The Best Kind of Beautiful

by Frances Whiting

  She had heard lots of stories second-hand, a couple of first-hand accounts from girls he had bedded, and she had giggled out loud, thinking that she would be one of them now.

  It didn’t bother her one bit.

  Lucas had asked what she was thinking about and she had told him, emboldened by everything she had just done – and so quickly. Her parents, so careful in their countenances, so sparing in their gestures, would be shocked at her behaviour.

  Philip and Nancy Catchpool, who walked through life like they were picking their way through a minefield, had raised their only child to be wary. Of crossing the road, of making new friends, of putting her hand up in class, of climbing trees or getting caught in the rain and, if they had known what was coming, Amanda smiled at Florence, most certainly of Lucas Saint Claire.

  Florence smiled back and tried to remember her maternal grandparents, who had both died within months of each other when she was in her early teens, but she could only conjure a vague vision of Nancy leaning down to give her a stiff, powdery kiss on the cheek. Her only memory of Philip was of him pretending he had stolen her nose and caught it in his thumb, a tedious game he had kept up long after she had stopped laughing, managing only a tight, forced smile.

  But Philip and Nancy Catchpool had gifted their daughter their voices, both excellent choral singers who performed at chamber recitals and church concerts, Amanda inheriting the talent that led her out of their home, onto the train to the Conservatorium and into the arms of Lucas Saint Claire.

  Lying in his dorm room that afternoon, the two of them curved into each other like question marks, Amanda had looked at his posters of musicians on the wall, his clothes bundled into a ball in the corner, an open suitcase on the floor, with a glittery pale blue scarf at its mouth (a girl’s scarf, she thought), and felt completely at home.

  ‘When girls leave your room,’ she told him that afternoon as the sun dipped to a sliver of pink neon in the sky, ‘they don’t call it the Walk of Shame, they call it the Walk of Fame.’

  Then she had started to laugh, really laugh, both at the idea that she was now one of them, and also because she felt slightly hysterical at everything that had happened between them in that room, the delicious abandonment, the letting go.

  But Lucas was not laughing, he was looking at her with his green, dancing eyes as he said, ‘Well, the gorgeous Amanda, I do intend to make you really, really famous.’

  What Amanda had not realised then, lying naked in Lucas Saint Claire’s college bed, one leg draped over it, her toe touching the floor, was that he had meant it.

  She had also not realised, until many years later, that he had sought her out, that he was looking for someone exactly like Amanda Catchpool to orbit his sun.

  That she adored him was incidental, as was her beauty – beautiful girls peppered the lawns of the university like flowers. If Lucas was only looking for a pretty girl who worshipped him, he need only stroll across one of its green expanses, reach down and pluck one out. What set Amanda apart, what propelled her to the front of the line and all the way in his pale green Volkswagen to meet his parents, was her voice. That she could sing meant that Lucas would always have someone to accompany him, on the stage and on the road. It meant he would always have someone in the audience.

  And so, one Saturday morning after they had been together for about six months, he had taken her to visit what he called ‘The Fam’, and that too, she supposed, had been an audition of sorts.

  The Saint Claires lived in exactly the sort of house Amanda had imagined they would, nothing at all like her parents’ brick bungalow on a corner block with its lawns punctuated by dreary rows of her father’s rosebushes. Even when they bloomed they looked disappointed to be there, alongside the bird’s house letterbox with its No Junk Mail sign in her mother’s firm hand. The Saint Claires’ home was an art deco pearl, hidden from the street by a long driveway, and set on a hill, its white walls curved and seductive, its garden studded with date palms and cacti, with two sleek black cats patrolling among them.

  Lucas’s family were nothing like hers either. When she and Lucas had walked in to the Saint Claire home, Juliet and Guy Saint Claire had been shouting at each other in the kitchen and they had not stopped shouting just because she and Lucas were there.

  Lucas had shrugged and led her up to his bedroom, a girl running down the stairs carrying a guitar case and pausing mid-flight as she passed them. ‘Hello, brother,’ she had said to Lucas. ‘Hello you,’ she’d said to Amanda, not unkindly. ‘Don’t go near the parents, Guy’s in the doghouse.’

