The Beachside Flower Stall

by Karen Clarke

  ‘Wow.’ So, we’d both left Dorset to build new lives, but while Tom’s return appeared to be permanent, mine was only fleeting.

  I pictured him with wind-ruffled hair and a rubber-gloved hand, helping a mare give birth. I wondered if he’d had girlfriends there. Of course he had. Look at him. With his brooding air, and love of animals, he must have been fighting them off.

  And yet, no one had won his heart. Only Megan.

  ‘I’m sorry about your mum,’ I said, with a vague recollection of her being distracted at Tom’s party by a woman choking on an olive. ‘I had no idea.’

  ‘Why would you?’ A shadow passed over his face. ‘She’d grown close to Megan while I was gone, especially after she became ill,’ he said. ‘She was really keen for Megan and me to tie the knot.’

  It almost sounded as if he was defending his decision to rekindle their relationship.

  ‘And now you’re going to be a dad!’ I seemed to be having trouble censoring myself.

  ‘She told you that too, eh?’ His eyes met mine, and there was something troubled in their depths. Maybe he hadn’t wanted everyone knowing before the wedding.

  ‘Congratulations!’

  ‘Thanks,’ he said, his gaze flickering to the side. ‘Let’s hope I make a better job of it than mine did.’

  ‘Still annoyed you’re not giving orders at Hudson Country Hotels?’

  ‘Or HCH, as it’s called these days. Megan’s idea.’ A faint smile lifted his mouth. ‘Weirdly, he’s not so bad since Mum died.’

  I wondered if he knew of his father’s plan to retire once Megan had persuaded Tom to come on board. ‘Well, that’s good,’ I said.

  He shrugged. ‘Too little, too late.’

  ‘But he approves of Megan.’

  Something flared in his eyes, then quickly vanished. ‘She seemed excited to have bumped into you,’ he said quietly. ‘I think she’s hoping you two can be friends again.’

  When hell freezes over.

  ‘I won’t be here much longer,’ I said. ‘In Shipley, I mean, not… you know… Dead.’ I cringed. ‘Sorry.’

  His expression softened. Relieved there’d be no risk of bumping into me after he was married, probably. ‘I expect you’ve a lot of catching up to do.’

  Nope. I’ve said all I ever want to, to Megan Ford.

  He didn’t seem in any hurry to leave, and I tried not to read anything into it as I pulled forward a bucket of powder-blue delphiniums to hide a surge of misery. Their scent was overpowering – or maybe it was Tom’s closeness.

  ‘So, what do you do, when you’re not selling flowers?’ he said, when it became obvious my words had dried up. ‘Did you become a high-flying accountant?’

  ‘Something like that,’ I said, lightening my tone to match his. ‘Not very glamorous, but I liked it.’

  ‘Liked?’

  ‘The company I worked for went bust.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’ He sounded as if he meant it.

  ‘I’ll find another job soon.’

  ‘And you’re happy in Manchester?’

  ‘It has a great Christmas market,’ I said. Brilliant. ‘And I’ve got my own house.’ Hardly likely to impress, when his father owned a bunch of hotels. ‘My parents live there too now,’ I blathered on. ‘And my sister had twins, so I’m an auntie.’

  He gave a slow nod of approval. ‘I never did thank you for my birthday gift,’ he said, unexpectedly. ‘The photo of Hovis. It was really thoughtful.’

  I glanced at the dog, now lying with his head resting on his paws.

  ‘Oh, you know,’ I said, fiddling with my money belt. ‘It was silly really, you don’t need a photo to remind you of him.’

  ‘No, but it was a nice memento of our walks together.’

  Our eyes became glued together, and the air around us felt suddenly fraught with danger.

  Tom looked away first. ‘So, Megan mentioned that you’re seeing someone.’

  I bet she did.

  ‘Yes!’ I said, injecting my voice with enthusiasm. ‘He’s coming to visit soon.’

  ‘She suggested we all go for a drink, or something to eat, while you’re here.’

  NO!

  ‘Lovely!’ I made a mental note to come down with gastric flu.

  Tom glanced at his watch. ‘I’d better get back to the surgery.’ As if he understood, Hovis rose and shook himself, staggering a little. ‘It was really good to see you, Carrie.’

  As he started to walk away, I suddenly couldn’t bear it. ‘Tom, wait!’

