A Special Day

essie cupped the rose tenderly in her hand. Although the day was hot the petals felt cool to her touch, like slightly damp satin. Technically, the garden was Malcolm's domain, to the extent that she sometimes felt like an interloper there. The flowers were his pride and joy and she had to admit that they were beautiful. Their orderly ranks formed lines of brilliant colour that contrasted perfectly with the regimented green of the lawn. Carefully clipped hedges framed the flawless picture, testament to the numerous hours of attention lavished on it, hours which Jessie sometimes fleetingly begrudged. Every weekend seemed to be taken up with care of the garden , to the exclusion of everything else.

Malcolm and she had first met twenty five years ago, when he began working as a trainee manager for her father's company. Apart from her father he was the first man she had ever had any close contact with, up to then her life had been a series of strict boarding schools. She had loved her father dearly, but there had never been any of the closeness that she longed for. He was a distant unemotional man who demanded obedience from his family, Malcolm had been kind and attentive and before long she had fallen in love with him. Contrary to her expectations her father had approved of the relationship.

"Bright young feller," he had said gruffly." Mark my words,he'll go far." She and Malcolm had married twelve months later. True to her father's expectations, Malcolm had risen steadily through the company ranks. When her parents had been killed in a car crash, ten years earlier he was already vice president.

"The loss of her family had devastated Jessie, the fact that as sole heir, she had inherited everything, only added to her confusion. But Malcolm had been there, a shoulder to lean on and a firm hand to guide her.

"You have enough to cope with after a loss like this," he had reassured her gently. " Don't worry about the company or the financial side of things. I will take care of all that. You just concentrate on trying to get over this." She had felt loved and cared for. He had even bought them this lovely home in an effort to cheer her up. True, when he had brought her here out of the blue one day and announced that he had bought the property, she had felt a small stab of resentment that she had not even been consulted. But another voice telling her that, Malcolm was only trying, in his way, to make her happy, soon drowned out the initial irritation. The cottage was lovely, its centuries old, weathered stone, clad in a gown of creepers and ivy, nestled amid rolling countryside as far as the eye could see. Jessie would have been sublimely happy there were it not for the loneliness.

Because the company took up so much of his time, Malcolm spent the working week in London. The hours alone could pass very slowly for Jessie and she looked forward to Malcolm's company at weekends, but somehow the garden always took precedence. Resentment occasionally wormed its way into Jessie's heart, but it never lasted long. She would begin to think about how hard he worked to supply all of the lovely things they had and her emotions would switch to guilt that she could deny him this small pleasure.

She clipped the rose and held it to her face, breathing in its delicate perfume. Normally Malcolm forbade her to cut the blooms, saying that it would spoil the symmetry of the garden, but today was such a special day and she needed the flowers to complete the surprise.

Glancing at her watch she hurried into the house. Malcolm would be home soon and she still had his clothes to lay out. In the wardrobe the clothes hung in regimented rows, like soldiers on parade. She reached for the blue cashmere jacket, feeling the rich downy softness of the material. The pale blue silk shirt came next, sliding through her fingers like oiled water. Picking up the Italian leather shoes,she peered at her reflection in their burnished gleam and thought about deep dark pools in secluded woods.

Later, sitting on the small patio at the back of the cottage, she heard the drone of Malcolm's powerful car crunching the gravel in the driveway. The thunk of the car door carried to where she was sitting and after a short silence she could hear him hurrying inside, calling her name as he went. She smiled and clutching the small package made her way through the house.

Malcolm stared, slack-jawed at the carnage in the bedroom. He was still reeling from the devastation in the garden. All of his precious flowers vandalised. Some maniac had brutally clipped every one and left them in untidy heaps in the centre of the lawn. And now this, his beautiful clothes savaged in an orgy of destruction. Jackets without sleeves, shirts minus a front, even the row of shoes each with a perfectly round hole hacked out of the toe-cap. He heard a noise outside and stumbled over to the window. The flowers caught his eye first, not in random piles as he had first thought, but arranged to spell out the word LIAR, across his once immaculate lawn. Then he saw Jessie.

"Oh my God ," he whispered. What had she done to his car? The tension inside him snapped and he opened his mouth to emit a deafening howl of pain and rage.

Standing by the car Jessie heard the totured scream. She looked up with a large grin and waved. The paint-stripper she had used was doing its work nicely. The smooth gleaming paintwork had turned into a seething mass that hissed and popped like small starbursts. She could still hear Malcolm screaming her name, along with a mixture of obscenities and a small bud of triumph began to blossom inside her. She sprayed the adhesive over the car windscreen and opening the package began to carefully stick on the photos. They had arrived in the morning post, thick glossy snaps, their starkness had disgusted her. The last one had made everything perfectly clear, when Malcolm's slack features stared back at her. None of them showed the face of the girl, but judging from the naked body she was very young.

Malcolm's stumbling progress through the cottage, was marked by his demented howling. Unfolding the scrap of paper she stuck it to the top of the photo display. It had been tucked inside the photos, a crisp white sheet written in black marker pen. The message proclaimed 'HAVE A NICE DAY'