LYNNE TRUSS
With One Lousy Free

Packet of Seed

Contents

Cover

Title Page

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

About the Author

By the same author

Copyright

About the Publisher

1

Not having a hand free for a more dignified entrance, Osborne gave the swing door a mighty push with his foot, so that it boomed and echoed where it struck the wall beyond. ‘Bugger,’ he said, and shuffled awkwardly through the gap, sliding his back along the door to keep it open. He was distinctly overladen. From each wrist dangled various coloured string bags, bulging with parcels, fruit and scarves; and across his chest (as though to break an expected fall) he wore an old BOAC airline bag stuffed thick with dog-eared papers.

The subdued brown editorial offices of Come Into the Garden, though accustomed to having their peace-and-quiet vacuum broken by this weekly intrusion, gave a collective wince at Osborne’s rough approach. The sudden draught of air that sucked the venetian blinds away from the windows and plucked the last rusting leaves from the parched, spindly weeping figs was like a sharp exasperated huff of disapproval. Someone once said you should never trust a doctor whose office plants had died. For some reason this dictum came back to haunt Osborne each week when he made his entrance. By the same token, you see, perhaps you should not pay too much attention to a weekly gardening magazine which looks as though it has just received a visit from Agent Orange.

‘Ah,’ he said (by way of greeting) to Lillian, the editor’s secretary, but she made no reply. Her head thrown back at a tricky angle, Lillian was engrossed in savouring the last dregs of a cup-soup, tapping the vertical mug with a practised hand so that the last shards of soggy croûton came sliding and tumbling mouthwards, like rocks down a mountainside. Osborne knew from experience that there was no point expecting a response from Lillian while a single iota of monosodium glutamate remained at large. To judge from the distinctive aroma that hung like an iron curtain across the office, today’s flavour was celery.

‘Lillian?’ A phone was ringing, and Osborne wondered vaguely whether someone should answer it.

‘Lillian?’

‘Ngh,’ said Lillian, preoccupied with running her tongue around the inside of the mug.

‘Shall I answer this?’

‘Ngh, ngh,’ replied Lillian.

‘Right you are, then,’ said Osborne cheerfully, and left it to ring.

Heaping his string bags on a free desk, he felt strangely happy. Come Into the Garden had always felt a bit like home to Osborne, a shelter where he was welcome and beloved. As a regular contributor, blown in weekly from the cold, he felt tended, nurtured – like a special potted geranium brought indoors by a caring husbandman at the first sharp sting of autumn frost. What colour geranium? you might ask, if you were a gardening person. Well, Osborne was not dogmatic on the subject, but in his mind’s eye he leaned towards cerise. But the colour was largely immaterial. The point was that though he might be hibernating (professionally speaking) at Come Into the Garden, at least he was not in imminent danger of rusting, wilting, perishing, or being hoicked out and shredded for compost. And occasionally – to push the geranium analogy to its furthest limit – a colleague with a kind heart and advanced ideas might even take the trouble to stop beside his desk and encourage him with a few kind words.

So every Wednesday Osborne came to the office to compose his time-honoured ‘Me and My Shed’ column and soak up the atmosphere. These pieces could equally well be written at home, really (in fact, the idea had been suggested to him more than once), but throughout his career he had always written in offices, from his early days as a staff reporter on a South Coast evening paper, and all through his time as a second-string drama critic in the sixties, so it was how he felt most comfortable. Physically, being a large, broad-shouldered person, he looked slightly out of place at an office desk, as if when he stood up he would tip it over. But Osborne merely felt cosy. He warmed to the very mottoes on the walls – ‘Ne’er cast a clout till May be out’; ‘It is not spring until you can plant your foot upon twelve daisies’ – and thought of the parable of the seed on fertile ground. Also, not for the first time, he wondered whether anyone on the staff actually had a garden.

A man who has been buffeted by life needs a place where he can lay down his string bags. He needs a place where he can sit at an old Tipp-Ex-spattered Adler, treat himself to a free cup of tea, miss his deadline by hours, stand helpless at the photocopier until someone rescues him, fill his pockets at the stationery cupboard, and make hour-long surreptitious phone calls to old journo muckers in faraway foreign parts. Come Into the Garden was that place for Osborne.

Today, however, it seemed there was no one about. Osborne removed a few thick, dank layers of navy-blue outdoor garment (the month was November) and hung them on a coat stand, which promptly collapsed under the weight. ‘Bugger,’ he said, and ran his fingers through his short, grey hair. Where was everybody? He looked around for clues. A half-empty mail-sack lay limp in the middle of Reception, but he was aware that little could be deduced from this. Lillian (who had now disappeared) famously claimed to have a medical problem with sorting the post, due to a rare neurotic-compulsive fear of envelopes. Such a condition was obviously unfortunate in a secretary (almost a disqualification, you might think), but there you were.

This unfortunate and improbable malady meant that post sorting was an all-day process, with a half-empty mail-sack permanently dumped on the floor as a kind of endless reproach, and most of the editorial staff sensibly steering well clear and simply learning never to depend too heavily on the prompt dispersal of correspondence. Lillian’s wont was to stoop and sigh over a heap of letters, laboriously examining each one with the aid of tongs, and stopping chance passers-by with faux-naif questions evidently calculated to drive them mad. ‘Look, this says “John Mainwaring, Editor”,’ she might say, waving the ironware in a wild, threatening manner, ‘but the editor’s name is James Mainwaring.’ Here she would pause to ascertain what reaction she was getting (usually uneasy silence). ‘What do you think? Shall I send it back, or pitch it in the bin?’ No one ever knew what to say to this sort of thing; after all, you don’t argue with mad people, especially when they are equipped to clock you with a pair of tongs. So Lillian got away with it, as she got away with everything else. And in between these bouts of petty tyranny, she would sit quietly at her desk, ignoring the phones, and give her full attention to the smoking of a cigarette – on the grounds, presumably, that if a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing well.

It seemed odd to be in the office on his own. Osborne was assailed by an understandable fear that he had forgotten an important appointment elsewhere – an appointment that his green-ink-fingered friends had evidently all remembered. Even the tireless sub-editors were missing from their work stations, and Osborne marvelled when he peered into their little book-lined room and saw their four empty chairs – a sight, he realized, that few people other than night cleaners had ever previously witnessed. The fabric on one of the chairs turned out to be a jaunty rich tartan – but no wonder he had never suspected it, when a sub-editor’s drab, grey jumper and unkempt shirt (not to mention his drab, grey, unkempt body) had always blocked the view.

