You needed practice at these things, Florence thought, to be any good at them. You needed to be able to say, ‘Hi girls’ with ease, to roll your eyes in exactly the right way at exactly the right moment, to reach over and lightly touch an elbow and say, ‘I know,’ in exactly the right tone to show that you really did.
Issy was right when she said Florence didn’t have any friends, but it wasn’t because she was prickly. She was just rusty. She needed to get out more and oil her voice for conversations. She needed to listen to their rhythms with a keener ear so she knew the right moment to come in.
‘You look beautiful, Flo’ – Orla, the only person in the world she allowed to call her Flo – ‘you don’t scrub up ’alf bad, does she, Ronnie?’
Veronica nodded then began another tale of another poor bloke she’d accidentally ensnared in her Veronicaness by allowing him to take her out to dinner.
‘What is it with these men?’ she was saying. ‘All I hear about is how reluctant they are to commit, and the ones I meet are talking about holidays together and meeting the parents within two minutes.’
Orla and Florence exchanged glances – Florence secure that this was exactly the right response to Veronica’s complaint.
‘Well that’s because you look like Jessica Fucking Rabbit,’ Orla said.
‘What about you?’ Veronica asked Florence. ‘You got a fella hidden away somewhere, is that why you never usually come anywhere with us?’
‘Nope,’ Florence shook her head, then added, in the spirit of things, ‘but there’s someone at work I might be interested in.’
‘Oooh,’ said Orla, ‘tell us everyfing,’ and both girls leant forward in exactly the way Florence had seen women on the verge of important new information do.
Florence leant forward a little too.
‘He’s just a colleague, but he’s really nice, and he’s really kind of solid, you know?’
The girls nodded.
‘He smells good.’
Orla nodded vigorously and offered that Gav had smelt like a Sunday fry-up.
‘And he’s really interested in reintroducing some of the native fungi we’ve lost in the Mount Bell forest. We’ve been working together on a species count of them.’
Florence knew from the women’s faces that this was not the sort of information they were after, but it was exactly the sort of information that mattered to her.
She liked that Albert was nice, she liked that he smelt a little bit earthwormy, and she liked that he knew about fungi.
‘So has anything happened between you and this mushroom man?’ Veronica asked.
‘No,’ Florence answered. ‘I think he’s not interested.’
‘Gay,’ said Orla authoritatively.
Florence shook her head. ‘I don’t think that’s it.’
‘Has to be,’ Orla answered. ‘I mean look at you, you’re not the sort of woman a man would frow out of bed on a cold night, Florence.’
Later, much later, when Florence half tumbled out of a cab after continuing on at the Gate House, she let herself in the door and crept up the stairs, not wanting to wake Isolde. It had been a fun night, better than she had thought it would be, Florence relaxing into Orla and Veronica’s company, blurring herself at their vivid edges. Climbing into bed and feeling the not unpleasant sensation of the room moving beneath her body – not the full spin, more like a gentle cycle in the washing machine – Florence closed her eyes and smiled.
‘I am not the sort of woman a man would frow out of bed on a cold night,’ she repeated to herself just before the room stayed still long enough for her to fall asleep.
*
From her armchair, Amanda Saint Claire looked in on her sleeping daughter.
Unusual for Florence to go to bed fully clothed, she thought, good for her, I hope she had fun.
Amanda had let herself in to her daughters’ home, as she always did – ‘there are no locked doors between the Saint Claires!’ she heard her own voice trill.
Amanda wondered what Florence would do if she just crept into bed beside her, as she knew Issy still did.
How would it feel to hold Florence again, to feel the hook of her arm around her waist, and her head resting in the crook of her shoulder, the slow, animal pants of her breath?
When Florence was small, she would leave her own bed to pad down the hall to her parents’, climbing up to lie between them, wriggling into position, always turning – and this gave Amanda a ripple of a thrill each time – slightly towards her, instead of Lucas.
