66
Your Destination Is Two Hundred Yards Ahead On Your Right. You Have Reached Your Destination.
The tinny voice of the satnav didn’t know how true she spoke. It had been a long winding road since the screening room in a stately home. Literally as well as figuratively, for the last two hours. Yet Roisin felt she might finally be in sight of some closure.
She’d had two minor miracles come her way; now she needed a third. The first miracle was Dominic unintentionally contradicting Joe. The second was that Beatrice McMahon, according to her online research, ran a florists in central York called Blooms By Bea.
Roisin calculated that most florists were independent and didn’t make extraordinary profits, giving her a decent chance of finding the owner behind the counter before closing. It was preferable to sitting outside her house in a stake-out.
She’d picked up her car in Webberley and set off, full of trepidation and butterflies, but no anger, not even indignance. Why was she devoid of wrath at the woman who likely had had intimate encounters with her other half? After all, it was virtually certain that Beatrice knew about her, and not vice versa.
The obvious explanation was because she wasn’t in love with Joe any more and she was in love with someone else. The deeper one was that she felt sure Beatrice had been contracted into it with deceptions.
The conundrum of coaxing Beatrice into a disclosure with her was similar to the Sesso waitress: what was in it for her? How did Roisin leapfrog the greater loyalty Bea would naturally feel she owed to the man she’d been having intermittent liaisons with for a decade?
After all, to have done it, she must either be a moral-less jackal or pretty terminal-smitten, and Roisin heavily betted on the latter.
Having thought and thought and thought about this, Roisin figured she had one card to play – only one. If it didn’t work, if Beatrice wasn’t brought onside, she was done. She felt a curious peace and satisfaction with this, rather than desperation. Beatrice telling her to do one couldn’t send Roisin into a tailspin of what next, as there was no what next.
Roisin knew something for sure, anyway. She’d confirmed to herself that Joe had lied, and she had no doubt Joe had cheated. If Beatrice chose not to corroborate that, then OK. A shame, but it wouldn’t change her mind.
Plus, if Roisin was wrong on specifics, if it wasn’t Beatrice at The Royal, then she’d made a tit of herself, but nothing more. The good thing about not going in guns blazing was that she had nothing to apologise for, except wasting her time.
The only part she regretted in this plan was the necessity of doorstepping Beatrice, which was, if not an aggressive act, then at least without Beatrice’s consent.
There was no other way. Messaging Beatrice came with such an incredibly high chance of Beatrice reading and rereading her typed words, trying to assess if Roisin was for real. And inevitably, even if she later came to regret it, snatching up the phone and calling Joe in a panic. Roisin couldn’t bear for Joe to get the jump on her, yet again. Next time, if there was one, he needed to be completely ambushed.
Roisin had a case to make to Beatrice, and some promises could only be made in person.
She parked up in the city car park she knew from her girlfriend visits. God, what if she ran into her former in-laws? She’d be having a day out, or something.
Roisin’s heart rate increased the closer she got to the location she’d looked at dozens of times on Google Maps. She walked past a dry cleaners and a vape shop and the windows of empty premises, scoured with whorls of white paint. She caught an amazing waft of dough and sugar and saw a fashionable bakery. On fidgety impulse, she darted inside and bought some doughnuts, straight out of the fryer.
Then, resuming her walk, there it was: buttercream-coloured signage with the name in curly green script, a doorway crowded with wooden pots of pansies and a chalk A-board, promising many more plants inside.
Roisin could feel her heartbeat in her neck as she wrenched open a heavy door that sounded a loud jangle of old-fashioned shop bell.
Inside, the floor was artificial grass, the ceiling a cluster of creepers like an invading alien force, and it smelled characteristically of a florists: damp soil and floral musk.
Beyond the counter there was a slight, fair woman with glasses on her head, wearing gloves, snipping long rose stems with secateurs. She looked up at Roisin, and froze. It was as if she’d seen a ghost, and Roisin supposed she was one. The Prying Lady.
It was about three quarters of all the confirmation that Roisin would ever need. She glanced to her left and saw a teenage girl with a septum piercing observing Roisin and her lightly steaming brown paper bag.
‘Hi. Is It Bea?’ Roisin said, to a still-frozen Beatrice.
