The sweet smell of revenge

“A rose by any other name would smell as sweet”

Another story from the Past; Tense collection

Dinner finished, Andrew chafes to be underway again. To join the tailbacks at every roundabout, to gaze blearily out of the windows and watch the traffic shuffle along the crowded holiday routes. Every inch brings him nearer to home. That’s Andy for you – a home creature. Sally was content, like me, to stop off at every antique shop and village tea room along the way. Like me, too, Sally found the process of getting to and from a holiday destination quite as satisfying, if not more so, than the holiday itself. Four years from now, following in the footsteps of his older sister, Jenny, Andy would hopefully be in further education. Sally and I will be free to indulge ourselves to satiation, visiting refurbished railway sheds or woollen mills rescued from demolition, and peering at piles of dusty antiques.“Da-ad,” Andy scuffs his heels, drawing out the vowel. “Can’t we just get on? There’s nothing here.”I suppose there isn’t for him. Reality for him is a succession of Facebook characters who want to say something inconsequential. I sit back in the outdoor eating area, enjoy the sunshine and stretch out.  I will compliment the middle-aged, mop-haired lady who took and, I suspect, also cooked our order. Good food, honestly served up with a genuine smile.“The garden shop’s still open, sir, lovely it is this time of year.” She hands over my receipt, acknowledging the tip with a radiant smile. This woman’s accent is like sunshine on the tree-lined slopes of Montgomeryshire. “Roses, we have. Rare ones too.”

“My father grew roses,” I murmur.  I can hear Andy, close by, breathing hard. He annoys me when he gets like this.

“Dad, can we go?” His voice is too loud. Tinny sounds like a wasp in a jam jar issue from around his ears. That does it!

“No,” I yell. “Roses, they have. You might not like roses, like you don’t like antiques, like you don’t like bookshops, like you don’t like much that your mother and I do, but I do; and I intend to look.”

Sally saunters up, straw hat lodged on her auburn hair; she guesses immediately what has taken place. “They do rare roses here, love,” she points to the sign. “Let’s take a quick look.”

Andy is outnumbered and out-manoeuvred. He plugs his headphones in again, shrugs and follows dejectedly behind. Deep in me, like a nagging wound, something twinges. I love Andy; like I love his sister. Jenny is bubbly, self-motivated and capable whereas Andy is a plodder, lacking his sister’s inherent sense of direction. He has to struggle to succeed and the struggle demoralises him. When he was younger we would hug him and tell him how proud we were of him but now the hugs are met with awkward resistance. So Andy’s insecurities have become walled inside a shell of bravado. The boy is becoming a man. The man is becoming a stranger to us both. ‘He’ll be okay,’ I tell myself.

As garden centres go, this one struggles. Many plants are slumped over the staging, thirsty and neglected. Even the ornamental heathers are showing signs of drought. Empty compost sacks flop around the weed-strewn paving and the ornamental fountains have a coating of green scum. The place has a resigned look about it and after ten minutes I begin to think Andy is right. There is nothing to see here.

“Don’t you want to see the roses?” Sally is as intent as I on thwarting Andy’s desire to get home. “John, love, I’m just off to the ladies.” She is laughing silently as she turns to go. I know because her backside wiggles when she laughs.

The roses are in much better shape. They have been arranged on staging, and show signs of regular attention. Peering at the labels it strikes me there are some real collector’s items here. Seeing my renewed enthusiasm our son huffs again and sits down on a stack of pallets, his shoulders hunched, the wasp furiously buzzing in its jam-jar.

And then I see it! Tucked behind a few specimens of Gallica ‘James Mason.’ I read the label once, then again, easing it from in amongst the curved thorns that rip at my knuckles.

“Andy!” Damn the youth, he is still hunched on the pallets. I wave to attract what little attention he still retains. “Andy, you must see this!”

He shambles towards me, removing his headphones like giant lumps of wax from his ear canals. “Can we go now? ‘Aven’t you seen ‘nuff yet?”

“Look at this!” The pot is too heavy to lift so I grab his neck and shove his face down for a better look. “I never thought I’d ever see one again, not one of Granddad’s.”

He wavers there, half bending, torn between the innate compulsion to discard anything not on a computer screen and curiosity about what his old man is getting so red in the face about. Finally he stoops to read the label.

He is about to straighten up when he realises what he has read. He bends down, reads the label again, then again. For ten, fifteen seconds he crouches, not believing the evidence of his own eyes. Finally he tears himself away.

