The Little Flower Shop by the Sea

by Ali McNamara

  Woody is rarely busy. St Felix isn’t exactly a hotbed of crime. The most he’s had to handle since I arrived was a mix-up over two neighbours’ recycling bins.

  ‘I’m very well, thank you, Poppy,’ he says, puffing his chest out. ‘A policeman’s work is never done. You never know when there might be a need for authority.’

  Amber and I glance at each other, but decide to humour him.

  ‘Of course,’ Amber says, wandering over to Woody with a tiny white flower in her hand. ‘I’m sure your presence would make any criminal think twice.’ She smiles at him and deftly tucks the flower into his lapel. Woody flushes red, all the way from his neck up to his curly hair.

  ‘Yes… well,’ he stutters. ‘Luckily I’m not often needed to exert my authority, but —’

  ‘If you were, we’d feel safe knowing you’re there to protect us,’ I finish for him. ‘Wouldn’t we, Amber?’

  ‘Oh yes.’ She nods. ‘If I was to be arrested here in St Felix, I’d definitely want it to be by you, Woody.’

  I grin at Amber – assuming she’s winding Woody up. But instead she virtually flutters her eyelashes as she looks coyly up at him.

  ‘Right, well – let’s hope I won’t be required to do that,’ says Woody, trying for brusque, but it comes out as a squeak. He clears his throat and continues, his voice softer now: ‘However, if I was to arrest you, Amber –’ he takes the flower from his lapel and offers it back to her – ‘I’d be very gentle about it.’

  ‘I have no doubt you would be, Woody,’ Amber says in the same tone, taking the flower gently from his hand.

  ‘Ahem!’ I say, grinning at the two of them. This, I hadn’t seen coming.

  ‘Yes, well, I must be off,’ Woody says, straightening up. ‘Ladies.’ He nods at us and puts his hat back on. ‘I’ll be back later, for your grand opening – crowd control, you know.’

  I very much doubt we’d be in need of that. We’ll be lucky to get any sort of a crowd, let alone an unruly one, but I play along with him. ‘Yes, of course, Woody,’ I say. ‘See you later.’

  Woody leaves and I look at Amber as she bolts the door behind him.

  ‘What?’ she asks, trying to look innocent.

  ‘Are you serious, Amber?’

  ‘About…?’

  ‘About Woody.’

  ‘He’s nice – I like him,’ she says coyly, pretending to rearrange some irises in a long vase as she passes.

  ‘I like him,’ I say, ‘but not like that.’

  ‘Well, we all have different tastes in men, and Woody isn’t like anyone I’ve ever met before. He’s kind and gentle – I’m not used to that.’

  I watch Amber return to the desk and furiously begin rewinding pink ribbon on to one of the many multicoloured rolls we have stashed under the desk. I wait for her to continue, but she doesn’t.

  I’m about to come right out and ask what she means when Ant and Dec appear outside with the tray of cupcakes I’ve ordered to give away to our customers this morning along with the posies.

  So we open the door for a third time.

  ‘Well, doesn’t she scrub up well!’ Ant says, looking around him as Dec carries the cakes through to the back with Amber. ‘You two have done a fabulous job. It’s so bright and breezy! Not at all like the old place. Oh, no offence,’ he says, slapping a hand over his mouth.

  ‘None taken,’ I say, smiling. ‘It was a bit dull in here before, you’re right. But my grandmother was getting on a bit; I guess the décor of the shop wasn’t her main priority.’

  ‘And neither should it have been,’ Dec says, emerging from the back of the shop. ‘She was a wonderful woman, Poppy, and she had a magical touch with flowers; everyone who came in here knew that. They weren’t bothered about what colour the walls were.’

  ‘Did you two ever buy flowers from here?’ I ask.

  They look at each other. ‘Of course, all the time,’ Dec says.

  ‘Any particular occasions you’d like to share with us?’

  They both look shiftily about the shop.

  ‘Wow, look at that!’ Ant says, exclaiming with delight over an abstract ceramic coaster in the shape of a tulip head. ‘That’s… interesting.’

