It Started With a Kiss (36 page)

As she opened the door Ava could see the floor was covered in flowers: unopened peonies in tight pink balls, crisp white lilies, their stamens bristling with pollen, and a bank of roses, almost mocking in their velvety glamour. Taking a deep breath to enjoy the aromatic mixture their scents made, she stepped over buckets of daisies to reach her desk. She hung up her coat, flicked the kettle on and flipped open her laptop. While the kettle boiled, she flicked through her post – the usual selection of bills and junk mail, along with a flyer for new classes at the Arts Centre. There wasn’t really anything worth opening or reading properly before she had a cup of tea on the go, so she stared absentmindedly at the flowers as the comforting sound of the kettle grew louder and louder. They were lined up according to type and colour, creating an extravagant floral carpet. Ava knew it would take her another few minutes to start to feel fully awake and was glad of some time alone with the shop.

She swirled a teabag around in the water, wondering if Rob was up yet. He had taken to staying at her house more and more lately, although whether his motivation was the
prospect of cosy evenings together or being closer to his office was unclear. Either way, he had been dead to the world when she left the house – completely still and snoring lightly, despite the clatter of her Monday morning routine. Ava wondered if he was even awake yet, if he had discovered the cup of tea she left by his bedside, or if he was still curled up in her bed, leaving his imprint on her pillow.

‘Morning, Boss!’ Matt had arrived and was standing in the doorway, a bucket of flowers already under each arm. ‘Had a good weekend?’

‘Yes thanks, Matt, nothing special,’ she replied. She repeated those last two words to herself: nothing special. ‘You?’

‘Oh yeah, it was wicked!’ Matt was grinning at the memory and it wasn’t even nine o’clock yet. Was he immune to Monday mornings? If he wasn’t a little sluggish at this point in the week, when was he? ‘We went down to the coast for a bit of surfing, had a barbecue – good times, amazing waves.’

Well over ten years younger than her, Matt seemed to have boundless energy and an insatiable appetite for fun. Even a spare half hour would be filled with some kind of sporting activity, an impromptu burst of socialising or a quick trip somewhere. He was no sofa surfer; indeed TV seemed to hold no allure for him at all. Just hearing about his hectic social life made Ava feel slightly dizzy, but he was so good-natured it was hard to begrudge him a moment of it. Truly, he was a gift. She smiled to herself as he put the first two buckets of flowers up onto the highest bracket of
the shelving unit, whistling, then immediately turned round to reach for the rest.

‘Look at these!’ he said as he picked up the roses, holding them admiringly with outstretched arms as if they were Liz Taylor herself, ready to dance. ‘They’re gorgeous today – I wonder where they’ll be ending up …’ He winked at Ava and she rolled her eyes. Relatively new to the job, he was still enthused by almost every part of his work at Dunne’s. ‘Although you’ve got to wonder – what’s a man doing buying red roses on a Monday if he’s not a little bit guilty about something?’

‘Oh come on, so young and already such a cynic! Maybe some men are just impulsive or romantic. I wouldn’t keep ordering them for a Monday if they didn’t sell.’ She gave him a playful cuff over the head and he ducked, giggling.

‘They sell all right,’ replied Matt with a wink, ‘but to romantic men … or those in the doghouse?’

‘Stop it – that’s too depressing!’

‘Only kidding,’ he said, as he finally hung up his jacket. But Ava suspected he wasn’t. She shook herself, trying to get rid of the leaden Monday morning blues she still felt.

‘Right, you – a cup of tea?’

‘Go on, then. I reckon it’s going to be busy for a Monday.’

For the next few minutes they worked alongside each other in companionable silence. Matt knew where the usual spots for all of the flowers were and neatly moved bunches from the plastic buckets in which they had been left to the smarter tin pails they were displayed in. More delicate blooms were stacked on wooden shelves across the main
side wall of the shop and he took the smaller, almost wine-bucket size pails outside onto the street. Daffodils, sunflowers and sturdy tulips were all arranged on the pavement beneath the shop window, with Matt whistling along to the radio as he worked. Ava made his milky tea and handed it to him before checking off deliveries against the invoice left three hours earlier.

‘Something’s missing,’ said Matt, as he nodded to thank Ava for the mug she had just passed him.

