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I drove into town at lunchtime to collect flowers from her favourite shop in the Covered Market and was half tempted to pop into St Aldate’s, but stopped myself. Quinn deserved his last day in charge without me creeping round the furniture.
By the time I turn into our street the drizzle is thinking aboutturning into sleet and the temperature’s dropped to three degrees. Most of the houses along here have their Christmas decorations out already – the usual mixture of the elegantly restrained and the borderline terrifying (the inflatable flashing snowman at number 78 never fails to give me the willies), but our house is still dark because Alex’s family always waited until after her birthday to put up the tree when she was a child and now we do too. Like she says, it’s good to spread out the things we celebrate.
Lily is at her grandparents’ tonight, so we can go out for dinner. I always find it touching the way she behaves a little differently with them, as if she’d intuited even as a toddler that Alex’s dad isn’t quite as mobile as he used to be, so maybe hide-and-seek won’t be as much fun as it is at home, but he does read a mean story. These days, of course, they read to each other, and they have this thing where they choose the story for the other to read aloud, with Lily choosing girly princess stuff for Stephen just to hear him do the voices, and him choosing cowboys and adventures for her, which she actually enjoys just as much. As Alex says, Lily’s done a gender awareness job on her grandad without him even realizing.
The lights are on downstairs, but there’s no sign of Alex, so I leave the flowers in the kitchen and go upstairs. The bedroom door is ajar and I can see her reflection in the mirror before she knows I’m there. She’s brushing her hair, leaning into the stroke. There are times, even now after all these years, when she’ll suddenly smile and literally take my breath away. I know she hates getting older and I know she’s right when she says that men have that so much easier than women, but I still find her as beautiful as the day we met. Though I can tell she thinks I’m just saying that. But tonight, in that deep-violet dress, with her blue-violet eyes and the amethyst and blue topaz bracelet I gave her this morning because I knew it would be the perfect match, she looks like a movie star. I back off before she sees me and go into the bathroom to shower.
‘The table’s at eight, right?’ she says when I join her in the bedroom a few minutes later.
‘Yup. But I thought we could go to the Ivy for a drink first?’
She comes over and links her arms round my waist. ‘You’re spoiling me.’
I kiss her gently, trying not to get her dress damp. ‘If I can’t spoil you on your birthday, when can I spoil you?’
‘Lily loved the flowers, by the way. She thought you were being very clever.’
I pull back slightly. ‘What flowers?’
She looks confused. ‘The ones that came this morning, silly. Come on, I know you like being an international man of mystery and all that, but even without a card I knew they were from you.’
I stare at her a moment, then grab a towel and go downstairs. My bouquet is still there in the kitchen, but there’s already a vase of flowers on the mantelpiece in the sitting room, next to the wedding invite from Somer. It’s our largest vase, because there are just so many of them. Roses and lilies, the scent up close almost overpowering. Roses and lilies for our daughter, Lily Rose. No wonder she thought Daddy was being clever.
I hear Alex come up behind me.
‘They’re beautiful,’ she says. ‘Just beautiful. But I couldn’t work out what the other flowers were for. I get the lilies and roses but what about the others?’
I’m staring at them, trying not to see this as a message, willing Alex not to read it that way either, because I don’t want that thought in her mind. I don’t want her connecting our daughter with those other flowers, with what they mean.
Those deceptively innocent little blooms with their white petals and their hard yellow hearts, so meek and unassuming among the splashy and the exotic.
You don’t need me to spell it out.
You know what those other flowers are.
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