Amanda would lie very still and listen to her daughter’s grunts and murmurs, and she kept still until Florence’s breaths told her she had gone to sleep.
Amanda’s own parents, Philip and Nancy Catchpool, had distributed their affection sparingly, they were stiff with her, given to patting their daughter on her head.
To have her own child, this girl, this brown-haired and brown-eyed sprite curved into her body filled Amanda with a quiet, buzzing joy, like she had caught a lady beetle in her hands.
It was easier when Florence was small, Amanda thought, before the other children came, and everyone wanted a piece of Lucas, then a piece of her family.
Before the Saint Claires became the Saint Claire Swingers, and Amanda, suddenly up front in plunging emerald gowns and chandelier earrings, got lost in it all.
Florence had once shouted at her, midway in some fight about a festival she did not want to go to, and some hideous pair of overalls Richard was trying to force them all to wear, that she had ‘forgotten how to be a mother’.
Florence looked at her sleeping daughter, one leg now flung outside of the sheets, dangling like discarded washing over the bed.
It wasn’t true, Amanda thought, looking at Florence, I never forgot I was your mother, but I did get distracted.
That was one way of putting those years when she was so busy singing and smiling and making sure that Richard hadn’t booked them into time slots that were too late for those members of the Swingers who still had to get up for school the next day.
She approved the costumes, and argued with the venue owners and brought food in Tupperware containers for the kids to eat in the back of the van, and none of it, absolutely none of it, was as exhausting as being Lucas Saint Claire’s wife.
Being married to Lucas wasn’t easy – actually that was not strictly true.
Being married to Lucas Saint Claire was everything Amanda Saint Claire, nee Catchpool, wanted.
Meeting Lucas at the Conservatorium all those years ago, she in a tartan mini skirt and white leather boots with buttons at the side – God how she had loved those boots, she’d spent winters with them welded to her feet – Lucas in a three-quarter-length sheepskin coat, and every bit the wolf, had tilted everything.
It had raised her up, and taken her away from her parents and their keeping her at arm’s length and into Lucas’s arms and bed where nothing was off limits, and the more touching the better, and she was nineteen and could not believe her luck.
‘Lucky you,’ she remembers her friends from the Conservatorium saying, ‘Lucas Saint Claire could have any girl he wanted.’
That he wanted her was something Amanda always felt obliged in some way to pay back, to thank him for lifting her from the pack and sweeping his arms out to include her in his embrace every time they walked on stage.
‘My wife, everybody,’ he’d say, drawing her into him, ‘the Gorgeous Amanda,’ and she would stand beside him and feel like she had been pulled into the orbit of the sun.
But being the Gorgeous Amanda was a full-time job in itself, it meant eye masks and expensive crèmes and frosted highlights and keeping slim, and never ever being dull.
Somewhere along the way, she became Lamanda, that awful name the children had christened her.
She hated it, and they knew she hated it, but she also knew she wore it well.
Amanda had long ago been displaced by Lamanda, and it was only in moments like these, looking at her sleeping adul
t daughter, that she knew she was still there, hidden like so many layers of a chiffon dress.
Amanda stood up and quietly left the room, turning to blow a kiss to her daughter on the way out.
5
‘Morning Flo,’ Victor called as she walked past his house on Monday morning, ‘beautiful day.’
Florence smiled at him. ‘It is, although I’m a bit dusty.’
Victor smiled at her, ‘Oooh, big night?’
‘Yep,’ Florence answered, ‘my head is thumping.’
‘Leon used to say he had a head like a fur shoe when he was hungover,’ Victor said, then added, ‘Want a cup of tea?’
Florence did.
She did want a cup of tea, badly, and some toast and maybe some of Victor’s honey, from the hive he and Leon had kept at East Elm’s community garden.
‘Sure,’ she said. ‘I don’t need to be at work for another half-hour or so.’
