The Best Kind of Beautiful

by Frances Whiting

‘Dad?’

  ‘Yes, my darling girl.’

  ‘You don’t need to wear a feather . . . I’d know your face anywhere.’

  ‘Oh but I must, Florence. Adds to the mystery, you see.’

  On Wednesday morning Florence came down to breakfast whistling, gave her mother a kiss, offered to make Isolde a cup of tea, and told Puck she would wash up his plate.

  ‘My, someone’s in a good mood today,’ Amanda said, and Florence smiled at her, the full, blinding, maximum wattage.

  When she passed her father in the hall, Lucas whispered to her, ‘Four pm, Java Lounge, blue feather, odd socks.’

  Florence spent the school day willing it to go faster, and when the bell rang at three o’clock, she grabbed her bag and ran to catch the early bus, passing Lucy Venables and her henchmen on the footpath.

  ‘Hey Florence, you’re in a hurry, do you need to use the kitty litter?’ Lucy called after her.

  Florence refused to prickle, kept running, and sang Jazz Cat on the bus all the way into town, throwing her hand out the window to give Lucy one glorious finger as it passed her.

  She hadn’t sung Jazz Cat in a long time, but she settled into its notes and allowed herself to enjoy it, gazing out the window at all the people who weren’t lucky enough to be taken out by their father with a blue feather in his grey felt hat.

  ‘Purr, baby, purr,’ she sang as she got off at her stop, where she paused to pull one sock up and tug the other one down.

  Walking into the Java Lounge, she saw her father hadn’t arrived yet but their favourite booth was empty, so she quickly slipped into it. Then she settled by the window to watch out for his bobbing step, hands in pockets, lips pursed in a whistle.

  She waited while the waiter kept asking her if she wanted anything, and Florence answered grandly, ‘I will order when my friend arrives, thank you.’

  She waited when the same waiter asked if she really needed the booth seat as other customers wanted it, and she answered yes, she really did.

  She waited while she slowly reached down to pull her sock back up again.

  Florence checked her watch every few minutes, until it reached a quarter to five, then she slowly got up from the booth and said to the hovering waiter, ‘My friend has been detained,’ and wondered why she was trying so hard to speak like a grown-up, only in a way no grown-up she knew ever actually spoke.

  Her father must have forgotten, she thought, and was not particularly perturbed by it. Lucas often missed things, he was often absent-minded, often late, and it drove her mother mad. When he did show up, striding through the door holding his clarinet case, apologising and running a hand through his wavy hair, it was like the sun had just crept across a shadow.

  ‘Sorry, sorry, everyone,’ he’d say, setting his instrument down. ‘I apologise for keeping you waiting,’ and then he would smile and people who five minutes earlier had been pursing their lips and saying, ‘I’ve paid for a babysitter,’ would find themselves saying, ‘Oh that’s perfectly all right, Lucas, we’re all here now.’

  Amanda called it his charm offensive. ‘I do believe your father could murder someone in this orchestra right now,’ she said to her children once as they watched Lucas circle the room, ‘and they would say, “Oh that’s perfectly all right, Lucas, what’s one less second violin?”‘

  People didn’t mind when Lucas Saint Claire let them down, and Florence didn’t really mind now, other than the fact she never got to have her milkshake. It was enough that he had wanted to wag with her, she thought, smiling at both the word and the idea. He was probably in the studio now, or at home, and when Amanda said, ‘Florence will be back soon,’ he would slap his palm against his forehead and curse himself for his forgetfulness.

  When she got home, Florence thought, she would pull her sock down again to show him she didn’t mind.

  Florence left the café and picked up her pace as she started the walk home.

  The sun had dipped a little and she felt the evening’s promise on her skin.

  ‘Have you got any money, sweetheart?’ said a man sitting on a small blanket, an open guitar case in front of him, a few coins scattered in its flattened velvet. ‘Just to buy a pie?’

  He had startled her and Florence shook her head and kept walking, feeling the man’s eyes on her.

  She wished she hadn’t reacted like that, it was something to do with walking through the day turning into night.

