The Flower Arrangement (18 page)

“Oh.” Her smile faded. She didn't want to know what kind of trouble required two hundred euros' worth of roses to put right. She just hoped that Jennifer Kelly had a lot of vases and a very forgiving nature. She found a pen to take down the message.

She was picking out the fifty best Black Magics when she heard a frantic tapping. She looked up and saw a man wearing glasses peering in the window. He waved frantically at her.

“I'm really sorry,” he said when she opened the door. “I know you're not actually open until nine, but I have to be at my desk at eight forty-five and I've just ruined my wife's day and it's our fourth anniversary. Do you think I could . . .” He waved his hand tentatively in the direction of the shop. His nails were bitten down to the quick.

“Of course,” she said. “Come in.”

He headed straight for the pink carnations. Lara didn't usually stock them. These were an over-order for a seventies-themed party. They were meant to be ironic, like the little cocktail sticks with cubed cheese and pineapple that had been served as canapés.

“Can I take six of these?” The man pointed at them. “No, what the hell! Make it a dozen. Could you deliver them today?”

“Would just before lunch be okay?”

“Better than okay.” He checked his watch. “Could you put a message in? I know what I want to say but I don't have time to write a card.” Lara copied down the message, the name and the address.

It was only after he'd paid her and dashed away that the coincidence hit her. Two women with identical names who lived in the same apartment complex getting “sorry” bouquets on the same morning from desperate husbands?

Michael was writing to say sorry. That was what her therapist kept telling her. Lara had been seeing Leo once a week since her father died. He was tiny and gray-haired, with a Boston accent. He wore terrible T-shirts with therapist-y slogans like
Be Unafraid, Be Very Unafraid
and
The Mind Is a Darkroom Where Negatives Develop
, but despite that he was wise and gentle and incredibly kind.

She had given him all of Michael's letters to read because she still couldn't face reading them herself and it didn't seem right to throw them out. He had handed the last one back to her on Friday. “This one is different,” he'd said. “I'd like you to read it yourself. You know I wouldn't ask you to if I didn't think you were able.” She did know. Leo and the shop had been her lifelines. Lara had marked off the months since the summer with the hours she spent at her therapy sessions and the flowers she held in her hands.

Agapanthus and peonies in June. Scented stock and sweet peas in July. Sunflowers and sweet William in August. By the time September's oriental lilies and ornamental cabbages appeared, she wasn't hiding upstairs in the workroom anymore. She was spending more time in the shop, answering the phone, dealing with the customers. One Sunday she spent the afternoon at an allotment belonging to a friend of Ciara's, picking lamb's ear and dusty miller and veronica for a wedding, and didn't think about Michael once, but she kept remembering a Patrick Kavanagh poem she'd learned at school, the one about how every old man he saw reminded him of his father.

Her dad would have approved of the carnations, she thought, as she chose the stems from the bucket. He had wooed her mother with carnations long before they fell out of fashion. Twelve didn't look like enough, so she filled them out a little with silver dollar eucalyptus leaves, and wrapped them in layers of pink and purple tissue paper.

Then she got to work on the huge bunch of roses. By the time she was finished, the bundle of stems was almost too thick to hold, and she had to tape four sheets of tissue and cellophane together for the wrapping.

The bouquet was magnificent, but it looked more like an arrangement for a luxury hotel reception than a gift for a person. Beside it, the small, inexpensive bunch of carnations looked sweet and heartfelt.

*   *   *

How many miles has she walked this morning? Jennifer wonders, as she trudges back and forth across the IKEA rug in the apartment's
doll's-house-sized living room. She was too miserable to get dressed and wrestle with the stroller but now she wishes she had gone out for some fresh air because Ava won't go down. Her eyes are glassy with tiredness but every time she starts to drop off (please, please, please, Jennifer wills her to sleep), her hands clutch at the air and she wakes herself up with a heartbreaking cry.

“It's okay!” Jennifer croons but Ava knows that it isn't. The baby can pick up on the slightest change in her mood and she feels Jennifer's upset as if they are still part of one body.