  Lucas had one sister, a slightly unhinged mother and a musician father who was relentlessly, chronically unfaithful.

  Amanda sat down on the bed next to Florence and put an arm around her.

  ‘Poor Juliet,’ she said, ‘and poor all of them, really. Guy Saint Claire was a handful.’

  Amanda paused, then added, ‘And so was your father.’

  The girls had never really stopped going in and out of Lucas’s room once he and Amanda had become an ‘official’ couple, she told Florence; they had just made the commute more discreetly. And Amanda, although she knew that they couldn’t all be music students, or girlfriends of friends, or once, she said laughingly, a cousin visiting from interstate, chose to believe him.

  ‘I wasn’t the last to know, darling. I always knew.

  ‘I always knew but I chose not to see it, not to make a fuss, your father hated fuss.’

  ‘What about later?’ Florence asked. ‘When you got married, when you had us?’

  ‘Then too,’ Amanda answered. ‘Especially then.’

  ‘Oh Mum,’ Florence said, then again, ‘Oh Mum.’

  Amanda smiled at her. ‘Your father tried, Florence, he really did, but, well, he was a musician, darling,’ as if that explained everything.

  Florence wriggled deeper under the quilt. ‘I didn’t know,’ she said. ‘How could I have not known all of this?’

  Amanda looked at her daughter.

  ‘Because I made sure you didn’t,’ she answered, and everything Florence had thought about her mother tilted.

  She saw Amanda hurrying them out of dressing rooms, or shepherding them into Richard’s van; she saw her crossing rooms to stand in front of Lucas and adjust his tie; she saw how hard she worked to keep them all in his eye line.

  She saw her father and Caroline Prentice in their backyard at a barbecue, Caroline throwing her head back in laughter, and Professor Prentice hurrying over, spilling his own drink in his haste to get there.

  She saw their father lying on the window seat, his head in Amanda’s lap as she stroked his forehead, pulling his hairline back slightly each time she did, Lucas relaxing under her touch, his forehead unfurling as his eyes closed.

  Lucas Saint Claire wasn’t the sun they all orbited around, her mother was.

  Once her father had taken the family to Luna Park; they had passed through its lurid, grinning mouth and gone on all the rides, and then to Coney Island with its pathways and distorted mirrors. Amanda, she remembered, had hated it, she had kept insisting they not touch anything, and when a woman approached the family and asked to take a photo, her mother had snapped at her, ‘Haven’t you got your own family to photograph?’ and pulled the children away, leaving Lucas and the woman behind. At the time, Florence thought Amanda was being rude; now she wondered who the woman was.

  She and Isolde went on one of Coney Island’s wonky attractions together, walking through two large spinning cylinders which constantly moved beneath their feet, making the journey, for Florence at least, an unsteady one. Isolde, of course, had made it through unscathed, even though she had looked like a flapping scarecrow in there, while Florence had stumbled, her palms against the smooth concrete walls, her feet slipping beneath her.

  When she got to the other side, Florence had felt disorientated and shaky, and it had taken her body a few moments to settle back into itself.

  That was how she felt now listening to Am
anda, like everything was slowly coming into focus.

  More memories and images were clicking into place: Amanda talking in a low voice to a woman outside their door, her mother pressing her body against its frame; Puck’s face when Lucas tucked him under the chin and said, ‘Sorry, buddy, you’ll have to practise on your own, I’m late’; Richard driving the family home from shows, glancing at Amanda in the passenger seat, her face to the window.

  She saw Amy Burton’s mother – no, that couldn’t be right, but yes, there she was at the back door, talking to Amanda. Caroline Burton seemed agitated, and Florence, walking into the kitchen, heard Amy’s mother saying, ‘It won’t continue,’ and at the time Florence had thought she was speaking about her and Amy’s friendship.

  Now she wondered if it was another Saint Claire they were talking about.

  Her mother’s hand found Florence’s fingers beneath the quilt and laced them with her own.