Victor opened his gate and Florence followed him into the house, realising that she hadn’t been all the way inside it since Leon’s death.
She had gone to the wake. People, mostly men, had crammed inside the tiny cottage, while Victor served up platters of sandwiches and sausage rolls he had made himself, and Leon’s immediate family, a sad-looking father and a too-loud mother, served them.
Since then she had mostly spoken to Victor from across the fence, where he stood poised like a Venus flytrap with a watering can, ready to catch someone in conversation as they passed by.
‘Sorry about the mess,’ Victor called out from the kitchen, ‘we haven’t had a clean-up in ages. Sit down in the lounge, love, I’ll bring you your tea in a jiffy.’
Florence noted the ‘we’ and the fact that all of Leon’s belongings were still in the lounge room, as if he was too. His boots were on the rug; his flat cap was on the hook, and his Times crossword was open on the table, a pencil lying diagonally across it.
‘I know,’ Victor said cheerfully, entering with a tray, ‘should get rid of them, but it makes me happy to have his things here.’
Victor shrugged, and Florence nodded.
‘Makes sense to me,’ she said, thinking of Lucas’s music room.
Victor served the tea, asking Florence for advice about propagating begonias, and Florence realised that while she had not been inside Victor’s house for several months, she had also not seen him outside of it. Not counting, that was, his front yard.
Usually she could count on at least one Victor sighting a week – at the shops, or the library, or at the community gardens where she sometimes went to get clippings and he tended his hives.
‘Victor, have you got any of your honey for this toast?’
‘No, love,’ he answered. ‘I’m sweet enough.’
‘Victor,’ she asked, ‘have you left this house lately?’
‘No, love,’ he answered. ‘I have not.’
‘Ah,’ she said, ‘can I ask you why?’
‘Because I’m afraid . . . stupid really.’ Victor held up a piece of toast, mid-butter. ‘Well, what if Leon comes back?’
He looked at Florence’s slightly alarmed face. ‘Not the actual Leon, don’t worry. I’m not like some queer Miss Havisham tottering around in my wedding frock waiting for him to come home. No, it’s more that . . . well, what if his spirit comes back to visit and I’m not here to greet him?’
Florence looked at Victor, holding a teapot with strawberry vines on it, and laughed out loud. ‘Victor,’ she said, ‘that is the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard.’
Victor stared at her. ‘Florence, if you are going to make fun of me, you can please leave.’
Florence laughed harder – God, what was wrong with her, was it the hangover? Why could she never say the right thing at the right time? Why must she always wrong-foot it? She looked at Victor’s face, and stopped laughing.
‘I’m not laughing at you, Victor,’ she said. ‘I am laughing because if Leon did come back to visit you and you weren’t here, if he saw that you were getting on with your life, he would be happy.’
‘Well then clearly you didn’t know Leon,’ Victor smiled and then began to laugh himself, a deep, throaty bellow.
‘So you’ve been sitting here, all this time, keeping the tea on for him?’ Florence prodded.
‘Yes, you know, just in case he popped by,’ Victor was really laughing now, ‘to check if he left the iron on.’
Florence laughed with him, and Victor became almost hysterical by listing other absurd things Leon might be popping in to cast an eye over: ‘He just wants to see whether there’s any library books due’, ‘He’s reading the water meter’, until he ran out of puff.
Florence finished her tea and glanced at her watch.
‘I really have to get going, Victor,’ she said, ‘but I’ll come and see you soon,’ and kissed him on the cheek, which surprised both of them.
She would visit more often – Victor needed looking in on, not walking past as she admired his peonies. She should have popped in earlier, and she should have seen what was standing right in front of her as she walked by Victor’s beautifully kept garden every day. It was lush and bountiful, the sweet peas cascading over the fence, the magnolias dotted between the native gardenias, and the raked vegetable garden at the side of the house, its lettuces in neat rows and the curling vines of the butternut pumpkins kept in check.
