Anyway, when you go along the path to the entrance, to the right is a row of brightly bluish-lit windows, with steel glittering, full of bustle. And sometimes Flora to be seen, somehow shining through the glitter.
I’d been to The Point a lot of times before I actually met Flora. Talked about her, had the feel of her name in my mouth. The sound in my ears. Flora’s happy, Flora’s doing, Flora’s decided, Flora won’t. You knew she’d have a last name but it didn’t ever come up. And of course I’d seen her, in glimpses.
Sometimes Terry Feldman persuaded her out of the kitchen. He took her hand and kissed it and said in that booming voice of his, Brava, brava, Flora my flower, Flora
ma fleur
,
fleurissima
, brava, brava.
That’s when it occurred to me that all of us were in love with Flora. We came and we adored, and the food she gave us was what fed our adoration. Of course there were some people, tourists for instance, who came once, you could see them looking round rather nervously, and you felt sorry for them, they would have their perception of bliss and then be excluded, by distance, or poverty – the special-night-out visitors – or even ignorance.
I wondered if I could have got as bad as Feldman and his florid tirades. I remember looking across at Flora, at her bent velvety head, her thin body in its white shirt, as she smiled, tiredly, it was the end of a busy evening, weary and yet charmed by him, as we so many of us are, it’s his gift.
Maybe it’s his not being snobbish, everyone comes within his ambit. The dishwasher, should he come upon him, would be included. Though probably more briefly. This night Laurel deflected him, allowed Flora to escape. She held out his overcoat and slid it on to him, expertly, settling it over his portly shoulders with the most delicate finger flick. She is a nice woman, Laurel, sometimes I’ve spoken to her. At the end of the evening we’ll stand and talk a little, often about her son, Oscar, a clever boy, and a worry.
He’s got into wild company, she said once. Though I don’t know whether I should say that … She gave me a painful smile. Sometimes I wonder if he is the one who is the wild company. If he leads Raoul and Hamish, all those young people he hangs out with, astray. He does seem to be the lively one, the one with energy and ideas. Experimenting, they call it. As long as it doesn’t kill you.
I should think he just needs time, I said. Though what would I know. Thinking of my own quiet life in those years, interred in the seminary, my excitements Latin and Greek and the words of the mass. But I pronounced them to comfort her. Clever boys, I said, take a while to settle down, work themselves out. These days.
She smiled, and for a moment it cleared her face of worry. Her pale blue eyes shone. You think so? she said. I’m sure you’re right. He says he’s working this year. Though he has dropped two subjects, so he can’t fail and be stuck with paying HECS on them. Which is an improvement on last year. Of course it’s his problem, but you hate to see them burdened with debt.
But it won’t be a problem, really, I said, not when he’s finished university and into a good job.
Or if he never has a real job at all, I thought, but didn’t say, I didn’t want her face to sag and her eyes to dull. When she smiled you could see the girl she not so long ago was, before scarpering husband and troubling child pinched her forehead and tightened her lips. She was slim and neat and dressed well, in simple and you could tell expensive black dresses, but her beauty did not flower. It didn’t quite wither, but it didn’t flower.
And Flora? Did her beauty flower? Before I fell in love with her I did not notice, did not see her. My eyes were gorged on the lusciousness of Anabel, on curves of flesh and falls of black hair, I had not learned to see how exquisite was the plainness of Flora. Once I had fallen in love with her I so desired what she was I could no longer make judgements. And could not remember the time when I might have. She was tired, she drooped, but for me … she was my heart’s Flora. I resented Feldman’s turgid mouthing of her name and beauty.
I could make an image here … Leonie, shift yourself, I do not want your bum on these words, these of all words … I could say that Anabel was like a rococo church, breathtaking, yes, all that ornate detail, gilded, gorgeous, restless, so surfacely intricate, whereas Flora was a Romanesque chapel, plain, unadorned, worn, perfect, and when you understand how to look at it, to still your eyes after all the agitation of the rococo, so beautiful you think your heart will break, just being there, looking.
