At the conservatory the next morning, the flowers were ready before the van was.
Nina stood beside the open doors with her installation sheet, looking at the arrangement of boxes as if it were a difficult equation. Ruth had left space for the two platform pieces, the entrance group and our tools. I wanted to tuck an extra bucket beside the wheel arch in case we needed something.
“What is it for?” Ruth asked.
“Spare stems.”
“We’ve got the spares.”
“These are different spares.”
She raised an eyebrow. I put the bucket back.
Nina checked the straps, then shut the doors. She had done this before. Today, with the responsibility payment on her timesheet and her name on the programme, she checked them again.
At the winter garden, the room looked different with chairs in it. Rows of them, paper programmes on every third seat, a low table for water beside the platform. The place smelled of polish and wet leaves. A musician was taking a cello from its case with the absorbed care I recognised from my own work.
“Where first?” I asked Nina.
“Platform. We can keep the doorway clear until we’re done.”
We carried the pieces through. They were heavier than they looked, and I spent the last few steps wishing I had brought the trolley rather than enjoying how elegant we appeared without it.
A volunteer offered to help. Nina asked him to hold the door while we made the next trip. He looked pleased to have a useful instruction and obeyed it exactly.
The arrangement fitted its marked position. Nina crouched, checked the base, adjusted the angle and stood. She didn’t take it apart to improve the part that was already right. I admired that considerably more than I said.
At the entrance, a woman arranging name badges asked if we could move the flowers six inches.
“They’ll cover the badges,” Nina said.
“Oh, yes. I thought they might make the table nicer.”
“They’ll make it impossible to find your name. We could turn the table slightly.”
They did. The flowers stayed where they belonged. Nobody needed my intervention.
I finished checking the floor and collected the empty sleeves. When I looked up, Adam stood at the far end, speaking to an older man with a walking stick. He saw me and lifted a hand, then returned to listening. There were a dozen things he needed to do. For once he was doing one of them at a time.
By half past four we were finished.
I looked at the signed sheet. Three pieces installed. The van would return for collection after the guests had left, with the time already paid for. Nina took the final photographs and sent them to Celia. Then she took off her work apron and folded it into the tool box.
“I’m staying for the music,” she said.
“Good.”
“I’ve never heard a cello this close.”
“You’ll have to sit on it to be closer than the flowers.”
She grinned and went to find a seat.
I changed in the small staff room, where a mop bucket occupied the only space long enough for my bag. I had brought the blue dress from the cinema. I had also brought shoes that would not make the dress look like an expedition. Getting from one to the other involved balancing on one foot while a volunteer knocked to ask where the spare bin bags were.
“Not in here,” I said, although for all I knew they were.
When I emerged, the garden had begun to fill.
People walked slowly. That was the thing I hadn’t expected. I was used to event guests heading purposefully towards drinks, food or the person who would tell them where to sit. Here they stopped beneath the trees and looked up. Some spoke. Others simply stood, heads tilted, as if somebody had opened a room in their own memory.
Near the main entrance, an elderly woman touched an iron upright with her gloved hand.
“I used to come with my mother,” she told a volunteer. “We’d sit over there when it rained.”
The volunteer said she was glad she’d come back. It was an ordinary sentence. It made my throat tighten.
There was no floral trail. There were leaves, glass, people discovering the way through. I could see why Adam had wanted a grand entrance. I could also see that this was an entrance, and it was already happening.
He found me near the turn into the side room.
“You changed.”
“I thought I’d risk being mistaken for a guest.”
“You look—”
“Careful. I still have scissors in my bag.”
“Beautiful.”
I let him say it without supplying a joke to take it back. His gaze moved over my face, lingering in a way that made the crowd less interesting.
“Come with me,” he said.
He took me to the older man I’d seen during installation. A retired gardener, Mr Ellis, who had worked there when the glass was dirtier and the chairs, according to him, no better. Adam introduced me as Elena, then added that my business had done the flowers.
Mr Ellis examined the room.
“Lovely. You haven’t hidden the place.”
“No,” I said. “We tried not to.”
He nodded, satisfied, then told Adam an elaborate story about a delivery of plants that had arrived at the wrong entrance in 1984. Adam listened as if it were new. From the look in his eyes, it wasn’t.
When Mr Ellis went to sit down, I leaned towards Adam.
“How many times?”
“Seven. The lorry gets larger.”
I laughed. He looked absurdly pleased to have made me do it.
