The Flower Arrangement (32 page)

Ben was as happy to talk as he was to listen. Lara knew on any given day exactly what he was reading and writing and thinking. His past was an open book. He told her about his long-suffering mother and his unfaithful father. About the boarding school he'd run away from. About meeting Katy at college. He would have told her every detail of their relationship if she'd asked him, but she didn't. It was history: that was all she needed to know.

She told him things she hadn't told anyone, not even Phil. About the evening her father told her he had cancer and the morning Michael had told her he was gay.

The day after she had told him about losing Ryan, he arrived at the shop with twenty pink roses. He had done what no other man would ever think to do. He had brought flowers to a florist. Ben had already said that he loved her, but that day she had started to believe it, started to understand, maybe for the first time, what love was.

It was like his roses in the corner of her workroom.

A soft blur of color at the corner of her eye. A scent that she was aware of even when she was busy, even when her back was turned.

And then there was the sex. If anyone had told Lara that sex was supposed to be like this, she would have known there was something wrong in her marriage right away. But even if she had been told, she thought, she would have written it off as an unrealistic romantic fantasy. The sweat, the laughter. The stars falling through the dark heaven behind her eyelids.

Ben came back and sat down on the side of the bed and looked at her. “What are you thinking about?”

“You.” She pulled him down, wrapped her arms around his neck.

*   *   *

Ben lay listening to Lara's steady breathing as sleep rolled away from him like a retreating tide. After an hour of staring at the ceiling, he gave up, pulled on a T-shirt and went quietly down the stairs. His messenger bag was by the hall table.

The living and dining rooms of Lara's father house, which she hardly used, felt abandoned and melancholy, but the big, comfortable kitchen was the heart of the house. Old-style wooden kitchen units, simple and functional. An oak table and six bentwood chairs. Big French doors gave out onto the lawn, where he could just make out the sooty silhouette of the water feature he'd installed for Lara.

He took a carton of orange juice from the fridge, sat down at the table and fired up his laptop. He had ditched his old screenplay and started working on a new idea. He had almost finished the first draft. The writing was easier and better than it had ever been before. It felt, like everything else, as if it had finally slotted into place when he met Lara.

A couple of his friends had been shocked when he'd told them that the woman he was seeing was forty-one. But most of them understood when they met her, except for Diane, who had always been a little in love with him herself.

But the age difference didn't matter. He loved that Lara had lived through so much. That she was a woman, not some girl still trying to find herself.

A shadow flitting past the window jolted him out of his thoughts. He stood up, went to the door and looked out expecting to see a fox or a cat, but there was nothing out there except the soft gray outlines of the bare trees and the shapes of flowerpots forming in the gathering light. He took the key from the hook by the door, opened it and went outside. The lawn was stippled with frost and the soles of his bare feet burned as he walked across the stiff grass to the water feature.

He was proud of that big lump of granite. It was a monument to Lara's dad, Ted, whom he hadn't known; it also felt like solid proof that Ben himself was part of Lara's life.

He felt a sudden chill that had nothing to do with the cold air. What if Katy was right? he thought, remembering what she'd said at the party. What if he was going to screw this up?

He put his hand on the cold, hard rock. He cleared his throat.
“Ted,” he said. “I know we haven't met. I know you probably think I'm not good enough for your daughter and my track record is not that great. And I'm scared that I'm going to mess it up. Can you give me a hand here? Tell me what to do?”

*   *   *

Ben slipped into bed and kissed Lara's bare shoulder. “I have an idea,” she heard him say, through her dream.

“Have you?” she murmured sleepily, desire waking up before she did, humming through her veins. “Could you have it again in half an hour?”

She was still sleep-deprived after the mayhem of Valentine's Day, and Mother's Day was only two weeks away. She was going to need all the rest she could get.

He kissed her shoulder again. “I think we should get married.”

Her eyes snapped open. He was propped on one elbow, looking down at her. “Well, that certainly woke me up.” She yawned and looked up at him, waiting for the punch line, but he wasn't smiling.

