The Best Kind of Beautiful

by Frances Whiting

  He was just a man, as capable of being hit by a Packers Dairy milk truck as the next.

  They could all stop – mostly Amanda, she hoped – saying his name in hushed voices.

  There was something else, too, in Florence’s laughter.

  She had carried the guilt of Lucas’s death like river stones deep in her pockets.

  She had felt the weight of them in her steps, their heaviness engraved with what ifs. What if she had ignored the boy in the yellow jacket and just kept right on singing? What if she had said to her father that day on the window seat, ‘I’m fine, Dad, I just need a break from the Swingers, but I’ll be back – you go to your recording session.’ What if she had reached down to put some money in the man’s guitar case?

  What if she took the stones from her pocket, and sent them clattering to the ground?

  Florence laughed with Isolde, the hard nub of the prickle inside her dissolving a little more.

  ‘We’ll have to tell Puck,’ Isolde said. ‘If we can find him.’

  *

  Florence knocked on Victor’s door the next morning on her way to work. It was early but Florence knew Victor would be up – gardeners were always up early.

  It was, in Florence’s opinion, the best time of day to witness a garden, when all the plants and tiny creatures that dwelt within them got busy. They unfurled their leaves and drew in their energy, or dropped down from webs to swing in the morning light, or scurried from beneath the damp leaf matter where they had made their bed.

  Birds scattered seeds, and the seeds rolled into perfect divots, and all this activity, all of this life-making work was carried out while the earth spun to face the sun.

  Florence could never understand people who slept through it.

  Victor opened the door and smiled widely when he saw Florence, a sprig of parsley in one hand and some rosemary in the other.

  ‘Got too much?’ he grinned.

  ‘Yep,’ Florence answered. ‘Acres of both – I was hoping to swap these for some of your honey.’

  ‘Which is a nice way of you asking if I’ve been out to the hives, and yes I have, twice this week.’

  ‘Good,’ Florence answered, ‘then you can make some toast with my tea.’

  Victor had been to the hives and, he said, also to a book launch for the author Cat Morrison. Did Florence know her? American feminist. Always wore hats.

  Leon had been a huge fan of her first book, and Victor had taken it along to be signed for him.

  ‘Bit crazy, I know,’ he said, ‘but she was in town, and I remembered Leon going on and on about her, so I just took myself there and handed her the book.’

  ‘Did she sign it?’

  ‘Yes, I told her to write, Dear Leon, better late than never!’

  Florence chuckled and wondered what Cat Morrison made of that.

  ‘I spied your friend Albert there, seemed very chummy with the author.’

  ‘Did he?’ Florence asked. ‘Did he now?’

  ‘Yes, she was having a drink afterwards and he was chatting to her with a couple of other people like they were old friends.’

  Albert Flowers was a dark horse, Florence thought. Probably a Clydesdale.

  After she finished her tea and two pieces of toast spread with Victor’s amber honey – ‘Very nice,’ she said, ‘buttery, with some notes of acacia if I am not mistaken’ – she thanked her neighbour and left for work.

  As she left, she noticed a new note on the fridge door.

  It said, Hi Leon, would it kill you to wash some dishes while you’re here?

  *

  ‘How was the book launch?’ Florence asked Albert at lunchtime in the Green Team’s office. Florence usually liked to take her lunch outside, but it was raining, sending spears of water down the library’s windows and beating on its roof in a steady, comforting thrum.

  ‘It was very, very strange,’ he answered, and then he told Florence about Cat Morrison’s strong aversion to her signature hats.

  ‘Well, that’s stupid,’ Florence said. ‘She should just stop wearing them.’

  Albert raised his eyebrows a little – and in their arch she saw she had missed the mark again.

  She was being flippant, but he hadn’t caught her tone. Momentum. Florence realised that was the problem. They didn’t have it. They could start out together, but whatever force was needed to help push things along a bit was missing. One of them would be in very grave danger if they were trapeze artists.

  ‘It’s not stupid,’ Albert was saying. ‘I think you’ll find it’s called being human.’