“Dad, this is a wind-up, innit?”

School finished early today and Dad collects me in the Morris Minor van. I can hear it coming by the resonant trumpeting of the exhaust as he changes down the gears. I climb in, enjoying the smell of the worn, red leather seats. As we drive to the nursery, Dad makes what passes for conversation.

“‘Ow was school, John lad? Have they made you prefect yet?”

I sigh. If Dad was really with it, he would know that High Grange Grammar school does not appoint prefects until fifth year. Next September I’ll be in second year. I wonder then if Dad actually knows what age I really am. He proffers one or two more tentative comments as we barrel down the overgrown lanes to ‘Dales Nursery.’

When the Morris pulls up on the mossy gravel, two men standing around pick up their tools and make to look as busy as they can. Dad winds the window down.

“Giddon wi’ some work, Jeff!” It is a friendly remonstrance. “‘Ave you pruned them ramblers yet?”

“Aye that we have, sirr!” The older man twitches his thumb over his shoulder. “‘Undred and fifty ready to go out the door. Just waitin’ for your van to get ‘em under way.”

Dad exhales heavily. “Sorry, lad. Missus needed van for trip t’ town.”

Dad turns the engine off, tosses the keys to Jeff and with a brief, “Come this way, lad,” strides away. We thread our way between hundreds of thorny stumps planted out in neat rows. I am reminded of the war graves in Normandy; each plant has a tag identifying its species and genus name. I imagine if I were to bend down and peer at the white tag it would say something like;

‘Gallica Charles de Mills – missing in action June 1945.

His name liveth for evermore.’

Because that was what happened to rose bushes Dad produced. The names they bore were likely to live for years in the catalogues and directories the length and breadth of the British Isles. Many went abroad to Europe and even America. Dad didn’t only grow established rose varieties, he nurtured new strains.

As a juvenile, following his lean-legged stride down those endless tracks of rose bushes, none of this made much of an impression on me. The fact  Derek Dale, a Yorkshire man who moved south and established in conjunction with a colleague the most respected and innovative plant nursery of its time; that meant nothing to my mind. I was saturated with the sights and sounds of the early sixties; technology, science, space rockets, Eagle comics and so on. I took our very comfortable standard of living for granted. I accepted without question that Dad was somehow ‘into roses,’ but it wasn’t an exciting occupation compared to some of my school friends’ fathers who worked in nuclear power or television, so I kept quiet about it.

“This way John.” We were alongside a long low building. Dad produced a set of keys and fumbled them in the lock.

“In you go, lad. That’s right, careful where you tread.”

When you get to your early teens, life does funny things to you. Everything you are familiar with, have accepted and are comfortable with; everything suddenly comes back at you with question marks all over it. Looking at him in the darkened interior of the building, with his thin form and rustic jacket and comparing him to mother’s elegant and impeccable appearance; I am hit by the weird realisation I am the product of their union. Right now that concept seems impossible. Nearly fourteen years ago they got together in the way our biology teacher gravely and scientifically explained to a sniggering class last week, and nine months later I was born.

Yes, I wonder. This biology thing seems unlikely in our house. Having had me, I suppose just to try childbearing out, my mother and father retreated into very different lives. He to his rose bushes, in conjunction with a man called Trevor Wilde; she to Hawthorn’s Country Club.

“Flitwick’s out gallivanting I tek it?”  Granny Dale was visiting for a week. She makes no attempt to conceal her contempt for her daughter in law. Again, this was something I assumed to be the normal order of things. Granny Dale would routinely visit and my mother’s activities would be subject to close and critical scrutiny. It would not be true to say there was no love lost between Granny Dale and mother – simply because there was none there in the first place. Gran called her ‘Flitwick’ because that was mother’s home town in Bedfordshire. But the word carried connotations of flightiness and Gran used it out of habit.

“I wish you wouldn’t speak of her like that, ‘specially in front of lad.” Dad grumbled.

“Why not?” Gran at least made up for her outspokenness by cooking us a decent meal. The scales of justice in my head tipped temporarily in her favour. “She’s a waster, Derek. What good ‘as she done for thee? Or John for that matter?”

I stiffen at that. Mum gave me a hug last week. She was on her way out of the door when she suddenly seemed to notice me, inspecting my puckered face in the hallway mirror.

