18+ years Winning Entry by JANE EDWARDS for The Globe Short Story Competition
She has Brought me Flowers
She has brought me flowers. A huge armful of them that obscure her face as I answer the door. And I am scurrying around finding vases for them, removing my wan early daffodils from their home and unceremoniously plonking them in a simple brown jug, freeing their vase for some of Rose’s copious offerings. They are delightful, her flowers. She has brought delicate, creamy, long stemmed freesias and beautiful tight-budded, pale lisianthus that will open up into full and blowsy cream blooms tinged with apricot and will conjure up the heaviness of high summer. Flowers that look like fat peonies; I can’t imagine where they’ve come from at this time of year and evade thinking about air miles. The sort of flowers I would choose if I were ever to have another wedding. Gregarious, overflowing flowers that speak of generosity and abundance and, of course, portray their giver as being imbued with those same qualities.
She has brought pink flowers as well. These I ponder over and decide on a separate vase. They’re flowers of a different ilk. Tight, dark pink rosebuds and exotic, deep throated lilies and folded in carnations of contrast with long strips of green foliage. I shall put them in my rarely used tall Worcester vase; passed down, in pristine condition, from my Grandmother.
“It’s too special to be using all the time.” She had embedded into my psyche.
And although her caution is still instilled in me, I know that these are blooms that need a Sunday parlour, best vase. A vase of quality is required for them. They are tall and upright and assertively command attention with their boldness. The mean but rather obvious thought that perhaps these blooms are a more true reflection of Rose’s personality than the gentle, overflowing flowers inveigles its way onto my mind. I try, unsuccessfully, to dispel it.
I have never received such a fabulous bouquet in my life. How ironic that it’s come from her. She who now leans casually on my kitchen worktop, looking superb in her elegant choice of coordinating shades of plums and mauves, as I clumsily scramble through cupboards to unearth containers and Michael makes coffee for us all. The combined fragrance of Rose’s offerings and the coffee hovers uncomfortably amongst the informality of my eclectic array of kitchenware, carefully garnered from auctions and car boot sales. I inhale deeply, unnerved by the exotic aromas she has created. An aroma that is insidiously invading my kitchen like mustard gas.
She addresses me directly, momentarily ignoring Michael.
“You’ve certainly given this place much more of a homely feel since —.” And chooses not to finish her sentence. Leaves it hanging because she knows that it has more power if unspoken.
She shifts up a gear, smiling meaningfully at Michael now. “It had begun to look very forlorn. But that’s men, I guess.”
He says nothing. Carries the coffee through into the living room. We follow silently.
The silence is as transient as a moment of joy. Once seated Rose begins her one woman show, and I know that we’re down to the serious business; the reason for her visit. It’s not a mercy mission to indulge me with an appropriately generous deluge of flowers because she’d heard that I’d been ‘off colour’. This is the next strategy in her campaign, and I pray Michael is not going to let her achieve her normal role of victrix ludorum. We listen. We are bit part players in her production. Occasionally we feed her with opportunities to take her conversation in a new direction, but she demurs and re-focuses us on her topic – Rose. She is centre stage and this is her moment. Her determination to leave me in no doubt about her superiority as a person and therefore, implicitly, as a partner for Michael is astounding. Ten out of ten for tenacity, Rose.
Her conversation, no, her carefully constructed dramatic monologue gathers momentum and volume like a snow fall cascading down a mountainside. And it’s every bit as dangerous and potentially destructive. She tells us of her new house and her plans for it, her impending job interview, her forthcoming holiday in New Zealand, the amazing car she has just ordered, until, ultimately, she reaches a crescendo and achieves her conversational goal; her new lover’s extravagant lifestyle.
“It’s absolutely exhausting.” She complains. “We’re away nearly every weekend, and when we’re not we’re just so busy socialising or entertaining. Richard’s a big entertainer. But then he’s got the space.”
