It was three days before the wedding, and Celeste was now devoting every minute at Seventh Heaven to working on the final details and drawing up a plan of action for the next forty-eight hours when she, along with a former member of staff brought in especially to help, and two of the Saturday girls would be working full tilt on the Mia Madison wedding flowers. All the bouquets, buttonholes and arrangements were to be ready for collection at 10am on the Saturday morning, six hours in advance of the ceremony, scheduled for 4pm the same day.
Celeste got the padded envelope from the safe and handed it over to Meghan. ‘I’m beginning to think she must be an heiress – or a fraudster! She’s so free with her cash.’
‘Perhaps you needn’t bother with those invoices…’ muttered Meghan, ‘since she’s paid in advance… unless she wants them for her records…’
While Meghan carefully counted the money and put it away in the safe, Celeste communicated her most recent fears about the welfare of Mia Madison.
‘Seriously, I’m beginning to wonder about Mia’s mental wellbeing,’ said Celeste. ‘That’s why I’m trying to give her so much support. This mysterious bridegroom that she refuses to name, I can’t decide whether he’s subjecting her to coercion, which is why she’s so desperately anxious about everything being perfect, or whether he’s actually a figment of her imagination. The whole situation is so weird. Could she be one of those delusional fantasists who imagines she in a relationship with someone she scarcely knows? There’s a word for it, isn’t there? Erotomania. It’s a type of paranoia, a recognised psychological condition.’
‘Well she is pregnant, so there must have been a man on the scene at some point,’ said Meghan wryly. ‘Unless it’s a phantom pregnancy! Thank goodness there’s nothing imaginary about her money,’ she continued, as she set the lock on the safe. ‘That will pay for stock replenishment for the next six months. It’s nice to receive a cash payment every once in a while.’ Celeste knew from Meghan’s tone that Mia’s payment would not be recorded on the next Seventh Heaven tax return.
‘There’s certainly nothing imaginary about the injuries Mia showed me when she was here yesterday evening,’ said Celeste, who was upset by Meghan’s lack of empathy. ‘She’s got red marks and bruises all over her shoulders and chest and the tops of her arms. Either that bastard she’s planning to marry hurt her badly or she’s seriously messed up in the head and is self-harming. I don’t know if I should be calling the police or a doctor.’
‘You shouldn’t get drawn in,’ said Meghan sternly.
‘I can’t just turn a blind eye,’ said Celeste. ‘I’ve got to believe her. She said it wasn’t the first time. I seem to be the only person in London she can talk to. She’s been trying so hard to keep up a perfect front for this fantasy, fairy-tale wedding. But she let slip that in private things are a lot less rosy. He gambles and he drinks too much and when he loses or has a pint too many, he comes home angry and aggressive and takes it out on her. I think she’s in love with him but scared of him too. She was making all sorts of excuses for him – pressure of work, anxiety about becoming a father et cetera, et cetera – all bullshit reasons, of course. You can’t excuse the inexcusable.’
Meghan gave her a look. ‘Celeste, don’t forget this is a business. You can’t allow yourself to get involved in the emotional hang-ups of our clients. So many people use our services at times of deep emotional need. We’ve talked about it before – the giving and receiving of flowers and floral tributes has so much psychological and cultural significance. People use us at every significant milestone in their lives. But you have to keep a professional distance. We’re florists, remember, not social workers or psychiatrists!’
Meghan’s patronising tone irritated Celeste. ‘Well, I can’t help it!’ she said. ‘Mia’s pregnant and she’s away from her family, far from home with a partner who seems (from everything she’s told me) to be excessively controlling and coercive. Someone has to watch over her. Someone has to call it out.’
PRESENT
32
I can’t let it go. I’m bursting to break the news that your American bride is engaged to be married to the man from the club. I dress in my trendiest clothes – well it’s just black drainpipe jeans and my black biker’s jacket but when I glance at my reflection in the shop windows, I feel content that I blend in with the other shoppers strolling down the Kings Road. It’s late-night opening tonight so the place is buzzing. I go into a café and pick up a handful of leaflets advertising some upcoming event and continue on to the garden square where the happy couple live. The leaflets will give me all the cover I need. I do a thorough job pushing the leaflets into the letterboxes of each address. All the properties are grand and imposing.
