WARNING TO READERS - This is a long, rambling, multi-part story and VERY British. The individual chapters will make more sense if read in sequence.
This chapter may seem to ramble even more than usual as it was originally several very short parts which have been combined into a single chapter.
Chapter 37: King of the Castle
Friday turned out to be pretty hectic. With both Maggie and Emma leaving for France on Sunday there was a lot that needed to be sorted out before they went. I spent most of the morning in the office as Emma wanted to make sure that Tayler and I were fully conversant with the administration, cashiers and payroll duties that we would be sharing whilst she was away.
Tayler was proving to be worth her considerable weight in gold, she was a fully qualified book keeper and a quick study, had picked up the garden centre routine almost instantly and was perfectly happy to stay in the main office all day, dealing with the admin tasks and answering the telephones. She and Emma worked well together and had become firm friends and Emma had given Maggie and I glowing reports as to her efficiency. She was popular with the other members of staff, but was a little bit nervous about meeting customers face to face however, that was not really part of her daily duties and presented no issues. She had offered to work through without a day off whilst Emma was away; an offer which I was more than pleased to accept but I had insisted that she had Saturday off to compensate.
I had initially thought that Tayler was a bit odd, she was twenty-two, seriously overweight, with bright green, short cropped hair, and dressed like a punk, with quite a lot of facial piercing but seldom wore much of her flamboyant jewellery at work. She was absolutely brilliant at accounts work with a wicked sense of humour which appealed to my own warped idea of what was funny.
She got on with the boys because she could match them pint for pint in the pub and still stay sober and could thrash all of them except for Steve at snooker or pool, and the girls found her comfortably non-competitive as she was proud of being gay. As far as I knew she did not have a current partner and lived at home with her parents and seemed perfectly content with that arrangement. I liked her a lot.
Maggie had been out with Kitty and Colin for most of the morning touring the larger jobs that they would be working on for the next week or so and making sure that they were happy with their assignments and had everything that they needed. With both Maggie and Emma away I would probably be unable to put much time in on the outside work although Colin and Kitty really needed very little supervision; I was happy that Taylor could run the office without any problems and Jack was as solid as a rock and capable of dealing with any other issue that might arise at the garden centre.
We had agreed to meet when she got back and go over any last minute issues that she wanted to hand off to me. I poured us some coffees and we sat together on the couch in our office whilst she updated me on things that I needed to know. We talked every day and so there were seldom any work matters that were not totally shared between us but the truth was that I wanted to spend a little time alone with Maggie before she left for France.
It was Friday and Gwen and Maggie were planning to have their regular 'twins night out' as usual, Maggie was out for the day with the twins on Saturday, they would all be driving down to Dover in the early hours Sunday morning and so this was my last opportunity to spend an hour or so with her so I was just going to make the most of sitting close to her on the couch, feeling the warmth of her thigh against mine and sharing silly small jokes about silly small things.
"One final task to do and then I will take you over to the pub and buy you that lunch I promised you," Maggie said. She got up and went to her desk for a large envelope, and the big office desk diary, refilled our coffee mugs and then sat down again. "We need to sort out the ticket allocations and times out for the RHS Chelsea Flower Show at the end of the month."
The Royal Horticultural Society, Chelsea Flower Show was the premier horticultural event of the British gardener's calendar and was held annually at the end of May or early June, that year it was to be the week that Maggie returned from France. Maggie always went up to London for the last three days and in previous years, I had also made the trip on the final Saturday and Jack usually took a couple of days out to attend as well.
This year with the re-launch of the garden centre Maggie and I had decided to buy the expensive tickets for any of the staff that wanted to go to the show and we would both go up on the Thursday and stay through the Saturday. Most of the full time staff had shown an interest and we needed to sort out which day each could be released to attend and still leave us sufficient cover for the daily business.
Emma had traded off going to Chelsea as she had asked for a weeks holiday later in August to go with Philippa and Janice to the Burghley Horse Trials, and so would be 'duty manager' in charge with both Maggie and I away, but it still took us a good hour to match everyone to the tickets and days. At the end we had three spares; two of which we both agreed we could offer to the new members of staff Benson and Libby who were starting at the week-end.
We had decided that we would pay for all the staff entry tickets and count the trip as a paid working day as a little thank you gesture for all the extra hard work that the whole team had put in that year. Everybody was thrilled with that offer and I was seriously looking forward to those three days with in London with Maggie. She had already booked us two rooms at the Draycott Hotel, which was the hotel that she used every year and was close to Sloane Square and within walking distance of the Royal Hospital where the exhibition was centred.
"I am really looking forward to the trip... it is going to be a lot of fun..." I told her as we finished making the diary entries. In actual fact most of the days were going to be hard work as we would be spending a lot of time checking out the trade stands and looking for new hybrids and varieties of plants to add to our range at the garden centre. We had already put together a shopping list of products to look for and Jack had been given a budget to use as he pleased on acquiring new strains of plants for the next year.
"There had better be some fun involved," Maggie laughed, "Don't forget that you still owe me a special date.... I am still one down, you know." It had been a running tease between us since I took Gwen to London for the week-end to the ballet.
"Yeah, I'm working on it...." I chuckled, "There are several good burger bars near-by and I think there is even a Kentucky Chicken take-away."
I put my arms over my head and rolled into a ball on the couch as she started to pummel me furiously with a rolled up magazine, both of us laughing and squealing. In fact, I had already taken care of my special treat for Maggie; Gwen and I had got together secretly to arrange a couple of things for the evenings that we were in London, but I wasn't going to spoil the surprise by telling her before we got there.
As usual, we were still messing about when Emma put her head around the office door.
"Bloody hell, are you two pissing about again, "She laughed, "Am I the only one who ever does any work around here."
We were both still giggling stupidly but tried to put on serious faces.
"I have just had Aunt Nikki on the telephone for you Jay," she announced. "Her train will be getting into Salisbury about 4:30 and she wanted you to collect her...."
I felt a cold chill grip my balls and glanced across at Maggie, she was grinning mischievously and raised an eyebrow. I really did not want to put myself in Nikki's path, not because I didn't like her but because I did. When it came to sex and women my dick was the senior partner and my brain tended to take a rear seat and I knew that if Nikki seriously came on to me I would probably not be able to resist her for long. Spending time with Nikki would be fun and I knew that shagging with her would probably be fantastic if it got that far however unlikely, but my brain told me that afterwards I would feel terribly disloyal to Maggie whom I adored; I would seriously piss off Gwen who I genuinely loved more than anything in the world and I would be giving Nikki a rod to beat Maggie with if she so chose.