Like many writers, Osborne was afraid of sub-editors, the trouble being that they had a disarming habit of changing his prose automatically, without telling him. ‘Ah, the further musings of the giant intellect,’ the chief sub-editor might say, with gratuitous cruelty, as she took his copy each week; and then, the moment he had left the room, she fell on it savagely with a thick blue pen, taking out all the bits he was most proud of. In his more gloomy moments, he wondered why he bothered to write the piece in the first place, when the subsequent contribution of the sub-editor so often outweighed his own. He had been known to quote the lament of Macduff (‘What, all my little chicks?’) at the thought of his innocents, massacred. And you couldn’t blame him. ‘Not in my back yard’ he had once confidently typed in a piece about a politician, only to discover, a few days later, in the printed magazine, that it had been rewritten as ‘Not on my patio’, which was not quite the same.

In the stealthy, unnatural quiet of the sub-editors’ room, dictionaries and half-corrected proofs lay open on abandoned desks. Osborne tiptoed guiltily, like a schoolboy finding himself alone in an after-hours classroom when everyone has gone home. To stay his nerves, he helped himself to an Extra Strong Mint from a roll next to the chief sub-editor’s typewriter (careful not to disarrange her impressive selection of nail varnishes), and peered from an awkward position at the proof she had been correcting, which was covered in tiny blue marks and explanatory notes circled with a feminine flourish. ‘NOTE TO TYPESETTER,’ he read, upside-down,

Far be it from me etcetera, but it seems to me that despite our best efforts a twinge of confusion remains in your mind between ‘forbear’ – a verb meaning ‘abstain or refrain from’ – and ‘forebear’ – a noun denoting an ancestor. May we bid adieu to these intrusive ‘e’s? I hope this clears things up. I have mentioned this before, of course; but how can you be expected to remember? You lead such busy lives, and Radio 1 must absorb a lot of your attention. I do understand. Sorry to take up your valuable time. And far be it from me, etcetera.

Michelle

Osborne gulped in amazement at such erudition, which was an unfortunate thing to do. For the Extra Strong Mint promptly closed over his windpipe, like a manhole cover over an orifice in the road.

Thus it was that when the three subs re-entered the room in wordless single file a few moments later, they discovered their ‘Me and My Shed’ columnist bent double with a gun-metal litter-bin held to his face, making mysterious amplified strangling noises. Since nothing louder than the whisper of a nail file was usually to be heard in this room, they naturally flashed their specs in annoyance. However, having all received the statutory sub-editor’s training (involving, one suspects, the same kind of rigorous football-rattle personality testing undergone by the horses of riot police), they simply resumed their solemn work of skewering other people’s chicks with their thick blue pens.

‘Are you in difficulties, mon cher?’ asked Michelle, the chief sub-editor, archly, adjusting an embroidered collar and seating herself carefully so as not to rumple her dirndl skirt. Osborne shook his head (and litter-bin) emphatically, to indicate that any difficulties were of only passing significance. The sub-editors swapped glances (or did they signal Morse code with those specs?) and sighed. Osborne discharged the mint with a loud ptang-yang sound and fled red-faced from the room, and all was peace again.

It was quite some time before Osborne discovered the reason for the empty office; obviously, if he had asked a few questions, there and then, he might have been saved a lot of the palaver of the ensuing week. Unfortunately, however, he did not. The fact was, there had been a crisis meeting. The magazine had been sold to a new proprietor; a new editor had been mentioned, along with a rationalization of the staff. He did not yet know it, but a cold wind was blowing at Come Into the Garden; his shelter had been torn up and blown away, like so much matchwood.

However, since nobody had yet informed him of this, Osborne merely dragged his airline bag to his favourite corner, and from a safe distance waved hello again to Lillian. She was flicking through a mail order catalogue now, turning each page with a practised insouciant finger-technique not involving the thumb, while a motorbike messenger stood in front of her desk, waiting for her to look up. Above her head, Osborne noticed, there was a new sign. It said, ‘What did your last slave die of?’

He produced his notebook, flipped a few pages and attempted to compose his thoughts. Now, Osborne, old buddy, who have you got for us this week? He typed the words ME AND MY SHED at the top of a sheet of paper, and added a colon.

ME AND MY SHED:

A name ought to follow, but for some reason it failed to come. Osborne frowned. Every week he interviewed a famous person about their shed – Me and My Shed: Melvyn Bragg; Me and My Shed: Stirling Moss. He had been doing it for years. In certain professional quarters people still raved about his Me and My Shed: David Essex; it was said that for anyone interested in the art of celebrity outhouse interviewing, it had represented the absolute ‘last word’. Osborne treasured this praise, while in general being modest about his job, deflecting the envy of non-journalists by saying merely that he had seen the insides of some classy sheds in his time. But today, despite remembering a bus journey to Highgate on Monday morning – despite, moreover, remembering the interior fittings of the shed in some considerable detail – it was only the classiness of the shed that stuck in his mind. He just could not put a classy face to it. The words

ME AND MY SHED:

looked up accusingly from the typewriter. Especially the colon on the end.

He flicked through his notes again, but they offered little help. After twelve years of writing ‘Me and My Shed’ he had come to the unsurprising conclusion that all sheds are alike in the dark. Even when the column’s remit had been extended, in the mid-1980s, to include greenhouses and any other temporary garden structures (such as the ivy-covered car-port), the interviews had always required a masterly touch to bring them alive. Here, for example, was a sample of this week’s notes:

Had shed since bght house. Quite good sh. Spend time in sh. obv. Also gd 4 keeping thngs in. Never done anythng to sh, particrly. Cat got locked in sh once, qu funny. Don’t thnk abt sh often. Take sh for grantd. Sorry. Not v interstng. House interestng. Sh not.

Time was pressing, The official deadline was 2.30, and it was now a quarter past twelve. Osborne typed a few words, hoping that the act of writing might jog his memory. He looked out of the window and tried to free-associate about Highgate, but curiously found himself thinking about Marmite sandwiches on a windswept beach, so gave it up. The experience of thirty years in journalism, a dozen of them in sheds, seemed to have deserted him.

In fact, he was just beginning to consider turning the column into a kind of mystery slot this week, calling it ‘Who and Whose Shed?’, when Tim, the deputy editor, ambled past, carrying a page proof towards the subs’ room. Tim was one of those aforementioned people who sometimes dropped a few encouraging words in the direction of a torpid geranium, and he did so now. But it was no big deal, actually. Tim was a thin, aloof young fellow (twenty-four, twenty-five?) with a generally abstracted air, tight pullovers and bottle-thick kick-me specs; a young man whose emotional thermostat had been set too low at an early age, and was now too stiff to budge. Now he stopped at Osborne’s side and crouched down to read on the typewriter ‘Me and My Shed’s’ recently composed opening sentence:

When the cat got stuck in the shed for 24 hours last year, there were red faces all round at a certain house in Highgate.

