The Flower Arrangement (39 page)

“We're not getting married,” Lara said quietly. “Ben broke up with me.”

“The two of you must have had a week from hell with me in here. He's probably just having a wobble.”

“His things were gone when I got back to Dad's last night.”

“Shit!”

“It's probably just as well. It was a bad idea all along.” She sounded as if she was trying to convince herself as much as him. “I got carried away. I told myself that the age difference didn't matter, but of course it does. At least it does to him.”

“Maybe getting married is too much pressure. Maybe you should just go on as you were.”

“Ben doesn't want to. And if I was ten years younger or he was ten years older, I'd probably try to change his mind. But I can't.” She turned away, hiding her face behind the dark curtain of her hair. “I've done it again, Phil. Let myself believe that something was right because I wanted it so badly. How could I have been so stupid? I even booked our honeymoon to Crete. To that place Mum and Dad went after they got married.”

“Oh, Lara. I'm sorry.” Phil wished he wasn't tied to the bed with tubes so he could reach his sister to comfort her.

“Don't be,” she said. “It's better this way. I'd rather know he has doubts now than wait eight years to find out.”

He couldn't argue with that. The door swung open and Katy stood there, her eyes blazing with happiness.

“They told me you were awake.”

Phil faked a yawn. “I was but I got tired waiting for my wife to arrive. So I'm going back to sleep now.”

“Don't you dare!” She half ran to the bed and bent over him, her hair falling around his face.

“You can kiss me,” he said softly. “I don't care if it hurts.”

“I'll kiss you on one condition,” she whispered. “That you never leave me like that again.”

*   *   *

Lara made up a story about needing breakfast so she could leave them together. She went down to the hospital canteen. She should be making last-minute preparations for her wedding in two days, she thought, poking at a plate of dried-up scrambled egg; she should be packing for her honeymoon. That future without Ben stretched ahead of her bleak and empty, starting with the week that she should have spent with him in Crete. She couldn't face going back to the shop yet. She had no idea what she was going to do with that time. But Phil did.

“Lara,” he said the next morning, when she came into his room. “Will you do something for me?”

“Anything,” she said.

“Swear on my life that you'll do it?”

“That's not funny, Phil.”

“I'm serious.”

“Okay,” she sighed, sinking into the chair by the bed. “I swear.”

“Will you go away?”

“What?”

“Will you take that week in Crete?”

Her dark eyes widened. “Go on my honeymoon on my own? You're joking.”

“Look, if you stay here, you'll just be haunting the hospital.” Or
sitting in their dad's house staring into space, Phil thought, slipping into depression, the way she had two years ago. He couldn't let her go back to that dark place, not when he wasn't in the whole of his health, able to pull her out again.

“I can't go away, Phil. You're down to have surgery on your pelvis.”

“Katy will look after me. And she'll be able to if you're not here to get in her way.”

“I'm not getting in her way, am I?”

He hardened his heart against the hurt in her eyes; he had to make her do this, no matter what it took. “I know you don't mean to. But it's hard for her to take the lead with my big sister around. We need time together now, me and Katy. Just the two of us.”

“I know.”

“You swore on my life that you'd do anything for me. Well, this is it, Lara. This is anything.”

*   *   *

Lara spent the day of her wedding working at Blossom & Grow. She couldn't face the customers so she scrubbed out the cold room, conditioned the flowers, checked the stock to make sure that nothing would run low while she was away. Ciara dropped her home and stayed for a few hours, cooked a meal that neither of them ate, opened a bottle of wine and then another one.

After she left, Lara went upstairs to pack a case. The drawer in the bedroom where Ben had kept his clothes was empty. There was a question mark of brown hair caught on the duvet. The ghost of a heart shape he'd once drawn in the condensation on the bathroom mirror.

Where was he now? she wondered. What was he doing on their wedding night? The wine she'd drunk with Ciara had softened her resolve. She could just send one text, couldn't she? Just to tell him that she was going to Crete, to leave the door open in case there was any way they could ever make things work again.

