A Needle in the Heart

by Fiona Kidman

  ‘For a while,’ Wilf said. ‘It’s a job.’ He sent one of his wide disarming smiles in the bank manager’s direction.

  Flo put her napkin to her mouth as if she was going to be sick, and stood up.

  ‘Flo,’ said her mother. ‘Manners.’

  ‘I thought you’d be pleased,’ said Wilf.

  Anyone looking round that room would have known that the person who was most pleased was my grandfather. His own grief and sense of betrayal would come later, when he learned what the visit was really about, and how the bank manager and his adviser were calculating the number of wool bales left in the shed that he couldn’t pay anyone to take away. Flo walked out of the room without a backward glance and stayed in her room for several hours. She drew the curtains and when Wilf went to the door and called her she didn’t come.

  ‘Flo,’ he said. ‘I’m off now. Aren’t you going to say goodbye?’

  When she didn’t answer, he said, ‘All right then. All right.’

  The Model T roared into life, and some muted goodbyes were called.

  ‘Just leave her,’ my grandmother said. ‘Let her alone.’

  ‘It was a queer sort of business,’ my mother said.

  I went to live with Flo and Theo after I left school, so I could get an office job — good skills for life. I learned to type and write letters for an accounting firm, and gained a working knowledge of how to handle money. I had money of my own to buy clothes and jewellery, which gave me a happily independent feeling.

  Theo said, when it was suggested I live there, that it would be a good thing for Flo. ‘She’s come a bit unstuck,’ he told my mother, scratching his thin sandy hair. He didn’t say this in front of Flo, of course. My mother had come down to talk over the idea with the pair of them. I think she was worried about my going there, but Flo had written and suggested it, and my parents were at a loss to know what to do with me, an awkward girl, described as ‘having brains’ who refused to take up any of the standard careers open to girls in those days.

  Theo had a strong builder’s face, with lips worn thin by the elements, clamped around the twenty or thirty tailor-mades he smoked a day. He recited his Masonic pledges in the bath behind closed doors and visited his mother at her house along the road every other evening. The two houses were at each end of a long street in a town that was rich in memorials, sparse in trees, with three hotels and a railway station straddling its main artery.

  I liked it all well enough in the beginning. My aunt was enraptured by my presence, as if now she had me all to myself, and I really lived with her. She planned my meals with care, and made my favourite foods, and worried about who I would marry. Although I was only sixteen, she had her eye on a young man called Tommy Harrison. He was a persistent lugubrious boy who wore a brown hat when he went to town on Fridays, the important day of the week, when farmers attended to their business. His father was a rich farmer, and Flo set her heart on my making a match of it with him, as if I could somehow rescue the family fortunes, however belatedly. He called at the office to bring the farm accounts up to date on a regular basis, and asked me to dances, in a whisper, as he handed over the invoices. I could see his palms sweating. I went once or twice, but found excuses after that.

  At the same time my aunt was doting on me, I was learning other things.

  I thought Flo was happily married. I thought she had everything a woman could want. But when I went to live with her, rather than just being there on holiday, I found out things were different.

  Some of the problem, at least, appeared to revolve around Theo’s mother, now a widow, in that house at the end of the street. Theo would say he was just popping in to visit his Ma on the way home, and then he’d stop on until eight o’clock or so, while the dinner Flo cooked him ruined in the oven. Often his mother would feed him the food that Flo had brought her at the weekends. Theo’s mother, now widowed, had been moved sideways from her expectations, when Flo took over her house, and she wasn’t going to let the matter rest. She was used to laying claim to her son. Theo worshipped her; it was that common male problem of wanting to spend his life divided between two women, only this wasn’t about a wife and a mistress. There would be quarrels when Theo came home late, and silences that lasted between them for days, then Flo would relent.

  ‘I suppose I’d better call on the old bid,’ she’d say in her most vicious voice. ‘Are you coming with me? You’ll give me an excuse to get away.’ Flo would normally visit her mother-in-law at the weekend, when I couldn’t plead work.