  Florence prickled. ‘I think you’ll find you sound like a tosser,’ she said, as any momentum they had gathered ground to a dull halt.

  Albert was about to say something else – and what Albert Flowers wanted to say was, ‘Sorry, Florence, that did sound a bit wankery’ – when Monty Rollins walked into the office with the air of a man tasked with something very important to say.

  ‘Sorry to intrude,’ he said, ‘but your mother is here, Florence,’ adding with an underline, ‘Amanda Saint Claire is in the library.’

  *

  Amanda’s presence in the East Elm’s borrowing section had not gone unnoticed by its patrons, drawn to her, Florence saw, like moths to a flame – Mrs Trenton in particular in full flutter.

  Except that moths weren’t really drawn to a flame, Florence thought, or even to a light. It was more confusion, less compulsion. Moths had used the moon as a compass for thousands of years. When they wanted to fly in a straight line, they kept its light at a set angle, to their right or left. Then Thomas Edison had come along with his electric light bulb and thrown them all hopelessly off course. With the moon as a lunar guide, it was easy for moths to keep to their flight plan, but a light bulb? A light bulb they would zoom straight past, sense the light was now behind them, and try to correct themselves again and again, flying in ever decreasing circles until they just flew straight into it. Moths thought light bulbs were the moon, and the patrons of East Elm Library thought Amanda’s light was equally celestial. They were equally confused as well, circling around her as dazed as any poor moth.

  Florence watched her mother nod and smile, her hand lightly resting for a moment on Mrs Trenton’s shoulder, and thought that the size of the audience didn’t matter, Amanda Saint Claire knew how to work a room, even if that room was the East Elm Public Library.

  ‘Darling,’ Amanda said, when she saw her, gently shaking Monty off her arm, ‘I’m sorry to bother you at work, but I can’t seem to contact your brother. I seem to have lost Puck.’

  Discombobulated was Florence’s favourite word, and one she was always trying to get the upper primary students from East Elm to use in a sentence. It was also exactly how she felt now, discombobulated by her mother’s presence in the library and the words she was saying.

  Neither really belonged in the world she knew.

  Florence felt detached from both, like she was looking at her mother from one of those terrifying peepholes they have in hotel rooms which make everyone on the other side look like cast members from The Shining.

  What was Amanda saying? That she’d lost Puck. That wasn’t how it worked. None of them ever lost Puck, he just took himself off and came back when he was ready. There was no looking to be done when someone had no desire to be found.

  Monty, who had somehow fastened himself to her mother’s elbow, took Amanda into the staffroom where she told Florence why she was ‘just the tiniest bit concerned’.

  ‘I know he’s disappeared before, darling, but Isolde took it upon herself to tell him about our little chat the other evening and he took it rather badly . . .’

  Monty Rollins was nodding his head and patting her mother’s hand.

  ‘Mmm Amanda,’ he said. ‘Go on.’

  Florence had always hated this, the way people just attached themselves to her parents.

  ‘Monty,’ she said, ‘would you mind leaving us alone for a few minutes?’

  Monty exi
ted the staffroom with a tug on his bowtie that said he did mind, very much.

  ‘What’s going on, Mum?’ Florence asked.

  Amanda had come home from a solo gig to find Puck sitting on the front stairs of the house.

  ‘Is it true?’ he’d asked. ‘All that stuff about Dad?’

  Amanda had played for time. ‘Why don’t we go and sit inside, darling?’ she had said, but Puck had said no, why didn’t she just tell him now whether the things Isolde had said were fact or one of Isolde’s fictions.

  So Amanda had told him that yes, there had been some fidelity issues with Lucas, but that it hadn’t impacted on the family, and Puck had shouted that of course it had, stood up and started walking. Where to, Amanda wasn’t sure, but he had not come home that night or the next. He wasn’t at Lance’s either, and normally she wouldn’t worry, only it was so unlike him to shout, wasn’t it?

  Yes, Florence thought, it was unlike Puck to shout, or to make any sort of noise really, apart from that which crashed from his drumsticks.

  ‘What about Isolde?’ she asked. ‘Has she seen Puck?’

