Chapter SIX
I loved my evening at the Pudding Club, although it had ended on quite a sober note.
I didn’t say anything to Sylvia because I didn’t want to worry her, but to me, finding a nail in not one, but two tyres, seemed a little suspicious. They were large nails – they looked the same in length and appearance – and for them to have embedded themselves into her tyres like that . . . well, I couldn’t really understand how it could have happened.
But then again, I was no scientist.
And nails puncturing tyres seemed to happen all the time . . .
Before that, I’d been really enjoying myself, though. It had made quite a change to be out mingling with such lovely people.
I rarely went out in the evening, mainly because I was too busy catching up with the phone calls and emails I hadn’t had time to get to during the day. Of course, there was also the small matter of not having many friends to actually go out with – definitely a result of being married to the job. (If you were never available to socialise, eventually people gave up and stopped inviting you.)
My super-early starts were another barrier to socialising. The flower markets opened at 4am, so I liked to be in bed by ten at the very latest the night before. For a florist, the days were long and the work could be tiring (lugging water-filled vases about was surprisingly strenuous) – but the creative rewards made all the hard graft worthwhile.
But . . . I was no longer the young girl I used to be!
My energy levels in my fifties were probably half what they were when I first started in the business. In those days, I’d put in a long shift, then I’d dance the night away with Mark and yet still manage to be up on time next morning (although obviously not the mornings I had a 4am start). Now, I was just grateful to fall into my blissfully cosy bed early, bury my face in the lavender-scented pillows and slip into dreamland, preferably by nine o’clock if at all possible!
My younger brother Peter always joked that I’d deliberately chosen a profession that gave me the perfect excuse to shy away from being sociable. (Really sorry, but I need to be at the flower market by 4am. Such a shame I can’t make it . . .) The first time he said it, I’d laughed and said I wasn’t exactly a hermit. But over the years, I’d accepted that there was probably a grain of truth in what he said. And that was fine. I was okay with his well-meant teasing.
I hadn’t always been boring, after all.
In fact, in my teens and early twenties, I’d been quite the party girl. I’d go out with my group of girlfriends most Fridays and Saturdays and we’d have such a laugh. We dated boys, of course, but never very seriously. And it was the girly nights I always remembered with such affection and sometimes sighed over, feeling a little sentimental.
The good old days!
Things never stayed the same, though. If there was one thing I’d learned in life, it was that everything passed eventually – the bad things and the good things as well . . .
My throat tightened.
Mark had been one of the good things.
He was the best thing that ever happened to me. And when we met – in a cocktail bar on one of my girls’
nights out – my life had changed forever.
After six months together, we were madly, passionately in love and planning our sparkling future together.
But then life got in the way and the impossible happened: we drifted apart.
I was working in a local café when we first met – just as a stop-gap after leaving school at eighteen. I didn’t want to go to university, which I knew disappointed my parents, so I was marking time at the café and feeling quite stressed out about not really knowing what I wanted to do with my life.
Then a job came up at a florist’s shop round the corner from my parents’
house, where I was still living. I applied for it just for convenience, really. (I had to get a bus to the café but the florist’s shop was a five-minute walk away.)
To my surprise, I got the job – and within a few weeks, I knew I’d found the thing in life that I was good at.
The lovely shop-owner, Vera, told me I had a natural talent for flower arranging and she recommended a university course I could go on to learn the skills I’d need if I was serious about it, and for the first time I felt excited at the thought of the future and pursuing a career I’d really enjoy.
Mark was really supportive, as I’d known he would be.
Vera was strongly recommending a course in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, which she told me was highly regarded in the industry. But the thought of moving away and leaving Mark behind in Surrey was proving to be a real obstacle for me – especially since I knew I could study floristry at a college local to me. I wouldn’t end up with a degree if I studied there, but did that really matter? At least I’d be able to stay at home and be with Mark.
My best friend at the time, Lucy, thought I was mad not to apply for the uni course. She herself was training to be an accountant and had her eye firmly on her future career, and she couldn’t understand why I was hesitating about going to Newcastle. My parents, too, were putting pressure on me to take Vera’s advice, and eventually, even Mark said I should go.
He could see that it was tearing me in two and he insisted that nothing would change between us if I went away. I’d be back for the holidays and he’d come up and visit me in Newcastle at weekends. It would just be for three years, then we could plan our future . . .
So I left to embark on a whole new chapter in Newcastle.
And at first, it was fine. Mark visited me a few weekends during that first term, and I travelled back to Surrey. But I was making lots of new friends and getting involved in new activities that sometimes spilled over into the weekends. I’d thought Mark would understand that I needed to immerse myself in university life if I wanted to get the most out of the three years. I didn’t realise he was feeling as if he’d been left behind. I can see now what I hadn’t understood back then. Nothing had changed for him, except for me going away. But the life I was living was all change and so exciting. It must have seemed as though I was having a whale of a time without him . . .
Mark kept all of these feelings to himself. And when eventually the situation reached crisis point – bit by bit, we seemed to be losing the closeness we’d enjoyed when we first met – it all exploded in a huge row, during which he questioned my love for him and I shouted that if he didn’t trust me, what was the point of us continuing in a relationship that was no longer as special as it once was?
When we calmed down, I told him I’d decided to give up the course and come home for good. But he wouldn’t let me, saying my career was too important for that. I couldn’t just give up halfway through my degree course.
I took that to mean he wasn’t really bothered that our relationship was falling apart, so I went back to Newcastle and told myself that if our relationship was meant to be, it would survive the separation.
