‘I’m sorry things didn’t work out,’ Puck said. ‘I know how much you wanted to play the show, Mum.’
‘Of course we’re playing the show, darling,’ Amanda said.
‘I don’t think so,’ Isolde said. ‘You insulted the man’s facial hair.’
‘Doesn’t matter,’ Richard said, ‘all your mother really did was put our price up.’
Poor Kip, Florence thought, it really was all a game, and no one had told him who the real players were.
When she saw him backstage at the New Year’s concert in a few weeks’ time, she would be sure to throw him a smile. As Amanda would say, there was no need to skite.
10
‘We look like piano keys,’ Veronica said.
‘Sexy piano keys,’ said Orla.
‘What do you think, Florence?’ Veronica asked.
Florence considered the three of them in the tuxedos she had rented.
‘I think we look like we mean business,’ she said.
‘Sexy business,’ said Orla.
They were in Veronica’s flat, getting ready for Music Under the Milky Way.
The three women were smoothing each other’s collars, tucking shirts in and gliding their hands through each other’s hair to affix high ponytails. Florence supposed this was the same sort of feeling some girls got from slumber parties, the brushing of hair and spritzing of perfume. She didn’t know for sure, she’d never been invited to one, but she thought it might feel a little bit like this.
When they were finished dressing, they considered each other in Veronica’s full-length mirror.
All traces of Miss Suki and her Nightshades had been erased, and in their place these women, both feminine and masculine – even Veronica. Their hair was pulled tight from their foreheads, eyebrows heavily pencilled like bird wings, and their lips outlined in a deep scarlet crayon. Florence thought the effect was more startling than sexy, but she still preferred it to Miss Suki and her Nightshades’ almost cartoonish curves.
She leaned forward and peered closely at her face in the mirror; stripped of some of Miss Suki’s layers, she saw the familiar outline of her eyes and lips, the lift of her chin. Becoming Miss Suki rendered her unrecognisable, which was, of course, the point.
Or had been. Florence thought it was nearing time to retire Miss Suki, send her off with a series of farewell concerts, pack up her greens and silvers and blacks and watch her shimmy off stage with, being Miss Suki, no backward glance.
She would miss her, Florence thought, but only as much as you could miss something that was never really there.
‘Right, ladies,’ said Veronica, ‘we’d better get going to the big ’ouse.’ The women slung their bags across their shoulders and walked out of Veronica’s flat to her car, Florence, her legs freed from the slippery confines of Miss Suki’s dresses, striding out in front.
‘I still think we look like penguins,’ Veronica said.
‘Sexy penguins,’ said Orla.
On the way to Avalon they passed the East Elm Library and Orla said, ‘That’s where you work, isn’t it, Florence?’
‘Yes, we have an office inside.’
‘Pretty different from this,’ Orla said, turning to face her in the back seat, ‘pretty different from us.’
Florence nodded. It was different, but she had grown used to straddling the two worlds, one foot in stilettos, the other in work boots, and Florence somewhere in between.
‘Did you ever crack it with that fella you liked?’ Orla asked.
‘No,’ Florence shook her head.
‘Why?’ Veronica asked, her eyes on Florence’s in the rear-view mirror.
‘We never met in the middle,’ she answered honestly.
‘His loss,’ Orla tossed over her shoulder, as they drove through East Elm and up the climbing roads to what the real estate agents called ‘Upper East Elm’, although nobody else did, not even the people who lived there.
The name had never caught on, and Florence was glad of it. She was sure the people who lived behind its sandstone walls and trailing ivy were aware that their gaze fell from loftier heights than the other citizens of East Elm. There was no need to press the point.
The car rounded the last bend to Avalon’s perch at the top – Upper, Upper East Elm, she supposed – the house throwing out light from every window, like a restaurant birthday cake held aloft and shimmering through the crowd.
‘Bloody ’ell,’ said Orla as they entered Avalon’s gates and began the climb up its driveway.
