‘But that’s enough about me,’ he said, with a visible effort. ‘Tell me about yourself. Tell me what you think about me!’
Michelle was so surprised, she just shook her head.
‘Don’t you want to tell me all about yourself? I am disappointed, Michelle. In fact, I am hurt. People generally do, you see. Because I’m an author, and they want me to immortalize them in prose.’
‘Well, if you’re an author, why don’t you just make me up?’ said Michelle heatedly. ‘Why do you need me to tell you anything? Besides, how could you know enough about me from a chat on a train to put me in a novel?’
‘Ah, but you don’t understand. The Michelle I will write about is not the person whose life you would describe. When I put you in a novel, I have the power to take liberties with you. I can peel back your layers, rip you open like a fig; do you understand? And you will surrender, joyfully. What shall I make of you, Michelle? I think I shall make you a flirtatious, gardening sex-kitten in thick gloves who – oh, what shall I say? – who likes to tie men’s arms with garden twine and stroke their nipples with a pitchfork.’
‘What?’ Michelle almost screamed. How on earth did he know about the pitchfork? Or Osborne’s nipples? Was this man a mind-reader, a blackmailer, what?
Carmichael raised an eyebrow and pretended not to notice the strength of her reaction. This was always his favourite bit, when he met new women, teasing them with kinky scenarios and gauging the reaction, while also trying out new plot ideas. Being a naturally parsimonious person, he liked the idea of killing two birds with one stone; the economy of effort gave him pleasure. Plus his success rate was uncanny, since sometimes (as with Michelle, apparently) he could hit home at once with dead-eye accuracy.
‘Or I could make you the victim, if you prefer,’ he continued, giving her time to collect herself. ‘I don’t know, buried alive, perhaps? Or covered with beer and slobbered to death by marauding snails? People often ask me, you know, why I choose the garden as my homicide arena, they think it might be restricting. But gardens are dangerous. They are also filled with the violent struggle of life, as flowers are forced to bloom wide and shriek with colour in their last gasp. And besides, as I always say to interviewers, it’s just right to die in a garden. You know the old rhyme, I suppose:
‘The kiss of the sun for pardon,
The song of the bird for mirth,’
– here he paused for the full sinister effect of his italics –
‘One is nearer to God in a garden
Than any place else on earth.’
Michelle did indeed know the old rhyme, but found it hard to associate the kiss of the sun and the song of the bird with Carmichael’s relentless fixation with sticking Wilkinson Sword gardening tools into people’s necks. However, since the erotic mental picture of Osborne’s little pink nipples standing out on a milk-white, goose-fleshy, hairless chest was now making her feel a bit sticky, she was probably not in a position to criticize.
‘I expect you are wondering why I called you all together, I mean, sorry, whoops, why I am on this train,’ Carmichael smirked, pleased with his own joke. ‘I am bound for Honiton, in the county of Devonshire, my dear, just as you are (I stole a look at your ticket), because my deductive talents have been summoned by a Miss Angela Farmer. She has a little mystery that requires a solution.’
At the name Angela Farmer, Michelle frowned a little, but he didn’t notice.
‘Nothing murderous, so far as I understand, so please don’t alarm yourself on my account. I’m sure I shall be perfectly safe. No, the lady is acquainted with my fine sleuthing instincts, so naturally, having a little problem with a, let’s see –’ here he opened a small leather-bound notebook and peered at some notes, ‘– oh yes, a crazed journalist with a hatchet, she thought I might investigate.’
Michelle gulped. Could he mean Osborne? After all, Osborne had visited Angela Farmer this week. But what was this stuff about a hatchet?
‘You wouldn’t know the publication Come Into the Garden, I suppose?’ he said.
‘No,’ she said, her face glowing hot, ‘I mean, oh no. I don’t think so. What is it?’
‘It’s a rather ghastly little magazine, quite frankly, with a tiny circulation, the sort of thing one’s mother used to read, if you know what I mean. Full of old-fashioned tips that the average gardener knows already, completely behind the times. You sometimes get a free packet of seeds. But they have a regular item about celebrity sheds which isn’t too bad – I know, I know, sheds! – but luckily they do manage to attract some stunning high-class names sometimes, some really top people, if you know what I mean. For example, they asked me –’
‘I see. And now Angela Farmer –?’
