The Flower Arrangement (17 page)

“Sounds like you,” he says, though he is very publicly engaged to a TV presenter.

“Like your brand.” Mia smiles. “I know of an artist who has a piece that would be perfect for your foyer. I'll ping you the details. But listen,” she says, “you can't mention that it was me who hooked you up.”

*   *   *

The flower section in the supermarket has taken over half of the fruit and veg aisle. “What's with the garden center in here?” Ronan stares at the massed bouquets of roses. “Where have they hidden the eggplants?”

“It's Valentine's Day next week.” Mia has been wondering when he will notice.

“Or”—Ronan frowns—“as I call it, Hallmark Day. I could throttle the person who decided to turn love into a branded retailing opportunity.”

Mia's heart sinks. Everyone at work knows she has a boyfriend. She is going to look like a pity case if she doesn't get a single red rose. She hatches a plan.

The next morning, when they are walking into town from her place, she overshoots the turn for St. Stephen's Green and leads him along Camden Street. Ronan doesn't even notice. He is talking excitedly about Hilary. About the phone call she had out of the blue from some hotshot businessman who wants to buy her personal baggage
installation. She was supposed to be moving out in two weeks. If this comes through, she can stay.

“I wonder how this Jack Donegan guy got hold of her details,” he is saying as they get closer to Blossom & Grow.

“Yeah,” Mia says innocently.

“Hey, I love this place!” Ronan puts his hands on his hips and looks up at the tall pale pink building. “That trompe l'oeil”—he points at the painted-on ivy—“is amazing.”

Mia takes his arm and steps closer to the window, which is full of white tissue paper hearts.

“Can we take a quick look inside?” Ronan says.

“Really?”

“Well, I know I said I don't do the whole flower thing, but I was thinking . . .”

She smiles. Getting him to buy her flowers is going to be even easier than getting him to lose the beard.

“It would be nice to get Hilary a plant, you know, to celebrate her news.”

Mia gapes at him. The fact that she is Hilary's secret benefactor does not change the fact that Hilary is a thundering bitch. But she is Ronan's best mate. And something she said that morning when she caught Mia snooping in her room has stuck in her mind.

If you keep changing him, he won't be the person you fell in love with.

“After you,” she says. And she follows him into Blossom & Grow.

*   *   *

At four o'clock on Valentine's Day, Mia is at her desk attempting a complex tax calculation when her phone rings. “Delivery for you,” the receptionist says. “It's a cardboard box,” she adds quickly, with a trace of pity, in case Mia might be holding out for a dozen red roses.

The box is very heavy. Mia lumps it back to her office and dumps it on her desk. She is opening the cardboard flaps when Dermot puts his head around the door.

“Are those the files from DTL?” he asks.

Mia is staring into the box. There's a sheet of red tissue paper on top, and beneath it, packed tightly together, are twelve bags of flour. Plain. Self-raising. Rice. Corn. Rye. Buckwheat. Potato . . .

There's a page from a spiral-bound notebook tucked between the spelt and the whole wheat. It has been torn, roughly, into the shape of a heart and signed with a small “r.”

“Jesus.” Dermot comes over and stares into the box. “What the hell is this?”

“No idea.” Somehow Mia manages to keep a straight face as she looks down at a dozen Valentine's Day flours.

Lara's therapist, Leo, made her list every single thing she had to do every day. Literally everything.
Get up,
have a shower, eat breakfast, go to work, drive home, make dinner, go to bed.

If she found herself frozen at her worktable, without the energy to reach into a bucket and pick out a flower, or sitting outside her dad's house, where she lived now, unable to get out of the car, she was supposed to take the list out of her bag and simply do the next thing written on it.

Each line on the list, Leo had explained, was another stepping-stone across the torrent of grief that she had been trying to get over since her marriage ended and her father died.

She felt the sadness rise as she unlocked the door of Blossom & Grow on a damp, dark late-October morning, so she fished around in her bag until she found her list. Her heart plummeted when she read what was written at the top. She let her eye skip farther down the page, then got to work.

• Check that both delivery boxes have arrived.
  
• Plug in seven strings of fairy lights.
  
• Light candles for the lanterns.
  
• Sweep up last night's debris!
  
• Trim any dead leaves off the bay trees and set them up on either side of the door.
  

When all this was done, she locked the door again, found a Stanley knife and cut the tape on the smaller of the two delivery boxes. There were three buckets inside and each one held bunches of blooms, tightly wrapped in paper. She opened them and ticked the flowers off on another list, the one she had written in the order book. White and purple veronica.
Alchemilla mollis
. Salvia Picante. Green hypricum. Purple dahlias.

She cut a half inch off each stem, pulled the lower leaves off and plunged the stems into clean water, then left them to rehydrate while she moved on to the second box.

