Lynne Truss - With One Lousy Free Packet of Seed

‘What do you mean? I –’

‘We agreed 11.30, didn’t we? Well, I put my head round the door ten minutes ago – ten to bloody twelve – and you weren’t here. I was beginning to think that you weren’t coming.’

‘Listen, I don’t get this,’ protested Osborne. ‘I was here all the time.’

Makepeace pursed his lips in disbelief. ‘Didn’t see you, pal.’

‘Well, I was.’

Makepeace put up his palms as if to say, ‘Don’t be so defensive,’ and then changed his tone.

‘Listen, you’re here now and that’s what matters.’

‘Hang on, you can ask any –’

But Osborne faltered and gave up. In the circumstances, actually, this was the only sensible course of action. Having known Makepeace only a couple of months, he had already learned one very useful thing – that you could never, ever place him in the wrong. Osborne had met know-alls in the past; he had been acquainted with big-heads, too. But Makepeace was both know-all and big-head, with an added complication. Conceivably, he was a psychopath.

‘Son,’ his daddy must have said to him at an impressionable age, ‘never apologize, never explain. Is that clear? Also, deny absolutely everything that doesn’t suit you, even in the teeth of outright contrary proof. Now, all right, let’s have it, what did I just tell you?’

‘Tell me?’ Makepeace must have hotly replied. ‘You told me nothing! What the hell are you talking about? I just came through the door, and you’re asking me a load of stupid questions.’

At which his daddy presumably chuckled (in a sinister fond-father-of-the-growing-psychopath sort of way) and said, ‘That’s my boy.’

Makepeace was younger than Osborne, thirty-five to Osborne’s forty-eight, but sometimes seemed to aspire to an emotional age of six. Wiry and five foot two, and usually attired in blue denim, he had a long face and a short, flat nose, so that Osborne was involuntarily reminded of a stunted, mean-looking infant pressing his face hard against a cake-shop window. It was easy to feel sorry for the little chap: parents warning their children against the dangers of smoking or masturbation had been known to point to him – unfortunately, in his hearing – as an example of the worst that could happen. Makepeace rose above all this by being clever, of course; and with a couple of good university degrees behind him, he presently made a fairly decent, grown-up living from writing erudite book reviews for national newspapers and periodicals, in which he used his great capacities as a professional know-all as a perfectly acceptable substitute for either insight or style.

There was, however, still a tears-before-bedtime quality to Makepeace’s existence, which compelled Osborne to worry on his behalf. The trouble was that this prodigy, precisely in the manner of a precocious child, was utterly unable to judge the point at which he had delighted the grown-ups beyond endurance. Thus, having acquired a reputation for his readiness to write a thousand words on any subject under heaven (he would have written the Angela Farmer thing without a qualm, even knowing that it was all a fraud), he now faced a quite serious problem, in that his extraordinary level of output was beginning to outstrip plausibility. People had started to notice that he wrote more book reviews in a week than was technically possible, yet if you suggested he hadn’t read the books with any degree of diligence, he would instantly offer to knock you down.

His various editors guessed that he might not be reading very carefully, but it was difficult to prove; and Makepeace was indeed an extraordinarily compelling liar, with a particular flair for outright incandescent denial. On the regular occasions when he missed a deadline (through sheer bottleneck of work) he would never admit it, but instead swore hotly that he had personally fed each sheet of his review into a fax machine – and without missing a beat he would go on to explain in a regretful tone that he would dearly love to send it again, had it not been: (a) snatched from his hands by a freak typhoon in Clapham High Street; (b) burgled from his flat; or (c) lent to a friend who had just boarded a flight to Venezuela. ‘Tell you what, though, I can type it out again by Friday,’ he would offer, fooling nobody. And somehow he always got away with it.

The curious thing, of course, was that while Osborne knew all this, he liked him anyway. Makepeace made him laugh. Also, Osborne enjoyed in his company the novel sensation of feeling relatively grown up. So he introduced Makepeace to more editors, and even arranged for him to review gardening books for Tim on the magazine. His one ridiculous error was in thinking he ought to explain a few basic gardening terms that Makepeace might not be familiar with. On this gross, unforgivable insult, their relationship nearly foundered. You just could not tell Makepeace something he didn’t already know; it was as simple as that. Sitting in this very Birthplace of Aphrodite one afternoon, and regarding the Greek pictures on the walls, Osborne had learned this lesson the hard way when a civilized difference of opinion about aetiological myths had hurtled seriously out of control.

They had been talking – as all literary people will, from time to time – of the legend of Persephone, whom Hades famously stole from the earth to make Nature mourn (thus proving the existence of winter, or something). Anyway, the question was this: had Persephone eaten six pomegranates while underground, or six pomegranate seeds? Osborne said seeds, and afterwards checked it in a book at the library. And he was right. Naïvely assuming that only the truth was at issue, he made a mental note to pass on the information to his friend when next they met. After all, seeds were probably significant, seeing as the myth was concerned with seasonal renewal, and all that.

So next time he saw Makepeace he mentioned their discussion and said, quite innocently, that yes, it was seeds.

There was a fractional pause, and then Makepeace said, ‘Yes, seeds. That’s what I said.’

Osborne gasped at the lie, and then giggled.

‘No, you didn’t.’

‘Yes, I did.’

Makepeace wasn’t joking. He should have been, but he wasn’t.

‘No. You didn’t. You said she ate pomegranates, that’s different. It was me who said it was seeds.’

‘You’re wrong.’

‘Look, I’m sorry, but this is really silly, and it’s not worth arguing about, but you really did say pomegranates. You argued with me, don’t you remember?’

‘I fucking didn’t.’

‘Makepeace, what’s the big deal here? I don’t understand. Why can’t you admit you were wrong?’

At which point Makepeace stood up so abruptly that his chair fell over backwards, and bellowed, ‘What the fucking hell are you talking about?’

It had been a tricky moment.

‘What’s all the stuff?’ asked Makepeace now, reading Osborne’s envelopes upside-down.

‘My post. I can’t face it.’

‘Do you want me to open it?’

‘No.’

‘Oh, come on,’ said Makepeace, and picked up the envelope with the Come Into the Garden postmark.

‘Not that one,’ protested Osborne, but it was too late. Makepeace had already taken out two sheets of paper and started to read them.

‘Odd,’ he said, shuffling the pages one behind the other, and frowning. ‘This is dead odd.’ He read them both a couple of times, and then handed them to Osborne.

Dear Mr Lonsdale [said the first],

I have long been a fan of your column. Being a keen gardener myself, your insights into sheds of the famous fill me with interest. I think you are probably a nice man. I can imagine you wearing a nice coat and scarf and slippers possibly. Also smoking a pipe, quite distinguished. While I am wearing not much while writing this actually. Just a thin négligé and some gold flip-flops. And green-thumb gardening gloves.