A Needle in the Heart (10 page)

‘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 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 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.

‘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.