  He turned, eyebrows raised, and I recalled him wearing that same expression at the pub where we used to congregate, when I called him back from the bar once, to ask for a packet of crisps. ‘What is it?’

  My eyes darted about and landed on a bucket of pink and blue asters (a talisman of love and a symbol of patience). I plucked out a bunch and crumpled some paper around them. ‘These are for you,’ I said, almost tripping over a bucket of foliage in my hurry to get to him.

  ‘Thanks.’ He took them, and shot me a grin that made a rocket go off in my stomach. ‘They’ll look nice in the cottage.’

  ‘Cottage?’

  ‘Attached to the surgery,’ he said, sniffing the flowers. ‘I mostly live there, to be honest.’

  Not sure what to make of that, I shielded my eyes with my hand. ‘Listen, Tom, about that night,’ I said, pausing as Hovis did his three-legged squat and weed against the foot of the bench where the elderly man was eating another ice-cream. Or maybe it was the same one.

  ‘I hope that’s all he does,’ Tom said, frisking his pockets with his free hand. ‘I haven’t got any poo bags with me.’ He looked at me. ‘Sorry, you were saying?’

  ‘Oh, nothing.’ I crouched to pat Hovis’s head. ‘It was good to see you both, too.’

  Chapter Fourteen

  ‘I don’t get why it’s a big deal.’ My sister’s voice reached me through a crackle of bad signal. ‘When you came to Manchester, you said you never wanted to see either of them again.’

  ‘I know, but —’

  ‘It was ten years ago, Carrie.’ Sarah emphasised the ten. ‘What they’re up to now is none of your business,’ she continued, her voice dying out. Either the reception was fading or she was multitasking; sending an email, or spiralising courgettes for dinner. There was never an idle moment in my sister’s life. ‘You’re there to do a job, and a pretty good one by the sound of it.’

  ‘But of all the weddings in all the world…’

  ‘You’re not over him then?’ Her voice filled my ear again. ‘I knew it,’ she said, with a hint of sisterly triumph.

  ‘Of course I am, it’s just weird, that’s all. I could probably accept him marrying someone else,’ I lied. ‘It’s just that they were supposed to have broken up.’

  ‘Well, people reunite all the time,’ said Sarah, as if she hadn’t married her very first boyfriend, Phil, straight after university, and not looked at another man since. ‘It sounds like it was an emotional time, with his mum dying. It must have made him realise he still had feelings for Megatron.’ I almost smiled at the old nickname, from The Transformers: ‘the viciously powerful leader of the Decepticons’.

  ‘Maybe she planned it that way.’

  ‘If that’s what you want to think.’

  For a second, I wished I hadn’t called my sister, but I’d needed to talk to someone who’d known how things were back then.

  ‘She’s playing games with me, I’m sure of it,’ I said. ‘It might have been a coincidence, her mum phoning about the flowers, but she’s going to make the most of it.’

  ‘I’d have thought she wouldn’t want you anywhere near Tom, knowing you two used to be friends.’

  ‘Oh, she’s not that insecure,’ I said. ‘She’ll want to rub it in, how well she’s done for herself, and to show me they’re “in love”.’ The words were like splinters in my mouth.

  ‘Or, you’ve massively misinterpreted the situation and she’s pleased to see you.’ Sarah let her w
ords hang for a second. ‘Do you still have feelings for Tom?’

  ‘No!’ I remembered the way my pulse had misfired when I heard his voice; the way my heart had seemed to leap towards him. ‘Do you know, the night of his party she told Tom I’d been planning to move to Manchester, and had only stayed for his twenty-first, implying I wanted to snoop around his fancy house.’

  ‘And he believed her?’

  ‘Apparently I’d been acting funny, so it kind of made sense.’

  ‘But didn’t you say you thought he had feelings for you?’

  I wished I hadn’t said that now. I’d rewound and replayed our friendship so many times, those first few weeks I’d stayed at Sarah’s. Practically since the day I’d returned to the vets to see how Hovis was doing, and Tom had suggested I stop by the house if I was passing, and we’d fallen so easily into friendship, I’d hoped he might see me as more than a friend one day. I’d gradually become convinced his feelings were changing; that his eyes had started to linger on mine when we said goodbye, and he was always quick to suggest another meeting. And then he’d made the comment about loving red hair, which I’d clearly read too much into.

  ‘I obviously got that wrong,’ I said.

