With One Lousy Free Packet of Seed

In fact, he was so absorbed in his confusion and dismay that he did not hear the phone ringing, nor hear Michelle answer it. What he did hear, however (and quite distinctly), was Michelle informing him that it had been Angela Farmer phoning to apologize. She would have to postpone their appointment for the following Monday, making it Tuesday instead. She suggested that since she lived in the West Country, he might like to use Monday as a travelling day and stay overnight at a local hotel, details of which she had passed on to Michelle.

‘She sounded very nice,’ said Michelle, studying Osborne’s pole-axed expression.

‘That’s lovely,’ said Osborne.

‘Oh, and she hoped it wasn’t too inconvenient – to ring so late in the day.’

2

Osborne dunked a piece of peanut brittle in his coffee and reflected. Perhaps it was time to bail out of this shed business before serious damage was done. From his favourite breakfast corner in his local Cypriot dossers’ café on a bleak November Friday (his belongings tucked around him like sandbags against a blast) he looked mournfully at the bright, mass-produced pictures of mythical Greek heroes adorning the walls and asked himself whether the cutting edge of outhouse journalism had not finally proved too much for him. A vision of Michelle sending him home two nights ago on a tide of unreassuring platitudes (‘It could happen to anyone, Osborne; but funny how it happened to you’), and then expertly recasting his article with firm unanswerable blue strokes (and well-informed references to Trent Carmichael’s favourite horticultural murder weapons), rose unbidden to his mind and gave him torment. He stared at a picture of Perseus amid the gorgons and emitted a low moan.

‘Me and My Shed’ had had its sticky moments in the past, but nothing ever like this. In the course of a dozen years’ trouble-shooting around celebrity gardens Osborne had been exposed to a variety of dangers – hostile rabbits, wobbly paving and possibly harmful levels of creosote – but none had shaken his confidence to a comparable degree. Not even when he was mistaken for the man from The Times and treated to a lengthy reminiscence of a painful Somerset childhood (none of it involving sheds, incidentally, or outbuildings of any kind) had he felt so pig-sick about himself, despite the extreme embarrassment all round when that particular ghastly mistake was finally uncovered. (It had been a terrifying example of cross purposes at work, incidentally, since for a considerable time the interviewee supposed that Osborne’s repeated prompting ‘And did that happen in a shed?’ was evidence of a deep-seated emotional disturbance almost on a par with his own.)

Osborne did not particularly relish recalling his past humiliations, but while he was on the subject he was compelled to admit there had been few things worse than the time he was locked in a shed by a hyperactive child, who then cunningly reported to its celebrity father that ‘the man in the smelly coat’ had been called away on urgent business. Luckily, an old woman had let him out, but only after four hours had passed. Interestingly, this was the incident Osborne generally called to mind when he overheard people say, ‘We’ll probably laugh about all this later on’ – because he had learned that there were certain miseries in life which Time signally failed to transform into anything even slightly resembling a rib-tickler, and spending four unplanned hours hammering on the inside of a Lumberland Alpine Resteezy was definitely among them.

‘All right, mate?’

A man in a tight, battered baseball cap touched Osborne by the sleeve, and he jerked out of his reverie – which was just as well, because it was turning grim.

‘What’s that?’

‘All right, are you, mate? Your coffee’s got cold.’

‘Thanks. Right. Oh bugger, yes,’ said Osborne, and stirred his coffee very quickly, as though the frantic action might jiggle the molecules sufficiently to reheat it.

In front of him on the table lay his morning’s post, still unopened, and he looked at it with his eyes deliberately half-closed, so that it looked sort of blurry and distant, and a bit less threatening. None of the envelopes resembled his monthly cheque; most, he knew only too well, would be scratchy xeroxed brochures for self-assembly Lumberland Alpines. He recognized immediately the familiar postmark betokening a personal reader’s letter ‘sent on’ from the magazine, and put it automatically to one side. True, sometimes a reader’s letter could cheer him up enormously (‘Another marvellous insight into a famous life!’ somebody wrote once, in handwriting very similar to his sister’s), but quite often Osborne’s correspondents were OAP gardening fanatics who not only entertained very fixed ideas about the virtues of terracotta (as opposed to plastic), but allowed these ideas full dismal rein in wobbly joined-up handwriting on lined blue Basildon Bond.

