‘I haven’t thought through the execution, Issy, I haven’t thought about the execution at all,’ she said.
Isolde put her arm around Florence. ‘It’s going to be fine,’ she said. ‘You are giving a party for your friend Albert to show him he’s appreciated. Who wouldn’t like that? I’d like that. I’d like someone to throw me a party just to say Isolde Marie-Louise Evangeline Saint Claire, we see you.
‘That’s all this party says, Florence, it says we see you, Albert Flowers, and not just because you’re the size of a small lorry.’
Florence laughed and leant into Isolde, resting her head on her sister’s shoulder.
Isolde lifted a hand to pat Florence’s hair. ‘This is just like Princess Diana speaking to her sisters the night before she married Prince Charles.’
‘What?’ said Florence.
‘You know that story about how she had cold feet the night before she married him and went to her sisters for help?’
‘No,’ said Florence, ‘I don’t.’ Sometimes trying to follow Isolde’s conversation was like trying to follow one of those small silver balls ricocheting around inside pinball machines.
‘Well, she was very nervous, and having second thoughts, and probably wishing she was marrying a stockbroker who wore red braces on his shirts, so she went to her sisters and told them she didn’t think she could go through with it. And they said: “It’s too late, Duch, your face is on the tea towels.”’
Isolde stood up. ‘Anyway, I’m off to bed. It really will be fine, Florence,’ she said, turning to go inside.
Florence sat a little longer beneath the cracking sky and thought about what Isolde had said. She looked out at the lightning dancing across the darkness.
‘I see you, Albert Flowers,’ she said.
In bed that night, Florence thought about Princess Diana pacing about her room in Clarence House the night before her marriage, hearing the crowds outside calling out her name. Her sisters, Florence thought, should have spirited her away, thrown a blanket over her and legged it.
13
Albert walked up the driveway to Kinsey, stopping to admire a mango tree, three tyres swinging from its branches. A beauty, he thought, although he might take a look at the roots. They could be problematic one day, silently making their spreading claim beneath the house. Albert looked up at Kinsey, recognising the white and green gables from photos he had seen of it over the years. It was as charming as everyone said, but Albert knew that given the choice he’d save the tree and knock down the house.
He put his hand to his collar, shifting it a little from his neck. Walking towards the front steps, clutching his bottle of wine, Albert felt as if this was a first date and Lucas Saint Claire was going to come to the door and give him the once-over. Albert adjusted his collar again. He’d taken far more care than he usually did with his clothes, which was to say, he had ironed them. Silly to feel a bit shaky, it was only Florence and her family, a few of her friends, and Monty wearing one of his signature collection bow ties.
Albert looked down the length of the driveway. He’d hoped to arrive at the same time as someone else, so he could attach himself to them for the walk-in, as if he was joining in a quadrille. But nobody seemed to be around, and Albert couldn’t loiter around the bottom of the steps any longer, pretending to examine a thriving Japanese windflower, although it was delightful, its pink flowers thrown like jewels across it.
Albert began climbing Kinsey’s front stairs. He wondered if he had thought this through. What would he do with his hands when he had no drinks to serve? What would he talk about when he was not in charge of the bar banter? What if he couldn’t get his words out? Albert faltered a little on the last step, then rang the doorbell.
The cherry-red door swung open before he had dropped his hand from the bell, and Florence stood behind it, holding out a flute of champagne, her smile stretching all the way to her earlobes.
He had never, he thought, seen it stretch so far. Florence almost looked like she was grimacing. ‘Merry Christmas, Albert,’ she said, passing him the flute. ‘Come on in.’
Albert took the glass and stepped inside, passing Florence the bottle.
‘Merry Christmas, Florence,’ he said as she led him into the lounge room where people stood in knots talking and laughing, and something, thought Albert, was not quite right.
Then Florence put her hand lightly on his arm and raised her voice.
‘Albert’s here,’ she shouted.
Then she raised her glass and shouted again, ‘To Albert!’ giving him a jolt.
The people in the lounge room stopped talking and laughing and turned their faces towards him.
‘To Albert,’ they echoed, raising their glasses.
