With One Lousy Free Packet of Seed (10 page)

(‘No!’ he whimpered.)

(Makepeace struggled for breath.)

‘Fuck!’ shouted Makepeace. The effect of this letter was quite extraordinary. He had started hyperventilating. In fact, he was bent double and panting when Gordon’s dad put his head round the door and saw him.

‘Gotcha,’ said the fireman softly. And standing outside, he gently but firmly turned the door-key in the lock.

You might suppose that Osborne Lonsdale of
Come Into the Garden
had reached the stage in his career when he could no longer be surprised by a shed. He might have thought so himself. But this would be to reckon without the
shedus mirabilis
which was now revealed to his astounded eyes in Angela Farmer’s garden. How fantastic, you wonder, was Ms Farmer’s shed? Well, put it this way: if Cole Porter had known anything about sheds, this amazing specimen would have featured in the famous lyric ‘You’re the Top’ alongside the
Mona Lisa,
the Tower of Pisa and something that rhymed with ‘bed’.

Osborne was speechless with excitement. Having spotted the shed from the side of the house, he fairly raced towards it, clutching his airline bag and bunch of flowers with one hand and reaching out with the other, rather in the manner of someone who has been wandering aimlessly on an almost forgotten pilgrimage for the better part of his adult life and then beholds the Holy Grail, large as life and twice as graily. All thoughts of Gordon Clarke’s perverse desires were banished from his mind. This shed had a chimney! It had a little garden of its own and a picket fence! It was blue! It had guttering and leaded lights!

To a man who had spent a dozen years dressing up boring
sheds for the benefit of his readers, Angela Farmer’s exceptional shed was like manna from heaven; his heart filled with praise. Forget the Cole Porter thing and put it this way instead: if the
Magnificat
had been about sheds, Osborne would have dropped down on his knees and sung it. For one thing, all those years devoted to looking at second-rate sheds were now utterly vindicated: they had prepared him to bear expert witness to this wondrous structure. And for another, how immensely cheering to reflect that this week’s ‘Me and My Shed’ piece would be an absolute doddle to write.

Angela watched him from the kitchen window, a cup of coffee in her hand.

‘That man is nuts,’ she said.

‘Mmm,’ agreed Gordon.

‘He’s acting like a goddam lunatic.’

‘Well, I –’

‘Is the bunny safely indoors? I don’t want that rabbit spooked by a nutsy newspaperman.’

‘It’s upstairs, I think.’

‘Good.’

‘Actually, it was nibbling some TV script or other, the last time I saw it. I hope that was all right?’

‘Sure. Why not? A rabbit needs all the roughage it can get.’ She put on a coat. ‘Well, I suppose I’d better go talk to the crazy-man. Don’t look so worried, baby. Take my word for it, the guy is harmless. On the other hand, he does seem to be worshipping the outhouse. Do you suppose that’s normal?’

‘We had some really nice times in that shed, Auntie Angela,’ said Gordon wistfully, as if nice times were emphatically a thing of the past. ‘Do you remember? How you used to sing me songs?’

‘I remember that you sang them too.’

‘Did I?’

‘Sure. Duets. “You say neither and I say nie-ther”.’

Smiling, Gordon suddenly sang out, ‘“But oh, if we call the whole thing off, then we must part –”’

She joined in. ‘“But oh,”’ they sang together, ‘“if we had to part, then that might break my heart.”’

Osborne opened the little picket gate and stood enraptured. Neat little descriptive phrases were leaping in his writer’s mind like salmon in the spawning season; he felt refreshed, vigorous, inspired and glad, nay proud to be the author of ‘Me and My Shed’. For some reason, however, he also kept getting intrusive little flashes from a recent memory of the
Come Into the Garden
office, but he couldn’t think why. He looked at his shoe – at the Tipp-Ex mark, actually – but it wasn’t that. It was something to do with Tim. That’s right. Tim crouching beside his desk, asking questions about Angela Farmer. All those details about sheds, about her husbands and gerbils, and umpteen sitcoms. Osborne couldn’t remember much of it now, which was a nuisance.

