Snowdrops on Rosemary Lane

by Ellen Berry

  ‘He was furious,’ James replied. ‘Stomped around the place, going, “Who the hell wants scented candles and potpourri?”’

  Lucy laughed. ‘Potpourri angered him?’

  ‘Made him livid. I remember him shouting, “Why have you brought me to a bloody grotto?”’

  ‘With Christmas music playing, no doubt.’

  ‘Oh, don’t get him started on Christmas music.’

  Armed with laundry-style bags and secateurs, they started to gather lush ferns and eucalyptus; the kind of greens that were often regarded as ‘fillers’ but which Lucy found as beautiful as the flowers they would be arranged to set off. There was a wild bay tree, from which she clipped sprigs, having paused to ask, ‘Are you sure it’s okay, taking all of this?’

  ‘Of course it is.’

  ‘Does your dad know I’m doing this?’

  ‘I told him I was meeting you,’ James said, as they carried on filling the bags.

  ‘Honestly, this is fantastic,’ Lucy said. ‘How did you know all this was here? I mean, it’s perfect.’

  He turned and looked at her. ‘I grew up here, remember. This is where I spent pretty much all of my childhood.’

  Onwards they went, filling all of the bags Lucy had brought, before heading back into the woodland and making their way towards the road. Lucy breathed in the scent of the firs as they followed the pine-needle-carpeted path. Chinks of sunshine eked in through the branches. It was so soothing in here, dark and shady and blissfully silent apart from their footsteps on the soft ground. Every so often, Lucy stopped to pick up small objects – a speckled feather, a particularly exotic fir cone – in the hope that they might inspire Sam to start a new museum in his bedroom. He would probably reject them, as the whole point had been that he’d found the items himself. Maybe he’d outgrown the whole idea anyway. But it was worth a try, she decided.

  Back at her car, they loaded the bags into the boot. ‘D’you think you have enough here?’ James asked.

  ‘Oh, yes, more than enough.’ She closed the boot and smiled at him. ‘Thank you so much. This has really helped me.’

  ‘Hey!’ a voice rang out, and they both swung around to the direction of its source. There didn’t seem to be anyone in sight.

  Lucy frowned. ‘This is your dad’s land, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’ James sighed, and a look of resignation settled on his face as someone – it was Kenny, she saw now – appeared from the woods and stomped towards them.

  ‘What’re you doing here, Dad?’ he asked pleasantly.

  ‘I’m not on house arrest, am I?’ he retorted. ‘I mean, I am allowed out into my own woods from time to time?’

  ‘Of course you are,’ James said, exasperated. ‘It’s just, I wasn’t expecting—’

  ‘What you two are doing is more the point,’ Kenny cut in, smirking now and turning to stare at the bags sitting there in Lucy’s open boot, greenery bursting from them.

  ‘James was just helping me out,’ Lucy started. ‘We were just—’

  ‘Helping you out in the woods? Bet he was!’ Kenny guffawed loudly.

  She looked away, her face burning hot. Christ, what was he inferring? Did everyone assume she and James were have some kind of fling—

  ‘Dad, I told you I was meeting Lucy,’ James said, clearly mortified by his father’s remark too. ‘I said she was doing some wedding flowers. Emma Somerville’s wedding, remember? The one you’re invited to?’

  ‘I didn’t realise you meant this Lucy,’ his father muttered.

  James laughed hollowly and shook his head. ‘How many Lucys d’you think I know, Dad?’

  Now Kenny was scratching at his beard, fixing his gaze on Lucy. ‘Well, I don’t know. He never tells me anything about his private life.’

  James groaned and shook his head, like a teenager in the presence of his embarrassing dad. Lucy edged towards her car, keen to escape before Kenny announced that he was considering taking out a full-page ad in the Heathfield Gazette, saying something like: James and Lucy. What’s really going on between those two? Silly her, for thinking it was so normal and unremarkable for a woman to be platonic friends with a man! ‘I’ve met you before,’ Kenny added, studying her intently now.

  ‘Yes – it was at the hospital. You’d had an incident with a fishbone …’

  ‘You were with Rikke. Our Rikke.’