Albert scanned the room, his eyes flicking across Florence to her sister, then Amanda Saint Claire in a floaty kaftan, a man beside her holding out a tray of blinis, Puck standing next to an astonishingly beautiful woman with red hair, and another one who looked like a drunk pixie. Laura Cox was standing with her parents and the Davenports, and Megan Stewart was raising her glass next to her mother Petra. Simon Bishop was smiling at him, his arm around Siobhan, her hands resting on a curved bump in full bloom. Natalie Bishop stood behind Siobhan, her hands on her daughter-in-law’s shoulders. Monty and his wife Sharon, who was wearing some sort of flashing earrings dangling from her ears, were standing next to Victor, who looked like he’d leapt over the fence to get here, and Fiona Wilson was waving to him, for some reason out from behind the books at Savage Reader. And on either side of his sister Adelaide stood his parents. Georgina and Laurence Flowers. In Amanda Saint Claire’s lounge room.
Off kilter. Albert felt very off kilter. He knew all these faces, or most of them, one way or the other, but he couldn’t connect the dots between them. Or between them and Florence.
Why were they here, holding out their glasses to him, for what seemed like a very long time? Dots connected or not, clearly some sort of response was expected. Albert raised his glass. ‘Thank you,’ he said, ‘although I’m really not sure what’s going on.’
Everyone started laughing and someone – Simon Bishop? – called out, ‘Good on you, Albert,’ and then they all turned like clockwork figurines back into their previous positions. Albert stood, his own glass still raised, and he couldn’t seem to bend his elbow to get it down again.
Albert felt Florence’s hand rest in its crook.
‘Come with me,’ she said, her hand on his elbow guiding him to a small room off the hallway, gold records encased in glass frames on its walls.
They sat on a couch next to a low table where Lucas Saint Claire smiled winningly at him from a photo frame.
‘I suppose you feel a bit sprung upon,’ Florence said.
Albert supposed he did. He couldn’t seem to get a hold of what he was feeling, but if he had to choose a frontrunner, it would be discombobulated. What the hell, he asked Lucas Saint Claire grinning at him from behind the glass, is your daughter up to?
Florence took a deep, inward breath, her words rushing out on the exhalation.
‘This really is just Christmas drinks, Albert, but I thought you might like a night off from serving them for a change.’
Albert felt another jolt, this one down to his boots. He drained his glass as Florence kept talking, a red flush creeping across her face.
‘I know about your Mobile Mixology business, Albert, and I know that I’m not really supposed to, but I do. And most of the people here are people you’ve poured a drink for at some stage or another, and all of them just want to say cheers to you. All you have to do is let them, just for the next couple of hours. You can interrogate me later, and I’ll tell you everything I know about you, and everything you don’t know about me, which is not a short list. But if we don’t get back in there soon Amanda’s going to start singing Jazz Cat and Veronica might start accidentally killing men by looking at them.’
Ah, the woman with the red hair, Albert thought.
As
she spoke, Albert saw the flush in her cheeks, the tremor of the glass in her hand. Florence, who was frightened of nothing he knew of, who had once lazily stuck out an arm across his chest as they were walking down a track, stopped, said, ‘Eastern Brown,’ and then kept walking, was shaking.
Somehow that struck him as far more shocking than her knowing about his extracurricular activities. How she knew, and how much she knew, he had no idea, but for some reason she had gone to some lengths to get him, and all those other people standing outside the door, here. Albert didn’t understand what that reason was and he still felt discombobulated, but Florence Saint Claire, the least likely person he knew to throw a party, was apparently throwing him one. At Kinsey. With her family. And his. With canapés. Albert looked at Florence’s increasingly flushed face and decided that, for the next couple of hours at least, that would have to be all he needed to know. What had Florence said? ‘You can interrogate me later, and I’ll tell you everything I know about you, and everything you don’t know about me.’ All he had to do was get through the next couple of hours to hear it.
‘So, do we have a deal, Albert?’ Florence said, standing up. ‘Party now and shoot me later?’
Albert didn’t want to be responsible for any more tremors.
‘With bells on,’ he said, and flinched at his words.
He followed Florence back inside to the lounge room where, once he quietened his own tremors and heard Isolde’s whispered, ‘Go with the flow, Albert Flowers,’ as she passed him, he settled into the unexpected feeling of being among friends.