Celia began the welcome without a microphone because the room didn’t need one. She thanked the people who had paid, worked, argued and returned. Adam stood when she named him, looked uncomfortable under the applause and sat before it had finished.
Then she thanked the floral team, and Nina, three seats away, stared so fiercely at her programme that I knew she was trying not to smile too much.
I applauded her. Ruth, who had arrived just before the welcome, applauded loudly enough for both of us.
The music began.
At first I watched the cellist’s hands, the different work of each one, the concentration in her bowed head. Then the sound gathered in the room until I stopped observing and listened. It was lower and more physical than I expected, a vibration that seemed to move through the chair into my ribs.
Adam’s knee touched mine. He didn’t take my hand immediately. I put mine on his leg, and he covered it with his own.
There was rain during the second piece. A fine ticking on the roof, almost lost beneath the music. I turned to look at him. His eyes were lifted towards the glass.
For a moment I saw what he had wanted all along, and felt how close he’d come to damaging something good by insisting it arrive exactly as he’d pictured it.
I squeezed his hand. He looked down, then at me. Neither of us spoke.
Afterwards there was wine, soft drinks and food on trays carried by volunteers who kept apologising for interrupting conversations they were invited to interrupt. Helen was there. She spoke to Celia, took photographs of the room on her phone and asked Nina if she could send her the final design image for their own event file.
Nina gave her the business address and said to mark it for her attention.
I did not hear an offer of work. I didn’t need one for the evening to count.
Ruth found me beside the entrance arrangement.
“I’m off,” she said.
“Already?”
Her eyes narrowed with amusement.
“I’ve been here an hour as a guest. I’m going out with my sister.”
I looked at the clock, then laughed at myself.
“Have fun.”
“That’s the intention.”
She kissed my cheek and left. The flowers remained upright without her.
Later, when the guests had gone, Nina and I collected the hire pieces. Adam helped carry the empty packing boxes to the van after asking where we wanted them. I watched him wait for Nina’s answer. It was a small thing. I was not ready to dismiss small things.
The night air was cool after the damp warmth inside. We wrapped the stems that could go home with volunteers and packed the supports. Nothing had to be remade. Nothing had required an unpaid rescue. Nina checked the final return list and shut the van.
“See you Monday,” she said.
She drove away with the last of the equipment. I had my car and no reason to return to the estate yet.
Adam stood beside me with his hands in his pockets.
“Are you tired?”
“Yes.”
“Would you like to go home?”
“Not particularly.”
He held out his hand.
The garden was almost empty now. Celia had gone to finish locking the office. We walked back through the main path, where a few lights remained on beneath the leaves. At the side room he stopped.
The platform was bare. There were damp marks where our trays had stood and a programme somebody had folded into a fan. I picked it up.
“Souvenir?” he asked.
“Nina’s name.”
I smoothed the page and put it in my bag.
He stood looking at the room for a while. Without people or music, it might have felt diminished. Instead I could still hear the applause in it, the low note at the end of the final piece.
“I wanted the camera here,” he said.
“I know.”
“I’ll still wish we’d had it.”
“You’re allowed.”
He turned towards me. “It doesn’t mean I wish you’d said yes.”
I believed him. Not because his voice was perfect, but because he had stood in front of Helen and removed the feature himself.
I put the bag down on a chair and stepped into his arms.
The kiss began gently and lost its restraint when his hand moved to the small of my back. I had missed this. The fact annoyed me for about half a second, then I put both hands in his hair and let him feel how much.
“Someone will come in,” he murmured.
“They can find their own room.”
He laughed against my cheek. I rested there, listening to the last rain falling from the trees outside.
We did leave before Celia had to evict us. At his house I kicked off the shoes inside the blue gate and walked across the courtyard in my stockings, carrying them by their straps. Adam watched as if this were the most interesting thing that had happened all evening.
“What?” I asked.
“Nothing.”
“Say it.”
“I like you here.”
I put the shoes down and kissed him again.
On Monday morning, the daisy bride’s final email was waiting among the invoices.
Her wedding had been on Sunday. Ruth had arranged the delivery; Nina had made the bouquet; I had checked the order without adding a single rose. The photograph showed daisies against white satin and a mother looking as pleased as if it had been her idea all along.
I printed the picture for the noticeboard beside Nina’s winter-garden programme. Two finished jobs. Two very different rooms.
Then I opened the station lease papers and called Harriet.
Sign Here
The man buying my trumpet vases brought a tape measure and no affection for them.
He lifted the first one, turned it over and found the dent I had managed not to notice in the photographs.
