A Fatal Bloom

Roz Pettifer stood at the mouth of the produce tent at eight o'clock on a Saturday morning in early July, her hands on her hips, and studied them. White, which was correct. Pressed, which was expected. But they'd been laid with the fold lines running crosswise instead of lengthwise, so the centre crease bisected the vegetable classes rather than running between them, and that simply would not do.

She set down her clipboard, took off her cardigan, the morning already warm, close and heavy, promising a good crowd and a bad headache by three, and began re-laying the nearest table. The linen was old and satisfyingly heavy. It had belonged to the society since before she'd taken over, and its provenance, like most provenance in Lower Wimborne, was both undocumented and fiercely defended. Mrs. Crale, who had died in 2019, had insisted the cloths were a gift from the Women's Institute in 1974. Doreen Biddle at the shop maintained they'd been bought at a church jumble sale for a pound fifty. The argument had never been settled, and Roz suspected it never would be, because the cloths had become one of those village fixtures that exist primarily to generate disagreement.

She smoothed the linen flat, aligned the crease with the gap between Class 12 (runner beans, five matching, to be displayed with stalks intact) and Class 13 (French beans, twelve pods, any variety), and moved on to the next table.

Eleven years she'd been doing this. Eleven years of fetes, autumn shows, and Annual General Meetings. Eleven years of seed orders and scheduling conflicts and the endlessly renewable question of whether the marrow class should be judged by weight alone or by weight and form. She'd taken over the presidency from Arthur Campion when he'd moved to Bournemouth to be near his daughter, and she sometimes thought she'd been running the society so long that she'd begun to think in its rhythms. The growing calendar was her calendar. She planned her spring around the seed-sowing schedule and her autumn around the show, and the months between were measured not in weeks but in the stages of whatever she was bringing to the bench that year.

This year: dahlias. Three blooms of one cultivar, a vase of mixed, and an arrangement in a jug provided by the exhibitor. She'd been disbudding since late May, pinching out the side buds so each remaining flower could swell to its full, preposterous, magnificent best. Her 'Café au Lait' plants were six feet tall and staked with bamboo, each stem wearing its single permitted bud like a promise.

The recreation ground was quiet at this hour. A blackbird was working the edge of the cricket square. Beyond the tent, the village hall sat in its own shadow, brick and 1930s certainty, and beyond that the High Street, still shuttered. Lower Wimborne did not rush into its mornings. The pub (the Green Man, low beams and horse brasses, run by Tom Eaves with the resigned competence of a man who poured more cups of tea than pints) wouldn't open until noon. Biddle's shop would be open by nine, and Doreen would be out by quarter past, because Doreen liked to be present at the setting-up of any village event the way a war correspondent liked to be present at a shelling.

Roz finished the fourth table and stood back to check the alignment. Better. The produce tent was a large white marquee that the society hired from a firm in Dorchester every July, and it smelled, as it always did, of cut grass and warm canvas and the faintly chemical tang of the guy ropes. She'd positioned it on the same patch of recreation ground she always used, nearest the gate, with the tea tent to its right and the tombola and the plant stall beyond. The flower tent, smaller and newer, a gift from Marjorie's ex-husband in what Marjorie described as "the only useful thing to come out of the divorce," stood opposite.

She consulted her clipboard. Show schedule, printed in May, proofread three times, and distributed to every society member with a covering letter that managed to be both welcoming and extremely specific. Twenty-seven classes across two tents. Vegetables: marrows, runner beans, French beans, onions (three, dressed), potatoes (five, one variety, named), tomatoes (five, on a plate), and the rest. Flowers: dahlias, sweet peas, roses, a vase of mixed garden flowers, and the arrangement class. Domestic: Victoria sponge (to the WI recipe, no deviations), fruit jam (any variety, two jars), and lemon curd. And the children's classes, which Roz supervised with an iron gentleness that left no child without a certificate and no parent without a clear understanding of the rules.

