by Fiona Kidman
‘I should be getting along,’ she said, as if she were 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 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, drifting in and out of sleep. 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 gentle into that good 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 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 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 what it was like to be well known, to be in the newspapers. 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 woman called Pamela, with dark hair swept up in frosted peaks and beautiful casual country clothes. She organised speakers for the Lyceum Club and was on the National Party branch committee. I could see why my aunt would have got along with her, although the unease between me and Pamela 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 pullover made of fine Merino wool, black pants and a gaily coloured 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 for Flo every day, which meant she knew exactly how often I wrote.
When conscious, Flo looked 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’d say in her mimicking, piping voice.
‘Oooh,’ Pamela said 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 for her to leave.
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 sad reassurance to Flo that living in a 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 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. But I wanted to say, you’re 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 had, 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 had often 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,’ Joy said.
‘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 heat of the kitchen. There were several places where you could be by yourself: the formal sitting-room, used only on Sundays; the large closed-in sun porch; the small pretty bedroom that I occupied when I was there; Flo and Theo’s own bedroom with its 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 might 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 so
me 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 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 in those days 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 sheeps’ 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 against the grass. His hair looked as if it were 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 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 Flo 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, whom my mother suspected was her favourite child.
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 younger 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, pointing 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 below that 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 an almost grown-up sister called Annabelle, who would be home from finishing school 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 around 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 foolish Flo. My mother had a strong sisterly affection for her, but her later position in the family had given her a sort of second sight about her sisters, as if she had become the wise adult.
‘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 were going to be sick, and stood up.
‘Flo,’ said her mother. ‘Manners.’
‘I thought you’d be pleased,’ said Wilf.
Anyone looking around 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 her door and called her she didn’t come out.
‘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 an odd sort of a business, my mother said when she related this.
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 make-up, which gave me a happy feeling of independence.
Theo said, when it was suggested I live there, that it would be a good thing for Flo. ‘She’s become 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 gone down to talk the idea over with the pair of them. I think she was worried about me 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 herself, 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 man called Tommy Harrison. He was a persistent, lugubrious boy, who wore a brown hat when he came 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. Tommy called at the office to drop off the farm accounts 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 problems, at least, appeared to revolve around Theo’s mother, now a widow, at that house at the end of the street. Theo would say he was just popping in to see 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 brought her at the weekends. Theo’s mother 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 a common male problem of wanting to spend his life 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, until Flo relented.
‘I suppose I’d better call in 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 often visit her mother-inlaw 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 or, 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,’ Flo said. ‘She’s like a daughter to me.’ I felt her edge her chair protectively towards mine.