They passed staff in black and white uniforms moving through the grounds, carrying trays and vases of fresh flowers and shaking out silver tablecloths.
Orla turned to face Florence. ‘We look like the bloody waiters.’
Florence looked at their outfits and began to laugh. ‘Sexy waiters,’ she corrected her.
They did look quite similar to the wait staff, she thought, but it was too late now; if anyone asked Florence for a canapé, she would just go and fetch it.
At the top of the drive, a man in a hi-vis vest directed them to the rear of the pool house where two small marquees had been set up as dressing rooms. A small woman wearing a headset and carrying a clipboard was darting between the two, tapping at the headset with her fingers. Marianne, the event planner, Florence thought. She usually hated dealing with event planners, snappy and overexcited with the delicious power of being the keeper of the clipboard.
Veronica pulled into a parking bay and switched the engine off.
‘Right,’ she said, ‘here goes,’ as everything in the car shifted.
A brief transference occurred, a wrinkle in time, as Veronica, Orla and Florence remained in the car and Miss Suki and her Nightshades exited it.
They were third on the bill, after the string quartet in the courtyard welcomed guests in – Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, for sure, Florence thought – and a duo called Sugar and Spice who Florence had seen before and sang far better than their stage name suggested.
The woman with the clipboard came over to where Florence, Orla and Veronica were standing just outside the performers’ marquee.
‘I’m Marianne, you must be the Nightshades,’ she said. ‘We’ve spoken on the phone. Now which one of you is Miss Suki?’
Florence raised her hand a little.
‘Natalie is very busy at the moment, but she said to tell you that the moon flowers are out.’ Marianne laughed, a startling honk from someone so tiny. ‘I thought she was talking about another group at first, but then again I also thought you were waitresses when I first saw you.’
She honked again and then showed them where to put their things.
‘So, I’ll come and get you about half an hour before you’re due on at eight. I understand you’ve brought your own PA and backing tracks?’ Veronica nodded. Marianne smiled. ‘Wonderful. I’ll be about if you need me.’ Then she scurried off again, still tapping at her headset.
‘I told you we look like waitresses,’ Orla sulked.
Veronica had insisted they dress at home, and looking around the small marquee, Florence was glad. Salt and Pepper were in the corner, wriggling their bodies into matching silver jumpsuits and bumping into its soft white walls.
Orla was reading a paperback, Veronica was doing and redoing her eyeliner, and Florence was feeling restless in the increasingly cramped dressing room as the string quartet and all its instruments entered it.
Florence thought she recognised the viola player, a slight woman with a pixie haircut and a glinting blue nose ring. She might have been one of Lucas’s backing players – or something else – and Florence turned her head slightly away.
‘I think I might go for a walk,’ she said to Orla and Veronica, ‘and see if I can find those moon flowers.’
‘But you’re in costume,’ Orla protested, ‘you can’t go outside in it.’
‘Yes I can,’ Florence said. ‘I’ll just grab a tray and blend right in.’
Outside the marquee, Florence walked slowly towards the
back of the big ’ouse, keeping to the darker side of the path and sniffing the air for traces of the moon flower. Breathing in deeply through her nostrils, she caught the bubblegum notes of plum magnolia, the sharp and sweet scents of jasmine, and the heavenly aroma of the angel’s trumpet.
You could get drunk on an evening like this just by inhaling, she thought.
Natalie Bishop had timed this benefit perfectly, when Avalon’s night garden unfurled its most heady scents.
There was one thing, however, that Natalie Bishop hadn’t got quite right.
Florence looked up at the night sky.
Music Under the Milky Way was missing its biggest component.
Wrong time of year, Florence thought, to glimpse that particular part of the galaxy’s billions of stars and planets. May or June would have been better, when the Milky Way appeared across the sky like a smear of white paint to anyone who cared to look up. But at this time of year, the Milky Way and the Goddess Hera who ruled it were not inclined to make an appearance.
But it didn’t matter, and Florence doubted anyone else would notice its celestial absence – except Albert.