*   *   *

Ben was in the men's room in Doheny & Nesbitt's pub. If he walked outside and threw a stone, he could hit the Merrion Hotel, where he should be right now with Lara. He went over to the sink and leaned his forehead against the mirror. He wondered where she was tonight. Probably in the hospital with Katy, he thought. Comparing notes on what a waster he was.

Ben's phone buzzed on the bar. Diane put her drink down and picked it up. A text, from Lara. She looked over her shoulder, then opened the message. She read it quickly and, with another quick glance over her shoulder, deleted it.

Lara had made Ben just as miserable as Katy had. Diane ordered another round and waited for him to come back and realize that
she
was the one he'd really wanted all along.

*   *   *

Ben didn't text back. He didn't call. Lara lay awake with the phone in her hand all night, waiting. She was still waiting when the taxi arrived to bring her to the airport the next morning. It was only when she was sitting in her seat on the plane and the air hostess asked everyone to switch their phones to flight mode that she realized that he wasn't going to call, and she finally let go.

She slept all the way to Crete. She slept again in the cab from Chania Airport to the south of the island, only opening her eyes after two hours as the driver slowed to take the hairpin bends down the hill into the small port. Sugar-cube houses spilled down the last slope toward the sea. A full moon floated above the inky water; the air from the gardens they passed smelled of gardenias and jasmine.

She slept as soon as she put her head on the pillow of the small white hotel room. When she opened the creaky blue shutters the following morning, brilliant sunlight fell in through the window and the hum of the bees on the vines below filled the room. The sea was every color of delphinium and larkspur. The smell of food drifted up from
the small restaurant below her balcony. Bacon, fresh bread, coffee, cinnamon. All she wanted was to feel Ben's arms sliding around her waist. To sit with him under the white awning below her window and eat breakfast. But she couldn't have that. So she forced herself to gather her things and go downstairs and eat alone.

She almost missed the ferry scheduled to leave at 10:30 a.m. She got confused trying to find the cubicle that sold tickets and had to run down the slipway, bumping her carry-on case along behind her. Twenty minutes later, she dragged it off again in a village called Chora that was hardly a village at all, just a couple of dozen whitewashed buildings and a narrow shingle beach. She couldn't bear to stay in the hotel she had booked for the honeymoon so she had picked the most remote place she could find out of the guidebook Ben had given her.

She walked the length of the village twice, looking for a sign that read “Room for Rent,” then, tired and hungry again, she ducked out of the sun and sat under the awning of a café and ordered a second breakfast.

The man who served her had murderous eyes and a bushy black beard with a pen stuck through it.

“Do you have rooms?” Lara asked him.

“No,” he said contemptuously, as if any inquiry about rooms from a tourist was the stupidest thing he had ever heard.

But as she paid her bill, he picked up her case without asking her, slung it over his shoulder and took off, giving Lara no choice except to follow him. He set off down a narrow alley that led to a winding backstreet. They passed a mini market and a walled church with a huge palm tree and climbed some shallow whitewashed steps scattered with the litter of bougainvillea blossoms.

He stopped at the gate of a small garden. Lara saw lilies and carnations, a terrace covered over with a tangle of vines and jasmine and a vegetable garden with neat rows of tomato plants, zucchini and herbs. An old woman was sitting in the shade crocheting. Her silver hair had been plaited and wound around her head like a garland. A kitten was tumbling in the dust beneath her chair.

The bearded man spoke to her in a rapid babble of Greek, then dumped Lara's suitcase unceremoniously on the terrace. “Stavroula.” He pointed at the woman. “Rooms!” Then he turned on his heel and marched away.

The old lady put her crocheting aside and stood up, pushing her swollen feet into shoes with the backs worn down and shuffling into the house. Lara dragged her case inside into the cool dark. Stavroula nodded several times, pointed up the stairs and took a key on a white ribbon from a hook on the wall.

Lara climbed the marble steps to a narrow room with a single bed and one window that opened onto a handkerchief-sized flat roof backing onto a dusty hill dotted with olive trees. She closed the shutters, climbed into bed and slept again.

