The Flower Arrangement (34 page)

“Come on!” He grabbed her hand. “We're not going to let a little padlock stop us, are we?”

Before she could stop him, he'd climbed onto the railings and swung himself over. He took the bouquet from Lara and she had no
choice but to clamber up and follow him. He held out his arms to catch her, and she jumped and he lowered her carefully to the ground.

The moon came out from behind a cloud as they emerged from the avenue of yew trees into the open and stood looking at the vast field of gravestones.

“I like cemeteries,” Ben said. “Every grave tells a story.” He took her arm. “You're not afraid of ghosts, are you?” Lara shook her head. What she was scared of was seeing the names of the three people she had lost.

It took her a few minutes in the dark to find the right row. “This is it,” she said to Ben at last. They stood and looked down at the headstone. Her dad's name was crisply etched in silver lettering. The silver on Ryan's name was softer. The gilding on her mother's name was almost worn away.

“You named your baby after your mother,” Ben said quietly. “I didn't realize that.”

Lara nodded. “Ryan was her maiden name.” She bent down and put the bouquet on the grave. When she stood up again, Ben had his arms open waiting for her. He folded her into himself and held her tight, sheltering her from the wind that snapped at the cellophane around the flowers.

“You want to know something funny?” she said, her words muffled against the heavy folds of his jacket. “My mother chose this place because of the view. How crazy is that?”

“Not crazy at all,” Ben said. “It's kind.”

She looked up at him; his face was in shadow. “What do you mean?”

“The view was not for her, Lara.” He turned her around so that she faced the bay. “Look. It's for you.”

The lights of the city were strung around the semicircular bay like the fairy lights in her flower shop. The moon was spilling a shimmering silver path across the water, stretching all the way to the sooty silhouettes of the Sugar Loaf and Wicklow Head.

Her heart leapt. She turned back to look at Ben. “How on earth did you know that?” she whispered.

He shrugged. “She loved you. She knew that every time you turned away from her grave you'd see this beautiful view and maybe not feel so sad.”

He might be twelve years younger than she was, Lara thought, but he was an old soul. They walked back to the gate and he helped her back over the railings.

“
Eg elska thig
,” he said, jumping down onto the pavement beside her.

“What?”

“It's Icelandic for ‘I love you.' It just came back to me. Amazing the things that stay stuck in your head.”

Lara stared after him. Had she told him that her dad could say “I love you” in every language except English?

He turned his collar up against the cold. “Come on, let's get into the car before we freeze.”

He walked back to the curb and began digging through his pockets, looking for the car key.

“Yes!” Lara said.

Ben looked back at her. “Yes what?”

“Yes, I'll marry you!”

“You will?”

And he walked back to her, his arms wide, his face lit up by the moon and the streetlights and by love.

Emily was early. She sat at their usual table in the Library Bar in the Central Hotel. Late-afternoon sunshine was flooding in through the tall sash windows, glancing off the gilt-framed mirrors and the crystal chandeliers, picking out the spidery gold lettering on the spines of a wall of books.

They should have thought about putting books in the guest rooms at the wedding, she realized. Romantic novels and volumes of poetry with personalized bookmarks so they fell open on significant pages. It was the kind of touch people would remember. Maybe there was still time to get it organized?

She'd opened her laptop to add a note to her spreadsheet, when Dan arrived, carrying his fold-up Brompton bike. His hair was damp with sweat. It was his day off and they were only meeting for half an hour, but still, Emily thought, he could have made a bit of an effort.

“You look hot!” she said as he bent down to kiss her nose.

“Thanks.” He grinned and gave her a quick eyebrow flash. “So do you.”

He waved at the waiter behind the elaborately carved wooden bar. “Half-pint of Guinness, extra cold. And?” He looked at Emily.

“I'm good,” she said pointedly. They were both supposed to be on diets. The wedding was only two months away.

“So.” Dan stashed the fold-up bike behind her chair and looked at her laptop the way a horse might look at a fence he had fallen at many times before. “You said there were one or two things to discuss?”

“It's more like three or four.”

He turned back to the waiter. “Can you make that a pint?”

Emily had already changed the bridesmaids' dresses from eau de Nil to watermelon and back again. The number of tiers on the cake from three to four to two. The song for their first dance from “The Sweetest Thing” to “Falling Slowly,” which was all wrong, she'd realized at four the previous morning. Falling was something you did by mistake, and “slowly” made them sound like learner drivers, not lovers, didn't it?

“What do you think of Van Morrison?” she asked Dan.

“I think he's old and grumpy and . . .” He saw her frown and changed course. “Incredibly talented.”

