled, eyes running along the sporadic, spontaneous thoughts that had all at one stage popped into
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