Nomance Read Online Free Page A

buttressed
and capacious nostrils that looked like they could suspend a
bowling ball by vacuum suction alone. Carla had almost dropped to
her knees in gratitude the first time Serena had stepped into
Romance, a decade or so ago.
    But it was a joy all
too soon to be supplanted by bitter disappointment.
    Her new customer had
quickly failed to realise any of her vast potential. Serena might
run her eyes appreciatively over the wide selection of blooms for
sale at Romance, but her purchases never went further than a packet
of slug pellets and a can of fly spray. Furthermore, not once had
she ever referred to the fragrances that filled the shop. She was
even reluctant to keep up her end of the conversation when Carla
apologised for the reek of the new fertiliser. In her darker
moments, Carla sometimes believed the solution to the mystery was
the precise one which offered Romance least hope for the future –
that the biggest nose on the block was a dud.
    ‘Oh Carla, the
blossom !’
    In reply, Carla smiled
ever so faintly. It was best to humour them. Like any other
customer, Serena could get right under your skin if you let her and
Carla had learned the lesson of the fifty-pound-fringe-trim well.
It stood to reason she was never going to actually ask Serena why
she didn’t buy any flowers. Carla would just as rather assume the
nose was stuffed on a permanent basis. Anything was better than
hearing that the nose wasn’t a dud after all, and that in fact
Serena spent thousands of pounds a week at a florist’s on the
Champs Elysees.
    Yes by God, Carla was
certainly grateful to Serena for never volunteering information
like that. Other customers who, like Serena, floated more often
than they walked, were far too free and easy with the sparkling
details of their scintillating lives. Indeed, they were so expert
at making Carla feel dowdy and dull that even the reverses and
disappointments they complained about were more textured and
vibrant than all of Carla’s birthdays and Christmases rolled into
one. What had never occurred to Carla, as yet, was that if these
uppity women had to make some pathetic little florist feel bad in
order to make themselves feel better, then they must hate their own
lives even more than Carla hated hers . . .
    . . . Serena was
gone.
    She had bought a can of
flyspray. Apart from the rare pack of slug pellets, she only ever
bought flyspray – the cheap Pine Fresh variety.
    Oh, if it were up to
Serena and her likes, Carla would be dead on her feet here.
    However, as luck would
have it, Romance was just about kept afloat by customers who were
themselves pretty well dead on their feet. I.e. the really, really old ones.
    There were about eight
or nine of them at any one time and, unlike Serena’s, their every
visit was a delight and a joy – in that they were always a little
bit more frail and decrepit than before. Carla was amazed at just
how frail and decrepit old people could get before they popped off.
They had her dangling on tenterhooks for months on end. After all,
a funeral for her and Romance could spell the difference
between survival and bankruptcy. That’s why Carla was forever on
the lookout for new ways to support the elderly. She did great
discounts for pensioners and always made sure they got the special
price list, the one with the fancy black border and the discreet
little advertisement for Rupert Nodes: Undertakers since
1884 .
    Carla had a lucrative
agreement with Rupert, and a good funeral jacked up the profits no
end. If this makes Carla seem insensitive then one must recall that Romance had only just about scraped through the last
financial year. That put death into some kind of perspective. She
wasn’t being morbid. She didn’t want them all to die. Just
two, or three every twelve months. Any more than that and she would
have to cough up more tax. Besides, she wasn’t 100 per cent immune
to grief. These bereavements took time to recover from. But recover
she did, because in time