“Ben . . .” She reached out and switched the bedside lamp on so she could see his eyes, and so he could see hers when she laid it bare. “Do the math. I'm too old for you. By the time you're my age, I'll practically be retired.”

“You, retire? From your beloved shop?” He laughed. “They're going to have to take you out of Blossom & Grow in a box wrapped in cellophane tied with one of those curly ribbons.”

She smiled. He was probably right.

“Look.” He rubbed his jaw. “Maybe there's someone else out there for you, but you are as good as it gets for me. And time is moving on.”

“It's only been nine months.”

“Phil and Katy got married a year after they met.”

“It's not the same,” she sighed.

“Why not?”

Because Lara had been married before and she wasn't sure she
wanted to go there again. Because people would call her a cradle-snatcher. Because she had never been happier in her life and she was terrified that getting married might ruin what they had.

“Because we can't all end up in happy-clappy couples,” she said. “This is life, not
The Waltons
.”

“The what-ons?”

She groaned. “Oh God! Are you so young you don't even know who the Waltons are? Please.” She straddled him, then leaned down until her hair covered his chest and kissed along his collarbone till she reached his ear. “Can't we just keep doing this?”

“Sure.” He gathered her hair behind her head in a knot. “For better for worse, for richer—”

She sat back up and pulled the duvet around her. “For goodness' sake, Ben! Will you think this through? If you're going to get married, you should be marrying someone your own age, someone you can have a family with.”

He reached up and put a finger against her lips. “I've told you. I don't see myself with kids. I never did.”

But Lara could. She could picture it as clearly as if she had seen a photograph. Ben walking along a beach with a little girl up on his shoulders.

“You'll change your mind,” she said.

“No.” He pulled her down again. Put his mouth against her ear. “I won't change my mind. So I'll have to change yours.”

Afterward, just when she was about to fall back into the feathery depths of post-sex sleep, she heard his voice against her ear again.

“Good night, Mary Ellen.”

*   *   *

It was the day before Mother's Day, the second busiest day of the year, and Blossom & Grow was under siege. Lara and Ciara had both been in the shop since 5 a.m. making up bouquets, but by mid-morning the combination of walk-ins and a sudden flurry of website orders had
created an order list of impossible proportions. Lara was standing at the counter trying to make arrangements and serve customers while Ciara made up cellophane wraps and replenished the empty buckets and dealt with the ever-ringing phone.

“Look who it is,” she whispered, sliding past Lara with an armful of dripping gladioli. Lara glanced up from the bouquet she was tying and saw one of her regulars slipping into the crowded shop. This woman was a mystery. For nearly six years she had come in every single Saturday and Lara still didn't know her name. She chose her flowers herself, always lilies, and hardly spoke except to ask for them to be double-wrapped in cellophane, then paid in cash so there was no card to read her name from.

She was not as old as she looked, probably only in her late forties, but her face was haggard. She wore expensive but mismatched clothes. What looked like a Chanel wool jacket with a trailing jersey skirt. Office trousers, their hems catching under the soles of ballet flats, with a zip-up sweatshirt. For a long time Lara had suspected that she was battling a serious illness, but since last summer she had started to look better. Today she had a little color in her face and a dab of lipstick on her thin, lined mouth, and for the first time, she wasn't alone. She was holding the hand of a small boy who, Lara felt, she must have seen somewhere before. He looked so familiar. If it had been any other day of the year she might have placed him, but she had made what felt like several hundred bouquets since five this morning, and her brain was almost as numb as her fingers.

“Goodness,” the woman said, looking around at the empty buckets and the large queue of customers crammed into the shop, standing on the carpet of leaves that neither Lara nor Ciara had had time to sweep up.

“Sorry!” Lara stepped out from behind the counter and waved a tall white lily. “We're a bit all over the place. It's Mother's Day tomorrow.”

She saw a tiny flare of pain in the woman's eyes.