  ‘It doesn’t matter, Florence,’ she said. ‘It didn’t matter then and it doesn’t matter now.

  ‘It doesn’t change the fact that your father loved you all very much, and he loved me very much, and that we were very happy together for a very long time.

  ‘What does matter is that you know that your father’s death had nothing, absolutely nothing to do with you.’

  Amanda’s voice rose several bars above its normal low thrum, and the fury returned to her face, appearing as two bright red circles on her cheeks.

  ‘It actually makes me feel incredibly angry and very, very sad that you have felt this way, because the reason why your father was run over by a milk truck,’ and Florence knew then that her mother really was angry, the ‘traffic accident’ euphemism dropped at last – in fact her mother looked like she wished she was behind the wheel of that truck, ‘is not because he was hurrying to meet you, but in all likelihood because he was late from meeting someone else.

  ‘There was always someone, darling,’ Amanda said softly, ‘to give a blue feather to.’

  There were, Amanda told Florence, quite a few recipients of Lucas’s blue feathers. Or signed albums. Or, for some, sets of silver cufflinks shaped like clarinets. Or whatever Lucas gave to whichever one of the many women he saw throughout their marriage right up until the moment a milk truck put an end to it.

  ‘Don’t ask me why,’ she said, ‘feathers, especially, were a little folly of his – I got one too, early on.

  ‘Half of the symphony orchestra had one pinned to their evening gowns in the seventies,’ she laughed. ‘Can you imagine?’

  Amanda’s voice was bright, gay – her performance voice, her children called it.

  But Florence couldn’t imagine it at all.

  Amanda’s voice wavered.

  ‘But Leticia, I didn’t expect Leticia,’ and this time it was Florence’s hand that found her mother’s.

  Florence had never been particularly fond of Leticia or Nancy, her mother’s oldest friends from school. As a child, she found them both, particularly Leticia, too much, always filling up the spaces around Amanda with swathes of colour Florence couldn’t find her way through; bracelets and scarves and layers of gossip. Amanda was always waving her away when they were at Kinsey, and Florence had spent a lot of time during their visits in one of her underground dugouts. But her mother, Florence knew, loved them both, particularly Leticia. After Lucas died, Leticia was at Kinsey for days on end, tussling with Richard for Amanda’s attention and taking up too much room in the house. Florence flinched – the gall of the woman, sharing their grieving as if she belonged in it.

  But Leticia had moved interstate and her visits had dropped off over the years. Now, Florence knew, Leticia would never come to Kinsey again. Lamanda would smile, turn her back and let her go, as lightly as a feather.

  *

  Florence stayed the night, calling Isolde to explain she was sleeping at Kinsey.

  ‘What? You’re at Lamanda’s? What’s happened? Is she all right? She’s not dying, is she? What could she be dying of? Overexposure?’

  Florence did not laugh as she would normally have laughed, and she resolved to tell both Isolde and Puck they all needed to drop the Lamanda thing.

  Florence had no doubt her mother would continue to be as infuriating as ever, that the two of them would clash as they always had. But as her mother’s eyes closed and her breathing slowed to soft, throaty snores, it was not Amanda Saint Claire Florence saw sleeping beside her, exhausted by the wine and the tears and the telling, but Amanda Catchpool, all cried out.

  She saw her mother, standing in a knot with her friends, Lucas Saint Claire walking towards her, about to change everything. She saw her beetling up the driveway to Guy and Juliet Saint Claire’s shimmering, curved walls. She could not remember much of her paternal grandparents. Juliet had died before Florence was born – of alcohol; of longing, her mother said – and Guy had blazed along for a few years after that, before falling from a golf cart and hitting his head, never to recover. Both Saint Claire men, Florence thought, destined to die inglorious, transport-related deaths. Lucas’s sister Coraline lived in London, and every now and again a postcard with Big Ben or a Beefeater on it would appear in Kinsey’s letterbox, with a message scratched across it. Coraline Saint Claire couldn’t wait, Lucas once told Florence, to get away from his family, and Australia, and had sworn she would never return. So far she had kept her word, sending flowers and another scrawled note to Lucas’s funeral that said, ‘Bad luck, brother’. Amanda, Florence remembered, had smiled and said, ‘Very Coraline.’ Her mother’s patience, it seemed, extended to all members of the Saint Claire family.