Feldman. The night he dropped the hint about outsourcing, when he was with the treasurer. A useful piece of information, it was. I suppose some people must have paid him for his information. I never did. Later, in the lavatory, having one of those strange parallel conversations that you have in such places with their odd etiquette of no eye contact. So at first he seemed to be talking to himself. Sex, he said. I suppose that’s why you left.
That’s what everyone thinks, I said. But they don’t usually say it.
Frankness. That’s the way to get on in the world.
Then I did laugh. I think that’s probably the most disingenuous remark I’ve ever heard, I said, because certainly I dare say Terry is quite often frank, on occasions, but it would be as carefully plotted as any of his strategies.
You think so? he said, in an injured voice, but smug underneath, as though I had paid him a compliment and was unaware of it.
Who was it said honesty is only profitable when it’s kept under control?
(Later I remembered who. It was Don Marquis who wrote the cockroach autobiography, and possibly it’s just as well I was not recalling its source, at the time.)
By this we were zipped and washed and going out the door and I had not answered his question, for no doubt it was a question, however he framed it as a statement, and one he wanted an answer for, and which it was my intention not to provide. You can’t answer a question like that over a piss, a book might do it, and even that’s not sure.
Of course I was being less than frank myself, and having that thought sidetracked me on to the idea of being a person called Frank and writing your memoirs,
Less Than Frank
being such a good title, but then I thought it would be better to call it
More
Than Frank
. Who wants to be less than himself?
Just as we were parting I said, Have you ever imagined that the devil might be a goldfish?
Ha ha, said Terry. Very good. Very good.
I thought of the things I might have said. There is a short answer to was it sex, and it is yes. Or equally, no. I might seem to be cavilling like a Jesuit, but both answers are true. It’s true that if the Church catches you as a lad, and fills your head with the noble thoughts young people used to take such pleasure in (Do they now? What would Oscar’s answer be?) of vocations and service, and the highest earthly calling, he will not know what promising celibacy means. No sex forever: we should not ask children to promise that. But neither was it, in Terry’s terms, to lust after women that I left. It was for the world, God’s world I would have said once, the world’s own world that grew into its lovely complicated self and was so much more than the friary. I was like a man denying God by not using his talent to live in that world. Which hangs over a narrow promontory of land like a lantern against the dark sky and the dark lake, and promises. How it promises.
Do you know how to wash up, asks Flora of the young man sitting by her desk.
Yep.
How would you wash glasses?
Well, the best would be a copper sink, not to bump them too harsh like, and some good hot water, no soap, it wrecks the bubbles in the champagne, and a clean dishcloth to wipe them, very gentle, and then you have to polish them with a linen cloth, always linen, cotton won’t do. And the polishing mustn’t be hurried. It needs to take as long as it takes.
I see. How do you know all this?
My mother. Her dad was a butler. In a grand house in the home counties. She used to tell me stories about it, when she was a little girl in the big house and all the things they did. At night, when it was hot an’ I couldn’t sleep, she’d tell me the stories.
Where was this happening, the hot weather?
Out Cooper’s Creek way. Mumma was the housekeeper.
The young man is thin and not very tall, but his muscles are good.
Flora gives him a job. The grandson of a butler. And she thinks, a copper sink, what a fine idea.
But he’s never actually done it himself, says Elinor.
No, but he has a vision of it. That’s the thing.
Is vision what you want in washing up?
He has the vision, he has the theory. The practice will follow.
He’ll practise on you. However many smashed dishes later.
Well, said Flora, it’s really pots, that’s what he has to do. I hope it won’t be too much of a shock for him. Copper pots to scour and polish, not crystal glasses and fine china in copper sinks.
What’s his name?
Joe. Joseph Southey. His grandfather’s name. As a butler he was called Joseph. A good name for a butler, he reckons.
Elizabeth David’s family’s butler was called Lavender.
That’s fancy. Joe says he’ll be Joseph one day, when he gets a job worthy of the name.
Laurel had better watch out. At least if you had Joseph doing her job you’d know what to call him. The butler.
I’d have to give him a buttery to lurk in.
Oh how nice, says Elinor. The words give her a pang of envy, an excited seeing-possibilities envy, she wants them to happen, she wants the butler to be there in his buttery, simply because the words for his being so exist.