“That’ll show.”
“Only if you put it backwards.”
“People walk round things.”
His name was Clive. He ran an event-hire business two towns away and had arrived in a van large enough to take most of my mistakes. I had set the ornamental stock out along the bench: the brass vases, six tall silver-coloured stands, two enormous bowls and a collection of lanterns whose glass took longer to clean than their hire fee justified.
Clive examined everything without hurrying. I hovered beside him, supplying explanations that did not increase his offer.
“These were expensive.”
“I expect they were.”
“The silver ones photograph beautifully.”
“Provided nobody gets a flash on that bit.”
He pointed to a patch where the finish had worn thin.
I wanted him to leave. I also wanted the money he had not yet offered me.
Ruth came past with the dispatch sheet, stopped and said, “We’ve hired those twice in three years.”
“Three times.”
“One of those was for Richard.”
Clive took out his notebook. I gave Ruth a look. She returned to her work.
He offered less than I wanted and more than the cupboard full of metal was earning. I said no to the first figure. He separated the lanterns from the rest and made a different offer. We discussed whether he would take the cracked glass panel and repair it himself. He would, if I stopped describing it as barely cracked.
By the time we agreed, I felt wrung out.
He paid by transfer. I checked it had arrived before we loaded. The bank balance changed in the small, ordinary way numbers did when a thing had become money.
I helped him lift the last stand into his van. For a moment I saw it in the conservatory as it had been at a party years earlier, full of white flowers while Richard touched my waist and told someone I had done all of it. I had liked hearing him say that. The memory remained true even with Clive strapping the stand beside a box of chair covers.
“Good weight,” he said.
“Yes.”
He drove away. I stood in the space he’d left, holding a roll of packaging.
Inside, the shelves looked startlingly empty.
Nina came to stand beside me.
“We could put things we use there.”
“A revolutionary approach.”
She smiled, then looked at me more carefully.
“Are you all right?”
“I miss the money I paid for them.”
“That wasn’t quite what I meant.”
“I know.”
I gave her the packaging and went to make the payment the sale had made possible.
The station lease had taken longer than I’d wanted and less time than it might have. Harriet had explained the clauses I did not understand. The owner’s agent had answered some questions quickly and others with the optimism of a man who hoped I would stop asking.
The entrance mattered most. I could cope with plain walls and a cupboard I disliked. I couldn’t sign for a shop whose customers stood unnoticed at one end while we worked at the other.
By Tuesday we had a written arrangement for the front entrance bell, a visible sign and specified collection access through the yard. The owner would complete the electrical work before we took possession. We would pay for our own fittings. There were limits to where the van could wait, and a neighbouring tenant’s access had to remain clear. I read that part twice, then drove over with Ruth to see whether it could work without daily hostilities.
The repair-shop owner came out while we stood in the yard.
“Moving in, then?”
“Nearly.”
He pointed to the marked space. “You can unload there. Just don’t leave anything where the oil delivery goes.”
Ruth looked at the distance to our door.
“How often?”
He told her. She wrote it down.
I watched them agree a practical matter without any mention of what the place meant to me. It was a relief.
Inside, the front door bell was being fitted. The electrician pressed it, and the sound reached the back room with a cheerful aggression that would be impossible to miss.
Ruth jumped.
“Perfect,” she said.
I walked to the window and stood where the tall urns had blocked the view during our trial. Without them, I could see the workbench position, the entrance and the small patch of pavement where someone might stop to read our name.
We had space for the arch on the inner wall. The decorative panels would stand alongside it, if the agreed removal went ahead. They would frame the flowers, not imitate a building we no longer occupied.
I took a photograph and sent it to Adam with the receiving measurements he’d asked for. His priced proposal for dismantling and preparing the selected pieces was already in my inbox. I accepted it through the business account after checking the schedule. Paid work, with a date, as the first visit had been.
Then I called Harriet about the remaining inventory issue.
Richard had marked the two decorative panels as estate fittings. The arch was easier: Mum’s old photograph and purchase papers showed it in her shop before we moved. The panels had been bought during the conservatory years, and I had found the invoice only after opening a folder labelled in my handwriting as Christmas Miscellaneous.
The invoice was addressed to the business. Payment was visible in the old account record. Harriet asked for both, together with the photographs of where they were fixed. She would put them with the proposed inventory agreement. The removal permissions and dates still needed to be clear, even where we agreed what belonged to whom.
I sent the files and closed the laptop.
For once, finding paper changed something more useful than my mood.