“You’re turning out a handsome lad, John.” It was an unexpected compliment and I noticed that her eyes were moist as she spoke.

Gran bashes the spoon to dislodge the creamy mashed potatoes onto my plate. I decide against arguing the point.

“She’s a good woman,” says Dad, finally, trying to sound convinced, but even my immature sense of propriety can detect the waver in his voice. “Just needs tamin’ a bit, that’s all.”

It takes a few moments for my eyes to adjust to the relative darkness inside the building. Try as I might the questions marks will not disperse. They cling like greenfly to everything I encounter. This rose growing business. Where did it come from? Well that’s one I do know the answer to.

Dad was never in doubt about his ability to breed roses. And soon enough he made it clear to every supplier in the trade he meant business. With his careful eye for a good breeding stock, and methodical, patient approach, he revolutionised the supply of the gorgeous blooms to every park, garden and stately home who were interested. What he lacked was money to develop the business, and here he was lucky. Mother, living in Flitwick was possessed of a small sum of cash – her parents had (and the word was whispered in my hearing) D-I-V-O-R-C-E-D and, unexpectedly, she was left well off.

Dad’s second stroke of luck was teaming up with Trevor Wilde; a fast-talking but competent marketing man. The diametric opposite of Dad’s plodding circumspection; Trevor’s energetic hawking of Dale’s new strains of roses was instrumental in putting the nursery on the map. Even Gran Dale could not fault the extraordinary success of the enterprise.

I follow Dad through the building. It is the masterpiece of his outfit.

All around Dad sees bushes, different qualities of blooms, some long-lasting, others possessed of fabulous perfumes, some resistant, others susceptible to blight and rust. He will mix their pollens; stir them together in season-slow recipes and select from the outcome the features he and Trevor think will appeal to the market.

All around, I see the Treens – a warrior race of aliens bent on conquest of planet Earth. I am Dan Dare, ace rocket pilot, fearless adventurer armed with a pistol that shoots a beam of light. Pow! Six Treens throw their spiny arms skywards as my weapon cuts them down, Swipe! Spatz!

“Ow!”

“What’s matter lad?” Dad turns round. One of the Treens had snuck up on my right and seized my flailing wrist, burying its poison-laden spine into my flesh. For a moment the soldier hangs on, his full weight dragging the spine deeper through my wrist. Then he crashes to the floor. Dan Dare’s eyes water.

“Careful lad. Nasty thorns on them tea-roses.” He scoops the debris from the floor and replaces the stumpy shrub back in the soil. His voice betrays no hint of irritation for my clumsiness.

“Dad, why don’t you grow ‘em without the thorns?” I suck the wound; it is swelling angrily.

“John,” he seems miles away. “The best blooms come with sharpest thorns. Fact of life.”

With my wrist still in my mouth, taking care to suck the Treen venom from the wound, I follow Dad to another door opening onto an enclosed courtyard. Here, I know, is where the product of his painstaking labours will be grown to bloom outdoors, away from prying eyes. The moment I walk through the door, I see what he has brought me here for.

“Dad, that’s a… that’s just…”

“Aye, John.” His voice is heavy. “Isn’t she grand?”

The word ‘beautiful’ fails dismally. Even to me, a teenage boy, I can see this is no ordinary rose. In rich soil just to one side of the enclosed area is a mature bush. One single bloom erupts from the fresh stem struck out from last year’s wood. Others are budding, a flirt of colour peeping through a slit in the husk.

“Go’wn lad, stick y’ nose in her.”

I lower my freckled face into the convoluted mass of radiant, white petals. For that moment my world is absorbed by that magnificent rose. All I see is white, all I smell is clean, warm, achingly evocative perfume. You mustn’t breathe deeply – roses don’t yield their best scent if you do. Inhale gently; let the aroma saturate your senses. Oh, and close your eyes!

“You like her, John lad?”

“Like her…she’s fantastic! What’s she going to be called?”

“Diana. Diana Dale.”

“But that’s mother’s…” I break off. I realise what I am about to say.

“Come here lad.”

I tear myself away from the rose. It seems absurd now, but the deep whiteness of the corolla seems to have a silver sheen at the edges. But not even Dad could grow a silver rose.

“Things haven’t been good between your mother and meself of late.”

More question marks. I thought the icy silences in our house were normal. Recollection of yesterday evening springs to mind.