  ‘It’s by one of the students from Belle’s art class,’ Amber explains. ‘Some of their work is really diverse and unusual.’

  ‘Mmm, that’s one way to describe it,’ Dec says, peeping over Ant’s shoulder. ‘Unusual.’

  ‘So, about this time you bought flowers,’ I prompt. ‘What happened?’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean, Poppy,’ Ant says. ‘Like I said, we bought flowers here all the time.’

  ‘You know my grandmother kept records of all her special transactions,’ I tell them. ‘Amber and I have found notebooks dating back years and years…’

  Since the first box had turned up, we’d discovered more boxes in my grandmother’s cottage with records going back over a hundred years. The magical goings-on at the Daisy Chain had started long before my grandmother took over the shop. It seemed to have been providing help to anyone who needed it for well over a century.

  Dec looks at Ant. ‘Go on,’ Ant says. ‘We have nothing to hide. You may as well tell her.’

  ‘I think you’d better put the kettle on, Poppy,’ Dec says, ‘this is a long story.’

  We’re all perched on wooden stools in the back room of the shop clutching large white mugs, each with a different flower on – one of Amber’s ideas for the shop. I have a Poppy of course, Amber has a sunflower, Ant has a daisy, and Dec a pansy.

  ‘Right then,’ Dec begins, ‘I’ll try and keep this as brief as I can.’ He glances at Ant, who nods his encouragement. ‘When I first inherited my uncle’s bakery here in St Felix, I was a bit of a lost soul. I’d been blissfully living the gay scene down in Brighton to its absolute extreme. And when I say living it to the extreme, I don’t think I need to explain what that means, do I?’

  We all shake our heads.

  ‘I had money, far too much money, from a lottery win – and boy did I know how to spend it. I’m not proud of how I behaved back then. But I was young and living the high life for the first time, and enjoying every debauched, decadent minute of it.’

  He takes a moment, to gather himself, and Ant lays a reassuring hand on his shoulder.

  ‘I thought I had friends,’ Dec continues, ‘but of course they weren’t real friends, they were only interested in my money and what it could buy them. In the end all it bought me was danger. I had a couple of very nasty experiences that… well, let’s just say they knocked the wind out of my sails.’

  Again he looks to Ant, who comfortingly squeezes his shoulder.

  I glance at Amber, but she just takes a long drink of her coffee.

  ‘So I gambled all my money away, and as a consequence lost all my so-called friends. I was literally on the brink of suicide – and that’s no exaggeration,’ he assures us, ‘when my uncle died.’ He smiles. ‘You would think that on top of everything else would have pushed me over the edge, but it didn’t. When I found out he’d left me – his favourite nephew, apparently – his business, it gave me new hope. Something to look forward to.’

  He looks at us all sipping our drinks, listening intently to him.

  ‘I know I’m sounding like some godawful candidate for Jeremy Kyle here with my tales of woe and redemption. But this is a true story, I promise you.’

  ‘Nothing truer than real life,’ Amber says sympathetically. ‘You’d be a lot more shocked if I told you some of my stories.’ We all look at her with interest, but she just winks at Dec. ‘Go on, what happened when you got here to St Felix?’

  ‘When I arrived at the bakery and found all my uncle’s secret recipes, some of which had been handed down through the generations, something changed, I began baking and people began buying and telling me they liked what I baked. It was odd, but I just felt special. Like I belonged.’

  ‘Tell them about the flowers, Declan,’ Ant encourages.

&n
bsp; ‘Ah yes. So I’d had the bakery open a while, and I was doing OK. I was enjoying living here by the sea. Brighton had been by the sea, of course, but it wasn’t like this. St Felix is…’ He thinks about this. ‘St Felix is different. I hate to use the same word again, but it’s special. You don’t know it is until you’ve lived here a while, but it really is. People say the sea air is healing; well, St Felix’s sea air is super healing, whatever is wrong with you. Anyway,’ he says, when only Ant acknowledges this, ‘even though I was happy, I still felt a bit lonely. I wasn’t really into flowers, but occasionally when the bakery was quiet I’d wander down and talk to your grandmother. She’d always have a kind word to say, or some friendly advice to give. But she never made you feel like she was preaching.’

