Page 52 of The Show Woman

51

Blooms

March arrives, dewy and brisk. It will soon be a full year since Lena’s father died and once more the showground is stirring into life, its occupants becoming restless, ready to break free of the invisible tethers that tie them to the city in winter.

Lena knows she must make a decision, and soon. Either it is time to create a new ladies’ circus, try out Belle on the trapeze, engage Rosie and Carmen – who has already moved into Rosie’s wagon – for another season, or move on. To where, she does not know, for thoughts of the future seem so clouded and uncertain that they have paralysed her.

The nice policeman has returned, once more, and informed her that her mother’s remains will be brought back to her in a few days’ time. She has spoken to William Weaver, Mary’s eldest stepson, who has insisted on paying for the funeral, and organising it too.

‘I’m sorry,’ he keeps saying to Lena, as though all of it, any of it, were his fault. ‘Harry and I always struggled with Mary. She wasn’t our real mother and she never really bothered with us. But then she was so harsh with Violet that we were quite grateful, just kept out of her way. Particularly when she’d been drinking.’

It is a long speech for a man whom Lena has never really known, and who always kept his counsel. She is grateful. And weary.

Three days before the funeral Harry catches her at the showground gates as she is coming in with fresh carrots and mutton, ingredients for a simple stew. He looks smart, a suit in tweed and a dark bunnet on his head, the cut on his eye now healed. He has a horse with him she has never seen before.

‘Hello, girl,’ she says, giving the chestnut mare a pat. ‘Where did Harry get you from, eh?’

‘She was going cheap at a market. You can never have too many horses. I’m just about to put her in the stables and then I have to head up town.’

‘Going somewhere nice?’ she asks.

He smiles shyly. ‘Maybe,’ he says. ‘It depends if you’ll come with me.’

The tram is noisy, windows steaming up on the inside as they approach the city centre and mothers and children pile on, bags of messages with them, the occasional gentleman hopping from one important meeting to the next. But the crowd thins out as they head up Great Western Road, a wide, long street with grand sandstone mansions on either side.

They are up west now, where the houses have double-fronted doors and the ladies wear elegant French lace. They walk slowly down clean streets with parasols and small dogs, while maids with necks bent scuttle guardedly behind them.

‘Here,’ says Harry, pulling the bell. They jump off the tram. Ahead of them is a busy junction, and on one side there are two curious red brick buildings on either side of a smart iron gate. At first Lena thinks it must be a gentleman’s estate. She has seen plenty of them on the road over the years, towering gateposts guarding long, tree-lined drives, but, as she looks closer, people are strolling into the grounds. A lady with her maid, a nanny with a baby carriage, behind them, a flock of stately young women.

‘Come on,’ says Harry, as they walk through the gateposts and into a park. The grass is neatly cut and slopes down a gentle hill, and here and there townspeople sit perched on rugs, or, for the less fancy, old newspapers. There are oak trees flushed with new leaves, and vast bushels of daffodils nodding in the spring sunshine.

‘That’s our destination,’ says Harry, pointing to a glasshouse, its dome veined in white, at the top of the hill.

‘What is it?’

‘It’s a palace. But the kind that opens its doors to everyone. Even the likes of us.’

He opens the door to a wall of heat. Stepping in, Lena is amazed. It is like high summer in here, one of those endless days when the air feels like liquid. And the silence – the sort she has only ever heard in the country, deep and rich. She could melt into it. There are flowers everywhere. A little fountain of trickling water, huge orange fish moving languidly beneath the ripples at its base.

They move through the glasshouse, Harry holding his good tweed cap in his hands. They marvel at the tall, exotic palms, the violently pink and purple orchids, flowers all the colours of a rainbow. Bright bursts of blue, smatterings of orange and yellow. Lena stops at an orchid of pale violet, examines its delicate oval petals, each one flecked with tiny smatters of gold, a fragile stamen at its heart. She has never seen anything so exquisitely formed in her life.

‘It’s beautiful,’ she says. ‘How did you find this place?’

‘Ah, that would be telling. My little secret. But I wanted to share it with you. These flowers – they’re not quite a red, red rose, but . . .’ He tails off.

Lena looks back at the flower. She is desperate to touch it, to see if it feels as she thinks it will, soft and velvety. Instead she settles for its scent, breathes long and deep, inhaling its rich sweetness.

Harry is watching her intently.

‘I know you’ve had a terrible time,’ he says. ‘And I’m sorry.’

‘Everyone keeps saying that to me.’

‘But I am. I’m sorry I didn’t keep a closer eye on Violet. I’m sorry about Carmen. I’m sorry about my awful excuse for a stepmother. And I’m sorry about us.’

Lena turns to him.

‘Was there ever really an us?’ she asks.

‘Well, I thought there could have been. I was thinking about it. That it could be a possibility, you and me. And I think there could be now.’

He turns to face her, lifts his hand to her cheek.

‘I’d really love there to be an us,’ he says quietly.

And perhaps it is the heat, and the softness it infuses into her bones. Or perhaps it is that she is weary of carrying her heart alone, wants to hand it over to this earnest, kind, flawed man to cherish and take care of. Or perhaps it is that she has always known that it was Harry. Only Harry.

But there, in the glasshouse, on a cold afternoon three days before her mother’s funeral, Lena kisses him. And everything else melts away.