Where was Makepeace? They had agreed to meet at 11.30, and it was after twelve. Why was Makepeace always late for these meetings? It is a general rule, of course, that the person with the least distance to travel will contrive to show up last. But Makepeace lived upstairs from the café, for goodness’ sake. This was why they had chosen the Birthplace of Aphrodite as their particular weekly rendezvous. He was up there now, in all probability, while Osborne had the job of retaining his claim to the table by the age-old custom of not finishing his food and saying, ‘Excuse me, whoops, I’m sorry –’ every time a table-clearer wielding a damp grey cloth attempted to remove his plate. In fact, he had spent much of the past fifteen minutes holding the plate down quite firmly with both hands, as though trying to bond it to the formica by sheer effort of push.

‘So,’ said Makepeace, sitting down opposite. ‘Where have you been?’ He appeared out of nowhere: just materialized on the seat as though he had suddenly grown there, whoosh, like a time-lapse sunflower in a nature programme. He was always doing this, Makepeace; creeping up on people. It was terribly unsettling. Once, he crept up on Osborne outside an off-licence, with the result that the six bottles of Beck’s that Osborne had just invited home for a little party suddenly found they had an alternative urgent appointment getting smashed to bits on the pavement. Now, at the Birthplace of Aphrodite, the effect was less catastrophic (it did not require a dustpan and brush), but Osborne was nevertheless startled sufficiently to let go of the plate, which was whisked away instantly by a triumphant cloth-lady.

Osborne sometimes speculated how the world must appear to someone like Makepeace – given the effect he had on it himself. You know the old theory that the royal family think the world smells of fresh paint, that the Queen assumes people talk endlessly on brief acquaintance about the minutiae of their jobs and the distance they’ve travelled to be present? Well, similarly Makepeace, with his unfortunate, disarming habit of misplaced stealth, must surely assume that the world was full of people who greet you by leaping in the air and shouting ‘Gah!’ in alarm. He must also, by extension, know a proportionately large number of people who worry ostentatiously about the current state of their tickers.

‘Gah!’ shouted Osborne. ‘Makepeace! Hey! Bugger me! Phew!’

‘Well, of course; bugger me, exactly,’ repeated Makepeace slowly, without much enthusiasm, as he gently peeled off his denim jacket, folded it as though it were linen or silk, and adjusted his long, ginger pony-tail so that it hung neatly down his back. ‘But what the hell kept you, my friend?’

Osborne looked quizzically into Makepeace’s blank blue eyes and considered what to say.

‘What do you mean? I –’

‘We agreed 11.30, didn’t we? Well, I put my head round the door ten minutes ago – ten to bloody twelve – and you weren’t here. I was beginning to think that you weren’t coming.’

‘Listen, I don’t get this,’ protested Osborne. ‘I was here all the time.’

Makepeace pursed his lips in disbelief. ‘Didn’t see you, pal.’

‘Well, I was.’

Makepeace put up his palms as if to say, ‘Don’t be so defensive,’ and then changed his tone.

‘Listen, you’re here now and that’s what matters.’

‘Hang on, you can ask any –’

But Osborne faltered and gave up. In the circumstances, actually, this was the only sensible course of action. Having known Makepeace only a couple of months, he had already learned one very useful thing – that you could never, ever place him in the wrong. Osborne had met know-alls in the past; he had been acquainted with big-heads, too. But Makepeace was both know-all and big-head, with an added complication. Conceivably, he was a psychopath.

‘Son,’ his daddy must have said to him at an impressionable age, ‘never apologize, never explain. Is that clear? Also, deny absolutely everything that doesn’t suit you, even in the teeth of outright contrary proof. Now, all right, let’s have it, what did I just tell you?’

‘Tell me?’ Makepeace must have hotly replied. ‘You told me nothing! What the hell are you talking about? I just came through the door, and you’re asking me a load of stupid questions.’

At which his daddy presumably chuckled (in a sinister fond-father-of-the-growing-psychopath sort of way) and said, ‘That’s my boy.’

