No Smoke Without Fire

by Claire S. Lewis

  As Celeste continued to fret, Anya grew impatient while the supper she had prepared was getting cold. She had seen the results of her friend’s wild imaginings over the last two years and she knew that despite her protestations, Celeste was still vulnerable to anxiety attacks that clouded her judgement and sense of reality.

  ‘If it’s bothering you that much, you should notify the police,’ said Jessi gently.

  ‘What would I tell them?’ said Celeste. ‘I don’t even have any proof.’

  ‘Well there’s a very easy way to find out if this really is him,’ said Anya. ‘Just call the number.’

  ‘That’ll encourage him,’ said Celeste. ‘I don’t want him to have my number or he’ll never stop calling me.’

  ‘Well, give me the number and I’ll call it then from my mobile,’ said Anya briskly, nodding towards the bin.

  ‘No way,’ said Celeste. ‘I don’t want you getting involved.’

  Ever practical but unconcerned about money, Anya said, ‘OK – so buy another cheap phone, pay-as-you-go, then you can call the number and find out who it is – and he won’t be able to trace you.’

  ‘Or I could ignore it,’ said Celeste. ‘Why should I throw money away on buying a second phone?’

  ‘Make your mind up,’ said Anya, who was rapidly losing interest in the subject as the dinner got cold. ‘Now, more importantly, what film are we going to watch?’ She banged the plates of pasta that she had been dishing up on to the table. ‘Don’t let this spoil our evening. Forget about it. Let’s sit down and eat.’

  *

  Although her first impulse had been to reject Anya’s suggestion, the very next day, Celeste stopped at her local phone shop on her bike ride to work and bought the cheapest phone she could find and a pay-as-you-go SIM card. During her lunch break, she went to sit on a park bench in one of the nearby garden squares. She unscrewed the ball of paper she had retrieved from the recycling bin before going to bed and she called the number. The voice on the other end of the phone was unexpected yet strangely familiar.

  ‘Who is this?’ she said.

  PRESENT

  11

  I know it’s a good sign when I check the notice board on my way into class for the weekly contact hours list. The sessions take place in pairs and every week, I’ve been living in hope. At last. There it is – written in black and white. Our names almost touching on the same line of ink. We’re sharing a slot in the timetable with our tutor today.

  This clinches the deal I brokered last week. You sealed our fate when You made that call. You can’t ignore me any longer. We’re meant to be together.

  By the end of the tutor contact session, gushing with enthusiasm, you’ve revealed all the ‘must haves’ of your marketing project and I understand all the system requirements needed to make it work. This is my opportunity to make myself useful, indispensable even! For me it’s so simple. It’s not your fault you’re incapable of getting to grips with any of the technicalities to get the website up and running. It’s the way your female brain is wired. And it’s obvious to us both that our tutor is less than interested in teaching You the mysteries of keychains, encryption and algorithms and more interested in getting his hand up your skirt! He’s just some jumped-up dude with an MSc in digital marketing. I’m the computer expert here.

  We’ll be a perfect team – You can deal with the flowery bit and I can make the software work!

  So, we walk out of class together and go for a coffee. And I’m so nervous, that I almost spill the coffee when I put it down in front of You. And I try hard to listen to what you’re telling me, and I try not to stare when You lick the foam of your caffè latte (almond milk and two brown sugars – I won’t need to ask You next time) from the corners of your mouth.

  Now we are Facebook friends and we have made a date to meet in college to talk about me helping You to build your website. And if I play my cards right, soon we will be real friends and every link in the keychain that powers your website will be copied to my own devices.

  *

  Celeste leapt up in excitement the next Saturday morning when she got into Seventh Heaven and switched on the computer. There it was on the CelestialHeadstones.com website – new message. She squealed when she opened the client inbox and called out to Meghan.

  ‘Meghan, come and see this. We’ve got our first order!’