  ‘Well, Megan Ford always was a massive bitch.’ Sarah had swung the other way now. ‘And if Tom couldn’t see it, he wasn’t right for you.’

  ‘You never even met him,’ I pointed out.

  ‘And you never found out what he was like to live with. You didn’t even sleep with him, so you don’t know if he’s crap in bed, or leaves his dirty undercrackers on the floor, or wears them for three days in a row, or forgets your birthday—’

  ‘You’re talking about Phil,’ I said.

  ‘Well, yes, but you know what I mean. He exists in this bubble in your head, all lovely and perfect, but I bet if you’d married him, you’d be divorced by now.’

  Maybe she was right.

  ‘If he thinks Megan’s the one for him, then good luck to him,’ Sarah added.

  ‘But they’re so different.’ Maybe that was the point. Our likes and dislikes had been too similar, and he preferred a challenge.

  ‘So were you and Megan,’ Sarah said drily.

  ‘She used to be nice sometimes.’ I wasn’t sure why I was bothering. Megan and I only became friends during our second-to-last year at school, after I found her sobbing in the toilets one day and asked her what was wrong. Normally I wouldn’t have bothered, because the scholarship girls tended to avoid the posh girls, who were mostly into clothes, bitching, boys and horse-riding, but Megan – normally so poised – had looked so wretched, I couldn’t walk away.

  It was a sign of how upset she’d been that she confessed to me – of all people – that her father had just left her mother, and she’d wanted to go too, but he’d refused to let her, and now she blamed her mother. She’d begged me not to tell anyone, and I’d promised I wouldn’t, and after that we’d stuck together.

  I knew my friends made fun of us, but I didn’t care. Everything seemed brighter and more fun in Megan’s company, and on her own she could be funny and kind, giving me make-up and horse-riding lessons, and inviting me to parties – though I rarely went, because someone always ended up with alcohol poisoning. And though she could be a bit cruel, inventing my nickname to amuse her cronies, and joining in when they laughed, there’d been something magnetic about her that was hard to pull away from.

  ‘She didn’t always have it easy at home,’ I said, ‘with her dad leaving and having more babies…’

  ‘Blah, blah, blah,’ Sarah interjected. ‘We all have our problems, but it doesn’t mean you make a move on the man your best friend’s in love with.’

  ‘To be fair, she thought we were just friends—’

  ‘Oh, I bet she didn’t,’ Sarah said. ‘You’d have been giving off all sorts of signs, believe me.’

  ‘Well, he didn’t have to respond,’ I pointed out. ‘Anyway, his father probably had a hand in things. I bet the minute Megan told him her mother was related to royalty, he saw it as some kind of merger.’

  ‘Look, if you don’t want to be involved in this wedding, it’s simple,’ said Sarah, losing a bit of patience. ‘Let Ruby deal with it.’

  ‘It’s not that simple at all,’ I said. ‘She’s not in a fit state for a start.’ I thought for a moment. ‘Do you remember much about her from when we were kids?’

  ‘Jesus Christ!’

  ‘What?’ I said, startled.

  ‘There’s a hair growing out of my chin.’ Sarah made a sound of despair. ‘I’m turning into an old hag,’ she said. ‘I need to get a strimmer to my thigh-brows as it is, before I take the children swimming.’

  I winced at the mental image. It was rubbish anyway. Sarah was tall and striking, and always turned heads with her piercing blue eyes, and her hair was a deeper russet than my flaming red.

  ‘Aunt Ruby?’ I prompted, watching a group of teenagers playing volleyball on the beach. It was lunchtime, and the sand was packed with bodies. The tide was out and the sun was high and hot. I was hungry and thirsty, and still hadn’t contacted Megan.

  ‘We never saw much of her, did we?’ Sarah said, finally responding to my question. ‘Didn’t she live with some chap in China for years?’

  ‘Henry, yes, and it was Hong Kong. She was nice when we did see her though, wasn’t she?’

  ‘I don’t really remember, to be honest.’ I sensed Sarah’s attention slipping back to one of the many things that made up her busy days. ‘What’s it like, staying with her?’

  ‘She’s really down,’ I said, knowing I couldn’t tell Sarah the truth. Being a mother, she might not understand how Ruby could have given up a baby – and she might tell Mum and Dad.

