Meeting Flora

He is still alive, and so am I.

I got an e-mail from him last week and he told me that he was in all sorts of shite but that he wasn’t in the mood to tell me the whole sad story.

He will have done a lot of money on the latest crisis of fiscal confidence, or he will have been to the doctor and heard the kind of news you hear when you are seventy plus.

It won’t be the kind of trouble that happened way back then, when I was under twenty, and he was nearly twice my age. It won’t be anything to do with women and children.

He was divorced with five children when we met. He was a notable part-time actor about town, and I was a drama student. His name was, and still is, Felix, and mine is Rosemary.

We have one of those complicated endgame relationships. I wrote “endgame” and then I suddenly wasn’t sure if it meant what I wanted it to mean so I looked it up on Wikipedia. I quote: “In chess, the endgame refers to the stage of the game when there are few pieces left on the board.” And then the invaluable Wikipedia goes on to enumerate all the complexities that follow.

Complexities.

It is much too much of a long sad story to fill you in on everything that went on, from then until now—the shape of his mouth, the fragrance of the bunch of violets that he gave me on the opening night of the Pirandello, the time I stood under his bedroom window as he and the girl he had picked up at the after-show party … well. Enough.

And exactly where we stand now. I don’t know where we stand now.

I can’t tell you everything, and I wouldn’t want to, so I will quickly sketch in the necessary background details as I tell you the story of the time I met Flora.

To begin. We were lolling on his bed in his flat in Campbell Road one Saturday afternoon. I had been hearing his lines for Green Julia by Paul Ableman, which was the next play at the Domain Theatre. He was playing the lead and I was the A.S.M. He used this excuse of hearing lines as a cover for us getting together. It embarrassed him to be seen with me, I was so very young.

I had just read an old book on palmistry by an Irishman whose nom de plume was Cheiro. So I took hold of his hands and studied the lines. Yes, there was his heart line with many many adventures, oh dear, so many. And there was his sensual, fleshy Mound of Venus at the base of his thumb. And one marriage, and maybe another. A shaky, broken line. But so many children. I counted up all the children. Six children.

He snatched his hands back. “I’ve got five children and that is all there are ever going to be.”

“I can see six,” I said, as I shrugged. I was a child myself, children didn’t matter to me. I was on the pill and I was safe from children.

And we fell to embracing and kissing, and oh the good smell of him. I was in it deeply, he was my happiness.

But there was plenty of sadness and sorrow for me as well, because now he was free from his marriage he indulged himself freely. At after-show parties he would survey the field and take his pick. Sometimes it was me, often it was not. It was the times, it was the milieu. I was expected to be cool about it. And I struggled to be cool.

I might leave the party and sit on the back step so as to not see him lighting a cigarette for Iris and being fascinating, leaning towards her, concentrating on her. Or I would sit and watch him playing pool with Heather, listening to their repartee, as she handled the cue boldly.

Or I might make a play for someone myself.

I was getting ready to trundle off to rehearsal for A Man for All Seasons by Robert Bolt one Saturday, not thinking of anything in particular, when Felix showed up.

I should explain. I lived in a decaying old mansion, in what had been the schoolroom at the top of the house. It was an enormous, lofty room, as big as a ballroom, that you reached by a curious circular staircase. The room had no door. I was on the far side, by my mattress on the floor and my jumble of boxes, and I was very surprised indeed when Felix appeared in the doorway. He didn’t visit me, he didn’t like my place. It troubled him. Did I have to live so much like a student? So bohemian, such a pose, etc. etc.

“I’ll give you a lift to rehearsal,” he said.

I followed him down the staircase and into his car. It was a company car, he had a day job.

But he didn’t start the car. We sat there in the sweeping driveway under the venerable avenue of trees until, without looking at me, he started to speak.

“Do you remember Heather? She’s been to a few parties. I played pool with her that time.”

“Oh yes,” I said.

“Six children, you said.”

“When I read your hand?”

“Yes.”

“Oh,” I said.

“The whole thing is impossible.” And he looked at me. I understood that we were friends. That was a strange thought. To lie between maid’s legs. Above all, beyond anything, we were friends. The upshot and the outcome of it was that I went around the city looking for an illegal abortion. It was the times. There was no other way. And there were reasons why he had asked me to do it for him, for them both. For Felix and for Heather. For a start, I knew where to start.

