by Fiona Kidman
On that first evening, the night nurse said she needed morphine. ‘Personally, I think the pain relief that’s been offered her is too light,’ she said. Every we time we tried to turn Flo, she screamed please please leave me leave me please leave me.
‘What can we do about it?’ I asked the nurse. I liked this young woman; she was very small and neat in her movements, almost as if she was a dancer, which I learned later she had trained to be, until her ankles lost their shape.
‘Get a doctor,’ she said. ‘You’re the next of kin, if you say she needs a doctor we can call one.’
‘Do it,’ I said.
The doctor, a young Indian man, took one look and then drew me outside out into the corridor. ‘As much as she needs,’ he said, ‘as much as it takes. But you must tell her.’
I went in and sat down beside her and said, ‘Flo, can you hear me? The doctor says morphine.’
Her eyes widened. ‘Morphine?’ she breathed, as if being offered a love potion. She must have known its power: she had nursed more than one patient towards their last seductive inhalation.
Only this morphine was neither inhaled nor injected but rather drops placed on her tongue. ‘Bitter,’ said Flo, ‘bitter.’ It reminded me of one of her sayings. ‘Life’s had a few bitter pills,’ she would say, ‘but you get by.’ She slept for a while. When she woke the morphine had begun to wear off and it was time for her to be turned again.
Please. No, not that.
And then I understood: it was at the height of each turn, the moment before her body pivoted down, that she began to scream and her free arm to flap wildly. When I caught it in my own, it was like a cold old fish flipper. ‘You’re afraid of falling, aren’t you?’ I said.
And she agreed that yes she was, and if I held her hand, she wouldn’t fall. It was much the same as walking over a height: that sense of relinquishing control, fear of abandonment. I suffer from that too.
I said to the nurse, who was called Joy, ‘How long do you think this will take? I mean, I don’t want to see her go on suffering like this.’
Joy gave me a careful serious scrutiny. ‘Do you mean,’ she said eventually, ‘do people go on with their lives, or keep vigils like our grandmothers did?’
‘Yes, something like that,’ I said. ‘I want to be here for her when she needs me.’
‘I think you’re doing the best you can,’ she said. ‘I can’t tell you when it will happen exactly. Death’s no flash in the pan for the old. It needs a lead-up, a preparation time, that says it’s done when it’s ready, not when it’s convenient.’
‘Like baking?’
‘I guess that’s a way of looking at it.’
‘That’s Flo,’ I said. ‘She was a terrific cook. You should have tried her orange loaf.’
I saw Joy look at my aunt in a new less clinical way, as if she could see beyond the helpless creature she had become, to someone younger, more vital — a glimpse perhaps, of the person I still saw.
‘You should get some rest and do whatever it is you have to do,’ she said.
Early the next morning, as dawn was breaking, I heard Flo again, before I saw her, only this time she was singing Look for the silver lining, whene’er a cloud appears in the blue. Remember somewhere, the sun is shining And so the right thing to do is make it shine for you. Her room looked out on a grove of orange trees; I could see rabbits skipping beneath them.
After I had seen Flo, heard her singing, and spoken quietly with her, I drove north to give a lunchtime reading from my work, and when that was over, I drove back again. The colourful Waikato landscape is like a sky banner: it should be trailing itself behind a helicopter. The grass has a green shimmer like Thai silk. On good days, like the ones that followed me through most of that week, the buttercup yellow of the sun shines out of an electric blue sky. Then there’s the way gardens grow there like tornadoes of colour. But there’s an unpredictability about it, too — the way passing clouds can turn the landscape black, and the night so dark that starlight is not always enough to show the way.
I decided to stay on in the town for as long as I could. I took a room at the edge of the park overlooking the thermal spa resort. I was struck, just a week or so later, by the way the earth is connected, when I found myself in another thermal town on the opposite side of the world. This one, near the hospital, used to be the haunt of fashionable people early in the twentieth century. They had built pavilions and a tea kiosk called Cadman House. I have a white china teapot stand, with a picture of the teahouse drawn in worn gold gilt, which I bought for a dollar in a secondhand shop. In the picture, a woman in a long full skirt is playing tennis on a court in front of the kiosk. This was just what Flo would have loved: it was like the beginning of her own life and my mother’s, and their sisters as well.
