Page 42 of The Little Flower Shop By the Sea
‘Well, doesn’t she scrub up well!’ Ant says, looking around him as Dec carries the cakes through to the back with Amber. ‘You two have done a fabulous job. It’s so bright and breezy! Not at all like the old place. Oh, no offence,’ he says, slapping a hand over his mouth.
‘None taken,’ I say, smiling. ‘It was a bit dull in here before, you’re right. But my grandmother was getting on a bit; I guess the décor of the shop wasn’t her main priority.’
‘And neither should it have been,’ Dec says, emerging from the back of the shop. ‘She was a wonderful woman, Poppy, and she had a magical touch with flowers; everyone who came in here knew that. They weren’t bothered about what colour the walls were.’
‘Did you two ever buy flowers from here?’ I ask.
They look at each other. ‘Of course, all the time,’ Dec says.
‘Any particular occasions you’d like to share with us?’
They both look shiftily about the shop.
‘Wow, look at that!’ Ant says, exclaiming with delight over an abstract ceramic coaster in the shape of a tulip head. ‘That’s…interesting.’
‘It’s by one of the students from Belle’s art class,’ Amber explains. ‘Some of their work is really diverse and unusual.’
‘Mmm, that’s one way to describe it,’ Dec says, peeping over Ant’s shoulder. ‘Unusual.’
‘So, about this time you bought flowers,’ I prompt. ‘What happened?’
‘I don’t know what you mean, Poppy,’ Ant says. ‘Like I said, we bought flowers here all the time.’
‘You know my grandmother kept records of all herspecialtransactions,’ I tell them. ‘Amber and I have found notebooks dating back years and years…’
Since the first box had turned up, we’d discovered more boxes in my grandmother’s cottage with records going back over a hundred years. The magical goings-on at the Daisy Chain had started long before my grandmother took over the shop. It seemed to have been providing help to anyone who needed it for well over a century.
Dec looks at Ant. ‘Go on,’ Ant says. ‘We have nothing to hide. You may as well tell her.’
‘I think you’d better put the kettle on, Poppy,’ Dec says, ‘this is a long story.’
We’re all perched on wooden stools in the back room of the shop clutching large white mugs, each with a different flower on – one of Amber’s ideas for the shop. I have a Poppy of course, Amber has a sunflower, Ant has a daisy, and Dec a pansy.
‘Right then,’ Dec begins, ‘I’ll try and keep this as brief as I can.’ He glances at Ant, who nods his encouragement. ‘When I first inherited my uncle’s bakery here in St Felix, I was a bit of a lost soul. I’d been blissfully living the gay scene down in Brighton to its absolute extreme. And when I say living it to the extreme, I don’t think I need to explain what that means, do I?’
We all shake our heads.
‘I had money, far too much money, from a lottery win – and boy did I know how to spend it. I’m not proud of how I behaved back then. But I was young and living the high life for the first time, and enjoying every debauched, decadent minute of it.’
He takes a moment, to gather himself, and Ant lays a reassuring hand on his shoulder.
‘I thought I had friends,’ Dec continues, ‘but of course they weren’t real friends, they were only interested in my money and what it could buy them. In the end all it boughtmewas danger. I had a couple of very nasty experiences that… well, let’s just say they knocked the wind out of my sails.’
Again he looks to Ant, who comfortingly squeezes his shoulder.
I glance at Amber, but she just takes a long drink of her coffee.
‘So I gambled all my money away, and as a consequence lost all my so-called friends. I was literally on the brink of suicide – and that’s no exaggeration,’ he assures us, ‘when my uncle died.’ He smiles. ‘You would thinkthaton top of everything else would have pushed me over the edge, but it didn’t. When I found out he’d left me – his favourite nephew, apparently – his business, it gave me new hope. Something to look forward to.’
He looks at us all sipping our drinks, listening intently to him.
‘I know I’m sounding like some godawful candidate for Jeremy Kyle here with my tales of woe and redemption. But this is a true story, I promise you.’
‘Nothing truer than real life,’ Amber says sympathetically. ‘You’d be a lot more shocked if I told you some of my stories.’ We all look at her with interest, but she just winks at Dec. ‘Go on, what happened when you got here to St Felix?’
‘When I arrived at the bakery and found all my uncle’s secret recipes, some of which had been handed down through the generations, something changed, I began baking and people began buying and telling me they liked what I baked. It was odd, but I just felt special. Like I belonged.’
‘Tell them about the flowers, Declan,’ Ant encourages.