Makepeace was younger than Osborne, thirty-five to Osborne’s forty-eight, but sometimes seemed to aspire to an emotional age of six. Wiry and five foot two, and usually attired in blue denim, he had a long face and a short, flat nose, so that Osborne was involuntarily reminded of a stunted, mean-looking infant pressing his face hard against a cake-shop window. It was easy to feel sorry for the little chap: parents warning their children against the dangers of smoking or masturbation had been known to point to him – unfortunately, in his hearing – as an example of the worst that could happen. Makepeace rose above all this by being clever, of course; and with a couple of good university degrees behind him, he presently made a fairly decent, grown-up living from writing erudite book reviews for national newspapers and periodicals, in which he used his great capacities as a professional know-all as a perfectly acceptable substitute for either insight or style.

There was, however, still a tears-before-bedtime quality to Makepeace’s existence, which compelled Osborne to worry on his behalf. The trouble was that this prodigy, precisely in the manner of a precocious child, was utterly unable to judge the point at which he had delighted the grown-ups beyond endurance. Thus, having acquired a reputation for his readiness to write a thousand words on any subject under heaven (he would have written the Angela Farmer thing without a qualm, even knowing that it was all a fraud), he now faced a quite serious problem, in that his extraordinary level of output was beginning to outstrip plausibility. People had started to notice that he wrote more book reviews in a week than was technically possible, yet if you suggested he hadn’t read the books with any degree of diligence, he would instantly offer to knock you down.

His various editors guessed that he might not be reading very carefully, but it was difficult to prove; and Makepeace was indeed an extraordinarily compelling liar, with a particular flair for outright incandescent denial. On the regular occasions when he missed a deadline (through sheer bottleneck of work) he would never admit it, but instead swore hotly that he had personally fed each sheet of his review into a fax machine – and without missing a beat he would go on to explain in a regretful tone that he would dearly love to send it again, had it not been: (a) snatched from his hands by a freak typhoon in Clapham High Street; (b) burgled from his flat; or (c) lent to a friend who had just boarded a flight to Venezuela. ‘Tell you what, though, I can type it out again by Friday,’ he would offer, fooling nobody. And somehow he always got away with it.

The curious thing, of course, was that while Osborne knew all this, he liked him anyway. Makepeace made him laugh. Also, Osborne enjoyed in his company the novel sensation of feeling relatively grown up. So he introduced Makepeace to more editors, and even arranged for him to review gardening books for Tim on the magazine. His one ridiculous error was in thinking he ought to explain a few basic gardening terms that Makepeace might not be familiar with. On this gross, unforgivable insult, their relationship nearly foundered. You just could not tell Makepeace something he didn’t already know; it was as simple as that. Sitting in this very Birthplace of Aphrodite one afternoon, and regarding the Greek pictures on the walls, Osborne had learned this lesson the hard way when a civilized difference of opinion about aetiological myths had hurtled seriously out of control.

They had been talking – as all literary people will, from time to time – of the legend of Persephone, whom Hades famously stole from the earth to make Nature mourn (thus proving the existence of winter, or something). Anyway, the question was this: had Persephone eaten six pomegranates while underground, or six pomegranate seeds? Osborne said seeds, and afterwards checked it in a book at the library. And he was right. Naïvely assuming that only the truth was at issue, he made a mental note to pass on the information to his friend when next they met. After all, seeds were probably significant, seeing as the myth was concerned with seasonal renewal, and all that.

So next time he saw Makepeace he mentioned their discussion and said, quite innocently, that yes, it was seeds.

There was a fractional pause, and then Makepeace said, ‘Yes, seeds. That’s what I said.’

Osborne gasped at the lie, and then giggled.

‘No, you didn’t.’

‘Yes, I did.’

Makepeace wasn’t joking. He should have been, but he wasn’t.

‘No. You didn’t. You said she ate pomegranates, that’s different. It was me who said it was seeds.’

‘You’re wrong.’

‘Look, I’m sorry, but this is really silly, and it’s not worth arguing about, but you really did say pomegranates. You argued with me, don’t you remember?’

‘I fucking didn’t.’

‘Makepeace, what’s the big deal here? I don’t understand. Why can’t you admit you were wrong?’

At which point Makepeace stood up so abruptly that his chair fell over backwards, and bellowed, ‘What the fucking hell are you talking about?’

It had been a tricky moment.

‘What’s all the stuff?’ asked Makepeace now, reading Osborne’s envelopes upside-down.

