On Top of Everything (17 page)

I wished she’d tell me, let me help her. I could have, I was sure of it. But there was no point me having all the confidence in the world, because she was the one who needed it. She needed to have it in me because I was a step ahead of her. I already had confidence in her. Florence wasn’t a risk for me, she was a certainty.

Do I believe in love at first sight? I have to say, yes, I do. Unravelling it from lust at first sight is the problem but I’ve learned that the hard way. I’ve learned everything the hard way.
But at least I have learned.

The timing for me and Florence was not perhaps right, although it also wasn’t wrong. She’d only just split up from her husband but at least she had split up from him. Because the truth is, if I’d met her anywhere else, at any other time, I would have felt exactly the same way about her. It’s an odd sensation: like having known a stranger already, intimately, forever.

I believed it would work out. I believed she would eventually trust me, trust herself.

Of course, I wasn’t exactly a catch. I didn’t have much money. I didn’t even own a house or my own flat. Just my truck and a few bits of furniture and the odd painting. But I knew I could take care of Florence, I really could. And I knew I could love her like no one else could ever love her, no disrespect to anyone who has. I knew that for a fact.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

It was such a peculiar thing, being desperate to see Will and to avoid him all at the same time. It barely gave me time to concentrate on having the measles. I kept wondering what would have happened if I hadn’t gone to see Young Nick, if I hadn’t had the colonoscopy, if I hadn’t been given the awful diagnosis. Would we still have met on the edge of my bed? Would we have kissed? Kept on kissing? Ripped off our clothes and had wild, passionate sex? Got married and had babies? Grown old together and turned into one of those ancient couples that never go anywhere without holding hands?

Of course it was possible that had I not got that phone call, Will would not have come into my room because I probably wouldn’t have been in it. And I most likely would not have realised that we were meant to be together because I wasn’t usually the sort of person who thought like that. Staring death in the face had brought that on. I’d never stared death in the
face before. I’d stared over its shoulder, I suppose, when I went into labour with Monty but even then I didn’t believe there was any reason for anything to go wrong. I was too young and silly to know how many complications the world was full of.

Now, I knew. And it changed everything.

Before Young Nick I’d felt something for Will but it was a by-the-by sort of a something upon which I don’t think I would have acted because I had so little experience in that field. Plus, I’d only been separated from my husband for five minutes and it seemed a trifle indecent to be contemplating a lover quite so quickly. Before Young Nick, I would not have admitted that the something I felt even involved contemplating a lover.

Before Young Nick, I don’t think I had ever even used the word ‘lover’. Before Young Nick? Yes, it’s interesting. With the buzz of a dial tone my previous life as a healthy thirty-nine-year-old was whisked impossibly far, far away dividing my life into two separate chunks. I was in some other world now. The ‘after’ world. Everything after Young Nick, however long that may or may not be, would be in this strange new territory, I supposed. With that phone call I had stepped over an invisible line; I could look back but I could never step across it again.

For the next few days, as my before and after worlds were extricating themselves from each other, allowing my muddled emotions to settle, giving me time to adjust to my lack of future, I managed to avoid seeing a single soul, bar Sparky. I was astonished at how easy this was. I’d never had to do it before. I’d never wanted to. Usually when I heard Monty’s voice in the house I would follow it until I found him but I discovered the opposite was just as easy to do.

Monty. I couldn’t bear the thought of looking at him, knowing what I knew. The things I would miss if the cancer
claimed me: him getting over this teenage nonsense and growing up properly; getting married, the right way, to a real wife and having gorgeous little grandbabies and a house in the country and a big golden retriever dog called Bill or Bob or Barney and a job in the City and a lovely car that didn’t make a knocking noise when you went around corners and beautiful clothes.

I would never hold those grandbabies in my arms, I now believed, I would never rock them to sleep, read them stories, take them to Regent’s Park to play on the grass. These were the things I had dreamed of for me and my son, the future I had stitched together for him as surely as if it was a patchwork quilt like the ones Charlotte made for her each of her girls.