I said, “I have a friend who’s got in trouble and needs to get rid of it.”

I was trying to tell the truth. My friend was a man who had got into trouble. I had thought that sentence out so it wasn’t gender-specific.

But I don’t think anyone believed in the friend. From the saddened, shocked looks I got it seemed everyone thought I had got myself into trouble. A couple of people were angry, but I don’t know if they were angry at me or for me. It was hard to tell. Maybe a bit of both.

I approached Bill and Jeanie, the Americans who made leather sandals. They told me to have the baby. I asked a couple of confident-looking long-haired girls at the Folk Club. They shrugged and looked askance. I went to an older woman called Celia who worked for TV and who came to opening nights wearing bold outfits and dangling earrings. She had a loud voice and decided opinions. She tried to embrace me, and then she got a phone call, and then she had to rush out. I tried everyone I could think of and I was getting nowhere.

Then I remembered Sean. He was a sometime muso I had had a fling with. He was a bit mad, he had a glittering eye. I had been to his flat in Amira Crescent a couple of times, stayed over. It was a nice flat, underneath a weatherboard house, near the harbour. I found out on my first sleepover that number 11 Amira Crescent was a notorious brothel run by the notorious Flora Richmond. A couple of her girls were bored and came down to join us for breakfast. What surprised me is that they were a couple of skinny country girls with lank hair and soft, slurred voices.

Sean had moved on months ago, I didn’t see him around any more. But if anyone would know how to access an abortion in this city it would be Flora Richmond.

I went to the post office and looked in the phone book. Flora Richmond of Amira Crescent had her phone number in the book. The world was getting stranger and stranger to me.

I dialled the number. A soft, slurred voice answered. “May I speak to Flora Richmond?” I asked. My voice had become quite crisp from all those diction lessons we had at Drama School. Red leather, yellow leather. The skinny girl from the country who had answered the phone seemed disconcerted. There was a sort of gasp and a rustle and a bang and then a woman, who could only have been the notorious Flora, boomed, “Hullo? What do you want?”

It was a powerful voice, it could have carried to the back of any theatre, or to the bottom paddock. It was an assured voice. It was full of gravel, a whisky and cigarette voice, but it had patrician notes.

“I am a friend of Sean’s who rented a flat from you …” I began.

“Yes, Sean,” she said. “He’s gone.”

“Yes,” I said. “But I have a friend who has got into trouble …”

“Ah,” she said. There was a pause. I sensed cunning, I sensed concern. And then she said, with a drop of honey in her voice, “Come round and see me tomorrow, dear. Come at ten. Okay?”

“Yes,” I said. “Thank you.”

And I put the phone down.

I caught the bus out to her harbourside suburb the next morning and was knocking on her front door just before ten. A skinny girl with unbrushed hair scuttled me through the hallway—which was shabby and dim and disconcertingly secular—and into the kitchen.

Flora’s kitchen. It was just like my grandmother’s kitchen. Except for the harbour view through the windows above the sink bench, which was piled with breakfast dishes. There was a large formica table. Flora was sitting at the table in a raspberry-coloured candlewick dressing gown which gaped open to show her winceyette nightie bestrewn with little yellow rosebuds. She was baking her shins on a one-bar heater—although they were already well baked, mottled purple and puce—and drinking from a big glass of milk and smoking a cigarette at the same time.

She could have been my grandmother. If my grandmother had had a very good time during the war, danced the night away etc., and still liked a drop. And smoked with a practised hand.

I was standing there, on the yellow lino, in my jeans and op shop jacket and leather sandals, all of my hair scraped back into a pony tail, with my feet in first position. When I am nervous the ballet training asserts itself.

Flora gave me a deeply shrewd look and rasped out—“Would you like some jelly and custard, dear?”

I was so astonished I couldn’t say a word, but I shook my head and sat in the chair that she carelessly pulled out from the table for me.

I am sure she knew that it wasn’t me who was in trouble. She was someone who could tell just by the look of me. And she’d had a good look at me.

I started to stammer out about my friend, but then stopped because I could see that she understood, more or less, what I was after, and, more or less, why I was after it. She was just deciding whether she could trust me.

She licked her lips and said—“This is the number to ring, dear.”

I whipped out my address book and a pen from my shoulder bag. And wrote the number down. I put it on the back page. Just the phone number.

“Get your friend to ring and leave their phone number and then they will get a phone call in a day or two.”