‘Yes, now Angela Farmer.’
‘I think I understand,’ said Michelle, rather glad now that Carmichael had so utterly dominated the conversation. As far as he was concerned, she could be anyone; he knew nothing about her. ‘So when they ask you about your shed,’ she asked innocently, ‘does it have to be particularly interesting? Or must you just fabricate stories about the cat being locked in it?’
Carmichael regarded Michelle solemnly, and then reached over and grabbed her hand. He spanked it lightly, and when she drew a sharp breath to complain, he put his fingers on her mouth. They smelled, but she didn’t react. She just tensed up as he whispered to her.
‘You are a remarkable woman. Michelle, and I am sure you remember what I wrote in your book. So perhaps now you would care to accompany me to the buffet car, or possibly the guard’s van, and we’ll find out what you really like?’
Lillian was on the phone to Mister Bunny. She didn’t have an idea in her head to tell him, so worked round the problem with her usual panache.
‘Oh, oh, bunny ever so sorry,’ she said, with a big childish shrug which really helped the performance, even over the phone. ‘Bunny just can’t come home to Bunnyland right now. Just can’t, bunny. Not poss. Poor bunny. Shame, shame, shame.’
Then she listened for a bit, while he gently asked the important questions – ‘Where are you?’ and ‘What on earth are you up to?’ and ‘Where do we keep the bin-liners?’ – at the end of which she took the conversation straight back to Bunnyville.
‘Miss you, bunnykins, miss you like ever so. I had a rotten night-night, you know, without the ted-babies and the wombats.’
This was clever, since Lillian knew the mere mention of lonely wombats would be more than Mister Bunny could bear. She was right. Before he knew it, he was saying that the poor little ted-babies and wombats had missed her, too; and that ted-baby Dexter needed wrapping up against the cold again, despite being a white bear presumably acclimatized to polar regions. Lillian suggested a red knitted scarf, and together they discussed its merits. And before long, Lillian’s money ran out, which was a kind of blessing, whichever way you look at it.
Thus beguiled (as always) by the charms of Bunnyland, Mister Bunny hung up before realizing he still didn’t know where his wife was, or what she was doing, or who she was with. Furthermore, if he wanted a bin-liner, he was buggered.
For her own part, much as she loved Mister Bunny, Lillian was glad the conversation was over. Admittedly Mister Bunny was a real good hubby, and their home was full of furry love and squirrel cuddles, and ted-babies snuggled in special knitted scarves; but on the other hand, sometimes in a secret part of herself, Lillian thought the hell with this, I’m forty-two. It never occurred to her that Mister Bunny (or whatever his real name was, she’d temporarily forgotten) might secretly think the same, and that perhaps a teddy amnesty followed by a big teddy bonfire might work wonders for the marriage. Alas, just as it is possible to stand so close to a wood that you can only see trees, so it is possible to be so densely involved in the dark depths of the marital bunny-wunnies that you just worry that Dexter the white bear is feeling the cold on wintry nights, or that he gets depressed during Panorama.
Better call the office, she thought, and make up some excuse. As she p
unched the number (she was using the pay-phone at Honiton station) she had this horrible presentiment that Michelle would answer and make things awkward. But instead of the snappy Michelle, a very quiet and unfamiliar voice answered, claiming to be somebody called Clement. Well, naturally Lillian denied all knowledge of anybody called Clement, and things turned a bit nasty until it was finally established to her satisfaction that Clement was in fact a sub who had been working at Come Into the Garden for two or three years, and that she ought to remember him because he once obligingly polished her post-sorting tongs when they lost their sparkle. At which point she decided to be gracious about it.
