Six Weeks

Martin rang Ellis on the Tuesday and moved his start date to the first of October.

He did it from the back room with the door open, which was new, and I heard him say, “Family thing. Nothing terrible. I’ll do the October and November block and I’ll do it well, and if you need someone for September that’s fair enough and no hard feelings.”

Then he came out and said, “Six weeks. I’m not doing a year of this. Six weeks, we try properly, and at the end of it we both say what we think.”

“That’s not very long.”

“It’s six weeks longer than most people get,” Martin said. “And I know myself. If I give it a year I’ll spend ten months being pleasant about it.”

Which is a sentence I had heard, almost exactly, on a pavement in Leytonstone, from someone else, and I want it…