Then a small voice piped up. “You have a pen in your hair!” It was the little boy.

“Do I?” Lara put the lily down and pulled it out, pretending to be amazed. “So that's where it went! Ciara!” She called across the heads of the waiting customers. “Someone just found the pen. We can write all those important messages now.” She turned back to the boy. Yes, she thought, taking in the blue eyes below his blonde fringe, she had definitely seen him before, but when? “Thank you!”

“It's okay,” he said, graciously. “I'm very good at observing. Do you know about Venus flytraps?”

“Josh,” the woman said gently. “The flower lady might be too busy to play twenty questions.”

“They eat all kinds of bugs,” Josh said. “And some of them”—he lowered his voice—“the really mean ones, eat frogs. That's not right. Everyone loves frogs.”

There was a ripple of laughter from the queue.

“I think that's just a rumor,” Lara said. “Their roots are stuck into the earth and frogs are pretty good at hopping away.”

*   *   *

Rita had been speechless the day she opened the door and saw Rebecca standing on the porch in a red lace dress beside what looked like a bunch of amaryllis with legs. Then the flowers had swayed to one side and there, behind them, was the boy. She might be standing there still with her mouth open and no sound coming out if Fergus hadn't stepped past her, opened the door wide, shaken Rebecca's hand, ruffled the boy's hair and invited them both inside. In the kitchen he found the tall crystal vase for the flowers, located a bottle of orange squash from the back of a cupboard somewhere and filled a glass for the boy, produced cups and saucers and plates and two kinds of biscuits, fed little capsules of coffee into the Nespresso machine and chatted about the weather.

He acted as if this was just some casual visit. As if the girl was a
neighbor's daughter and not the reason why their only son, Gavin, was dead. It might have been the old man with Alzheimer's who had knocked him off his bike, but Gavin would not have been on Arran Quay in the first place if it had not been for this girl in the slutty red dress and the high shoes, taking a cup of coffee from Fergus, agreeing that the evenings were getting longer and that the lilac was lovely this year. Could she really believe, Rita thought, that showing up unannounced five years later with a bunch of flowers and this boy who could have been anybody's son for all she knew was going to make it all okay?

Rita sat like a statue, her own coffee untouched and cooling, waiting for her voice to return so she could open her mouth and tell this insolent girl what she thought of her.

“Why do you have two remote controls?” She looked up and saw the boy standing beside her looking at the two black controllers on the coffee table. “Is it because your telly is so big?” He gazed admiringly at the huge flat-screen on the wall at the end of the room. She would not look at him. What Fergus did was his own business; she had to tolerate it but she would not be part of it. “Do you have Cartoon Network?” he persisted. She shook her head. “Boomerang? The Nature Channel?”

“I don't know,” she said coldly.

He came over to her chair. “If you like,” he said very quietly, “you can come to our house and watch our telly.” He set off across the wide room, heading for what Fergus referred to with gentle mockery as “the shrine.”

She had hung a dozen photographs of her son on the wall between two tall white cabinets. Below it was an antique end table where she had lined up her most precious mementos. The trophy Gavin had won in a chess tournament in first year. His mobile phone. His key ring, a worn leather fob with a silver outline of a wolf's head, which had been in the pocket of his school trousers when the hospital had given his clothes back.

“Josh!” Rebecca called.

“It's all right,” Fergus said. “Let him explore.”

Rita got up and followed the boy across the long room, wanting to get away from her husband and the girl, intending to stop the child if he so much as touched anything. He came to a sudden halt and looked up at the photographs.

“Is that your swimming pool?” He pointed at a picture that had been taken the year before Gavin was killed, at the villa they'd rented in Aix. She swallowed hard and shook her head. Gavin was seventeen in the photo. His chest was tanned beneath the open shirt. She had asked him to take his sunglasses off and he held them in one hand. He was grinning at her, squinting slightly in the strong sunlight, telling her, she remembered, to hurry up.