Page 11 of Summer at Croftwood Cinema
‘Quite. We’ll find out,’ said Oliver easily. ‘We always do. So what’s the next step with the cinema guy?’
‘Oh, we’re going to arrange to meet up on Thursday so I can show him the projection box. Is that okay with you?’
‘Course it is. I can hold the fort here. Which reminds me, I need to ask Linda if Jack’s still interested in a few hours here.’
‘Sorry, Ollie, I meant to ring him the other day. Let me get his number off Linda and give him a call.’
‘Would you? That would be great, thanks. I’ve got the accounts to do and I’m seeing Matt later about submitting the plans. Do you want to sit in on that?’
Patsy scrunched her nose. She was keen to see the plans but her first impression of Matt was that he was a bit condescending towards her. Because they were inevitably going to work together, perhaps she should suck it up and go to the meeting to get things off on the right foot. Maybe her first impressions were wrong. It had been known. Since they were meeting upstairs in Oliver’s flat, she decided to go but regretted her decision almost before they’d started.
‘Are you a qualified architect?’
‘Well, no, obviously not.’ Even Oliver seemed taken aback at Matt’s response to Patsy’s suggestion that they put a dividing wall in the foyer to make a corridor between the foyer and the entrance to the stalls.
‘You can’t ‘just’ put walls in wherever you want to. You have to consider the flow of the building. And there are all sorts of other considerations like fire escapes…all sorts of things.’
Matt seemed exasperated and was running his hands through his hair.
‘Is everything alright, mate?’ Oliver asked him.
‘Sorry. It’s been one of those days. Apologies, Patsy, I didn’t mean to snap at you.’
‘No problem.’ It had confirmed her suspicions about him but she appreciated the apology, nevertheless.
‘The most important thing for you guys is to get the necessary planning permission in place as soon as possible and the quickest way for that to happen is to make the fewest changes possible.’
His tone told Patsy that he was struggling to keep calm in the face of two people who didn’t know what they were talking about and she wondered what had happened to him to put him in such a mood.
‘We need planning permission to open up the brickwork at the back so that the old scene dock door can work and we need permission to fit the extraction system into the side of the building where the new kitchen is going to be.’
‘Those are the most important things to get us up and running,’ Oliver said, looking at Patsy for her consensus.
‘Yes, but we haven’t talked about exactly what we’re going to do to the inside. What if there are other things we ought to be putting on the planning permission that we haven’t thought of yet?’
Matt exhaled impatiently but to his credit, took a breath and said, ‘We can always put in amendments at a later date. It’s not now or never, we’re just ticking off the big things first.’
‘Okay, that’s fine then,’ Patsy said.
‘I’m sorry, Oliver. If we’re agreed on that, I’ll submit for you tomorrow but I could do with calling it a night. It’s been a long day.’
Patsy briefly felt sorry for him. He did look tired.
‘That’s fine, mate. I appreciate you doing this with us tonight.’
They shook hands and Matt gave Patsy a weary smile. All of a sudden, tired, cross Matt was somehow more endearing than condescending Matt had been.
‘I’ll be in touch,’ he said, and headed downstairs to the coffee house to be let out by Oliver.
‘Want me to walk you home?’ Oliver asked Patsy when he came back upstairs.
‘No, of course not. But thanks for the chivalrous offer. So what’s with Matt? Is it a bad work day or something else?’
Oliver shrugged and Patsy knew she was an idiot to think that a man and his friend would discuss anything personal.
‘I don’t know. He’s recently been through a divorce, maybe it’s something to do with that?’
‘Mmm, maybe.’