He patted Siobhan Bishop’s baby bump, spoke to Victor about his hydrangeas, looked at some, but not too many, of the Davenports’ photos from Greece, laughed at a very rude joke Laura Cox told, danced a little with Florence’s friend Orla who he couldn’t keep up with, commiserated with Megan Stewart about her disastrous twenty-first and the disastrous boyfriend who had caused it by kissing someone else during the speeches. Fiona Wilson handed him a card from Cat Morrison, which said: I hope you have a wonderful night, Albert. I wish I could be there. If I still wore hats, I’d tip mine to you, and someone called Richard kept giving him canapés.
At one stage he found himself outside on a small balcony with Simon Bishop. Simon had tapped his shoulder and said, ‘Follow me, mate,’ then winked and patted his shirt pocket meaningfully. Albert followed, thinking, What’s in there? A joint? Was Simon Bishop going to try and give him some money? But it was a fat Cuban cigar Simon pulled from his pocket, passing it to Albert and pulling out another one for himself. ‘I’m celebrating the baby, giving it up when it comes though, of course,’ Simon said, tilting his head to one side, a brief flicker of a flame lighting the cigar’s tip. Albert said thank you but he didn’t smoke. And then he said, as if he and Simon Bishop were the sort of friends who said these things to each other, ‘Wouldn’t say no to a beer though.’ Simon passed Albert his cigar, then darted back inside to get one.
He came back, holding two glasses, and exchanged one for the cigar. He took three quick puffs to relight it. ‘I wanted to have a chat to you, in private’ – Don’t say man to man, Albert thought – ‘man to man. I wanted to thank you for what you said to me at the wedding. I’m not sure if Sibby and I would even be having this baby if you hadn’t made me pull my head in, so cheers for calling me a fucking idiot.’
They sat in companionable silence, the night air laced with spicy notes of Cuba. When they went back inside, Adelaide and Monty and Sharon Rollins were roaring with laughter at something Carl Davenport was saying, and his parents were deep in conversation with Natalie Bishop. Merry Christmas, Mum, Albert thought. He’d spoken to his parents earlier in the night, and both Laurence and Georgina seemed slightly bewildered to be inside Kinsey’s whitewashed walls but determined to make some sort of go of it. It appeared to be paying off for his mother, who was nodding intently at something Natalie was saying – Georgina’s days of patrolling her back fence might be over, Albert thought. He looked over to where Isolde was standing, tapping a microphone on a small raised stage he hadn’t noticed on the way in.
‘Good evening, everybody, my name is Isolde Saint Claire’ – ‘Go Issy!’ someone shouted – ‘and on behalf of my mother Amanda, my brother Puck, and my sister Florence, I’d like to welcome you all into our home. We do have some music here tonight.’ Albert scanned the crowd for Florence, so he could meet her eyes and roll his at the impending entrance of Amanda Saint Claire and her Jazz Cat. ‘So please welcome to this very small stage, hastily constructed by our very good friend Richard, the one and only Miss Suki and her glorious Nightshades.’
Orla and Veronica stepped out from behind a folding silk screen Albert also hadn’t noticed, and took their places behind two standing microphones, a space between them. Then another woman stepped out and filled it. ‘Good evening, everybody,’ she said. ‘I am Miss Suki, and these are my Nightshades, and we’re going to take you down to a little place by the water we like to call Swingtown, don’t we ladies?’
‘Uh-huh,’ Orla and Veronica said together, leaning in close to their microphones.
‘And when we get to Swingtown, what do we like to do, Nightshades?’ the woman asked, and Veronica answered: ‘We like to. Cause. A. Ruckus.’
Albert peered at the women in their floor-length silver gowns and matching silver gloves – Orla, the one who looked like a slightly inebriated sprite; Veronica, the one who could apparently kill a man by raising an eyebrow at him; and the woman in the middle who was talking in Florence’s voice but had someone else’s face. Albert peered closer at Miss Suki, and as he did, she lifted her eyes to meet his, and beneath the layers, the painted-on lips, the coloured-in cheeks and the black, heavy lashes, was Florence. Albert drew his breath in sharply, a jolt that went all the way beneath his ribs.