  Florence was sure that if it was bright and sunny, and if she had someone with her, she would have given the man some money from her purse.

  Lucas would have. Lucas would have given the man all the money he had on him, and the man’s eyes would widen at the notes in his hand, and then Lucas would give him something else. Lucas would chat with him, asking the man to show him the guitar, exclaiming over its make or praising its strings, and then he would say, ‘I wish you well, brother,’ and the man would feel the warmth of Lucas Saint Claire’s smile bestowed on him. In that moment, Florence knew, the man would feel loved, and understood.

  That was her father’s magic, the real reason his concerts sold out and chat show hosts always had a seat for Lucas Saint Claire on their couches.

  Sometimes, Florence thought, it was almost like a trick.

  She shivered a little and kept walking, wanting to get home, to open the silver handle of Kinsey’s front door, put down her bag and yell up the stairs, ‘I’m home,’ and watch her father hurry down them, his face an apology.

  She ran down the last two streets before her own, her thumbs beneath the front straps of her backpack as it bumped against her shoulders. When she rounded the corner of her street, she saw the red and blue wash of the police lights before she saw the cars themselves, one of them parked on the footpath as if in some television police drama.

  Florence slowed her steps, and when she came to the Prentices’ house she sat down beneath the tree that hung like loose arms over its fence. She still called it the Prentices’, they all did, even though they were long gone, Professor Prentice accepting a position at Cambridge University, shaking her hand gravely in the driveway on the morning they left and saying to her, ‘Good luck, Florence.’

  He was a nice man, Professor Prentice, she thought, leaning her back against the fence. I wonder what his first name was.

  Florence watched her house from where she sat, her back curled into the fence, hands clasped around her drawn knees. She watched people she knew arriving with flowers in their hands, and people she didn’t know arriving with nothing in their hands at all.

  She watched as the shadows from the tree’s branches grew longer and thinner, and as her mother came out from the house, Leticia and Nancy behind her.

  Amanda Saint Claire was looking up the street, scanning it, Florence knew, for her eldest daughter.

  Amanda stepped out onto the middle of the road and looked up and down it until her eyes settled on Florence. She said something to Nancy, then patted Leticia’s arm and the two women turned and walked back into the house.

  Florence knew with every step her mother took towards her what Amanda was going to say, she just wondered how she would say it.

  She had known it the moment she had seen the light of the police cars.

  Maybe she had known it before then too, all the way home, as the sun dipped and she felt the quickening behind her.

  Florence thought that if she could just sit here beside the Prentices’ fence, she could hold the moment still, so that everything she knew was coming could go right back into the house with Leticia and Nancy.

  She pressed her back further into the fence, feeling its coarse hardness, willing her mother to stop walking towards her.

  ‘Florence,’ her mother said, kneeling down in front of her. ‘There’s been an accident.’

  Florence looked at her mother’s toes, painted in coral nail polish.

  ‘Your father is dead.’

  Florence closed her eyes, and Amanda shifted from her knees to sit beside her.

&n
bsp; Florence was glad her mother had delivered the news with such directness and no fuss.

  She couldn’t have stood it if Amanda had gone into hysterics, wailing at her daughter’s feet and sobbing into her skin.

  They sat still and silent as the darkness swallowed the evening, and then her mother began to sing.

  Florence could never remember the song, if it was a song at all or just some sort of keening, and years later, when Amanda was telling her the story of that afternoon, she had asked her, ‘What did you sing to me, Mum?’

  ‘A song of lament, it was all I had left in me, darling.’

  After Amanda had walked Florence inside, somewhere in the sounds of Isolde’s high-pitched wails from her room, and Puck’s drumming from his, and Leticia insisting on helping Florence into her pyjamas, the older woman too close and smelling sharply of wine, a policewoman had appeared at her bedroom door and asked Florence if there was anything she could get her.

  ‘I would like an obscenely large milkshake,’ Florence had answered.

  ‘Prickly one,’ the policewoman had told her friends afterwards.

  *

  ‘Florence?’