  ‘I’m sure she’ll get over it,’ Sarah said. ‘She probably just wants someone to wait on her hand and foot.’

  After ringing off, and not feeling much better than I had before our conversation, I took a swig from a bottle of lukewarm water I’d stuffed in my bag, then topped up the water in the flower buckets, before pulling up Ruby’s emails on my phone. Making up my mind, I pressed in Megan’s number.

  ‘Hello?’ She sounded harassed and slightly breathless.

  ‘Megan,’ I said, in the most businesslike tone I could muster. ‘It’s Carrie from Ruby’s Blooms.’

  ‘Hi, Carrie!’ Her voice warmed up. ‘I’m just on my way to a cake-tasting session,’ she said. ‘My mother wanted to make the wedding cake, but even the birds won’t touch her baking.’ I couldn’t think of a single thing to say to that. ‘She did a course last year,’ Megan continued. ‘She’s still terrible, though. She’s doing Italian lessons now, god help them. The Italians, I mean.’

  Determined not to become distracted, I said, ‘We’re happy to provide your wedding flowers, but need to agree on a price.’

  ‘The money doesn’t matter, but do go on.’ She sounded amused. In the background, I heard the bleep of a car door unlocking. Something sporty, no doubt, like the car her father bought her when she passed her test first time, transferring the money from Canada, as if it could make up for his absence.

  ‘We thought three thousand, five hundred,’ I said, adding the five hundred on the spur of the moment. How wonderful to be able to say that money didn’t matter, when to most people, it mattered a great deal.

  Megan didn’t miss a beat. ‘I had a call earlier from Jay Simmons,’ she said breezily. ‘Apparently, his arrest was the result of a misunderstanding and he’s keen to get back to work.’

  My heart plummeted. ‘I see.’ If I hadn’t called him he probably wouldn’t have contacted her. This was all my fault. ‘Well, I’m sure we can match his price.’

  ‘Actually, he’s charging more,’ she said. ‘He’s miffed that I gave him the elbow, says he’d already ordered the flowers.’

  ‘Right.’ So that was that.

  ‘I’ll tell you what.’ Megan raised her voice above the sound of a car engine revving. ‘Why don’t you bring an arrangement
to Hudson Grange this Sunday and I’ll make a decision then.’

  ‘Hudson Grange?’

  ‘I practically live here now,’ she said, as though it made perfect sense. ‘Though sometimes I spend the night with Tom at the little cottage at the surgery, if he’s on call. It’s so cosy there, the two of us snuggled in the attic room.’ I remembered how she’d hated animals, apart from horses. Maybe she’d had a change of heart.

  ‘Why do I need to bring an arrangement?’ I said.

  ‘It’s only fair, don’t you think?’ I didn’t. ‘I know that Jay’s got a solid reputation, at least in the floristry world, but I don’t know if your aunt’s any good. I mean,’ she went on, before I could speak, ‘it would be silly not to have a sample, like with the cakes.’

  ‘But you have to taste cake to know what you want,’ I pointed out. ‘Flowers are visual. You can look at a photo and know whether they’re good.’

  ‘It doesn’t tell me much about the quality of the flowers though, does it?’ She was obviously enjoying herself. ‘Just a simple, good quality arrangement shouldn’t be too much to ask,’ she added. ‘I’ll get Jay to do the same, and Tom and I will choose.’

  God Almighty. ‘Fine,’ I said, keeping my voice even. ‘What time?’

  ‘Let’s say eleven o’ clock.’ I heard the crunch of gravel beneath tyres. ‘You’ll have to excuse me, I’m due at the tasting in half an hour, and I have to pick up Tom.’

  She rang off without saying goodbye, leaving me feeling marooned. And also confused. Was she hoping I’d make a fool of myself in front of Tom? Or did she just want me to see them together, presenting a united front?

  My stomach gurgled with hunger, and I backed across the square to the newsagent’s, eyes trained on the stall, ready to run back if a customer materialised.

  Inside, the shop felt blissfully cool. I was tempted to loiter, but grabbed a carton of orange juice from the fridge and a couple of bags of crisps.

  ‘Business not very brisk,’ said the man behind the counter as I approached. It sounded more like a statement than a question.

  ‘I’m just helping out for a bit,’ I said politely. He was pale, with darting eyes and coal-black hair, and was wearing a cable-knit jumper as though it was winter. ‘I don’t know what business is like normally.’