With One Lousy Free Packet of Seed. Lynne Truss

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,