  ‘That’s right,’ she said. ‘I hope you don’t mind me gathering up a few bits and pieces from the woods,’ she added, indicating the pile of bulging bags.

  ‘A few bits and pieces? Is that what you call it?’ He raised an extravagantly sprouting eyebrow and strode over to her car to peer into the boot. She really couldn’t tell if he was teasing or not.

  ‘Remember I told you Lucy’s decorating the church and the house for the wedding?’ James said.

  ‘Right,’ his father said, his dark eyes gleaming with amusement now. ‘Well, you just come and take whatever you like anytime, Lucy. I’m sure James will be very happy if you do …’

  ‘Kenny, I—’ she started.

  ‘… Something like nine hundred Scots Pines and Douglas Firs out here,’ he went on, sweeping an arm as if to indicate his kingdom, ‘so I’m hardly going to miss a few bits.’ He paused and looked at them both. ‘Sorry to disturb you two today.’

  ‘Dad,’ James said quickly, ‘you weren’t disturbing anyone.’

  ‘So you keep saying.’ Kenny chuckled as Lucy climbed into her car, and James threw her an apologetic, what-can-you-do? kind of look as she drove away.

  Had Kenny really thought they’d been ‘up to’ something, other than gathering plants? The idea was so ridiculous it was actually funny. Amused now – in a mortified way, as if she’d come out of the ladies with a trail of loo roll stuck to her shoe – she fixed her gaze on the narrow road that led back to the village. At least she had virtually an entire garden centre stuffed in her boot – which meant she would never need to venture into Kenny Halsall’s woods again.

  And thank heavens for that.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Although she suspected it wasn’t entirely good for her, Lucy would occasionally wake up and just lie there for a few minutes, playing a game with herself. These games often involved making a list in her head, and today it was entitled:

  If I Still Had Ivan

  I wouldn’t try to cajole him into being more sociable. She was going to a wedding today – Emma and Dylan’s wedding – and if her husband were here he’d be huffing and puffing, saying they didn’t even know them – so did they really have to go? Like a grumpy teenager he’d be sulking and poking about in his wardrobe – the one that was still stuffed with his clothes, as if he might appear miraculously and need something to wear. And he’d be grumbling about having to put on a suit (in a sort of protest he had only ever owned one at a time, to be brought out for special occasions).

  Although he had always been perfectly lovely with her friends, Lucy had wished sometimes that Ivan would make a little more effort – with the B&B guests too, for that matter. As it was, he was only truly sociable where his own friends and colleagues were concerned. Now, of course, she berated herself for having nurtured any criticisms of him at all. That’s what happened when someone died; you couldn’t bring yourself to acknowledge that they had any faults at all. Instead, you decided you’d been an overcritical harridan and not appreciated them enough.

  … Or mind if he didn’t want to come on a walk. When Ivan started working back in Manchester, Lucy’s expectations of their weekends had shot off the scale. While she was eager to get out in the countryside, once he’d put in a couple of hours in the garden here, Ivan had often just wanted to flop on the sofa and bury himself in a book. ‘What a waste of our precious time together!’ she’d fume. Had she been awful to live with back then, she wondered now? It had been perfectly reasonable, she reflected, for Ivan to prefer to stay home – ‘Those clouds look ominous, Luce’ – rather than hiking up a hill with Sam, Marnie and
a bunch of their friends to pick raspberries that they could have easily bought from a shop. ‘Without bugs in them,’ he’d pointed out on more than one occasion. Shop-bought raspberries were one of about eight million things that made her think of him.

  … Or get cross if he started mansplaining. When she had been trying to shift a little weight after being pregnant with Sam, Lucy had taken up running. ‘I’ll tell you the right way to train,’ Ivan had said – proceeding to jog around the park with her, rattling off a list of must-dos including ‘never slap your feet down like that, all right? Unless you want to damage a tendon.’

  ‘Of course, that’s my goal for today,’ she’d shot back, ‘to wreck my body.’ She’d glared at him. ‘Anyway, before today, when was the last time you did any purposeful running?’ He’d just laughed her off and continued, irritatingly, to dispense tips – and if that happened today, she would not mind a bit. Nope – today, he could stand there, instructing her on the best way to pack her delicate wedding decorations into her car (he had always been an extremely precise car-packer) and she would bow to his superior knowledge, and bestow thanks.