That afternoon, Flo and I talked for almost the last time. Mostly we spoke about old times, times when I was a child and used to come by bus from up north, and she’d come to meet me; the time I’d lived with her after I left school, the way I’d driven her crazy when I was a teenager, and how things pass.
‘Through my journey of life, I’ve simply liked to help people,’ she said. And in a way it was true. There was nothing grudging about what she remembered that afternoon.
‘I should be getting along,’ she said, as if she was visiting me. ‘Theo will be waiting for me.’ She began to knead my thumb between her own and her forefinger with a strong clawing intensity.
‘I reckon it’s time you went to him,’ I said. ‘Forty years. You’ve kept him waiting long enough.’
‘He’ll be there.’
‘What will you say to him?’
‘What time’s the quinella?’ she said, and gave a gentle snicker of pleasure.
Towards five in the evening, something altered: she slipped into unconsciousness and her breathing became shallower; at times I thought she had stopped altogether. I didn’t call anyone because I believed this was it, the moment she had waited for, when I would be with her, and she would simply let go.
Only she didn’t die, she went on living for several more days. In the mornings when I went back, she had begun to shout, wails of grief echoing through the corridors of the small hospital. Do not go gently into that dark night I said grimly to myself.
It seemed that it was only the beginning.
What followed for me was a kind of dreamtime, a compulsion to keep going that I still can’t explain. Driving, speaking, coming back again in the middle of the night to be with my aunt. What did I say to people I met? So you want to be a writer. Well, you must learn to live with yourself, however difficult that might be at times, because you’re on your own in this job; you need to make space in your life, settle on your priorities. A writer’s life is not spent in an ivory tower. Learn to accept that real life is full of interruptions. You have children? Yes, of course, many of us do. Write for fifteen minutes a day — it’s better than nothing at all. No, I agree, this is not about craft and style, but it’s about how to survive, which is the best I can tell you right now. Can I guarantee this recipe for success? No, no of course not. Nothing is certain. Forgive me, I have to leave now.
Not all of my vigils were alone. (What had Joy seen in me that made her so sure I would keep watch, as my grandmother might have done?) I got to know others on the staff — Betty and June I remember in particular. They were both capable women; unlike Joy, they nursed part time and worked at home on their farms. They chatted about their lives and families and asked me about what it was like to be well known, to be in the papers. I said that, when it all came down to it, it was pretty much like other people’s lives; certainly, the big important things were, like birth and death. They said, yes, they could see that, and wasn’t it strange how everyone was interested in much the same things. She was so proud of you, they said, looking down at Flo’s inert body. It’s as well she had you.
As well as these nurses, there was my aunt’s neighbour, who had lived close by for several years, a middle-aged wom
an called Pamela with dark hair swept up in frosted peaks, and beautiful country casual clothes. She organised speakers for the Lyceum Club and was on the local National Party branch committee. I could see why my aunt would have got along with her, although the unease between Pamela and me was palpable. I was the sort of woman she could never trust. I saw her eyeing my appearance and comparing it with her own. Mostly I wore a loose-fitting roll-neck grey pullover made of fine Merino wool, black pants and a gay floating blue and yellow scarf, which I didn’t change from day to day, because I was travelling light and fast. For my part, there may have been some element of jealousy present, because it was clear that, in some ways, Pamela knew Flo better than I did. She had shopped for her, cut her toenails, intimate things like that. And she’d collected the mail every day for Flo, which meant she knew exactly how often I wrote.
When Flo was conscious, she would stop shouting long enough to look at me with a certain malice.
‘And where have you been?’ she said, each time, glaring through one half-closed eye.
‘I was just out for a while, you knew I’d come.’
‘I’m here,’ she said in her mimicking piping voice.