Monty Rollins sidled up to him and said quietly, ‘She’s very good, wonderful pipes, as they say in the business. Sharon and I have had the pleasure of watching Florence, or should I say Miss Suki, perform several times.’
Albert nodded. Had they? Why hadn’t he? Why hadn’t Florence introduced him to Miss Suki? And why was she wearing so much makeup? If it weren’t for her eyes, Albert would never have found her in there.
Monty continued in a low voice, ‘Of course, we couldn’t let her know we’d seen her. Florence likes to keep that part of her life mum. I don’t understand it myself, but perhaps you might.’
They both kept their eyes on the stage as Monty spoke, Albert’s trained on Miss Suki, who was Florence but with embellishments. At first he could only see Miss Suki beneath her cherry bob, the chalky mask on her skin, the black beauty spot painted high on one cheekbone; it was difficult to get past her. But the more he watched, the more Florence emerged from Miss Suki’s skin: Florence striding ahead of him along the melaleuca track; Florence looking up at him from a seed catalogue; Florence telling off a woman who had pushed in front of Abigail Trenton in the borrowing line, saying, ‘How about I push you, would you like that?’ until Monty had stepped between them, and Florence had received a handwritten warning from him about codes of behaviour. By the time the set had finished, Florence was all he could see when the women took their bows, Orla turning to throw a kiss to the audience.
Everyone stood clapping and cheering, and Albert wondered if he wasn’t going a little bit mad. He felt strangely as if he had heard the three women sing before, but he couldn’t place where, like siren songs far out at sea.
The whole evening seemed conjured up somehow. Kinsey, like some suburban myth at the end of its driveway, an entire roomful of people turning to raise their glasses to him, Amanda Saint Claire floating by in her kaftan, Simon Bishop waving his cigar on the balcony, his mother asking the caterer for his blini recipe, and now Florence appearing in some strange glittery costume she didn’t belong in. Surely this incarnation of Miss Suki would be at the top of Florence’s list of promised revelations.
Monty had said he’d seen Florence perform before, and it was clea
r from their performance the three women hadn’t just cobbled the act together. They had been wonderful. Florence had been astonishing.
Albert looked at all the people she had gathered from his own other life: the Davenports, Fiona Wilson, the Bishops, the Stewarts, Addie, his parents. Florence the Conjurer. And now, Florence the Cabaret Artist. The party seemed to be winding down; people were searching for handbags and keys, and thanking Amanda and the man he thought was the caterer standing beside her. Simon Bishop was putting a pea-green coat on his wife’s shoulders, and Fiona Wilson was kissing Isolde on both cheeks. Albert was exhausted just looking at them. It had been a wonderful, if very strange evening, but now he couldn’t wait for everyone to leave. He looked for Florence and her Nightshades, but they hadn’t reappeared; probably somewhere upstairs, he thought, stripping away all those layers.
Albert thought he would wait for Florence, thank all the Saint Claires for their hospitality, make his goodbyes, and go for a very long walk – and he would ask Florence the Conjurer to come with him.
He felt a hand on his shoulder as Adelaide appeared beside him. ‘Mum and Dad want to say goodbye,’ she told him, ‘and I have been sent over as an emissary.’ Albert nodded, and saw his parents hovering by the front door. Why must they send Addie? Why could they never meet him halfway?
Albert smiled at his mother as he approached her, and Laurence Flowers put out his hand. ‘Terrific night, Albert,’ he said, ‘we really enjoyed ourselves,’ and Georgina Flowers echoed, ‘We really did, I can’t remember when I last had such a lovely evening,’ and raised her hand to his cheek. Albert raised his own to touch the back of her palm briefly. Another jolt. The feel of his mother’s skin as she leaned into his ear. ‘Lasagne,’ she said, ‘your favourite meal is lasagne.’ Then she patted his cheek and turned towards the door.
He walked his parents to the car, and as he turned back towards Kinsey, the front door opened and most of the party tumbled out of it. Monty stumbling a little on the steps, and Puck, sandwiched between Orla and Veronica. Megan Stewart and Adelaide emerged, their arms linked.
The Best Kind of Beautiful Page 25