  … I’d also let him ‘help’ with the cooking. While Ivan had cooked occasionally – on special occasions, when praise was in the offing – Lucy had tended to take care of meals day-to-day. But Ivan couldn’t resist ‘helping’, giving a curry an idle stir as he ambled past, or squirting in some lime juice or tasting it and saying, ‘Mmm, I think it needs salt.’ It didn’t count as helping, as it had no impact on her workload; in fact it served only to rile her. However, now she would embrace his lime-squeezing, salt-adding tendencies, which led her to the next point …

  … Crisps! ‘God, I fancy some crisps,’ her husband would often exclaim, such was his rabid desire for salt when she could barely tolerate any at all. ‘Why do we never have any in the house?’ If Ivan were here now, the cupboards would be so crammed with his favourite variety (good old salt and vinegar) that, whenever he opened a cupboard, an avalanche of family packets would tumble out.

  But the truth was, she didn’t have Ivan, so these games were pointless – and anyway, what was she doing, lying in bed, remembering Ivan nagging about her tendons and claiming all the cooking glory when the wedding was happening in a few hours’ time? She jumped out of bed, conscious of unfamiliar twinges from the hours she had spent piecing the final floral arrangements together last night. For seven hours straight she’d been bent over mounds of greenery, her eyes scratchy with tiredness and her fingers sore from all the twisting and bending of branches and stems.

  Having served up nothing more elaborate than beans on toast, followed by Angel Delight – luckily, the children regarded such offerings as treats – she had zoomed through the bath time and story time routines with brisk efficiency, letting them get away with a perfunctory teeth clean, before settling down to toil away at the kitchen table until two-thirty a.m. Prior to that – for most of the day, with Rikke helping out – Lucy had put the indoor decorations in place in the church (the outdoor ones would have to wait until morning). Then they’d driven out to Fordell House to drop off the table centrepieces and decorate the banisters of the sweeping stairwell, twisting them with eucalyptus and ivy and inserting fresh flowers, with cunningly disguised spongy pouches at the bases of their stems to keep them fresh until the next day. Phyllida had been delighted, thank goodness.

  Now it had just gone six-thirty a.m. and dawn was creeping through the white linen blinds in Lucy’s bedroom. She hadn’t had nearly enough sleep, and she registered the tiredness in her eyes, the dark shadows lurking beneath and the prominent crease between her brows – the ‘mum line’, as it was known – as she checked her reflection in the dressing table mirror. She would need to perform some kind of rescue job with make-up, and do her nails, too. They were grubby and ragged after her endeavours with the foliage last night. She hadn’t even thought about her hands until this moment.

  At least her hair was in better shape, she decided after her shower. She’d been back to Nicola, who’d done a brilliant job, and as Lucy blow-dried it she realised she was starting to look more like old-Lucy – i.e. younger Lucy – from the days when she’d still made an effort each morning for work. When she had been at Claudine – in the pre-Max Cleavage days – they used to say lingerie was ‘a woman’s best friend’. It was on all their packaging and advertising material in elegant script. Granted, it was hardly a genius tagline, but it summed up the fact that, like a dear friend, the perfect bra and knicker ensemble could lift the spirits like nothing else.

  Only now, with her interest in lingerie long gone, Lucy decided that an excellent haircut had an even more marked effect. It fell in loose waves around her face, glossy and healthy-looking, by some kind of miracle. To think, back in her Claudine days she would have given a tiny rural salon like Nicola’s a wide berth, assuming they still used the rubber-cap method for highlights, and recommended poodle perms.

  She applied light make-up quickly, and when she’d finished she was pleased to see that she looked like a fully fledged member of the human race again. Pleasingly, Lucy had also managed to unearth one jar of nail polish that hadn’t entirely glooped up.

  Sam and Marnie were up and dressed now, and Carys had stopped by to whisk them off for the day. Lucy had decided not to take them along to the wedding, in spite of Emma’s generous invitation. She knew they’d have a far better time with their friends. ‘Look at you!’ Carys exclaimed. ‘God, Lucy. You look fantastic!’

