Page 1 of Pansies

Prologue

Tuesday was Nora’s favourite day of the week.

Nobody liked Mondays, and she was no exception, but she thought it was unfair for the bad feeling to taint Tuesday too.

Tuesday offered all the possibilities of a new week with none of the disadvantages of being Monday.

It was also the day when Aidan O’Donaghue came.

Aidan O’Donaghue, who was not from around here, who wore a waistcoat and drove a Ford Thunderbird, and whose mouth tasted like the sky.

While she waited for him, she made up a basket of sunflowers, chrysanthemums, and glossy green aspidistra. She hummed softly to herself, muddled snatches of whatever had been playing recently on the radio. She’d never been able to hold a tune, but it didn’t stop her singing.

Not on a Tuesday, anyway.

He had come into her shop for the first time nearly a year and a half ago. It had been chance, pure chance. His mother’s birthday. Through the big front windows, she’d seen his car, a bold splash on the kerb.

She’d made him a bouquet of white roses and blue moon freesia, her fingers trembling a little among the petals. Because his eyeswere all the colours and his lashes were tipped with gold, as though some careful artist had liked him enough to try and gild him.

Nora was dreamy for days afterwards.

He came back the next week to tell her his mother had loved the flowers. Somehow they started exchanging pieces of information, as shyly as children swapping barnacle shells and coral twists, mermaids’ purses and unicorn hair.

It began with names.

Then she learned he was the regional manager for Woolworths. That his father was Irish and had been in the Army. That his mother was French. And he spun the world for Nora in her little shop: glittering American cities with skyscrapers wreathed in cloud, stars spread as thickly as freckles across a desert night, the heather-purple highlands of Scotland, and the glass-blue lakes hidden in the Welsh mountains.

She also learned that he smiled with the right side of his mouth before the left and that the dimple there was deeper than its fellow.

One day when he came to see her, she locked the door behind him and flipped the sign to Closed. She took his big hand and led him into the back room, which smelled of pollen and perfume and damp leaves and growing things.

For a long time, they said nothing. Looking had somehow become a different thing now they were alone. And Nora was greedy for it, this newfound freedom to bask unchecked in blue-grey-brown-green eyes and a mouth so full of kisses. Then he reached out and began to unpin her braids, slowly combing out the corn-yellow tresses of her hair. Her mother wouldn’t let her cut it. Called it her crowning glory. Aidan O’Donaghue’s blunt fingers moved through it with unimagined tenderness. When it was all set free, he drew her to him and kissed her.

Everyone thought Nora was a good girl. A quiet girl. Even if she was a little odd sometimes, with the things she wanted and didn’t want.

But that afternoon she was neither good nor quiet.

When they were together, they talked as infinitely and endlessly as they touched each other, and she never asked, or thought to ask, for promises. She had no need of them. She was South Shields born and bred. A sand dancer.1 The sea was everything she knew. She would no more have thought to keep him as she would have thought to hold the waves. She simply loved him, as she loved the flowers that lived their lives in a brilliant moment, and the whispering tides that came and went with the turning of the moon.

It was strange, she thought to herself this particular Tuesday, not quite six months from the first, the way everything could change, and nothing.

Certainly not her. Or Aidan O’Donaghue. Who came into her shop, wearing the sun in his hair and carrying the world in his eyes. Who, every Tuesday until this one, had given her his body like a gift. And who had, perhaps unintentionally, given her another gift, even more precious than the first. The promise of a life, curled deep inside her, already loved and waiting to be free.

Just like always, he turned the key and flipped the sign, but she did not lead him to the back room. Instead she took his hand, as she had the first time and every time that followed, and drew it down to rest against her stomach.

His eyes went wide.

Then he pulled away.

She bowed her head against the pain. Expecting it had not made it easier, as she had dared to hope it might. It was a little piece of loss, amidst all her joy.

I love you, she thought fiercely, to the life beneath her fingers.I will always be with you.

Her friends and family wouldn’t understand. They would watch her andtsk, as they so often did. They would whisper she had been careless. But it wouldn’t matter, because she hadn’t been. She had loved and been loved, and from that love had come a child, who would know the sea and the sky and all the worlds between.

“Nora.”

She turned slowly.

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