Page 83 of My Kind of Happy

Chapter Twenty-four

The following week I arranged to speak to Nina on the phone. So far, we’d spoken mostly via text and email because of the eleven-hour time difference between us. But the cost of the flowers I was going to need to fulfil the Edelweiss order was so enormous that I’d wanted Nina’s blessing before committing to it. It was morning here, and night where she was. It was lovely to hear her voice and she sounded in very good spirits.

‘Just go for it,’ she trilled down the phone. ‘I trust you wholeheartedly.’

‘Are you absolutely sure?’ I said, wincing at the amount in the ‘total’ box on the screen. ‘Last chance to back out.’

‘Edelweiss have emailed their approval, haven’t they?’ Nina asked before hiccupping. I’d interrupted her having a drink with her new friends. I suspected it wasn’t her first.

‘Well, yes.’

‘Press confirm and stop worrying about it. As the saying goes: you’ve got to speculate to accumulate.’

Even from over eleven thousand miles away, I could detect the new lightness to her voice. And not only because of the alcohol. Her time away from the business was definitely doing her good.

‘OK, here goes.’ I tapped the ‘confirm’ button, committing us to the largest amount of flowers the shop had ever bought for a single event. ‘Let’s hope this is the start of our accumulation phase.’

I had butterflies in my stomach; I felt the weight of responsibility passing from Nina to me as I took the company bank card out of the drawer and typed in the number.

I kept thinking about what Nina had said about corporate flowers being for ‘faceless’ people. Of course Marcia at the Claybourne Hotel was a real person and I had already been paid the deposit. But I hadn’t actually spoken to anyone at Edelweiss and although I’d had a prompt response to my email I still felt nervous about it. I tried to explain this to her but she was only half listening; it sounded like someone was topping up her drink in the background.

‘Did you always meet your clients face-to-face in your last job before doing a market research project for them?’

‘No. You’re right,’ I admitted. Perhaps I was being over cautious. ‘I just want to do a good job for you.’

‘Are you kidding me!’ she shrieked. ‘Thanks to you I’m in New Zealand for six weeks while it’s business as usual for Nina’s Flowers. There’s no way any of this could have been possible without you. You’ve made my dream come true. Well, between you and Freddie. If you hadn’t told me about the lovely letter he wrote to you, I’d never have had the balls to actually go ahead with this. I’m finally doing what makes me happy and I’m so proud of myself.’

My heart skipped for her. ‘Oh, that reminds me, talking of letters, Biddy was telling me about her romantic past. Can you remember her receiving a weekly bouquet for a while?’

Biddy’s story had really stuck with me, so much so that I’d spent the last two evenings going through every single one of Nina’s old order books to take a glimpse at the messages he wrote to her for myself. But I hadn’t been able to find anything which matched what she’d told me.

‘Yes, I do,’ she said thoughtfully. ‘It was early on, probably during the first year of me opening the florist’s. The whole thing was utterly romantic. The first note was something about her bringing sunshine into his life. She cried when she got the first bouquet. And they got steadily more intimate. He told her that he counted down the days until he saw her again, that she’d always own a piece of his heart, that he dreamed of the day he could wake up and the first thing he saw would be her. The loveliest one brought tears to my eyes; it said something like her smile was his sunrise, her eyes his stars, and her heart the centre of his world.’

No wonder Biddy was heartbroken when it ended. Imagine having a love as intense as that and losing it.

‘Goodness, I don’t think anyone has felt like that about me,’ I said.

‘Me neither. Anyway, this went on for months. And then one day he wrote that even though they could never be together, he’d never stop loving her. And that was the last I ever heard from him. It nearly broke my heart delivering that final bouquet.’

Poor Biddy. At least the reason the love affair finished was because he’d decided to do the honourable thing and stick by his sick wife.

‘What was he like?’

‘I never met him. That was the weird thing. He used to drop an envelope of cash through the shop letter box along with a handwritten note. Whoever he was, he was a beautiful letter writer. I used to look forward to getting them to read first and then once I delivered the flowers, just knowing that Biddy had received that romantic message used to make my day. Biddy has never said a word. Not one word of explanation. I’ve always wondered. Why do you ask?’

‘She mentioned it the other day, that was all and I was intrigued.’

So that was why I hadn’t found any records, because there weren’t any. I’d had some vague notion of somehow trying to track him down via his credit card details. Just as well; it would probably have been breaking a dozen data protection laws anyway.

‘What else has been happening in my absence?’ Nina wanted to know.

‘Besides making a fruit and vegetable-themed coffin spray and planning a flower workshop for a cricket team?’ I said airily. ‘Not much.’

‘A what?’

She snorted with laughter and gasped in delight as I filled her in on what I’d been up to.

One of Wendy’s staff had collected the arrangement for Mrs Benton-Ridley’s funeral yesterday (from the look on his face he’d never seen anything like it), and Sam had called in again yesterday evening to confirm numbers for the cricket team workshop this coming Saturday night and paid a deposit of twenty-five pounds per head. And then of course, the big event at the Claybourne Hotel.