  I nod. I remembered that about her.

  ‘One day I came down to the shop for a chat – it was a Monday afternoon in late April, never the busiest of times for either of us. Your grandmother sensed something was wrong, even though I didn’t really let on what it was, and before I left she presented me with some flowers to take back to my shop.’

  ‘Ooh, which ones?’ Amber asks excitedly.

  ‘A single peony, a long stem of verbascum, and a spray of freesia, all bound together with a white ribbon. That became her trademark – the ribbon, didn’t it, Ant?’

  Ant nods. ‘If ever you saw someone leaving Rose’s shop with flowers bound together with a white ribbon, you just knew.’

  ‘Knew what?’ I ask impatiently.

  ‘Knew something special was about to happen to them, like it did to me. To us,’ Dec says, taking hold of Ant’s hand.

  ‘Come on, guys!’ pleads Amber. ‘I wanna know what happens next.’

  Dec smiles. ‘Patience, my American friend, all is about to be revealed. So, I took the spray of flowers back to my shop and put them in a vase of water. I didn’t give them another thought until about three days later when Ant appeared at my door asking if we sold – of all the things you could have asked for,’ he says, waggling his finger at Ant, ‘cream horns. It was one of the few recipes of my uncle’s I hadn’t tried out yet.’

  ‘I was holidaying in Cornwall with my then boyfriend,’ Ant explains. ‘We hadn’t meant to stop in St Felix, but our hire car had broken down because I hadn’t remembered to put petrol in it that morning, and boy was he mad at me! He loved cream horns – the cake, you understand!’ Ant reassures us with a wink. ‘And I thought if I got him one it might pacify him until the garage filled us up and got us on our way.’

  ‘And did it?’ I ask, not really understanding where this story is going.

  ‘No, that’s the point, isn’t it? Dec didn’t have any.’

  ‘So…?’

  ‘I found myself explaining to Dec why I was so stressed over a cream horn, why I needed one so badly. And do you know what he said?’

  I shake my head. This story, far from telling me anything about my grandmother and her old shop, is fast veering into the realms of something you see advertised on the front of Take-a-Break magazine.

  ‘I know! I know!’ Amber shouts, her hands in the air like she’s answering a question in class. ‘I bet Dec said, “If it’s that important to you, I’ll bake some cream horns for you right now!”’

  Ant looks at Dec reprovingly. ‘Amber’s right. That’s exactly what you should have said, Declan!’

  Dec tuts. ‘I couldn’t, could I? I was on my own in the shop back then, I couldn’t go out back and start baking a load of puff pastry for an angry poof!’

  The two of them smile good-naturedly at each other.

  ‘So what did Dec say?’ I ask. ‘You still haven’t said.’

  ‘Go on, you tell them,’ Ant says, flashing his blue eyes at Dec.

  Dec blushes. ‘I said he shouldn’t worry about filling the guy’s car up. If he was going to get mad over something as silly as that, then he wasn’t worth it.’

  Amber nods approvingly.

  ‘Go on…’ Ant says, nudging him. ‘Tell them the rest.’

  I get the feeling that it’s not just in looks that Ant is larger than Dec. His personality is much bigger and more boisterous than Dec’s too. Dec, I think, likes to keep something in reserve.

  ‘And I also said,’ Dec swallows hard, ‘that if he ever felt like popping back to sample my cream horn, then he’d be most welcome.’

  ‘Nooo!’ Amber and I cry at once. ‘You didn’t?’

  Dec is bright red now.

  ‘He did indeed,’ Ant says proudly. ‘And I’m pleased to inform you that I most definitely did come back, and I sampled many of Dec’s splendid cream horns. And –’ he pats his tummy – ‘a few too many other fine cakes in the process.’

  ‘That’s wonderful. I’m pleased for the two of you,’ I say, genuinely meaning it; they seem like a lovely couple. ‘But you haven’t told us the significance of the flowers in all this.’

