PRESENT

7

It takes me less than an hour to complete the assignment that our tutor set for the weekend. I think I could teach him more than he knows. By lunchtime I am going stir-crazy sitting in my empty room.

It’s less than twenty-four hours since our trip to Shearham and already I’m crossing off the days to next Friday’s class. I forced myself to stay away from your flat off the King’s Road last night. I don’t want to be that creep who hangs out on street corners. But this is different.

Almost without thinking I find myself sitting on the pavement on the opposite side of the road from Seventh Heaven. I have come up with the perfect disguise. I’m in my oldest clothes, sitting on an old blanket with my head bowed, my features shielded by a baseball cap and in front of me an empty plastic cup and a cardboard sign that reads:

‘I need £10 for a hostel tonight – please help’

No one bothers me. No one wants to catch my eye. Some of the shoppers glance in my direction then quickly look away, with a quickening of the step and tightening of the grip on the straps of handbags and shoulder bags. A few – not many – fumble in pockets or purses and drop a few coins into my cup. Most of them want to pretend I’m invisible, which suits me fine.

But You – You notice. You see me through the foliage and displays that decorate the shop window. I don’t know if You recognise a likeness, but You know I’m there. And I can see You in a delicious peep show as You move up and down, in and out of view like a marionette busy with the customers. At one point the shop is empty and You pause right in front of the window, looking straight at me, while You push back your hair. Is it pity or something else that makes You stop and stare?

Late in the afternoon, my patience is rewarded. I hear the gates of Seventh Heaven grinding open on the side street and then I see You at the wheel of the Seventh Heaven van, pulling out into the queue of traffic. Thank God for red lights! Seconds later, I have left my pitch, collected my bike from where I left it parked further up the street and am following in your tracks.

*

It was unusually quiet in Seventh Heaven for a Saturday morning. Perhaps, after Valentine’s Day local residents were tired of romantic gestures and extravagant gifts. Celeste was thankful that Meghan had tasked her with redesigning the window display to remove all the Valentine’s motifs and replace them with flowers and decorations looking forward to the spring season and Mother’s Day. It was absorbing and creative work, which helped to take her mind off the memories rekindled by her trip to Shearham and the unsettling events of the past few days.

There was an awkward moment when Celeste absent-mindedly took off her cardigan and the Saturday girl caught sight of the cuts on her forearm.

‘God what happened to your arm?’ she blurted out, without thinking.

Celeste covered the partly healed wounds with her hand. ‘It’s nothing,’ she said hastily. ‘I’m so clumsy. I tripped over my workbox yesterday.’ She turned her back on her. ‘I’ll go and put on a plaster.’ She went into the bathroom at the rear of the shop and got out the first aid kit. She was angry with the girl for being so tactless – she was sick of having to make excuses, to explain herself to people. But she was even more angry with herself for being such an idiot. She’d been free of this curse for almost two years. She couldn’t allow her mind to go back to that dark place. Unconsciously she ran her fingertips softly along the faint scars at her wrists.

‘He can’t do this to me,’ she said grimly. ‘He almost killed me once. I won’t let him do it again.’

She looked up and couldn’t recognise the stranger in the mirror.

You were there in the mirror when I looked at myself. I hated myself and the guilty person that you made me feel I was, that nobody cared about. You were there in my mind each time I took a blade to my body to hurt and cut myself again and again to punish myself for the shameful person I became.

You are here in the mirror.

You are back.

‘I refuse to be your victim,’ she said out loud.

Her reflected image frightened her, and she had to look away.

*

Anyone looking through the windowpanes later that afternoon would have been touched by the scene inside Seventh Heaven. It was like the set of a romantic movie. A big delivery had arrived, and Celeste was halfway through unloading and putting the new blooms out on display. She was flushed from the cold air outside and the exertion of helping to carry the boxes into the shop. Although she’d had a bad night, her complexion was naturally clear and luminous, so she looked as delicate and fresh as the blooms all around. She was encircled by a rainbow of petals – scarlets, violets and pinks. Flowers filled the stone counter and cascaded to the floor. Almost the entire floor space was taken up with silver buckets containing single flowers, bunches of spring daffodils and tulips, and varieties of foliage in a hundred shades of green. As she reordered the window display, she worked at conditioning the flowers, placing them in buckets of icy cold water from an outside tap. She went in and out of the backyard. It was snowing again, and the air was so cold that it seemed as if this time it was going to stick.