  Florence, half dreaming, half awake, pressed her entire body deeply into the back of the chair. God, was it Monty?

  ‘What are you doing here?’

  Florence looked up at Albert Flowers standing in front of her, a key in his hand.

  ‘I could ask you the same thing.’

  ‘Well, Miss Marple, I’ve come to do a bit of work.’

  ‘Me too.’

  Albert glanced at the armchair.

  ‘Yes, I can see,’ he smiled. ‘So . . . do you come here often?’

  Florence straightened her back. ‘All the time actually, but I haven’t seen you here before.’

  ‘Ah, that’s because I have only recently come into possession of a key.’

  ‘Handy,’ Florence said.

  ‘What about you, do you also have a key, or do you just break in through a window?’

  ‘No, I too have a key,’ she smiled, ‘although do not ask me where I got it.’

  She’d got it from a drawer labelled Spare Keys in Monty’s neat, precise hand, in the staff kitchen – probably where Albert had pilfered his from too.

  ‘All right, I won’t. Mind if I join you?’

  Florence said, ‘Please do,’ then ‘Not at all,’ then ‘Pull up a pew,’ then she told herself to stop talking.

  Albert sat in the other armchair in the corner and took a book out of his backpack.

  Florence smiled. ‘Is that what you’re working on?’

  Albert smiled back. ‘Yes, now if you don’t mind, I really do need to get cracking.’

  Florence leant back in her chair, feeling the lids of her eyes close, as if someone had placed a small pebble on them. She would have liked to talk to Albert, they were so rarely alone in this quiet space, but the weight on her eyes was too heavy, keeping her lids firmly shut.

  ‘Goodnight Florence.’

  ‘Goodnight Albert,’ she said, giving in to the waves of sleep that beckoned from the shore to pull her and her hangover in.

  When Florence woke up an hour or so later, Albert was putting the book into his backpack.

  ‘Was I asleep?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Did I dribble?’

  ‘Copiously.’

  Florence nodded.

  Perfect.

  She stood up and stretched a little.

  ‘Well, that was a very productive afternoon,’ she said.

  ‘Yes,’ Albert agreed, ‘I can see why you like working here, you get so much done.’

  ‘As do you,’ Florence smiled as they walked into the Green Team’s office together.

  ‘After you,’ Albert said at the side door, and she slipped through it.

  ‘Florence,’ Albert said, ‘I meant to ask, did you go to see the Amorphophallus titanum?’

  ‘No, my family ended up coming over and I had a bit to do to get ready for them.’

  ‘Ah . . . that’s a shame. Is it still on?’

  ‘It’s not like a Broadway show, Albert, but if you’re asking if it’s still blooming, then no.’

  Florence realised that once again she sounded sharp, when she had meant only to tease. I am like a violin’s strings that won’t tune, she thought.

  Albert nodded. ‘So, we’ve missed our chance then, have we?’

  Florence thought about the afternoon, how the two of them had been held in the library’s hollows, witnessed only by rows of silent authors still lurking, she believed, in the pages of their books. Surely if anything was going to happen, that would have been the moment, under the watchful eyes of all those writers, urging them to begin. Mary Wesley, for one, would have been shouting her head off.

  Florence nodded. ‘Looks like it,’ she said. ‘But not to worry, I’m sure it will smell just as repulsive next year.’

  4

  That night Florence met up with Orla and Veronica for dinner, an invitation she had accepted after their last gig, the Nightshades launching a two-pronged assault on her from either side of the mirror.

  ‘Come on, Florence, come, it will be fun.’

  ‘You never come out with us.’

  ‘We only ever see you on stage.’

  ‘It’s actually kind of insulting.’

  ‘It’s actually very insulting, it’s like you don’t want to know us.’

  I don’t, thought Florence, not really.

  Orla was taking her makeup off, her sweet, pinched face surprising Florence, as it always did, with its girlishness. On stage Orla was all knowing eyes and teasing banter. ‘I like your suit, honey,’ she’d toss to a man in the audience. ‘Does your mama buy all your clothes?’ But off stage she was a twenty-three-year-old part-time hairdresser from the Isle of Dogs in the East End of London who’d moved to Australia to be with her boyfriend Gav, who had unceremoniously dumped her shortly after they’d arrived, because, Orla said, he was a ‘right tosser’.