‘My post. I can’t face it.’

‘Do you want me to open it?’

‘No.’

‘Oh, come on,’ said Makepeace, and picked up the envelope with the Come Into the Garden postmark.

‘Not that one,’ protested Osborne, but it was too late. Makepeace had already taken out two sheets of paper and started to read them.

‘Odd,’ he said, shuffling the pages one behind the other, and frowning. ‘This is dead odd.’ He read them both a couple of times, and then handed them to Osborne.

Dear Mr Lonsdale [said the first],

I have long been a fan of your column. Being a keen gardener myself, your insights into sheds of the famous fill me with interest. I think you are probably a nice man. I can imagine you wearing a nice coat and scarf and slippers possibly. Also smoking a pipe, quite distinguished. While I am wearing not much while writing this actually. Just a thin négligé and some gold flip-flops. And green-thumb gardening gloves.

Phew, it’s hot work, gardening. I am not a celebrity like Melvyn Bragg and Anna Ford but I would let you rummage in my shed if you asked me!! I’ve got all sorts of odds and ends that nobody knows about tucked away behind the flower-pots. If you catch my drift.

Yours affectionately,

G. Clarke,

Honiton, Devon

Osborne was slightly embarrassed. But at least it made a change from the terracotta maniacs. He finished his coffee in a single swig, and shrugged at Makepeace.

‘Mad, I expect,’ he said.

‘There’s more,’ said Makepeace.

Osborne shuffled the papers and found the second letter, identically typed, and on the same-sized paper as the first. It seemed to be from the same person, but it had a distinctly different tone.

Dear Mr Lonsdale,

Having counted no less than 15 errors of fact (not to mention grammar) in your last ‘Me and My Shed’ column, isn’t it time you stopped pretending to be a journalist? Call yourself a writer well I don’t think. I could do better myself, and thats saying something. I haven’t even met Trent Carmichael. How much longer must we be subjected to this slapdash twaddle masquerading as journalism? I am surprised anyone agrees to be interviewed by you. Do you know you make all the sheds sound the same? Why does a magazine of such evident quality continue to employ you? Stay out of sheds and do us a favour.

G. Clarke,

Honiton, Devon

P.S. Someone ought to lock you in a shed and throw away the key.

‘What do you think?’ asked Makepeace.

‘Bugger,’ said Osborne.

Lillian lit a cigarette, narrowing her eyes against the smoke, and looked round to check that no one was watching. Coughing, she leaned back and continued to ignore the ringing of the phone. There is a cool, insolent way that blonde, permanent-waved secretaries inspect their fingernails in old film noir movies, and Lillian, a baby blonde herself in an electric-blue angora woolly, attempted it now, arching her eyebrows like Marlene Dietrich; but then suddenly broke the illusion by tearing off the broken top of her thumbnail with a savage rip from her teeth. She looked round again, smiling, spat the nail expertly into a waste-paper basket and tried momentarily to imagine what it would be like to be deaf.

Since the announcement of the takeover of Come Into the Garden, the phone had not stopped ringing. The newspapers were not very interested; but readers would phone in panic, selfishly demanding reassurance that the magazine would not cease publication just when the greenfly problem was at its height, or when the monthly ‘Build your own greenhouse’ series reached a crucial stage in the glazing. Lillian fielded these inquiries in a variety of ways. For example, sometimes she simply unplugged the phone. At other times she answered, but pretended to be speaking from the swimming baths. And sometimes, as now, she sat and suffered its ringing, perched on her typist’s chair with her legs crossed and with her eyes fixed steadily on the ceiling.

To add to the picture of martyrdom, a new sign hung above her desk, with the legend ‘Is Peace and Quiet So Much to Ask?’ But a keen-eyed observer might also notice that today Lillian was mixing her metaphors, for her corner of the office was adorned with items suggestive less of pietism than of couch potato. A fluffy rug had appeared; also a standard lamp, a magazine rack and a basket with knitting in it. Half a sitting-room, in fact, had blossomed overnight where previously had stood only furniture and fittings appropriate to the office of a small magazine. She was not using this stuff yet, but it was there, and it was obviously permanent. It was a statement of intent.

