The Flower Committee

Chapter One — The Foxglove Year

The foxgloves came up tall that June, taller than Nell could remember, leaning over the churchyard wall as if they wanted to read the names on the older stones.

She stood among them with her secateurs and her trug, and did not cut a single one.

"You're poison, the lot of you," she told them, not unkindly. "Beautiful and no good in a vase. Tom always said so."

Tom had said a great many things, standing just there, in his shapeless gardening jumper with the dropped stitch at the elbow that she had never got around to mending and now never would. Pretty things, foxgloves, he'd say, but every bit of them will stop your heart if you're foolish. We make medicine out of them, you know. Digitalis. Same plant that'll kill you in a meadow will keep you alive in a tablet. It's all in the dose. He had a doctor's fondness for the things that could go either way.

Nine months he'd been gone. She had measured it in flower rotas. The white lilies of his funeral, and then the harvest chrysanthemums she had arranged with her hands shaking, and the Christmas holly, and the Easter daffodils, and now the foxgloves of an ordinary summer that he would never see. Grief, she had discovered, was not a wave that came and went. It was a lodger. It sat in his chair. It used his mug. It had opinions about the weather.

A weight landed on the wall beside her trug, neat as a full stop, and she did not have to look to know it was Bramble. The marmalade cat had appointed himself her shadow some weeks after the funeral, padding in through the scullery window one wet night and declining, with great dignity, ever to leave. He had belonged, loosely, to no one. Now he belonged, loosely, to her.

"You're not to eat the birds," she said.

Bramble looked at her with the flat contempt of a creature who would, in fact, eat the birds.

Nell turned back to the church porch, where the real work waited. St. Jude's wanted dressing for the fête — St. Jude being, as the Reverend Bertie Lyle never tired of pointing out from the pulpit, the patron saint of lost causes and desperate situations, which made him, Bertie said, the natural patron of any parish that relied on a summer raffle to fix its roof.

Inside, the cool of the nave smelled of stone and beeswax and the green sap of cut stems. Dot Renshaw was already there, of course. Dot was always already there.

"I've done the font," Dot said, stepping back to admire it. "Sweet peas and a bit of the gypsophila. I didn't think you'd want anything grand, what with — well." She let the sentence go where it needed to.

"It's lovely, Dot." It was. Dot had a gift Nell had never quite matched: she could make a jam jar of garden flowers look like the most natural thing in the world, as though they had simply decided, of their own accord, to gather there and be beautiful. Nell arranged flowers the way she had once taught long division — correctly, thoroughly, with a result you could be proud of. Dot arranged them the way some people prayed.

They worked in the easy quiet of two women who had done this together for thirty years. Dot was seventy-one now, small and round and soft-handed, with a cardigan for every weather and a tin of something in her bicycle basket for anyone who looked peaky. Half the village wore her comfrey salve on their aching joints and drank her cordials when their chests were bad. She had buried a husband and, harder, a son, and she had answered both the way she answered everything — by keeping busy, by feeding people, by turning up at the church before anyone else with her secateurs already sharpened.

"You'll want to mind those foxgloves out there," Dot said, threading a sprig of feverfew into the windowsill arrangement. "I caught the Hartle children sucking the flowers off them last summer. I told their mother, you keep them away, that's the same poison as'll be in half the heart pills in this village. People don't think. They see a pretty bell and they don't think."

"You sound like Tom."

"Your Tom was a sensible man." Dot's hands went still for a moment. "He was good to my Michael, you know. At the end. Came out at all hours, never made him feel a nuisance, even when there was nothing more to be done." She gave a small, brisk nod, the kind that closed a door gently. "Twelve years this autumn. You stop counting the years and start counting the things he'd have liked."

Nell touched her arm. There was nothing to say that they hadn't both already learned the hard way, so she said nothing, which was the only true comfort either of them had ever found.

It was Felicity Banwell who broke the peace, as Felicity Banwell generally did, sweeping in through the south door with a clipboard held before her like a processional cross.

"There you both are. Now. The fête." Felicity chaired the fête committee the way an admiral chairs a fleet. "I have news, and you are not to make a fuss, Eleanor, because it's all arranged and I won't have it unarranged. We have got him. Gideon Frost. The Gideon Frost. He's agreed to judge the bake-off and open the whole thing. Guest of honour. In Pennycombe."

Dot's secateurs clicked shut.

"The man off the television," Nell said.

"The man off the television." Felicity glowed. "Three series of Frost on the Cake. His new book out in August. And — this is the thing, this is what brought him — he's a Pennycombe boy. Born here. Gary Frost, the baker's son, before he was anybody. His sister's still at the post office, Brenda, you know Brenda. He wants to give something back. His words. Give something back."

"How generous of him," said Nell, "to give us back his Saturday."

"You can be as dry as you like." Felicity was already moving on, ticking. "It will be the biggest fête we have ever had. There'll be photographers. There may be regional press."

In the small commotion of Felicity's leaving, Nell noticed only one thing, and she did not think anything of it at the time, which was the whole trouble with noticing: you so rarely knew, at the time, which thing mattered.

She noticed that Dot Renshaw had sat down quite suddenly on the end pew, and that her round, kind face had gone the colour of the gypsophila, and that her lips were moving, very slightly, around a word she did not say aloud.

"Dot? Are you faint? It's the heat."

"It's the heat," Dot agreed, and smiled, and was herself again so quickly that Nell let herself believe it.

Outside, the foxgloves leaned over the wall in the sun, listening.

Chapter Two — A Local Boy

Gideon Frost arrived on the Thursday before the fête in a low silver car that did not suit the lanes, and he brought the weather of celebrity with him.