‘Look,’ she started to say, ‘whoever you are, and you shouldn’t be so bloody nondescript in my opinion, if you want people to take any notice, just tell Tim that I shan’t be in today but I expect to be back by Friday –’
But he interrupted her. Didn’t she get her letter this morning? At home? Telling her the magazine was closing? That Come Into the Garden was no more? ‘We found out yesterday,’ he said, ‘after you’d – er, what was it, gone out or something – and then today we all got letters from Digger Enterprises in Honiton. They’ve decided to close us down.’
Lillian staggered.
‘Michelle and Tim have gone by train to Honiton this morning to see if they can talk Mr Clarke out of it, beg for time, you know. But in the meantime, Ferdie and I thought we’d start sharing things out in the office, and actually it’s good you called because Ferdie wanted to know whether that standard lamp was going begging, or whether it was yours.’
‘It’s mine,’ she snapped. ‘You leave that standard lamp alone.’
‘We didn’t think we wanted to take anything, but it’s funny, once you start thinking about it, and looking around, you want to take home all the chairs and standard lamps and – sorry, I’m running on, and you’re not well, this is terrible. Are you all right, Lillian? Honestly, we won’t touch any of your stuff until, um, at least tomorrow. Anyway, we’ll be here if you need us, although obviously we’ll go quite early this afternoon because there’s no work to do, it’s really odd, especially without Michelle …’
And so he went on. Lillian didn’t know what surprised her most, this appalling news about the magazine, or the fact that a sub called Clement (for heaven’s sake) could get words out in such quantities. But it was all, all of it, very hard to absorb. The fax she had received at the office was no hoax, then. This G. Clarke really existed. He was not just Michelle’s dangerous alter ego who had wicked designs on Osborne; he had bought Come Into the Garden and closed it down.
Suddenly the full force of it hit her, and she felt her face burn with indignation. Fifteen years! After all she’d done! A decade and a half of back-breaking toil had just been tossed aside, flung in her face, taken for the high jump, or another more exact metaphor that would possibly strike her later. Fifteen child-bearing years of thanklessly answering that phone, sorting post, nodding at people with stupid names like Clement, trying to keep their spirits up with friendly chat. All down the Swanee, out the window, down the toilet.
She had done everything for that magazine. And here was her future. On the bonfire with the rest of the flop-eared bunnies. Bitterly she remembered how she had once put a note on the stationery cupboard saying, ‘Tell me when you remove things from this stationery cupboard, I am not psychic you know’, and had a row with Michelle about it. The things she had put up with from Michelle! Just in the cause of keeping the office running smoothly. To think she had given herself so entirely to an enterprise only to be chucked in the bin, let out with the bathwater, thrown to the wolves, cut loose from the dock. It was no good, the phrase wasn’t coming. It probably required a calmer state of mind.
Should she call up Mister Bunny again, and tell him what was going on? No, better not. He had Dexter’s chill to worry about. But if she were going to stay in Honiton and get Osborne released from his upstairs prison (the Michelle and Tim mission to G. Clarke could wait till later, and Honiton was a big place), it was obviously imperative that she make a friend on the inside, and she rather thought the young lad with the ginger hair was the ideal fellow. He had an honest face, he appeared to be a confidant at Angela Farmer’s house and, best of all, he seemed to live at a B & B, so she could move in without it looking suspicious. (Usually it does look suspicious if you move into someone’s house and make friends with them afterwards.)
Lillian felt her resolution grow to bursting-point within her. These bastards wouldn’t grind her down. She could go undercover, calling herself – um, Miss Dexter, yes; Miss Dexter from the teddy business. Which had the obvious virtue of being easy to remember.
As she made her way to Dunquenchin, grimly she lit a cigarette and thought how hard it was for a woman in her position, with such a fantastic level of commitment, to be jettisoned, ditched, dislodged, discarded, put out with the cat, stubbed out like a fag-end. It was curious, this; but for the first time in her entire life, Lillian felt the lack of a thesaurus.
