called out.
God!
‘I need a shower!’ he called back.
‘I need to go.’
Thank God!
‘OK.’
‘Call me.’
‘OK.’
Xander always marvelled at the transformation. All it took for his Lazy Git alter ego (the duvet-muffled bloke who’d had too much red wine the night before) to morph into Xander Fletcher with all traces of sleep, sex, stubble and sweat erased, bright and eager to greet the day, was a ten-mile run in under an hour and ten minutes. Dressed neatly in dark trousers and a pale shirt, driving sensibly through his beloved village of Long Dansbury to his office in Hertford twenty-five minutes away, he thought of the process as a sort of protracted Superman turnaround. Well, if not a super man, a good bloke at any rate. Heading for forty in a couple of years, Xander had no complaints at all. He lived in a lovely cottage, he had an OK bank balance and his own business keeping its head above water, a close family, great friends and a woman called Siobhan who didn’t mind things being casual. Doing those ten miles in sixty-three minutes would ice an already tasty cake. He thought about it as he headed out for his car. It was doable. Xander had been brought up to believe anything was doable. Apart from Love, which was beyond one’s control. Accordingly, he’d decided not to entertain it in his life, not since Laura.
He drove through a landscape which rolled and tumbled like a soft green rucked-up quilt. Born and bred here, Xander had never fallen out of love with his environs and never stopped noticing its beauty or the changes, for better or worse. That’s why, after interludes in Nottingham and London, he’d returned home at thirty.
His route took him through a handful of small villages, a few still with a shop clinging on for dear life to the local economy like a limpet to a storm-lashed rock. Most supported a pub and all of the villages heralded their approach with a profusion of daffodils along the verges in spring. Beyond each community, pastureland subtly cordoned off by barely visible electric fencing supported little gatherings of horses in weatherproof rugs, looking like the equine relatives of the Michelin Man. Woodland interrupted the swathes of fields like a patchy beard and the rivers Rib, Ash and Beane coursed through the landscape as if on a mission to deliver goodness straight to the Lea, the main artery of the area.
‘Good morning, Xander.’
Pauline Gregg, his PA of eight years, still wished he’d let her call him Mr Fletcher or Alexander at the very least. To her, it seemed too casual, unseemly somehow. When she’d been at secretarial school all those decades ago, she’d been trained, along with other girls, in the correct way to address their future employers and their clients. Formality is fitting; that’s what they learned. She felt it somehow downgraded her qualification to call her boss ‘Xander’. Her daughter, who was Xander’s age, told her it was a generational thing. But there again, her daughter had sent her children to a school where the pupils called their teachers by their Christian names. Moreover, the school didn’t classify it thus, but as ‘given names’. There again, that school appeared to be teaching Pauline’s grandchildren more about something called Diwali than Christmas. So many things to button one’s lip against – it was part of Pauline’s day to declare to herself at least once, what’s the world coming to?
‘Morning, Mrs Gregg,’ Xander said. He respected her right to be addressed like this – even though eight years on and being privy to the end of her marriage, the birth of her grandchildren and that Unfortunate Incident at the Roundabout With That Silly Car Which Wasn’t Her Fault, Xander considered Mrs Gregg to be on the outer ring of his family.
‘Seventy-two minutes?’ she ventured. Xander cocked his head and smiled. ‘Seventy?’
‘Sixty-eight,’ he said.
‘Very good, that,’ said Mrs Gregg. ‘Tea?’
‘Please.’ They sipped in amicable silence, each leafing through the documents on their desks. Xander looked up. ‘You’ve had your hair done.’
Mrs Gregg touched it self-consciously but smiled. ‘Yes.’
‘Very nice,’ said Xander. He wished his own mother would wear her hair in a similar style – elegant and in place – instead of the unruly thatch half in, half out of a bun, invariably adorned with debris from the garden. ‘Mrs Gregg, can you take this to the post office? And can you pick up a nice greetings card – blank inside?’
She glanced at him. When Xander had been steady with Laura for all those years, he’d never once asked her to help assist in the running of that relationship. He’d scoot off at lunch-time himself and return with flowers or something bulky in a bag which would sit quietly taunting her from the chair in the corner until he left in the evening. That was another part of her training going to waste – he had no need for her to alert him to Valentine’s Day, or Special Occasions. Yet today he was asking her to buy a card, blank, just like his expression.
‘Blank inside,’ she said, writing it down and, without looking up, she asked, ‘And what should be on the outside?’
‘Oh,’ he said, ‘something soft – floral perhaps. Or a landscape.’
She wrote it down. Floral. Landscape. Unlikely to be a special card for a ‘significant other’ – or however his generation referred to girlfriends these days. She felt strangely relieved and yet somehow disappointed for him too. He’s such a nice young man, she often described to her friends at bridge. It’s a bit of a waste, she’d say. Perhaps he’s not a lady’s man, one of her chums might venture. Oh, he’s not like that, Pauline would say, almost defensively. The contradiction had never confronted her – how she wanted to mother him, be at the helm of his life, yet keep the Decorum of Division she’d been trained to maintain.
‘Anything else?’
‘Treat yourself to a Danish pastry,’ said Xander.
‘Why, thank you!’
With Mrs Gregg gone, Xander leafed through his diary and in-tray. Design, print and packaging wasn’t a sexy business, but it was a solid one and even in the dire economic climate, Xander found his long-term clients remained loyal. He’d cut overheads instead of staff and it had been serendipitous that Keith, the designer, had asked to go part-time just when the office rent had been hiked, so Xander and Mrs Gregg moved to these smaller premises in the same building. Everything remained the same. Apart from the chair that had been in the corner of the old office, on which the flowers or the bag with the bulky object for Laura had once sat.
I don’t need that chair, Mrs Gregg, Xander had said. And that’s when Mrs Gregg realized Xander had broken it off with Laura – right at the point of engagement, she assumed. Though he said they could bring the chair with them, if she felt it might be useful, she’d declined. If he didn’t need it, who was she to suggest he might, at some point, in the future?
‘I bought this card – it has flowers and a landscape and is what I’d call gentle. I have paper napkins with this very design.’
‘Monet,’ said Xander.
‘No, no – it wasn’t pricey.’
‘Monet,’ Xander said again, as if he hadn’t heard her. ‘The Garden at Giverny.’
‘One of my favourites,’ Mrs Gregg