  The website wasn’t perfect yet. She still needed to expand the galleries and refine the options on the ordering system and streamline the links and add the final touches to the eye-catching homepage. But the key thing was it was up and running and the incredible thing was that she was staring at her first order. She scarcely dared to open the message in case it should disappear into the ether, but once Meghan had strolled over with her morning fix of strong black coffee and was looking over her shoulder, she clicked, and the words came up on the screen.

  The message had come in overnight from the US – all the way from Mrs Barbara Garcia in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She had sent a long message and attached a further document with information about her father, a lieutenant in the United States Army Air Corps, Navigator Eugene Jack Ashford from Sacramento, California, who had been killed in March 1945 when his aircraft, a B-17(G) Flying Fortress bomber crashed into a hillside on the North Downs as the crew were returning to their base in Northamptonshire after an operation near the German–Czech border.

  ‘Wow! This is fascinating,’ said Celeste as she read through the email. Even Meghan who was usually so pragmatic and business-like seemed interested.

  Celeste read out loud from the message. ‘I was three years old when my father, Eugene Ashford was tragically killed on 19th March 1945 in a crash in the Surrey Hills just two weeks after his twenty-seventh birthday. Before he joined up, my father was a reporter for the Sacramento Chronicle newspaper where he met my mother who was a typist. They had a whirlwind romance followed some weeks later by a shotgun wedding and I was born a short eight months later.

  ‘My childhood memories are so fragmented, and I can’t be sure anymore what is memory and what is imagination, but I carry a childhood picture in my head of the man who was my daddy and my hero – so tall and so handsome and so strong – the only man in the whole wide world as far as I was concerned! When I wasn’t clinging to his knees to stop him walking out the door, I was up on his shoulders, clinging to his neck with my little legs and patting his glossy black hair – and I can still relive that feeling, of being on top of the world, looking down from my daddy’s shoulders. If I close my eyes and sit very still, I can smell the musky scent of the gel that he used to slick back his cowl. I remember him swinging me round above his head and I remember him leaning over my bed like a gentle smiling giant and calling me his “little angel” and soothing me to sleep as he stroked my hair with his big, soft hands.’

  Celeste felt a kind of wistful and jealous admiration for these expressions of love. She had never had such feelings for her own father. In contrast, Meghan bridled at the sentimental message. ‘Well she’s certainly got a good memory!’ she said tersely, when Celeste looked up at her triumphantly.

  Below the text, there were two pictures of Eugene.

  ‘She’s right,’ said Celeste. ‘He was a handsome man.’ The first photograph, sober and posed, must have been taken by a professional photographer soon after Eugene was mobilised. He was in characteristic US air force military uniform, standing upright and confident, his fleece-lined leather bomber jacket zipped to the chin, as dashing as a Hollywood actor. His sombre eyes stared directly at Celeste from beneath the gleaming black visor of his cap that he wore tilted a little to one side, perhaps revealing a defiant and rebellious side to his character. His features were strong with firm lips, straight nose and dark eyes, well suited to the determined expression that still shone out from the image, surviving the passage of the years.

  The second picture was a family snapshot taken in a city park – Sacramento City Park – according to the title beneath it. Although, the pict
ure was, of course, in black and white, Celeste could tell that the sun was shining on that day in 1945 – the play of shadows and light was sharp and bright. Eugene was wearing a short-sleeved cotton shirt and his face was lit up with sunlight and laughter as he squinted at the lens. And the tiny girl up on his shoulders was presumably, Barbara, in a pinafore dress, cherub-like, with a mop of light curly hair. He was holding one of her chubby legs in one hand and reaching up with the other to hold her hand in his. Barbara was beaming and her mouth was smothered in ice cream. With her free hand she seemed to be waving a cone of melting ice cream like a flag while it dripped down her little fist onto her daddy’s head.

  ‘This photograph must have been taken just a few weeks before Eugene died,’ said Celeste.

