THE FIRST TIME was occasioned by his bad knee. After onerously following the rise and fall of the coast, Gordon Bosky’s postal route in Newquay veered inland and passed right by his own semidetached. The ache had been sharpish, so he pulled the trolley into his vestibule, fixed a cup of tea, and fell asleep. When he awoke it was too late to finish the delivery without drawing a torrent of complaints, and the following morning there would be yet more mail—too much to fit in the trolley without removing the undelivered tranche. So he loaded the orphaned post into a bin liner, which remained at the foot of the stairs for some time. Nobody noticed; the sun still rose in the sky.
Of course, his neighbors might have objected had their post ceased to arrive altogether. Thus with impressive psychological acuity and mathematical cunning, Gordon learned to calculate just how often a trolley full of envelopes and packets could go missing with no one the wiser. As for why? He was overworked and underpaid. The Royal Mail demanded that routes be completed far too double-quick for a man with a dodgy knee. From his own discerning perusals, the post these days was chock-full of such rubbish that his customers were well spared: a catalog flogging motorized salt cellars, or rebukes from the Revenue in brown envelopes so cheap and grim that you’d think it was still World War II.
But perhaps most of all because nary a soul ever posted an envelope to Gordon Bosky himself. It was hardly fair for the means by which a man earned his crust to rub it in on a daily basis that he was alone in this world. He’d originally shifted to Cornwall on the assumption that a holiday destination would be teeming with sex-starved widows and rich American divorcées. Instead, Newquay was overrun with lean, cliquish surfers who looked right through a fifty-five-year-old postman as if he were a jellyfish.
Thus as the bin liners burgeoned, Gordon came to look on his stash as his own sort of tax, or more kindly, a tithe. Since no more did be-holden customers hand their postman a discreetly folded tenner or even a sodding fruitcake at Christmas, he was therefore obliged to extract an additional gratuity around the holidays, when the pickings were more choice. Or they once were. Enragingly, indolent shoppers were now purchasing the tastier gear through Amazon, which shunned the Royal for couriers. Really. As if postmen weren’t to be trusted.
Combing through his booty was hard work, and the council might have commended his diligent recycling—the blue boxes out front forever bulging with circulars, bank statements, blood-test reports, and Tesco coupons that regrettably he couldn’t use because their bar codes didn’t match his Club Card. Accordingly, Gordon felt he’d earned the few usable bits of kit he salvaged, like fleece-lined slippers only a size too small. Alas, rare personal correspondence merely confirmed that his neighbors were a tedious lot: cranky complaints about a tube of toothpaste full of air, or handwritten hate mail for some poor journalist on Jubilee Street—scrawled in green ink, dripping exclamation marks, all in capital letters, every other word underscored three times.
But one elegant envelope caught his attention in September. The handwriting of the address was fluid but firm, and what’s more it was legible (for the bane of a postman’s life of late was tosspots raised on computers whose cursive rendition of Newquay was indistinguishable from Moscow). Inside, on quality stationery:
Dear Erskine,
Forgive my impertinence, but my daughter located you for me on Facebook (an enigma quite beyond my ken, I’m afraid). You may not remember me, but we attended school together at Bergen Grammar in Peterborough. After thirty-nine years, I can finally admit that I fancied you then. I admired not only the confidence with which you managed your difficulties, but also the shrewdness with which you used hardship to your advantage.
My daughter claims that you’re single, and describes your photograph as “roughly handsome”. My husband died some years ago. Would you care to meet up? I’m attending a film festival in Newquay the first week in November.
If I don’t hear from you, perhaps your life is too full to accommodate a virtual stranger, and no offence taken.
Best regards,
Deirdre St James (the girl in the little red hat)
Poncey name. Still, Gordon and Deirdre must have been about the same age, and after four decades you could have turned into anybody. He surely qualified as “roughly handsome,” if with a tad too much emphasis on the adverb. A shut-in who’d never so much as peered through his letter box, the real Erskine Espadrille (very poncey name) had recently vacated his dwelling without taking the judicious precaution of purchasing redirection services. A skinflint whom Deirdre (about whom he already felt proprietary) was better off without. Gordon wrote back.
Pleasantly, his letter did not land in the hands of a postman like himself, and achieved its mission. When she rang the number “Erskine” had enclosed, Deirdre’s voice engendered the same clarity and firmness of her handwriting. A mischief in her laugh was consonant with a little girl who had sported a quirky red hat. They arranged to meet at a café not far from the Lighthouse Cinema, between screenings she was keen to catch; a proper film buff, was Deirdre.
A well-kept, stylish woman with neat, short gray hair entered the café right on time, per their agreed signal wrapped in a bright red scarf, a token of her girlhood trademark.