It was packed to the brim with crimson velvet—seventy Black Magic roses. She unwrapped them carefully but not quite carefully enough. She felt a sharp hook tear at the pad of her thumb and a little bead of blood ran down along her wrist.

Why did roses have to have thorns? she asked herself for the millionth time.

*   *   *

It is 7 a.m. on a wet autumn morning but the atmosphere in the kitchen of the one-bedroom apartment on the third floor of Block A, Beacon Court, is wintry.

Jennifer Kelly, in a pink fleece dressing gown with dried baby spit on the lapel, is looking out of the window so she doesn't have to look at her husband's face.

“Oh no,” Jack says again, staring at the cufflinks in the little red leather box. A silver “X” for one sleeve, an “O” for the other. A kiss and a hug. This is how they still sign their texts, though kissing and hugging have been in short supply since Ava came along.

“If you don't like them,” Jennifer says huffily, “I can take them back!”

“I didn't know we were doing presents.”

“Are we doing cards?” she asks, looking pointedly at the unopened envelope propped against his cereal bowl. “Because I can't bring that one back, I've already signed it.”

“I was going to give you yours tonight.”

“Well, don't bother.” The kitchen is so small she doesn't even have to turn around completely to reach out and dump her bowl and coffee cup into the sink. The clatter wakes Ava on the other side of the paper-thin wall and she begins to wail.

“That's all I need,” Jennifer says, under her breath.

Jack looks at her, then looks at the door, unsure of what to do. When Jennifer does not move, he sighs, puts his glasses on and hurries into the baby's room. She can hear him walking slowly backward and forward in the bedroom, talking to Ava in the low, soothing tone of voice he used to use when Jennifer was upset.

Does it never occur to him that she still needs soothing too? Ava has developed silent reflux, which means she has to be fed every hour. Jennifer can't remember the last time she slept through the night.

When Jack comes back, he has his coat on. “She's gone back to sleep. You probably have half an hour. Why don't you have a shower? Look”—he comes over and puts his arms around her and holds her tight—“can we start again?”

“I don't know,” she begins. “I just feel we're not on the same page anymore, not even the same book, and I—”

“I'm sorry.” He is trying to catch sight of his watch over her shoulder. “I meant can we start again when I get back. I'm already late for my train.”

She shrugs him off. “Well, don't let me keep you!” She turns away.

“I'll make it up to you,” he says. “I promise.”

She shakes her head and squirts washing-up liquid into the sink and turns on the tap. After a moment she hears him go out into the hall. The front door opens then closes with a loud click. Ava begins to wail again.

Jennifer goes into the bedroom and picks the baby up. Ava smells of Woolite and breast milk and a trace of Jack's aftershave where he must have pressed his chin against her cheek. The musk and bergamot scent, which used to make Jennifer weak at the knees, catches in her throat
now. “He'd better not try to make it up to me with a bunch of petrol-station flowers,” she says loudly over the baby's protesting squawks.

*   *   *

Across the courtyard in the penthouse flat of Block D, Jenny Kelly, in an embroidered red kimono that skims her toned thighs, is flinging bottles of aftershave into a bulging black plastic bag that already contains James's Xbox, his iPad and his precious Nespresso with water still sloshing around inside it. Is there room for his books? James is not a big reader. She retrieves
Who Moved My Cheese?
, then
Blink
, and she has
The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs
in her hand when her mobile chimes. Her self-respect has no intention of answering it, but her free hand has other ideas.

“Jenny, I'm so sorry I missed your calls last night. My phone died and I was working late. I'd left my charger back at the hotel.”

“You were working late!” She sounds unconvinced, James thinks. Somewhere between “significant doubts” and “incredibly suspicious.” “How late exactly?”

“I don't know.” He yawns. “Half twelve or one.”

“Well, that's funny”—she doesn't sound amused—“because according to Mark Zuckerberg, you were in a club called Madame JoJo's at a quarter past midnight with your arm around someone called Annelise.”

Fucking Internet, James thinks, ignoring the irony that he earns a considerable living from it. It's impossible to do anything,
anything
, without broadcasting your every activity as it happens to the world and its wife (or in this case, his fiancée).

“Yeah,” he says, trying to sound casual. “A whole bunch of us headed over after we finished the pitch rehearsal. They were all gagging for a drink. I only went along to pay for the first round, then I came straight back to the hotel.”
With Annelise
, he does not add,
who is asleep on the other side of the closed bathroom door.

“The hotel where, presumably,” Jenny grunts as if she is lifting
something heavy, “you were happily reunited with your phone charger. So why didn't you call me then?”