Poor Laurel, says Flora. You’re doing her out of a job.
Do dishwashers ever rise so giddily in the world?
If he wants it enough, he will make it happen.
Oh Flora, you’re such a romantic. You talk about him as though he were a lad in a fairytale.
Why not?
I suppose he’s poor but bright-eyed. Plain but with an honest face. Slight but wiry.
How did you know?
You’re impossible. Or else … You’re making it up.
You know I don’t have that sort of imagination.
You’ve invented an anachronism. Where’s he been all these years since butlers died out?
It was his grandfather was the butler, and in England, of course. He could have been quite old. And anyway, people in England still have them, there are people rich enough to have butlers still. You can do fabulously expensive courses to learn how, and expect to make a lot of money out of it.
That’s rare.
Yes, but not non-existent. Out of Joe’s league though. He grew up in the outback somewhere. His mother was housekeeper on some property. There doesn’t seem to be a father, and I think the mother might be dead. I don’t think she was very young.
So you have got yourself an innocent.
Just a good boy to wash dishes.
I still think you’re inventing him.
No I’m not. Especially not the bright eyes. I have to confess that was a huge plus. You can’t imagine … some of the people who apply for that sort of job have got such dead eyes. They know they’re the bottom of the heap and they’re going to stay there, and dishwashing isn’t going to save them, not in a lifetime.
As it may not save Joe.
Indeed, no, it might not. But he doesn’t know it yet. There’s still life in his eyes. He’ll be good to work with. Whereas the ones with dead eyes – it’s like having a black hole in the kitchen, they suck all the energy.
They are sitting in the sun on the terrace of a cafe in Manuka. It’s cold but the sun is warm. The sun in winter, Flora says, that’s what I came to Australia for. Funny, the sun is why my mother left, so she said. Flora likes to order a sandwich when they have lunch together. Most of hers is sitting on her plate, not because she doesn’t like it but because she doesn’t eat. She’s taken a bite, and while Elinor watches she has another nibble. She takes more mouthfuls of wine than of food.
You’re not eating, says Elinor. You’ve got to keep your strength up.
This Brindabella riesling’s good, Flora says.
Yes, but it’s not food.
It’s nourishing.
Not very usefully. You’ll become an alcoholic.
Cooks always take to drink.
Not in your league they don’t.
Flora takes another mouthful of wine.
Oh Flora. I do scold you, don’t I. Why do I scold you?
Perhaps because you are fond of me. You’re trying to improve me.
She says this so placidly that they both laugh, as she meant them to.
But it worries me. Every time, after I’ve seen you, I think, next time I see Flora I won’t scold her, then I do.
I wouldn’t know where I was if you didn’t.
Elinor picks up Flora’s hand and kisses it. A rough little paw, finely wrinkled. They sit in the sun and smile at one another. The waiter comes past and takes up Elinor’s plate. Flora motions to hers. Finished? he says. Yes, says Flora, it was an excellent sandwich. The waiter looks at the bite and two nibbles and his expression is confused. Quite excellent, says Flora.
Elinor doesn’t often eat at The Point. It’s too expensive. It’s open from Wednesday to Saturday evenings and Saturday lunch, this last for people who say, The view is so wonderful, what a pity we can’t see it in daylight. Yet The Point is essentially a night place, then it is its lantern self, by day opaque. Such people would expect to lunch this seriously on a Sunday, but Sunday, Monday and Tuesday are Flora’s own days, her own time to do all the reading she needs and her own cooking. This is when she sees her friends at meals in her kitchen, trying out the dishes that are preoccupying her at this moment. And visiting sometimes in turn at their houses.
Elinor isn’t nervous about inviting Flora to meals. People say to her, Flora—! Having Flora to dinner! Don’t you get in a panic? How can you cope? I’d die, having to do a meal for Flora. But Elinor knows that apart from not eating much Flora is not judgemental about other people’s food, provided it is honest. That is, not industrial, or fake, or pretentious.
We’ll probably have bread and cheese, says Elinor. Or Ivan might make an omelette.