The Flower Arrangement (35 page)

Emily had called into the shop and changed her mind about the flowers four times so far, but Lara still always looked pleased to see
her. She'd stop what she was doing and make them a pot of Moroccan mint tea and start again from scratch. Emily could sit there for hours—and had done—listening to her describing the sooty center of an anemone or the scent of white lavender or the tightly packed petals of a rose.

And every time Emily left, she was certain she'd picked the right flowers this time, until she woke up a day or a week later and realized that they were all wrong.

Dan ordered another pint. “Come on, Em, have a glass of wine. You look as if you need it.”

“I can't.” She had already lost ten kilos but the dress, a simmering bell of gauze, would look even better if she could lose another two. “It'll just undo all the work I'm going to do at the gym later.”

“That's snow excuse.” Dan smiled. They had started trading snow puns that first week and they still hadn't stopped.

“Snow pain, snow gain,” Emily said, opening her laptop again.

She wanted a glass of cold white wine, though, and not just one. She wanted to sit here with him knocking back glasses of wine until her head spun. To saunter over to the Italian in Temple Bar and sit at a table outside and eat quattro formaggi pizza and lick the cheese off her fingers. To go home and get into bed and watch a box set and spoon-feed one another cookie dough ice cream until one of them decided it was time to have sex. But there was too much to do.

“Fire lanterns!” she said. “I think the red ones are a bit tacky. Do you mind if we go back to white?”

“Snow problem,” Dan said sadly.

That night, Emily dreamed that she showed up for her wedding in a tracksuit instead of a wedding dress. That her dad did not arrive to give her away and someone else had to step in. That it was Paul.

She woke up with a jolt and couldn't go back to sleep. Instead she lay awake staring at the ceiling, worrying about the readings for the wedding. Dan's mother had chosen them and picked that one from the Song of Solomon that everybody used. “My beloved is like a gazelle
or a young stag. Look! There he stands behind our wall, gazing through the windows.”

“Whenever I hear that one,” Paul had whispered at her sister Monica's wedding, “I always think the beloved sounds like a Peeping Tom.”

Monica had choked on her coffee when Emily told her about the invitation she'd sent Paul.

“You invited him to your wedding? After what he did?” Monica mopped spilled coffee off her knees. “Have you lost your mind?”

“Dan is inviting two of his exes,” Emily said. “It only seems fair.”

The truth was that she wanted Paul to get the invitation and to read, in black-and-white on heavy gilt-edged cream paper, that she had moved on. That she was so madly in love with someone else that she wanted to share her happiness with everyone. Even him.

The possibility that he might decide to turn up had never occurred to her, but his was the first RSVP that arrived, and now, whenever she thought about the wedding, she saw it all through his eyes. The venue, the ceremony, the food. Most of all—worst of all—herself.

Paul's eyes were amazing. A startling blue that bordered on violet, so bright in his lean, dark, handsome face that they looked as if they had been digitally enhanced. Cowboy's eyes, Lisa had called them. He looked as if he should be spending his days roaming the plains beneath a vast empty sky, but in fact he was the marketing director of a low-fat yogurt brand and a part-time lecturer in advertising.

They had met when the PR company where Emily was working handled his new product launch. She had only sat in on the initial briefing because one of her colleagues was ill and her boss asked her to pad out the team so that Paul would feel important.

“You don't even have to listen,” he'd said. But ten minutes into the meeting, she realized that Paul was addressing his PowerPoint presentation directly to her. She was first puzzled, then intrigued, then flattered. Why her?

Much later, she found out that this was a trick he used in his
lectures. Get the interest of the least interested person in the room and the rest will follow. By then, Emily had realized that keeping Paul was far harder work than getting him, but she didn't care. She would have followed him anywhere.

“He really loves himself,” Monica said, “doesn't he?”

But what was wrong with that? People were always saying that you had to love yourself before you loved another person. He was just putting it into practice.