  Florence took the wine bottle and the glasses downstairs to clean up, then returned to her mother’s room. She changed into one of Amanda’s nightgowns – deep green silk with something scratchy at its neck, the rest of the material slippery against her skin – and crossed the hallway to the music room.

  There was no ghost there to greet her. No Lucas looking up from his chair to smile at her or shoo her out or open his arms for her to climb into. It was just a room, Florence saw, and one that was long overdue for a clearing out. It was ludicrous the way they all kept it, her father’s books and newspapers still in place, his music scores on the piano, his clarinet against the wall.

  This wasn’t a room, it was a shrine.

  Florence sat at the window seat and looked through the glass to the tree, its spindly arms reaching out into the night.

  Why had it taken her so long to remember? How could she have erased the memory of Leticia giving her the feather, or Leticia stumbling out of her room afterwards, smiling as if she had done Florence a favour.

  Well, she remembered now. She remembered that she had stood up after Leticia had gone, opened her window and raised the feather to her lips.

  Then she had exhaled her breath in a rush, watching it dance from her hand to the street below.

  Then she had shut the window.

  In the music room, all these years later, Florence remembered and understood it all.

  The feather had drifted from memory because she had willed it so.

  On the night she had lost her father, she had been sixteen years old and she had known exactly what she was doing.

  She had raised the blue feather to her lips and watched it float away to somewhere it couldn’t hurt any of them.

  7

  ‘So, what was the sleepover about?’ Isolde asked when Florence returned to their cottage the next morning. ‘Did you have pillow fights? Did you give each other makeovers?’

  Florence ignored her. ‘Is Puck here?’ she asked instead.

  ‘No. He must be at Lance’s place.’

  Florence nodded. ‘So Issy,’ she began, putting the kettle on.

  The thing that Florence would always remember about that morning, more than Issy’s shocked face when she told her about the afternoon of their father’s death, or the way she had shocked Florence when she’d shouted: ‘I knew it, I bloody knew it!’ when Florence spoke about
their father’s infidelities, was the way Isolde sat opposite her during the telling.

  No stretching or swinging limbs, Isolde contained all of her body into one form and kept it there.

  ‘You’re so still, Isolde,’ Florence said. ‘Are you all right?’

  Issy nodded, a barely perceptible movement of her chin.

  ‘It’s the gravity of the situation,’ she said. ‘I’m taking it all in, and I can’t do that if I’m flapping about.’

  ‘Fair enough,’ said Florence.

  Isolde continued to sit quietly and Florence, who spent much of her life wishing Isolde would just keep still and stop talking for one moment, found herself wishing that her sister would return to her normal state of a person caught inside the spin cycle of a washing machine, shouting to get out.

  ‘I’m sorry, Florence,’ Isolde said finally. ‘I’m sorry you thought you had killed Dad for all those years, that can’t have been easy.’

  ‘No, it wasn’t,’ Florence agreed, and then their eyes met across the table and Isolde giggled, her hand going to her mouth too late to catch it.

  Florence began to laugh too, at the understatement of Isolde’s sentence, and all that lay behind it.

  Isolde’s shoulders were shaking as she wrapped her arms around her waist and clutched her stomach, and Florence stopped even trying not to laugh, letting it come from deep within her belly.

  When their laughter had softened to a few giggles, Isolde tried again. ‘No, Florence, I really am sorry that you thought it was your fault Dad was run over by a milk truck . . .’

  Florence and Isolde’s eyes met as they started laughing again, mildly hysterical now at the absurdity of it, and all the letting go.

  Lucas Saint Claire may have been one of the finest clarinet players of his generation, he may have been as spellbinding to his family as he was to his audiences, and there may even have been magic in him, but he was no more and no less than anyone else.