When I try to write about Flora I keep wandering off into the villainy of men. The point is that pretty young women are expendable. Nobody likes them, except the men who are currently involved with them. Their mothers envy them, their fathers are disturbed by them, their plainer siblings resent them, their teachers dislike them. They have a hard time growing up, and a hard time when grown. A pretty girl driving a Mini will be driven off the road by lorry drivers as a matter of course. What’s she doing on the road? Driving is work, not entertainment. Professors refuse to give them degrees, in case they’re accused of prejudice. Their husbands don’t trust them. Everyone knows what a pretty girl is for, that’s the trouble. If Flora had been plainer, Bernard might have married her and not treated her like a skivvy and a slave. (Plain girls marry earlier, statistically, than pretty ones.) Look at her now, as I do, cleaning Natalie’s floor long after Natalie had the wherewithal to pay her for so doing. Pretty, and therefore persecuted! Flora’s piled-up, streaked-in, frizzed-out hair has toppled halfway down her creamy cheek. She keeps trying to push it up again with her delicate white fingers, and has put a streak of grime across that selfsame creamy cheek. This is, I admit, beginning to get to me. How sad that these things must pass! The creamy cheek one day will be no longer; as will that female movement of the hands through the hair, to puff and prettify. Sad, I say – yet that part of me given over to jealousy and envy is not sorry, but glad, that all things flesh are mortal, especially the flesh of the prettier members of the great universal sisterhood.
‘I’m not going to work here for nothing,’ said Flora, crossly, putting away the mop, helping Natalie extract Angus’ dead hen, feathers and all, from the freezer. ‘Why should I wash your floors, if not for money? Bernard says if you like he’ll come and take away a couple of chairs in lieu.’
‘Those chairs cost eighty-five pounds each two months ago. I only owe you fifteen pounds.’
‘You should have bought antiques,’ said Flora. ‘Then they’d have had a re-sale value.’
‘Harry liked new things,’ said Natalie. These days she talked about Harry whenever she could. She thought she should. He’d been gone for three weeks. She had told the children he’d gone to Spain on business, and that there was trouble getting money through. That’s why Ben wouldn’t have a new briefcase for his books and Alice six new hair slides. She thought Alice believed her but that Ben did not. She’d told them they were changing schools at half term and Alice had turned white and said nothing and Ben had flushed and thrown a book at her and said he hated her.
‘Always a mistake to do what a man likes,’ said Flora now, as if she knew everything in the world. ‘They get bored, if they have everything their own way.’
‘So it seems,’ said Natalie. Why was she confiding in the help? She regretted it, now.
‘And he just walked out without a word!’ said Flora. She felt like Natalie’s younger sister, which was why she kept coming up to Dunbarton and working for no money. ‘Aren’t men pigs. But I can’t believe you didn’t see it coming.’
‘If I was someone different I expect I would have,’ Natalie said. ‘But I’m me.’
‘You don’t do much screaming or shouting,’ said Flora.
‘There’s no one to hear me,’ said Natalie, sadly, and apart from Flora, there was indeed no one. Only Angus, who had asked himself to dinner, out of the blue, to eat his chicken. It proved impossible to pluck the feathers from a deep-frozen hen, but Flora offered to at least hack off the head with a chopper before she left.
‘You won’t have the nerve, Mrs Harris,’ she said and Natalie accepted the offer with relief. She had only ever bought oven-ready birds.
The heavy knife whacked down upon the creature’s neck, stretched as it was across the chopping board, head dangling, and a frozen globule of blood flew across the room and landed upon the print of Van Gogh’s sunflowers.
‘I never liked that picture,’ said Natalie. ‘Although I know I’m supposed to. Could I ask you something, Flora?’
‘Ask away.’
‘Did you steal my jewellery?’
‘No.’
‘Then he did it,’ said Natalie. ‘The bastard,’ and she picked up a cup and threw that at the sunflowers. The cup broke and the picture fell off the wall. The return of rage, as I say, marks the beginning of recovery. It was at that point that Natalie stopped walking round like a zombie and thereafter flustered and wept and stormed and went round with red eyes and a haggard face like any other wife left suddenly with no money and the children. It takes years to recover properly, of course, before you can assume that because you woke bright eyed and calm to the day, you will continue thus until its end, without suffering a fit of melancholy, rage, distress, remorse, jealousy or some other unpleasant emotion. One in every three marriages ends in divorce. It happened to Natalie, it happened to me, it had happened to most of us on the carnival float that night – and all agree, all we have in the end are our friends.
The hen lay divided, gently thawing. Disgusting, really, the way people eat animals. I can never work out what stops them from eating each other. It would save so much trouble and hassle, and would efficiently recycle essential nutrients. Our agricultural land would be allowed to restore itself, and cease being the mere dull base for chemical fertilizers on which our crops are grown. For that is what the English soil has become. This whim – and it is nothing more – which obsesses humankind, that it is morally allowed to mass-produce animals in order to devour them, but morally disallowed to eat its own dead, will be the end of us.
Be all that as it may, saner, nicer and less cannibalistic people than me began to turn their heads to the sun the day Natalie threw a cup at Van Gogh’s sunflowers.