With One Lousy Free Packet of Seed (7 page)

Those spoof letters she wrote to Osborne from the unfortunate red-herring address in Honiton were only the latest of dozens she had written for her own amusement and then filed carefully in a special place in the office. In each brace of letters, moreover, she had conformed to the same schizoid pattern, making it a rule that for each saucy epistle there would be a reproving one of equal strength. Looking back on the two letters that (thanks to Lillian) had got away, she was proud of the part about the gold flip-flops and the gardening gloves, but relieved, on the whole, not to have made reference on this occasion to a particular sexual fantasy that recurred in the letters as it recurred in her dreams. She didn’t want to scare anyone unnecessarily, even under a false name. But this fantasy, for what it is worth, entailed the tying of Osborne’s wrists with garden twine, the staking of his body to a freshly turned flower-bed, and the stroking of his exposed nipples, ever so lightly, with the sharpened tines of a rusty, jumbo pitchfork. In some obscure way which Michelle had never dared pause to analyse, the idea gave her enormous pleasure.

Approaching Stonehenge, Makepeace ventured, ‘Perhaps you know Angela Farmer in the biblical sense.’ Osborne took a
moment to guess what his friend might be getting at, because his mind immediately leapt to Angela Farmer as the redoubtable Eve in
Forgive Us Our Trespasses –
in which case, of course, he
did
know her in the biblical sense, as did millions and millions of other people.

‘Are you talking about sex, Makepeace? Are you suggesting
Angela Farmer
would have sex with me? The well-known glamorous person? You must be further off your trolley than I thought.’

‘Why not? You’re a nice-looking bloke. I’ve seen how the women look at you down at the Birthplace of Aphrodite.’

Osborne suddenly felt rather warm and unbuttoned his coat. His window steamed up.

‘Just drop it,’ he said.

‘You’d make a nice couple, you and Angela – and the tulip. And she must have
buckets
of money.’

‘Look –’

‘You should get in there, I’m not joking. Take her some flowers. Tell her she’s got the nicest shed you’ve ever seen. Something like that.’

‘Leave it, please.’

‘I’ll bet you two dozen cup cakes she remembers you.’

‘Shut up. I mean it.’

It was just getting dark when they finally located their boarding house. Fortunately there were unlikely to be two B&Bs with a name like Dunquenchin in a small town like Honiton. ‘What does it mean, for fuck’s sake – that they’ve given up alcohol?’ asked Makepeace, as he noisily wrestled the bike out of the back of the van on Dunquenchin’s gravel drive. ‘Big fucking deal.’ He had been a bit tetchy ever since the conversation about Ms Farmer, Osborne had noticed, and was starting to
behave in the manner of a loose cannon. Perhaps Osborne’s notorious helplessness with street-maps had annoyed him (it annoyed most people); perhaps something nasty once happened to him in a town famous for lace and traffic jams. Either way, he had started to say ‘Fuck’ a lot, so it was fair to assume that something was up. ‘Fuck!’ he now exclaimed for no apparent reason, as he fixed the bits of his bike together. ‘Oh, fuck
this!’

‘You all right?’ asked Osborne.

‘Fuck off.’

‘We made it, though.’

‘Dun-fuckin-quenchin,’ Makepeace went on. ‘Jesus Fuck, what the fuck is that?’

Osborne wondered momentarily whether he had somehow stumbled into a Martin Scorsese movie, but he looked around and he was definitely still in Honiton at lighting-up time.

‘I expect there’s an explanation,’ he said in an attempt to mollify.

‘An explanation, he says. Fucking great. Mister Oz reckons there’s an explanation. So what will you be calling
your
retirement cottage, Mister Oz? Dun-buggerin-about? Or just Dun-doin-fuck-all?’

Osborne tried to ignore this, merely dragging his bag to the front door and peering in the dark for the doorbell. This was scarcely the right time to fall out with Makepeace, because for one thing they had booked a double room. He found the doorbell and pressed it. ‘Better than Dun-bloody-knowing-it-all,’ he muttered, but loudly enough for Makepeace to hear. Which was probably a mistake.

Makepeace threw the bike down with a clatter (that ominous
tring!)
and strode towards him, almost at a run.

‘Dun
what?’
he bellowed. Good grief, it was the horror of the pomegranates all over again. Osborne stifled a scream. ‘Dun fucking
what?’

At which point, luckily, the door opened to reveal the rather dramatic silhouette of a large man in an old fireman’s jacket, and Makepeace skidded to a halt on the stones. Osborne looked around in amazement. The man, who was observing Makepeace coolly from the step, appeared to be holding a metal hatchet in his hand, possibly with the intention of using it. Everything went terribly quiet. ‘It’s called Dunquenchin,’ he said softly to Osborne, absently polishing the blade with a large white hanky. ‘Does your friend’ – here he pointed with the weapon – ‘have a problem with that?’

‘Oh no, I don’t think so,’ said Osborne.

‘Mm.’

‘I’m really sorry about the shouting,’ continued Osborne, ‘but he’s been driving all day, and he’s a bit wound up.’

‘Wound up?’ said the man. ‘As Jeff Bridges so wittily remarks in
The Fabulous Baker Boys,
he’s a bloody alarm clock.’ They looked together at Makepeace, who had gone back to the van and was now inexplicably stamping on the ground in fury, as though involved in a strange Cossack dance of his own devising.

‘He’ll be all right if he can have a drink, I expect. “Dunquenchin” doesn’t mean you don’t serve drink, I hope?’