  ‘Thanks,’ she said, unused to such an enthusiastic response to her appearance.

  Carys beamed at her. ‘Good luck for today.’

  ‘Thanks,’ Lucy said again, seemingly incapable of more meaningful speech.

  Her friend grabbed her hand. ‘You should feel really proud of yourself, doing all of this, and going to the wedding …’ She paused. ‘Are you nervous?’

  ‘Just a bit,’ she admitted.

  ‘It’ll be great. Lucky you – I hear it’s the wedding of the year, around here.’

  Agh, please don’t say that, Lucy thought. Then Carys hugged her and called for the children; Amber and Noah had hared straight up to Sam and Marnie’s rooms.

  In the now empty house, she caught herself pacing from room to room, straightening cushions, picking up the odd lidless felt tip and, disconcertingly, a whole toasted crumpet that was poking out from beneath the sofa. Hopefully it hadn’t been there for long enough for any of her guests to spot it. Taking a deep breath, she tried not to dwell on the last conversation she had had with her mother, during which Anna had enquired about how things were going with the B&B, and the wedding flowers – implying yet again that it was far too much for Lucy to manage. At least she hadn’t started on how Lucy must sell Rosemary Cottage and move to Leeds or Manchester or anywhere else. And she hadn’t asked her about James either.

  Lucy made herself a strong coffee and sipped it, reassuring herself that the flowers looked great, and that she’d know plenty of people at the wedding. Della and her husband Frank would be there, and James and his father, of course – although she might have to keep a distance if Kenny was still on that, ‘Ooh, what were you two up to in the woods?’ trip like a sniggering thirteen-year-old rather than a seventy-something man.

  It was finally time to set off. Lucy mentally added one more point to her ‘If I Still Had Ivan’ list: I’d be perfectly satisfied if he told me I looked ‘okay’.

  It used to frustrate her, the way he’d say, ‘Yeah, it’s nice,’ whenever she put on a new outfit for him to express an opinion on. She’d craved a more enthusiastic response – perhaps to reassure her that he still found her attractive, or ‘ravishing’, as he used to say, back in the old days.

  One last check in the mirror: ‘You’re fine, Luce,’ her husband would say whenever she dithered like this, kissing her cheek and giving her a teasing smile. She smoothed down her long dark hair and tried for a smile. He was right; she was fine. That was good enough for her.

  Chapte
r Thirty

  She arrived early at the church to meet Davide, as arranged, and a couple of his brothers who had come over from Narbonne, their hometown in France. While Lucy checked the bouquets she had already fixed to the ends of each pew, Davide and one of the brothers hopped up and down on a flimsy stepladder in order to set up the wire frame that would support Lucy’s cascade of flowers and foliage at the entrance. Rikke was on hand to help, although at the reception she would be focusing on her harp recital. It still surprised and delighted Lucy to notice how lives intertwined here in this small, close community. Her path would never have crossed with Emma and Dylan’s if Phyllida hadn’t mentioned to her hairdresser that she had been let down by her florist.

  Soon, everyone began to congregate outside the church. ‘The flowers look gorgeous,’ Della said, scuttling over to her, with Frank at her side, adding, ‘You can sit with us if you like.’

  ‘Thanks,’ she said gratefully. Lucy had been aware of this before: the feeling that she was being taken care of at a social event so she wasn’t left hanging about on her own. She had already glanced around for James, but there was no sign of him yet. The guests were all filtering into the church now, and Lucy sensed a swell of pride as she looked around. Although she had put everything in place last night, it was a different matter seeing her work on display on the actual day. It was a crisp, bright morning, and sunshine beamed in through the stained-glass windows, scattering patches of jewel-coloured light onto the tiled floor and polished woodwork. The effect of the copious greenery, plus sprays of hollyhocks and freesias was beautifully fresh and cheery, and as they took their seats Della whispered, ‘So many people are talking about your flowers. You should be so proud of what you’ve managed to do.’

  Lucy beamed with delight, and the beautiful couple glided in, Emma a slip of a thing in cream chiffon, her long blonde hair scooped up, her equally stunning bridesmaid in dusky pink. The ceremony began.