When Gregory got back to the shop he rang Heavenly Holidays and was told that Angela had rung in to say that she wouldn’t be back at work in the afternoon. He spoke to Lisa, who acted as Angela’s deputy in her absence. “She’s not been herself, lately,” said Gregory, defensively, after listening to Lisa’s catalogue of complaints against his wife. Apparently, the worst of these was that Angela had booked a family of twelve on to a charter flight to Tenerife that had been taken off the timetable a year ago. Lisa had been forced to ring Head Office for authorisation to book the irate family into an airport hotel until seats on scheduled flights could be arranged for them.
“Will she be in tomorrow?” said Lisa. “She’s got three dirty mugs on the draining board in the staff kitchen.”
Gregory admitted that he didn’t know what Angela’s movements were tomorrow. He could hear telephones ringing in the background and a masculine voice raised in argument. Lisa said, “I’ve got to go. Tell her to ring me.”
During the short time Gregory had been on the telephone a queue of women had built up at the cash till. His own Christmas rush had begun. The first woman in the queue had brought back a tablecloth she’d bought the day before, complaining that there was a design fault all over it. She pointed at the reindeer pulling Santa’s sleigh, which ran as a continuous pattern around the edge of the cloth.
“Look, their antlers are faulty,” she said.
Gregory looked closely and saw that each right-hand antler was missing some brown thread, giving the reindeer a peculiar lop-sided appearance. The woman prodded a slim finger at the cloth. “It’s an authentic design,” said Gregory. “In the wild you would never see a reindeer with identical matching antlers.”
“What utter nonsense,” she said.
He recognised from the woman’s accent and self-confident manner that nothing but a full refund would satisfy her. He took £9.99 from the till and handed it to her with a smile, saying, “And a Merry Christmas, madam.”
When she’d left the shop he went through the huge stock of reindeer ‘and Santa tablecloths and found, to his profound horror, that each one had exactly the same design fault. He was on the telephone to his Portuguese supplier at once, but the person in the office who spoke English was out. He slammed the telephone down angrily, and, as was customary for him on occasions like this, practised telling Angela about his frustrating afternoon. Then he remembered that he couldn’t be sure if Angela would be there when he got home, or if she would want to listen to him if she was.
He hoped that this stupid fling she was having was caused by the menopause. He’d read that some women changed their personalities for a while until their hormones calmed down.
Angela had once left him for two days and gone to stay in a hotel in Cromer. They’d had a quarrel about the correct way to stack the dishwasher, which had quickly escalated into a screaming row about money.
He still remembered the desolate atmosphere in the house after she’d gone. He hadn’t known what to do with himself. Without her he felt incomplete.