“Take your hand off me!” Mother does not raise her voice. Dad has placed his scarred hand on her arm in a gesture of affection. “I don’t buy new clothes for you to rub dirty marks into.”

“Sorry lass.” Dad removes his hand as if he has just found a large curved thorn hooked into the base of his thumb. “It’s a grand blouse you’ve got on.”

“It’s a chemise,” she responds in her ‘why do I bother’ tone of voice. “And before you ask, tea is get your own. I’m out with Margaret this evening.”

I gaze at the rose. Dad clears his throat.

“It’s her birthday next weekend. She’s having some do at that club of hers. I thowt I might present her with it.” He pauses. “Do you think she’ll take to it?”

“Derek!” Before I can reply the door behind us opens and Trevor Wilde bursts in. “Where have you been? I’ve been looking all over.”

He makes an unlikely partner for Dad. His speech is, as Mum often says, ‘proper gentleman speaking.’ He is neatly dressed with oiled hair and shiny shoes. He flashes a ready smile and has a capacity to remember names and trivial bits of information. He tousles my hair.

“John! Quite a little man, aren’t we? Soon have the ladies after you, see if you don’t!”

I like Trevor. He has that ability to make you feel special. He does that now. He asks if I managed to escape detention last week, or did I have to stay behind? Does crabby Miss Howard still teach me Mathematics? Sometimes he slips me a shilling for no reason. I chat to him, while Dad stands reticently by. Finally he cannot contain himself. Gently he tugs Trevor towards the white rose.

“Tek a look, Trevor.” His voice is soft. “Tek a look at this beauty.”

Trevor stands back for a few moments, inspecting the whole bush. Then he cups the bloom, reverently in his fingers and puts his face close to the creamy explosion of beauty, looking horizontally across the petals, admiring the evenness of the colour. For a full minute his nose pays homage to the fragrance. When he stands straight, Dad can hardly contain his excitement:

“Well, Trevor? Well? Well?”

Trevor looks hypnotised. He speaks slowly, but like Dad cannot hide his delight.

“This one is without question the finest you’ve done, Derek. This is the queen of roses. What will you call her?”

Dad shuffles. “I was just telling John here, it’s Diana’s birthday this weekend. I thowt I might be getting to call this ‘un after her. I…I felt it was kind of appropriate, like. Her being such a looker an’ all.”

“Diana Dale?” Trevor’s hands still cup the bloom but his face has frozen.

“What’s matter Trev? D’ye not think it’s a grand name?”

“Grand name,” he repeats faintly. “Why, yes of course. Absolutely. Very appropriate!” In a rapid movement he consults his wristwatch. “Derek, I must be on my way. Duty calls and all that.”

“No, stay a while, lad. Angus Higgs telephoned me this morning. He wants our new list for the catalogue. I told him we had five new ‘ybrids for him. Stay on and see what you might reckon to be callin’ ‘em.”

But Trevor Wilde is halfway to the door. “Sorry, I’m late already.”

“Will we be seeing you at our Diana’s party? I was going to present it to her there. Afterwards I’ve booked us a few days at a hotel in Plymouth. You know how she likes the big cities.”

“Yes, yes of course I’ll be there Mr Dale.” He is gone.

“Funny,” muses Dad. “‘Ee ‘asn’t called me ‘Mr Dale’ for many a year. Wonder what’s mitherin’ him?”

That weekend I go on the train to Harrogate. Gran is at York station to meet me, formidable even amongst the crowds rushing over the footbridges. We board the local train. She drags off her hat and raincoat and settles back in the seat as the train lurches out of the station.

“How’s thy father doing lad?”

I tell her about the Diana Dale rose, and Dad’s plans to present it to Mum at the party. She knew about Dad’s scheme take Mum to a hotel in Plymouth – hence my going to stay with her. She harrumphs a few times as I tell her the news, but refrains comment. The train sways and rattles on its way.

That was the weekend of the hurricane. That’s what it felt like to me. It’s when events start spiralling out of hand. Everything you’ve known and taken for granted is suddenly rolling over and over, faster and faster. You pray for it to stop, but the wind just gets fiercer, and even things you’ve accepted as permanent are buckling before its force. You cry until your chest hurts, but it makes no difference. There it goes, your home, family, familiar faces – all your life to date blasted away by unstoppable events.

I thought it was my fault. Gran never approved of comics. In spite of this I squirreled a few back issues of the Eagle in my suitcase. Gran’s appropriately eagle eye spotted them almost at once. This time she made no remarks. But I felt guilty.

