With the tree as a landmark, we turned east walking through the garden towards the lake.
"How crazy do you think I am?" he asked suddenly.
"I don't think you're crazy at all."
"No?" He looked at me with raised eyebrows.
"Well, not more than the normal artist-crazy, anyway."
"Oh!" he laughed a little. "Do you think I sleep in an oxygen tent?"
"No."
"Why not?" he grinned. He was apparently enjoying the topic.
"Because that's nonsense. Sleeping in an oxygen tent wouldn't make you one day younger."
Somehow that didn't seem to be the answer he had been expecting. He pursed his lips for a moment thinking, then, "Do you think I tried to buy the bones of the Elephant Man?"
I blinked. "I've seriously never thought about that."
"Why not?" He sounded surprised, maybe even a little disappointed.
"Because it doesn't mean anything to me." I shrugged. "It's your money. It's your business what you spend it on. If you want to buy the bones of Mr Merrick, and someone wants to sell them to you, then that's fine with me." I shrugged again. "It's not dangerous, so if it makes you happy, so be it."
He didn't answer, just looked at me as we walked on. After a moment of silence I asked, "Now, did you try to buy them?"
"No."
"But the story, the story that you wanted to buy them, and the one that you sleep in an oxygen tent, they were both penned by you, weren't they? You made them up yourself - you or your manager."
For a moment his face fell, and his eyes seemed darker and deeper. "What makes you think so?"
I considered the question. "Well," I said carefully, "the kind of journalists to whom these stories are credited have High School at best. Both stories seem a good deal too sophisticated for them. I would bet that none of them ever heard of the Elephant Man Merrick until you told them. All in all, it just seems to be neither their kind of fantasy nor their vocabulary. I think these stories were tossed to them to keep them occupied."
"Maybe you should eat dinner with my manager," he said giving me a wry look through squinted eyes.
"He didn't invite me," I pointed out.
"That's true!" he stated in a self-satisfied manner.
"Besides," I continued in a lower voice as we entered the shade of a patch of trees, "I'd much rather eat with you."
He looked up at the new tone. And I looked back at him with big, questioning deer-eyes, lips slightly parted, then subtly closing them under his gaze. He blinked, and looked at his feet, and then up at me again. When he did, I gave him a shy smile, then bat my eyelashes looking slightly past him, before finally looking away. He might have been brilliant at playing the card of the vulnerable and innocent, but it's a game invented by women. In the corner of my eye I could still see him looking at me stunned. Then a wide smile broke across his face.
"Yeah?"
"Yes."
"Why?"
"That's your favourite question, isn't it?"
"Yeah! So, why?"
"Well, firstly, I have never met your manager. I had him on the phone, but if I met him in the street tomorrow I wouldn't know it, and if you told me his name was Johnny Walker, I'd believe that too."
Bending forward, the free hand over his mouth, he giggled at 'Johnny Walker'.
"And secondly," I went on, "you may be a little crazy..."
"Normal artist-crazy?" he put in.
"Yes. But those people who run the business from within the shadows of your spotlights - managers, concert agents - make my hairs stand on end somehow."
"Maybe he's a very handsome, young man," Michael probed.
"Maybe."
"No, he's a short, fat guy, turning bald!" he said quickly. "But I'll tell him the Johnny-Walker-part. That'll be fun!"
"Well, might be he'll disapprove of me, then."
Seemingly in the best of moods, he said, "Well, he can disapprove all he wants! It's none of his business."

