With One Lousy Free Packet of Seed Read online

  5

  ‘I love this van,’ said Makepeace, as he accelerated the old Fiesta away from the kerb with a screech of tyres and punched a few buttons on the crackly radio cassette so that a loud Dire Straits number drilled the air. Osborne, tightly duffled in his coat and fastened securely in his seat belt, clutched his overnight bag hard against his chest and, with his head thrown sharply back by the G-force of the take-off, prayed silently with his eyes closed to the patron saint of hopeless causes. But an immediate squeal, thunk and shout forced him to look up. Makepeace had belatedly noticed a large coach bearing down on them and braked, just in time, to a violent dead stop.

  It was an ominous beginning. The van rocked furiously on its chassis, and Makepeace’s push-bike shot forward from its position in the rear so that a hurtling handlebar struck Osborne quite forcibly on the back of the head. The sound of tring! is not usually associated with despair, but there is a first time for everything. Makepeace, incensed, grabbed his door handle, evidently with the intention of leaping out to defend his affronted honour, but fortunately the offending coach roared off in a haze of exhaust, because otherwise a rendezvous for pistols at dawn would surely have been appointed.

  ‘Pillock,’ averred Makepeace, turning the music a little louder. ‘Arsehole.’ At which the van lurched off again, this time (by an undeserved stroke of good fortune) locating a perfectly Fiesta-sized gap in the stream of westward rush hour traffic.

  Devon had never seemed further off than it did now to Osborne, as he contemplated London’s South Circular Road and imagined the grim prospect of his friend taking up cudgels for his legendary infallibility every six or seven yards between Putney and Stonehenge. ‘I did not pull out without indicating’; ‘But you did’; ‘I did not, you arsehole’; ‘You did, you fucking maniac’; ‘Take off those glasses and say that’; Biff!; ‘Aagh!’; Boff! Tinkle! Tring! If debate over traffic accidents tends to bring out aggression in people, Makepeace had just the right demeanour of overweening smugness to invite a nasty smack in the eye from virtually any fellow motorist not laid low by infirmity or disqualified from punch-ups by gender or divine ordinance. Mind you, come to think of it, ‘Take off that wimple and say that’ sounded pretty feasible, too.

  Osborne suddenly realized he couldn’t remember why he liked this bloke. ‘Do we need to fill up?’ he yelled above the din of music and engine, but his words were ignored. Shortly afterwards, however, Makepeace announced to no one in particular, ‘Hey, I’d better get some petrol,’ and swerved into a garage, narrowly missing a woman on crutches with a baby on her back.

  It is a misplaced perception tragically common among neurotics that dangerous situations are somehow not dangerous per se, but are merely sent to try them. Famous for worrying about nothing, the Osbornes of this world paradoxically respond to genuinely scary situations by affecting not to notice, because somehow it makes them feel better. So, while any normal person might have sprung from Makepeace’s van at this perfect opportunity, pretending all of a sudden to remember a valid train ticket in the back of their wallet, Osborne merely breathed deeply, glanced around to check that the crutch lady was still vertical, and reached into his bag for the solace of the packed lunch.

  ‘Cup cake?’ he said. Makepeace applied the handbrake and stared at his passenger in surprise, as though Osborne had been deliberately keeping his presence a secret. He repeated the offer. ‘Er, cup cake, Makepeace?’ ‘Certainly not,’ said the master of all their fates. ‘For God’s sake, can’t you see I’m driving?’

  An hour later, as the little yellow van screamed and rattled from the M3 on to the old West Country road, and the surrounding Hampshire scenery presented its quaint palette of November greens and browns, Osborne brushed the last of the chocolate crumbs off his lap, feeling obscurely pleased. He was, when all was said and done, a man who took his consolations where he found them, and experience had taught him there were few situations that did not contain them if you looked hard enough. So, Number One, he had survived this miserable journey thus far with only a slight bash to the head; and Number Two, eight cup cakes in a single sitting was a personal best. He noted with additional satisfaction that in six cases out of the eight, he had so carefully peeled the silver paper that no chocolate icing had been caught in the little corrugations. So, not so bad, really. Now he leaned back, tried to blot out the FM babble of the radio (the signal was wandering, but Makepeace didn’t notice), and closed his eyes so that Makepeace’s maverick tendency to thunder up close behind other cars and then scarily overtake on the left was something he merely felt in his gut rather than experienced fully through the organs of vision.

  Riding as a passenger in Makepeace’s van was in one regard quite different from what he had expected: there was apparently no necessity for talk. In other ways, alas, it was precisely what he might have imagined. Makepeace’s driving was of the God-I’m-dying-for-a-pee school: fast, tense and involved, and with his torso inclined so far forward in his seat that occasionally his nose bumped against the windscreen, leaving a smear of grease. Osborne felt no compulsion to communicate, therefore, especially since Makepeace’s few utterances were exclusively addressed either to road signs (whose information he predictably refused to believe), or to other motorists (who thankfully could not respond). ‘Since when?’ was an evident favourite in Makepeace’s open-road repertoire (‘Basingstoke “four miles”? Oh yes? Since when?’). Osborne guessed rightly that this was a question that required no answer – or at least none that he was in any position to supply.