It was Sunday night as I was in bed I heard Gran on the telephone to Dad. Muffled by two rooms and a hallway, but I knew what she was telling him about. She was angry about my comics. Her voice raised, my imagination working overtime to fill in the blanks.

“Calm down, Derek …” muffle…muffle… “I’ve told you before…” muffle, muffle… “You should have put your foot down…”

I lay awake palpitating, but when Gran put her head round my bedroom door I feigned sleep. She tucked the linen sheets around me and tiptoed downstairs. She’d calmed down. Good!

The full force of the hurricane only became apparent days later. Gran announced flatly, “You’re t’ stay wi’ me John lad.”

“Oh!” I took some more toast. “How long for?”

“Till things is ready to go back.”

Some time later I discovered Dad had turned up at the country club wearing a jacket that almost had him refused admission. Most people at the party were unknown to him and he wandered round clutching the rose bush until Trevor introduced him to a few people. Somebody made a snide comment about his bucolic appearance and mother had taken it badly. Then in a monstrous display of poor timing, Dad made an effort to present the rose to Mum in the main ballroom.

“It’s a rose, Diana, love…” he stumbled, his face crimson. The band was waiting to play the next dance number. In the silence somebody tittered at this rather obvious statement, hastily turning it to a cough. The revellers dressed in starched white shirts and tuxedos watched in disdain. Dad blundered on. “It’s called ‘Diana’ after you; to say ‘ow much I love you and t’ thank you for all these years…”

Mother was dazzling in a black sequinned dress. But blacker still was the look she gave Dad.

“What are you doing here in that awful jacket?” She hissed. She had had a couple of gins already and it made her reckless. “You look like a tradesman!”

In silence, Dad held out the rose bush to his wife.

“Put it down there.” She snapped.

And then Dad snapped too. In the warm evening he was perspiring in his jacket. His lovingly prepared olive branch had been comprehensively discarded and his placid temperament had had enough

“What d’ye think you’re doing here, lass?” His normally soft voice carried an edge, blistering as a winter blast over the fells of home. He advanced towards her. “Just who the hell do you think you are, poncin’ around this place, givin’ y’self all these airs and graces? You and these snooty friends of yorn, they make you forget…”

His finger prodded her.

“They make you forget it was my hard graft got you here, wi’ your fine ‘ouse and fine clothes. Aye, I refused you nothin’ and look at the thanks it gets me.”

“You?” Her eyes were hard. “You’d have been nothing without Trevor!”

At that moment Dad saw what everybody had known for months. Trevor Wilde, standing close by her, immaculate in suit and bow tie. Dad saw the sudden, anguished glance, heard the sharp intake of breath and the “Diana, no…”

And what was left of his world tumbled away in the hurricane.

The details of those ghastly months following are a blur to me now. But the overall effect is leached into my memory. After a couple of weeks Gran and I travelled back home to ‘try and sort things out.’

And here a different, unexpected side of Granny Dale presented itself. I anticipated her fighting stridently on his side, giving ‘Flitwick’ a broadside of her opinions in Yorkshire invective. Instead she acted as go-between, trying to isolate Diana from her new surroundings in Trevor’s well-appointed country home and get her son and daughter-in-law back together. She arranged that they could meet at neutral venues; in the hope, locked together they would ‘see a bit o’ sense!’

But the ‘bit o’ sense’ was doomed. Dad spent most days slumped in his armchair watching the nights close in and saying less than usual. Mother, subject to the vivacity of Trevor Wilde was not dazzled by her husband on these contrived occasions. In short she wanted a D-I-V-O-R-C-E from him.

Dale’s famous rose nursery languished under the loyal but inexpert care of Jeff the foreman. While the existing stock was dutifully shipped to markets around the country, the new strains of rose bushes remained in their compound, a prisoner of divorce proceedings.

But one night remains clearly stamped in my recollections. I can hear now the rain pattering on the window, smell the open fire in the living room spitting on damp wood. Gran is cooking tea – every cloud has a silver lining. Then the telephone rings.

Dad slumped in his chair, staring into the flames hears it but does not register or stir. Finally, in my role as up-and-coming man of the house, I get up and answer it.

“Is that Derek Dale?” It is not a voice I know.

“No, it’s his son John. Can I help you?”

It is the divorce lawyer acting for mother. I call Dad who stumps wearily down the hall to the telephone. I unashamedly listen to his grumpy replies.