‘Barney proposed to me in that shed,’ Angela told Gordon, as if reading Osborne’s mind. ‘You didn’t know that, did you?’

‘I did, I think. But I’d forgotten.’

‘Well, why should you remember? He left before you and your dad moved down here; he’s hardly been near me in ten years. He wasn’t a man for keeping in touch.’

‘Was it terrible, breaking up?’

‘No, it was predictable. It was never going to work. I said “neither” and he said “nie-ther”.’ She grimaced. ‘But to be honest, that was bearable. No, the trouble was that neither of us said “pot-ah-to”. We had to call the whole thing off.’

They looked out at the big, autumnal garden, and both shivered. Gordon rarely heard a word about Barney. The ex-husband could be buried out there in the cold ground with the invisible bulbs and tubers for all the difference it would make. All Gordon knew was that Angela’s second (and last)
marriage had endured for just five years, and that there had been no children, even though it had been Angela’s last chance of motherhood. She gave up quite a few things for that man. Before Barney, she had split her career between London and New York, but because Barney worked in British television (cockney character parts, mostly), she settled with him in England, bought the big house in Devon and the flat in town, even agreed with his decision not to have babies. And then he dumped her – just when her biological clock wound down and stopped. She never forgave him for that, and especially not for starting a family straight away with his next wife, his bimbo co-star on
For Ever and Ever Amen.
That was a real poke in the eye.

Barney was a louse, as Angela was fond of saying. He was, she said, ‘of the louse, lousy’. When the Angela Farmer tulip was announced, he sent her a postcard, from completely out of the blue, saying, ‘There you are, love! You got propagated after all! Ain’t nature wonderful?’ which made Angela so mad she set fire to the curtains.

Since Barney, there had been very few liaisons of the romantic variety, either in the shed or out of it. Angela spent most of her fifth decade alone, partly because she was happier that way, but also because the available talent for women her age was so sparse it was laughable. The brightest spot of the past ten years had occurred in a darkened cinema, when Angela saw to her amazement, in the movie
In Bed with Madonna,
that she was not the only famous glamorous woman who had trouble finding a mate. Men were intimidated by her, for God’s sake. If not by her intelligence, then by her fame; if not by her independence, then by her money. Her best girlfriend in the biz, Jerry Moffat, would sometimes talk to her about all this when they met at a London hotel for cocktails, but they didn’t particularly see eye to eye on the subject.

‘Poor babies,’ Jerry would sympathize, while a waiter
hovered nearby. ‘No wonder they’re threatened. They’re just so insecure, don’t you see?’

‘Fuck that,’ said Angela, handing back the bowl for more nuts. ‘Let’s have another drink.’

Jerry was the one friend of Angela’s who did not actively hate her for her success. As Angela had warned Gordon all those years ago in the shed, when
Digger
looked set to make him famous, it is easier for a camel to thread a needle with its eye than for a friend to forgive you for being recognized in Sainsbury’s on a Saturday afternoon. Even Jerry, to be honest, sometimes went home cursing after their meetings, because Angela was recognized by somebody and she wasn’t. Years ago, they had made a special trip along Shaftesbury Avenue to see Angela’s name being hung in lights outside a theatre. It had been Jerry’s idea to do it. But then, when they got closer and saw it, and Angela said, ‘Wow, can you believe that?’ Jerry mysteriously jumped in a taxi and drove off, holding a large white hanky to her face.