Like many others, the house where I saw Mia is divided into four apartments, one on each floor. I know that Mia and her partner occupy the first floor because I saw him carrying her into the flat the other night. I check the names on the buzzers as I push the leaflets through the door. ‘B Johnson’ – that must be him. I click on my spyware tab and scroll back through your recent messages. I find what I’m looking for easily enough – a nonsensical message Anya sent You a few days ago. It’s not the content I’m interested in. It’s the names. ‘BJ’, ‘Ben’ – she mentions him about five times. Ben Johnson – he’s my man. There’s a light on in the living room but the place is very quiet. I sense that there’s no one at home.
The basement flat is empty for sure – the estate agent’s battered ‘For Rent’ sign fixed to the railings advertises the fact. Looks as if it’s been empty for some time too, as the sign is discoloured and ragged. Metal steps lead to a separate entrance for the basement flat below the level of the pavement. I go down to post my leaflet into the dark. As I expected, the space between the steps and the concrete foundations provide a perfect hiding place to watch and to wait.
*
Celeste had worked so hard on the Madison Wedding that Meghan had released her from working on the set-up for the other two weddings booked in for the same weekend. Fortunately, for these two weddings, Seventh Heaven’s involvement was more limited – in each case they were doing only the wedding flowers for the bridal party and the church, while the florist designated as ‘preferred supplier’ for the respective venues was taking care of the flower arrangements for the reception celebrations. In order to give Celeste a chance to catch up on her CelestialHeadstones.com orders, Meghan had decided to rope in her family to help her out. This meant using the services of her husband (who did the deliveries on a regular basis) and her eldest daughter who was back from university for a twenty-first birthday party over the May bank holiday weekend and was keen to earn some spare cash. Meghan’s daughter had a natural gift for flower arranging – having learnt it at her mother’s skirt.
Meghan had permitted Celeste to continue with her CelestialHeadstones.com business venture provided she was always accompanied by another member of staff on the graveyard trips. ‘You can’t take any risks. If anyone’s got erotomania, it’s that boy,’ said Meghan. However, she had banned her from using the Seventh Heaven van until the repairs and the insurance had been sorted out. Celeste had received two confirmed orders to deliver memorial flowers to the Islington and St Pancras Cemetery, one of the large burial sites serving the north of London. So, it was agreed that she and Emily would travel together to the site on public transport, via tube and bus, to fulfil these orders, while the others dealt with all the wedding business of the day using the company van.
‘If that kid has been tracking the Seventh Heaven van, he’s less likely to see you leaving the shop or to have the gall to follow you on public transport, surely,’ said Meghan confidently.
The girls had decided to make a day out of it and were both in high spirits when they met at Seventh Heaven on the Saturday morning. Celeste picked up her floristry workbox and her photographic bag containing cameras and tripod, while Emily carried baskets containing the two memorial bouquets. They called in to the deli to bu
y themselves a picnic lunch before setting off across the green leafy garden squares of Pimlico to the bus station at Victoria. It was a bright sunny day, which seemed to have lifted the mood of everyone out on the streets. Even once they reached the main roads, the pavements were less grey than usual. In contrast to the stony-faced, dark-suited commuter crowds, the people they passed today were dressed in bright weekend colours and were enjoying each other’s company as they strolled by or sat chatting at outdoor café tables. London looked almost Mediterranean.
It was too nice a day to go down into the tube, like rats into a sewer, said Celeste melodramatically. Instead she decided they would take the scenic route by bus, and better still an open-top bus, at least for part of the journey. She found a ‘hop on, hop off’ tourist bus that was heading northwards, with a route passing close to Buckingham Palace, Pall Mall, Trafalgar Square and Covent Garden.
‘Let’s take this…’ said Celeste, ‘…see a bit of London.
