Emma looks around at the flowers intertwined with the rooftop and thinks of all the flowers she has seen over the past few weeks: in her garden, the garden centre, in Clem’s shop, on the riverbanks in Cambridge, in the flowerbeds of Paris and Seville. The cosmos that smell of chocolate, the sunny-faced gerberas, the feathery lavender and velvety lupins, the bold, happy sunflowers and the old English roses scented with summer.
As the flowers bloom and fade they speak to her of the fragility of life– there one moment and gone the next. But each delicate petal, each fragrant flower has also reminded her of something else, something she has been in danger of forgetting.
That life is beautiful.
Emma takes one last look across the glowing city and calls for the bill. It is time to go home.
She has a book to write, a garden to tend and a lunch to host.
Nine months later, Emma will have achieved one of these three things.
PART 4
Chapter 78
Emma
Oxford
Emma lies under the apple trees, her fingers brushing a few long blades of grass that she missed when she mowed the lawn earlier. She had been asleep and had been dreaming in Spanish. She stretches her arms out wide, looking up at the sky through the branches. It is a clear May day, two years and two days since Will died.
She turns her head towards the greenhouse, where she can glimpse the tops of her young plantlings: blush-coloured hollyhocks, magenta poppies and lupins the colour of ice cream.
It has taken her longer than she imagined to find a date that everyone could make for lunch, but tomorrow is the day, and she is just about ready. She has been cooking for two days solid and all the crockery, tablecloths, glasses and cutlery are piled up in the utility room. Beside her, under the apple trees, the table and chairs are lined up ready. All she really has left to do is arrange the flowers for the tables and make up the spare room bed.
She sits up and looks out at her garden. Early white and purple aquilegia are standing guard by the gate and the peonies that line the drive look about to burst into life. Under the trees and in the (now tidy) flowerbeds, the last of the bluebells and cowslips bloom. Behind them, standing tall and proud, the foxgloves have returned.
Emma smiles at her garden– and she likes to think it smiles back at her. She couldn’t have done it all without Les’s advice and occasional manual labour, but she is a quick learner. After all, she comes from a long line of gardeners.
Les wouldn’t accept any payment for his help or for the many plants he has given her, so instead, she has been giving him and Betty French conversation lessons over supper in her kitchen. They are planning another trip to Paris to celebrate their forty-first wedding anniversary. As Betty put it, ‘At our age, love, you can’t hang around waiting for someone to ask you to dance’.
In addition to French, Emma now runs Italian and Spanish conversation classes at the garden centre, the new café being a perfect space for people to gather. On warmer evenings, they throw open the doors so they can have lessons on the veranda looking out over the downs.
Since returning from Seville, her time has been taken up with her garden, her three days a week in the garden centre and her burgeoning language classes. And the book idea has changed into something else. In the end, Emma decided to follow one of the lessons she learnt the previous summer: small contributions are worthwhile, too. So instead of writing a book, she ended up collaborating with Alistair on an academic paper exploring the flowers on theTitanic. The paper referenced the work of what they had concluded was a band of stewardesses– the florists on theTitanic– but it was dedicated to one in particular: Violet Jessop.
Alistair will be staying with her after the lunch tomorrow, while Clem will stay with Betty and Les, as will Mrs Pepperpot. Roberto and Philippe have organised accommodation in Oxford with friends and relatives. Tamas will be getting a taxi over.
Emma invited Berta, too– a shy but determined woman whom Emma has now met a few times– but she politely declined. She and Tamas are now spending more and more time with Betty and Les at the garden centre, and together they are drawing up plans for Tamas and Berta to take over some of the day-to-day management of the centre, freeing up time for Betty and Les to visit their son and for Les to concentrate on growing begonias and sweet peas for the local flower shows. Berta also has ideas for extending the market linked to the allotments, and she has enlisted her father’s help to work up plans to make English wine.
Emma has finally tracked down the smiley girl from the library– who she now knows is called Ellie– and while she cannot join them for lunch she is going to call in for a drink (and pudding) in the afternoon. Her only slight sadness is that it is impractical for Guy to fly over for the lunch.
When Emma heads inside to tidy the spare room, she visits her own bedroom on the way, pausing by the perfume Phillipe sent her a few months ago. As she sprays it on her wrist, the fragrance fills the room with the promise of summer, with a hint of something that stirs old memories.
Once the spare room is prepared, Emma sits for a while on the edge of the bed, enjoying the satisfaction that everything is now ready. Absentmindedly, she pulls a drawer open in the chest beside her.
She glances at Will’s old love letters, bundled up alongside the letters Granny Maria sent her over the years. Can she bear to look at them? Emma glances out of the window to the garden that she has come to love so much, and thinks, now, she can.
She pulls a pile of letters from the drawer and sits cross-legged on the floor, back propped against the bed. She unties the ribbon, takes a deep breath and starts to read.
There are the remembered phrases and endearments, written in small, rounded handwriting, which always made her think of Will, the little boy, sent away to boarding school at eight. There are lines from songs that reminded him of her; lyrics that take her back to evenings spent together shuffling through tracks on his iPod, squabbling over each other’s taste in music, until they fell silent over one song they both loved.
One of the final letters she opens is still creased from where it lay under her pillow. There are the three words he chose for her: Brave, Bossy and Beautiful. She smiles as she reads on and cries afresh as she runs her fingertip over where Will signed his name.
Hedidlove her. And she loved him.
When she can no longer see the pages for her tears, she puts the bundle away, and starts to read Granny Maria’s letters instead.
Granny Maria wrote sometimes in English, sometimes in Spanish, but always in a big loopy scrawl. The letters have been stored in no particular order and there seem to be hundreds of them. She finds advice to her twelve-year-old self about friends at school. Her grandmother’s suggestions were centred around kindness, but with a sting in the tail:If they make you cry again,mi niña, I will come and beat them with my big stick.