  Orla had no desire to go back to the East End and her mother Carol-Lea’s hair salon, and the council flat her father Seamus, a drummer, blew in and out of in between gigs and greasy breakfasts. She did not want to return to join the ranks of the girls she’d grown up with and marry ‘some chav in a shiny suit ‘oo finks he’s one of the Kray Brothers’.

  The girls had laughed, Veronica had said, ‘Fair enough,’ and Florence had thought, not for the first time, that she loved Orla’s East End lilt, which vanished the moment Orla stood in front of the microphone; her flat East End vowels replaced by something far more, as Orla said, ‘Kensington Gardens’.

  ‘It makes the act sound classier,’ she said to the girls. ‘Punters don’t want to see three old slappers up there.’

  Florence didn’t agree with Orla’s vocal disguise on stage, she found her true voice far more charming, but who was she to argue? She slipped on an elaborately embroidered cloak every time she became Miss Suki, a woman who never gave out her real name, not even to the Nightshades. They knew her as Florence Jones, a lamentable choice of surname, almost transparent in its commonness, the sort of name a bumbling criminal might choose for his alias. But she had chosen it on the fly when she’d made her first tentative steps back into the footlights, wanting a professional name as far away from Saint Claire as possible.

  She’d written down Jones in a scratching hurry on the first audition form she’d filled out since leaving the Swingers, deciding in the moment to change her last name. She had toyed with changing her first name too, but decided it would be too complicated to answer to not one but two false names, when she was already wading knee deep into the waters of deception.

  Florence hadn’t told anyone she was auditioning – she had hardly known it herself.

  Her self-imposed exile from singing had ended abruptly one Saturday morning when she was flicking through the copy of High Notes Isolde had left on the kitchen table. High Notes was the music profession’s bible and Florence, despite h
er self-imposed exile from its ranks, still pored over its listings and reviews and passionate letters to the editor . . . Really? Only two stars for ‘Blue Rondo à la Turk’?

  Mercy Jones, Isolde and Puck’s band, sometimes appeared within its pages, as did Amanda, usually smouldering like a dying fire on the cover. And in a box beneath Florence’s bed was the High Notes edition of 16 September 1989.

  Its cover was edged in black, the coda from ‘Love Walked In’ rising and falling across its pages.

  Florence had felt a rush of gratitude to whoever had chosen not to mark Lucas Saint Claire’s passing with the last plaintive mews of ‘Santa Was A Jazz Cat’.

  She had remained loyal to High Notes, and on the morning she found herself auditioning to sing again, a small advertisement in its ‘musicians wanted’ section caught her eye.

  Back-up singer wanted. Rock outfit. Good pipes. No try-hards.

  Its directness appealed to Florence.

  She certainly wasn’t a rock singer, but she did have a good set of pipes, and she had spent the last several years not trying at all.

  In her kitchen, holding her cup of coffee in one hand and High Notes in the other, all the songs that Florence had held to her chest started to sing at once.

  It wouldn’t hurt, she told herself, to give them a short airing.

  Florence Saint Claire drove her car to the address listed in High Notes, where Florence Jones filled out the audition form, a somewhat ambitious name for the scrap of paper she was handed, and sang from the song sheets.

  She had decided that if she got the gig, she wanted to be sure it was because of her voice, not who she was, or had been.

  It didn’t matter. Florence Jones did not get the gig as back-up singer for Christian Altman’s Furies – Christian Altman telling her after her audition that she was too ‘show-tuney’.

  ‘Nice work,’ he said, ‘but we’re looking for someone with a bit more grunt, you know?’

  Florence knew, and thanked Christian and the Furies (pale boys with slouched shoulders, who, Florence smiled to herself, had no idea that in Greek mythology the Furies were three vengeful female spirits, Alecto, Tisiphone and Megaera, who had snakes for hair).