Angela knew she didn’t deserve the pariah treatment, but at least she understood the dynamic. The point was that she was funny. She was funny on stage, funny on TV, even faintly amusing in real life. Therefore the public didn’t just point at her across supermarkets, they responded to her personally. They came over, smiling, with their hands outstretched. Naturally this warmed her heart, but it was extremely galling for her friends. Going around with Angela was like being the sidekick of the Most Popular Girl in the Fifth. It was enough to drive anyone back to the camels and their frustrated attempts at ocular needlepoint. Angela, to reiterate, understood this. But unfortunately she didn’t see what she could do about it. And if guys were put off by it – if guys couldn’t cope with the public adoring her – then they weren’t worthy of the name ‘guys’, that’s all.

‘Fuck ’em,’ she muttered.

‘Sorry?’ said Gordon.

‘Forget it.’

She drained her cup and smartly zipped up her coat, the very picture of heroic resolve.

‘I’m going out now,’ she said. ‘I may be gone for some time.’

And she struck off down the garden in the manner of Captain Oates in a blizzard, her forearm pressed against her eyes, staggering occasionally to the left. Gordon laughed. For the time being, he had entirely forgotten the existence of the
Come Into the Garden
hit-squad. There was no one in the world he liked so much as Angela.

‘I want to show you something.’ Lillian breezed into Tim’s office and shut the door with a slam.

Tim pressed himself deep into his chair and held his breath. He really hated it when people shut the door of his room with him inside it. It made him want to scream. His glasses went all bleary with the heat rising off his jumper.

‘Actually, I’ve got rather a lot of work just now. This feature about mulching is the worst I’ve ever read and Makepeace has let us down again and if I don’t completely rewrite this in time for the two o’clock bike, which always comes at one forty-five I might add, it won’t be set up by tomorrow and then we won’t –’

Lillian snatched it from his hand and threw it in the bin.

‘Oh look, your desk calendar is wrong,’ she snarled.

‘What?’ Tim looked frantic.

It was Tuesday, wasn’t it? Still Tuesday? Wasn’t it?

‘Just kidding,’ she said. ‘Got you going, though.’

Tim stared at her and felt his heart race. He didn’t understand it. Lillian was the most irritating person he had ever
known, but she was usually wheedling and awful, or whinging and awful. Now, suddenly, she was aggressive and awful, too, and he didn’t think he could bear it.

‘Look at these,’ she said, and threw down on his desk a thick file full of photocopied letters. ‘Go on,’ she said. She seemed to mean business. In fact, he had the distinct impression that if he didn’t look at these letters straight away, she would get behind him and push his head down on them, like a dog having its nose rubbed in widdle on the carpet.

‘Er, thank you, Lillian.’

‘Look at them.’

‘Of course. But possibly later.’

‘Now.’

‘Right. Er, what are they, exactly?’

‘They were written by someone on the staff. She has been writing letters to this magazine under a false name for several years, and I would never have said anything about it, except that this time she has gone too bloody far.’

Lillian’s voice rose to an unearthly shriek. Tim looked at the file. It was an inch thick at least. ‘Could you leave them with me?’

‘No. You read them
now.’
She kicked a waste-bin with such force that it flew across the room and hit a partition wall, leaving a mark.

‘Fine. I’ll do that.’

‘She’s got a pash on Osborne, you understand.’

‘A what?’

‘She’s obsessed with him.’

This was more than Tim could take in. He didn’t know who this person was, but how could anyone be obsessed with
Osborne?

‘Are you sure?’

‘Read the letters.’

She didn’t move. Tim couldn’t think how to shift her.

‘I believe I can hear the phone ringing, Lillian.’

‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ she said, sitting down on his spare chair and producing her orange knitting from a large bag, ‘Get
real.’

When Angela Farmer opened the shed door and barked for humorous effect, ‘You! What do you think you’re doing in there?’ she disconcerted a very happy man. Osborne was gazing at the piles of sheet music, the collection of 78s, the wind-up gramophone, in silent ecstasy. What an amazing place. Only a cup cake could convert the experience into a transcendental one, he thought. Which meant he was in luck, actually, because providently he had bought a couple of boxes at the shops.