Yes, Paul could be tricky. He didn't tolerate fools gladly, and he had a pretty broad definition of the word “fool.” But on the other hand, waiters (Emily had always found waiters intimidating) took one look at him and gave him the best table in the restaurant. Airline staff upgraded him. He got what he wanted without even asking for it, and—here it was—he wanted
her.

It was like being pulled from the audience onto the stage at a rock concert to dance with the lead singer. Whatever it was he'd seen in her, that was what she wanted to be. That was the price of admission. She didn't change for him; she did it all for herself. Upgrading like an operating system, losing all the old, annoying, clunky features and becoming a slicker version of herself.

She lost weight. Traded in her Citroën for a secondhand Mercedes CLK. Took a wine-tasting course. She ditched her M&S underwear for sexy Myla and beautiful Stella McCartney. She stopped buying clothes and invested in “pieces.” A pair of shoes she'd seen in
Vogue
. A butter-soft leather dress that cost as much as a holiday used to. Her credit card was permanently maxed out but it didn't matter. She wanted to be perfect for him.

Then, as she got to know him, she realized that he wasn't as perfect as he looked. He used hair thickener to bulk up the spot where his blonde curls were thinning. He changed his clothes three or four times before they went out. He practiced his lectures, word for word, in front of a full-length mirror in his bedroom (she knew; she listened).

She loved him even more for these little flaws because maybe they
meant that he wouldn't love her any less when he found out that she had flaws too.

Emily felt a familiar rush of dread as she pushed open the door of Blossom & Grow. She hoped that Lara would be behind the counter and not that stroppy blonde assistant. But the shop was empty and deliciously cool and quiet after the heat and clamor of Camden Street. It smelled like a forest—of ferns and greenery and moss.

“Emily!” Lara came out of the kitchen with a huge bucket of water in each hand. Her green apron was soaked and the sleeves of her pink T-shirt were damp to her elbows. She blew hair out of her eyes. “I was just giving the flowers a drink.”

“I'm really sorry!” Emily began nervously. “I know you must be sick of the sight of me.”

“You're just the excuse I need to put down these damned buckets before I drown myself, and make some tea. Make yourself comfortable and I'll be with you in one second.”

Emily sat down at the wrought-iron table under a Moroccan lantern. Paul had been going to ask her to marry him on that holiday they had booked to Morocco, she was sure of it.

She had seen a link to a diamond dealer in Antwerp when she was having a sneaky look through his Internet browsing history on his laptop. There was no reason for it, nothing specific, he'd just seemed a little distant. Emily was ashamed of herself for spying on him, but if she knew he was losing interest in her, then she could take corrective action, couldn't she?

She'd grinned at the screen of his laptop, feeling light-headed with happiness. He wasn't losing interest at all. He was planning to propose to her in the souk or the mountains or the desert. It was going to be perfect. Except that it never happened. She had to go to the ER with bad abdominal pains one afternoon and it turned out that she needed emergency surgery to have a fibroid removed. She didn't tell Paul that, of course, she just said she needed to have a small procedure. She wanted to maintain the illusion that her womb was as perfect as the rest of her.

She hoped he'd cancel the trip to stay with her, but his mate James had just broken up with his girlfriend, so the boys decided to head off on their own. They weren't on their own for long. They met up with a pair of English girls and decided to take a tour of the desert.

They were just traveling together, Paul said, sharing the cost of the jeep and the guide, which made sense. Camping in the Sahara, white tents, candlelight, silver service. It sounded a bit romantic to Emily, but that was just her imagination again.

When she got an infection and had to stay in the hospital for another few days, Paul sent her four kinds of roses. He didn't have a good signal in the desert but he Skyped her when he got back to Marrakesh. The English girls had headed home and he and James were staying in a
riad
in the Medina. He held his phone up so Emily could see the stars and hear the sound of the drummers in Djema el-Fna.

After they said their good-byes, he pressed the wrong button and Skype stayed open on his phone.

“Paul,” she whispered, in case she disturbed the other patients in the ward. “I'm still here!”