“I didn't want to wake you. Listen, I'd better go. I'm out on the street trying to catch a cab.” He opens the bathroom window so the traffic noise from the Tottenham Court Road will filter in to support his story. “The presentation is in half an hour.” “I'll call you the minute I get out. Okay?”

Jenny twists off the antique diamond engagement ring that he gave her on the Ponte Vecchio and drops that into the bag on top of
The Seven Habits of Highly Successful People
. “Don't bother.”

She tucks the phone under her ear and drags the bag past the double-height plate-glass windows and out into the hall.

“Look,” James says soothingly, “I should have called you, no matter how late it was. I'm sorry. I haven't been looking after you. I've been distracted.”

He hears something that sounds like a snort of amusement from the other end of the phone.

“That's one way of putting it.” Jenny slides open one of the white doors on the floor-to-ceiling storage cupboard and hauls out a bag of golf clubs.

James winces. “What are you doing?” he asks. “What's all that crashing around?”

His head is still booming from the music in the club and blurry from the line of coke Annelise cut after they finished the vodka in the minibar. But the meeting isn't till 9 a.m. A couple of espressos will soon sort him out.

“I'm packing up your stuff,” Jenny says coldly. “You can pick it up when you get in from the airport.”

Suddenly his head clears and he realizes just how much trouble he's in. “Jennifer?” He always defaults to her full name when he wants her to know he is being sincere. “Don't you think you're overreacting just a little bit? I'm sorry from the bottom of my heart if I upset you, but—”

“Hey?” Annelise taps on the door. “Open up! I need to pee!”

James turns on the shower. “It's lashing rain here. I've got to go. We can sort this out later. You know I love you, and if you don't, I'll prove it. I'll—” He realizes the line has gone dead.

Jenny stares at the wallpaper on her phone. A photograph taken two years ago, when he was still a software coder working eighty hours a week trying get his app design company off the ground.

She'd met him a few months before, in an Indian restaurant on George's Street. “Don't look now, but a seriously cute guy drinking a mango lassi is checking you out,” her friend Liz said. Jenny had seen him on the other side of the restaurant, looking at her over the rim of his glass, giving her what her brother called “the hairy eye.”

She had forgotten all about him by the time they left. Suzanne had hailed a cab for herself and Jenny was walking down Merrion Row to catch the Dart when she heard running footsteps behind her. Her hand closed around the Mace spray in her pocket and she swung around, and there he was, holding out a dozen carnations.

“Did you just steal those?” She blinked at them. “From the restaurant?”

“I borrowed them.” His voice was gravelly and self-assured.
I like me
, it seemed to say.
I think you'll like me too.
“But I don't think they'll welcome me back at that restaurant in a hurry.”

“That's a shame,” she said. “It's the best Indian in Dublin.”

“You've obviously never been to Vermilion.” He handed her the carnations. The guard leaves, like little green hoods, had slipped down off their red heads. They smelled of cloves. “We'll have to do something about that.”

The phone buzzes suddenly in Jenny's hand. It's the journalist who is coming to interview her at two this afternoon.
Hair and makeup girl has come down with flu. Can you do your own? Also can photographer come at 1 to get the snaps out of the way?

Great. Jenny gives the golf clubs a quick kick as she passes. This is all she needs.

The interview is a promo for the new travel show she's fronting. They're going to ask about James. If she tells the truth, it'll be all over the paper on Sunday. But maybe that's a good thing, she thinks. At least if she goes public, James won't be able to change her mind.

*   *   *

The envelope had been in the bottom of Lara's bag and at the top of her list for four days now, but there always seemed to be something more urgent on her list.
Clean out the cold room. Feed the succulents. Design a window for Halloween. Answer the phone.

The shop didn't open for another hour, but it might be urgent. She took the call. “Blossom & Grow?”

“I was just about to give up!” It was a man's voice. He didn't sound, Lara thought, like the kind of man who gave up that easily.

“We don't open till nine.”

“I'll be in a meeting at nine and it'll be too late. Look, you're the third florist I've tried. This is an emergency. My future marriage is going down in flames and you may be the only person who can save it.”

“How can I say no to that?” Lara opened the order book. “What do you need?”

“An urgent delivery to Jenny, no, make it
Jennifer
Kelly, Penthouse, Block D, Beacon Court. Can you do it right away?”

Ciara wasn't coming in until eleven. “I could do it around eleven thirty if that's any use.”

“It'll have to do. Okay, we need to get all the big guns out here. How many red roses do you have?”

Lara looked at the four buckets of roses she had just finished conditioning. “How many do you need?”

“Twenty—no, make it fifty. Are they definitely all red?”

“I'm pretty sure all the red roses are red today”—she smiled—“but that's a lot of roses.”

“Well, between you and me,” he said meaningfully, “I'm in a lot of trouble.”