That was just the sort of thing Albert Flowers would notice – the Milky Way missing.
Florence walked the edge of the path, watching as the grounds of Avalon transformed into its own Midsummer Night’s Dream. The staff were putting centrepieces of silver candelabras swathed in boughs of ivy on each table, and tying huge creamy bows on the back of each chair, as if they were dressing small children.
A man pushing a wheelbarrow filled with bags of ice wobbled it towards each table, filling the buckets that stood at either end and then wobbling off again.
‘Can I help you?’
Florence started. She had not heard the man, who was now standing close behind her, approach at all.
‘No, I’m just looking,’ she answered, irritated, and taking a step back from him.
‘Are you staff?’ he asked, and somewhere in the tone of his asking, the way he said ‘staff’ as if it had quotation makes around it, made her prickle.
‘No,’ she said, looking at his tuxedo and glancing down at her own. ‘I’m your long-lost brother Geoffrey.’
The man laughed, a shouty guffaw.
‘I’m sorry, that sounded rude – Mama’s got me patrolling the grounds, checking the perimeters, that sort of thing.’ He smiled and put out his hand. ‘Oscar Bishop,’ he said.
Florence took it and answered, ‘Miss Suki – and I am staff, I’m one of the performers.’
‘Ah, my mother told me about you,’ he answered. ‘You’re the girl who knows all about flowers.’
He was about her age, she thought, but he had one of those boy-man faces that made it hard to tell: slightly fleshy cheeks, full lips, and wavy, coppery hair tucked behind his ears.
‘Yes, your mother and I had a pretty long chat about the garden.’
‘She’s mad about it,’ Oscar said. ‘So who are you when you’re not Miss Suki?’
Florence smiled – it was an excellent question.
‘I’m not at liberty to divulge that information, and I’m not allowed to fraternise with guests either. They’ll be gossiping like mad below stairs,’ she said and turned back towards the pool house.
‘Nice to see you after all these years, Geoff,’ Oscar called after her.
‘About time,’ Orla grumbled when Florence walked into the tent, just as the string quartet were walking out, moaning about having to play the Four Seasons again.
‘I would like to murder Spring,’ said the woman with the blue nose ring.
Florence and Orla and Veronica ran through their vocal exercises and Orla’s ‘facial calisthenics’, a series of grimaces and exaggerated expressions she believed loosened their airways and jaw, and Florence believed made them look like they were collectively having very bad sex.
‘Right,’ said Veronica when they were finished, ‘hands in.’
Veronica insisted they complete this ritual before every performance, and sometimes, particularly in the early days when Miss Suki and the Nightshades played much smaller gigs, Florence found it unnecessarily theatrical. But she had grown to like it, the brief touch of Orla’s and Veronica’s hands on her own, the moment their eyes locked, the belonging.
Florence put her hand out on top of Orla’s and Veronica’s and smiled.
They walked out of their tent towards the back of the stage where Sugar and Spice were shaking it about with more enthusiasm than Florence felt was strictly necessary.
‘I still fink we look like zebras,’ Orla huffed.
‘Sexy zebras,’ Florence said.
Peeking through a gap in the draped silk of the stage marquee, Florence felt like she was looking at a giant chessboard, Avalon’s guests moving like smooth, gleaming pieces about the grounds. The women wore long evening gowns with flowers tucked behind their ears; the men were in black tie, and all of them, Florence thought, looked utterly at home here, gliding around the board with ease.
What might that be like? she wondered, watching a woman approach a group at one of the tables, the men standing to greet her, the women smiling, heads tilted. To know that you belonged in such a place? That your family knew that family who went to school with that family who were cousins of that family who played football with that family who married into that family? It would either be wonderful, she thought, or suffocating. Probably both. Florence remembered Albert telling her about the wedding of one of the Bishop boys. Who was it? Simon, she thought, older than the one she had just met – Oscar – who had asked if she was staff. There was a sister too, she recalled, trying to remember what else Albert had told her about that night. Something about the groom being annoying and a conga line. There was always a conga line, she thought, although she couldn’t imagine Albert being in it. Florence couldn’t really imagine him here either, although he was close enough to at least one of the Bishop brothers to be invited to his wedding. But he hadn’t mentioned this particular party on his dance card. It had been one of the reasons she had said yes.