Tim wrinkled his nose and chewed his biro. ‘So?’ he asked. ‘How did things go with Angela Farmer?’

Osborne thought for a second. Angela Farmer?

‘Quite a coup getting her, I thought,’ continued Tim. ‘In fact, I made a note somewhere. I think we’ll splash it. Nice to have your name on the front of the magazine again before –’

Tim stopped abruptly, but Osborne didn’t notice. He was experiencing a strange sense of weightlessness. Was it possible to meet Angela Farmer, glamorous middle-aged American star of a thousand British sitcoms, and have no recollection of it? He tried picturing the scene at the door, the handshake, the famous smoky voice of Ms Farmer barking, ‘C’min! What’re ya waitin for? Applause?’ but nothing came. His mind was a blank; it was as though he had never met her. Panic welled in his chest, and in a split second his entire career as a celebrity interviewer flashed before his eyes.

‘So what was she like?’

‘Is it hot in here?’

‘Yes, a bit. But what was she like?’

Osborne decided to bluff.

‘Angela Farmer? Oh, fine. Fine, Angela Farmer, yes. Very’ – here he consulted his notes – ‘interesting. Very American, of course.’

Tim nodded encouragingly.

‘Good shed, was it?’

‘Angela Farmer’s shed, you mean? Yes, oh yes. Ms Farmer has a surprisingly good shed.’

‘Did you ask about those hilarious gerbils in the shed in From This Day Forward?’

‘Did I? Oh yes, I’m sure I did.’

‘And I think I read somewhere that she was actually proposed to in a shed by her second husband – whatsisname, the man who plays the shed builder in For Ever and Ever Amen – but that they broke up after a row about weather-proofing.’

‘All true, mate. All true.’

‘Should make an interesting piece, then.’

‘I’ll say.’

They both paused, staring into the middle distance, pondering the interesting piece. ‘The cat got stuck in the shed overnight once, too.’

‘What’s that?’

‘The cat. Got stuck in the shed. Overnight. She said it was quite funny.’

The deputy editor wrinkled his nose again, and changed the subject.

‘Oh, and you ought to mention the Angela Farmer rose. Smash hit of last year’s Chelsea. No doubt propagated in a shed, of course, ha ha. But I expect you covered all that.’

Osborne gave a brave smile.

‘Well, mustn’t hold you up.’

‘No.’

‘See you later.’

‘Yes.’

‘Don’t you ever get tired of sheds, Osborne?’

‘Never.’

‘Unlike some,’ said the deputy editor darkly, and girded himself to do battle with the subs.

Waiting for Osborne’s column later that evening, after everyone else had gone home, Michelle donned her pastry-cuffs, strapped a spotless pinny over her outfit, and tackled the reference books, rearranging them in strict alphabetical order, fixing them in a perpendicular position, and drawing them neatly to the extreme edge of the shelves. Having accomplished this, she scoured the coffee machine and dusted the venetian blinds, in the course of which activity she deliberately elbowed a large economy packet of Lillian’s cup-soups into a bin. Then she sat down at her typewriter and wrote some much-needed letters for the ‘Dear Donald’ page.

She loved this task. Few bona fide readers were writing to the magazine these days, and Michelle’s particular joy was to write the bogus letters ungrammatically and then correct them afterwards. Subbing was a great passion of Michelle’s; it was like making a plant grow straight and tall. ‘Dear Donald,’ she would type with a thrill. ‘As an old age pensioner, my Buddleia has grown too big for me to comfortably cut it back myself …’ She could barely prevent herself from ripping it straight out of the machine, to prune those dangling modifiers, stake those split infinitives. How quickly the time passed when you were having fun. The only thing that stumped her – as it always did – was the invention of fake names and addresses, because she could never see why one fake name sounded more authentic than any other. ‘G. Clarke, Honiton, Devon’ was how she signed each one of today’s batch, hoping that inspiration would strike later. She often chose G. Clarke of Honiton. She’d never been there, but she fancied that’s where all the readers lived.

Time to check up on Osborne, she thought, when ten letters from G. Clarke were complete, photocopied and subbed within an inch of their lives. She dialled Osborne’s number on the internal phone. It rang on his desk and startled him, so that he dropped an open bottle of Tipp-Ex on to his shoes.

‘Bugger,’ he said, as he answered the phone.

‘Going well, oh great wordsmith?’

Kneading his face, Osborne watched in helpless alarm as the correcting fluid seeped into the leather uppers of his only decent footwear.

‘Anything wrong?’

‘No, no. Nearly there, actually. Just got to think of the pay-off.’

‘Oh marvellous.’ Michelle sounded ironic, the way she often did on Wednesday nights. ‘That’s dandy.’ There was a pause.

‘Far be it from me,’ she said sweetly, ‘but have you mentioned that he writes in his shed? And that this explains the repeated use of weed-killer as a murder weapon in the books? You know what I mean: he looks up from his rude desk of logs for inspiration, and there’s the weed-killer, next to the bone-meal. In the one I took on holiday last year, he killed off the prime suspect with a garden rake. One blow to the back of the neck, and that was it. Nasty. In the latest book, I understand, someone is dealt the death-blow with a pair of shears.’

‘What are you talking about? Who do you mean?’

‘Trent Carmichael. This week’s “Me and My Shed”. The crime writer.’

Osborne thought a minute, thought another minute, remembered everything – in particular the bestselling author laughing apologetically, ‘Well, er, the cat got locked in the shed once, but no foul play was suspected!’ – and said, ‘I’ll call you back.’

Things were looking bad. He unlaced his shoes, took them off, and on bended knee started to scrub them upside down on the carpet, hoping to remove the worst of the whitener while deciding what to do next. He looked up to see Michelle standing beside him.

‘No, you’ve got it wrong,’ he said, keeping his eyes on the floor, his pulse pounding in his neck. ‘Trent Carmichael is next week. You wouldn’t know whether this stuff washes out, would you?’

‘So who is it this week?’

‘Angela Farmer,’ he mumbled.

‘Who?’

‘Angela Farmer.’

‘No. Are you sure?’

‘Of course I’m sure.’

‘That’s very odd.’

‘No, I met her on Monday. Not odd at all. Nice woman.’

