Outside, the morning had warmed. We walked along the north side, where the garden narrowed between the conservatory and a clipped hedge. Adam took off his jacket and hooked it over his arm. Beneath it he wore a dark green shirt with the sleeves folded back. His forearms were lightly scratched.
I looked at the gutter.
He looked at the gutter too. For entirely better reasons.
“The downpipe is blocked,” he said.
“We’ve had it cleared twice.”
“By someone who looked at where it drains?”
“By someone with a ladder and a bill.”
“A popular combination.”
He crouched again. I crouched beside him, less elegantly, and a twig caught in the hem of my coat. I tugged at it. It tugged back. He reached to help and then stopped when I swore.
“Sorry,” I said. “Not at you.”
“I was hoping.”
I freed the twig and stood up too fast. My shoulder hit his as he rose, and for a second we were both trying to occupy the same narrow strip beside the hedge. His hand came to my upper arm, steadying rather than holding. I could smell cold air on his shirt and something faintly like cedar.
Then he stepped back onto the path.
“Mind the step.”
“I live here.”
As soon as I said it, I wished I hadn’t.
He glanced at the house but didn’t ask.
At the far end, beside the three projecting bays, he measured the distance to the access gate. I began telling him about the delivery that had almost got stuck there at Christmas. He listened, then asked how high the delivery had been.
“I don’t know. A van.”
“Moving even dismantled sections will need rather more than your flower van.”
“I wasn’t going to do it myself.”
“You looked as though you were considering it.”
“I was considering hiring a larger van.”
He laughed. Not kindly. Properly laughed, head lowered, one hand pressed to the back of his neck.
I resented how much I liked it.
“All right,” I said. “You’ve had your fun.”
“I haven’t even asked where you planned to put it.”
“I haven’t found that yet.”
The laughter went out of his face.
“Then don’t pay anyone to design a complete relocation until you know the receiving site. Storage, foundations, access—all of that changes the job.”
“I know that.”
I didn’t. Not all of it.
He looked at the far bay again. “What matters most? The working space or the old structure?”
“Both.”
“If both isn’t available?”
“You haven’t established that it isn’t.”
“No,” he said. “I haven’t.”
We went back inside through the yard doors. Nina had gone to make a delivery. Ruth was on the telephone, holding the receiver slightly away from her ear in the way that meant a customer was describing a colour at great length.
Adam turned towards the old display arch between the central bays.
“Was that always there?”
“Not when the conservatory was built. Mum had it brought in from her old premises.”
He studied the painted uprights. “I assumed it was part of the later partition.”
“It isn’t attached to that.”
I reached behind the trailing ivy, lifted the pot out of its wire cradle and exposed the base.
“Look.”
There were bolts beneath removable wooden caps. Mum had made the caps herself, badly enough that one was held in place with folded cardboard. The upright had come with the shop. I remembered standing on newspaper while she painted it, being told to stop stepping backwards.
Adam knelt.
“You’ve moved this before?”
“I helped.”
“Do you remember how it came apart?”
I fetched a stool and showed him the joint near the top. He handed me the tape, watched while I hooked it round the right point and wrote down the measurement I called out.
The arch wasn’t large. It couldn’t hold a roof. But as we worked along it, naming pieces I knew, I stopped feeling as though every word out of my mouth was going to be corrected.
“That could travel,” he said.
“Yes.”
“And the decorative panels alongside it may be reusable separately. I’d need to check their condition.”
I wanted to be pleased. Instead, I looked up at the roof and felt cheated by the smallness of what he could offer.
He noticed.
“I know it’s not the whole room.”
“Then don’t say it as though it is.”
He closed the notebook.
Ruth finished her phone call. In the silence afterwards, I could hear the boiler clicking behind the partition.
“I’m going to get lunch,” she said. “Elena, cheese or chicken?”
“I’m not hungry.”
“Cheese, then.” She looked at Adam. “You?”
“I can go and get something.”
“I’m going anyway.”
“Chicken, please.”
He took out his wallet. Ruth accepted the money, took mine from the petty-cash tin with a note beside it, and left us alone.
I put the ivy back in its cradle. A leaf dropped onto the floor. I picked it up, because bending down was easier than looking at Adam.
“I was rude,” I said.
“Yes.”
I straightened.
He was leaning against the bench, arms folded loosely, looking at me with maddening composure.
“You could give me a little help.”
“You were doing well.”
I laughed despite myself. “Don’t push it.”
“I’m sorry I sounded pleased about a small part when you’d asked me about all of it.”
“You were pleased.”
“It’s a good piece. And you found a solution I hadn’t seen.”
I looked at the arch. The paint needed touching up. Mum’s ugly wooden caps were visible now that the ivy had been moved.
“She never could cut a straight line.”
“Your mother?”
“She used to tell people it was rustic.”
He bent to inspect the cardboard beneath one cap.
“Very rustic.”
“Careful.”
He held up a hand.
When Ruth returned, we ate at the small table by the yard doors. She carried her sandwich into the office to finish an order, leaving me with a cheese baguette large enough to threaten my jaw and Adam with a chicken sandwich that had lost all structural ambition.