She was woken every morning by goat bells. She allowed herself to check her phone just once a day, before breakfast. Ciara fired through an occasional reassuring update about the shop, but she skimmed over these, concentrating instead on Katy's messages about Phil. He was improving every day. He had started reading the newspaper; he had asked her to smuggle in a roast chicken sandwich. The consultant had confirmed that the operation on his pelvis would go ahead on Monday. There was nothing from Ben.

No matter how early Lara woke, Stavroula was always awake before her. She came down every morning to find breakfast laid out on the wooden table under the vines. Yogurt with a pot of honey or a peach. Boiled eggs and a thick slice of bread. Coffee.

While she ate, Lara soaked up the peace of the garden. Bees buzzing in and out of bean flowers, a kingfisher skimming in low over the sea, the sound of the old lady counting the stitches under her breath as she bent over her crochet hook.

One morning, Lara found a small, rusty metal palette of paints and a dog-eared watercolor pad on the table waiting for her when she came down to breakfast.

“For me?” she asked Stavroula.

The old woman shook her head. “
Ne
.” Although it seemed like “no,” Lara had learned that this meant “yes” in Greek.

It was years since she had drawn anything other than designs for flower arrangements. She made quick sketches of the flowers in the garden, then more detailed ones, mixing colors on an old cracked plate that Stavroula brought her, trying and nearly making the exact shade of magenta for the bougainvillea.

After breakfast, she walked to the beach along high dusty goat trails, tiny blue butterflies flickering in the sage and thyme flowers she brushed with her boots. By the time she laid a sarong she'd bought at the mini market under a feathery tamarisk tree and tied her lunchtime picnic in a plastic bag to a high branch out of the reach of goats, she was ready to sleep again.

She dreamed that Ben was lying beside her. She could see his face a few inches from hers, his green eyes watching her, the sunshine picking out sparks of copper on his stubbled chin, but when she reached out to put her hand on his shoulder, she woke up. It all seemed unreal now. Ben, the year they'd had together, the life they'd planned. Sometimes she wondered if she had dreamed the whole thing.

At night, the small taverna in the village was crowded with tourists, so Lara sat with Stavroula watching the moths dancing around the bare bulb by the gate and the fireflies around the jasmine.

Sometimes, on the walk back from the beach, she took a fork in the goat track and climbed up the hill to the tiny whitewashed chapel. Cicadas rattled like a thousand sets of tiny maracas as she walked around to the back to look at the tangle of passionflower that grew from the window above the altar. She picked one and carried it home to put in the water glass next to her bed.

The peeling wooden door of the church was closed with a double length of rope attached to a nail. One day she went inside. The floor was littered with goat droppings. A cardboard box of candles sat beneath a crooked brass candelabra. Red and gold icons gleamed from the painted panels in front of the altar.

She closed her eyes and let the memories she'd locked away pour back. The sound of Ben's footsteps hurrying up the wooden stairs to the workroom. The moonlit night he'd held her in the cemetery and turned her around to see the view, telling her it was a gift from her mother. A glimpse of him in the garden, his T-shirt sticking to his back with sweat as he dug a hole for the water feature. The look in his green eyes the day he'd kissed her by the canal. The first time she'd seen him, in a very different chapel, in a different place, a year ago.

*   *   *

On her last night at Stavroula's, Lara gave her landlady a jar of fig jam, a tin of fancy biscuits that the mini market owner had unearthed from somewhere and the sketchbook filled with paintings. The old lady's rheumy eyes were serious as she turned the pages, examining every picture.

“
Galfallo
,” she said, pointing at a painting of red flowers.

“We call them ‘carnations.'” Lara smiled.

The arthritic fingers turned another page.

Stavroula looked down at the blossoms that were not really blossoms at all but clusters of magenta leaves around the pinhead-sized flowers. “
Boukamillia
.”

“Bougainvillea.” Lara nodded.

“When?” Stavroula looked up at Lara.