In the present, Monty was making it easy for me to avoid him because he made such a bloody racket. He seemed to rattle the door a thousand times louder than anyone else when he came home from wherever he was going these days. I swear his feet were heavier on the stairs than even Stanley Morris’s. The sound of him getting a glass out of the kitchen cupboards could probably be heard in Chichester. And most of the time, to boot, there was the sound of his roaring laughter; his overwhelming, uncontrollable, ineffably audible joy at being in the company of Crystal.

He’d always had the best laugh, Monty, and a smile to go with it. A smile that took up his whole face. His entire school life I’d been told that his exemplary record had been helped enormously by that smile. It could right a hundred wrongs, his home room teacher Mrs Whiting told me once, not that there were a hundred wrongs involved, she hastened to add, but there were one or two, though only quite small and in fact hardly worth mentioning now she came to think of it.

Will had a lovely smile too. Not as wide as Monty’s, but
then Monty was young. Younger. Will’s smile came with the baggage of having been around longer. But not much longer. Thirty-bloody-one? What had I been thinking? What was I thinking now? How much longer did I have to think?

In the days following our little incident in the bedroom, I married him in my mind sixty-five times, died a hundred more and imagined God knows how many lavish funerals.

I also baked not one but two chocolate and banana cakes, burning the first one while I was busy avoiding Monty and Crystal by taking a bath in the middle of the day. I got the second one right but icing it was a mission. I went three times to Tesco to get sour cream for the icing, forgetting it the first time and getting cottage cheese by mistake the second. Trips to Tesco were rather more complicated these days because I went out of my way to not go up Warwick Place past my old shop. As a result, my thoughts were often dark and filled with bitterness and resentment as I went the long way around, which in turn led to quite a bit of bungling on the shopping list front.

I’d been particularly addled on the sour cream expeditions, thanks to not passing the shop and not seeing Charlotte. The subject of Charlotte upset me just as much in the after world as before, if not more. I had, after all, a rather glaring hole in both places where a good friend should be.

As it was, with no one but my shattered self for company, I was starting to lose my grip. My poor mind bounced from cancer tragedy to motherless son despair to unrequited love angst without stopping for a breather until in one brief window of clarity I accepted that I was in danger of my inner turmoil getting the better of me. I was icing my stale cake when I decided, as I licked the spoon and tasted salt from my tears, that I really should drive to Tannington Hall and tell
my family what was happening to me. On the cancer tragedy front, that is, not the unrequited love angst front, although I’m sure they would have preferred the latter. Not that there was really anything to report with the latter other than I had it and would have it forever, however long forever was.

‘Not scaring you away, are we?’ Will asked with a sad smile when he caught me sidling down the stairs with my overnight bag.

I couldn’t meet his eyes, but I recognised his smell. It was like vanilla, only sort of lemony. Thoroughly delicious. Totally cruel. My eyes swivelled around erratically, landing every now and then on Stanley, who grew nervous under such odd scrutiny.

‘I’m going to see my parents,’ I said to the space where the wall between Monty’s TV room and the hall used to be. ‘I need to speak to them about something. Not much. But something. You know.’

I sounded twelve. It was atrocious.

‘What’s happening with the pipes?’ I then asked trying to claw my way back to appropriateness.

‘Pipes? Well, nothing just yet. We’re sort of working around that. It’s the dry rot we need to sort out first.’

‘Oh, yes, of course.’ I had actually completely forgotten about the dry rot.

‘We’ve had a mate of Stan’s around to give us a second opinion,’ Will said. ‘I thought you might have seen him? Or heard him?’

I shook my head. I’d been busy.

‘Rattly little bugger,’ Stanley laughed. ‘Could talk the hind legs off a donkey.’

‘He had quite a few suggestions, actually, that could save us a bit of money, if not time,’ Will continued. ‘The good
thing is that the rot is contained to the foundations near the kitchenette plumbing and the floorboards above that so we just need to cut out the affected parts and take another metre from the floorboards to make sure it doesn’t spread.’