No, Victor’s garden didn’t need tending, but its owner did.
Looking around Victor’s shrine-like home to his partner of almost thirty years, Florence could see Victor and Leon pottering around inside it. Leon in his Hawaiian shirts and board shorts, Victor in his gardening clothes, the two of them hunched over the crossword or shouting at each other from across a backgammon board. Occasionally she and Issy would watch movies with them, Leon serving popcorn and tall glasses of gin and holding Victor’s hand on the sofa.
How could she have missed it?
How could she not have seen the aching gap that Leon’s ‘Pipeline 68’ shirts had left behind?
Somehow she had thought that waving casually to Victor as she sailed past his gate every morning was enough, that as long as he was upright and in his garden, all was as it should be. But it wasn’t and if she was truthful with herself, she had known it, Victor’s loneliness tugging at her like a distress signal from deep within a mineshaft, not seen but heard.
‘Victor,’ she said, ‘how about we leave Leon a note?’
‘What?’
‘Let’s leave him a note, so that if he does come back to turn on the washing machine or check the mail, and you are not here, he will know that this is still his house, and you are still his husband.’
Victor looked at her, both eyebrows raised, his chin tucked into his hand.
‘I would like to get out more . . . where would we leave it?’
Florence smiled. ‘On the fridge, of course.’
Florence knew she would be late for work as she sat down to help Victor pen his note, but it didn’t matter. What was more important was that once Victor had written his note, which they decided should be, like all good notes, short and sweet – Dear Leon, I am just out for a bit but will be back soon. Love Victor – she might be able to propel him out the door.
They had two false starts, Victor getting as far as the hallway then turning back, and the second time making it to the front porch before saying, ‘No, I don’t think so, Florence.’
She said gently in his ear, ‘Oh but you must, Miss Havisham,’ and took his elbow to lead him down the front stairs, leaving Leon’s note held firmly by four magnets on the fridge door.
They said goodbye at the crossroads, Florence turning around to watch Leon’s disappearing back, just to make sure.
Arriving at work, Florence checked her roster on the Green Team’s noticeboard and saw she was down for five days in the park, none of them in the library and all of them with Albert as her co-worker.
Florence smiled, thinking of a week-long foray into the forest without Pedro Perki
ns, and latterly his new sidekick Shawna Carter asking her questions they knew she didn’t have the answer to, and also of Victor hopefully checking the beehive frames.
Monty Rollins appeared beside her, peering at the list. ‘“And into the forest I go, to lose my mind and find my soul,”’ he said quietly, then added, ‘John Muir.’
‘Yes,’ Florence answered, surprised, ‘I like him too, have you read much of him?’
‘Oh yes,’ Monty smiled. ‘I think I’ve probably read all of his works – Travels in Alaska, Steep Trails, Cruise of the Corwin et al – I’ve walked a lot of the trails he wrote of too, with Sharon, of course, and some of our friends.’
‘Sharon?’ Florence asked, and just stopped herself from adding, ‘Friends?’
‘My wife,’ Monty said, his hands adjusting his bow tie. ‘Wonderful hiker, puts me to shame, it’s her thighs of course, marvellous.’
‘Her thighs?’
‘Oh yes, dear, she charges up those hills on them like twin pistons going at it when she attacks a trail, it’s all I can do to gaze on in admiration.’
‘I didn’t know you were a hiker.’
‘Thought I spent my weekends with my nose buried in a book, did you?’ he smiled at her.
‘Yes, I suppose I did,’ she answered truthfully.
Monty nodded. ‘Well I do actually, but it’s usually under a tree somewhere.’
‘I like to read outside too,’ Florence said, ‘or inside, or anywhere really.’
Monty laughed, and for the second time that day Florence realised she had missed something. First Victor and his loneliness, and now Monty, who loved the Scottish conservationist, John Muir, and had a wife called Sharon with Teutonic thighs.
The Best Kind of Beautiful Page 9