Michelle narrowed her eyes as though to contest the point, and then decided not to bother. She stretched her arms instead; this conversation clearly had nowhere to go.

‘How nice,’ she said. ‘I’d better not hold you up, then. Have you mentioned she’s got a tulip named after her?’

‘I thought it was a rose.’

‘No, tulip.’

Osborne looked like he might be sick. ‘Tell you what,’ said Michelle. ‘It’s been a hard day, I’ll look it up for you.’

Osborne sat in his stockinged feet, stroking the keys of his typewriter and staring into space. In all his years as a journalist, he had never before written up an interview that had not taken place. Why ever had he believed Tim? Tim didn’t know. How, moreover, could he extricate himself now he had gone so far? Not only had he cast all Trent Carmichael’s faint and unamusing witticisms into a broad American slang, but he was now also stuck with sentences referring to (a) love being like a red red tulip, and (b) a woman who viewed the world through tulip-tinted spectacles.

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.’

‘No, I didn’t.’

‘OK.’

Makepeace changed the subject.

‘A doddle though, presumably?’

‘Oh yes. The piece is half-written already, if I’m honest.’

He started fiddling with his string bags. ‘I ought to check where she lives, I suppose, since I’ve got to arrange to get there on Monday,’ he said, and distractedly pulled out a few scarves and Paris street-maps. ‘I’ve got a diary in here somewhere.’

‘More coffee?’ asked Makepeace, and went to order it while Osborne delved among tangerines and library books, muttering, ‘He said rose, though’ several times under his breath.

‘Ah, here we are.’ The diary was found. ‘Honiton,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘Angela Farmer’s address. Honiton in Devon.’ They looked at one another.

‘You mean, like, Honiton where the nuts come from?’

‘Oh, bugger. Bugger it, yes, I think I do.’

3

A hard day at the typesetters had left Tim pale and drawn. His big specs felt heavy on his face, and a deep weariness sapped his soul as he trudged back from the tube station with only a few minutes to spare before his Friday night curfew of half-past seven. Being the sort of chap who responds to pressure by withdrawing deeper and tighter into his own already shrink-wrapped body, Tim was often on Friday nights so tautly pulled together that he was actually on the verge of turning inside out. Not surprisingly, then, he carried himself pretty carefully for those last few yards to the front door. After all, the merest nudge in the right place, and flip! it might all be over.

It would be unfair to say, as many had, that Tim’s outer coolness masked an inner coolness underneath. But peeling the layers off Tim was not a job many people could be bothered to undertake, especially since Tim did so little to encourage them. Once, when Tim was a small boy, he foolishly dug up some daffodil bulbs from his mother’s flower-beds to see how they were doing (this was a favourite story of his ex-girlfriend Margaret, who thought it so funny she snorted like a pig when she told it). Well, it was Tim’s great misfortune in life that nobody (including Margaret) had ever thought to dig him up in the same way, just to check that healthy growth was still a possibility.

Most people, then, considered Tim cool, aloof and just a bit of a geek (because of the specs). And that was it. To his own mother he was a daffodil murderer, a mystery never to be solved. To Margaret (a smug psychology graduate) he was a textbook obsessive. Only his cat, Lester, was really bothered to get better acquainted with him. But then, as the cynics will gladly tell you, any emotional cripple with a tin-opener is of devotional interest to his cat.

Today Tim was especially worried about the emotional turmoil ahead. A new proprietor, indeed – good grief, the whole thing spelt change, and he hated the sound of it. Textbook obsessives rarely disappoint in certain departments, and Tim was not the man to transgress the rules of an association. Thus, the past week had seen him dutifully fretting to the point of dizziness about the smallest of matters slipping from his control. The Independent had gone up by five pence! On Tuesday he had forgotten to change his desk calendar to the right day! Tonight he had trodden on an odd number of paving stones on his walk home from the tube! Tim never worried about things he could actually do something about – he never, for example, grew cross with the printers on Fridays, as Michelle did, when they were inefficient or lazy. But powerlessness made him frantic. The selling of the magazine to a new proprietor whose intentions were obscure – well, that was the kind of thing to drive him nuts.

It was with a genuine lack of enthusiasm that he unlocked the door to the flat. Since Margaret moved out, the place seemed spooky; he kept finding Margaret-shaped holes in its fabric. There were gaps in the bookshelves, empty drawers, an exactly half-filled bathroom cabinet, a clearly defined gap in the dust on the kitchen surface where her Magimix formerly stood. If he had been a sentimental person, he would have considered it sad. Nobody muttered ‘For Pete’s sake’ when Tim checked the door for the fifth time before going to bed; nevertheless he heard the words not being spoken. Margaret’s absence, to be honest, was more conspicuous to Tim than her presence had been. Sometimes, when he was changing the bed-linen, he had an awful feeling he would draw back the duvet and find a crude Margaret-shaped outline on the bottom sheet, like the ones the American cops draw around homicide victims on sidewalks.

The only thing she had left behind was the cat, a ginger tom with a loud purr, who wrecked Tim’s attempts to work at home by ritually jumping up on every sheet of important paper (with wet paws), and then ceremoniously parking his bum on it. So Tim had stopped trying to work at home (which was a good thing). The only trouble was, he couldn’t quite get the hang of feeding the cat at proper times, so that now, as Tim roved the dark, joyless flat turning on lights, Lester followed him about, making intense feed-me-Oh-God-feed-me noises combined with much unambiguous trouser-nudging. Tim shrugged distractedly and reached for a pad of sticky Post-it notes. FEED CAT, he wrote on the top sheet. This he peeled off and stuck to the nearest door-frame before continuing his perambulations.

As he moved into the hall he barely noticed that on every door-frame there were dozens of similar notes, slightly overlapping, as though left over from some jolly atavistic maypole ritual. He saw them, of course, because they were unmissable –

REMEMBER AUNTIE JOAN AT CHRISTMAS

DRY HAIR AFTER SHOWER

FEED CAT

JAMMY DODGERS ON OFFER AT PRICERIGHT

CHECK DOOR

FEED LESTER

TELL OSBORNE NOT TO WORRY ABOUT NEW EDITOR – SHEDS EVER GREEN

– he just didn’t see anything odd.

