7

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.

‘Oh, Ms Farmer,’ he exclaimed, spraying chocolate cake crumbs at her. ‘Ms Farmer, I am so pleased to meet you. This is the best shed I’ve ever seen. I can’t tell you, it’s so marvellous, I –’

‘Listen, it’s a shed. Don’t pop your cork.’

Osborne looked at her. God, he wished he could place her. What a stunning woman, what a presence.

‘Right. You’re right. I do apologize.’ Hastily, he stuffed some silver cup-cake papers in his pocket and reached for his votive offering. ‘Um, these flowers are for you.’

‘Well, thanks.’ She wiped the crumbs from her zipper-jacket and accepted the chrysanths with considerable grace. He smiled and shrugged. He was rather cute, she thought, in a ne’er-do-well, beaten-up, chocolate-cakey kind of way.

‘So what do we do now?’ she asked flatly. ‘What’s your angle?’

‘Oh, ha ha, I don’t really have one, actually. I’ll just ask you about the shed, if that’s all right.’

Angela gave him a frank, don’t-mess-with-me look.

‘Oh yeah, sure. That’s what you told my friend Trent Carmichael last week. Just ask about the shed, you said. All that boring question-and-answer about the cat locked up overnight, remember? And then you write a brilliant piece with references to crime devices in his novels so way back and obscure that Trent himself had forgotten them. So come on, tell me what you want. I’m not going to give you stuff about how long I’ve owned a hosepipe if in the end you write about how I’m related metaphorically to the goddam Angela Farmer tulip. Which has been done before, I might add.’

‘But you’ve got it all wrong,’ objected Osborne.

‘How?’

He thought quickly. He could hardly explain that all the clever stuff in his Trent Carmichael piece had been written by Michelle.

‘Well, to be honest, mainly because this really and truly is the best shed I’ve ever seen, and I desperately want to write about it.’

‘And of course you say that to all the girls.’

‘No I don’t.’ Osborne was getting worried. His dream piece seemed to be slipping away fast. He would have burst into tears, if he hadn’t suspected it might not be professional.

Angela patted his arm and smiled. ‘Don’t take any notice of me. Really. Nobody else does. Let’s just sit down and talk about the goddam shed, if you want to, and then we can go and get a drink indoors. Deal?’

‘Deal.’

‘Right. Fire away.’

‘Thanks.’

‘Just let me say one thing.’

‘What?’

‘You’re very sweet when you’re confused.’

Indoors, Gordon was feeling better. He could see Auntie Angela sitting quietly in the shed with the interviewer, everything was calm, it was all right. He hummed into his cup of camomile tea, ‘But oh, if we call the whole thing off, then we must part.’ He danced his fingers along the work surface, in time with the music. How silly to get hysterical about these men from the magazine. They couldn’t possibly know his plans, so why should they feel any animosity towards him? But even if they had somehow found out the whole story, surely it was pretty unusual for disgruntled employees to turn, in the first resort, to murder. Aside from anything else, it might hamper their case at ACAS.

So. The fact that the ‘Me and My Shed’ man was an expert on homicide (of the horticultural type, anyway) was sheer – or possibly shear – coincidence. Oh yes. Gordon kicked himself for being so hysterical, and took a sip of consoling camomile. If these guys were jumpy, obviously they were jumpy about something else. It wasn’t his concern.

The phone rang. It was Dad.

‘I’ve got him,’ he said breathlessly.

‘Do what, Dad?’

‘I’ve got the little writer. You keep the big one occupied, and I’ll come and take care of him, too.’

‘Er, Dad,’ ventured Gordon, ‘when you say you’ve “got” him, what do you mean?’

‘I’ve locked him in your office.’

Gordon could hardly believe his ears.

‘What was he doing in there? Did you ask him in? What happened?’

‘He had broken in, Gordon. You were right, there’s something really fishy going on.’

There was a pause.

‘Gordon? You all right, son?’

‘What’s he doing now?’

‘I don’t know, he’s gone quiet. But I think he’s tampering with your computer.’

‘What a nerve.’

‘Shall I come over for the other one?’

‘I suppose you’d better.’

‘I’ll be there as quickly as I can.’

But back at Dunquenchin, Gordon’s dad did pause momentarily to take a few deep breaths before swinging out of the front door with his hatchet. Blimey, he thought, it was really tough being so macho all the time. Why couldn’t somebody else deal with this? Why was it that whenever he looked around in a crisis, he seemed to be the only grown-up in sight? ‘Is it a bird?’ they said. ‘Is it a plane? No, it’s Gordon’s parent (male).’

Standing in the dining-room, considering whether to put down the hatchet and proceed unarmed, he felt a sudden surge of resentment. He looked at the pictures on the walls – all of them, when you came to think about it, mementoes of a career spent dousing other people’s fires, extinguishing other people’s cock-ups. It was part of family history that when Gordon was little, he had noticed an astrology column in a newspaper and said, ‘You’re Aquarius, aren’t you, Dad?’, to which he had replied that actually he wasn’t. ‘But you must be,’ persisted Gordon, ‘you’re the water-carrier.’