They found seats on the top deck, in among the tourists and day trippers.
‘I feel like I’m on holiday.’ Celeste laughed as they snapped selfies and pictures of the monuments along the way. She smiled at Emily. ‘It’s nice having company. I’m glad Meghan asked you to come along.’
They gathered up their bags and hopped off the bus at Trafalgar Square. There had been some kind of environmental demonstration going on in the square, so the tourists mingled with environmental protestors, a straggle of good-natured students, wearing sandals, cut-off jeans and faded T-shirts with gloomy slogans emblazoned across the front predicting the end of the world.
‘Come on, let’s get an ice cream,’ said Celeste, as they crossed the square. ‘You wait here on the steps with all our stuff and I’ll go and get us a cone each.’
They sat on the stone steps, licking their ice creams and watching a gang of shrieking Spanish schoolchildren who clambered up onto the vast bronze lions guarding the base of Nelson’s Column, thereby incurring the wrath of their schoolteachers.
Leaving Emily to guard the other bags, Celeste then took out her tripod and camera and drifted along the wide terrace in front of the National Gallery, enjoying the street performers, the buskers and floating ‘living statues’ and the graffiti artists chalking up the flagstones. As she took in the scene she was filled with a sense of pride and solidarity with this great city. Only in London could you find such a juxtaposition between carnival festivity and ceremonious grandeur, street art and fine art – all co-existing so happily together.
Celeste hadn’t used her camera for a while but as it was such a beautiful bright sunny day, she had brought it with her with the intention of taking some pictures at the cemetery to freshen up her website. It felt good to be taking photographs of the living rather than monuments to the dead for a change. Some of these tourist attraction shots could go on her website. There was no reason why she shouldn’t put up a few iconic images of London on CelestialHeadstones.com for clients who contacted her from overseas.
‘We better get on,’ said Celeste as she packed up her camera bag. They hopped on another tourist bus headed for the British Museum. There they would change to the regular service bus route, which would drop them outside the entrance to the cemetery. When they sat down on the bus, Celeste told Emily (who seemed rather apprehensive about what lay ahead) all that she knew about the background to the orders. She glanced down at the baskets at Emily’s feet. The first contained a heart-shaped wreath of delicate baby-blue and white flowers. It was made up of scented white oriental lilies, lilies of the Nile in the palest of blues, white avalanche roses, sky-blue iris, sweetly fragranced blue freesia and a sprinkling of tiny pale blue forget-me-nots.
Celeste had designed, and lovingly and painstakingly put together, this floral arrangement for the headstone of a baby who had died shortly after childbirth. The baby’s mother lived in Pimlico and had come in to Seventh Heaven earlier in the week to select the flowers and write a card for the memorial tribute. This baby had been her first-born child, born with a life-limiting congenital disorder. Celeste had begun to realise that florists were like hairdressers – people found it easy to open up to them and tell them their deepest sorrows and most personal secrets along with the trivia of their lives, things they wouldn’t discuss with their family or with their closest friends. There was an intimacy in these services, thought Celeste, whether it was arranging someone’s flowers or arranging someone’s hair – services performed by strangers but with love and care. Florists and hairdressers – they were the modern-day confessors – better than priests, as they didn’t impose penances or pass judgement.
Anyway, Celeste had listened patiently and empathetically while the mother told the tale and she remembered every detail as she recounted it to Emily. The little boy had been born eight years ago. She now had three girls – the oldest aged seven, born almost a year to the day that their first-born had been born, and twin girls aged three and a half. Saturday was the eighth anniversary of the infant boy’s death but there was a traditional May Day Fair taking place at her little girls’ primary school – they even had a Maypole. Alice had been practising her dancing for weeks. She would be so upset if her mother didn’t go to watch. And the following day they were celebrating Alice’s seventh birthday party – fifteen little girls coming around. It was a nightmare – she couldn’t bear to think of it. What with all the shopping for the party tea and the party bags, and thinking up party games, and keeping the twins entertained – the ‘terrible twos’ had been bad enough, but, ‘let me tell you, the terrible twos are nothing compared to the “fearsome threes”! And I should know – I’ve got double trouble. I’m rushed off my feet.’ The mother had finished up her tirade with a laugh.
