Violet
Remembered Honeysuckle
Somebody once told her that The Purser spent several years training to be a priest. She can hear it sometimes in the pitch of his voice when he instructs a gathering of stewards: he is a man who can read a list like it is liturgy. She has heard some of the restaurant staff call him The Purser Priest behind his back. She knows no one would say this to his face– not because they are frightened of him, but because he is a man who everyone knows is straight and true, like the creases he likes pressed into his trousers. The only time she has heard him shout was when the baggage steward swore at the bellboy. The Purser Priest is not a man who allows the Lord’s name to be taken in vain.
She wonders what he would have been like as a priest. She thinks he would have worn the vestments well and imagines adetermined flick of his cassock as he turns to mount the pulpit. Theeyes that she sees emerging over the top of the gilded bible bring her daydream to an end. His eyes are not like those of the priests she has known. The priests of her childhood had a different look altogether– one had eyes like a greedy hawk, while another had a watery eye that seemed to be gazing through a film of the Virgin’s tears. And there was one who looked at the children as if he would have liked to taste their tears.
The Purser is like none of these. He has eyes that shift from side to side– checking, checking– but when they land on you (and if you are not found wanting), his eyes invite you to share something with him. She thinks that as a small boy he might have kept toffee and string and beetles in his pockets. She suspects he was a boy who liked to share a joke.
It is while she is thinking this (and carrying a plate of scones to a woman who herself looks like a plump cake) that she is approached by a woman in a pale, lemon dress.
‘You will excuse me for asking you,’ she says, uncertainly, ‘but you remind me so much of a child I once nursed in Buenos Aires.’ She smiles, apologetically, but her eyes are merry– and for a moment she is taken back to a hospital bed in a garden and a blanket of honeysuckle.
The woman turns to the tall, dark-haired man who has joined them, and she wants to ask him if he has brought a snail’s shell in his handkerchief as a gift.
Dr and Mrs Merry Eyes are delighted to find that the young girl they looked after all those years ago did not die.
The doctor looks at her in wonder. ‘I remember you so well. I must say, I call this a miracle. We had so little hope– indeed, nohope.’ He shakes his head, but he is smiling at her.
She decides not to tell him that her mother calls it a miracle, too, or that he should have prescribed honeysuckle.
The doctor tells her that it was he who insisted she was moved into the garden, because he heard she loved the smell of freesia. As she was dying anyway, he saw no harm in it.
She lingers a little while, not dying but talking.
But she cannot wait long, the cream in the scones is melting and she must hurry on. She does not want The Purser’s eye to land on her and find her wanting.
Chapter 50
Emma
American Beauty
Emma gives Alistair a potted history of her investigation and thanks him profusely for meeting her. As he swats away her thanks, she notices that the freckles on his hands run all the way down his long fingers to his neat fingernails.
Emma concludes, ‘So, I’m pretty certain there was an unofficial florist on board, possibly working part-time on the flowers, but there’s no record of who arranged the flowers on theTitanic. It’s a total mystery.’
Alistair grins. ‘And I expect you’ve discovered they had everyone else on board.’
Emma nods, reaching for her coffee. ‘I know. I wonder why, if they recorded people’s jobs in so much detail, they didn’t show The Florist.’
‘I’ll tell you what I think, for what it’s worth. I bet it was because it was a woman.’
Emma wants to reach out and hug him.
‘In 1912, a man’s profession was what mattered– women were mothers and housewives. Although, actually, this was a load of shit and lower-class women were working their arses off to keep families fed. But it’s not what the Victorians or Edwardians wanted us to believe. So when it came to recording a woman’s job, they were hardly likely to go into a lot of detail. The women didn’t matter as much as the men as far as they were concerned. You can bet if it was a man looking after the flowers, they’d have given him a proper title.’
For the first time, Emma can imagine Alistair teaching in a lecture theatre, gesticulating enthusiastically as he spoke.
‘Knowing I was meeting you, I looked up a few things about other ships and I found that theAquitania, which was launched a year later,didhave a record of a gardener on board. A man.’
Emma leans forward. ‘Well, the first florists were gardeners, so that makes sense.’
Since meeting Mrs Pepperpot, she has looked into the Bealings in more detail and found that in the 1881 census, Frank Bealing’s occupation was recorded as ‘Gardener’ but by 1891 he was described as ‘Florist’. She starts to explain to Alistair about the Bealings and their buttonholes. She then tries to articulate what she’d thought as she went through the exhibition. ‘These ships were showcases, right?’
Alistair nods.
‘No detail was overlooked. So it makes sense that the flowers were part of it.’