‘No, only that I don’t put out fires.’

Osborne looked at the uniform and said, ‘Ah.’

‘Just been giving a talk to some lacemakers. They loved the hatchet.’

‘I see.’

‘You on business?’

‘Oh yes.’

‘Name?’

‘We booked under the name of Makepeace. That’s him.’ The fireman considered him for a moment. ‘What does your friend do, apart from impressions of Rumpelstiltskin?’

‘He’s a writer.’

‘You don’t say. What does he write?’

‘Book reviews, mostly.’

‘It takes all sorts.’

Nobody else was staying at Dunquenchin that night, which was not surprising given the season. In the evening, therefore, Osborne and Makepeace sat alone in the small, chilly dining-room consuming a fairly good home-made soup, cream of cauliflower, and staring in glum silence at their host’s many fire-service mementoes decking the walls. Normal talk was impossible: for a start, Makepeace had overheard the Rumpelstiltskin comparison and was still sulking; but on top of that they both laboured under the usual inhibition of self-conscious visitors to guesthouses, a paranoid conviction that their conversation, however banal, was being not only overheard but possibly also written down.

Nothing could be further from the truth, of course, since the fireman obeyed the corollary rule of guesthouses, which says that the host pays very little attention to the diners (‘Brr, are you sure you’re warm enough?’ he said, not waiting for an answer, as he whisked away the soup bowls), and that the meal must be prepared with the maximum rumpus and no self-consciousness whatever about kitchen conversation travelling straight to the ears of the guests. So, ‘I gave them the last of the cauliflower soup,’ they heard him say to someone on the other side of the thin swing door. They tried not to listen, but they couldn’t help it. ‘Oh,’ replied another, younger, male voice. ‘Hadn’t it gone a bit whiffy?’ Osborne scratched his nose and looked hard at a shiny helmet, a medal and a large full-colour photo of a warehouse conflagration in 1975 – presumably a fire with happy memories for his host. ‘What
are they getting next, then?’ the conversation continued. ‘One of my famous risottos.’ ‘Blimey, Dad, is that all? You’re not exactly pushing the boat out.’ ‘Well, they’re a bit obnoxious, if you must know.’ ‘Oh, I see. How many nights?’ ‘Just the one, I hope.’ ‘Good.’

‘Shall we go out for a drink after this?’ asked Makepeace in a low whisper.

‘Good idea.’

‘I was in a bit of a mood earlier on.’

‘I noticed.’

‘I get moods like that sometimes.’

‘Right.’ If this was Makepeace’s way of saying sorry, ‘Right’ was all he was getting in return.

‘I don’t like it here.’

‘Nor do I.’

There was a pause.

‘Did you think the soup was whiffy?’ asked Osborne.

Makepeace didn’t reply.

There was another long pause while they stared at the walls, and the word ‘obnoxious’ bounced around the room.

Suddenly Makepeace let out a little shriek. ‘Oh, fucking hell,’ he rasped. ‘Look. You see the name on all this fireman crap? It’s Clarke.’

Osborne looked puzzled. ‘Clarke? What do you mean?’

‘Look at it,’ hissed Makepeace.
‘Clarke.
Of
Honiton.
You know. The flip-flops. It could be him, our friend with the shiny buttons.’

‘Oh, for heaven’s sake!’ exclaimed Osborne, forgetting to keep his voice down.

Makepeace signalled at him furiously, so he shut up. But Osborne was confused. Was this a joke, or what?

‘Listen.’ Makepeace now sounded urgent. He had picked up a spoon and was studying it carefully, as though thinking his way out of a dangerous situation. ‘Think back,’ he hissed,
importantly. ‘Does he know who you are? Did you give your name or anything when you booked?’

Osborne thought about it. ‘No, I gave yours. But –’

‘Whatever you do, don’t tell him, then. Funny letters are one thing, but he’s got a hatchet. Next thing you know, you’ll be on a one-way journey to the shed in a fireman’s lift.’

‘Listen, this is stupid.’ Osborne started to get up from the table, but at this point the door burst open and a young man with carroty hair entered with two bowls of steaming dinner, a side salad and a basket of bread, most of it precariously balanced on his forearms. He plonked it down, gave them a pleasant non-committal sort of smile, said, ‘Hello I’m Gordon, hope you’re warm enough in here, not very warm though is it,’ and promptly disappeared again, to rejoin the conversation off-stage.

Gordon. They looked at one another. That made him G. Clarke.

‘It’s him, then!’ said Makepeace. ‘The boy! It’s him!’

But by now Osborne had had enough. ‘All right, shut up,’ he said. ‘This is bloody silly. Just because his dad said you looked like Rumpelstiltskin, there’s no need –’

‘Come and “rummage in my shed”, big boy,’ Makepeace continued. “Phew, hot work, gardening”.’

‘I’m not listening.’

‘Keep your voice down,’ commanded Makepeace, and jerked his head towards the door so vehemently that they stopped arguing and started listening again. Which was unfortunate, really, the way things turned out later on.

‘Have you sent those
Come Into the Garden
letters yet, Gordon?’ shouted the older man over the drumming of water in a washing-up bowl.

‘Not yet,’ his son yelled back.

‘You ought to do it soon. I mean, if it’s urgent.’

‘I know.’

Osborne gulped. Makepeace, astounded, burst out laughing. ‘Urgent!’ he repeated, and pointed at Osborne’s face.