To be fair, Celeste’s new client did look dishevelled and overtired. The dark roots of her hair were coming through and she had big dark circles under her eyes.
The mother had continued to ‘share’ while Celeste wrote down the details of the order. She explained that the family had moved away from Islington before her second child was born partly to get a fresh start and leave behind all the sadness. She was so busy with her young girls that she didn’t often get the chance to make the journey across town to visit her little boy’s grave.
‘I’m ashamed to say I haven’t been to the cemetery for over four years,’ she had said. ‘I just can’t spare the time this weekend to go and put flowers on his grave, but it would be such a blessing and a comfort to me to know that you will.’
Celeste had smiled at her sympathetically.
‘It will be an honour and a pleasure,’ she had said quietly.
Who am I to judge you? had been the words she really wanted to say.
As well as the blue heart wreath, the first basket contained a picture drawn by Alice as a gift to her brother, and two matching little blue bunnies from the twin girls. Celeste’s client had been tearful when she handed these over. She’d also drawn a crude map of the cemetery on a page ripped from a notebook.
‘I can visualise it so clearly,’ the woman had said. ‘The grave is in the corner of the Children’s Memorial Garden, in front of an ivy-covered wall, a few feet from the gravel pathway.’ Celeste had folded the map away safely in her purse.
Celeste had also felt moved as she took the drawing and the bunnies from her.
‘I’ll laminate Alice’s picture for you,’ she had said, her voice breaking, ‘to make it last longer.’ She had put it carefully into a folder, planning to take it into college on the Friday to use their laminating equipment.
The child’s drawing had really got to her. As her client left the shop, she’d had to run into the back room to regain her composure, leaving a young man who had just come through the door fidgeting impatiently as he waited to be served.
As the bus came to a halt in the midday traffic, Celeste took the drawing out of the basket. It was of three little girls, of course – Alice and her twin sisters – and they were all standing in line holding hands. A round yellow
sun was shining in the sky in the top right-hand corner of the page, sending its rays down over the children. On the left-hand side of the picture Alice had drawn an apple tree with oversized red apples. And a boy was sitting in the tree with his legs hanging over a long branch. The boy figure was bigger than the girls and clearly represented her brother. He had a Cheshire-cat smile on his face, and he was holding out a huge red apple to his sisters. Celeste handed the drawing to Emily wordlessly. Emily just smiled and nodded. The picture said it all.
The second basket contained a traditional classic white chrysanthemum-based cross with a scarlet ribbon edge, finished with a spray of red roses and foliage. It was the kind of arrangement that Celeste hated – particularly the conventional chrysanthemums – traditional funeral blooms that she felt lacked imagination and soul. But it was what the client had asked for. This type of tribute was popular with her older customers. Celeste had discovered from the notes on the order that it had been placed by an elderly woman who had previously lived in Highbury with her husband. When she became widowed, the client had moved out of London to live near her daughter and young grandchildren in the West Country. She rarely came into town now. She had apologised in advance for the state of her husband’s grave.
‘It’s weird the way my clients feel they need to apologise to me for the neglect of their loved ones’ graves,’ said Celeste to Emily. ‘After all, if they were taking proper care of them, I’d be out of job!’
*
As the bus came to a stop in front of the entrance to the Islington and St Pancras Cemetery, Celeste commented to Emily that she had enjoyed their bus trip across London. It had been fun seeing the sights and mingling with the tourists. Her fears seemed irrational and disproportionate on this bright sunny day. She wouldn’t let either of those men intimidate her. Ben – well, she’d already made up her mind what she was going to do about him, and Theo – Theo was just a kid with a crush. His infatuation with her was now proving useful. She could handle him. She’d had to contend with a whole ‘rugby fifteen’ of alpha males in her friendship group as a teenager.
No Smoke Without Fire Page 18