  ‘Ah yes, the flowers,’ Dec says, smiling. ‘I wondered myself afterwards what they meant, so I looked them up. Peony means anger. Verbascum – take courage. And freesia – lasting friendship.’

  ‘I still don’t see —’

  ‘It was a message from your grandmother. Ant turned up on my doorstep because Dominic, his partner, was angry with him – the peony. I had to take courage – the verbascum – in inviting Ant back to taste my wares. And as a result?’ He takes hold of Ant’s hand. ‘We now have a lasting friendship – the beautiful delicate freesia – that’s been getting stronger every year for the last ten years.’

  Fifteen

  Columbine – Desertion

  After Ant and Dec’s revelation about the flowers, and the story of how they met, we all suddenly realise what the time is.

  Ant and Dec rush back to the bakery to see if Neil their Saturday boy has coped in their absence, while Amber and I get ready to open the doors to our first customer.

  ‘What are you doing?’ I ask as Amber begins tying some white floristry ribbon across the shop doorway.

  ‘It’s for you to do the official opening,’ she says, tying one end with a fancy bow.

  ‘What official opening? I thought we were just opening the door at ten?’

  ‘Poppy, you can’t let a significant occasion such as this go by without at least a bit of fuss.’

  ‘Can’t we?’

  ‘No.’ She finishes tying the other end. ‘I was going to use a red ribbon, but after what Ant and Dec said I thought white would be more appropriate.’

  ‘You don’t believe all this flower nonsense, do you?’ I ask. ‘That thing about Ant turning up after Dec got the flowers – that was just a coincidence.’

  ‘Albert Einstein once said: “Coincidence is God’s way of remaining anonymous.”’

  ‘Einstein said that? I thought he was all into science and stuff, not airy-fairy quotes.’

  Amber pauses before she unbolts the door. ‘Einstein was a very clever man, Poppy. Do you know why?’

  I shake my head.

  ‘He didn’t let his incredibly smart brain cloud his thinking on any subject. Instead, he allowed his super-intelligent mind to be opened up to a whole world of new possibilities,’ she says, sliding the bolt back. ‘Gosh, I hope you’re good at speeches!’

  ‘What do you mean?’ I ask as Amber flings open the door and I see a small crowd has formed on the cobbles outside the shop. ‘Oh fu— or goodness sake,’ I recover just in time, and put on my best welcoming voice. ‘I didn’t expect to see so many of you. Hello, welcome, how good of you all to come.’

  The crowd look up expectantly as I dither in the doorway.

  ‘The ribbon, Poppy!’ I hear Jake shout from amongst them. ‘You need to cut the ribbon before we can come in.’

  A pair of silver scissors miraculously appears over my left shoulder, courtesy of Amber.

  ‘Speech!’ Amber calls from behind me, trying to disguise her accent.

  Cheers, Amber, I’ll get you for that later…

  ‘Right… well…’ I grin manically at the people
in front of me. ‘Like I just said, thank you all for coming, I’m sure my grandmother would be very touched to see you all here.’ I hear someone mumble, ‘Probably turning in her grave, more like.’

  I run my eyes over the sea of eager faces in front of me, but I can’t spot anyone who would have said that, so I carry on:

  ‘The shop wouldn’t be opening today without the help of many of you standing here right now. Jake Asher –’ I gesture towards him and Miley – ‘the ladies of the St Felix Women’s Guild –’ I wave quickly at Harriet, Willow and Beryl along with a few others. Then I notice that Caroline has joined them today, although she had been notably absent when we’d been setting up the shop. Then there’s Bronte and Charlie, Woody, Lou, Mickey, Belle, Rita and Richie from the Merry Mermaid, Ant and Dec and a few other shop owners from Harbour Street – even Father Claybourne the village priest is here. ‘Wow!’ I exclaim, taken aback at seeing them all standing here. ‘Actually, so many of you have been absolute stars at helping us out, Amber and I really couldn’t have done it without you all, honestly we couldn’t. So from the bottom of our hearts, thank you.’