And then the three people in front of her start to busy themselves with their work, and she can do nothing, say nothing. The idea of explaining her tentative research seems ludicrous. So, she steps through the door, takes off her jacket and joins them. She has nothing more to offer– not even a coffee cake that without sugar never stood a chance.
After a few minutes, Les leaves the Flower Cabin to work elsewhere in the garden centre, and Betty offers to fetch Emma and Tamas coffee from the café, adding, ‘And do you fancy some cake? I made a Dorset apple cake last night after the talk.’
Emma mumbles her thanks and is left alone with her shame– and Tamas. He is silent for some minutes, unloading and sorting the boxes, before giving her the delivery note to sign.
Then he starts. ‘I think Les really minded that you were not there. He was sad. Do you not find theTitanica fascinating subject for a talk? I myself find it of enormous interest. Or is it that you do not like Les and Betty?’
To divert him, and herself, she asks, ‘Where is it that your accent is from, Tamas? I can’t quite tell.’
He stands up tall with his hands on his hips. ‘You must guess.’
‘Netherlands?’
‘No!’
‘Finland?’
‘No!’
She still thinks it might be Scandinavia. ‘Norway?’
‘Ha! You are getting cold! But then Norway is a country full of snow,’ and he gives a great laugh.
Before she can say any more, Betty has returned, carrying their coffee and cake. Emma knows her face is burning as she says, ‘I’m really sorry about last night, Betty.’
She wants to add that when she said, ‘she couldn’t face it’, ‘it’ meant the other people, the prospect of feeling conspicuous and terrified. It was not the thought of listening to Les’s talk. She can’t seem to form the sentences she wants and as it turns out, Tamas has the last word anyway.
‘Look, now I see, you have such large feet! Your shoes, they look like boats! It is good. With those feet you will never fall down.’
At the end of the day, as Emma is bringing in the flowers that form the display in front of the Flower Cabin, Betty remarks, mildly, ‘Love, there’s no need to have cake if you don’t fancy it. Or you could have given it to Tamas– I’m sure he’d have liked a second piece to eat in his van,’ and Emma realises Betty must have found the discarded cake that she had surreptitiously hidden, uneaten, in the bin.
She starts to blurt, ‘No, it’s not that…’ but gets no further. How can she explain that she threw the cake away because she didn’t think she deserved it and she feared it might choke her?
So, she says nothing and turning to collect the next basket of flowers knocks over a bucket of pink clematis with her size-ten boats.
A fitting end to her day.
Chapter 8
Violet
Crushed Roses
The rose petals are crushed, but she thinks she can make them better. She can’t kiss them better, as she once did her little brothers. They claim they are too old for kisses now anyway, even though they still have the plump softness and bounce of baby animals.
The roses need smoothing with a gentle hand and the old petals need to be removed. Once perfect, she will weave them into her mother’s best straw hat. Her mother tells her she has a way with flowers.
The sun is warm and the wind gentle as her parents prepare for a trip out to a street-side café. They are celebrating a ‘little bit of luck’– for once, the sheep market prices favouring her father. She can hear the unaccustomed laughter and the lightness in their voices as they get ready. It makes her smile as she sits on the steps of the house, swiftly weaving flowerheads around the crown of her mother’s hat. The air smells of soapy water, earth and roses. She has already tied a yellow bow at the back of the hat, leaving the tails to hang down low over the brim.
Her mother appears beside her and accepts the hat with a smile, then drops a few words of warning into her lap. Her nine-year-old self is expected to keep her brothers fed and out of mischief. One of these tasks, she thinks, will be easier than the other. Her father places a hand on her shoulder and whispers in her ear, ‘The postman has been.’
She waves goodbye and darts inside.
Her father started this back when he was out early on the Pampas and gone for days on end. Just a few words, scribbled in his thick, clumsy script, left under her bolster. Pillow post, he calls it. It is one of the few things that truly belongs to her alone– his firstborn. Everything else is shared or fought over.
Sometimes he will leave a flower pressed between a rough sheet of paper. He knows the tangled bodies lying in the bed beside her will not look under the pillow. Little boys too busy rushing outside to find buried treasure to realise there may be a precious secret lying under their noses.
Chapter 9
