Floral line drawing with lilies and daisies

Every week Mrs Honor Clegg sent her boy Alfie up from Ramsgate with a crate of flowers on the milk cart. Carnations the colour of boiled ham, daisies with yellow hearts, lilies that dripped pollen on your good gloves, and one great chrysanthemum that looked like a tired old gentleman in a waistcoat. The girls pinned them on their lapels and their shoulders, and Ray Dunmore's band played Stardust so slow you could have knitted to it.

On that final Saturday, Alfie came in early and found Nora Penhale, the caretaker's daughter, sitting on the edge of the stage with the hymn book from the cloakroom open on her knee. She had taken one bloom from every bunch in the crate and pressed it flat between the pages. The water lily she'd lifted from the foyer pond, where it had floated since the war, and it had left a brown ring on the hymn book that never came out. She said somebody ought to keep a record, because nobody else would.

When the lights came up that night, the dancers went home with bare lapels and the crate was empty. Alfie swears the water lily was still in the punch bucket by the door, turning slowly like it was waiting for the next waltz. Nora never told anyone what was in that book. I'm telling you because I was the one who wrote the tune, and it's the only thing left of that night that still plays.