Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine

First things first: before I went to my desk and faced everyone, I had to have the dreaded back-to-work interview. I’d never had one before, but I’d heard the others muttering about them in the past. Apparently, HR forced you to have a meeting with your boss if you’d been off for more than a couple of days, ostensibly to make sure you were fully recovered and fit for work, and to see if any adjustments needed to be made to ensure you stayed well. In reality, however, the popular view tended towards this process having been designed to intimidate, to discourage absence, and to check whether you’d been – what was the word? – ah yes, skiving. Those people didn’t have Bob as a boss, however. Only the section managers reported to Bob. I was one of them now, the Praetorian Guard, the elect. Bob was an odd kind of emperor, though.

He stood up and kissed me on the cheek, and while he hugged me, his little pot belly pressed against me and made me want to laugh. He patted my back a few times. The whole thing was excruciatingly embarrassing, but really, really nice.

He made me a cup of tea and fussed around with biscuits, making sure I was comfortable.

‘Now then, this interview. It’s nothing to worry about, Eleanor, a formality – HR give me a hard time if I don’t do these things, you know what it’s like.’ He made a face. ‘We just need to ticky boxy’ (what?) ‘and sign the form, and then I’ll let you get back to it.’

He was slurping from a mug of coffee and had spilled some down his shirt front. Bob wore thin shirts, a vest visible beneath, which added to the overall impression of an overgrown schoolboy. We went through a list of insultingly banal prescribed questions from a form. It was, to the visible relief of us both, a painless if somewhat tedious process.

‘Right then,’ he said, ‘that’s that done, thank Christ. Is there anything else you wanted to talk about? It’s a bit soon to get into specifics, I know,’ he said. ‘We can meet again tomorrow when you’ve had a chance to get up to speed with everything, if you like?’

‘The Christmas lunch,’ I said, ‘is it all arranged now?’

He screwed up his little round face, and swore in a most uncherubic fashion.

‘I totally forgot about that!’ he said. ‘There were so many other things to sort out, and it just kind of, I don’t know, slipped off my radar. Shit …’

‘Fear not, Bob,’ I said. ‘I shall address it post haste.’ I paused. ‘I mean, after I’ve caught up with all the accounts, of course.’

Bob looked worried. ‘Are you sure? I really don’t want to put any extra pressure on you, Eleanor – you’re just back, and I’m sure you’ll have more than enough on your plate …’

‘No problemo, Bob,’ I said confidently, giving him a double thumbs-up sign, thereby trying out a favourite phrase and gesture of Raymond’s for the first time. Bob’s eyebrows shot up. I hoped I had used them correctly, and in the appropriate context. I’m very good with words as a rule, but this sort of thing does, I must confess, trip me up sometimes.

‘Well, if you’re one hundred per cent sure …’ he said, not, it must be noted, sounding particularly sure himself.

‘Absolutely, Bob.’ I nodded. ‘Everything will be confirmed and arrangements put in place by the end of the week. You can count on it.’

‘Ah, well, that’d be brilliant,’ he said, scribbling on the form, which he then passed to me. ‘I just need you to fill in that section at the bottom, and that’s us done,’ he said. I signed with a flourish. I don’t have much opportunity to use my signature in day-to-day life, which is rather a pity, as I have a very interesting ‘John Hancock’, as our cousins across the pond would have it. I don’t mean to boast. It’s just that almost everyone who’s seen it has remarked on how unusual, how special it is. Personally, I don’t see what all the fuss is about. Anyone could write an ‘O’ as a snail shell spiral if they wished to, after all, and using a mixture of upper and lower case letters is simply good sense – it ensures that the signature is difficult to forge. Personal security, data security: so important.

When I finally sat down at my desk, the first thing I noticed was the flowers. They’d been obscured by the monitor as I’d approached, but now I saw the vase (well, it was actually a pint glass; the office never had enough vases, cake knives or champagne flutes, despite employees celebrating life events on what seemed to be a weekly basis). It was filled with blooms, sea holly and agapanthus and iris, and it was glorious.

An envelope was propped against the arrangement, and I slowly opened the seal. There was a card inside, a stunning photograph of a red squirrel eating a hazelnut on the front. Inside, someone (Bernadette, I suspected, from the childlike scrawl) had written WELCOME BACK ELEANOR! and a multitude of signatures, accompanied by Best Wishes or Love, were scattered across both sides. I was somewhat taken aback. Love! Best wishes! I wasn’t at all sure what to think.