"The ‘ends well’ bit, I shout. "I want the ‘ends well’ bit. I want the ‘ends well’ bit now."

HOME ALONE, and waiting for a call from my husband. 

He’s in London with my son, who had an interview this afternoon for a job which is so proper-sounding that it’s challenging certain assumptions I’ve made about further education.

“And there I was,” I muse, lying on the sofa with book, hot water bottle and house-phone, “thinking that he simply had a degree in hot chicken rolls, over-the-counter hangover cures and losing iPods.”

The phone rings.

“All good,” my husband pants, before I have time to speak.

“Did you give him his degree scrolls?” I ask.

“All good,” he pants, and there is triumph in his tone, and a little bit of something else. A residue of panic, I fear. Rather as if “All Good” was the name of a train and he’s just caught it by the skin of his teeth as it was pulling out of the station.

I stiffen on the sofa.

They met yesterday, my husband pants, at ‘Howl at the Moon,’ the pub in which he works.

“He’d brought a suit with him to the Howl, to ask me if it was all-right for the interview, but when he held it up for me to see, there was just the jacket on the hanger. No trousers [pant, pant.] We think they must have fallen off on the bus. Anyway, he insisted on buying me lunch and a couple of beers, which was nice of him. Craft beers. Quite nice. After that he went home to prepare for the interview, and sort out another suit.”

“Did you give him his degree scrolls?” I ask.

“It’s all [pant] under control,” he says. “When I got back to Vanessa’s after the Howl, I realised I’d forgotten to give him his scrolls. So I met up with him last night to give them to him [pant, pant] and he tried on this other suit. Cheap thing he’d bought. And he thought the tailor-tacks were part of the design. You know those white criss-cross stitches all down the side splits of the jacket? I had to tell him it was removable stitching. I hope he remembered to cut them off.”

“Can you get to the “under control” bit?” I say, sitting up, “immediately please.”

“No need to panic,” he says. “This morning he got off at the wrong Tube station. He figured it would be quicker [pant, pant] to run back to the right one but then it started pissing down. He says the dye in his suit was running. And when he got to the interview place, it was the wrong entrance and the security man wouldn’t let him in because he didn’t have a pass for that entrance.”

“Get to the ‘no need to panic’ bit now,” I shout, “no back story. And did you tell him to leave plenty of time? An extra hour, for everything to go completely wrong, like I told you to, like I always tell you to do?”

“All’s well that ends well,” he says, “the place was huge [pant, pant]. Four hundred and seventy acres! The security man told him it would take 45 minutes [pant] to walk the perimeter, round to the right entrance and he only had half an hour...”

Now I am starting to pant. “Get to the ‘ends well’ bit,” I shout, “no more back-story.”

“Anyway he decided to hitch and three young lads [pant] stopped to pick him up on their way to work. He told them his story and they gave him a spin half way and he thanked them, jumped out, sprinted off, and was legging it down the road in the pissing-down rain...”

“The ‘ends well’ bit,” I shout, standing up. “I want the ‘ends well’ bit. I want the’ ends well’ bit now.”

“...and then,” my husband says, “the same car pulled up beside him again, and the driver [pant] told him to jump back in [pant] and they took him all the way there. Right to the front door. He got there with five minutes to spare!”

“What’s with all the panting then?” I shout. “I know why I’m panting, but why are you still panting?”

“I’m on the way to the airport,” he says, “but I had a bit of a problem with my passport. Left it at Vanessa’s but don’t worry [pant, pant]. All [pant] good.”