He lifted half of it. Filling slid out onto the paper.
“You should have commissioned a survey,” I said.
He looked at the wreckage, then at me.
“Did you save that up?”
“Since you ordered.”
“That’s quite a commitment.”
The baguette cracked when I bit it. A shower of crumbs fell down my coat. Adam politely pretended not to notice for approximately half a second.
“At least mine’s standing,” I said.
“So is this conservatory. We haven’t reached a conclusion about either.”
I had cheese stuck to the roof of my mouth and couldn’t answer. He looked very pleased with himself.
We talked about the sandwich shop, which he said had been better before they enlarged the menu. I disagreed. He objected to beetroot being treated as a universal improvement. I told him he was frightened of colour. He asked whether everything I sold had to be beautiful, and I admitted that funeral tributes shaped like footballs were the most difficult part of my professional life.
“Because they’re ugly?”
“Because it’s impossible to arrange flowers into a convincing sphere and still get it through a door.”
“Perhaps a larger van.”
I kicked his shoe beneath the table.
It was not a calculated thing. I used to do it when someone teased me. I hadn’t realised how long it had been until my foot touched his.
His eyes lifted to mine.
I reached for my tea.
After lunch, he went through what the next piece of work would involve. A limited survey identifying salvageable elements, with photographs, dimensions and handling considerations. The doubtful structural connection needed the separate check he’d arranged; he would include the result when available rather than guessing. Any move would need permissions and practical arrangements that neither of us could settle today.
He wrote down the fee and turned the page towards me.
I looked at it, then at the conservatory.
“I can’t pay for you to tell me everything’s impossible.”
“I can’t promise to tell you something else.”
I ran my finger down the edge of the paper. There was enough in the business account to pay it. There was not enough to stop caring whether it had been worth paying.
“The arch,” I said. “The panels. Anything else that could work in a different building. Give me those options as well.”
He added the words while I watched.
“And I want the photographs even if the answer is no.”
“Of course.”
I accepted the limited scope. He said he would email the terms that afternoon and send the salvage report on Sunday, the eleventh, provided his colleague could complete the connection check tomorrow as arranged. If that changed, he’d tell me.
At the yard gate, he paused beside his car.
“Do you have someone looking for premises?”
“Me.”
“I know a couple of local agents. I can give you names.”
“I’d like that.”
“There may be somewhere worth considering. I need to check the details before I describe it.”
He didn’t tell me to cheer up. He didn’t say my new place would be better.
He got into his car and then wound the window down.
“Your survey joke was terrible.”
“Your lunch was worse.”
He drove away smiling.
I stayed by the gate until the car turned out onto the lane. Then I went back inside, moved the ivy aside again and took a photograph of Mum’s crooked wooden cap.
For the first time since Richard had spoken, I wanted to show somebody something that wasn’t evidence.
An Honest Price
The quote was wrong by more than the amount I paid myself in a good week.
I checked it again, because I disliked that conclusion.
Nina had put small orange dots beside the numbers she wanted me to look at. There were enough dots to make the page appear infectious.
“What are these?” I asked, although I knew.
“Hours.”
“I put the hours in.”
“Some of them.”
The morning was wet. Water pattered into the temporary tray beneath the north gutter, and beyond the glass a man Adam had arranged to inspect the roof connection was lifting equipment from his van. Adam’s written scope had arrived the previous afternoon as promised, together with two local agents’ numbers. I had accepted it by email and paid the survey fee before I could change my mind. Now another man had come to tell us what we should not climb on.
I wanted flowers. For one morning, I wanted my work to consist of flowers.
“The wedding is only forty minutes away,” I said.
“Each way. Twice.”
“We could collect the stands the next morning.”
“That’s the second trip.”
I looked at the orange dot beside collection.
“And the staircase takes two people,” Nina said.
“I can do the staircase.”
“I know you can. You can’t do the staircase and put the table pieces out at the same time.”
“We’ve done it before.”
“Yes. You skipped lunch and I stayed until eight.”
There was no reproach in her voice, which somehow made it harder to answer. She had her calculator ready, tilted towards me. She’d already done the sums. What she needed was for me to stop pretending they were opinions.
The client was coming at eleven.
“It was an estimate,” I said. “Not an accepted quote.”
“Then we can change it.”
The original email lay beneath her calculations. I’d sent it three weeks earlier, at eleven at night, after Richard asked if we had anything he could take to a colleague’s birthday. I remembered putting the costs together while checking whether the ribbon cupboard contained something sufficiently masculine for a man who had specifically requested flowers.
Three thousand two hundred pounds. Preliminary, subject to final design and access.
I had left out most of my own preparation time.
We started again.
At half past ten, the man checking the roof asked us not to use the end bay for storage until the temporary support he recommended had been fitted. He emailed his note to both Adam and me. I moved the light things with Nina while Ruth arranged the required follow-up. There was no dramatic crack, no falling glass. Just another part of the room we could not use as casually as yesterday.