“Deirdre!” Gordon tried to imbue his clasp with the confidence she’d admired in her schoolmate. “Figured you might not recognize me after all these years.”
“Erskine,” she stressed, gaze aglitter. “I might not have recognized you at that.”
They ordered tea. Formerly a functionary in Swindon’s Building Control and Planning, Deirdre had taken early retirement, the better to pursue a range of outside interests. After Gordon shared his anxiety about rumors that the Royal might be privatized, the two commiserated. Scandalously, these days the whole nation seemed to resent its public workforce. “As if we’re parasites,” Deirdre said. “There’s no appreciation. Would people in the vaunted ‘private sector’ want these jobs? I don’t think so. The term is civil servant. So I got out while I could still get a proper pension. Having sacrificed so much, a body has to take advantage of the few perquisites.”
“Right you are,” Gordon—or Erskine—agreed heartily. “The punters take us for granted. You wouldn’t credit the rudeness—mums with strollers going head-to-head with my trolley on the pavement, expecting an agent of the state to give way! Deliver one letter to the wrong address, and it’s heaps of abuse. Are they glad for the hundreds of items delivered to the right address? Never.”
Deirdre invited him along to the cinema, where Gordon was in such fine humor that he overcame his aversion to subtitles. Indeed, for the rest of the week, Gordon joined her for afternoon screenings, his attendance facilitated by stashing the majority of his morning’s postal delivery unceremoniously in his vestibule. They took walks on the coastal path (his knee having uncannily improved), caught sunsets on Fistral Beach, and dined with views of the sea. He wooed her with thoughtful little presents from his postal trove: a packet of exotic dried mushrooms, a restaurant guide to Cornwall, and, by a stroke of fabulous good fortune thanks to some biddy with time on her hands in Yorkshire, a hand-knit woolen watch cap in red.
Of course, there was awkwardness. Gordon would forget to look round when his date called him Erskine. Settling bills, he rushed the credit card into his wallet, lest she glimpse the account holder. A Google search on “Bergen Grammar Peterborough” may have enabled wistful remembrance of an ivy-covered amphitheater, but when Deirdre reminisced about particular teachers and fellow students, Gordon could only nod. He’d had to scramble, too, when one of his few customers who actually knew it hailed him by name—a nickname, he explained afterwards, from his fondness for gin. Gordon was subsequently obliged to order G&Ts, though he preferred lager.
Yet when she hinted that for her last evening it would be nice to eat at his house, the whole charade was in danger of collapse. Dining in was a reasonable request, but he’d be hard-pressed to justify the GORDON BOSKY on his bell or the disparity between his address and the one to which she’d sent her query. His home was riddled with tiny details that would betray him, like the name on the prescription pain medication for his knee. Most of all, how could he rationalize the mountains of bin bags? In truth, he had come to fancy her madly, but sooner or later with this “Erskine Espadrille” palaver some slip would do him in. They had no future.
So he acceded to her wishes, and welcomed her that evening with a funereally hung head. If she noticed any anomalies, Deirdre politely refrained from observing them aloud. Stepping over a bin bag, she did ask decorously if he had a penchant for hoarding.
“Of a sort,” he said miserably. The merest glimpse in one bag would give the game away, and there’s some who would take a less than charitable view of his customers’ involuntary tithe. It was over—a week hitherto the finest of his life.
At dinner—candlelight minimizing bin-liner glare—Gordon had little appetite, and finally came clean. “Deirdre, love. I’m not Erskine Espadrille.”
“Of course not,” she said readily.
“You knew?”
“Erskine was born without a right hand. Prosthetics have advanced, but they’re not that lifelike. I’ve been captivated by your enterprising spirit. Though I’m curious. However did you gain possession of my letter?”
With nothing to lose, Gordon confessed.
As Deirdre laughed, that chime of mischief pealed into full-tilt naughtiness. “What good fun! I’m a dreadful snoop, and can’t think of anything more delightful than poking through other people’s post. But from the looks of this place, you’re not up to the job alone. What say we take on that bag by the door after pudding?”
Thereafter, deploying the same efficiency with which Deirdre St. James had denied planning permission for sheds in back gardens, the operation became more professional, and they cleared the backlog. Gordon would tackle the recycling as his wife-to-be read out belligerent passages in correspondence. Both tenderly reserved premium discoveries for what would prove a cracking Christmas. Sensibly, they unearthed the occasional object so improbably ugly or useless that the easiest means of its disposal was to deliver the packet, albeit belatedly, to the hapless addressee. Gordon Bosky’s efforts having schooled his customers in the art of appreciation, they never groused over the delay, but acted suitably grateful to have got any post at all.