  We always set off for his mother’s house laden with cakes and casseroles that Flo made in preparation for her visits. I can see now that food was Flo’s vocabulary for an inner life, a way of saying, at best, that she truly cared for you; at least, that she was making a peace offering.

  ‘She tarts herself up, that girl does,’ Theo’s mother said to Flo one day when I’d gone on a visit. She usually spoke of me in the third person. I was wearing my latest acquisition, a pair of wheel-shaped clip-on earrings made of blue feathers with diamanté centres.

  ‘Don’t speak like that,’ said Flo, looking at me. ‘She’s like a daughter to me.’ I felt her edge her chair protectively towards me.

  ‘Well, really. I do beg your pardon,’ said the mother-in-law, snorting. She had a lined face like a small old berry, very pale, and dusty with powder.

  ‘I’ll put your cakes away,’ said Flo. She clattered tins as she got them out of a kitchen cupboard and banged the lids as she shut them. She draped a clean tea towel over the enamel casserole dish she had stood on the bench. From the way her lips were pressed together it was clear Flo wasn’t planning any more conversation.

  ‘You’re so kind to me,’ her mother-in-law said, in an exaggerated way. ‘What’s in the casserole today?’ You could tell the way she really wanted to know: an old greedy expression glanced across her face.

  ‘Chicken.’

  ‘You sure you haven’t put liquor in it? I thought I tasted liquor in the last one you brought.’

  ‘I wouldn’t waste booze on you.’

  ‘I thought I smelled it. I go to church you know,’ she said, turning to me.

  I nodded, without speaking. I thought that anything I said would be wrong.

  ‘A pity you don’t have a Frigidaire,’ Flo snapped. ‘This food won’t last five minutes in the heat.’

  ‘Oh well, who’s a spoilt girl? We know you have the best of everything.’

  ‘Theo’d buy you one in a flash,’ said Flo. ‘You know you only have to snap your fingers and you can have what you like.’

  ‘I’m too old to be filling up expensive contraptions like that. Tell that girl to help you more.’

  ‘We’re getting out of here,’ Flo said ominously. She snatched up her bags and pulled her cardigan off the back of her chair. ‘Come on.’ She indicated the door.

  ‘Feathers and paint, make a little girl just what she ain’t,’ said the older woman, as we were leaving. ‘I guess she’s better than nothing.’ She slammed the door shut, as if afraid Flo might hit her.

  But Flo was staring straight ahead as she marched down the street with me at her heels, and I saw that there were tears glistening in her eyes. ‘I’ve had a few bitter pills in my time,’ she said, as if her jaw was aching, ‘but that really has to be the limit.’

  The barren daughter-in-law. The childless woman. I see now how I was her trophy child, her daughter for the moment.

  Of course she had wanted children. Once when I was visiting, we chatted about people I’d known in the town.

  ‘What became of Tommy Harrison?’ I asked. My children were playing in the garden where we could watch them. The sun was melting out of the sky and I thought the children should come in and put on more sunblock but Flo said, ‘Oh leave them, the sun’s good for them,’ the way she said, ‘Oh leave the young people alone, let them smoke,’ though she didn’t herself and I think would have hated it if I did.

  ‘Tommy Harrison? Oh, he’s around. Full of
himself.’

  ‘I could have told you that.’

  ‘Well, never mind. I’m glad you didn’t marry him.’

  ‘Why? You were keen enough at the time.’

  ‘He didn’t have any children. You might have ended up the same as me.’

  ‘Oh Flo,’ I said. I didn’t know whether I wanted this conversation to go on, but this was the moment she had chosen to tell me. About the missed periods for a month or two, and the heavy swelling of her breasts, all the hope that followed her round and then the stains in her panties, a day of cramps, and it was over every time. And how this happened, not once, but often — endless farewells in the bathroom.

