“Why,” I asked, knowing, as always, I should not, “would a pirate’s favourite cheese be the sea?”
“Well, that’s what it was last time.”
I cast my mind back over the three hundred and seventy jokes I’d told Alex over the last few years and finally remembered myself in a minibus on the way to Alex’s own fucking wedding. “Hang on, that was a pirate’s favourite letter of the alphabet.”
“Same principle applies, surely?”
“No,” I told him. “Because there isn’t a principle. They’re unrelated jokes.”
Alex was looking perplexed. Which I admit was his usual state. “So whatisa pirate’s favourite cheese?”
“Yarrrrlsberg.”
“Not Seasberg?”
“No.”
With a level of persistence substantially more dogged than my actual dog, he asked, “Why not?”
“Because there’s no such cheese as Seasberg.”
“There’s no such cheese as Yarrrrlsberg either.”
My brain was doing the mental equivalent of grabbing me by the arm and yelling,Leave him, Luc, he’s not worth it, but like a football fan about to get arrested for being drunk and disorderly, I carried on anyway. “Yes, there is.”
“What sort is it?”
There were a whole lot of skills I didn’t have. Cooking, for example. Or DIY. Or speaking more than three words of French, even though it was my mother’s native language. Or, apparently, describing cheese. “It’s…I think it’s one of the ones with holes in? It might be a bit rubbery?”
Alex got that concerned expression he used when he was trying to gaslight me into thinking the real world was the one he lived in, rather than the one I remembered having inhabited before he started talking. “Pretty sure that’s Emmental.”
“I think there might be more than one type of cheese with holes in it.”
With fatal comprehension, Alex nodded. “And pirates like that sort of cheese?”
“Pirates,” I told him very, very slowly, “like the syllableyarrrr.”
“I suppose they do,” agreed Alex, grinning. “Although in my experience, not as much as they like the syllablesea.”
Had I just…lost? Had I, in fact, lost every time for the past eight years?
Fuck.
“See you at the meeting,” I said.
“Don’t you mean, yarrrr me at the meeting?” Then Alex’s eyes widened. “Wait a moment. What meeting?”
“The meeting you organised?”
“Doesn’t narrow it down, old boy. I organise two, maybe even three meetings a month.”
I sighed. “The meeting you organised for today, where we meet the new earl and, if we’re lucky, don’t all lose our jobs. The meeting that took a solid six weeks to arrange because the man we’re meant to be meetingwithwas, and I quote, ‘not feeling it.’”
“Oh, that meeting.”
I nodded and went through to what we were charitably calling our open-plan hot-desking area. In reality, it was Barbara Clench’s former office, and it was open plan because it contained exactly one desk, and it was hot-desking because it contained exactly one desk. One desk that currently contained Rhys Jones Bowen.
“Hello, Luc,” he said, glancing up. “You know what’d be lovely right about now? A cup of tea.”