“Really?” She hadn't been sure he'd know who Van Morrison was. “Would you mind if we changed our first song to ‘Moondance'?”

“Is that the one about the brown-eyed girl?”

“No, Dan,” Emily sighed. “That song is called ‘Brown Eyed Girl.'”

“In that case”—he picked up the pint the waiter had put in front of him and took a gulp—“‘Moondance' it is.”

“Settled. Now I know we've paid the deposit for the flamenco guitarist, but can we go back to the string quartet? Classical music is just . . .”

“Classier?” Dan stifled a sigh.

“Exactly! I'll get to the canapés or hors d'oeuvres in a minute, but first, about the soup . . .”

“What about the soup?” His eyes were beginning to glaze over.

“Will it be too hot for soup? Would we be better going for something lighter?”

“Hmm?” He wasn't even pretending to listen now.

“I was thinking maybe a hedgehog sorbet.”

“Sounds good.” He licked the Guinness moustache off his top lip then his eyes snapped back to her. “Ah! That's a joke, right?”

“Yes, it's a joke.” She shut her laptop decisively. “And so is this! You're not remotely interested in this wedding, are you?”

“Of course I am. I just don't have your level of . . .” He searched for the right word.

Go on, she thought, say it. Neurosis. Obsession. That was what everyone thought.

“Attention to detail.” He waved his half-empty glass. Except that for Dan, it was half full. It was one of the things she loved about him, his optimism, along with all the other things. The way he paused Netflix to explain the plots of complicated thrillers. Listened to her father's nutty conspiracy theories, played Junior Scrabble with her seven-year-old nephew and let him win.

Dan put the glass down and picked up her hand. His fingertips were deliciously cool. She wanted to press them against her aching temples.

“Look, Em. I can see you're upset, but trust me, everyone's going to be far too busy having a good time to notice whether they're eating canapés or hors d'oeuvres. I'm not sure many of them will even know the difference.”

Paul will know the difference, Emily thought.

*   *   *

“I met the love of my life by accident,” Dan liked to tell people. Emily had wrenched her shoulder on the first day of her skiing holiday when she swerved to avoid a snowboarder and collided with a tree. Dan had sprained his ankle five minutes into his first lesson. They were both grounded from the slopes for a week.

He had smiled at her from the other side of the crowded waiting room at the resort clinic. Had she smiled back? He said she had but she wondered if he'd imagined it. The truth was, she had hardly noticed him. He was just an average-looking brown-haired blur at the corner of her vision. She had been miserable that day, as she sat waiting for her injured arm to be strapped up. She had been miserable most days back then.

The trip to Courchevel with her friend Lisa and her boyfriend was supposed to cheer her up. It had been eighteen months since she'd left
Paul, but he was like one of those exotic parasites people picked up in the tropics. Just when Emily thought she had finally gotten him out of her system, he flared up again, humming through her blood, making her sick with longing. She was beginning to wonder if she would ever get over him at all.

Lisa had wanted to stay behind at the hotel the next day and keep Emily company, but she didn't want to ruin her friend's holiday too. She'd be fine, she'd insisted. She'd find things to keep her occupied. But what? she wondered, after Lisa had finally given in and left. What the hell was she going to do for the next six days?

Having only one working arm meant she couldn't straighten her hair or put on her eyeliner or pop in her contact lenses. She couldn't zip up her jeans or balance properly in heels. The only thing she could comfortably wear with her sling, it turned out, were fleece leggings and an extra-large sweatshirt with one sleeve cut off, donated by Lisa's boyfriend.

She didn't want anyone to see her dressed like that so she sat on her bed feeling sorry for herself while the hotel emptied, listening to the laughter and excited voices, shouted instructions not to forget lift passes, the clatter of boots passing her door.

When she finally emerged, the hotel was deserted. She made her way down to the dreary, windowless breakfast room, a Tyrolean-style horror decorated with a mural of the mountain that looked as if it had been painted by a kindergarten class.

There was no sign of any breakfast now, and there were no waiters to be seen. She managed to coax a cup of coffee out of the ancient vending machine, then sat under the disapproving gaze of a stuffed moose head.

If Paul was to walk into the breakfast room, she thought, he probably wouldn't recognize her. In the two years they had been together, he had never once seen her without makeup. She used to get up half an hour before him so she could set her hair in Velcro rollers and brush her teeth before he woke up.

Paul had never seen her in a sweatshirt. He liked her in fitted jackets
and tight pencil skirts and sky-high heels. He said she looked dangerous in them. Emily, who had never considered herself even slightly dangerous, except when she was changing lanes on the M50, liked this new, dramatic version of herself. She had always worried that she was too timid, but Paul made her sound risky and exciting.