  ‘Oh well,’ she said, ‘you know, there’ve been a few bitter pills. We were too old, me and Theo. I don’t know what I was thinking of, that he could give me kids. Don’t you think those children of yours should come in out of the sun?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, relieved.

  She had a sliver of snot on her lip that she wiped away with the back of her hand.

  ‘Hayfever,’ she said.

  Not everything in that house was darkness, but when it came, it fell quickly. In their early years together, Flo and Theo loved the races and dressed up whenever there was a weekend race meeting. This went on for years, until suddenly Flo wanted a change, and they stopped. But they’d decorated their lavatory like one of those joke toilets, with pictures of racehorses, dozens of them, especially of the famous Phar Lap, whose heart, it was discovered when he died, weighed a whole fourteen pounds, as well as with cartoons that reflected their enthusiastic support for the right-wing politicians of the day.

  And, deep in the house, there was a wide passage with a recess, which was like Flo’s throne room. A low seat made of plaited leather on a carved wooden frame sat beside a highly polished mahogany table. On the table stood three objects: a brass box containing photographs of the family, several of me as an infant, and of the farm where she grew up; a swirling cloudy green Crown Devon jug, kept filled with flowers (hydrangeas were her favourite); and the telephone. Flo sat on the low seat and talked on the phone for hours, either to her older sisters, or to her best friend Glad Dean with whom she’d nursed in the tuberculosis sanatorium during the war.

  One evening, while I was talking on the phone, I let one of my new silver bracelets rest on the table. When Flo called out, that dinner was ready, I swung around from the table, scraping the bracelet along the surface and leaving a deep gouge behind.

  ‘You stupid cow,’ Flo shouted at me. ‘Stupid, stupid, stupid.’

  And then she didn’t speak to me for a week. Theo slunk around the house not speaking either.

  As Theo was taking his lunchbox out of Flo’s Frigidaire one morning, I said, ‘I’m sorry, Uncle Theo.’ Flo was taking a bath and the door to the bathroom was firmly closed. Suddenly the big sprawling house seemed too small for the three of us and I had been thinking that if things didn’t improve soon I should probably pack up and go back up north to my parents. I felt joyless and as stupid as Flo had accused me of being. I had thought that Theo liked me living with them but now I felt unwelcome. He gazed through me as if I wasn’t there.

  ‘About the table. I didn’t mean to do it.’

  He shook his head as if to clear it. ‘What about the table?’

  ‘About the scratch.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ He was a bulky man, a bit big around the ears, with a small fold of fat between the base of his head and the beginning of his neck. He put his arm around me with an awkward little squeeze. ‘C’mon little tart, you’re doing all right.’

  It was Friday when this happened. In the evening he came home very late.

  ‘Been at our mother’s, have we?’ Flo said, without looking up from the bench. His dinner was like a mud cake on a plate.

  ‘No, as a matter a fact, I havven been to Ma’s.’ He walked down the passage towards the bedroom.

  I thought she would stay still in the kitchen but she followed him, telling him to speak to her. ‘Well, just say something will you,’ she shouted.

  His voice when he answered her was too low to hear, but I heard hers, full of contempt. ‘You’re drunk. Think again.’

  Then she said something else I didn’t hear.

  ‘It’s not my fault,’ he said.

  So any number of things could have been going on in that house and the scratch on the table was beginning to seem like the least of them.

  Flo kept up her silence for a week. She spoke to neither Theo nor me, not even pass the butter stuff. Flo would suffer and eat dry bread rather than ask anyone for anything.

  Then, as suddenly as all this had started, she was herself again. She resumed the preparation of my favourite foods and was seemingly peaceful, at least with me, until I left at the end of the year to go to another job, further south, which my parents had arranged. In the week before my departure, Flo moved back inside herself, although not in the same furious way that she had before. It was more as if she was resigned to something over which, again, she had no control.

  Less than a year after I left, Theo complained one morning of not feeling well. He went to the doctor, and discovered he was dying. He fought a brief battle, which hardly seemed like a fight, with a rapid moving cancer that had started in his prostate.