It hit me then, like a ton of the proverbial, that the house more or less had the bloody measles too. It had started in the joists and was spreading its poison throughout this whole safe, solid, precious building, threatening its very existence.

The rattly man with the donkey’s hind legs was in fact the glove inserting itself up my house’s basement and determining how long it had to live.

What sort of an unhinged universe was this?

‘But is it terminal?’ I asked abruptly. ‘The dry rot? Is it terminal?’

‘Terminal?’ Will repeated.

‘What do you mean by terminal?’ Stanley asked as I trembled pathetically on the stairs.

‘I mean terminally terminal as in the end!’ I blurted out. ‘I can’t have terminal rot in Rose’s house, I just can’t. This house is … it’s … if it’s terminal I can hardly have a tearoom. There would be no point, no future. It would be an utter waste of time. And money. Money I don’t even have. And who knows if a tearoom is …? I just can’t see now how it could work. No, I can’t see it at all. I think we need to stop. I need to rethink this. The tearoom is too much for me, I realise that now. It’s probably too much for me without terminal rot but with terminal rot it’s even more ridiculous. I can’t. I simply can’t. No, no, I think we need to stop this right away.’

I looked around at the debris, the exposed pipes, the crumbling walls, the flaking wallpaper, the dust. What had I done? I flopped down on the stairs, astonished at my own ludicrous enthusiasm. What had I been thinking?

Will and Stanley swapped a bewildered glance.

‘Well, Florence, I don’t really think you need to panic. There’s really no such thing as terminal rot,’ Will said, carefully. ‘The whole house isn’t rotten. Just bits of it and we can replace the bits. It’s really not a great big problem. It’s a medium-sized problem. Small to medium, even. And we can fix it completely. Honestly. There’s nothing terminal about it.’

‘There you are,’ Stanley agreed. ‘Listen to the expert.’

‘If anything, we can probably make the house stronger than it was to begin with,’ Will continued, ‘but it will just cost money and we know that could be difficult for you so Stan and I are throwing around some ideas — and Sid the rattler is helping us out — to see if we can come up with something.’

‘Make it more affordable,’ Stanley interjected again.

‘Just so as we’re clear on there being no such thing as terminal rot, Florence,’ Will repeated. ‘The tearoom is a fantastic idea. There is a point, of course there is. There is a future. It’s not ridiculous.’

I looked at him, albeit fleetingly, and thought my heart would break. The tearoom was too much for me, rot or not, and so was seeing him, smelling him, imagining him, imagining the life we would never have.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said, getting to my feet. ‘It’s just not going to happen. The money, I mean, there’s no way … I just don’t … You’ve both been so lovely but I’m sorry.’ And like the mature thirty-nine-year-old I was, I fled out the door, leaving the two of them standing there like stunned mullets, while I flung myself into the tired Golf.

I cried all the way to Suffolk, Sparky at one point howling in sympathy next to me as I sped up the M11. It was so unfair! How was I supposed to deal with all the rotten things? How was one person supposed to — oh my God, I thought, just
about swerving off the road at Newmarket. This was the beginning of another roll of three! I’d had the job-husband-son threesome and now there was the house-with-its-sodding-dry-rot and there was me-with-mine. Which meant there was one more rotten thing to come. How inconceivable! I howled myself then, which actually shut Sparky up. He looked most put out: I’d out-saddened him.

My howling became hiccups by Bury St Edmonds and by the time I turned into the lane leading up to Tannington Hall I had quite a firm grip on myself.

That loosened, however, when I pulled into the driveway.

There was an ambulance there, the back door of it open, nobody inside. The front door of the house was swinging open, almost closed and open again with the sway of the gentle breeze.

Rotten thing number three? Stage two? So soon?

Sparky slumped down on the front seat and put one paw over his eyes.

I wished with all my heart I was able to do the same.