Jennifer pulls her phone out of the pocket of her dressing gown, but there are no missed calls, no messages from Jack. She remembers their first proper fight. A stupid argument about whether global warming was a real threat to the planet, as she believed, or, as Jack kept stubbornly insisting, a sideshow to distract the West from Third World poverty.

The next morning when she got to the bank call center in Tallaght where she worked, there was a huge bouquet of white lilies on her desk. They lasted for a week and every time she looked at them she felt happy. And nothing, not the fear that she might soon lose her job or the angry callers who seemed to hold her solely responsible for the collapse of the entire Irish banking system, could spoil her happiness.

There have been other fights since the wedding. Occasional flare-ups about important things, like whether they could afford to buy the flat and whether she should take redundancy and have a baby. But since Ava came along, the fights seem to be about things that don't really matter. Who used the last of the low-fat milk? Who left the heating on? Who put the bin bags in the wrong drawer? And somehow these tiny, pointless niggles feel like bigger issues than global warming or world poverty ever did.

The only flowers Jack has given her in the last year were a bunch he brought home after he'd forgotten to book the babysitter and they had to miss out on a friend's birthday dinner. Awful yellow and orange chrysanthemums wrapped in plastic with the Maxol price tag still stuck
on. It was hard, looking at them, not to remember the lilies and compare their lives now to the happiness they'd had back at the start.

The baby seems to be settling at last. Jennifer walks to the door and back to the window. She sees her own ghost floating in the glass and stops short. Who is that? she thinks. She still hasn't lost her baby weight and the unflattering dressing gown is pulled tight around the bulge of her stomach. Her hair is lank and her roots are growing out. Who could blame Jack, she thinks bitterly, for not loving her as much as he used to?

She looks through her reflection across the courtyard and up to the penthouse apartment in the block opposite. A woman of her own age is sitting in front of the huge arched window putting on makeup. Her blonde hair ripples down the back of her tiny red silk dressing gown that does not, Jennifer guesses, have dried breast milk stiffening in patches on the front. For a moment she feels as if she would give anything—her husband, even the baby in her arms—to be that other woman for a day.

Jenny dips the individual lashes in a blob of glue, tilts her head back, narrows her eyes and drops the lashes one by one onto her own. Her phone buzzes again and she squints at the screen. A text from James.
Sent you a little something to say a big sorry
, it says. Some colossal floral monstrosity this way comes, she thinks grimly. But it's not going to work this time.

The lash glue is making her eye stream. As she reaches for a tissue, she sees a silhouette in the window of an apartment across the way. A woman, probably not much older than she is, cradling a baby in her arms. A picture of domestic contentment. Madonna and child. Before she can stop herself, she is crying, really crying. That was supposed to be me, she thinks.

And for a moment she is ready to forgive James. Then she remembers the Facebook picture. James with his arm thrown around the bare shoulders of the tall, dark-haired girl. Something that might have been innocent but then again might not. It didn't matter, because by now Jenny couldn't tell anymore.

“I was just a penniless coder when we got together,” James said in his most recent interview. “Jenny was this superstar TV presenter. Totally out of my league. I made a complete idiot of myself to get her.” But it was that idiot Jenny wanted to have children with, she thought, not this one in the Facebook photo.

*   *   *

“Wow!” Ciara leaned her bike against the counter and stared at the enormous bunch of roses. “What did the guy do? Kill someone?”

“Possibly.” Lara was struggling to get her arms around the bouquet.

“Here! Let me give you a hand.”

“No, you stay here. If you could get the flowers for the Fitzgerald wedding started while I'm out, that would be great.”

“Did you read the letter?”

“Not yet.” Lara gasped under the weight of the roses. “Hand me those carnations, will you? And my keys?”

She began to edge carefully across the floor, hidden by the flowers.

Ciara went ahead of her and held the door open. “You have to read the letter, Lara. It's hanging over you like the sword of . . . whoever's sword hangs over you waiting to drop.”

“Damocles,” Lara grunted.

