‘Sounds reasonable.’ Dina chucked Cassie’s coat onto a sofa in her sitting room, pulled the door closed and led the way through the hall towards her kitchen, where the rest of the Hawk Egg lobster festival committee were assembled.
Cassie screwed her face up. ‘There’s no real point in us speaking,’ she told Dina. ‘I mean, we know alotabout each other now. He’s been very anal in checking my background.’ If they spoke on the phone rather than by email, there was a chance she’d end up snapping at him if he asked yet more questions. It seemed the basic SwapBnB checks hadn’t been enough for James. In the end, Cassie had, in the space of forty-eight hours, provided him with passport and driving licence details, proof of her dual British and US residency (she’d been born in the US before moving to Glasgow as a baby) – apparently he suspected her of some kind of visa scam – plus a bank reference, proof of ownership of her property, various health details, all manner of things. Frankly, it had been a surprise that she hadn’t had to supply her dental and vaccination records. She’d been on the brink of pulling out several times, but each time had remembered that his flat lookedperfect– location, layout, size, niceness, everything –and none of the other options she’d found had looked remotely right for her.
They went into the kitchen and Cassie distributed hugs and hellos to her friends before taking another slurp of her wine. That was good.
‘It can’t hurt to speak to him, though, can it?’ Dina asked, as Cassie joined her at the side of the room to gather snacks to carry them to the table.
‘He’s very annoying. Very demanding.’
‘People often come across that way in writing and are sweethearts in person, though.’
‘That’s true.’ Cassie chewed her lip. ‘And it would be good to be on friendly terms with him. I just don’t want to discover that I can’t stand the man who’s going to be living in my house.’
‘Honey—’ Dina reached round Cassie for bowls ‘—you’re swapping homes. He isn’t an ogre. He’s a regular human being. If heisn’ta regular human being, you don’t want to swap homes with him. Speaking to him will be totally fine.’
Cassie nodded. Dina was probably right.
‘You know what?’ Dina waved a pretzel in Cassie’s face. ‘By the end of the call I bet you’ll be the best of friends.’ She handed the pretzel bowl and one containing cheesy crackers to Cassie. ‘Guaranteed.’
* * *
Cassie huddled into her coat and pulled her faux-fur-lined hood closer. She squinted through the bright-blue fluff of the fur at the steel grey clouds above the sea. She should have given James her landline number. Her mobile almost never worked inside the house, so she had to be outside to speak on it, and, even without the rain that was threatening, this afternoon wasn’tthemost pleasant for sitting in the garden. She checked the time. One minute to go.
And approximately sixty seconds later, her phone rang. Not a surprise. You’d guess from his photo and emails that James was punctual. Anal. Not a hair out of place. Not a reference un-asked for. To be fair, Cassie did like punctuality, but not to a ridiculous extent.
‘Cassie.’
‘Hi, James.’
‘Thanks for agreeing to a call. I had a couple of points I wanted to discuss that I thought would be easier by speaking rather than emailing back and forth.’ He had a deep voice with a bit of a rasp, and was both extremely London and extremely confident-sounding. It was the kind of voice a lot of women liked. Cassie herself had gone for that type of man in the past; now she was older and wiser.
‘Okay, great,’ she said, not meaning it. There’d be a lot to say once the swap started, obviously, because they’d want to tell each other how things in their respective houses worked, give each other advice, all sorts of things, but there was no point going through any of that now, because they’d just forget.
‘Firstly, I thought it would be good to touch base, just really to confirm that we are who we say we are.’ What? He still didn’t believe she was definitely who she said she was after conducting possibly the most anal pre-house-letting due diligence of all time?
‘Right. Well, yes, I am me.’
‘Great.’ There was a pause. Maybe he’d just realised how ridiculous he sounded. ‘And I am me, of course.’
‘Excellent,’ Cassie said. Honestly.
‘The other main reason that I wanted to speak to you was to agree the start date of the swap. We should probably actually have done this before exchanging all our other details.’
‘Okay, no problem.’ When they’d filled in their online forms, James had said that he could start any time and Cassie had said she could start in about a month’s time. She wanted to be around for Dina’s daughter Amy’s eighteenth, plus it would take time to pack. She’d started preparing the house and she’d started on some notes for James, as and when things occurred to her, but she was in no way ready. So, since James could do any time, they would presumably start when Cassie wanted to. Ideal. ‘Thank you for being flexible.’
‘Sorry, but I’m not flexible.’
‘You aren’t?’
‘No. I’m afraid that I need to start the swap immediately,’ he said.
‘But you said on the online form that you could do any time starting now.’
‘The form was badly constructed in that sense. It didn’t give me the opportunity to say exactly what I meant, which is that not only can I start the swap soon, I do need to start the swap within the next week.’
‘But I can’t start for at least three or four weeks.’
‘Is that due to work or family commitments?’