Nell met him properly at the post office, where she had gone for stamps and stayed for the spectacle. He filled the little shop. He was a big handsome man gone slightly soft at the jaw, with a barber's tan and a watch the size of a drain cover, and he had the trick — Nell had seen it in head teachers and bishops and once, memorably, in a man selling miracle gutter-cleaner at the door — of looking at you as though you were the most fascinating person he had met all day, while his eyes did sums over your shoulder.

"And this is?" he said, beaming at Nell.

"This is Mrs. Fenwick," said Brenda from behind the counter, in a voice you could have chilled a larder with. "She chairs the flower committee. She taught you your times tables, Gary, not that you'd remember."

"Eleanor Fenwick," said Nell. "You wrote your fours backwards for a whole term and cried when I made you do them again."

Something flickered behind the television smile — not pleasure. "I'm sure I deserved it." He turned the smile up a notch to cover the gap. "It's Gideon now, Bren. We've been over this."

"You'll always be Gary in this shop." Brenda Frost was a square, grey woman who had stayed where she was put and resented every soul who hadn't. She slid his change across the counter without touching his hand. "Mother's bakery's a closed coffee shop now, before you ask, with the prices to match. Walter Pym ran it till your programme finished him. You'll want to keep clear of Walter."

"Walter Pym." Gideon's laugh was rich and easy and entirely for the room. "He went to pieces over a soggy bottom. On national television. I judged what was in front of me, Bren. It's not personal, it's standards. People want standards."

He scooped up his change and his charm and swept out, and the bell over the door jangled long after he'd gone.

"Inheritance," said Brenda, to no one, to the stamps. "He's come for the cottage. Father's cottage, where I've lived these forty years. He thinks I don't know. Half of it's his on paper and he's come to give something back." She laughed, once, like a dropped plate. "He'll sell it from under me and call it generosity and the cameras will love him."

Nell bought her stamps and did not say what she was thinking, which was that she had rarely seen anyone look at a brother the way Brenda Frost had looked at the door he'd left by.

---

She learned the rest of it in pieces over the next two days, the way one learned everything in Pennycombe — at the butcher's, in the queue at the chemist, over the wall.

She learned about Walter Pym from Walter Pym, who was up to his elbows in his allotment when she passed with Bramble at her heels, and who was not a man to suffer in silence.

"You've heard he's coming, then." Walter straightened, a big slow man with sad spaniel eyes and forearms like a navvy. Behind him, against the fence, a great stand of foxgloves nodded purple and white among his beans, self-sown and let be. "Guest of honour. At my bake-off. The same fête I've baked for thirty year."

"It's hardly his fault you're a better baker than he is, Walter."

"It's exactly his fault." But he softened, because everyone softened for Nell. "He had me on his programme. Did you see it? Course you didn't, you've better things to do. They flew me to a tent in a field and they were ever so nice for the cameras, and then he stood there in his nice apron and he said my bread was — what was it — 'the bread of a man who's given up.' To eleven million people. My bread. And the orders stopped, just like that, and the bank wanted its money, and I lost the shop. His own mother's shop, as it happens. There's a thing." He drove the fork into the earth. "I could kill him, Mrs. Fenwick, and that's the truth and I don't care who hears it. But I won't, because then he wins, and I'd not give him the satisfaction. I'd sooner take him to court and have him say sorry where the cameras are. That's what I want. Him, alive, saying sorry."

He pulled a foxglove leaf absently as he spoke, rolled it, dropped it. Nell watched it fall and thought nothing.

She learned about Audrey Latch from Audrey herself, who ran the tearoom on the green and who had, over the years, become the nearest thing Nell had to a confidante since Tom. Audrey was sixty, sharp as a tack and twice as useful, and when Nell mentioned the bake-off Audrey put down the teapot with a click.

"He's bringing his memorabilia," Audrey said. "For the book signing. Did you know? Felicity's that thrilled. His 'culinary journey.' His old aprons. His recipe cards." She said recipe cards the way another woman might say my mother's wedding ring, that I last saw on the hand of a thief. "Nell, his whole career — the lemon and rosemary drizzle, the one that made him, the one on the cover of every book — that's my grandmother's. Word for word. Edith Latch's drizzle, that won this fête in nineteen sixty-something. He worked a summer in her kitchen as a boy and he took it and he put his name on it and he never so much as sent a card when she died." Her mouth was a thin line. "And now he's coming to give something back. If I see that recipe on his table I don't know what I'll do."

And she learned about Tessa Vane by accident, on the Friday evening, when she cut through the lane behind the Pennycombe Arms and heard two voices going hard at each other in the car park, low and furious.

"—because there's nothing left, Gideon, that's why—" A woman, young, clever, frightened. "The show's not been recommissioned, the advance is spent, the car isn't even yours, and you stand there—"

"Keep your voice down."

"Three years I've covered for you. Three years. And the minute it suits you—"

"It's handled, Tessa. The cottage covers it. Brenda will see sense or she won't, and either way—"

Nell walked on. It was none of her business. But she carried it home through the dusk, the shape of it: that the silver car wasn't his, that the great Gideon Frost was hollow as a chocolate bunny, and that the sharp young woman who managed his diary knew it and was tied to him by something that sounded, to a teacher's ear, a good deal like love gone sour.

That night Bramble would not settle. He sat in the window and watched the lane, and when Nell finally carried him up to bed he turned his head and looked back the way they'd come, down towards the green where the marquees were going up white in the moonlight, and made a low sound in his throat she had never heard him make.

"It's only a fête, you daft animal," she told him.

She was wrong about that, too.