But in the end, it didn’t.
The damage had been done. We’d spoken some hurtful things to each other that couldn’t be unsaid, and gradually, during my final year at uni, we drifted apart – finally admitting it was over when Mark was offered the chance to study in New Zealand for a year. It was somewhere he’d always longed to visit, so we both knew he had to go.
But that was the end of us.
We’d survived the distance between Surrey and Newcastle. But with Mark on the other side of the world, it was totally unrealistic that we should carry on . . .
I was devastated, but there was nothing I could do but carry on with my studies and make sure that the sacrifice I’d made to get my degree ended up being worth it. I had a ton of regrets but I tried not to dwell on them. Later, forging ahead in my career was a way of putting Mark out of my mind, so that’s what I did.
After losing the love of my life, I never really had the heart for dating after that. Every man paled by comparison to Mark and over the years, I never found anyone I gelled with in quite the same way. Somewhere along the way, I’d given up hope altogether and resigned myself to being single for the rest of my life. And as I did that, my blossoming career went from strength to strength, as if to fill the hole that Mark had left.
As I often said to Peter, I’d never have become as successful as I had if Mark and I had married and had a family. No way. So that was something . . . wasn’t it?
I loved my brother’s children to bits. I got on really well with Rachel, my sister-in-law, and looking back, the days I’d always treasured the most were the ones I spent with my niece and nephew, Ryan and Cora.
In my memory, those days were touched with sunlight and laughter . . . mucking about in a ball pool with them when they were really little, or racing with them along a summer beach as they tried to catch up with an excited Baxter, the cocker spaniel.
Ryan was twenty-eight now. How the years had flown! He had a little family of his own, yet he always made a point of coming round to see me when he was on leave from the army. I’d make his favourite sticky ginger cake specially and we’d chat about anything and everything, and Ryan at some point would always tease me that I ought to b.
‘out there’
dating and having fun, instead of being married to my boring job.
He had no idea how those innocent jokes of his pierced my heart – because deep down, I knew he was probably right. Not that I would ever dream of letting him see how vulnerable and lost I felt at those moments. His auntie had always been cool, calm and collected – especially in business – and I wasn’t going to let the mask drop. Not even for Ryan . . .
My relationship with Cora had become a firm and precious friendship.
Aged thirty, Cora was a career woman herself now – a marketing executive, rising steadily through the ranks at work, with no time for romance.
We’d meet regularly for coffee and a catch-up, and when Cora called, I’d always reschedule meetings to see her. We’d go shopping, often with Cora’s mum, Rachel. The three of us would take the train into London and treat ourselves to a gossipy lunch and a good deal of wide-eyed exploration of the flashy department stores.
Rachel, who’d married my brother at a young age and had loved being a stay-at-home mum, was always eager to hear my tales of working with celebrities and wealthy business people. She’d lap up all the gorgeous descriptions of the grand manor houses, tucked deep in the countryside, whose owners had commissioned me to decorate with lavish wreaths and stunning, twinkling foliage displays for the festive season.
If I couldn’t be a mum myself, I’d be a brilliant auntie! And the precious bond I shared with Cora and Ryan gave me more happiness than they would ever know.
I’d had flirtations, of course, and there had been several men who’d piqued my interest but never in a truly passionate way. And the problem was that for me to focus on a relationship and spend less time on my business, it would have to be for someone really special – and I’d just never found anyone as special as Mark.
It was sad, but I didn’t waste time being miserable about it.
Life was about a whole lot more than finding the love of your life! I’d found him but it hadn’t worked out and that was fine. Mark lived in New Zealand now and I tried not to mind when I heard through the grapevine that he’d got married.
I told myself I was really pleased for him. Mark so deserved to be happy. But it was around that time that I developed horrible, itchy patches of eczema on my arms and legs, and looking back, that was no coincidence.
The eczema had gone (a small patch would sometimes reappear on my arm if I was extra-stressed) and so had the deep regret at losing Mark to a woman in New Zealand.
At least, that’s what I’d thought.
But then, back in March, something happened that had rocked my whole world. More than six months later, I was still feeling the after-shocks of those few days and trying desperately to get my life back into its nice, predictable groove.
Lately, I’d found myself getting ridiculously emotional over certain poignantly romantic scenes in films on TV, which previously I’d have scoffed at and switched off. On occasion, I’d wept there on the sofa until there were no tears left, and this was worrying.
Even last night, when I’d been looking through photographs of Sylvia and Mick together, the tears had come. They were smiling at each other in every one, and there was an entrancing, youthful light in their eyes. It was as if finding each other had wiped away the decades, such was the effect of findin.
‘your person’
and being truly in love . . .
These emotional ambushes were dangerous. They were beginning to distract me from my work, and I was desperate to get back on my steady, even keel.
Deep down, though, I was beginning to wonder if I’d ever be that cool, ultra-professional career woman again. It was as if I’d been keeping my feelings carefully contained, but after meeting Mark again, the dam that had been shoring them up had smashed beyond repair, leaving me helpless to get my tumultuous emotions under control again . . .
I hated these scary feelings, which rose up inside me without warning, and sent me hurtling into the unknown on yet another emotional rollercoaster ride. What if I could never banish them?
If only I hadn’t gone shopping in Sunnybrook that day. Because that was when all this mental and emotional chaos had descended on me.
I’d been hurrying along the busy high street, thinking about my forthcoming meeting with a new client, when a face among the crowd had made my heart lurch and stopped me dead in my tracks.
Mark . . .
Fen