Something a great deal more lively awaited Michelle when she too reached home that evening, at roughly the same hour. Mother – a nice-looking, grey-haired old woman in natty, mauve velour track-suit and trainers – was poised and ready in the darkened living-room, having planned the moment with the precision of a true enthusiast. Just as Michelle’s key entered the lock, Mother tipped a number of smouldering cigarette butts on to the carpet around her wheelchair, pressed the button on the CD remote control (so that Irving Berlin’s ‘Always’ began to play) and finally flung herself back in her seat – in what she hoped was an attitude of death from filial neglect. A momentary quandary about whether her eyes should be open or closed was hastily resolved, so that when Michelle burst into the room shouting, ‘All right, all right, what is it this time?’ she saw her mother’s wide, staring eyeballs reflecting the little blue flames that were just beginning to reach up out of the Wilton.

There was artistry in it, undoubtedly, but Michelle had seen it before. Also, she could not help thinking – even as she stamped out the fire and switched off the music – that the gory hatchet-through-the-head accessory was slightly gilding the lily.

Meanwhile, in a nice living-room in south London, Osborne studied the expensive curtains (the words ‘Very Peter Hall’ came to mind, but he couldn’t think why) and pondered the advantages of house-sitting as a way of life.

‘House-sitting’: how calm and steady it sounds. There is nothing steadier, after all, than a house; no posture more shock-resistant than sitting. Osborne, the man who sat in other people’s sheds as a profession, also sat in other people’s living-rooms when he went home. And as far as he was concerned, it was great, because it was cheap. The deal was, he stayed for free in other people’s flats and watered their plants, while they took nice foreign holidays or worked abroad. People trusted him, it seemed; and then they recommended him to other people, who in turn gave him their keys and wrote him chummy notes about fish-food and window-locks, and afterwards overlooked the breakages. Osborne came with recommendations. He was easygoing and honest, though not particularly house-trained. Most people figured that, in a house-sitter, two out of three wasn’t bad.

For the past few weeks he had been living in the home of an old journalist friend whose job had taken him to Los Angeles for six months. The Northern Line ran directly underneath this flat, and Osborne liked to listen to the trains rumbling in the tunnels far below. He had noticed that you could feel the tremor even outside on the busy street, and he liked it; it made him feel safe. But tonight he was rattled; for he had had a perplexing day. He could hardly believe, for one thing, that he had really sat helpless in the Birthplace of Aphrodite and agreed to let Makepeace come with him to Honiton on Monday (were they really going in Makepeace’s van?). And worse than that, he seemed to remember saying that Makepeace could ‘sit in’ during the Angela Farmer interview. ‘I’ll just observe,’ his friend had said. What? Since when was ‘observing’ such an innocuous activity? Observing counted as threatening behaviour. The thought of Makepeace observing made him almost want to cry.

Taking refuge in food, Osborne popped along to the kitchen with the intention of knocking up a tasty meal, an intention which (if nothing else) paid tribute to hope’s triumph over experience, since Osborne had never succeeded in creating a tasty meal in his life. Recipe books scared him, especially when they had jaunty titles such as One is Fun!, so his usual method was to open a few tins of things left behind by the absent home-owner – some tinned spaghetti, say, and a slab of tuna – and mix it up in a bowl, with prunes for afters. This he would place on a tray with a glass of expensive cognac from a bottle found stashed behind the gas meter, and then eat in front of the TV.

Osborne entertained few qualms about helping himself to the stuff people left behind in cupboards. Being unacquainted with the notion of housekeeping, he assumed that food and booze just sort of belonged in the house and should be used accordingly. Only once had he encountered hostility to this view, when he pointed out to a returning home-owner that her supply of toilet paper had run out halfway through his six-month stay. He had been obliged to buy some more, he said, the full astonishment of the experience still making him shake his head in disbelief. The woman in question, brown and dusty from six months’ fending for herself in the Australian outback (with no Andrex supplier within a thousand miles), took this news by merely gaping and gesticulating, speechless.

It was hard to imagine interviewing someone with Makepeace listening in. ‘The maestro at work,’ Makepeace had said, with an insinuating smile. Was this man mad, or what? Osborne had certainly done some good stuff in his time (the David Essex, as aforementioned, was unsurpassable), but methodology was not his strong point, heaven knew. Osborne was convinced that Makepeace merely wanted to expose him; what other motive could he have? He imagined the scene: himself pretending to consult his notes while panicking what to ask next, Angela Farmer croaking ‘You OK, honey?’ and handing him a clean tissue for the sweat dribbling in his eyes, and Makepeace stepping in with some smart-arse brilliant question and hijacking the whole enterprise. Bluffing was hard work at any time, without being watched.

Twiddling some cold Heinz spaghetti on a spoon, he looked up to see that Angela Farmer, by some happy coincidence, was on the television screen right this minute, in her new smash-hit sitcom Forgive Us Our Trespasses As We Forgive Those Who Trespass Against Us. He could hardly believe his good fortune. ‘Blimey, research,’ he remarked aloud, with his mouth full, ‘that’s a bit of luck.’ In the old days, of course, when he was young and keen, he would have looked for Angela Farmer’s name in the reference books, got some cuttings from a newspaper library, swotted up, requested tapes from the BBC Press Office. But these days he reckoned that a chance sighting of his subject on the box was quite sufficient to be going on with. A person’s curriculum vitae, he had discovered, rarely had much bearing on their relationship with the shed.

‘Nice-looking woman,’ he said, and got up to look at her more closely. ‘Makepeace is right, she’s great.’ But then, as he got closer to the screen, he suddenly felt all weightless again – and it wasn’t the prunes, because he hadn’t eaten them yet. ‘Don’t I know you?’ he said, and peered at Angela Farmer more closely still. ‘I do, don’t I? I know you from somewhere.’ But of course she didn’t enlighten him. She was on the telly, after all.

The sitcom was a humdrum affair (as so many are) in which Ms Farmer played a wisecracking New Yorker called Eve, opposite a limp-wristed British aristo named Adam. Osborne checked the title again in the paper – Forgive Us Our Trespasses – and decided not to worry too deeply about this interesting confusion of Old and New Testaments, because it was probably the product of ignorance rather than design. Adam was played by another famous TV star (in whose sparkling greenhouse it had once been Osborne’s privilege to feel sweat in his eyes); and the idea of the piece was that Adam and Eve did not get on. That was all. The remarkable serendipity of their names was oddly never remarked on, although the title sequence did show an animated naked couple enveloped by a serpent and dithering over a pound of Coxes. What a shame, thought Osborne, that ‘Lead Us Not into Temptation’ had already been snapped up by that game show on ITV, and that this Adam-and-Eve vehicle had nothing to do with original sin (or trespass) in any case. But the audience seemed to like it. They laughed like drains every twenty seconds or so, whenever Eve and Adam had another hilarious collision of wills.

‘Milk or lemon?’ a hotel waiter would ask.