She pauses momentarily but dramatically, and allows her eyes to convey just a hint of disdain as she lets them glance round the cottage living room. The room that was once hers, but which she has now outgrown. The stone floor covered with my beautiful, exotically hued Turkish rug that I bought from the factory and had shipped home, the rustic wood-burner and the comfortable Liberty sofas that now lack the cachet they once had, are not of her world any more.
Her new man’s style is what she’s appeared to aspire to for a long time, but her continuing visits to the cottage as she’s ‘passing by’ reveal a different aspiration to me if not to Michael.
I endure her vacuous chatter as we work our way through second cups of coffee and I silently castigate Michael for making such a large pot, although the caffeine does help. Eventually she announces.
“Well, I must go. Richard’s having a big dinner party tonight, some of his county set. The Blue Boar people are doing the food, of course, so we don’t even have to think about that.” She laughs and makes a silly gesture with her hands. “But I need to get over there to check that the table settings and flowers have been done properly.”
She looks from one to the other of us expectantly. Our grins are banal, like someone who has misheard a remark and doesn’t want to give offence. The expected responsive words have got lost in the black hole between our thought processes and our mouths.
Undaunted, or perhaps inspired, by our taciturn reaction to her dinner party plans she picks up her car keys and delivers her parting volley.
“Not like the old days Michael, when it was pasta and a bottle of Bulgarian red round the kitchen table.”
She scored a bulls-eye with this one. I instinctively glance at Michael, but he won’t be drawn and shifts coffee cups around on the tray. We still entertain like that. I didn’t know that was how they, Rose and Michael, did it. I thought it was my influence, my love of homely and uncomplicated way of living that drove our simple style.
I’ve had enough now and I hasten her departure.
“Well, goodbye Rose. Thank you so much for the beautiful flowers. I feel like a fraud, I’ve only been a bit off colour, not ill.”
“Nonsense.” She flashes another glance around the room. “Anyway, they give the place a touch of sophistication.”
I leave Michael to see her out and make my way through the kitchen to the garden, which entices me from beyond the French doors. Only pausing momentarily en route to pick up my secateurs from where I left them when Rose arrived.
Whether it’s a conscious decision that compels me or some deeply primal instinct I don’t know. It just feels right. I’m observing my hands as if they’re not mine. Like those people on the television, that I have always dismissed as being weirdos, talking about their out of body experience my hands cut and pull at first one and then the other of the two disproportionately large rosemary bushes that phalanx the French doors. The pile of fragrant, spiky green twigs grows at a startling rate. This is what I should have done in the autumn, instead of listening to Michael’s protests of.
“Oh, don’t cut them back. I rather like them.”
I move on, because she wasn’t satisfied with just one ostentation eponymous statement in this garden, she was like a dog marking its territory. I had never, until I came to live here last year, realised how many varieties and colours of rosemary there are. Or, indeed, of roses. I methodically cut them all back; the Albertine, the Rambling Rector, the Elizabeth of Glamis and the many, many whose names I am blissfully unaware of. The egocentricity of the woman astounds me, as does my own exquisite and intense sense of catharsis. I don’t stop until all the roses and all the rosemary bushes are just stark, bare twigs and the garden is strewn with the detritus of my cull. A bonfire is the only way I’ll get rid of it all and I inwardly relish that pleasure yet to come. Appraising my handiwork I smile but am shocked at how ugly and small the plants have become, how controlled. They’re in proper perspective now and other plants, smothered by them, have become apparent. Under what used to be the canopy of the largest rosemary bush I can see the green tips of the first snowdrops.
As I turn towards the kitchen I see Michael. He is leaning against the door, watching me. I wonder how long he has been there. He smiles and waves the box of matches he has in his hand.
“Come on.” He says. “It’s time to get rid of this lot.”
We arrange the cuttings into a huge pile down the bottom of the garden. As he strikes the first match I give him a quizzical look.
“It’s OK.” He says. “We should have done