Sugar – or Spice – said, ‘Thank you very much, you’ve been a wonderful audience,’ as Veronica pressed the tips of her fingers to Florence’s shoulders: ‘We’re on’. Sugar – or Spice – whispered as they passed them at the back of the stage, ‘No, they haven’t, they’ve been shit, good luck.’
It was not one of their better shows; they hadn’t settled into their new skins properly. Later Veronica would say they should have worn the silvers, and Florence would agree. As much as she had liked the tuxedos, Miss Suki had resisted. Florence found she could not get into character, and neither could Orla or Veronica, the teasing banter between them sounding, to Florence’s ears, rehearsed and stiff. But it didn’t matter. No one was listening. After a polite smattering of applause when they first walked on, and a thimbleful of silence, everyone went back to talking to the person on their right or left and Florence didn’t blame them. It wasn’t really the sort of night to pay attention. It was the sort of night to lose yourself in conversation, wine and your own luck at being in such a place, loosening your tie.
After their last number – thank God there had been only three of them to trawl through – Florence said a hurried thank you, and she and Orla and Veronica exited, stage left, Orla not turning around as she usually did to flatten out her palm and throw a kiss.
‘Well, that was ’orrible,’ Orla said when they got back to the dressing room, pulling at her ponytail.
‘Dire,’ Veronica nodded.
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Oscar Bishop said, strolling in, Florence thought, as if he owned the joint, which she supposed he did. ‘I thought you were very good.’
He had his hands in his pockets, his bow tie untied to hang slackly on his chest, and his head tipped slightly to one side.
Florence knew she was meant to be charmed but she was not.
It was a sliver too louche.
At her mirror Florence swivelled her head around.
; ‘You’re not allowed in here,’ she said. ‘You should have called out before you just walked in, this area is for performers only.’
Oscar dipped his head. ‘My apologies. I am really not getting off on the right foot with you, am I, Geoffrey? Anyway, I’m Oscar Bishop, Natalie’s son,’ he said to Veronica and Orla, ‘and Mum has sent me to ask if you’d all like to stay for a drink?’
Orla and Veronica declined, but Florence hesitated. She felt like she should stay, Natalie Bishop had been so kind to her, and she wanted to ask if she could come and plunder Avalon’s gardens for clippings one day.
‘I’ll stay,’ she said. ‘I’d like to say hello to your mother.’
Florence said goodbye to Orla and Veronica and walked with Oscar towards the party, now in full, throaty swing. A seven-piece covers band was playing and most of the guests were now shoeless and dancing.
Florence wished she could join them, take off her own shoes on the wooden dance floor and pretend the Milky Way was above it.
Were these people Albert’s sort of usual suspects? She supposed they were. She supposed he and Jeremy and Lydia would feel right at home here, mimicking each other’s dance moves and putting their arms up in the air, or whatever it was DJs were always exhorting people to do.
Florence smiled. She couldn’t actually imagine Albert putting his arms up in the air at all – unless it was to pick a sticky berry from a mulberry branch.
‘What sort of drink would you like?’ Oscar asked. ‘There’s all the usual, and we have a Pimm’s bar, and a mobile mixologist – whatever that means,’ he laugh-shouted in her ear above the music. Oscar gestured to a bar with ‘Cocktails’ written in curling, pink neon letters above it, and a chalkboard of drinks beside it.
Florence considered the list – Long Island Iced Teas, Sidecars, Strawberry Daiquiris and Manhattans. She thought she might have a Long Island Iced Tea, because although she had no idea what was in it, it seemed to be exactly that sort of night where you could say to the bartender, ‘A Long Island Iced Tea, please,’ as if you were in West Egg instead of East Elm.
The Best Kind of Beautiful Page 19