  ‘No,’ Amanda answered. ‘I went to your house first to check if he was there, and Isolde said she hadn’t seen him since she told him about your father’s . . . peccadilloes.’

  Florence raised her eyebrows at her mother’s delicate choice of words.

  Amanda sighed. ‘She was very rude when I suggested that perhaps it wasn’t her place to tell him.’

  ‘Did she tell him the rest?’ Florence asked. ‘Did she tell him about me?’

  Amanda shook her head.

  ‘I’m not sure, he stomped off before I had a chance to find out exactly what your sister said.’

  Florence had trained herself not to panic over Puck; she had spent a lifetime being told by Lucas and Amanda and Isolde that he was perfectly fine, that he would come back when he was ready, and that she, Florence, was overreacting. But this time Amanda was worried enough to enter a public library voluntarily, and that in itself was a cause for concern.

  The only thing that could have made her more concerned would have been if Amanda had announced she’d caught the bus there.

  ‘Right,’ she said to her mother, ‘let’s go look for him.’

  Florence went back into the Green Team’s office to get her bag, explaining to Albert that she had to leave to deal with a ‘family matter’.

  ‘Of course. Can I help?’

  Florence said no but thank you for offering, and Albert seemed to stammer a little as he replied, ‘I know I sounded a bit pompous before, Florence. I didn’t mean to, sometimes my mouth runs away with me . . .’

  ‘It’s all right,’ she answered, ‘it really doesn’t matter,’ because it really didn’t.

  What mattered was finding her twenty-three-year-old little drummer boy and finding out exactly what Isolde had said to him.

  She passed Albert’s sister Adelaide Flowers as she left, Adelaide half raising her hand as if she was going to ask Florence to look for another book for her. ‘I’m not a librarian,’ Florence said, and kept walking.

  *

  ‘What?’ Isolde said, chin lifted, looking at her mother and sister from her bed where she sat cross-legged, a mess of knitting in her lap.

  ‘What is the big deal? Mum, you told Florence, Florence told me, and then I told Puck. It’s the natural order of things, when you think about it.’

  Florence thought Isolde was being maddeningly unhelpful, even for her.

  Florence also thought that Isolde had probably just blurted out to Puck what she had learnt, not choosing her words carefully; not really choosing her words at all.

  But whatever she said was enough to set Puck wandering, something he hadn’t done in months, maybe a year – long enough, anyway, for Florence to stop noticing he had gone.

  ‘Isolde,’ she said, ‘what did you say to Puck about Dad?’

  Isolde stood up and put her hands on her hips.

  ‘Nothing bad, nothing terrible, I just said that Lucas was a root rat,’ then, seeing the expressions on Amanda’s and Florence’s faces added, ‘which he was.’

  ‘A root rat?’ Amanda repeated. ‘A root rat?’ and Florence heard echoes of her mother shrieking, ‘A milk truck!’

  Florence shook her head at her sister. ‘Isolde,’ she said, ‘you need to choose your words more carefully, you need to choose everything more carefully, you need to pay attention, do you hear me? You need to pay more attention.’

  Florence was shouting now, repeating the words every teacher had written on Isolde’s report cards since grade one, as Isolde moved her hands from her hips to her face and began to cry. Amanda started crying too, and then Florence, annoyed with herself for doing so, began to cry as well, all three Saint Claire women weeping in the kitchen over two missing Saint Claire men.

  Florence looked around the kitchen table and thought she was glad no one could see this display of Saint Claire drama.

  Why must her family be so theatrical? Why must her family be such a mess? Why could they not be normal? Why must Isolde cry so noisily, so uncontrollably? Why did Amanda cry as if she was being filmed, looking off into the distance between delicate sniffs? Why was she, Florence, joining in? Must they do everything together? And where the fuck was Puck?

  Florence stood up. ‘I’m going to look for him,’ she said, grabbing her keys, but she did not add that she thought she knew where Puck was.

  He didn’t need a deputation from the three wailing witches of East Elm.

  ‘What should I do, darling?’ Amanda asked, and usually Florence would have prickled at her mother’s fluttering hands and blinking lashes, but now she looked at Amanda and saw that she really was floundering.

