The flowering made Susan cry. That wasn’t really to do with grief anymore, though she had been very fond of John’s mother at one time. She had known, even so, that it would not have been right to attend her funeral. Susan and John had once been so in love, but they had fallen out quite sharply with each other at the end. Of course, she had long since forgiven him for the words he’d uttered in anger. It was just that, since then, he had been married and separated, twice, and she had not known how to maintain the link with his mother. Besides, she thought, her turning up at the service would probably just have embarrassed John. Lord, he would have enough to deal with, if both the estranged wives arrived, without her being there as well. Also, deep down, she couldn’t be sure that John had forgiven her for getting so furious with him. She’d barely forgiven herself for throwing that vase at him, complete with the flowers he had just given her and which she had plonked ungraciously into their best crystal. That had turned out to be their final quarrel. They had cleaned up the glass, the water, and the battered tulips together without saying anything at all, before parting their ways.
So instead, she had written a little card to John, expressing her sympathy on his bereavement and telling him that she had fond memories of his mother. This was true. Eileen had never criticised her untidy nature. Instead, she had encouraged her to grow some herbs and to plant out a tub of primroses on the tiny, sun trapping balcony of the dishevelled flat she and John had once shared.
Susan had seen the funeral listed in the local paper and decided to pay her own homage at the appointed hour by tidying up the small flower bed in her little yard. Then she had transplanted into it some of the fledgling seedlings cultivated on her cluttered kitchen windowsill. Later she had raised a weak cup of tea to Eileen’s memory, since this had always been Eileen’s drink of choice.
And that was that, she’d thought, until the next day when she’d come back from her daily outing to the local garage to pick up a paper. Coming in through the back gate, she had seen that something was waiting for her by the kitchen door. As she had got closer, she had been able to make out a tangle of green stems topped by distinctive scarlet flowers. Of course, tulips, she had smiled. She had bent down slowly to inspect them and seen that a little note had been placed underneath the now rather tatty bouquet. ‘Left over from the funeral. Thought of you. John’. She had laughed then, happy to have the mangled flowers that he had deposited there. She was sure now that he had forgiven her. Carefully taking the tulips indoors and arranging them in a colourful jug, she had thought of how much Eileen would have approved. The tulips had obviously come from an upmarket florist, the sort where they leave the bulbs on the stems to be retrieved, preserved and re-used for planting again. Susan had been determined not to miss this second chance and, in the autumn, had planted out ‘Eileen’s bulbs’, in the well dug soil of her raked flower bed. She waited patiently through the winter for the new tulips to emerge and unravel. On the day that the first bulb bloomed, Susan wept a little, thinking of John and his mother, and catching just a little hopefulness from the weak spring sunshine as it illuminated the first flower.
About the author
Jane lives in Woodbridge, Suffolk UK. With the encouragement of the local creative writing class which she joined in 2021 she has been writing stories ever since, some of which have appeared on Café Lit. She also enjoys writing about Victorian literature.
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