‘It’s like you’re on speed,’ Anya had said to her the other day. Now Anya was more interested in looking at Celeste’s wedding plan than worrying about her flatmate’s state of mind. Celeste was happy to indulge her friend – she knew Anya was fascinated by all things extravagant and glamorous and enjoyed fantasising about her own lavish wedding in the not too distant future.
‘She’s gone for our most expensive package, Platinum Heavenly Opulence. To go with her hair, I guess – she’s a natural platinum blonde,’ said Celeste drily. Anya read the description of the package:
A beautiful mix of all the freshest, most delicate and stylish flowers really captures the essence of a heavenly wedding that exudes romance and sophistication. Choose our Platinum Heavenly Opulence wedding package and we will create stunning flowers for you and your wedding party, the ceremony and reception – everything you need for your perfect ‘out of this world’ experience on your wedding day.
In the course of her consultation with Celeste, the bride had been tempted into adding a number of other arrangements to the already extensive package.
‘Look at this,’ said Celeste, ‘She’s gone completely nuts – taken virtually every single extra option available. I’ve just finished amending the description of her proposal. Does she think it’s a royal wedding? She’s not marrying the future king.’
Celeste read out the final draft of the wedding proposal to Anya.
Featuring an exquisite personalised bridal bouquet, two bridesmaids’ bouquets, a flower girl’s basket, six buttonholes, six corsages, a bridal headdress, two bridesmaids’ headdresses, three flower adornments for handbags, festive garlands for the bride and groom, three magnificent ceremony arrangements, a floral arch for the entrance to the ceremony and a matching floral arch for the entrance to the reception, one stunning flower wall backdrop for photographs, two elegant pedestal arrangements, a full-length table top display, a table top display for the Registrar’s table, a foliage garland, waterfall cake-flowers, place-setting mini bouquets and five hand-tied thank you bouquets, all beautifully coordinated and individualised for your special day.
‘God, I never knew there were so many different categories of wedding flowers! How much will all that cost?’ said Anya.
‘I haven’t drawn up the final budget yet,’ said Celeste. ‘It depends on what flowers she chooses. But it’ll be north of ten thousand. It seems that money is no object…’
‘Did you write this?’ said Anya laughing, pointing at the final paragraph of the proposal.
We promise to give you guidance in your choice of colours and flowers and to use our expertise and attention to all the finer details to ensure that your wedding flowers fit perfectly with your chosen theme and are just what you imagined, reflecting your personality, vision, dreams and desires.
Celeste nodded. ‘What’s so funny? What’s wrong with it?’ she said.
‘Well, it certainly sounds as if you’ve given her the hard sell!’ said Anya. ‘You’re making me want to get married.’
‘I’m still working on the draft function sheet. That’s a huge task. It’s fifteen pages long.’
‘Poor thing!’ said Anya. ‘I feel sorry for her. For something that’s supposed to be an exclusive and private wedding what you’ve talked her into sounds pretty excessive. Maybe she thinks that’s the way we do things over here? All she’s seen of English weddings is Lady Di, and Kate and Will on her screens.’
‘That’s what she wanted. It’s her vision. I think she’s trying to impress her husband-to be. To be honest I think she’s trying a bit too hard!’ said Celeste, leaning on the final words to emphasise her point. ‘I’m beginning to question her objectivity.’
Anya chuckled. ‘Is that a polite way of saying you think she’s crazy?’
‘Let’s just say I’m concerned for her mental well-being,’ said Celeste diplomatically. ‘She seems so stressed and anxious about it all.’
‘Who is this husband-to-be anyway – that she’s trying so hard to impress?’ said Anya.
‘To be perfectly honest, I don’t know his name. During all our consultations she’s never once mentioned it. She just refers to him as her fiancé.’
‘Well, I hope she loves him! More importantly, I hope he loves her – and that he isn’t just marrying her for her money,’ said Anya.
‘I get the impression he’s loaded too,’ said Celeste.