  Mrs Barbara Garcia’s email went on to explain that this year would be the one hundredth anniversary of her father’s birth and that she had been hoping to commemorate his life and his tragic loss by coming to England to visit his grave at the American military cemetery near to Cambridge. Unfortunately, she was prevented from travelling by ill health. Having almost resigned herself to marking the anniversary privately in her own home, she was blessed to have come across CelestialHeadstones.com while browsing for a florist local to Cambridge. She had felt as if she had been touched by something mystical and divine. CelestialHeadstones.com was offering exactly the service Barbara Garcia was looking for.

  ‘My prayers have been answered,’ she concluded.

  Celeste clapped her hands.

  ‘Isn’t it wonderful?’ she said. ‘To think that a sweet little old lady on the other side of the Atlantic in Santa Fe, New Mexico, is able to connect with us and that we can be the answer to her prayers!’

  Meghan was more hard-headed.

  ‘She isn’t that old,’ she said. ‘By my calculations she must be seventy-six – and she isn’t that helpless! She’s certainly internet savvy – look, she signed up for your free delivery promotion, which means that if you honour her order we’ll be paying for the diesel between here and Cambridge, which must be at least a 150-mile round trip – not to mention your travel time!’

  But Celeste was passionate. ‘I can’t turn this down. Look on it as a loss-leader. It’s Sunday tomorrow. I’ve got nothing planned. I’ll come in at 6am to prepare the flowers and I’ll do the delivery in my own time. I’ll take lots of photographs myself and I’ll ask Barbara if we can post her photographs and feature her father’s story on the website. It’ll be great publicity – a brilliant way to launch the website.’

  *

  The next morning Celeste arrived at Seventh Heaven at the crack of dawn. She let herself in through the back door. The shop was eerily quiet. In the stillness, the smell of flowers and foliage was overpowering, almost intoxicating. For a moment she allowed her guard to fall. She closed her eyes and breathed deeply.

  *

  Now she was in a different room, white and clinical. There was soft music playing, and crosses on the walls and a shape in the middle of the room that she couldn’t look at – a black hole that she would tumble into if she reached out or stepped any closer. She screwed up her eyes and bowed her head, sick and faint with the smell of decomposing flowers. She couldn’t even cry.

  *

  A tap had been left dripping in the cold room at Seventh Heaven and the sound of water hitting the china basin struck like small hammer blows in her head. Celeste opened her eyes and made a conscious effort to wrench the waking nightmare from her brain. She ran to the tap and screwed it up tightly. Then she took her workbox from the shelf and opened her laptop. She opened up Barbara Garcia’s order and went through to the cold room to select the blooms.

  Barbara had chosen the ‘Misty Mornings’ arrangement as featured on the website. Celeste had described this as a sympathy tribute in ‘a very nuanced and soft style’ made up of ‘heavenly pale and pastel vendela roses, cloud-pink peonies, pure white lilies, purple-dawn lisianthus and a mix of striking and delicate foliage in shades of green from dark to fresh lime’. It was one of the most expensive arrangements in the CelestialHeadstones.com offering, listed in the ‘luxury’ category. Celeste had created the design with femininity in mind and understood that in picking this one out Barbara had been thinking less about the character and attributes of her father (or whether this arrangement was fitting for a soldier’s grave) and more about her own sense of loss and longing that she had carried in her heart since losing her father when she was a little girl. No doubt Barbara had fallen for ‘Misty Mornings’ because it spoke to her own romantic yearnings and memories. Perhaps she had been swayed by the lyricism of Celeste’s marketing prose.

  ‘If this could be delivered with the morning dew found on misty mornings, a sweet chorus of birdsong, and the faint shimmer of dawn, we could capture the celestial beauty of nature in this exquisite floral tribute.’ Barbara’s choice revealed more about Barbara, than her father. But that was the whole point, reflected Celeste as she paced around the cold room from one steel bucket to another, selecting the foliage and blooms that she needed to create the arrangement.

  In her business model, the giving of sympathy flowers was all about making the person who gave them feel good. Her clients might not be able to visit the graves in person. It was possible that the only person to see and enjoy the floral tributes would be Celeste. But it was the act of giving that mattered. And Celeste would send her clients photographs and feature the graves on her website, and they would know that any casual passer-by and any visitor to the website would see that their loved one was still remembered and cherished. The flowers delivered by CelestialHeadstones.com would be a celebration of that loving memory in the real, the spiritual and the virtual world!

