Chapter 9

Chapter 9

Emma

White Peonies

Emma closes the car door and carries her small amount of shopping to the house. Leaving the bags on the back step, she retreats down the drive to put the bins out. Will always insisted on sorting the recycling– he was surprisingly fussy about it. That and the order the dishwasher was loaded. She picks up an empty bottle of wine from the box for glass recycling and dumps it in the bin for household rubbish. Then she waits.

Silence.

Her father once told her he had taken up smoking again when his mother died because he knew how much it would have irritated her. He said it seemed like the only chance he had of hearing from her again. Emma could well believe that Granny Maria would not have been able to contain herself. She had died when Emma was nineteen, but she had been a strong and welcome presence in her childhood. Yes, Granny Maria would have had something to say about her son taking up smoking again.

Returning to the house, Emma unpacks her shopping, then she finds a jug for the peonies she has brought home from theFlower Cabin. Tamas said they were likely to be the last ofthe season.

She smooths the soft, blousy petals, breathing in their delicate, sherbet-y scent. Today, for some reason, she's been thinking about Will's funeral. Had she bought the peonies because of this?

She takes the jug to the kitchen table, clearing a place for it by pushing a jumper and several magazines onto a chair. One small part of her registers that her home now resembles a car boot sale, but she knows nothing short of a visit from her mother or an estate agent would bring the chaos into focus. As it is, her mother isn't coming to stay and she doesn't want to sell their home. She sits at the table and strokes the feathery petals and gazes down at her feet encased in navy ‘boats'. The sides of her shoes are scuffed and worn.

Despite the distance that separates them, Emma can still sense her mother's disapproval. She can even hear her mother's voice. She always kept certain phrases to hand, ready-made. After all, she would need them again.

‘If only you would make a bit more effort.' This covers a raft of things from the state of her shoes to her interactions with her mother's friends. Emma cannot remember her life without this particular phrase.

‘If you can't get it right, at least keep it simple.' As a result of this stricture, usually about her clothes, Emma rarely wears anything other than navy. She would like to wear more colour, but the problem is, every time her eye is caught by the flash of something enticing on a clothes rail, her mother's words return and doubt descends like rain.

‘There are academic brains and then there is common sense, which is actually of some use.'

Does her mother really mean what she says? Can she really be that heartless? Or is it a case of like mother, like daughter, and her mother's words simply come out wrong? Emma has struggled with this conundrum for as long as she can remember.

She blows out a breath and looks again at her shoes. Another of her mother's sayings comes to her: ‘You can always tell a lot about a person by their shoes.'

Transferring her gaze to the peonies, Emma reflects that you can also tell a lot about a person by the flowers they send to a funeral.

Will's firm ordered a formal spray of lilies and lisianthus. Emma could imagine the practice manager: ‘We'll go for 3C, in purple and white. He was one of our partners so we want it to be a large arrangement.' A display unequivocal in its precise proportions, perfectly sized to outshine everything but the family's tributes. The lawyer's flowers. A large contingent had attended from Will's firm, neat in their monochrome precision tailoring– suitable wear for office, court and as it turned out, a funeral. The only discordant note was the visible grief displayed by one of the associates.

The university sent a wreath on behalf of the research team: an arrangement of uniform, yellow roses– beautiful in its simple symmetry, a circle of interconnecting flowers. The scientist's flowers. A few of her colleagues attended, men and women she had enjoyed sharing a coffee with. They struggled to know what to say and Emma struggled to know how to answer them.

Will's widowed mother made her own tribute: a twisted wreath threaded with sweet William. The mother's flowers. Five months after her son's death, she had also died– quietly, with no fuss. A gentle woman, too worn out by grief to put up much of a struggle.

Emma was pleased to see that at the funeral, her brother, Guy, looked after her. Guy did not bring flowers, but he did come in person, and that was more than enough. He flew in the morning of the funeral from his home in Singapore, and she walked into his hug with a feeling of being able to lay down part of her burden.

