At Ferns and Foliage the manager, whilst knowledgeable and competent, insisted on sticking rigidly to his contracted hours. Except for essential cover for sick absences and unforeseen crises, Andrew disliked paying overtime, believing that bonuses based on profits were the best way of rewarding staff for good work and flexibility, whereas regular overtime encouraged people to work slowly and take unnecessary time off sick. He was worried that the manager would use his absence to change working practices, and persuaded me to go in a couple of times a week on the excuse that he wanted me to ensure the paperwork was well maintained and check on stock levels.
The manager knew about the new arrangements for signing cheques and understandably resented my interference. He occasionally made mildly critical remarks, for instance when I rather stupidly asked why it was necessary to stock a dozen different types of fertilizer, he said contemptuously, 'Your trouble is you don't know your chrysanthemums from your dahlias.' The criticism was largely justified, and for him to voice his irritation was better than letting it fester into a grudge. Even Tom knew more about plants and the uses of the various packets and bottles of stuff on the shelves than I, and sensibly explained that whether so many different types of fertilizer were necessary did not matter much; the garden centre, like shops of all kinds, stocked whatever would sell.
Andrew's illness, or rather the lack of his company, exposed a weakness in our relationship. From my very first visit to the Beckford Arms, Andrew and I had been the great talkers, discussing everything from the price of crisps to the dangers of global climatic change, while Tom put in a few comments here and there. Since Andrew no longer came to the pub regularly Tom and I were spending more time on our own together. Some of his habits of speech began to irk me: his use of 'ain't' instead of 'haven't', usually followed with another negative as in 'ain't got no time for them' or 'ain't never been there'; his 'going for a quiet drink' in the Beckford Arms even though the pub was often noisy and overcrowded; and the way he called his clients 'gov' on the 'phone as though trying to ingratiate himself by being obsequious.
When he wanted he could be surprisingly articulate. In the early days when we were getting to know each other he told me about his childhood, for instance how he, his brother and a couple of friends used to play at tying each other up with bits of rope they found in an uncle's garage. They would take it in turns to be the 'captive', submit to being tied up and left for five minutes alone in the pitch dark to try to struggle free, sometimes succeeding before the others came to release them, sometimes not. Their escapades sounded imaginative and exciting compared to the games my sister and I used to play in the back garden, never far from parental eyes.