Her shyness was “enigmatic.” Her girlish ticklishness made her “polymorphously perverse.” This meant, he explained delightedly, that she could derive erotic pleasure from any part of her body. He said it when he nipped at her earlobe or nibbled the crook of her elbow and she shivered.

She felt as if she was turning into a character in a movie when they were together, but after it was all over, she realized she was just ordinary Emily after all.

She picked up her phone. She should have deleted Paul's number after what he'd done, but she hadn't. She wanted to call him so badly that it hurt more than her aching shoulder. She looked up at the moose.
Don't even think about it!
his weary, glassy eyes seemed to say.

She sighed, put the phone away and popped a codeine, which would have to do instead of breakfast. She swallowed her longing with a gulp of cold coffee. She tried not to think about whose elbows Paul was nibbling now and how perverse they were.

Half an hour went by before she heard a sign of life in the hotel. The faint click-clack of someone walking on crutches growing louder until a man appeared in the doorway. For a moment she couldn't place him, then she realized with a sinking heart that it was the guy she'd glimpsed at the clinic the day before. He lifted one crutch solemnly in salute, then limped toward her.

“All fun and games”—he sat down at her table and twiddled his thumbs—“till someone breaks a leg, then it's snow fun at all, is it?”

She shrugged without meeting his eye, as if not looking at him meant that he couldn't see her horrible glasses, her un-made-up face, her hideous outfit.

He gazed around at the pretzel-colored wooden beams and the chintz
curtains and the cuckoo clocks, then did a comic double take when he saw the moose head. “You think he lost his head in a skiing accident?”

Emily glanced up. “He looks more like a snowboarder to me.”

He smiled, and she felt oddly pleased.

“You have to keep your sense of humor,” he said.

“Someone should have told me that,” she sighed. “I left it in my room.”

He smiled again. “Dan.”

“Emily.”

“Come on.” He stood up and picked up his crutches.

“Where?”

He nodded at the mural. “If we're going to spend the rest of the week stuck looking at a mountain, it might as well be a real one.”

Dan somehow persuaded the hotel manager, a man who looked even more disapproving than the moose, to take pity on them. Except there was no silky charm involved: Dan was just polite and direct. The manager's expression didn't change but he opened the dining terrace on the fourth floor, lit the burners and rustled up two plaid rugs and a hot-water bottle for Emily.

They settled into two wooden chairs and sat, bundled up, watching the enormous jagged white molar of the mountain appear and disappear through the falling snow.

“We don't have to talk,” Dan said, on that first morning. “Or amuse one another. Deal?”

“Deal,” Emily agreed.

They read their books in companionable silence. From time to time, when the view became especially beautiful or magical, one of them would look up from their book and point at the wall of falling flakes and hum a bar of “Let It Snow!”

And it might have been the codeine, or the majesty of the view or the easygoing company, but Emily forgot about her bad mood and the pain in her shoulder. For nearly a whole day, she forgot about Paul.

And next morning, she was waiting impatiently when the manager
arrived to unlock the terrace. As she was sitting down, she heard the clatter of crutches behind her.

“Did you book?” Dan asked, looking around at the empty tables.

“No,” she deadpanned. “I just showed up on the chance they'd have a cancellation.”

*   *   *

“What do you and this Dan get up to all day?” Lisa asked, relieved that Emily had company and fishing for any scent of romance.

“Nothing much,” Emily said, and it was true.

They played gin rummy, although they were both a little vague on the rules. They ate leathery omelets and drank hot chocolate. They filled in crosswords in old newspapers. They listened to his iPod, which had better playlists, with her headphones, which had better sound quality.

When they got caught up in Emily's glasses, Dan untangled them and polished the lenses carefully with a napkin before he handed them back. When her hot-water bottle went cold, he limped off to find an elusive hotel employee to get it refilled. When her rug kept sliding off, he thought to bring the safety pins from a hotel sewing kit and pinned it to the sweatshirt. Tiny acts of kindness, each one as light and inconsequential as a snowflake, but it was amazing what a lot of snowflakes could do when they got together, she thought. You only had to look at the mountain.

“Will you do me a favor, Em?” Dan was turning her engagement ring around and around with his thumb, an oval sapphire surrounded by a cluster of tiny diamonds. Emily had loved the ring when he'd given it to her, but now she wondered if it was a bit ordinary, a bit—what was the word Paul used to use? A bit
vanilla
. “Will you stop changing things that are already perfect?”

That's what everyone kept saying; well, some version of it anyway. Her mother, her sister Monica, Lisa, the caterer, the cake designer. The only person who hadn't said it so far was the florist.