The Saturday girl had just popped out to get herself a sandwich when the door opened and an elderly gentleman came into the shop to buy fresh spring flowers to celebrate his wife’s birthday. Celeste helped him to pick out flowers for the bouquet, asking about his wife’s favourite colours and blooms. Now she stood behind the counter making up the hand-tied bouquet. The man was a local resident. She had passed him occasionally walking his dog and had noticed his shuffling, unsteady gait. Today he was without the dog and was walking with the help of a stick. The side of his face was badly bruised. He told her he’d had a fall on the icy pavement. She noticed that a car was pulled up right outside the window with its warning lights on, waiting on the double yellow lines.

Celeste worked quickly and methodically, skilfully placing the blooms in her left hand to distribute pink dragon tulips, gladioli and white roses and structure the bouquet with foliage before binding it with twine, trimming the stems and wrapping it in cellophane.

The man waited in silence, his head tilted forwards stiffly. He was watching her white steady hands with a peculiar intensity as she worked quietly, putting together the bouquet. His own hands shook as he struggled to get a wallet out of his pocket. Celeste guessed he must be suffering from the early stages of Parkinson’s disease.

‘Would you like to choose a card to write a message for your wife?’ said Celeste, nodding towards the card holder that contained a selection of designs. He fumbled with the cards and knocked over the holder.

‘Please don’t worry,’ said Celeste kindly. ‘I’ll just finish tying this and then I’ll help you.’

While the man hesitated, she made polite conversation only half listening to his replies.

‘When is her birthday? How long have you been married?’

‘Her birthday is today,’ he said quietly. ‘And we’ll have been married fifty years this August.’

Celeste pulled out a card and picked up her pen.

‘Now what would you like me to write?’ she said. ‘What is your lucky lady’s name?’

For a moment the man seemed unable to speak. Then he swallowed to clear his throat.

‘Marilyn,’ he said, ‘like the actress. Marilyn Rose.’ Celeste wrote the name carefully, in her neatest handwriting. Then she looked up.

‘And the message?’

His voice was husky. ‘Just something simple… In Loving Memory…’ he said. ‘In Loving Memory of Marilyn Rose, Ever Yours, Ralph.’

*

While Ralph was settling up the payment, which seemed to take forever as every movement was difficult and slow, he explained that every year of their marriage, without fail, he had bought flowers for his wife’s birthday. She had been his main carer for the past five years of her life as his condition had deteriorated but, sadly, she herself had died the previous September after a short illness. Now he was dependent on the brief daily visits of council carers who came to his home to help him get dressed and prepare his food. He wished he was able to visit the cemetery to place the flowers on his wife’s grave, but his carers were not allocated enough time to help him with an outing such as that. The cemetery was more than half an hour’s drive away. Instead he would take the flowers home and put them on his kitchen table.

‘I can sit and look at them and remember her,’ he said philosophically. ‘What else can I do? She’ll understand.’

As if on cue, the driver in the car outside the shop gave two loud beeps on the horn.

‘I better get going,’ he said, with a mischievous grin. ‘Or I’ll be in trouble. She’s scared she’ll get a ticket.’

Celeste took the man’s arm to help him out to the car with the flowers. Touched by his devotion to his dead wife, she had a sudden thought and on impulse she asked him, ‘Would you like me to take the flowers for you? Business is slow today. I can leave work early. If you give me the address, I’ll find the grave and place them on the headstone for you. If you like, I can take photographs and email them to you or send them to your home address?’

While the woman in the car leant on her horn, Celeste scribbled down the details and promised that before the day was out, the bouquet of fresh spring flowers would be beautifully arranged on Marilyn Rose’s grave.

Once Celeste had finished sorting and displaying the new stock, she rummaged in the storeroom cupboard for the key to the van. Meghan had taken the afternoon off to go shopping up in Oxford Street for a date with a new boyfriend that evening. She was recently divorced and was just beginning to dip her toe in the water again. She seemed to be quite dizzy about this new guy – behaving like a twenty-year-old not the mature forty-something businesswoman that she was. It was not like Meghan to take the afternoon off work to buy a dress so she must be pretty keen!

