With One Lousy Free Packet of Seed

  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 t
he 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 obser
ved 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.