On Top of Everything (24 page)

‘She’s just walked in, I’ll pass you right over,’ she said, and before I could fully register what was happening she had thrust the receiver into my hands.

It was Young Nick, of course.

‘Florence, are you there?’ he asked. ‘Why haven’t you answered any of my calls? Or letters? I’ve been desperately trying to get in touch with you. We need to talk about your options, to work out what to do next. This isn’t something you can sweep under the carpet, I’m afraid. I’m terribly worried about you.’

‘I’m so sorry,’ I said, trying to keep my voice light and friendly even though what I really wanted to do was shout at him to fuck off and leave me alone and then strangle Crystal with the phone cord until her eyeballs popped out and her nose exploded. She stood just out of arm’s reach, her nose looking small and neat, her eyeballs tidily in their sockets, not even pretending she wasn’t listening. ‘I’ve been run off my feet with work,’ I said gaily, ‘and my sister’s been very ill.’

‘With work?’ Nick asked. ‘So you went back to the antiques business? You sorted things out with your partner?’

Bugger! I’d completely forgotten I’d told him all about that. ‘No, no, another sort of work. Another business,’ I said rather lamely, blushing under Crystal’s scrutiny.

‘Well, just tell them they’ll have to wait,’ I heard Nick telling someone in the background at his end. ‘I don’t care. Get a
bucket!’ I felt a droplet of remorse, then, at causing trouble. But it dried up almost instantly when he turned his attention back to me. ‘You just can’t ignore this,’ he said. ‘This is very serious, Florence. We could be talking about your whole life.’

‘Yes, I’m well aware of that,’ I said, opening the pantry door and stepping into it, to avoid Crystal’s unwavering gaze.

‘But are you aware that we could also be talking about nothing more than the equivalent of having a wart removed? The danger lies in not finding out, Florence. With the not knowing. You need a CT scan and a consultation with a surgeon. It’s the crucial next step. There’s just no way around it. You really must deal with this.’

‘Why thank you,’ I said as evenly as I could manage considering I’d just noticed a whole lot of pongy Asian herbs in the pantry that I certainly hadn’t put there. ‘I’ll take that on board and get back to you, shall I?’

This might assuage my nosy daughter-in-law, I thought. Although when I looked over my shoulder, she had not budged from her watchful position. Nor did she appear particularly assuaged.

‘Have you told anybody?’ Nick persisted. ‘Are you getting any support? You can’t do this on your own, Florence. No one can.’

‘Oh, that won’t be necessary,’ I said, a little too quickly perhaps, and then threw in a forced laugh for good measure. ‘It’s fine just the way it is, thank you so much.’

‘There’s only one thing you can be sure of,’ Nick said, and his voice dropped even lower, became yet more grim, ‘and that is that it’s not fine just the way it is. Whether what you have is rust or forest fire, Florence, you deny its existence at your peril. At Monty’s peril. Do you understand that? I wouldn’t be doing my job if I didn’t spell it out for you this clearly.
And when I say Monty’s peril, I don’t just mean that if it’s not like removing a wart, if it is more serious, that he might lose his mother. I mean you may have a genetic predisposition to colon cancer. You’re young and healthy but something is not right, so it could be a flaw in your genes. And if that’s the case, it could be a flaw in Monty’s genes too. He might be predisposed as well, Florence. Does that make a difference to you? Monty needs to be tested too. Do you understand?’

My heart was thumping abnormally low in my body. It felt like it was in my stomach.

‘Thank you so much for calling,’ I said as brightly as I could manage, although my bravado felt like it was being mulched in the kitchen disposal unit. ‘I have to go now. I’ll speak to you soon. Goodbye.’

I stepped out of the pantry and carefully placed the phone down in the cradle and stood there, staring at the calendar that I noticed for the first time in three months was three months out of date, trying not to shake. Monty? Cancer? I hadn’t thought of that at all. If Monty had cancer it would be the end of me, if I wasn’t ended already. He could die. Is that what Young Nick meant? Or that he could pass it on to his children and they could die and Crystal had already had one baby die and how terrible would that be if it happened to her again? That would be the most terrible thing of all. And for it to happen to Monty a first time, for his baby to die, it was almost more than I could bear. I was bearing so much already.

I felt the warmth of my daughter-in-law’s small tanned hand on my arm then. I wanted to swat it away, to cast her aside, but I couldn’t. I was frozen to the spot. ‘Florence?’ she said. ‘What is it? What’s the matter?’

‘There’s asafoetida in my cupboard,’ I said. ‘And tamarind paste.’

‘Florence, you’re pale as a ghost! And you’re trembling. Please come and sit down.’

‘And pomegranate syrup. What do I want with pomegranate syrup?’

‘Florence, I think you should …’

‘How dare you!’ I was suddenly so full of uncontrollable rage I could not help but unleash it on her. Poor Crystal. Always there when my fury was getting away on me. I reeled around to face her, flinging her hand off my arm, backing away from her as though she were toxic waste. ‘How dare you put these peculiar foul-smelling things in my pantry without telling me first,’ I shouted. ‘How dare you just march in here with all this foreign bloody muck and throw it about the place, just leave it everywhere, on the shelves, in the pantry, in the kitchen, in my house,
in my house
! Without any permission, without any warning, without checking with me first, without me having asked for any of it, without so much as a by-your-bloody-leave! It’s unconscionable! It’s bloody criminal! It’s so incredibly unfair, I mean how dare you? How, how, how …’ I don’t know when I had started to cry but deep wrenching sobs appeared out of nowhere and, mixed with this awful uncontrollable anger, temporarily removed my ability to breathe.