‘Milk,’ piped Adam; ‘Lemon,’ barked Eve (both speaking simultaneously); Hargh, hargh, hargh, went the audience.

But Osborne had stopped listening to the dialogue and had even abandoned the delights of his Tuna Surprise; he was peering at the snarling close-ups of Angela Farmer with an increasing unease, his initial frisson of recognition having broadened and deepened until it flowed through his body like a river and leaked out horribly at his toes.

‘Inside or outside?’

‘In,’ said Adam; ‘Out,’ said Eve; and the audience roared again.

Osborne felt ill. Had she said ‘Out’? Where had he heard her say ‘Out’ like that? Perhaps it was his imagination, but he suddenly felt quite certain he had heard Angela Farmer say ‘Out’ in that pointed manner before. And the horrible thing was, she must have said it to him.

Back at Tim’s flat, Forgive Us Our Trespasses was also playing. There wasn’t much on the other channels that evening. But in any case, Forgive Us was the sort of television Tim particularly enjoyed: safe, predictable, and OK if you missed bits when suddenly you felt the urge to check that the fridge light still worked. Watching Eve with interest, he found that he rather envied Osborne’s luck in interviewing Ms Farmer; he must ask him what she was really like, beyond the parameters of the shed stuff. He reached for a Post-it pad and wrote tell OSBORNE I THINK A.F. IS A V. FINE ACTRESS, and stuck the label on the side of the coffee-table.

Lester made a noise that sounded like ‘meat’ (but it might have been ‘me, eat’), and arched his back before sinking his front claws into the chair and ripping. Teatime was long past, yet the happy clink of spoon on cat-bowl was yet to be heard, and Lester was running out of hints. Why was Tim so oblivious to feline nuance? It was enough to drive a cat crackers. So it was back to ripping the sofa, even though he didn’t really feel like it. ‘How banal, really,’ thought Lester, as he dug in, and the fabric made poc, poc, poc-opoc-poc noises, like fireworks on Chinese New Year. ‘How stupid.’

‘Just stop that!’ said Tim in a voice so loud and commanding that Lester sprang back and gave him a look. Tim stirred in his chair, but Lester was right not to race to the kitchen, for it was a false alarm. Tim reached for his pad again. BE MORE PATIENT WITH LESTER, he wrote, and, at a loss where to put it, stuck it on the cat.

Makepeace sat at his typewriter, not watching the TV, and composed the covering letter for his Come Into the Garden book review, every word of which was an obvious lie to anyone who knew him.

Dear Tim [he wrote; actually this part not a lie exactly, but read on], Sorry [not at all] you did not receive this by fax on Thursday as requested, but as I explained on the phone I faxed it from the copy shop [no, he didn’t] and then lost my original while gardening [stretching it a bit here, but there you are]. So I have retyped this from notes [yawn] and hope you like it. I actually think it came out better the second time! [clever touch this, the maestro at work, as it were].

Funny, I agree, that we didn’t bump into one another at the launch of the Fruit Garden books last week [he wasn’t there]. I was definitely there [see previous note]! In fact, I looked high and low for you, but couldn’t see you [classic turning of tables; never fails to convince].

All the best,

M. Makepeace

Miles eastward along the river, past Greenwich Reach and the Isle of Dogs, Lillian was sitting with her feet up watching Forgive Us Our Trespasses, just like everybody else. From the steamy kitchen she could hear the pleasant sounds of George (the hubby) making dinner, and she looked up in proper feeble-invalid fashion to see him present her with a pre-prandial cup-soup, made especially in her favourite Bunnykins mug. Some people might balk at the idea of cup-soups forming any part of an evening meal, but somehow it had become part of the routine. The idea was that, with God’s help of course, it would keep up Lillian’s strength until the arrival of solid food.

‘Dwarling,’ he said in a singsong baby voice. (I’m sorry if this is ghastly, but it’s true.) Lillian looked up, saw the cup-soup, pretended it was all a big surprise and gave him a sweet, affected, little-girl look that was enough honestly to freeze the blood of any disinterested onlooker. She peered into the bunny-mug and frowned a deep frown.

‘No cru-tongs, bunny,’ she lisped, her mouth turned down in disappointment.

‘Poor bunny,’ agreed her husband (who by day, incidentally, was a used-car salesman). ‘No cru-tongs for bunnywunny.’

He hung his head, extended his arms behind his back and kicked his instep.

Fortunately, she smiled her forgiveness, and the moment of conflict passed. Otherwise there might have been a tantrum. But tonight they made secret-society gestures with their little fingers, as proof that the no-crutong incident had been forgotten. Don’t ask. They just seemed to enjoy it, that’s all.

‘Bunny tired?’ asked Mister Bunny, after a pause.

‘Bunny werry tired.’

‘Did the phone never stop ringing again?’

‘Never.’ Lillian pouted and delicately picked some fluff off her teddy-slippers, real tears of childish anguish starting in her eyes.

‘Phone went ring ring ring ring ring ring –’

‘Poor bunny, with phone going ring.’

‘Yes, poor bunny.’

‘Nice spinach for tea, make bunny stwong.’

‘Bunny never be stwong, bunny.’

‘I know,’ said Mister Bunny, with a tinge of heart-felt regret. ‘Poor poor bunny-wunny.’

‘Mmm,’ said Lillian, closing her eyes.

Osborne was trying to make notes for his interview on Tuesday, but somehow the usual all-purpose questions about sheds looked rather hollow and unsatisfactory: ‘Old shed/new shed? Shed important/unimportant? Hose kept in shed? Or not? (Any funny hose anecdotes?)’

He looked at the TV screen and there she was again, this amazing blonde woman with the mystery and the scarifying attitude.

‘Singles or double?’ asked a hotel receptionist.

‘Double,’ said Adam; ‘Singles,’ barked Eve.

It was the last line of the show, and Osborne switched off just before the inevitable gale of appreciative studio applause. Looking at his notebook, he saw he had written: ‘Bugger the trespasses and bugger the shed. Why didn’t you tell me who you were?’ And now he looked at it, aghast, because he didn’t have a clue what it meant.

Michelle heard the closing music to Forgive Us Our Trespasses from the kitchen, where she had just discovered a cache of trick daggers and tomato ketchup wedged behind the U-bend in the cupboard under the sink. She felt a twinge tired of all this, though far be it from her, etcetera. Nobody at the office knew about Mother; it was such a sad old commonplace for a single professional woman to have a loony mum at home that she simply wouldn’t stand for anyone to know, especially not Lillian; she wanted to circle the offending cliché in thick blue pen and send it back for a rewrite. But life is not susceptible to sub-editing, by and large, and the mad mum remained fast embedded in Michelle’s text. Mother was a liability – mischievous, hurtful and addicted to practical jokes. Underneath the sink Michelle found an invoice, too: evidently Mother’s latest consignment from her favourite mail-order novelty company included a new severed hand which had not yet come to light.