‘Oooh,’ said Pamela on an indrawn breath, on one of these afternoons.
‘Don’t be upset,’ said, Joy, who had arrived with a damp flannel for me to wipe Flo’s face. ‘This isn’t the Flo you know. She’s left.’ I knew what she meant, but Pamela looked bewildered.
‘I think I’ll go home for a shower,’ she said.
‘What a good idea,’ I said, trying not to sound too eager.
Joy lingered in the room, looking at objects taken from Flo’s house. Pamela had brought them there, some weeks before, as a kind of pathetic reassurance to Flo that living in the hospital room was like being at home. Not that I disapproved — I would have done the same thing myself, had I been around to do it. There were bits of pretty porcelain china with floral motifs and a little silver-rimmed vase with a hand-painted Egyptian scene on it that Flo had been given for her twenty-first birthday. But there could never be enough in that room to explain what Flo was really like, had been like for over ninety years of life. Joy studied Flo and Theo’s wedding photograph. ‘How pretty she was. What a stylish, vivacious looking woman,’ she remarked.
‘She reminded me of the queen,’ I said.
‘Really?’
I couldn’t help elaborating. ‘I met the queen once,’ I said. ‘The tips of her gloves stuck out beyond her fingers, so I simply had to wriggle the soft white kid. From the look in her eyes I realised I’d held on longer than I should have. But I wanted to say, you’re so like my Aunt Flo. I didn’t, of course, because she might have taken it as rudeness, or too personal.’
‘She might have taken it as a compliment.’
‘I doubt it. Or if she did, she would have said nothing. They say she never acknowledges compliments, simply accepts them as of right. Or she might have said, “Why? Why do you think this?” and I would have had to explain that her skin was of a similar texture and she wore her hats at much the same angle. Although when she was young, Flo wore her hats much more rakishly than the queen. I could have told her that when Flo smiled in unguarded moments, the dour look she often had melted away. Like hers.’
‘What did you really do?’
‘Oh I smiled nervously, like most people do, and made a funny awkward curtsey, the way we were taught to at school when we won a prize.’
‘If I’d gone on to be a dancer, I might have got to meet the queen too,’ said Joy.
‘You met Flo instead,’ I said with a laugh, but when I looked at Joy’s face, I saw how thoughtless I had been: she did have a sense of loss which she had hoped I might acknowledge.
To cover the discomfort between us, I set out to describe my aunt’s house, the one Theo built for her at the end of the Depression when the building trade was slow and it gave his men work. He could still afford to buy Flo a diamond ring, if not as big as the Ritz, at least the Nottingham Castle Hotel. The house was expansive, flowing out in all directions from the central heart of the kitchen. There were several places where you could be by yourself: the formal sitting-room, used only on Sundays; the closed-in sunporch that was big enough to hold a bed; the small pretty bedroom that I occupied when I was there; Flo and Theo’s own bedroom with a dark dresser and a fat mattress on the bed which Flo never changed in the forty years she was a widow; the dining room with a copper coal scuttle gleaming on the hearth, and Theo’s miniature spirits collection lining the head-high shelves on the walls. Yet in spite of its generous proportions and spaciousness, it was a dark house. For a start, the walls were all stained timber panelling, and then Flo kept the brown holland blinds three-quarters drawn in every room — all day, every day, until it was time to close them right up again at night.
Theo wasn’t young when he married Flo, and she made him wait. She said she’d marry him, and then she changed her mind. For a while, after he’d built the house, his own mother and father lived in it, so she was not its first mistress and I think that may have had something to do with the trouble between her and Theo later on. Certainly, the parents weren’t happy either, when she changed her mind for a second time, and said she’d marry him after all.
All this thinking on Flo’s part took some years. She was, perhaps, thinking about, and remembering, Wilf Morton.
