entertained few qualms about helping himself to the stuff people left behind in cupboards. Being unacquainted with the notion of housekeeping, he assumed that food and booze just sort of belonged in the house and should be used accordingly. Only once had he encountered hostility to this view, when he pointed out to a returning home-owner that her supply of toilet paper had run out halfway through his six-month stay. He had been obliged to buy some more, he said, the full astonishment of the experience still making him shake his head in disbelief. The woman in question, brown and dusty from six months’ fending for herself in the Australian outback (with no Andrex supplier within a thousand miles), took this news by merely gaping and gesticulating, speechless.
It was hard to imagine interviewing someone with Makepeace listening in. ‘The maestro at work,’ Makepeace had said, with an insinuating smile. Was this man mad, or what? Osborne had certainly done some good stuff in his time (the David Essex, as aforementioned, was unsurpassable), but methodology was not his strong point, heaven knew. Osborne was convinced that Makepeace merely wanted to expose him; what other motive could he have? He imagined the scene: himself pretending to consult his notes while panicking what to ask next, Angela Farmer croaking ‘You OK, honey?’ and handing him a clean tissue for the sweat dribbling in his eyes, and Makepeace stepping in with some smart-arse brilliant question and hijacking the whole enterprise. Bluffing was hard work at any time, without being watched.
Twiddling some cold Heinz spaghetti on a spoon, he looked up to see that Angela Farmer, by some happy coincidence, was on the television screen right this minute, in her new smash-hit sitcom Forgive Us Our Trespasses As We Forgive Those Who Trespass Against Us. He could hardly believe his good fortune. ‘Blimey, research,’ he remarked aloud, with his mouth full, ‘that’s a bit of luck.’ In the old days, of course, when he was young and keen, he would have looked for Angela Farmer’s name in the reference books, got some cuttings from a newspaper library, swotted up, requested tapes from the BBC Press Office. But these days he reckoned that a chance sighting of his subject on the box was quite sufficient to be going on with. A person’s curriculum vitae, he had discovered, rarely had much bearing on their relationship with the shed.
‘Nice-looking woman,’ he said, and got up to look at her more closely. ‘Makepeace is right, she’s great.’ But then, as he got closer to the screen, he suddenly felt all weightless again – and it wasn’t the prunes, because he hadn’t eaten them yet. ‘Don’t I know you?’ he said, and peered at Angela Farmer more closely still. ‘I do, don’t I? I know you from somewhere.’ But of course she didn’t enlighten him. She was on the telly, after all.
The sitcom was a humdrum affair (as so many are) in which Ms Farmer played a wisecracking New Yorker called Eve, opposite a limp-wristed British aristo named Adam. Osborne checked the title again in the paper – Forgive Us Our Trespasses – and decided not to worry too deeply about this interesting confusion of Old and New Testaments, because it was probably the product of ignorance rather than design. Adam was played by another famous TV star (in whose sparkling greenhouse it had once been Osborne’s privilege to feel sweat in his eyes); and the idea of the piece was that Adam and Eve did not get on. That was all. The remarkable serendipity of their names was oddly never remarked on, although the title sequence did show an animated naked couple enveloped by a serpent and dithering over a pound of Coxes. What a shame, thought Osborne, that ‘Lead Us Not into Temptation’ had already been snapped up by that game show on ITV, and that this Adam-and-Eve vehicle had nothing to do with original sin (or trespass) in any case. But the audience seemed to like it. They laughed like drains every twenty seconds or so, whenever Eve and Adam had another hilarious collision of wills.
‘Milk or lemon?’ a hotel waiter would ask.
‘Milk,’ piped Adam; ‘Lemon,’ barked Eve (both speaking simultaneously); Hargh, hargh, hargh, went the audience.
But Osborne had stopped listening to the dialogue and had even abandoned the delights of his Tuna Surprise; he was peering at the snarling close-ups of Angela Farmer with an increasing unease, his initial frisson of recognition having broadened and deepened until it flowed through his body like a river and leaked out horribly at his toes.
‘Inside or outside?’
‘In,’ said Adam; ‘Out,’ said Eve; and the audience roared again.
Osborne felt ill. Had she said ‘Out’? Where had he heard her say ‘Out’ like that? Perhaps it was his imagination, but he suddenly felt quite certain he had heard Angela Farmer say ‘Out’ in that pointed manner before. And the horrible thing was, she must have said it to him.
Back at Tim’s flat, Forgive Us Our Trespasses was also playing. There wasn’t much on the other channels that evening. But in any case, Forgive Us was the sort of television Tim particularly enjoyed: safe, predictable, and OK if you missed bits when suddenly you felt the urge to check that the fridge light still worked. Watching Eve with interest, he found that he rather envied Osborne’s luck in interviewing Ms Farmer; he must ask him what she was really like, beyond the parameters of the shed stuff. He reached for a Post-it pad and wrote tell OSBORNE I THINK A.F. IS A V. FINE ACTRESS, and stuck the label on the side of the coffee-table.
Lester made a noise that sounded like ‘meat’ (but it might have been ‘me, eat’), and arched his back before sinking his front claws into the chair and ripping. Teatime was long past, yet the happy clink of spoon on cat-bowl was yet to be heard, and Lester was running out of hints. Why was Tim so oblivious to feline nuance? It was enough to drive a cat crackers. So it was back to ripping the sofa, even though he didn’t really feel like it. ‘How banal, really,’ thought Lester, as he dug in, and the fabric made poc, poc, poc-opoc-poc noises, like fireworks on Chinese New Year. ‘How stupid.’
‘Just stop that!’ said Tim in a voice so loud and commanding that Lester sprang back and gave him a look. Tim stirred in his chair, but Lester was right not to race to the kitchen, for it was a false alarm. Tim reached for his pad again. BE MORE PATIENT WITH LESTER, he wrote, and, at a loss where to put it, stuck it on the cat.
Makepeace sat at his typewriter, not watching the TV, and composed the covering letter for his Come Into the Garden book review, every word of which was an obvious lie to anyone who knew him.
Dear Tim [he wrote; actually this part not a lie exactly, but read on], Sorry [not at all] you did not receive this by fax on Thursday as requested, but as I explained on the phone I faxed it from the copy shop [no, he didn’t] and then lost my original while gardening [stretching it a bit here, but there you are]. So I have retyped this from notes [yawn] and hope you like it. I actually think it came out better the second time! [clever touch this, the maestro at work, as it were].
Funny, I agree, that we didn’t bump into one another at the launch of the Fruit Garden books last week [he wasn’t there]. I was definitely there [see previous note]! In fact, I looked high and low for you, but couldn’t see you [classic turning of tables; never fails to convince].
All the best,
M. Makepeace
Miles eastward along the river, past Greenwich Reach and the Isle of Dogs, Lillian was sitting with her feet up watching Forgive Us Our Trespasses, just like everybody else. From the steamy kitchen she could hear the pleasant sounds of George (the hubby) making dinner, and she looked up in proper feeble-invalid fashion to