‘The sweet peas are late.’

Unlike the more exotic flowers that Dunne’s stocked, the sweet peas were not imported from abroad, but delivered sporadically by a local farm. They tended to swing by and drop off a supply whenever they felt the shop needed them, paying little heed to such trivialities as whether or not Ava actually needed them, or had indeed ordered them. But Ava couldn’t bring herself to start ordering them from elsewhere. She loved the area, having grown up just outside of Salisbury, and stocking local flowers was important to her. It made no sense to have spent her childhood playing in the fields of the West Country and then to import absolutely everything from elsewhere once she had her own business in the area.

When she left college and headed off to London with dreams of a career arranging cutting-edge displays for celebrity events and society weddings, she had wanted little to do with the gentler countryside flowers such as blowsy roses, peonies and sweet peas. After over a decade of providing breathtaking arrangements for corporate
receptions only to watch city brokers and their nonchalant PAs walk past completely oblivious to their beauty, she began to tire of wasting her best work on an audience who cared so little. The breaking point had been the week when she worked her fingers raw on a series of jaw-dropping displays for the awards ceremony of a glossy magazine, held in an echoing warehouse somewhere near Docklands. She had led a team spending eighteen-hour days to transform the imposing concrete structure into a venue where pop princesses, rock icons and supermodels alike would be happy to pose and party against a backdrop befitting them. Exhausted, but aglow with the satisfaction of a job well done, Ava had left the building only to wake to a series of charmless tabloid photographs of a well-oiled soap starlet flicking her cigarette into one of her red ginger and anthurium arrangements before collapsing into another – apparently fuelled by a lethal combination of four-inch fluoro heels and limitless free fizz.

‘At least your work has been in the papers,’ was her ever-pragmatic younger sister Lauren’s response. ‘Other florists would kill for that kind of exposure.’ Ava was convinced Lauren herself would probably be first in the queue, but still wondered if her fee for the work could ever make up for the body blow that seeing those pictures had provided. And then came the second punch: later that very same day Ava received an email from a woman in which she explained that she had been having a six-month affair with Mick, the darkly handsome but elusive and unreliable boyfriend with whom Ava had just spent the last three years of her life.
Already living together, they had been saving to buy a property while making do in a tiny one-bedroom in East London, above a bone-shakingly noisy main road. Devastated by how her dreams of urbane adulthood had panned out, Ava decided to leave London for a year and spend some time in the area where she had grown up, trying to decide her next move.

Initially concerned months spent within ‘popping by for a quick cup of tea’ distance of both her parents and Lauren would leave her suffering a nasty dose of claustrophobia, Ava soon realised the opposite had happened. Now she breathed a deep sigh of relief at being away from the capital’s eternal hamster wheel of marriage–career–babies, even if those possibilities still preoccupied her mother. Slowly the pain of soured romance faded, as did the stress of working for her dictatorial former boss, Nigel, Bespoke Florist to the Stars. Of course she missed some of her friends and occasionally daydreamed about walks along the river or shopping in department stores with proper cosmetics departments, but largely, she realised, she was not a Londoner.

When that first year of working at the charming little garden centre in the grounds of a local stately home ended, she knew she couldn’t go back to her old life. Instead she chose to invest her savings in buying a small place in Salisbury and setting up a business of her own. If the ‘finding eternal love’ column on her life plan was to take a little longer than planned, she was damned if she would waste time on the ‘enjoy your work, and be the very best at it’
column. Thus Dunne’s of Salisbury, her pride and joy, was born and quickly became a fixture in the market town. Ava found she was far more quickly integrated into the local community than she had ever been in London, where the idea of borrowing a cup of sugar always remained a faintly ridiculous fantasy. So what if life was quieter, less glamorous and or dramatic in Salisbury? It was the path she had chosen and what would make her happy. Just like Robin, with whom she had now been for five years. Lovely dependable Rob – he would never let her down, of that she was sure.

Ava’s two cups of tea had hit the spot by the time she followed Matt outside with the large wooden A-board. It had ‘Dunne’s’ written across the top of it, in the classic typeface she had chosen five years ago and still loved as much today. The bottom half was blackboard, upon which Ava leant forward to write ‘Peonies – 6 for £5’, and beneath that ‘Rosemary – £6’ in her wide loopy font. After brushing the white chalk off her fingertips, she stood back to check her handwriting and then admired the pavement display.

