Someone Has Been Watering the Roses

There were fresh roses in the courtyard every Monday. Not growing roses. Cut ones, stood in a chipped jar on the stone bench.

Jo noticed them during her second week in the flat. She had been washing a mug when the colour caught her eye: pale pink against a wall almost entirely covered by dead ivy. The courtyard gate was locked. According to the landlord, nobody had used the garden in years.

“Old tenant's key went missing,” he said when she asked. “It'll get sorted.”

He used the same expression about the shower pressure and a letter addressed to someone who apparently owed money to everyone in the city. Jo had learned that it meant the subject would need to become more inconvenient before anything happened.

On the next Monday the pink roses became yellow. The following week they were white.

She worked from home, designing packaging for products she rarely bought. Moving to the city had seemed like the sensible part of a new beginning. Her relationship had ended; her old flat was too expensive alone; the new place had a room large enough for a desk. Every decision had made sense individually. Together they had produced a life in which she could go four days without speaking to anyone except a delivery driver.

The roses gave her something to watch besides the cursor on her screen.

She imagined an elderly gardener with a secret key. A tenant who came home only at dawn. Somebody conducting an affair with the person in the flat below. The possibilities became increasingly elaborate as her actual work became increasingly dull.

On the fourth Monday she set an alarm for six.

At six fifteen, a delivery cyclist stopped outside the railings. He took flowers from a canvas bag, lifted the jar through a gap between two bars and replaced the old stems with new ones. He tipped fresh water from a bottle, returned the jar to the bench and rode away.

The whole operation took less than three minutes.

Jo felt mildly cheated. It looked more like an errand than a mystery.

The following Monday she was waiting by the gate with two coffees.

The cyclist braked so hard that his back wheel skidded.

“I'm not stealing anything,” he said.

“I didn't think you were.”

He looked at the locked gate, then at the cups.

“Am I in trouble for something else?”

“I live upstairs. I've been watching the flowers.”

“That sounds worse than you think.”

She laughed and handed him a coffee. He accepted cautiously. His name was Amir. He delivered parcels and groceries, sometimes flowers. The Monday roses had once been a regular order through a florist on the high street.

“Once?”

“The florist closed in February.”

“Who pays now?”

He put the stems down on the bench through the railings.

“Nobody. It's a few pounds.”

It was clearly more than a few pounds over a year, but Jo could hear that he did not want admiration. She asked who had placed the original order.

“Walter. Used to live on the first floor. He moved into care. I don't think he knows I still bring them.”

Walter bought roses for his wife every Monday, Amir explained. After she died, he began putting them in the courtyard where they had eaten lunch together. Amir delivered flowers to the building for three years. In the beginning Walter met him at the gate and insisted on inspecting the stems as though he were buying a used car.

When Walter left, nobody cancelled the standing order immediately. Then a relative did. The florist closed a month later.

“And you carried on?”

Amir shrugged. “I came past anyway.”

His phone buzzed. He looked at the screen, finished his coffee and apologised for needing to work. Jo watched him lift the jar through the gap, reaching farther than looked comfortable to settle it on the bench.

“Why doesn't the landlord give you a key?”

“Probably thinks I'm part of the ivy.”

That afternoon she called the landlord again. This time she explained exactly why she wanted the courtyard opened. He said it was a nice story, which worried her because nice stories often received less practical attention than broken pipes.

She asked whether she could look through the spare keys herself.

On Thursday he arrived with a box. The correct key was in an envelope marked with the wrong flat number.

Inside, the courtyard was smaller than it looked from above. There were weeds between the paving stones, a collapsed chair beneath a shrub and a stone bench polished smooth by years of rain. A climbing rose grew along the far wall, almost invisible beneath the ivy.

Jo sent Amir a photograph. He had given her his number in case the landlord complained about the deliveries.

He replied: Actual access. Very suspicious.

She wrote back: Bring gloves next Monday.

He arrived on Sunday instead, after his last delivery. They worked for two hours. Jo pulled weeds while he cleared the drain. Neither knew much about gardening. They agreed not to cut anything that looked as if it might be trying.

At dusk the courtyard contained three full rubbish bags and a bench they could sit on without first wiping their hands across it.

“Should we tell Walter?” Jo asked.

Amir looked at the roses.

“Yes. But let's ask before we turn him into a project.”

They wrote a letter, enclosing a photograph. Amir had an old forwarding address from a delivery Walter's niece had arranged. They asked the care home to pass the envelope on if Walter wanted it, and included Jo's number.

His reply arrived a week later in careful block capitals.