  Celeste was soon absorbed in her work – preparing the pottery vase that she would leave on the grave, laying out and then trimming the stems at an angle, snipping some of the blooms to shorter lengths to give visual impact and statement to the flowers, criss-crossing the woody Pitto greenery in an ‘X’ shape to give a sturdy base before filling the gaps with the delicate green foliage and finally pushing in and arranging the blooms to create a display that was eye-catching and gorgeous from every angle. It came naturally to her. As Meghan had told her, she had a gift. Her artistry went beyond what Meghan herself could teach her apprentice about the trade and the craft of floristry.

  Celeste could see beyond sentimentality. She understood the meaning of suffering. And she had an instinct for turning it into something beautiful.

  PRESENT

  12

  Just when I get my lucky break, now here’s another setback. Your social life is taking off.

  I used to be able to spend my evenings loitering in your street, rewarded by fleeting images of You moving round the flat or warmed by the amber glow of your bedside lamp shining through the gap in the curtains. But now You are out almost every night. Tuesday night it was bowling, Wednesday night it was the pub, Thursday night it was a late-night shopping trip and tonight it’s the cinema.

  These days You are never alone – always surrounded by your new gaggle of college friends. I don’t get it. Are You looking for safety in numbers? Are You trying to freeze me out?

  The faces change from one night to the next – all except for one that crops up too often. I’ve never seen him at college.

  Here he comes, bearing popcorn and Cokes. He muscles his way past the other girls in your group to sit next to You in the row. I slip in as the lights are dimming and find a seat to the side at the back. I don’t see much of the film (some puerile comedy about a foursome of sex-craved pre-menopausal women) but I have a perfect view of the back of your head. I can’t see your profile very well because his thick neck and big head keep getting in the way. Thank God he doesn’t try to kiss You, but it’s only a matter of time. You are sharing his popcorn.

  I can’t bear the way he leans in to touch your arm or catch your eyes whenever some inane scene raises a laugh. Soon you’ll be sharing his bed.

  Tomorrow, it wi
ll be blissful to have You to myself at last.

  *

  Celeste was already beginning to feel light-headed by the time she turned off the Madingley Road to the entrance of the American Military Cemetery and Memorial on the outskirts of Cambridge. True to her word, Meghan had lent Celeste the Seventh Heaven van for the day. The roads had been clear and at 9am she was bang on opening time and the first visitor to arrive in the car park. As she turned off the engine, Celeste remembered that she hadn’t eaten or drunk anything since the popcorn and Diet Coke that had passed for supper at the cinema the night before. She’d been so absorbed in arranging the flowers at first light in Seventh Heaven that she hadn’t even bothered to make herself a coffee.

  She hauled out her floristry bag, her camera and her tripod, all of which she managed to carry on one side of her body. Then she wedged the ceramic pot containing the ‘Misty Mornings’ arrangement between the crook of her arm and her hip, on the other. She set off in the direction of the visitor centre in the hope of getting a drink before figuring out the location of Eugene’s grave.

  The cemetery was a vast, sloping site framed by woodland, extending over thirty acres, (as she found out later from the information boards in the visitor centre) and designed with military precision and geometric sensitivity. She paused beneath the flagpole that rose up from a platform overlooking the site. Turning her face upwards, she could see stars and stripes from the partly unfurled American flag as it fluttered in the breeze beneath the soaring golden eagle at the top of the flagpole, and beyond that, a clear pale blue sky extending to infinity.

  She was struck by the great ocean of mortality spread out before her eyes. Beyond the Great Mall with its reflecting pools bordered by beds of blood-red roses, the burial area was laid out in concentric waves of headstones sweeping over the lawns like the ridges on a shell. Each untimely death was marked in the curving swathes of white crosses and Stars of David that sparkled against the backdrop of green grass and from a distance reminded Celeste of foamy crests of waves surging into shore.