She sat back on her heels for a moment and, without undue self-pity, considered what she had to put up with. The irony was unbearable. Here she was, possibly the only person in the world who knew the difference between ‘forbear’ and ‘forebear’, and she was also the only person of her acquaintance who was consistently obliged to put both words together in the same sentence.

Tim made a note, WATCH FORGIVE US OUR TRESPS NEXT FRIDAY DON’T FORGET, and attached it to his jumper with a safety-pin, next to GO TO BED AT SOME POINT – which he had written carefully backwards, to be read when he caught sight of himself in a mirror.

Lillian and Mister Bunny pulled faces at one another, trays on their laps, and affected diddums-y thoughts as the credits rolled. (I’m sorry.)

‘Dat wath qw’ goo’,’ said Mister Bunny.

‘Mmm,’ said Lillian, ‘but this spinach was gooder!’

Makepeace wrote another letter, beginning with the words ‘Can’t understand how this did not reach you by post, although I wonder now whether your secretary gave me the correct address.’ He noted without pleasure that he could type this particular sentence as quickly as he could do ‘The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.’

Angela Farmer switched off the TV and consulted her diary. ‘Oh yeah,’ she remarked to no one in particular, ‘the schmuck from the gardening magazine. I suppose I better mention the goddam tulip.’

And Lester the cat, festooned with Post-it notes, made his way to the darkened kitchen, knocked a tin of Turkey Whiskas to the floor, and rolled it carefully with his nose and paws in the general direction of the living-room. If that stupid bastard fails to get the hint this time, he thought, I’ll scream.

4

The magazine for which all these people worked was a modest weekly publication, usually running to thirty-two or forty pages, with a circulation of around twenty thousand. In its far off post-war heyday – which none of the present staff could remember – it had achieved a sale four times greater, but during the sixties, seventies and eighties its appeal had dipped, declined and finally levelled out; and today it would not be unkind to say that in the broad mental landscape of the average British newsagent, Come Into the Garden was virtually invisible to the naked eye.

This vanishing act represented a great lost opportunity. Gardening had become a lot more sexy in the past ten years, the garden centre had almost supplanted the supermarket as a magnet for disposable dosh, and the urgent question of morally defensible peat substitutes had become the staple talk of middle-class dinner tables; yet Come Into the Garden still somehow failed to clean up. Michelle was often struck by the sad image of her beloved magazine pathetically sheltering indoors in the breezy climate of the 1980s while other, brighter, glossier monthly publications came stumping heartily into its territory, utterly oblivious to its existence. She imagined these competitors taking a quick glance round, sniffing the wind, and then digging energetically with flashy stainless steel implements, heedlessly scattering the sod.

Michelle’s picture did not end there, either. It was remarkably colourful and detailed. For example, Come Into the Garden wore a pair of brown corduroys, tied at the knee with string, and an old jumper with holes, and plimsolls, while the rivals were togged in Barbour jackets, riding boots and aristocratic flat caps, rather like the pictures of Captain Mark Phillips in Hello! magazine. Michelle was good at mental pictures. Once, when she observed Lillian standing tall, knock-kneed, spare-tyred and stupid in the middle of the office, the word ‘Ostrich!’ leapt quite unbidden to her mind, and she had relished the analogy ever since. She had successfully thought of other animal-types for the remainder of her colleagues, too. But luckily – apart from flinging the odd ‘Oink, oink’ noise at a departing back – she kept this personal taxonomy to herself.

The depressing thing about working for Come Into the Garden, however, was not the variety of wildlife. It was that the general public had this awful habit of remembering it from years ago, placing it on the same conceptual shelf as Reveille, the Daily Sketch, Noggin the Nog and Harold Macmillan. ‘Blimey,’ they said, shaking their heads in disbelief, ‘my Nan used to read that; is it really still going?’ – at which one could only smile weakly and try not to take offence. It was nobody’s fault, this widely held assumption that Come Into the Garden had long since sought eternal peace in the great magazine rack in the sky. Nevertheless, it required strength of character for those intimately acquainted with the title not to take such comments personally. After all, it was a bit like being accused repeatedly of outliving your own obituary, or being dead but not lying down.

Imagine the difficulty of applying for other jobs. Michelle in particular had tried quite strenuously to outgrow Come Into the Garden, but she had been compelled to realize that citing her occupation as chief sub of this magazine sounded suspiciously like Coronation Programme Seller, or Great Fire of London Damage Assessor: prospective employers simply assumed she hadn’t worked for years. On the whole she bitterly envied the sensible, big-headed young journalists who had joined the title only to use it as a tiny stepping-stone en route to bigger things. They had come into the garden (as it were) and then pissed right off again, with no regrets, and moreover without a trace of loam on their fancy shoes. She did not blame them for this, she just despised them – a feeling she expressed quite eloquently by affecting never to have heard of them (‘Paul who? Doesn’t ring any bells’) whenever their names were raised.

Editors too had come and gone, almost on a seasonal basis, but that wasn’t so bad, because mostly they kept themselves to themselves. And if they tried anything clever, Lillian was a highly effective means of damage control, since she paid absolutely no attention to anything they asked her to do. At the time of this story – the early 1990s – Come Into the Garden had seen four editors in five years, but it would be fair to say that ‘seeing’ was literally the limit of the acquaintance. A police line-up featuring all four of them would not necessarily elicit a flicker of recognition. By now, the long-standing staffers had grown quite blasé about meeting new bosses – content merely to count them in and then count them all out again. Indeed, when this dull Mainwaring chap (James? John?) had first settled his ample bum into the editor’s chair in July, Lillian had asked him straight off, day one, what sort of thing he fancied for a leaving present, on the principle that it would save awkwardness later on.

Lillian thrived on the chaos of mismanagement. Half the time she had no boss at all (and she refused to work for anyone besides the editor), and the other half she could spend in playing lucky dip with the post-bag, or aggressively blocking the paths of busy, timid people (such as Tim) with sudden rockfalls of inane chat. Lillian’s behaviour was quite easy to predict, by the way, once you realized she was talkative in inverse proportion to the amount of talk anyone cared to hear at that particular moment. It was an infallible gift. Thus, when she was asked to disseminate important news, she automatically clammed up, kept her counsel, went home, phoned in sick next day. Whereas when everyone was bustling, agitated and far too busy to listen, she did the famous Ancient Mariner impression, expertly mooring them to the spot with heavy verbal anchors about sod all.