  The day after the funeral, Helena, the beautiful, sickly sister, arrived at Flo’s house with all her bags, and said she’d come to stay for a few weeks.

  ‘You don’t need to, I can manage,’ Flo said.

  ‘I doubt it,’ Helena said. She stayed for twenty years, until she, too, died. After Theo’s death Flo turned her back on nursing, and took a job in the county office, keeping minutes for all the council meetings. She had talents nobody had ever guessed. In the evenings she went home and cooked Helena’s meals, and although Helena talked in a lively fashion whenever I was there, I never heard Flo speak to her directly.

  Once Theo had gone — a builder one day, a man dead and buried a month later — Flo discovered him, as if he’d been the love of her life. I think this was a fiction. A reconstruction. People believe what they want, I told my audiences on that tour. You can say what you like about the boundaries between life and art: people decide what they believe and that’s that.

  Which I have supposed is what Flo did, what kept her going, through the years with Helena, and the years beyond that.

  Flo’s poor old rotting hulk had a stale smell hovering about it that no amount of bathing and attention would remove. She breathed in shallow puffs beneath an oxygen mask, not appearing to know us or hear us.

  I was due to appear on a panel of writers in the town of Cambridge that night, nearly an hour’s drive away. I was ready to move on. The driving backwards and forwards to the hospital had taken a toll. I spoke in a kind of dream when I stood up in front of an audience. In my head, I knew Flo must die soon, but how long is soon? I was going abroad, and in a day or so there would be nothing for it: I would have to say goodbye. I was to go to Gisborne the next day, the last stage of my journey, and then home.

  ‘I’ll stay with Flo,’ Pamela said, when I explained the situation. I could see how reproachfully she looked at me. I had changed into clothes more appropriate for an evening gathering: a long dark skirt with a fuchsia-coloured jacket.

  ‘I might see if I can get a later flight tomorrow,’ I said. ‘I’ll stay over there tonight, and come back first thing in the morning.’ Putting it off.

  I met the group in Cambridge and checked into the room next to Davina Worth, who is a playwright. She writes monologues for solo voice, some of which she performs herself. She’s got clear green eyes and dark hair streaked with grey that falls from a centre parting. She’s a great person to be around, a formidable presence on stage. I began to think I need not have worried: she and the poet who had come as well would be enough in themselves. I saw the way Davina looked at me. ‘What have you been doing to yourself?’

  I tried to explain, told her how I mi
ght still have to go back to the hospital that night. I’d rung and spoken to Joy, and she’d been noncommittal when I asked her how Flo was.

  ‘You’d tell me if she got worse, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘Yes,’ she agreed.

  ‘Promise?’

  ‘I do, yes, I promise.’

  ‘You’re driving yourself nuts,’ Davina said, when I relayed this conversation to her. ‘You’re going to Canada next week. Stop doing this to yourself.’

  The booksellers sold fifty-seven copies of our books that evening in Cambridge. ‘Well done,’ they said and gave us cheques for our appearance fees.

  ‘I should go back to the hospital,’ I said.

  ‘You’re exhausted,’ said Davina. ‘You need to come out with us. When did you last eat?’

  She and the poet and I ended up in a café, a reckless kind of place, full of celebrating Cambridge horse breeders having a night out, because someone had sold a horse for a million dollars that day. I can’t remember what I ate, but I drank two glasses of wine and laughed a lot. Davina told us a story about when she’d done some training in Australia for the theatre (she’d decided that she was better at writing for it than acting), and she’d rehearsed Ophelia. No matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t find her way into the character, which didn’t surprise me. Davina is too much of an extrovert, too thoroughly optimistic about life. ‘I couldn’t get it right. I said to the director, this Englishman with his broad Midlands accent, I said, “Barney, what am I going to do?” And Barnie just threw his hands in the air, and said, “I don’t know, perhaps you should think of yourself as a cross between a piece of jasmine and a booterfly.”’