agreed Makepeace.
‘I mean, what does she take me for? You don’t expect Tolstoy in a piece about sheds, surely?’
Makepeace grunted, wiped some egg-yolk from his chin and prepared to contest the point. ‘Except that all happy sheds are happy in the same way, I suppose,’ he volunteered, reaching for a serviette. ‘While unhappy sheds …’ But he tailed off, sensing he had lost his audience. Osborne looked nonplussed.
‘I suppose we are sure it’s a woman,’ added Makepeace. ‘I mean, the négligé might be more interesting than it at first appears.’
Osborne looked mournfully at the infant Hercules wrestling with snakes (next to the tea-urn) and shook his head.
‘So who’s the next shed, then?’
‘Ah,’ said Osborne darkly, as though it meant something. ‘Angela Farmer.’
‘Where’s the problem? Right up your street. Funny, charming, famous. Didn’t she have a rose named after her recently?’
‘It was a tulip.’
‘That’s right. She had a tulip named after her, the Angela Farmer.’
‘Yes, but you said rose.’
‘No, I didn’t.’
‘OK.’
Makepeace changed the subject.
‘A doddle though, presumably?’
‘Oh yes. The piece is half-written already, if I’m honest.’
He started fiddling with his string bags. ‘I ought to check where she lives, I suppose, since I’ve got to arrange to get there on Monday,’ he said, and distractedly pulled out a few scarves and Paris street-maps. ‘I’ve got a diary in here somewhere.’
‘More coffee?’ asked Makepeace, and went to order it while Osborne delved among tangerines and library books, muttering, ‘He said rose, though’ several times under his breath.
‘Ah, here we are.’ The diary was found. ‘Honiton,’ he said.
‘What?’
‘Angela Farmer’s address. Honiton in Devon.’ They looked at one another.
‘You mean, like, Honiton where the nuts come from?’
‘Oh, bugger. Bugger it, yes, I think I do.’
A hard day at the typesetters had left Tim pale and drawn. His big specs felt heavy on his face, and a deep weariness sapped his soul as he trudged back from the tube station with only a few minutes to spare before his Friday night curfew of half-past seven. Being the sort of chap who responds to pressure by withdrawing deeper and tighter into his own already shrink-wrapped body, Tim was often on Friday nights so tautly pulled together that he was actually on the verge of turning inside out. Not surprisingly, then, he carried himself pretty carefully for those last few yards to the front door. After all, the merest nudge in the right place, and flip! it might all be over.
It would be unfair to say, as many had, that Tim’s outer coolness masked an inner coolness underneath. But peeling the layers off Tim was not a job many people could be bothered to undertake, especially since Tim did so little to encourage them. Once, when Tim was a small boy, he foolishly dug up some daffodil bulbs from his mother’s flower-beds to see how they were doing (this was a favourite story of his ex-girlfriend Margaret, who thought it so funny she snorted like a pig when she told it). Well, it was Tim’s great misfortune in life that nobody (including Margaret) had ever thought to dig him up in the same way, just to check that healthy growth was still a possibility.
Most people, then, considered Tim cool, aloof and just a bit of a geek (because of the specs). And that was it. To his own mother he was a daffodil murderer, a mystery never to be solved. To Margaret (a smug psychology graduate) he was a textbook obsessive. Only his cat, Lester, was really bothered to get better acquainted with him. But then, as the cynics will gladly tell you, any emotional cripple with a tin-opener is of devotional interest to his cat.
Today Tim was especially worried about the emotional turmoil ahead. A new proprietor, indeed – good grief, the whole thing spelt change, and he hated the sound of it. Textbook obsessives rarely disappoint in certain departments, and Tim was not the man to transgress the rules of an association. Thus, the past week had seen him dutifully fretting to the point of dizziness about the smallest of matters slipping from his control. The Independent had gone up by five pence! On Tuesday he had forgotten to change his desk calendar to the right day! Tonight he had trodden on an odd number of paving stones on his walk home from the tube! Tim never worried about things he could actually do something about – he never, for example, grew cross with the printers on Fridays, as Michelle did, when they were inefficient or lazy. But powerlessness made him frantic. The selling of the magazine to a new proprietor whose intentions were obscure – well, that was the kind of thing to drive him nuts.
It was with a genuine lack of enthusiasm that he unlocked the door to the flat. Since Margaret moved out, the place seemed spooky; he kept finding Margaret-shaped holes in its fabric. There were gaps in the bookshelves, empty drawers, an exactly half-filled bathroom cabinet, a clearly defined gap in the dust on the kitchen surface where her Magimix formerly stood. If he had been a sentimental person, he would have considered it sad. Nobody muttered ‘For Pete’s sake’ when Tim checked the door for the fifth time before going to bed; nevertheless he heard the words not being spoken. Margaret’s absence, to be honest, was more conspicuous to Tim than her presence had been. Sometimes, when he was changing the bed-linen, he had an awful feeling he would draw back the duvet and find a crude Margaret-shaped outline on the bottom sheet, like the ones the American cops draw around homicide victims on sidewalks.
The only thing she had left behind was the cat, a ginger tom with a loud purr, who wrecked Tim’s attempts to work at home by ritually jumping up on every sheet of important paper (with wet paws), and then ceremoniously parking his bum on it. So Tim had stopped trying to work at home (which was a good thing). The only trouble was, he couldn’t quite get the hang of feeding the cat at proper times, so that now, as Tim roved the dark, joyless flat turning on lights, Lester followed him about, making intense feed-me-Oh-God-feed-me noises combined with much unambiguous trouser-nudging. Tim shrugged distractedly and reached for a pad of sticky Post-it notes. FEED CAT, he wrote on the top sheet. This he peeled off and stuck to the nearest door-frame before continuing his perambulations.
As he moved into the hall he barely noticed that on every door-frame there were dozens of similar notes, slightly overlapping, as though left over from some jolly atavistic maypole ritual. He saw them, of course, because they were unmissable –
REMEMBER AUNTIE JOAN AT CHRISTMAS
DRY HAIR AFTER SHOWER
FEED CAT
JAMMY DODGERS ON OFFER AT PRICERIGHT
CHECK DOOR
FEED LESTER
TELL OSBORNE NOT TO WORRY ABOUT NEW EDITOR – SHEDS EVER GREEN
– he just didn’t see anything odd.
Something a great deal more lively awaited Michelle when she too reached home that evening, at roughly the same hour. Mother – a nice-looking, grey-haired old woman in natty, mauve velour track-suit and trainers – was poised and ready in the darkened living-room, having planned the moment with the precision of a true enthusiast. Just as Michelle’s key entered the lock, Mother tipped a number of smouldering cigarette butts on to the carpet around her wheelchair, pressed the button on the CD remote control (so that Irving Berlin’s ‘Always’ began to play) and finally flung herself back in her seat – in what she hoped was an attitude