‘Oh, look!’ she would announce to no one in particular, flapping an envelope in her tongs too fast for anyone to see what it was. ‘Someone’s written to Mike McCarthy!’

She would look around to see what effect this was having. And she would know, with the instinct of a top professional, that the sullen, negative take-up (people staring at walls, and so on) meant she actually had the room in the palm of her hand.

‘But don’t you see? Mike McCarthy left ages ago!’

At this point young Tim might rashly attempt to tiptoe past, but be tugged forcibly to a halt by tight invisible chains.

‘You must remember Mike McCarthy, Tim!’ she shrieked. ‘He was the editor who tried to do away with the “Dear Donald” page, just because his name wasn’t Donald! For heaven’s sake. I kept telling him, didn’t I, nobody’s name is Donald!’

And not for the first time, Tim would wriggle miserably, like bait on a hook, and think how clever Ulysses had been, in the old story, to lash himself to a mast, with ear-plugs.

That Tim did not remember Mike McCarthy, Lillian knew full well. Tim had been deputy editor for only a year, and had taken the job straight from a postgraduate journalism course. In fact, at the time of Mike McCarthy’s ill-fated editorship, Tim had still been a quiet bespectacled schoolboy dreaming of a career modelled on Norman Mailer’s, and wondering how his myopia, general weediness and night-time emissions would affect his chance of success. But it was Tim’s newness, more than his youth, that put him at a disadvantage where Lillian was concerned, despite the fact he had done more for the magazine in a year than she had done since circa 1978. Michelle and Lillian had come into the garden long before everyone else, and the length of their stay was an accomplishment for which they both demanded a high level of respect. At the all-too-frequent leaving parties – for the transient editor (or whoever) whose nugatory role in the magazine’s forty-year history was ruthlessly scratched from the record the moment he hit the pavement outside (‘Mike who? I don’t recall’) – the heroic span of Lillian and Michelle was usually trotted out again, mainly because it was the one single topic either of them could be persuaded to talk about in company.

For people with so little in common, it was noticeable how much Michelle and Lillian made comparisons with one another. True, they were the same age, forty-two; they had both worked at Come Into the Garden for fifteen years; and neither could stick being in the same room with the other. But that was it; these were the only points at which their experience coincided. On this crucial length-of-service issue, in fact, Michelle could just remember life before Lillian, in that same wistful glimpse-of-yesterday’s-sunshine sort of way that some people can just remember being happy before the war, or sex before Aids, or global innocence before the Bomb. And when asked politely by craven sub-editors about the changes she had seen (at those godforsaken leaving parties amid the crisps and sausage rolls), Michelle was good at saying, with her eyes fixed musingly on the ceiling, ‘Well, funnily enough I can just remember life before Lillian,’ pronouncing the words with such perfectly judged emphasis that everyone latched on to the war-Aids-and-Bomb analogy without it ever being openly stated.

Come Into the Garden was a miserable, inert place to work, no doubt about it. Osborne’s joy in turning up once a week to soak up the atmosphere was a measure of his desperation, nothing more. This was the sort of office where the plants embraced easeful death like an old friend, the stationery cupboard gave a wild, disordered suggestion of marauders on horseback, and nobody washed the coffee cups until the bacterial cultures had grown so active they could be seen performing push-ups and forward-rolls. There is a theory that says if employees have few outside distractions (i.e. don’t have much of a home-life), they will make the most of work, but in the case of Come Into the Garden the opposite appeared to be true. Miserable at home meant dismal all round. The words ‘Get a life!’ were once hurled at an affronted Michelle by a fly-by-night sub as he stalked out one day at the typesetters, never to return. It was a brutal thing to say (the other subs exchanged significant glances before silently dividing the recreant’s bun), yet nobody could deny it was an accurate assessment of the problem.

For Michelle’s self-sacrifice was an appalling trap, with glaringly few personal compensations. And unfortunately it affected everyone, because she measured commitment by the yardstick of her own strict voluntary martyrdom. People resented this; it put them in a no-win situation. Besides the sub-editors under Michelle’s control whom we have heard about, there were four colleagues with status equal or superior to hers – art editor (Marian), features editor (Mark), advertising manager (Toby) and deputy editor (Tim) – all of whom periodically took grave offence at Michelle’s continual assertion that she cared a hundred times more about the magazine than they could possibly do. ‘No, no, you go home, Tim,’ she would say. ‘Why should you hang around? I know how you love Inspector Morse. Leave everything to me. I’m usually here until half-past nine anyway. I’ve been here for fifteen years, don’t forget; I ought to be used to it by now!’

Michelle’s big mistake was to suppose she had no illusions. Just because she had seen a few dozen colleagues come and go, loam-free, and had sub-edited several hundred celebrity interviews about sheds (in which Osborne did indeed make all the sheds sound the same), she thought she had seen it all. But alas, she was wrong. A lifetime of rewriting ‘Me and My Shed’ was not the worst hand fate could deal you, not by a long chalk. What she was yet to discover, as she sat on the kitchen floor on that Friday night with only the unknown whereabouts of Mother’s trick severed hand to disturb her mind, was that James Mainwaring (or was it John?) had already been declared the last editor of Come Into the Garden. The last ever, that is. If all went according to plan, those anxious readers who had phoned about ‘Build your own greenhouse’ had been absolutely right to worry: they would soon be left high and dry with a stack of panes and a lot of wet putty on their hands. And Come Into the Garden, for all the sacrifice it had wrung from Michelle, would return to the earth from which it came; ashes to ashes, compost to compost, dust to dust. No one at Come Into the Garden would survive to say ‘Michelle who?’ some day; nothing would remain.

For while she knew that the publishers, Wm Frobisher, had sold the title along with its lucrative seaside postcards business to an extremely youthful entrepreneur in the West Country, she did not yet know that the said young whippersnapper had decided immediately to close it down, merely retaining the Victoria premises of Come Into the Garden for his own personal headquarters. She did not know that the typesetters and printers had already been contacted by the whippersnapper’s solicitors; or that a personal letter to each of the staff was already sitting on the whippersnapper’s breakfast nook, awaiting signature. The little upstart had already inspected the building with his dad, in fact, and the spooky truth was that he had taken one look at Michelle’s little corner and earmarked it immediately as the proposed position for his own executive desk. He had even helped himself to one of her Extra Strong Mints and admired her range of nail varnish.

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