  Lucas Saint Claire may have had his little – what had her mother called them? – peccadilloes, but he had been excellent in a crisis. He had a way of stepping in and saying exactly the right thing in exactly the right tone so that everyone’s shoulders relaxed a fraction. When things went awry, he was the guide with the umbrella held steadily aloft in the air, his grey felt hat bobbing beneath it, and its owner completely confident they would all follow.

  Since Lucas had died, Richard had taken over the day to day running of her mother’s life, so she could concentrate on the full-time job of being Amanda. If Puck wasn’t where she thought he was, Florence might call Richard, get him on the case.

  Florence shook her head. She was not immune to the odd spot of theatricality either. Why didn’t she just pop on a trench coat and a trilby hat?

  ‘I think you should stay here with Isolde,’ she told her mother, ‘in case Puck comes back.’

  Amanda nodded. ‘All right, darling,’ she said, putting her arm around her still-wailing youngest daughter.

  Florence did not feel so kindly towards her sister.

  ‘Enough histrionics, Isolde,’ she said, and then, surprising all three of them, added, ‘and look after Mum.’

  Then she got in her car and drove to Langdon’s quarry.

  *

  The quarry had been closed for so long, nobody seemed sure any more of what had been mined there.

  When they were kids, Keep Out signs were posted on droopy orange barriers, not sufficiently alarming to keep anyone out, least of all the kids on bikes and teenagers in cars who turned up on weekends. They smoked cigarettes in the folds of its granite rocks, swam in its rock pools, mostly the deepest one known as ‘Gerry’s Hole’, named after a fat, lazy catfish generations of East Elmers had spied there.

  Kids would dare each other to dive beneath the waterhole’s milky greenness, to where Gerry purportedly lurked, then shoot again through the blister of its surface.

  Gerry was probably long gone, Florence thought, and smiled remembering the time Isolde had shot out of the water when they were teenagers shrieking, ‘Gerry’s got me! Gerry’s got me!’ and pulling at her bikini bottom to find only a stick wedged in there.

  The signs didn’t keep Puck out either. Langdon’s was close enou
gh to walk to from their house, if you knew the short cuts, and Puck knew all of them. He’d spend hours at the quarry, going for a quick dip at Gerry’s Hole, then he would continue on past a stack of boulders tossed there by giants.

  At least, Florence smiled, that’s what Lucas had told them when they were children.

  The giants’ boulders ringed a smaller rock pool, hugged by a half-moon of granite, where sounds grew deeper and richer, and where Puck would sometimes get out his set of bongos and play.

  If he picked the right sort of day, with the right wind direction, the sound barely carried at all, so he was largely left alone, which was largely how he liked things.

  Florence got out of her car and walked to the quarry’s entrance, then along its main path to Gerry’s Hole, calling Puck’s name and feeling the same familiar bird wings beat in her chest that she’d felt frequently when she was much younger. She wondered if anyone in her family knew about how, while they were all saying not to worry, he’d be back soon, she would do nothing but silently worry, putting her hand on her heart trying to slow its pace.

  Isolde never seemed to notice when Puck was missing, and if Florence pointed it out, she would say, ‘Oh, well I expect he’ll turn up sooner or later,’ and he always did, Florence’s entire body filling with rushing relief the moment she saw him.

  When Puck was a child, she felt responsible for him, and Florence wondered whether this was because she was the eldest or because sometimes her mother and father didn’t behave like adults at all and Florence felt that someone in the family ought to. But now Puck was an adult and Florence wondered if they weren’t all being a little overdramatic. She was sure other families didn’t send out search parties when a grown man was not contactable. But her family, she knew, was not like other families, and Puck was not like other grown men.

  There was his name to start with. What had her parents been thinking? She and Isolde had got off lightly, but Puck? Florence’s brow furrowed, trying to remember her high school English lessons and the one term when they had been assigned A Midsummer Night’s Dream. All she could really remember was Lucy Venables snorting, ‘Isn’t that the one about your brother?’ and one line about Puck being a ‘merry wanderer of the night’.