Suddenly he pointed at a bush about the height of a man with dark leaves and large, pendulous, trumpet-shaped blossoms, that stood inside a metal cage. "Do you know what that is?"
"Yes, an Angel's Trumpet, isn't it?"
"You know it?" he sounded surprised.
I nodded. "Why is it in a cage? I don't think it can run away, you know."
Michael gave me a sideways grin. "No, actually, they told me I had better put it in there, 'cause it's poisonous."
"They are actually right," I said becoming serious again. "It's very poisonous, indeed. Especially when there are children around it's a problem. With small children it can be enough for them to as much as touch the leaves and then rub their eyes to have dilated pupils, the first sign of poisoning. Juveniles in turn sometimes come up with the idea of breaking off the blossoms and drinking the nectar to get high. But dosing is a huge problem."
Michael looked at the plant in its cage with open displeasure, now. "Maybe I shouldn't have let them plant it after all..."
"Well, as long as it's trimmed so it doesn't grow through the bars, I think it's really safely put away. Don't worry about it."
"Can it kill someone?"
"Yes."
"Gosh!"
"Well, and so can two pounds of table salt. It's all a matter of dosage."
"You are clearly a lawyer knowing such things!"
"Well," I smirked, "it's not forbidden to eat an Angel's Trumpet as long as it's your own. It's when you break the blossoms off your neighbour's plant that the legal problems start!"
"Oh!" He laughed. "Yes, I can see that! So I could legally try eating that plant for a trip?"
"Well, yes, if you feel like it." I shrugged. "Or you could break into your own kitchen and eat three nutmeg apples."
"Really?"
"In theory, yes. But honestly, Michael, you're a rich man in a business where it shouldn't be hard to get better stuff if it's drugs you're after. No need to try your luck with plants from the nightshade family or nutmeg apples."
"But that wouldn't be legal!"
"True. Well, do what you must. But that conversation in mind, I think I'll skip the salad tonight, thank you very much!"
He laughed as we walked on.
"Are you really going to try eating it?" I asked after a moment.
He looked back over his shoulder with a bright smile, then down at his feet as the distance between us and the plant grew. "Probably not," he said after some thought. "On that area I'm a proud coward. Apart from that, what if something goes wrong and I'm hospitalized because of it? That'd be a bad headline! People start acting funny when I as much as drink a beer in public. And then what if children try it 'cause I did? And what if someone gets hurt - or worse? No, I must never do that! It's too dangerous."
I regarded him with a smile as he walked next to me. Questioning he looked up.
"Yes," I nodded knowingly, "I'm a proud coward, too. And I'd much rather you wouldn't try it."

The wind was warm and velvety. The conversation drifted. I avoided asking about him or about his work. His information politics were generally tongue-tied. I didn't want to give him the impression of being interviewed, and I just didn't know how to draw the line. Michael asked me what my childhood had been like. It was a topic clearly close to his heart. I tried hard to find a few interesting things to say about it. He kept asking for details. I told him how I'd become a singer in church at age seven because my piano teacher had probably realized that I wasn't ever going to be a great pianist but I clearly enjoyed the singing along, and the professor of his girlfriend at the music academy in town was also cantor in church and always looking for children who could sing well. As expected, Michael asked me to sing for him. In silence I looked out over the lake at a fountain in the middle of it and at the main house on the bank opposite, enjoying the splashing sound it made, my blue silk dress moving lightly in the warm wind.
"It's okay, you don't have to," he offered.
"No, that's alright, I can. It's just... you see, I'm not a pop singer, Michael."
"No, anything will be fine! Something from church if you like."
I nodded, trying to think of something I could sing without sheet music. In absence of a better option I decided upon a Christmas chorale. I had been singing it repeatingly every year for so many years that I thought if someone had startled me out of my sleep in the middle of the night I could still have sung it then and there. It's called 'Break Forth, O Beauteous Heavenly Light', but back then I knew neither the English title, nor the English text. Thus I sang in German.

It was a short piece and after I had finished we walked in silence for a moment, Michael with a boyish smile around his lips. "That's Bach," he said finally. Surprised, I turned to him. He wasn't looking at me, but he seemed to see my surprise in the corner of his eye, because his smile widened dramatically under my gaze.
Then he complimented me on what a pretty voice I had. But I didn't give much for it. He would have said that anyway.

After rounding the lake, and with our glasses long empty, we returned to the house through the same winged door.
Leaning on the counter to the kitchen he addressed the lady, who was now occupied cooking.
"Do we have nutmeg apples?"
"Yes, we do. Would you like to see them?"
"Yes, please, if it's not too much of a bother."
"Not at all." She took a jar with five brown balls in it from a shelf and placed it before him on the counter. Then she brought a small grater on a saucer and placed it beside the jar.
"To grate it," she said at his questioning look. "In case you want to."
"Do you need it for cooking tonight or can I take them to the dining room?"
"No, you can take it," she smiled.
"Could I maybe have another glass of lemonade?" I asked politely.
"Yes, darling, of course!"
"Me too!" Michael said in a childish tone.
She filled both glasses. Michael took his glass and the nutmeg jar.
I picked up mine. "Do you want me to bring the grater along?"
"Yes, please. I don't have a free hand."
I followed Michael as he went up the few steps that led out of the room. As he was reaching the landing, the lady in the kitchen called after him, "But be careful. Nutmeg can cause hallucinations if you consume too much of it."
Michael turned on the heel looking back at her. "What is it today that everyone seems to know that but me!" he exclaimed in mocking dismay.
She looked at me, and I shrugged apologetically.
"Maybe the women around just know more about cooking than you do," she stated matter-of-factly and went back to her work. Michael rolled his eyes, then he winked at me, and we walked out into the dining room.

~~~~~

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