*
The next morning Celeste sat down in the Bridal Room at Seventh Heaven with Meghan to run through the function sheet for the Madison wedding before they began calling suppliers to check on availability of the various blooms that Mia had requested for the bouquets and arrangements.
‘The delivery and set-up is going to take hours,’ said Celeste. ‘We’re going to need extra help.’
‘You don’t need to worry about that,’ said Meghan. ‘I made it clear to the bride when she contacted me last week that we could only offer to her help out at such short notice if she made her own arrangements for delivery and installation of the flowers. As you know, we’ve already got two weddings the same weekend that were booked in months ago. You’ll be rushed off your feet dealing with those. She was OK with it. Apparently her chief bridesmaid is going to organise a wedding planner who’ll take responsibility for collecting all the wedding flowers from Seventh Heaven on the Friday afternoon.’ Meghan explained that the wedding planner would also supervise the set-up of the wedding flowers at The Chelsea Register Office. ‘You just need to make sure all the wedding flowers are ready for collection by 3pm on Friday.’
Celeste shrugged off Meghan’s use of the word ‘just’. They both knew that this was already a big ask.
When they’d finished with the business, Meghan turned to Celeste and said, ‘I’m worried about you. Are you OK? Smashing up the van last week, and the speeding ticket – that’s really not acceptable. Any other manager would have shown you the door! And then, you’ve been looking so tired and stressed the last few weeks. I didn’t want to say anything. But when I heard on the grapevine, that Ben’s been seen back in town, I wondered if that’s what’s sending you off the rails.’
Celeste got to her feet. ‘For God’s sake don’t mention his name.’ She went over to the sink and began obsessively washing her hands. ‘He means nothing to me now.’
Five minutes later, Meghan stood up, went over to the sink and turned off the tap. ‘That’s enough. Stop it. So, if it’s not that, what’s up?’
Celeste’s face was pale and drawn. She was determined to divert Meghan’s attention away from the subject of Ben. She blurted out defiantly, ‘If you must know, I am feeling anxious and stressed but it’s nothing to do with him. It’s a student at college. He won’t leave me alone. I think he’s stalking me.’
Meghan looked shocked. ‘What’s he doing?’ she asked.
‘He always sits behind me in class – I can feel his eyes on the back of my head. Then he waits for me outside class in the corridors, and sometimes follows me home, and I’ve noticed him lurking around near here once or twice and look…’ Celeste opened up the screen for the Seventh Heaven bank account. ‘This order last week – B. Ware. It was a fake order, I’m sure of it. I think it was him, this student; for some reason he wants to intimidate me. I made the mistake of letting him help me set up the website and now he seems to think I owe him something. I think he placed the order and followed me there.’
‘Are you sure? B. Ware – that’s so immature! But following you to the graveyard – that’s creepy! This is outrageous, completely unacceptable behaviour,’ said Meghan. ‘You should have told me sooner. We should get the police onto him. I’m not putting up with someone threatening my staff.’
But Celeste was adamant she didn’t want the police involved, if only because of what had happened to Ben’s car at the churchyard.
‘This is why I didn’t tell you. I knew you would want to steam in…’ she said. ‘I can’t bear the thought of having police officers coming around and i
nterviewing me and asking all sorts of questions and having to give formal evidence. You can understand that can’t you… after what happened?’ Celeste glared at Meghan. ‘The sound of a police siren is enough to give me a panic attack,’ she said quietly. ‘If you want me to be open with you, you’ve got to promise that you won’t ever do anything behind my back like going to the police. You know very well I have absolutely no trust in them. I was treated so badly last time…’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Meghan, taken aback by Celeste’s passion. ‘OK I promise. But you need to take care. You’re an attractive young woman. You’re bound to get some unwanted attention from men, but this is out of order.’
‘Meghan, he’s only a kid! Seventeen or eighteen years old. I must have given him some encouragement without meaning to. He’s completely harmless. He’s got a teenage crush on me. I can deal with it.’
Meghan picked up a carton of roses and carried them through to the cold room.
