Page 117 of Meet Me Under the Mistletoe
She felt as though she was living in her own peculiar montage, faking happy for her customers during the working days and throwing herself into paperwork in the evenings, with takeaway meals from Pepe’s and too much wine before falling gratefully into sleep: a blissful respite from thinking about Isaac and lamenting what might have been.
“If you keep being this efficient, I will be out of a job,” Andrew commented, having gone to check the stock and finding it completely up to date. “I think I preferred you when you were hopeful and haphazard rather than crestfallen but competent.”
“I’m sorry my shattered love life is making you feel redundant.”
“What are you wearing to our Christmas do?”
“I’m not sure yet.”
“Well, you haven’t got long to decide.” He looked at her pointedly. “You do know it’s tonight, don’t you?”
Nory stopped what she was doing, a book hugged against her chest.
“Tonight? It can’t be. Are you sure?”
“Yes, Nory, of course I am sure. It’s been booked for months.”
“But. So today is Saturday? Saturday the twelfth?”
“Correct.”
“How did I lose track of the time like that?”
“You’ve been in a wormhole of woe.”
“Oh god, that’s pathetic!”
“I’m surprised Ameerah hasn’t been on at you about outfits; the only thing that woman likes more than the law is clothes.”
“Don’t forget Dev.”
“As if we could! Who knew that under that hard-nosed barrister lay a hopelessly romantic Marianne Dashwood?”
Ameerah always joined them on their Christmas work dos, partly because she bopped into the shop so often she was practically an honorary employee, and partly to add to the numbers; only Andrew and herself actually worked at Serendipitous Seconds, and if she didn’t rustle up a date that year, it would just be Andrew, Seb, and Nory out on the town.
“Now I think about it, the last few times I’ve spoken to her, Ameerah has mentioned the work do,” Nory mused. “I’d just assumed she was talking about it for, you know, sometime in the future, sort of getting ahead of the curve, you know how organized she is.”
“Yes, well, the future, as they say, is now. So, you’d better start thinking Christmas pudding and drunken bankers; these venues love to pack in the work parties. I hope they don’tdeconstruct my food. I hate that. Just put the bloody meal together. Don’t hand me a plate of separate ingredients and call it deconstructed, it’s just laziness. If I wanted to make my own dinner, I’d have stayed home.”
Nory made a mental note to check the menu before tonight. If Andrew’s Christmas pudding came out as separate piles of brandy-infused dried fruits on a plate, there could be trouble. He already had an aversion to foods served to him on pieces of slate and/or tiles.
“And don’t get me started on slate tiles!” he said, as though reading her mind. “Slate is for roofing, not for eating your dinner off of. The only people who should be eating from slate tiles are roofers on their lunch breaks.”
Nory thought she’d better change the subject. They were skirting dangerously close to the subject of Jenga chips: the restaurateur art of building a structure of precisely cut rectangle chips in the style of the Jenga game—another foodie foible that drove Andrew to distraction.
“Is Seb’s mum babysitting Matilda?”
Andrew pulled a face. “Yes. It’ll be her first time alone with her. I had hoped to get my mum round as well—I was selling it as a sort of granny-bonding movie night—butthatwon’t be happening. Grandma jealousy is real! They compete overeverythingto do with Matilda. It’s the battle of the babushkas in our house every time my mum crosses the threshold.”
“But your mum is so calm and lovely,” Nory reasoned. “She makes Miss Marple look like Cruella De Vil.”
“Or so we all thought.” Andrew snorted. “Throw in an interloper grandma from America, and she’s a completely different woman. She keeps trying to prove her seniority. It’s all ‘Glendadarling, that’s not how Matilda likes it at all!’ Or ‘You wouldn’t know, Glenda dear, you don’t have the same bond with Matilda that I do, I’ve been here from the start!’ ”
Nory was trying and failing not to laugh. “I just can’t imagine it. Quiet little Nina with her embroidery club and volunteering in the cat café,” she said.
“It’s all been a facade—she’s a power-hungry diva granny! I’m surprised she hasn’t been scenting the baby’s things.”
Nory pulled a face.