Celeste had been entrusted to set up the new window display and to condition the stock and close up for the day. But she had worked hard and fast and Seventh Heaven was looking, well heavenly, Celeste thought to herself quite proudly. She reasoned there would be no harm in leaving the Saturday girl to hold the fort while she borrowed the company van to drive across to the Brompton Cemetery and deliver the flowers to the grave of Marilyn Rose.

The roads were busy with all the Saturday shoppers. There were a few flakes of snow still dancing in the air, but it was shaping up for a clear night. She put the address into her phone and braved the traffic. Eventually she saw the sign for the Brompton Cemetery and managed to squeeze into a parking space on the Fulham Road before entering on foot through the South Lodge. The light was fading as the pale winter sun sank below the dome of the chapel. The soles of her old trainers scrunched on the frosty paths and the birds were singing an evensong chorus that she had never consciously listened to before.

Celeste had never visited the Brompton Cemetery and had no idea that it was such a vast and imposing historic site. Ralph had given her reference details to find the location of his wife’s grave, which turned out to be almost at the opposite end of the cemetery. As she searched for Marilyn’s grave, she skirted the chapel, crossed the Great Circle and walked for several minutes along the grand Central Avenue, flanked on each side by rows and rows of elaborate monuments and statues. She felt overwhelmed by the number of memorials to the dead – some 35,000 graves according to the visitor information. So, this was one of the places London hid its dead.

Disconcertingly, she had the same feeling as when looking for her car in one of those vast car parks at big events like football matches or music festivals. Increasingly disorientated she walked up and down the rows until at last, she found the plot she was looking for far away from the Central Avenue in amongst a group of newer graves, memorials to local residents, made up of simpler, modern memorials. In fact, the cemetery was anything but like a car park. On the contrary, it was like a nature reserve in the heart of London – bursting with life – a microcosm of biodiversity of flora and fauna. Perhaps, because it was sheltered by the great city, spring seemed to have come early here – starting with the snowdrops that had sprung up around so many of the headstones like choirs of miniature angels.

It looked as if no one had visited Marilyn’s grave for many weeks. The headstone itself was clean and new but overgrown and obscured with weeds. She crouched down and pulled away a few tufts of stray grass and there it was. She read the inscription:

In loving memory of Marilyn Rose Peters

beloved wife of Ralph Edmund Peters

Below the inscription there was a space on the stone, which she understood must have been left blank at Ralph’s direction, ready to be engraved when the time came. He had decided he wished to be buried in the same spot as his wife.

By the time Celeste finished weeding the plot and polishing the stone and arranging the flowers it was almost dark. She had set up a torch on her workbox as best she could to give sufficient light for her task. Other visitors to the cemetery had left and she was alone. It was almost closing time. Before leaving she got out her phone to take photographs by flashlight of the spruced-up grave and the arrangement of flowers at the base of the headstone. She was filled with a quiet satisfaction knowing that her kind gesture would give peace of mind to the gentle old man who had come into Seventh Heaven earlier in the day.

Celeste’s walk back to her car along the Central Avenue of the cemetery was lit by a vast orange full moon that hung low in the sky. The scene reminded her of the vampire movies that she had watched with her friends as a teenager, with the moonlight sending elongated monstrous shadows of the monuments and graves across the lawns. She heard a rustle behind a row of headstones and saw two eyes glowing yellow in the dark. As she stifled a cry, a fox darted out in front of her – stealthy and lithe as a werewolf. She quickened her pace, anxious that the wardens might have the locked the gate. She didn’t want to be trapped here for the night. She doubted she would be strong enough to scale the wall.

Her mood blackened with the night sky. There was menace in the air and her imagination was on fire. She heard footsteps on the path behind her. She saw figures moving between the mausoleums in front of the trees and torches flashing darts of lights among the branches. She jumped at a shadow that loomed ahead of her on the path. Guarding a young child’s grave, the vast stone angel to her left had soaring wings and an outstretched arm.

She shuddered.

The angel’s shadow on the frozen gravel seemed to be reaching out to catch her by the ankles and trip her up.