‘OK, if you’re sure you feel safe. But from now on, no more trips on your own to graveyards in the middle of nowhere. In the future, you can do the trips on a Saturday and go with Emily or one of the other Saturday girls. Any more trouble from that kid, and I’ll come with you myself to drag him out from under his bush and give him a piece of my mind. He needs to grow up.’
PRESENT
31
You spend so much time with that woman that I’m dying to know why she’s got such a hold on You. I know you’re planning her wedding flowers (I’ve watched all the orders going through the Seventh Heaven online ledgers and accounts) but that doesn’t explain all the time You spend together, all the private conversations and whisperings and hugs. It’s making me jealous.
One rainy night in April, I’m in my usual spot, precariously balanced on the packing crates peering into the Bridal Room, when finally, I get proof that something strange is going on. A wedding should be a happy thing, right? But Mia is not happy tonight. She’s been agitated and distracted all through the consultation. Though I can’t see her face, her hand gestures say it all. Out of the blue, she stands up, unbuttons and pulls off her blouse, then hunches over as if she’s going to cry.
You stand up and caress her back gently. Then You walk round in front of her and run your fingertips across her chest. You take a step back and look her up and down before reaching for your iPhone to take photographs. Finally, You draw her in towards You until her head is resting against your shoulder. I can see from the juddering of her back that Mia is crying inconsolably while You stroke her hair. But it’s the expression on your face that captivates me.
It’s not love or compassion. You have morphed into another person. If looks could kill…
*
The next couple of weeks were really busy. Celeste had several more meetings with Mia in Seventh Heaven to finalise her choice of flowers and designs for each of the arrangements. Hours were spent sourcing the blooms, which included unusual variants of classic wedding flowers such as peonies, lilies, orchids and wild roses. These were seasonal flowers that should have been readily available for a late spring wedding, but Mia turned out to be unexpectedly specific and sensitive when it came to colour tones and scents. To keep Mia happy, Celeste ordered in single stems of three varieties of oriental lilies ‘Casablanca’, ‘Le Reve’ and ‘Stargazer’ – known for their ‘heady and intense fragrance’ – and spent a whole morning with her ‘sampling’ the scents until she finally opted for ‘Le Reve’ as ‘the most sensual and escapist’. It was the same for every bloom in every bouquet.
‘I’m just so thankful I’m not dealing with her make-up and hair,’ said Celeste to Meghan, when she finally got Mia out the shop.
Mia had also fixated on certain ‘out of season’ items that were difficult to source through Seventh Heaven’s usual suppliers. She insisted on including mimosa because its light, lemony fragrance ‘made her want to swoon’ and reminded her of balmy summer evenings on childhood holidays to the Mediterranean. Orange blossom was another ‘must-have’. Its sweet citrus-fragranced flowers reminded her of the Californian orange groves that she had so loved when living on the West Coast of the US as a student at UC Berkeley. Celeste tried to keep reminding her client that they were designing wedding flowers not creating a new perfume, or sensory distillation of her life so far. Mia was very sweet, but it seemed the anxious young woman was taking perfectionism to extremes.
The bridal bouquet was a whole saga in itself. Mia had chosen an elegant bridal bouquet known as the ‘Composite Flower Bouquet’ or the ‘Carmen Rose’ that looked deceptively simple in design but was fiendishly difficult and fiddly to create. This bouquet was constructed from hundreds of individual rose petals wired together to look like one gigantic flower. Meghan tried to talk Mia out of it.
‘I know it looks simple to a casual observer – and that’s the beauty of it – a single, perfect, giant rose. But this is one of the most sophisticated types of bouquet – it’s the most expensive option, if only because of the hours of work that go into it.’
Mia was not to be put off.
‘I don’t mind the expense. I’ve set my heart on it,’ she said. ‘The sophistication and simplicity of the single rose will contrast beautifully with the romantic opulence of all the other arrangements.’
Well there is that, thought Celeste ironically. It seemed that Mia had taken on board the language of floristry marketing – Meghan would be offering her a job soon if she spent much longer on their premises!