“Why should I…? Yes, those are t’ property of Dales… You really want your pound o’ flesh don’t you? Yes…five new ‘ybrids… All right, I’ll get ‘em valued. No, they need registering first… All right, get off me back, I’m payin’ for your time!”

What really sticks in my mind after he has replaced the receiver and stumped back to his chair is the way his muttering suddenly stops, and a gleam, the first light in months, appears in his eyes.

For a short time afterwards Dad became more animated then any of his acquaintances had ever seen him. He visited the nursery regularly even although it was to be sold over his head. Gran began to see light at the end of the tunnel for him. One day Angus Higgs came to the house. He was clutching a piece of paper.

“I take it this is a joke, Mr Dale?”

“Nope!” Dad, if it were possible, was a man of even fewer words now.

“You’re serious then? You are asking our catalogue to register these plants under these…names?”

“No reason why not, is there?”

He looked flustered. “It’s all highly irregular, Mr Dale. I think it could cause a scandal.”

“It’s already scandalous, lad. T’ question is, are you going to tek ‘em, or shall I ask Prewitts?”

And this decided it. As my Dad signed some papers, Angus was heard to mutter, “I suppose it’s publicity, good or otherwise. Could even catch on.”

“That’s my fellow!” Dad clapped him on the shoulder.

Both earphones hang out of Andy’s ears. They pump what passes for music unheeded into the air. Andy is reading the label for the umpteenth time.

“Granddad called it this?” For the first time in quite a while, he makes unwavering eye contact with me. “Cool!”

“This and four other new varieties.” Behind me I can hear Sally humming as she approaches. Curiously I am disappointed. Andy and I are having a moment of connection. He is finding the question marks about his parents cropping up as I did once. Now this bit of family history has emerged to forge a link between Andy and me and I resolve to cultivate this tender shoot. He knows more about his grandparents and by extension he has glimpsed a little more of me.

Sally slips her arm round my waist. She absorbs the moment in a moment. “Long way from home, isn’t it? Wonder who’s growing them right out here?”

“Can we buy it Dad?”

I hesitate. The rest of the story hangs like the smell of sour milk in my first school. It is a story of two people who having severed their relationship, refused to admit it was probably the only one that would have worked. Together they might have lived in a freezer, but at least the walls were strong. The nursery thrived while they were married, and in their own way they too throve.

Apart, well, they fell apart. Mum entertained notions of globe-trotting with what Gran called ‘her fancy-man,’ but in truth the nursery was sold for much less than its market value. She ended up alone, running a guest house in Woolacombe, still outstanding in her appearance, but her face set in a hard look of a thwarted woman.  Dad just drifted along until a stroke laid him low at the tender age of fifty-five.

I visited him often in those days. Sally, just at the transition from being ‘another girlfriend’ to ‘my girlfriend’ came with me. She it was who picked up the old catalogue and found the roses with the outrageous names. It brought back a flood of memories: angry calls from solicitors, amused calls from tradesmen and friends and, amazingly, an almost apologetic call from Trevor. Dad fielded them all with equanimity. He had taken advice; a rose name was not, and never could be interpreted as slander.

And ironically the roses did well. They attracted media attention – not the polite newspapers, oh no! But the daily rags found great glee in advertising ‘Dale’s rude roses’ in half-page spreads. Especially the enigmatically-named climbing rose: ‘It’ll never last, clever Trevor.’

That one was a prophecy. Trevor never earned as much as he did as a partner in Dales, their marriage lasted four years before he took himself off, much to Gran’s satisfaction.

Shortly before he died, Dad’s speech improved. Sally was with him when he offered his benediction. “You’re a good ‘un, Sal. You’ll do our John good.” And then his eyes fell on the now infamous catalogue.

“I’m sorry about all that.”

He closed his eyes and Sally was about to leave the room when he reached out and gripped her hand.

“But by ‘eck, lass, it felt good at time!”

I contemplate the rose bush, the single stem, with half a dozen leaves fluttering in the breeze. As my lips trace again the cruelty of the words on the label, I can appreciate why my teenage son is so enamoured with this rose. And I cannot help but compare it with Andy. Both are prickly, pot-bound, waiting for space to grow and waiting to be claimed.

But both hold the promise of imminent blossoming into something spectacular.

“Okay,” I tell Andy. “Find us a trolley.”