“Yeah, him. The swearier cousin of Hercules.”

Lara looked over the roses at the shuttered front of the Camden Deli across the street. A sudden gust of wind rattled the “For Sale” board that hung outside and tore at the cellophane on the bouquet. Lara dropped her car keys as she tried to hold on to the flowers. As she bent down sideways, trying to scoop them up, her bag slipped off her shoulder, scattering its contents into the gutter. She glimpsed her phone facedown in a puddle, her purse upside down, half open, and then, out of the corner of her eye, she saw a tiny flash of gold rolling away. Her wedding ring! She let the bouquets fall from her arms and made a dive for it just as it disappeared into a drain.

She fell to her knees. The ring, glittering in the darkness below, had landed on a pipe, but as she pushed her fingers through the grate to try to reach it, it fell into the water.

Just when you think you have lost everything, she thought, there is always one more thing to lose.

“It's only a ring, Lara.” That's what her dad would say. She forced herself to stand up and wiped the grit off her knees. She wasn't the first person to have her heart broken, or the last. Look at her dad, who had lost the love of his life when he was younger than Lara was now. Look at poor Ciara, who had been dumped by the husband she adored.

She bent down to examine the bouquets. The cards had been knocked off and the heads of two of the roses had been snapped. If she went back to replace them, the deliveries would be late, but there were so many, two would hardly be missed. She'd slide the stems out and made a mental note to refund the difference to the customer's credit card.

She steered the flowers into the van and bent down to pick up her things and stuff them back into her bag. As she stood up to go, she saw it. The envelope was a few feet away, by the wheel of a car, the edge of it lifting slightly in the wind. Lara held her breath, willing it to blow away, but it stubbornly stayed put. She picked it up, sighed and shoved it back into her bag too.

*   *   *

The woman in the dressing gown who opened the door of Apartment 22A Beacon Court looked utterly miserable. The baby in her arms was wailing like an ambulance siren. Lara had to lean to one side to see around the bouquet of roses. “I hope I didn't wake her when I rang the buzzer.”

“No, she was—” The woman stopped and blinked at the flowers, as if she thought they might be a hallucination. The baby, sensing the change in the atmosphere, suddenly fell silent.

“Are those,” the woman whispered, “for me?”

Lara smiled at her over the baby's head. “They're pretty heavy and you have your hands full. Why don't I put them in water for you?”

“They won't fit in the sink.” The woman stood to one side to let her in. “You'd better put them in the bath.”

Lara put the bouquet carefully in the tub and ran in some cold water. “Give them a few minutes before you put them into vases,” she said.

The woman was smiling, jiggling the baby on her hip. “Thank you. I'm just a bit lost for words here. Neither of us has ever seen so many flowers in our lives.”

“Well, enjoy them! Both of you.”

The woman beamed. “Thank you, we will.” All the sadness was gone from her eyes. They were shining with happiness. Lara saw this small miracle happen every day but she never got tired of it. Words had to pass through the head but flowers, she thought as she waited for the lift to come, went straight to the heart.

*   *   *

The whole flat is filling up with the sweet scent of the roses. Jennifer puts the baby down, then goes back and sits on the edge of the bath. She opens the tiny white envelope and slips the card out.
Sorry! X O, J
.

She reaches out a finger and counts their velvety heads. There are forty-eight. One, she smiles as she realizes, for every month of the four years that she and Jack have been married.

*   *   *

Jenny is bagging up James's clothes when the doorbell rings. She freezes. The journalist is early and now she will have to explain why the flat is littered with bulging black sacks. But when she opens the door, it's not the journalist standing out in the corridor. It's a tall, thin woman with long dark hair holding a tiny bouquet of flowers.

“Delivery for Jennifer Kelly?”

That old trick of James's, Jenny thinks, using her full name to try
to get around her. “Yes, I'm Jennifer Kelly, but I don't want—” She stops as it hits her, the sharp-sweet scent of cloves. She hasn't smelled carnations since that first night when James chased her down the street with the table decorations he'd stolen from the Indian restaurant.