Apart from the phone ringing, the office was quiet again. Friday was the day when most of the editorial staff decamped to the typesetters, to sit on broken chairs in a makeshift work-room from six in the morning and wait miserably all day for proofs to correct. Lillian had never visited the typesetters, and imagined it, rather perversely, as some sort of holiday camp. The word ‘buns’ had once been mentioned in her hearing, and this had unaccountably conjured to her mind a scene of great frivolity, like something Christmassy in Dickens. Perhaps she thought the sub-editors tossed these buns across the room at each other, or had races to pick out the most currants or lemon peel. Who knows? Envy can play funny tricks on a person’s mind. Anyway, the fact that Tim and Michelle would return late on Friday afternoons actually stumbling with fatigue failed utterly to shake Lillian’s notion of Typesetter Heaven. ‘No, I’m afraid Michelle is not in the office today,’ she would report to the editor (who sometimes popped in on Fridays to check his post for job offers). ‘She has got the day off, at the typesetters. I expect she will be back at work next week.’

Suddenly, on a whim, Lillian answered the phone.

‘Come Into the Garden,’ she snapped, making sure it didn’t sound too much like an invitation.

‘For heaven’s sake, Lillian, where were you?’

It was Michelle. Lillian pursed her lips and made a series of smoke rings by jabbing her cigarette in the air.

‘Did you say where was I?’ she repeated carefully. ‘Well, I’ll tell you. I was stuck in the bloody lift, that’s where I was.’

Michelle ignored this. Life was too short to argue about it.

‘Listen, could I be a desperate bore and ask you to do something for me? I brought my “Dear Donald” file with me, and a couple of letters are missing. Would you be unbelievably selfless and helpful, and look on my desk for them?’

Lillian prepared to stand up, but then thought better of it.

‘The letters to Osborne from Honiton?’

‘What?’ Michelle sounded rather indistinct, suddenly.

‘The letters to Osborne. From Honiton.’

‘No,’ she said, after a noticeable pause. ‘Ha ha, I don’t think I’ve seen any letters to Osborne. No. Not from Honiton, I don’t think. Hmm. I mean, surely they would be sent straight to him, wouldn’t they? Nothing to do with “Dear Donald”. Or to do with me, for that matter.’

‘I suppose not.’

Lillian waited. She had known Michelle for fifteen years. This pally ‘ha ha’ business told her something was up. The seconds ticked by. ‘So,’ said Michelle at last, ‘have you got the letters to Osborne? I wouldn’t mind a peek.’

‘No can do, I’m afraid. I sent them on yesterday.’

Michelle gasped.

‘To Osborne?’

‘That’s right.’ ‘Oh.’

‘Nothing wrong, I hope?’

‘No, it’s fine.’

Lillian took a deep, satisfying drag on the cigarette. ‘By the way, you haven’t seen my big packet of cup-soups by any chance?’

Osborne turned the letters over in his hands, and felt peculiar. Peculiar was the only word for it. Makepeace meanwhile took a large bite out of a fried-egg sandwich and tried to imagine what it would be like to realize one morning that you had a fan in the West Country who entertained schizophrenic delusions about you while dressed in gold flip-flops and reinforced gloves. It was hard.

‘I don’t like this bit about slapdash twaddle,’ said Osborne at last.

‘Hmm,’ agreed Makepeace.

‘I mean, what does she take me for? You don’t expect Tolstoy in a piece about sheds, surely?’

Makepeace grunted, wiped some egg-yolk from his chin and prepared to contest the point. ‘Except that all happy sheds are happy in the same way, I suppose,’ he volunteered, reaching for a serviette. ‘While unhappy sheds …’ But he tailed off, sensing he had lost his audience. Osborne looked nonplussed.

‘I suppose we are sure it’s a woman,’ added Makepeace. ‘I mean, the négligé might be more interesting than it at first appears.’

Osborne looked mournfully at the infant Hercules wrestling with snakes (next to the tea-urn) and shook his head.

‘So who’s the next shed, then?’

‘Ah,’ said Osborne darkly, as though it meant something. ‘Angela Farmer.’

‘Where’s the problem? Right up your street. Funny, charming, famous. Didn’t she have a rose named after her recently?’

‘It was a tulip.’

‘That’s right. She had a tulip named after her, the Angela Farmer.’

‘Yes, but you said rose.’