I asked how much and she told me but I don’t remember how much it was. It didn’t seem outrageous, impossible.

I have sometimes wondered if maybe Flora got a cut, for referrals, as it were. But I don’t think so. I didn’t sense anything like that.

By now I was vibrating like a strand of fencing wire being strained up too tight, so I leapt to my feet, stammered out my thanks—I had a wild thought that maybe I should kiss Flora goodbye—and quickly exited via the gloomy hallway and the front door, out into the morning sunshine and the fresh sea breeze.

Flora had put out a hand to detain me. She had wanted to be sociable, but when she saw me shy away like an unbroken filly, she nodded to herself and watched me escape. She didn’t turn her head but her eyes followed me.

I found a phone booth and rang Felix at work. I wasn’t normally allowed to do this. I had tracked his number down—in the phone book of course—and rung him once and been told off up hill and down dale. But this was different.

When he heard my voice he said—“Can’t talk. Come and meet me. One o’clock. Wait across the street.”

So there I was, sitting on a window ledge, waiting across the street, and he came out of his office building. Our eyes met and I jumped up to go across to him, but he signalled for me to follow.

So off he went, down the street, and I tracked him, insouciantly. I started to have a bit of a giggle about the lengths he was going to, and from all the nervous strain too, I expect.

So when he stopped in an alleyway, a quarter of a mile from his place of work, and turned back to me, I must have seemed quite happy and jolly. He was laughing a little bit too.

“Really!” I said.

“One can’t be too careful.”

And he steered me into a little coffee bar that was almost empty, to a table in the far corner.

I gave him the phone number and the price and he leant back in his chair and relaxed. He said—“Thank you.” Then he said—“I appreciate it.”

Then he bought me lunch and we talked theatre gossip and the next play which was a Chekhov. He didn’t think much of Chekhov and bullied me a little because I was such a fan. But I couldn’t be bullied out of liking Chekhov.

A week or so later Felix turned up again at my place. By a quirk of fate I was standing across the room in much the same position as I had been when he had arrived so unexpectedly on that Saturday morning.

He didn’t approach me. He said, “It’s done.”

I didn’t understand for a minute what he was talking about. Then I could tell by the way he was standing that something of great import had happened to him. He was serious and intent. He was unsure of himself. So I knew.

Then he said, striking a pose, “I’ve been handing out cigars.”

I understood the joke and I understood his need to joke so I began to laugh.

And then he said, “It looked like me.”

I began to heave. My stomach turned over. “That’s awful!” I said.

“Yes,” he said. And he turned to leave, throwing over his shoulder as he went, “I’m not going to be in Vanya. I just don’t get Chekhov.”

So I didn’t see him for a bit and then he was in the next play, a Neil Simon, but we didn’t take up exactly where we had left off. There was a difference. I never saw Heather again.

The old mansion was pulled down to build town houses and I started sharing flats with other young people. Flats with bathrooms and kitchens and telephones. Moving in here for a bit, and then moving in there for a bit. Restless, me. On the move. And I shook Felix off. It was an act of will. I cut off all my hair and refused to speak to him.

I finished Drama School and left the city. Eventually I left the country. But until I left the country, no matter where I was, every so often I would get a phone call and a female voice would say—“Hullo. I’m a friend of Erica”—or Laurel or Jasmine—“and I heard you know a phone number …”

I don’t know how word got around but it did. The first couple of times I dished out the phone number and didn’t think too much of it. I liked the feeling of being in the know, of being able to “help someone out”.

Then I just didn’t want to do it any more. I really didn’t want to. Something had changed in me and I don’t understand how it had happened or know when it had happened but something inside me had shifted. It may have been the water-dripping-on-stone effect. That sad parade of women’s voices had got to me. They all sounded the same. Sad and tense and fearful. I felt so sorry for them. But I didn’t want to help them out. It went against my grain. It felt like bad luck.

I ripped the back page with the phone number out of my address book and tore it up and threw it out. So I could say I didn’t have the phone number any more.

I knew I would never need it.

How Felix and I got back in touch with each other is another story. It took quite a few years but people who love each other cannot be kept apart. He married again—it didn’t work out—and I’m married, but you know, we’re friends.

I am waiting for an e-mail from Felix. I hope he is up to telling me what is going on in his life soon. I am worrying a little. Neither of us are as young as we used to be. But we are both still alive.

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