Of course it was useless to argue, at this stage of life, with one’s personal destiny. And if being a cross between a tower of strength and a perpetual bucket of water was his – well, at least it was better than being a poison dwarf like the little chancer locked upstairs. ‘The honorary Aquarian’ was how Angela described him whenever she saw him in the vicinity of water – be it running a bath, watering the garden, washing the car, or just filling the kettle for a cup of tea. She admired him very much, and liked the way the title dignified him. One day, if he was agreeable, she fancied commissioning a classical fountain for the garden modelled on Gordon’s dad, with him dressed up holding a trident and bewhiskered like the source of the Thames. She visualized him surrounded by an interesting, splashy, post-modern medley of water receptacles ancient and new – deep classical urns and pitchers, of course, but mixed up with buckets and standpipes and hydrants.

Why he had given up being a fireman nobody knew, but sometimes when Angela came to dinner and they all talked late, he dropped a hint or two about a woman in London he had known; also a fire in Hammersmith, in which a friend had died. He often dreamed of fires, but didn’t discuss it much, the way the heat and flames encroached on him in the night. Once he had spoken of it with his niece Margaret, because she seemed interested, but unfortunately she rather abused the confidence, and so he learned it was best to keep his own counsel. Margaret was currently studying for a master’s degree in psychology at a London college, and whenever she came to stay, she affected a huge interest both in Gordon’s computer stuff and in his dad’s dreams. The trouble, however, was that she was extraordinarily insensitive. So the moment she acquired an insight into someone else’s imagination, she used it as a blunt instrument with which to knock them down.

‘You’re scared of impotence, it’s obvious,’ she had declared to Gordon’s dad, simply, between bites of dinner. ‘It informs everything you do. By the way, is there any more of this? It’s not very good but it fills a hole, if you know what I mean.’ Another time she had called Gordon’s dad on the phone quite late at night because something had struck her, and it couldn’t wait until the morning. ‘You should call that house “The Four Elements”,’ she had declared. ‘You cover the whole range! Do you get it? Here’s Gordon with his higher mind and his Digger, all air and earth; do you see? And here’s you, all fire and water. Wow! No wonder you complement each other so well. Did I ever tell you about my last boyfriend? How he dug up some bulbs once when he was a child to see if they were growing? Can you believe that? Isn’t it marvellous?’ At which she snorted loudly, rather like a pig, and hung up.

Tim had always regretted telling Margaret that story. Margaret was the girlfriend who had moved out quite recently, you may remember, leaving just the cat behind. Digging up the bulbs had been silly, but that was all. It was on a par with opening the oven door to check on a soufflé: you learn from it, and then don’t do it again. And that’s it; it’s dead and buried. Yet fate had somehow contrived to make him pay for it over and over, with Margaret shovelling loam like a madwoman, to dig up the story whenever he least wanted to hear it.

Living with Margaret, he nowadays reflected, was like being with a fanatical resurrectionist, forever exhuming for the benefit of science all the stuff he had taken special care to bury in an unmarked spot. What a relief she had gone, really. Now he could bury things for good, if he felt like it – and generally he did. These letters from G. Clarke of Honiton, for example: if Lillian hadn’t known all about them already, he would gladly have paid a funeral director out of his own pocket to bury the whole lot six feet under.

‘So what do you think?’ asked Lillian, her eyes flashing. ‘It’s Michelle, you know. Michelle wrote them. She’s mad. She’s got to be stopped.’

Tim pulled himself together and gave her a solemn look.

‘I think you should put them away,’ he said, ‘and forget all about them.’

It was precisely the wrong thing to say in the circumstances, because Lillian went berserk.

‘But she’s crackers, you bloody neurotic!’ she yelled with great and surprising volume. ‘Good bloody God! Sit there in your fancy bloody knitwear and tell me to forget about it – well, I won’t! You’re a weed, that’s what you are! Are you saying Osborne shouldn’t be warned that Michelle wants to poke his nipples with a pitchfork? Are you?’

Tim tried to interject, but somehow failed to raise a squeak.

‘To think I considered knitting you a woolly!’ she yelled. ‘Ha! And you’d rather forget it, would you, that she’s getting Makepeace to send faxes from Devon telling us that the magazine is closed! Yes, Makepeace! He’s in on it, too, you know! He sent a fax from the same number within ten minutes of this bloody “G. Clarke” thing arriving. And Osborne is with him down there, for the Angela Farmer piece! And God knows what plans they’ve got for him between them. Forget all about it? Not bloody likely, you spotty-faced wimp!’ She snatched the letters from the desk, and grabbed the door-handle. ‘God, you make me puke!’

On which departing words she wrenched open his office door with such sudden energy that all the staff gathered outside to hear the shouting didn’t have time to run off, and were caught standing there with their mouths open.

‘Get out of my way!’ she yelled, and grabbed her coat (a bright pink one). It was extraordinary. Lillian was transformed by fury. If her husband had been present, he would scarcely have recognized her. This was no poor ickle bunny, that’s for sure. Or if it was, this was one little bunny that, in Angela Farmer’s words, was all riled up.