But he couldn't hear her over the sound of his own footsteps as he left his room with the phone in his hand. She saw dizzying fragments of the
riad
as he hurried past a fountain and down some steps into a courtyard. An intricately tiled floor, a window made of jewel-colored glass, a corridor lined with candles in huge glass lanterns.

The footsteps stopped and she saw a carved wooden door, heard three sharp taps. She smiled, waiting to see James's feet, but instead she saw high silver sandals, heard a voice—English, female, slightly annoyed—saying, “What kept you?”

He claimed that the girl was just a mate, that Emily was being paranoid. It killed her that he thought she was such a perfect fool.

*   *   *

Lara poured the tea into two tiny glasses and moved a plate of shortbread biscuits closer to Emily, who looked even thinner than she had
a month ago. “Just stop me when you see anything you like.” She began to scroll through her Pinterest board. Flowers blossomed on the screen. The golds and ochres first. Golden peonies, apricot honeysuckle, saffron, poppies the color of amber.

Emily gnawed at her thumbnail. The corners of her mouth were jittery. “I'm so confused.” She turned to look at Lara. “If you were getting married, what would you choose?”

“I don't know.” Lara flushed. She had to stare at the screen in case her expression gave her away. She
was
getting married, just a few days after Emily's wedding, but nobody knew.

Ben had wanted to have a party but Lara had managed to persuade him that it would be more romantic if they kept it just between the two of them. The truth was, she would have loved her brother to be there, but Ben was awkward around Phil, and having Katy there would just be too hard on him. They had so much history together.

So she had talked him into a registry office ceremony with strangers as witnesses. Afterward they were having lunch at Restaurant Patrick Guilbaud, then spending the night in the Merrion Hotel. The next morning they were going to fly to Greece for a honeymoon that everyone thought was just a holiday.

“You don't think it's a bit cloak-and-dagger?” Ben asked when everything was booked. “Not telling anyone at all?”

“I think it's a good thing,” Lara said, as much to herself as to him. “Most weddings are about other people. This will just be about us.”

Her wedding to Michael had felt oddly impersonal. The ceremony had been held in Michael's family church in Richmond in Surrey and the reception was at a hotel that overlooked the Thames. Lara was supposed to be involved in the planning, but she was in Dublin and in the end Michael's mother had taken over.

Only the flowers had felt like her own. She'd ordered them from a florist in Kew. Garden roses, sweet pea, chamomile, lavender and Queen Anne's lace. She wore a simple garland of ivy instead of a veil. Her dad had cut it from his garden and brought it over on the Ryanair flight in his suitcase.

Lara had lost sight of Michael at the champagne reception. She searched for him in the crowd milling around on the lush green lawn that rolled down to the river until she found him, finally, by the water, leaning against a tree, looking uncomfortable in his gray morning suit. He had smiled at her and let her lead him back up to the wedding party. Poor Michael, hiding even then, pretending to be someone he wasn't.

Who was this girl pretending to be? she wondered, looking at Emily's tense profile. What was she hiding? Lara wanted to tell her that if you went into a marriage with a secret, all the flowers in the world would not hide it. That when you committed to someone, you had to commit as the person you really were, not the person you thought they wanted you to be. But that was something she had to work out herself.

“What's wrong with me?” Emily whispered. “I'm looking at all these beautiful flowers but I can't decide which ones are right for me.”

Lara closed her laptop. “Why don't you imagine you're buying them for someone you've known your whole life, someone you really love.”

“Who?” Emily blinked at her.

Lara smiled. “You.”

*   *   *

Emily had been trying to be all things to all people, she realized as she lay awake that night staring at the ceiling. The polished, elegant woman she'd turned herself into for Paul and the ordinary girl in the XL sweatshirt with her arm in a sling making snow puns with Dan. Which was the real Emily? There was only one way to find out.

When she arrived at the French restaurant he'd picked, he was already at the table, tasting a glass of wine, watched by an attentive waitress. He inhaled it, sniffed it, swirled it around his mouth. Emily knew that he'd seen her but he didn't look up till she reached the table. It was worth it, though, just to see those amazing blue cowboy eyes of his widen in amazement.