‘Looking lovely,’ she told Matt, who was just tweaking some of the last bunches to make sure none were squashed too tightly together. Ava stooped and rubbed a stem of young, oily rosemary between her fingers. She held one hand to her nose and inhaled the fresh scent of clothes and roast dinners.

‘As are you, Boss,’ replied Matt, with a cheeky wink. He held the door open for her, and as it closed behind them both she turned the ‘closed’ shop sign over. As the beeps of
the 9 o’clock news began on the radio, Ava rested one hand against the sign hanging on her glass door.
Open
. Smiling to herself, she headed back to her desk.

She hadn’t even reached it before the bell on the door tinkled, announcing the first customer of the day. But it wasn’t immediately clear who it was for they appeared to be entering backwards. It took a moment and a commanding ‘EDMUND!’ before Ava realised that it was a woman reversing a double buggy into the shop. Readying herself for the potential chaos, she brushed a stray hair away from her face. Matt immediately left the worktop of foliage he had been separating and went to help the customer. As she swung the buggy round, a ruddy-cheeked toddler leant out of his seat towards the brightly coloured strands hanging from reels of twine fixed to the wall. He was wearing a pair of bright blue trousers and a rugby shirt that would have fitted one of Ava’s childhood teddies. His hair was soft, with a hint of a curl, and his dimpled cheeks and knuckles gave the impression that he was made entirely from uncooked pastry dough. His sister was asleep in the other seat, wearing a huge overcoat. Her legs, in a pair of bright pink tights with patent leather shoes on the end, were limp; her head was thrown back and she was drooling.

Their mother had the kind of haughty glamour only gained by living in the countryside in a house so big you don’t always know who is in it. Almost impossibly thin for someone with such young children, she had long, dark, slightly wavy hair, falling around a face that was horsey and beautiful in equal measure. She too was wearing a
rugby shirt, only hers was clearly a women’s cut – deep pink, with a pale pink collar. On her feet were flat Converse All-Star Plimsolls, but even so she was as tall as Matt. Entranced by the twine, little Edmund clambered out of his seat and toddled off, causing the entire buggy to lurch forward. Dangling from the handles were an enormous Mulberry handbag and several carrier bags of groceries from the wildly over-priced delicatessen across the square, their weight clearly greater than that of the sleeping youngster now jolted from her sleep. All three adults leapt to support the buggy as organic baby food and Dorset Knobs tumbled. The child woke with a start, looked around her and then settled back down again once the buggy was secured.

‘Hiiiiii,’ the woman said, lifting her chin. ‘I need some flowers.’ Ava wondered why else she might have come in, but smiled patiently. Meanwhile, Matt busied himself back at the worktop.

‘Great,’ said Ava, brushing her hands on her jeans in readiness. ‘What are you after?’

‘Dinner party, this weekend, but I’ll need them delivered – there just isn’t going to be time.’

‘That’s fine. We do local deliveries.’

The woman seemed neither surprised nor grateful, apparently used to living in a world where she knew she would get her own way, on account of knowing she could afford to.

‘Super. Well, we need a couple of large arrangements for the table …’

‘The dinner table?’

‘Yah. Like, centrepieces.’

From the corner of one eye Ava spotted the reels of twine spinning wildly as Edmund turned round and round, wrapping himself in coloured strands. She tried not to wince. What good would that do?

‘Okay.’

‘And then I want, like, something romantic. Something that looks as if, like …’ the woman paused, a flash of uncertainty crossing her face for the first time.

‘Yes?’ Ava continued to concentrate on focusing on the customer, not her son.

‘Well, something that will seem …’ Gazing heavenwards, she held her hands out in front of her, thinking. It was impossible for Ava not to notice her stunning engagement ring. A huge diamond, surrounded entirely by several other tiny diamonds, it was breathtakingly beautiful. Ava imagined her husband choosing it for her. Someone, somewhere, adored this woman enough to pick out a fabulous piece like that for her. To him she was adorable, not formidable or brittle as she seemed today.