When we returned to the quote, Nina had drawn a second version of the staircase installation on the back of a delivery sheet.
“What’s that?”
“Something that doesn’t take four hours to remove.”
She had designed three grouped arrangements in fitted containers, with trailing foliage linking them. The containers could lift off after the ceremony and go beside the evening bar. My original drawing wrapped the whole banister in flowers.
“It loses the line,” I said.
She turned the paper sideways so I could see the height.
“The line’s still there. It just isn’t covered.”
“I wanted it to feel abundant.”
“It will. Look at the bottom.”
I looked. The lowest group was generous, almost wild, with branches reaching into the empty space beside the first step. It would photograph beautifully. I hated that my first instinct was to find a reason it wouldn’t.
“We’ll need a trial,” I said.
“I made one.”
She pointed behind me.
On the old display plinth, half-hidden by a sheet of brown paper, stood a rough arrangement made with leftover foliage and stems too short to sell. It was unpolished and considerably better than the drawing.
I walked round it.
“You shouldn’t have used that bucket.”
Nina’s face closed.
The bucket was a perfectly good bucket. I had been saving the stems in it for something I could no longer remember.
“No,” I said. “That was stupid. The shape works. Bring it over.”
She lifted it without comment.
Sophie and Finn arrived six minutes early with a folder, a coffee each and Sophie’s mother on a video call.
“She can’t stay long,” Sophie assured me.
“I can hear you,” her mother said.
Finn put his coffee on the bench, saw the water ring immediately forming and lifted it again.
“Sorry.”
“It’s been worse,” I said. “You should see what roses do to it.”
He smiled gratefully.
We sat around the consultation table with Nina’s trial arrangement beside us. Sophie touched one of the arching stems before she took off her coat.
“That’s gorgeous.”
“It’s a rough sample,” I said.
“But that shape?”
“Yes.”
Her mother peered at us from the phone. “Can somebody turn me round?”
Finn held up the phone. We all looked at the flowers, including a woman fifty miles away who announced that she didn’t care for dangling things.
“I do,” Sophie said.
There was a short silence.
“Then have them, darling.”
We went through the rooms, the timings, the pieces that would move between ceremony and reception. Finn asked practical questions. Sophie kept coming back to the trial shape, wanting to know whether the flowers would reach as far as the foliage did. I showed her with a spare stem, and she leaned forward with a look I recognised: the moment when a picture became something she could stand beside.
Then I put the revised quote on the table.
“This is higher than my preliminary estimate.”
“How much higher?” Finn asked.
“Four thousand eight hundred and sixty in total.”
He looked down.
I could hear rain striking the roof, individually, like somebody tapping their nails above us.
“That’s a lot more,” he said.
“Yes.”
I wanted to tell him why I’d been distracted when I wrote the first number. I wanted to offer to do the collection myself. I wanted to knock off something, anything, before he could say no.
Instead I showed them the work. Two people at the venue. The preparation. The containers, transport and return visit. The revised staircase design saved time, but there was still time to pay for.
Sophie glanced at Finn.
“We could lose the flowers outside.”
“It’s your entrance,” her mother said from the phone.
“It’s a door, Mum.”
Finn tried not to smile.
I turned to a photograph of the venue. “There are already planted tubs either side. You don’t need to hire two more from us. If you wanted to remove that element, I can show you the exact reduction.”
“Would it look bare?” Sophie asked.
“No.”
Her mother made a doubtful noise.
“The room matters more,” Finn said. “We’ll be in it for hours.”
They bent over the page together. I let them. Nina stood by the workbench, trimming a stem so slowly that she could not possibly have needed it that short.
At last Finn put his finger on the total.
“Keep it. The outside bits too. We’ve got room if we stop adding things to the food.”
“I told you no one needed a second pudding,” Sophie said.
“I needed a second pudding.”
“You can have mine.”
He looked at me. “Can you send this as the final version?”
“Yes.”
I said it as if the word had not just loosened something painful beneath my ribs.
After we confirmed the date, I explained that our working address might change before the wedding but that the agreed delivery and installation would remain the same. Sophie asked whether she’d need to collect anything. When I said no, she returned to discussing the flowers.
“I like your new staircase idea better,” she told me as she put her coat on.
“It’s Nina’s.”
Nina looked up.
“She designed the removable groups. She’ll help install them.”
Sophie went over to ask her a question. They stood beside the trial arrangement, leaning towards it at the same angle, and I watched Nina draw the shape in the air with her hands.
Finn lingered at the table.
“The first estimate,” he said. “You weren’t going to spring all this on us later, were you?”
“No. I got it wrong.”
He nodded, apparently satisfied by the answer I had found hardest to give.
When they left, I sat down in the nearest chair.
“You can breathe now,” Nina said.
“I was breathing.”
“Through your ears, maybe.”
Ruth came out of the office. “Did they book?”
“They’re accepting the revised quote.”
“Good. Put all the hours in the diary.”
I glanced at her. “We did.”
“Yours too.”
“Yes, mine too.”
She studied me for a moment, then took the old estimate and put it in the recycling.