change later. ‘That’s very good of you. You’ll manage all right?’
‘I’ll manage,’ Nick said again. ‘Now. Let’s have that coffee and no biscuits – I remembered the milk, the biscuits didn’t occur to me – and we’ll go through the tasks of the week. It’s the same every week.’
Twice a week, on Tuesday morning – ‘but I went on Monday this week’ – and on Friday morning, before the Saturday rush, Nick went in the little van to the flower market. He’d be back before opening time, and together they’d strip the flowers’ foliage, plunge them into the buckets. ‘I’ll just get what tempts me,’ Nick said. ‘I suppose in a bit we’ll find out what sells and what doesn’t.’ That was the fresh stock, which he was dealing with. Apart from the flowers, there were leaves and other greenery, used in making up bouquets. There was, too, a range of dried flowers and grasses so the shop, even at the end of a busy day, wouldn’t look denuded. Some of that, too, could go into a fresh bouquet, like the shining coins of honesty, and some more exotic things: there were crabbed and arthritic fingers of willow twigs, and, against the wall, a fan of peacock feathers. ‘People come in sometimes, and they just buy honesty and peacock feathers,’ Nick said. ‘The trouble is they last for ever, so we won’t see them for another year, and we won’t get rich on that.’
There was, too, a range of vases for sale. ‘You’d be surprised,’ Nick said, ‘– at the number of people – I’ve already discovered this and I’ve only been here a week – who come in and buy a bunch of flowers, they’re the ones who’ve got something to apologize for, to their wives usually, I suppose, and then they remember they haven’t got a vase. You can charge what you like for those.’ Katherine looked at the strange collection: some big square greenish glass ones, a Chinese-looking one with dragons, and half a dozen in brownish pottery, a few Victorian ones with blurred transfers of fruit and vegetables.
‘Well,’ Nick said, ‘I had a flurry of custom on Monday, just after you came in – it must have been you, bringing me luck – and a little bit on Tuesday, but then it died down a bit. I had a good day on Friday, though, and actually, Saturday too. We were closer to running out of stock than I’d expected. Curiosity, I expect – we’ll see what it looks like in a month.’
‘And the vases?’ Katherine said, picking at a stuck-on rose on a goblin fantasy of fruit and flowers, bulging like goitres.
‘Don’t you like them?’ Nick said. ‘I was in York a week or two back, and I saw a florist’s, just closing down. I went in and I bought the stock. It must have been there years. He was glad to get rid of it. I thought it was a good omen.’
‘A good omen?’ Katherine said. ‘Yes, I suppose you could see it like that.’
Nick looked at her solemnly, his boyishly blue eyes, his untidy blond hair; she wondered if he knew what he was doing. All at once, he was laughing. ‘I see what you’re getting at,’ he said. ‘If they wouldn’t buy them in York, they’re not going to buy them in Sheffield.’
‘I didn’t mean that, exactly,’ Katherine said, blushing. She shouldn’t kick off by criticizing him.
‘But you don’t like them,’ Nick said.
‘Well,’ Katherine said, ‘not all of them. That one, for instance.’ She ran her hand over it. It bore a jazz-modern pattern, orange and yellow and brown, the sort of thing Malcolm’s mad aunt Susan had had since before the war. ‘That’s fairly horrible.’
‘You don’t think it’ll come back into fashion?’ Nick said, still laughing.
‘And in the meantime we’re to have it cluttering up the shop and frightening off the customers?’
‘I see what you mean,’ Nick said. He took off his chamois gloves and, with his slight hands, picked up the vase. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘We’ll christen the good ship Reynolds.’
She followed him to the back of the shop. He gave a sturdy kick to the door. It flung open. The brick courtyard was shaggy with weeds, and a cat threw itself up a wall. ‘Right,’ Nick said. ‘Do you want to do it or shall I?’
‘Do what?’
‘Christen the shop,’ Nick said. ‘All right. I name this good shop –’ he hurled the vase with one movement against the wall ‘– Reynolds.’
The vase bounced, then rolled along the ground, coming to rest at their feet. They looked at it, soberly.
‘It must be melamine,’ Katherine said. ‘Or some such.’
‘I suppose it must,’ Nick said. ‘How hilarious.’ And then they were laughing and laughing; they did not stop until the bell at the front of the shop announced their first customer of the day.
That night, at supper, Katherine told the story; she tried to make it funny.
‘I don’t understand,’ Malcolm said. ‘Why would he try to smash a vase he’d bought?’
‘It was so ugly,’ Katherine said. ‘I don’t know why he bought it in the first place.’
‘Someone might not have thought so,’ Malcolm said seriously. ‘You can’t assume that everyone’s going to have the same taste as you. He’s not going to make a success of it if he goes on smashing his stock like that. I expect he could put it down to accidental damage, though it wouldn’t be exactly honest. If I were you—’
Daniel groaned.
Malcolm looked at him in astonishment. ‘What’s up with you?’ he said.
‘It’s funny,’ Daniel said. ‘He sounds a right laugh, Mum’s boss.’
‘Yes,’ Malcolm said. ‘That’s what I’d expect someone of your age to think.’
Daniel groaned again.
‘That’s quite enough, Daniel,’ Katherine said. She looked down at her plate: the jazz-modern orange and brown pattern they’d always had. She ought to do something about it. And she agreed with Daniel: Nick was a right laugh.
She soon discovered that Nick needed someone like her. The shop was, of course, just a business. It took in perishable stock, relying as well on imperishable steady sellers – Nick ran an illogical but quite profitable line in minor stationery by the till as well as a carousel of cards, and it was surprising the number of people who popped in for a card, some of whom found themselves leaving with some flowers as well. (The cards were much more artistic – Monet! – on the whole than the dismal and ancient range to be had in the newsagent’s opposite and, being blank inside, were superior to his faintly common specifications of particular birthdays and particular family recipients.) It was, if you thought of it in an abstract, Malcolmish way, like many other retail businesses.
And yet it was not, because there was the question of the flowers that Nick went to fetch twice a week. Nick, you might easily assume, was a person who had little idea: he projected a kind of uselessness, and a casual Malcolmish auditor might conclude that he had no particular attraction to flowers and no particular aptitude that would make the business a success. But when Nick came in twice a week with his van of flowers, she perceived, without his having to say anything, a kind of magic. That twice-weekly unloading made her feel as if she had carried out some act of betrayal against Malcolm and, in particular, his garden. Malcolm’s garden was a matter of mulch and compost, of feeding and pruning,