11
Late that night at Dunquenchin, all was silent save for the muffled keyboard thumpings of Margaret’s lap-top word processor as she sat up in bed with her specs on, an old blue cardigan pulled around her shoulders, and worked with fanatical concentration on the day’s events. Pigs in muck don’t usually make notes about the experience, but in most other respects – especially the snorting with pleasure – the resemblance between Margaret at Dunquenchin and a pig in muck was actually quite striking. So much to write, she thought, as her nimble fingers danced and flew over the flat grey keys at midnight; so much to write, tra-la, tra-la, diddle-dee; so little alternative to damned hard work in this relentless pursuit of excellence. She frowned and licked her lips and, with a huge effort at selflessness, pitied all the poor little people in the world of psychological research who suffered the current misfortune not to be her.
Such a burden. Not for the first time, she pondered the enormous responsibility she owed to her talent. How could any single person, even a noted brainbox such as herself, hope to assimilate and organize all the extraordinary tell-tale psycho hang-ups she had witnessed today? Sometimes she wished she could subdivide herself, in the manner of an amoeba, to form two identical Margarets, or four, or sixteen, or 256, all tapping away at their lap-tops in Busby Berkeley formation, all equally dedicated to blasting their insights into the waiting world. Ah, the truth was clear to see: in common with the poet Keats (but with arguably less cause for regret), Margaret had fears that she might cease to be before her pen had glean’d her teeming brain.
Fortunately, however, the other 255 lap-top-thumping Margarets were as yet babes unborn; and uniqueness was still one of the nicest attributes you could ascribe to her. ‘There’s only one Margaret Sexton, and I’d know her anywhere,’ Trent Carmichael had commented aloud, with an interestingly ambivalent choice of greeting, when he recognized her voice from the dining-room of Dunquenchin that afternoon. She and Tim had travelled on the same train, not knowing it; but immediately on arrival in Honiton she persuaded him to join her at her uncle’s, so here they were: Margaret springing forward to be greeted by a tanned, handsome Silver Dagger Award winner with big white teeth; Tim hanging back in the hall, looking thin, pale, bothered and demoralized. He had never noticed it before, but suddenly the sleeves and armholes of his jumper were so tight he could hardly breathe. It hadn’t helped his spirits much, either, that Margaret introduced him to her nice cousin Gordon by reminding everybody of that oft-related, character-pigeonholing incident from his childhood when he dug up those bloody bulbs.
Tim had good reason for his mood of despair on arrival at Dunquenchin. Not only was he out of a job, uncertain as to the whereabouts of his chief sub and secretly worried almost to distraction about whether he had locked his front door properly, but on the way from the station he had volunteered to carry Margaret’s dead-weight briefcase, and the effort had nearly killed him. Unknown to him, alas, this bag contained Margaret’s entire TIM file, complete w
ith diagrams, photos, computer print-out and even some specimens of his famous Post-it notes. This explained why Margaret, watching him wrestle innocently and pink-faced with the bag, considered the whole thing absolutely hilarious. Oh dear, she thought later in bed (removing her specs briefly to wipe her watering eyes), she was going to miss studying Tim.
Tim’s behaviour shows all the classic signs of deterioration [she wrote with lightning speed] – the anal retentive obsessive–compulsive control freak loses his routines at a single blow, and his personality implodes. It is happening already, and it is fascinating. What worries me is whether my own presence on the scene – as his ‘ex-girlfriend’ – will in any way interfere with the natural course of his inevitable breakdown; after all, science would not thank me for supplying the cause of his bearing up and surviving! However, I noticed that he burst into tears when we came upstairs to our separate rooms at bedtime, so perhaps I am worrying about nothing. I do hope I am not becoming neurotic! To be fair to myself, I may in fact be helping to nudge him off into the abyss, which is reassuring. I don’t believe in rigging experiments, but there is surely nothing unethical in helping him along his destined path.
Margaret took a sip of cold Oxo from a brown mug, nibbled a piece of cheese and stared briefly at the wall before continuing.
It was a surprise to see Trent here, especially with the peculiar new girlfriend. A bit old for him, though, or so I would have thought, from my own experience. Talking of which, I notice he is still using that picture I took of him, the one of the burials in Angela Farmer’s garden, on the dustjacket of his books, so he hasn’t forgotten our little pact. He pretended to be pleased to see me, but he knows I could ruin him tomorrow if I wanted to! Tee hee.