My wife would have complained about the weeds. You have done well to make a start. The rose against the wall is not dead. Please don't let anybody with enthusiasm and shears near it.

He had underlined the last sentence twice.

Jo read it to Amir over the phone. He laughed so suddenly that she heard somebody nearby ask whether he was all right.

“He wants a visit,” she added. “Sunday afternoon. If we'd like.”

They went together. Walter was eighty-seven, wore a cardigan with a missing button and regarded both of them with the expression of someone being offered an unrequested replacement appliance.

“You're the flowers,” he said to Amir.

“Yes.”

“And you're the gardener?” he asked Jo.

“That's a generous description.”

He nodded, apparently satisfied by this level of modesty.

They had brought biscuits, then worried about whether biscuits were permitted. Walter opened the packet before they could ask anybody.

His wife's name was Elsie. She had worked in the town library and had strong opinions about people who folded the corners of pages. He showed them a photograph of her on the bench, laughing at something outside the frame.

“What was funny?” Jo asked.

Walter studied it.

“I don't remember. Which irritates me. I remember arguments about electricity bills from 1982. But not that.”

He handed the photograph to Amir. The room was full of small ordinary evidence of Elsie: a knitted blanket, a postcard, a paperback with her name written inside. Jo realised the roses were not the only way Walter had been keeping her company.

They did not ask whether he was lonely. They asked if he wanted to see the courtyard once it was cleared. He said possibly, if transportation could be arranged and nobody expected him to lift anything.

On the bus back, Amir showed Jo a message from Walter. It was a photograph of the biscuit packet with an instruction to buy the same ones next time.

“We've passed,” he said.

“Provisionally.”

Spring arrived slowly. A neighbour named Helen saw them working and offered plants from her balcony. The student on the ground floor contributed a table he had found outside an office, which they inspected carefully before accepting. The landlord paid for a new lock once Jo sent him a photograph in which the courtyard looked like an asset.

There was an argument about access. Helen wanted the gate open during the day. The student worried about strangers. Amir, who didn't live there, stayed quiet until Jo asked what he thought.

“I think the people who use it should have keys,” he said. “And everyone else can ring a bell.”

They bought six keys and a small sign. It was not an inspiring resolution, but it worked.

Walter came for lunch in April with a carer named Beth. Amir collected food from a café. Jo made a cake that rose unevenly and tried to disguise the damage with icing.

Walter inspected the climbing rose before sitting down.

“Still alive,” he said. “Against considerable odds.”

He stayed two hours. He told Helen which windows had once belonged to which tenants. He corrected the student's story about the building's age. He ate a second slice of cake and declined to comment on its architecture.

Before leaving, he asked Amir how much the roses cost.

“Don't worry about it.”

“I didn't ask whether I should worry. I asked what they cost.”

They looked at each other. Then Amir told him.

Walter nodded. “I can't afford every week now. Once a month, perhaps.”

“I don't mind—”

“I know. I'd still like to buy my own wife flowers.”

Amir looked down. “Once a month, then.”

Afterward Jo found him stacking plates in the kitchen.

“I made it about being helpful,” he said. “Forgot to ask.”

“You asked today.”

He rinsed a plate. “Eventually.”

The weekly deliveries stopped. On the first Monday of each month, a jar of roses appeared. In between, the climbing rose began producing its own flowers, small and slightly untidy. Walter supervised its progress through photographs and increasingly confident messages full of unnecessary punctuation.

Jo and Amir kept having coffee. Sometimes in the courtyard, sometimes at her kitchen table when it rained. She learned that he was studying engineering part-time. He learned that she did not enjoy designing packaging but loved the occasional project involving an actual drawing.

He asked to see her sketchbook. She refused for three weeks, then left it on the table where he could not reasonably avoid it.

The first drawing was of him leaning through the railings with the jar in his hand. He looked at it for a long time.

“You've made me look taller.”

“Artistic licence.”

“Generous.”

One Monday in June he arrived without flowers. The stall had not opened, and he had a delivery across town in twenty minutes. He stood by the bench, frustrated with himself.

Jo moved her bag to make room.

“Walter's not expecting them until next week.”

“I know. I got the dates wrong.”

“Then you have time for coffee.”

He sat. Through the open window above them, her phone rang with a work notification. She let it ring.

After a while Amir asked if she wanted dinner on Friday. Not as a reward for gardening, he said, or a planning meeting about the gate.

“As dinner?”

“As a date.”

She smiled. “That would be nice.”

The climbing rose moved against the wall in the breeze. Jo had spent months looking down into the garden, trying to work out what happened there. From the bench, with somebody beside her, she found she was much less interested in solving it.