She felt the same as soon as she saw the ‘Glory Girls'. She can no longer recall how she and her two closest friends from university came to be the ‘Glory Girls'. She vaguely remembers a television programme about the Piccadilly Glory Girls. Later, when they set up a WhatsApp group, ‘Glory Girls' seemed the obvious, if ironic, choice. And they all agreed it was better than their first thought of, ‘Geeky Girls'.

Still, her friends are ‘ Glory Girls' in their way. They have both become well-known in their particular field of science, working either side of the globe in Harvard and in New South Wales. She has just never kept up with them, unable to quite decide if she wanted to be a scientist or a linguist, ending up as a junior scientist who could be sent to that conference in Paraguay no one else wanted to attend.

The ‘Glory Girls' came to Will's funeral bearing white peonies, knowing they were her favourite flower.

Acquaintances from the village brought posies of bluebells and cowslips– empathetic flowers that spoke of an English countryside that they and Will loved. Emma's mother sent rare Madonna lilies that told a tale of exquisite taste and a passion for all things Parisian. She would have come to the funeral, ‘of course', but Eurostar was encountering problems, and she never flew. Her mother had lived in France since the death ofEmma's father from cancer ten years ago at the age of sixty-five. Emmaremembers drinking in the heady fragrance like a thirsty child, as she held tight to Guy's hand, trying not to choke on the familiar and bitter aftertaste of disillusionment.

More than anything, Emma wanted her dad. He would not have said much but he would have been beside her, every step. His suit, his shirt (chosen by her mother) would have exuded a subtle and expensive fragrance (also chosen by her mother) but Emma knew the dry skin of his hand, as he touched her cheek, would have smelt of wood-smoke and the jasmine flowers from his greenhouse.

When she thinks of her father, she cannot recapture the essence of the expensive scent her mother liked him to wear. A sophisticated fragrance that Emma suspects her mother had hoped would mask the simple truth of the quiet, humble man. That scent had quickly evaporated from her memory. Yet even after a decade without him, the smell of burning leaves or the smell of jasmine always brings her father back to her as surely as if he were standing beside her in the orchard at the bottom of the garden. She does not know what flowers her father would have brought for Will, but she knows that he would have grown and cut them himself.

The only flower choice that surprised her was her own.

Emma had chosen the flowers that lay on top of the coffin. She had picked all white flowers: roses, lilies and anything else the florist suggested. It had been the first image of funeral flowers the florist had pointed to on a page littered with coffin sprays and wreaths. Emma could not bear to look beyond the first one.

As she followed the coffin into the church, she pinned her eyes on the flowers, in the hope that if she didn't break eye contact, they would draw her on and ensure she kept putting one foot in front of the other. She wondered why on earth she had chosen these flowers. Will had loved colour.

Her steps stuttered. Maybe she was at the wrong funeral? A heartbeat of hope had made her halt altogether. Maybe he wasn't dead? Then she spotted a white foxglove nestling in between the ice-white lilies, and deep inside its petals she caught a glimpse of purple. It was a rebel among the sterile white, and she knew for certain she was burying her husband.

Emma pulls herself back to the present. The effort is almost physical and leaves part of her aching. She tries to focus, to take a scientific approach, to concentrate on what has been written on the subject of grief. God knows, she has read enough of it. Heard enough of it.

It gets easier.

Just give it time.

But these are lies. She knows people don't mean to lie. Like children who point chocolatey fingers and blurt, ‘He ate it'– these are lies from those caught out in embarrassment.

If there is anything I can do just ring me.

She realises now that no one ever rings.

Work can be a lifesaver.

Maybe that. Maybe that could be true. Her research work? Going back to the lab helped, at first. Her work demanded her concentration until the growing sense of needing a change overtook her.

And now this. Despite what happened today– the blundering into speech and into buckets of flowers– she finds that being among the flowers helps her. And being with Betty and Les? Yes, maybe, work can help.

A stray thought slips in. Work can be a lifesaver. But not if you are the florist on the Titanic . Then work might very well kill you.