To keep her client happy, Celeste agreed to take on the challenge of creating the ‘Carmen Rose Bouquet’ for Mia. Of course, first, they had a long discussion about the varieties of roses to include – as Mia desired a certain effect in terms of tonal and textural graduation, and the mix of floral scents. When this was finally agreed, then there was the small problem that Celeste had never created a bouquet in this design before. She knew she would need a few trial attempts to perfect the technique before doing the real thing so she looked up floristry tutorials on YouTube as well as the official floristry websites that Seventh Heaven subscribed to, and took instructions and advice from Meghan (who had once made a Carmen Rose bouquet for another fancy wedding).
In the end, Celeste made a special trip up to the New Covent Garden Flower Market to bulk buy three wraps of pink roses (managing to charm the wholesaler into selling them to her at a discount when they remained unsold at the end of the morning) and then spent the whole of that afternoon experimenting on threading and wiring her trial Carmen Bouquet, using up bucketsful of rose petals in the process.
‘They won’t go to waste,’ said Meghan, ever practical and business-like. ‘Save all the petals. We can put them out in the garage to dry and make them into rose petal confetti for the wedding. She’ll like that. Just add the invoice to her bill.’ Meghan went back to her accounts, then added as an afterthought, ‘Oh and don’t forget to keep a record of all your hours and add them to Mia’s account too. We’re not running a charity here.’
Eventually it was all sorted. The flowers were sourced and ordered, and the function sheet was finalised. Mia was prompt with her payment. She had no problem with the Seventh Heaven policy of getting everything paid for up-front for weddings. She had paid her fifty per cent deposit fifteen days in advance of the wedding date in cash. Given the sums involved, Meghan was taken aback when Celeste handed her the large wodge of fifty-pound notes. But she didn’t object. Cash payments were always welcome in her eyes, leaving some scope for a little creative accounting that helped to balance the books and didn’t hurt anyone. The balance was due two days before the date of the wedding.
Celeste had a new spring in her step. This was the first wedding on which she had taken the lead and she was enjoying the responsibility and autonomy of the role. In their lengthy ‘consultations’, she had begun to feel close to Mia. She had learnt a lot about her background and her outlook on life. Mia was a chatterbox – prone to gushing enthusiastically about everything and nothing in that guileless
American way. Everything was ‘awesome’ or ‘so cool’. It made a change from the irony and cynicism of her English friends. The only topic on which she was secretive was the identity of her fiancé.
Celeste became very protective of ‘her client’. She kept Meghan, with her judgemental acerbic English wit, at arm’s length – only involving her when absolutely necessary. She took every call and dealt with every matter herself. She gave Mia her private mobile phone number (which was against Seventh Heaven staff policy as laid down by Meghan) so that Mia could contact her out of her shop hours, or indeed at any time of the day or night, if she had any ideas or concerns.
‘What on earth are you talking about? All those hours… closeted in the Bridal Room…?’ said Meghan. ‘I don’t think you’ve served more than ten customers in the past week.’
‘Oh, you know,’ said Celeste defensively, ‘she doesn’t have any family over here or, it seems, any friends. She hasn’t got a job and she’s been really sick with the pregnancy. She’s keeping it all hush-hush from the family in the States so she can’t talk to anyone about the wedding or the baby. And she wants to keep the all the plans for the wedding flowers as a surprise for her husband-to-be. I feel sorry for her. She seems quite lonely… and completely in the power of her fiancé. I suppose I’ve become her confidante – her confidante and her only friend in London.’
‘That’s all very well,’ said Meghan. ‘But remember she’s your client at the end of the day. This is a business relationship.’
‘Oh, if it’s the money side – you don’t need to worry,’ said Celeste. ‘She gave me another envelope today for the balance of the total cost. I put it in the safe. Sorry, I forgot to tell you. She’s an excellent payer. I haven’t even drawn up the invoices yet.’
No Smoke Without Fire Page 17