The card labels were next. She laid them out along the tables, each one handwritten in her best capitals. CLASS 14: ONIONS, THREE, DRESSED. CLASS 15: POTATOES, FIVE, ONE VARIETY, NAMED. She had a system and she trusted it. Labels first, then the display plates (white, uniform, also the society's), then the entry cards face-down beside each place so the judges wouldn't see the names. Anonymity in judging was a principle Roz defended with something close to ferocity, because the alternative was what had happened in Arthur Campion's last year, when the marrow class had been awarded to a man whose cousin was doing the judging and the resulting argument had nearly ended in a fistfight behind the tombola.

"You're here early."

Tom Eaves appeared at the tent entrance, carrying a folding table under one arm. He was a large, mild man who involved himself in village events with the air of someone paying off a debt he couldn't quite remember incurring. He set the table down where Roz pointed and went back for another.

"The WI are bringing the tea urn at nine," he said over his shoulder. "Sandra Potts rang last night to say the big urn's playing up, so they're bringing the small one and the backup."

"The small one won't do three hundred cups."

"That's what I said. She said it would if people didn't take seconds."

Roz wrote TEA URN (CONFIRM SIZE) on her clipboard and underlined it twice.

By half past eight, the recreation ground was filling with the cheerful organised chaos that preceded every Lower Wimborne fete. The bunting went up (red, white, and blue, faded to pink, grey, and lilac, another fixture of disputed origin). The plant stall materialised in sections, each section carried by a different committee member and none of them quite fitting together. Duncan Greaves arrived with his wife Janet, who was carrying a tray of young lavender plants in four-inch pots and trying not to look at the way Duncan was carrying a second tray at a forty-five-degree angle.

"Straight, Duncan," Janet said, without turning round.

Duncan adjusted the tray by roughly three degrees and kept walking.

Roz liked the Greaveses. Duncan was a genial blusterer who talked about his allotment the way some men talked about their golf handicap, with a confidence only loosely connected to the evidence. Janet, who actually did most of the growing, let him. It was a village marriage of the traditional sort: she did the work, he took the certificate home, and they both seemed content with the arrangement, or at least too settled in it to renegotiate.

She was checking the flower tent (sweet pea vases filled with water to the correct depth, two inches, not three, because three inches made the stems float and the blooms tilt) when she heard the first mention of Gerald Finch.

"Is he entering the marrows again this year?" That was Pat Coombs, who grew respectable parsnips and lived in perpetual, resentful awe of Finch's vegetable hauls.

"Course he is. Put his name down for six classes." Duncan, setting out price labels for the plant stall with the casual authority of a man who hadn't priced any of them. "Marrows, runners, onions, potatoes, tomatoes, and the heaviest pumpkin."

"He won heaviest pumpkin last year with that thing that looked like a tumour."

"Forty-two pounds."

"Forty-two pounds of what, though. That's what I'd like to know."

This was the Finch conversation, and it happened every year. Gerald Finch was the society's most prolific exhibitor, its most decorated competitor, and its most thoroughly disliked member. He grew the biggest marrows, the tallest runner beans, and the most symmetrical onions in the village, and he did it with a showmanship that made everyone else feel like amateurs. He won cups. He made speeches. He offered advice that was indistinguishable from condescension. And he cheated.

Everyone knew it. Nobody could prove it. Or, more precisely, nobody had yet proved it in a way that satisfied the rules, because Finch was clever about his cheating the way he was clever about everything, which was to say just clever enough to stay one step ahead of people who had better things to do than police a man's allotment. There had been suspicions about his tomatoes (too uniform, too early). Questions about his onions (too large, too perfect, suspiciously identical to the ones sold at the farm shop in Blandford Forum). And a persistent rumour, never confirmed, that his prize-winning sweet peas two years ago had been bought from a nursery in Devon and repotted into his own containers.

Roz's position on Finch was careful. As president, she couldn't accuse without evidence. As a gardener, she had her doubts. And as a woman who had spent thirty years watching other people's marrows with a trained eye, she had a strong suspicion that nobody's courgettes grew that straight without intervention.

She was arranging the dahlia vases (one per exhibitor, glass, provided by the society, washed the previous evening and dried with a lint-free cloth, because water spots on a vase had been known to start arguments) when Eunice Prescott appeared in the flower tent with an armful of white tablecloths for the display tables.