My mother told me about Wilf Morton and Flo. The family lived on my grandfather’s sheep station, one of the big prosperous runs of the 1900s. As well as my mother, the youngest, there was Helena, the beautiful frail daughter, Monica, the clever one, and Flo, the funny laughing girl, at least when she was a child. My mother had been irrepressible and cheeky and was sometimes slapped by her big sisters for bad behaviour. She rewarded them by watching everything they did, especially when they brought young men to stay at the farm. Later, she paid them back in a different way, by giving birth to me while they remained childless. Not that they saw it that way: they envied but never disliked her. I brought my mother status she never anticipated when her sisters shouted and pleaded with her to leave them alone and mind her own business.
Wilf Morton was Flo’s fiancé, and he stayed on and off at the farm for years, without showing any sign of setting the day for a wedding. Other young men who stayed at the house lent a hand with the stock, took their turn in the shearing sheds, trying out their hands as fleecos, collecting up the wool as it peeled off the sheep’s backs, dragging it away in preparation for storing it in the presses.
Not Wilf.
Wilf was always playing tennis. He stayed around the house wearing whites, the extravagant cuffs of his trousers turned up so they wouldn’t brush the grass. His hair looked as if it was permed; his eyebrows beneath a long white forehead were dark and straight as pencil lead; on the little finger of his left hand he wore a signet ring inset with a grape-coloured garnet. Even if you couldn’t see the ring you could tell he was flashy by the way the men in the family looked at him. Beside him, Flo looked a trifle plain, although she wore the most fashionable clothes of any of the sisters, and she was the one with a dimple in her chin. She also got herself engaged to Wilf, although her father didn’t approve of the match, said he didn’t feel he knew enough about the man and, since she was a girl who liked nice things, would love be enough? But the fact was, when he was around she shone as if lit within, and when he wasn’t there, she was withdrawn and miserable, refusing to take part in conversation at dinner. This led my grandmother to say to her one day, when Wilf had been absent for a week or more, and nobody was sure where he was, ‘Really, Flo, I’ll be pleased when you’re married and out of it.’ This was an unusually sharp rebuke for her to give Flo, who was her favourite child, apart from her son Martin who was, well, simply a boy.
The next day, all Flo’s sulks, as her mother had started calling these black moods, had disappeared. Wilf arrived back at the farm driving a new Model T Ford and bringing with him two men and a boy. The men were very well dressed, the you
nger man with his hat pushed back on his head so that the brim tilted upwards. He walked around the farm with his arms folded and an inscrutable look on his face, while the other man linked his fingers in front of his chest and made jokes. The boy with them was different from the boys on the farm: he wore his shirt open down his chest and put a hand on one hip and crossed his legs and pointed his foot like a dancer. Wilf tousled his hair and said, ‘You’re a real little bounder, aren’t you?’
As usual, Flo’s face glowed at the sight of Wilf. She must have known he was coming because she was dressed up in a pretty flapper dress with a long straight line to the knee and then a band from which fell several straight pleats. She wore white stockings and strapped shoes.
What were these men doing at the farm? They didn’t say immediately, although it emerged that one was a stock and station agent and the other a man from the bank. They were planning to foreclose on the farm, but that was a common enough story in the years that followed. What mattered was why Wilf Morton was with them.
‘I’m going to spend the summer teaching this young man to play tennis,’ he said indicating the boy, whose name was Ralph. Ralph had a nearly grown-up sister called Annabelle who would be home from school for the holidays soon, and their father, the bank manager, was keen that they improve their athletic skills. Wilf had been offered a live-in job coaching them. Wilf smiled round the table when he told the family this.
It was clear that this was the first time Flo had heard about the arrangement. ‘Does this mean you’ll be going away?’ she asked.
Wilf looked sideways at her. ‘Well, I guess so. I mean, I can’t teach Ralph and Annabelle here, can I?’
‘So you’re going to live at their place?’
There was a long silence while everyone examined their plates for a last speck of gravy. The rat, my mother said, when she recounted this. He knew my grandfather was going under and he’d found himself a better prospect. Not that she could see it, poor fool. My mother had a strong sisterly affection for Flo, but her later position in the family had given her a kind of second sight about her sisters, as if she had become the wise adult.