  So instead he turned his mind to the mystery of Angela Farmer, whose part in his downfall he was still agonizingly unable to place, despite the automatic writing he had seen on his notepad on Friday night. ‘Why didn’t you tell me who you were?’ it had said ominously, with a kind of low cello vibrato – reminding Osborne of something from a sensational nineteenth-century novel, along the lines of ‘Gone! And never called me mother,’ or, ‘But there is one thing no one has ever told you, my pretty; you are mad, quite mad.’ For a man who treasured the quietness and regularity of his life, and was convinced he had never paddled in the shallows of melodrama, this mystery was cause only for alarm. What a shame, he grimaced, that all the cup cakes had gone. Chocolate is always so helpful when a man wants to think.

  It was at this point, unfortunately, that Makepeace decided to get chatty. Thirty miles from Hyde Park Corner, he suddenly relaxed with an audible sigh. He leaned back in his seat, switched off the radio, lowered his speed and altered his entire disposition. ‘So,’ he said, ‘tell me what you reckon to this Angela Farmer.’

  For a moment, Osborne was so surprised to find himself addressed that he glanced into the back of the van to find out who Makepeace was talking to, and received the full force of a handlebar just below his eye.

  ‘Ouch,’ he said. ‘Who, me?’

  ‘Mm. What angle are you going to take?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Osborne hated being asked questions about his work; his answers always sounded so unconvincing. ‘I haven’t got one.’

  ‘Course you have.’ Makepeace apparently knew all about it. ‘You can’t do an interview without an angle.’

  Osborne, a man who had never had an angle in his life, and wasn’t sure he would recognize one if it snuggled in beside him in the Fiesta, shrugged and consulted his notes, faintly hoping that a heading marked ‘Angle’ would appear miraculously at the top. It didn’t.

  ‘No. Really,’ he said. ‘I just thought I’d ask about the shed.’

  His friend laughed scornfully, as though he were pulling his leg.

  ‘You don’t mean that.’

  ‘I do.’

  Osborne felt he was being got at. Which of course he was.

  ‘All right, you do,’ conceded Makepeace. ‘But there must be some sort of idea of what you want her to say before you start, surely. I mean, what do you usually ask? Tell me how it goes.’

  Osborne sighed. He hated this.

  ‘Well, it varies f
rom person to person,’ he said at last. ‘Sometimes they say do I want to see the shed on my own, and then talk about it indoors over a drink or something, which saves them the bother of coming out; and sometimes we go down together, which I prefer actually, because I find it leads to the best stories.’

  ‘Right.’ Makepeace noisily dropped a gear to overtake a dawdling 70 m.p.h. milk-tanker, his arm out of the window with a V-sign on the end, but nevertheless appeared still to be listening. Osborne continued.

  ‘And then we go and have a look at the shed. And I always double-check they haven’t reorganized it since the photographer came, because otherwise I might say in the piece that it’s a really neat and tidy shed and the picture shows it as a terrible mess, which makes me look stupid.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘I mean, it’s bad enough when I describe them wearing gumboots, and the picture shows them in sandals.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘I let them know that I’m familiar with their work, because that makes them relax.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘And sometimes I take flowers, if it’s a woman.’

  ‘Right.’

  Makepeace was thoughtful. Osborne had evidently failed to say what he wanted to hear. ‘But what about the excitement? Isn’t it a buzz meeting famous people all the time?’

  Osborne thought about it, but the question meant nothing to him at all. He shrugged.

  ‘Haven’t you done any interviews yourself?’

  ‘Never.’

  ‘Is that why you wanted to come?’

  ‘Partly.’

  ‘But it’s not like really meeting these famous people, you know. I mean, you might bump into them in the street the next day and they wouldn’t know you.’

  ‘So what?’

  ‘I mean, take this Angela Farmer. I’m positive, positive, I have met her before, but I know for an absolute fact that she won’t remember me.’

  ‘You have met her, though; that’s something.’

  ‘Well, there’s the difference between us. I really don’t think that it is.’

  Osborne was wrong, though, if he thought he had no impact on people in general, because there was one group of his acquaintance on whom he made an impression disproportionately large: women. Unlikely as it may seem, women regularly took a fancy to Osborne, against all the negative probability that a down-at-heel hack with only a few kilos of peanut brittle to his name would make a woman remotely happy in the long term. There was just something about him; something that the little squit Makepeace, for example, would never possess despite all his youth and cleverness, despite even his ginger ponytail. Even Osborne’s virginal vagueness about sex, which he always modestly supposed would disqualify him from the field, paradoxically served only to fuel the attraction.

  Of course, cynics might say that the phenomenon owed more to the shocking self-esteem of the women concerned than to the innate attractiveness of the man; but this insight, while undoubtedly helpful, could not account for everything. Osborne had many genuine features to commend him: a pleasant manner, decent dental hygiene, and a liberality with cup cakes bordering on saintliness. To cap it all, there was an old-fashioned streak of gallantry he had somehow never shaken off – which meant that he sometimes complimented women on their appearance, opened doors for them, even kissed the backs of their hands. This knocked them dead. Such demonstrations being like showers of spring rain in the veritable Death Valley of most modern women’s emotional lives, Osborne absent-mindedly picked up female admirers the way other people pick up fluff.

  Michelle, of course, had fancied him for twelve years, a fact that anyone but Osborne would have deduced long ago from her wildly divergent behaviour towards him. Why else would someone appear to be so cloyingly sweet one minute, and the next as punchy as a boxing kangaroo? It is a sure sign of thwarted passion in a naturally forceful person such as Michelle. But Osborne, unable to penetrate the mystery, merely assumed that when she was nice, she was attempting to give him the benefit of the doubt; and when she was nasty, it was because, understandably, she found she couldn’t, after all.

  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.