She nodded, in mute horror.
‘I wondered if I could have a quick word, in private?’
A moment passed. Roisin could barely have got more of a reaction if she’d flapped a coat open to reveal a holstered gun.
‘Er … Yeah. Upstairs,’ Beatrice said, in a quavering voice. She came out from behind the counter, laying down her tool and peeling off her gloves, and led Roisin up a short flight of very deep steps to a tiny, low-ceilinged office-cum-storeroom. It had an overflowing desk and nowhere much to sit, so Roisin stood.
‘Sorry to barge in like this. I guess you know who I am: Roisin. Until very recently, I was Joe Powell’s girlfriend. You need to know that I come in total peace. I’ve brought these as an offering.’ She held aloft her doughnuts to a bewildered Bea, as if brandishing a dog poop-scoop sack. ‘Nothing you can say will make me upset at you. I’m only here to put my mind at rest.’
She placed the bag on her desk.
‘If you tell me to piss off, I will piss off at once. This is emphatically not girl-on-girl violence. The only person I want to expose or get into trouble here is Joe. I don’t care or mind what you did. I only want to prove for my own sake that I never got the truth from Joe.’
Beatrice looked, understandably, stupefied. As Roisin had predicted, this announcement alone didn’t tip the scales into Bea reflexively unburdening about her sex life to a stranger who’d breezed into her place of work at five o’clock with sweet pastry goods (two jam and two ring).
‘OK, so. When I was twenty-three, I worked with a guy from York at Waterstone’s Deansgate. Joe, who had a girlfriend back home, here. You. He flirted. We flirted, I should say. Only for about a month, six weeks. I’m not without guilt. It was never going to go any further, as far as I was concerned, as I knew about you. I should’ve kept a more respectful distance though.’
Roisin smiled awkwardly and drew breath. It was impossible to tell how this was going across.
‘Then one day, he came up to me and said he was ending it with you in order to ask me out. He told me afterwards you two were pretty much on the rocks at the time, you wanted different things. You didn’t want to move to Manchester. The break-up was very amicable. You wanted to stay friends, but he didn’t. I didn’t feel fully comfortable about you being dumped so fast for me, and nor should I. But he made it easy not to think about it.’
Beatrice, albeit not having many options in the matter, was listening so intently her forehead was furrowed.
‘If that was true, and you are completely fine with how Joe represented your situation, and … possibly have other reasons for doing what I think you did at The Royal hotel a few weeks ago, then that’s that. But I have this intuition that I got told what I needed to hear when you split up. And that, perhaps, you’ve never had a true account either. That although by rights we should be enemies, we might have some common ground.’
Beatrice was perfectly silent, totally still.
‘Or alternatively, some woman has marched in here, dragged up very old news for you and mentioned hotel stays that mean nothing to you. In which case, feel free to pity me.’ Roisin smiled. ‘But I hope you don’t feel attacked. I’m just trying to put the puzzle pieces together, having shared my life with someone who was hiding half the jigsaw from me.’
‘Uhm,’ Beatrice cleared her throat.
Everything hung in the balance. Roisin thought the very fact Beatrice hadn’t said, what the hell, get out, indicated a willingness to discuss this.
‘I … I have no idea what this is about, sorry. I’ve not seen Joe in years.’
Roisin felt sadness, but not surprise. ‘Ah, OK. Absolutely fair enough. Apologies for the strangeness of my approach. Please enjoy the doughnuts, at least.’
Beatrice nodded.
Roisin smiled a hearty stoic’s smile, turned and descended carefully down the stairs, and saw herself out of the shop, avoiding acknowledging the curiosity of Beatrice’s assistant.
She closed the door behind her with a jangle, walked down the street, inhaling the early evening air in deep gulps as the adrenaline receded.
Well, that was that. Did she believe her? She was unsure. Not really. That wasn’t the demeanour of someone genuinely perplexed, more cornered.
As Roisin reached the car park and blipped the key fob to open her car door, she felt a hand on her arm.
She turned to see Beatrice, slightly out of breath from having chased her, wind blowing her hair across her face.
‘Roisin. I’m sorry. When you said you’d walk away if I said I didn’t know what you were talking about, I had to know you meant it, and it wasn’t a trap. Would you have time for a glass of wine?’