Folly by Alan Titchmarsh

Hodder & Stoughton, £18.99

2007 "Any more bids?"

  1. Folly
  2. by Alan Titchmarsh

James Ballantyne looked down in astonishment from the auction podium as Artemis King raised her hand. Where had Missy been for the past five years?

"You know how it is," she explained after buying the Munnings for £750,000. "Our grandfathers have a secret feud that they never talk about and when mine realised we were becoming friendly, he sent me to America. And as I am congenitally stupid I could never phone you."

"And as I too am a complete moron, I could never contact you either," James said understandingly. "But now you're back, why don't we put the cat among the pigeons and start dating again?"

"Oh Jamie, I thought you'd never ask. Take me to bed."

1949 Lord Leo Bedlington picked up his teddy in a desperate attempt to invoke the spirit of Brideshead and sighed. "What's going to happen to us all when we leave Oxford?"

"Is it too, too terrible to admit it?" Eleanor whispered, "All I want to do is settle down and have children, but I fear the man I really love is not interested in me."

"Harry Ballantyne adores you," Leo consoled her. "He is just shy."

"What can I do?" she wailed. "I cannot tell him I am besotted also. So I'll end up with the loud bore, Richard King, instead."

"Come on now, everyone," Leo declared, as Richard, Harry and their working-class Glaswegian pet, Mac, bounded into the room. "Let's go to the races, where we're bound to meet the famous painter Sir Alfred Munnings who will invite us back to his home so he can give Mac some advice about his paintings."

2007 "How lucky we are to be so rich and in love!" said James, stroking Missy's beautiful tresses.

"Oh Jamie," Missy sighed, caressing his athletic body. "This is some of the worst dialogue outside an afternoon TV chat show."

"Well at least there's no gardening in it this time."

"I'm so heppy we're together again. Nothing can go wrong now!"

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1949 Eleanor's heart leapt when Richard said he had a cold and couldn't join them for the visit to Munnings' studio. Now Harry might be free to prostrate himself!

"I er-quite-er-like-er-you," Harry stuttered torturously over 20 pages.

"Then take me now," Eleanor cried, throwing her legs open with wanton abandon. "And when you've climaxed, you can go back to your room and we won't ever talk again. So when we get back to Oxford you'll overhear Richard proposing to me and assume I'm going to accept and you'll rush off to become an auctioneer and marry someone you don't love and I will marry Richard after all and we'll all be terribly unheppy."

2007 "There's something I've been meaning to tell you for 25 years," said Eleanor to Missy. "Harry Ballantyne is your real grandfather."

"Then I can't be with Jamie after all!" Missy wailed.

"That's not all," her grandfather, Richard, added. "We're broke, because it turned out that Mac was a pansy who had a pash for me and was upset when I didn't return his advances and when he went to live with Leo out in France he painted some fake Munnings to help Leo pay his father's death duties when he was down to his last five mill and I sold them thinking they were genuine and when I discovered they weren't I had to buy them back to protect my reputation."

2008 It had been months since Missy had rung and Jamie still had no idea why he had been dumped. "I thought we were getting on so well," he sobbed. "But at least she will be rich - Leo left her the real Munnings in his will."

2008 "There's something I've been meaning to tell you," Missy's father said. "You're not my daughter. Your mother had an affair. Your real father is dead, just like your mother."

"That's fantastic," Missy laughed. "I can be with Jamie. It's a miracle. The family feud is over."

"The real miracle," Jamie said later, teasing Missy's pert breasts, "is that Alan Titchmarsh has written a book that makes Jeffrey Archer look talented."

The digested read, digested: Just plain stupid.

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