Cassie
Cassie checked her watch. 6 p.m. A little early for a glass of wine maybe, but sheneededone. BloodyJames. And the bloody Wi-Fi. She should probably apologise properly, with no temper involved. Obviously sheshouldhave told him about it, but it just hadn’t occurred to her at any point before she wrote the notes for him. She’d been too overwhelmed by the whole Eek-I’m-moving-to-London-far-sooner-than-I-was-expecting thing.
She found a bottle opener and poured herself a glass of his red.
She took a big sip. And that was good. James wasn’t her favourite person but he had great taste in alcohol. Cassie sat in the sitting room armchair – the only comfortable seat in the flat – and wriggled her shoulders, feeling her tension begin to slip away. She took another sip. Yes,verygood.
And then the doorbell rang. She jerked upright in panic. Was it Emily again?
Luckily, she leaned forward as she moved, so that she spilled her wine on the floor, not the chair.
No, of course it wouldn’t be Emily at the door again. Cassie was just being paranoid.
She mopped up the wine with loo paper – she should have bought kitchen roll yesterday – and tiptoed – like the doorbell ringer could hear her – over to the doorbell camera screen. It wasn’t Emily, obviously. It was, however,anotherbeautiful woman. How many of themwerethere?
She checked that the chain was definitely on the door and said, ‘Hello?’, over the intercom.
‘Hi. Cassie? James asked me to bring a small present for you. He said it was an apology.’ Oh. Wow. She really hadn’t expected that. So soon after their call, as well. He hadn’t sounded apologetic at all on the phone. Well, that was nice. She was definitely going to apologise to him again too. She’d obviously misjudged him. And it was nice that he had close (beautiful) friends who would come round with presents, at the drop of a hat, even if he didn’t know his neighbours.
The woman was even more beautiful in the flesh. She flashed a stunning smile at Cassie and held out a perfectly wrapped, rectangular gift and an enormous and gorgeous bouquet of flowers, deep purples and reds.
‘My name’s Dee, and James uses our concierge services. I’ve just popped my card in the bag,’ she told Cassie with another perfect smile. ‘You never know.’ Oh, okay. It seemed remarkably flash of James to use a concierge service but it was a nice gesture.
‘Thank you. The flowers are beautiful.’
‘Not at all.’ Dee flashed her perfect teeth again and she was gone.
Cassie closed the door behind her and went into the sitting room with the flowers and wrapped present, interested to open it. Was it something James had suggested or was it Dee’s choice, something generic?
There was a card tucked into it, simply worded: ‘Apologies. James’.
The present turned out to be two deep-mattress, fitted bed sheets. Which would have been an excellent apology if it wasn’t a day late, after her one-and-three-quarter-hour round trip yesterday afternoon traipsing back to John Lewis and exchanging the other ones. And if you ignored the fact that he should have provided bed linen in the first place. Still, she’d better send him a text to say thank you.
She got two blue ticks immediately. He must be outside to have reception. Oh. Right. Yes. That thought demonstrated that it would be quite annoying to be in his position, thousands of miles away from his friends and contacts but with unreliable Wi-Fi and no phone signal in the house.
He’d replied.
Np.
Cassiereallydisliked ‘Np’. Just say ‘No problem’, or ‘No prob’, or even ‘No worries’. But, whatever, he’d apologised for their argument, and she was going to apologise too. Oh, three dots. He was typing again.
Just to be clear, the apology was for yesterday, for Emily’s intrusion.
What? No apology about his Wi-Fi tantrum? The rude shit. She was tempted to send a sarky message back, but she was going to be the bigger person here. And now that she’d calmed down she could appreciate that having no Wi-Fi might be quite annoying.
Okay, well thanks. Apologies that I forgot to tell you about the Wi-Fi. I really did just forget because I was in a flap and I do now appreciate that it’s very annoying for you and I’m very sorry.
One grey tick. Two grey ones, so therefore it had arrived.
They didn’t turn blue. Rude.
Well, whatever. She was going to ignore him and get on with her evening.
Cassie really couldn’t be bothered to cook dinner today and that was fine. This being a fancy London neighbourhood, there were more takeaway places with outstanding reviews within a square mile than you could possibly count. The only question was, what did she feel like having? Hard to decide, except it didn’t matter; she could have a different onewhenever she liked. On the island, you could only get takeaway from Joe’s Diner, and only when Joe was in the mood.
Another thing, of course, that she could do here whenever she liked, was use the internet at wonderfully high speed, and order her takeaway online.
Half an hour later, she was forking up Chinese – to-die-for sautéed squid in black bean sauce, with cutlery because she was terrible with chopsticks – while checking out some facts about the Tower of London for her books on her laptop, occasionally glancing at the leafy views from James’s sitting room windows.
