Flowers

Flowers

In a complicated world things really couldn’t get much worse for Helen. She had a young husband, James, who drank a lot and they really weren’t getting along. She’d fallen in love with his best friend Andrew and had been having an affair with him before she got married and continued to do so for 2 years after the wedding.

She didn’t see her lover that often as he lived 240 miles away down south, on the south coast of England. But they were in touch every day.

Just to add to her confusing life she had an admirer at work, Paul, who she was very good friends with but he was infatuated with her and kept telling her he loved her. He smothered her with little gifts often. She kept him at arms length and never encouraged him and just wanted to remain friends. There was no way he would back off but she could cope with the situation. Paul never made advances on her so she felt safe and had no grounds for sexual harassment.

One day he bought her an £80 bouquet of flowers. It was enormous but beautiful. She decided it was best if she took the flowers home, so put them on the back seat of her car on Thursday night. When she got home her drunken husband accused her of having an affair with Paul from work and said he had bought them for her.

She denied this of course and said she had bought them herself for the funeral she was due to go to the following day. So she had to leave them on the back seat of the car.

Friday morning she made an early start and hit the road to drive 200 miles to her Uncle’s funeral in Dorset. The weather wasn’t too hot so the flowers surprisingly survived quite well. As she drove she thought these would look lovely in Andrew’s flat. She knew exactly where she would put them to give the maximum effect and which vase she would use. It was the best vase she had ever bought and special too as she and Andrew had bought it together a few months before as he had bought her a lovely bunch of flowers and they had realized then they had nothing to put the flowers in. She reminisced as she retraced her thoughts back to the day when they flew off into town and left her flowers sat in a pool of water in the sink. They finally found one they both liked in Debenhams. These thoughts were still with her and she was unfortunately smiling when her car drew up outside her Aunt’s house. She was one of the first to arrive as the traffic hadn’t been too bad and she’d made good time.

As she got out of the car her Aunty Joan came out to greet her. She saw the flowers on the back seat and exclaimed they were beautiful and really she shouldn’t have got something so big, but she’d find a vase for them and scuttled in the house. Helen stood there gazing into the car thinking, ‘I’ve got to take them into her now, how can I say they are not for her. I’ve turned up a funeral and you take flowers to a funeral so I must take them in the house, I have no option’, so she carefully took the flowers inside to her Aunt.

Later on, they all moved in convoy to the church, as Helen entered the church she was horrified to see her bouquet from Paul perched high on the top of the coffin. She just stood there, mouth open wide.

Everyone who was behind her thought she was dumbstruck because of the coffin and not seeing her Uncle Barry again and promptly helped her into a pew. She couldn’t sing. She just stared at the coffin with her beautiful massive bouquet on the top. She couldn’t cry. She was just too shocked. She was dumbfounded.

After the funeral was over she made her way to the car and said goodbye to the family and drove another 40 miles to spend the weekend with her lover. When she got there, she found the vase in the cupboard and just sat gazing at it for a while, thinking what her flowers would have looked like displayed in it. She had a lovely uncomplicated weekend with Andrew and reluctantly had to leave on Sunday to return to the north for work on Monday.

Once back at work one her first visitors in her office was Paul. He was beaming from ear to ear his first words were ‘did you like my flowers sweetie?’ She drew in a deep breath and said slowly ‘yes I did Paul they were lovely but….’ Sighed heavily and thought I must tell him ‘I have a confession, they were gorgeous but they’ve been cremated’.