Midsummer flowers
Yesterday while my Last Friend was still here, Peter had a ginormous bouquet of flowers delivered. Last Friend and I were at the cottage, and Peter rang me up to yelp that these magnificent flowers had arrived and he had no idea who they were from. There must be a card, I said. There is a card, he said, but it has a Cryptic Acronym on it! It says ‘congratulations on your honour from all your friends at RHNYC’! It must be ‘Royal Hampshire’ something or other—
Club, I put in helpfully.
—But I don’t belong to any clubs except small harmless bridge clubs! uttered Peter in accents of despair. Peter is the kind of bloke who writes thank-you letters to all the people who wrote letters supporting his nomination: well, okay, I haven’t got a clue if this is proper behaviour or not; the Queen’s Honours was not a part of my upbringing.* So maybe you do force someone to cough up the endorsements so you can write thank-yous.**
But I agree that you have to thank people for sending flowers. Especially for flowers that it took a forklift to get off the delivery van. Maybe they’ll write you, whoever they are, to make sure the flowers arrived, I offered. What if the florist made a mistake? Because whoever they are, they’ll have done this over the phone.
Inarticulate gleeps from the other end of the wire.***
I rang off and told my friend what was going on. Royal Hampshire New York Club, I said, wildly.
New York City, said my (American) friend.
New . . . York . . . City, I repeated, staring at the Cryptic Acronym. Random House! I cried. Random House New York City!
I rang Peter back. Random House New York City! I said.
Cries of joy from the other end.
When Last Friend and I got down to the mews ourselves, and after we’d been suitably intimidated by the flowers, which are easily large enough to need a room of their own, I had a look at the florist’s card myself. One of my less favourite things is florists who fancy the beauty of their own handwriting: but I did eventually discern, buried among the curlicues, the name of Peter’s editor.
Mystery solved.
Whew.†
* * *
I hope those peonies come out properly. The florist here sells cut peonies, but they cost a bomb. Peonies in a vase is decadent. The flowers are in the hall chiefly because it’s cooler out there and they’ll last longer than if they’re on the kitchen table–also, those lilies are the pongy kind and while I love pongy lilies Peter doesn’t so much. But when the peonies unfurl I shall bring the vase (staggering slightly under the weight) into the sitting-room, wrap myself up in my embroidered kimono †† and sip champagne. Since the sitting-room generally involves the sofa, the hellhounds will discover a hitherto unknown attachment to peonies as cut flowers.
However, speaking of delphiniums: I have a love/hate thing with delphiniums. Mostly I love them. But tying the frellers up is infuriating. 
That pale blue one in the middle–which is actually a pale blue with stripes and dashes of pink–is both my heart’s delight and the bane of my existence. Delphiniums will grow in partial shade, which I have a lot of, which is a good excuse for delphiniums: but it makes them even more prone to tipping over, no matter how much tying up you’ve done. That one is supported by a veritable cat’s cradle of green twine . . . but she is not going to stand up straight, and I can just get used to it.
That apricot-yellow rose on the back wall is Ghislaine de Feligonde, and the pink one just coming out is Empress Josephine.
* * *
*I am old enough that my training in the social niceties included wearing little white gloves and little hats with little veils to go shopping, but I was the wrong side of the Atlantic for how to behave when your name appears on the Queen’s birthday list.
** Personally I find the idea deeply embarrassing. Would you lay it on with quite such a trowel if you knew the person you were likening to the Second Coming would read it? Perhaps I’m merely demonstrating my lack of British reserve. Praise disconcerts me. Oh tut tut you’re supposed to say, hem hem hem.
*** We are a landline family. Peter is permitted to use his mobile only to ring me from one of his small harmless bridge clubs to say that he’s going to be home late, and he’ll therefore be ringing me late, and that the lateness will not have been caused by his being mowed down in the street by a division of Ghanznavid war elephants.
Some day, speaking of Ghanznavid war elephants, I have to re-engage British Telecom on the subject of the landline to Third House—I believe I have told you this?—BT having declared there is no landline to Third House, despite the presence of the phone jack in the sitting-room. I wonder if one can hire a war elephant? I feel the central office might find it rather impressive.
† Another Life with Peter story that I’ve been meaning to tell you but it never quite fits in on the evening’s agenda. Several weeks ago now Peter started complaining about the disappearance of his ginger nuts, which are a sweet biscuit, aka cookie, like a ginger snap, only fatter. At approximately the same time he began commenting in a puzzled sort of way about how many more rubber bands there were suddenly in the rubber-band tin. You didn’t add any, did you? he said to me. No, I said, not raising my eyes from my computer screen. It was about a week later when Peter, looking for a particular size of elastic, dumped the contents of the rubber-band tin out on the countertop and discovered . . . a pack of ginger nuts.
This is, however, merely a particularly pleasing disparity. We are on more or less permanent alert status for one or another pair of missing spectacles . . . although I admit I get fairly testy when one of a pair of chopsticks goes missing (again). It may show up again months later in the wooden-spoon jar, the silverware drawer, or the back of a bookshelf^. It may not. We run about even in the mislaying of computer memory sticks and pairs of secateurs, and the only reason I don’t lose my glasses is because I have only one pair and I’m wearing them all the time. And hellhounds tend to protest being mislaid. I wonder if some clever computer person would like to invent a small hellhound programme to attach to various easily overlooked items like spectacles and memory sticks?
^ I have no idea.
†† Well, I do have an embroidered kimono, although decadent is not precisely the term that comes to mind.
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