"Morning, Eunice. You're a star."

"I thought you might need these for the arrangement class. I pressed them last night."

Eunice Prescott was one of those members who made a society work by being present at every event and asking for nothing in return. She was slim, neat, her iron-grey hair always in a careful French pleat, and she wore a clean gardening apron even when she wasn't gardening, as though prepared for the possibility that something might need weeding at any moment. She'd been in the society for over thirty years, longer than Roz, and she was, by any objective measure, one of the finest gardeners in the village. Her borders were immaculate. Her conservatory was a small masterpiece of overwintered tender specimens. And she never, in Roz's experience, made a fuss about any of it.

"Perfect," Roz said, and meant it. "Put them on the arrangement table, and I'll lay them out once the vases are done."

Eunice nodded and set to work with the quiet efficiency that was her signature. Roz watched her for a moment, then turned back to her own preparations.

The morning settled into its rhythm. Roz moved between the two tents with her clipboard, checking and adjusting, adjusting and checking. She repositioned the marrow table (too close to the tent wall, which meant the afternoon sun would come through the canvas and warm the fruit, and a warm marrow was a sorry thing). She confirmed that the judging sheets were printed, collated, and clipped. She verified that the rosettes (first, second, third, and highly commended, each with a ribbon in the society's colours, dark green and cream) were sorted and counted. Seventy-two rosettes. She'd ordered eighty, because she always ordered eighty, and the eight spares went into a drawer in the village hall kitchen where they joined a slowly growing collection of unclaimed rosettes from years past, each one a tiny monument to a prize that had gone begging.

David would have been carrying the trestle tables by now. He'd always helped with the setup, even though he'd had no interest in competitive horticulture and found the politics of the show bench bewildering. He'd carried tables and hung bunting and fetched cups of tea from the urn, and at the end of the day he'd helped her sweep the tents and fold the tablecloths and walk home in the long summer light with grass clippings on his shoes and a bag of unsold plants from the stall.

Four years since he'd died. Quietly, in the front room, heart failure, on a Tuesday afternoon in March. Roz had been in the greenhouse, pricking out sweet pea seedlings, and by the time she came in he'd gone. The paramedics said he wouldn't have suffered. She'd been grateful for that and furious at the rest of it, the sudden empty chair, the silence where his reading had been, the particular cruelty of a death that happened while she was forty feet away doing something ordinary. She'd kept the greenhouse. She'd kept the seedlings. She'd pricked out the rest of the tray that evening because they needed doing, and then she'd sat at the kitchen table and cried until the light went.

She didn't think about it often now. She thought about it at the fete, because he'd always been here, and she thought about it at the AGM, because he'd always dozed through the treasurer's report, and she thought about it in March, because March was March.

She straightened a rosette, moved a display plate a quarter-inch to the right, and went to check on the tea urn.

"Roz!"

Marjorie Batts arrived at twenty to ten, which was both characteristic and tactical. Characteristic because Marjorie treated punctuality as a flexible concept, and tactical because arriving twenty minutes before the other committee members meant she could help with the final details without having been present for the heavy lifting.

She was carrying a Victoria sponge on a china plate covered with cling film, and she looked, as she always did, as though she'd been dressed by a cheerful explosion in a Laura Ashley factory. Floral blouse, floral skirt, floral scarf knotted at the throat. She was round and bright and in constant, gentle motion, like a bumblebee in a herbaceous border.

"I've brought the sponge for the tea tent, and I've brought news." She set the cake on the nearest table with the care of a woman who'd spent two hours on the filling. "Gerald Finch has entered the runners."

"He enters every year."

"Yes, but Doreen says he was in the shop yesterday buying five pounds of runner beans."

Roz looked at her. "Buying them."

"Five pounds. At four o'clock in the afternoon. The day before the fete."

They looked at each other. In the hierarchy of Lower Wimborne's unspoken knowledge, the detail of Gerald Finch buying runner beans from Biddle's the day before he was due to exhibit home-grown runner beans at the society fete occupied a very specific position. It was not proof. It was not even, technically, suspicious, because a man might buy runner beans for his supper. But it was noted.