She should have slapped me, or pushed me out the window, or chopped me into tiny bits and fed me to the dog as I stood there quivering and swallowing great gulps of air, but she didn’t.

She steered me to a chair, pushed me gently down into it, got me a glass of water, and then said: ‘I don’t think this is about pomegranate syrup.’

She sat down next to me, so close I could all but feel her even breath on my hot cheek. ‘What’s happening, Florence?’

I willed myself not to say a word, to keep quiet, to hold my horrible secret to myself but it was too strong for me. Suddenly, my own thought bubble popped and the terror I felt at what lurked within me burst out into the realm of great gasped half-suffocated spoken-out-loud words.

‘I have colon cancer,’ I sobbed. ‘Bloody bollocky colon cancer. And if I die, no one will care. No one will even notice. It could kill me, it could be killing me right now, as I speak, and it could kill Monty too if I have faulty genes, and I should have done something about it weeks ago when I first found out but I was so scared and then there was Poppy and Will and the rot and I don’t want to turn into one of those tragic people you see on the TV, all great big bald head and sad eyes and skinny arms and trying to raise money to go to some far-flung corner of the earth for wheatgerm therapy or …’

I was weeping so hard by then my stomach muscles had started to spasm, and I collapsed on the table, my head on my arms, and surrendered to my tears.

Which was when I felt Crystal stroking my hair. This woman I hardly knew and to whom I had been nothing but evil ever since meeting her, sat next to me while I wept, and stroked my hair.

Why this made me even more sad, I don’t know. Well, actually, I worked it out. I felt vulnerable. Accepting sympathy means you’ve dropped any pretence of not needing it and that leaves you raw. Plus I knew that there was no going back from this. It was out. My situation was out. And even if I could contain it as a tiny leak for a while, it would eventually become a raging torrent, claiming the few people I knew and loved just as it was claiming me.

The hair stroking helped, mind you. I know from experience with Monty that it’s quite hard to keep that sort of thing up
after the first few minutes — it’s hard on the wrist — but Crystal never wavered at all.

Finally, I got the sobs under control and eventually the tears. Then she got up to make me a cup of lemon verbena tea. She was very good at being quiet. At waiting. I really liked that about her, actually.

‘So, tell me everything,’ she said. ‘And maybe I can help you figure out what to do next.’

She was the last person in the world I would have imagined baring my soul to but as the secrets leached out of me I began to realise that in a way she was perfect. I didn’t have to worry about my relationship with her, for a start, because up until then we hadn’t really had one. Or not a meaningful one at any rate. I wasn’t in love with her, I wasn’t her mother, she hadn’t married me then cheated on me with a man, she hadn’t given birth to me, she wasn’t suicidal. She was probably the person with the least investment in my existence in the whole wide world, other than to not want Monty to bear unnecessary pain on my account, which was something we had in common.

Plus despite her alternative leanings, it turned out Crystal was not particularly psycho-babbly or airy-fairy or tree-huggy, as one might have expected.

In fact, the first thing she did was write a list. She said writing lists helped calm her down when she was stressed about anything because it put problems in order. You could look at a list of things and see how you could tackle each one separately without feeling sick about it, she said. Whereas if they all just stayed jumbled in your mind in one great big sticky ball you never got to consider them individually.

She actually spoke a lot of sense for someone with toe rings and a Chinese tattoo.

And she was enormously efficient, in a secretarial sort
of way, which she said was the result of having been a bank manager in her previous life! A bank manager? Within an hour she had secured an appointment with one of London’s top surgeons at his Harley Street clinic the following day. How did these people get bookings so easily? I’m sure I couldn’t if I tried — which I supposed I generally didn’t.

She offered to come with me and I accepted partly because I was in shock at learning she had once been a bank manager, partly because I had expected her to recommend alternative treatments involving odd herbs and strangely spelt clinics in Switzerland not a Harley Street consultant, and partly because I wanted to keep her on my side so that she wouldn’t tell Monty.

‘You’re going to have to tell him eventually,’ she said. ‘And Archie and Beth and Poppy and Harry, too, for that matter. They can help you, Florence. We can all help you.’

‘But they all have their own problems right now,’ I argued. ‘And I can’t bear to make matters worse.’

‘You might make matters better, had you thought about that? You’re putting a lot of pressure on yourself trying to keep everyone else happy and it’s not necessarily the best thing. Try having a little faith in your family.’

‘Can we just try to get through the next couple of days?’ I begged her. ‘Nick says it might be no big deal, just a little deal, a wart-sized deal. And then I would have worried them all for nothing.’

She agreed, as I knew she would. I wasn’t quite ready to let go of my one great big sticky ball.

Nobody expects me to be practical — maybe because I’m small and blonde — but I am and I always have been.

When Florence told me about her diagnosis the best thing I could think of was to write a list of all the things we needed to do and organise them in order of priority.

It took me one minute on Google and two phone calls to get an appointment with London’s most highly recommended colorectal surgeon. You have to love the internet, don’t you? His secretary told me there wasn’t a chance at first but then she spoke to the consultant himself and came back saying that it appeared they would be able to slot us in after all. I supposed they thought Florence’s case was that urgent.

Next, I rang Nick March back to get him to fax a referral over to the surgeon’s office. Th en I made an appointment for a CT scan the following day, and I changed the time for a job interview I had so I could go with Florence to her appointment. After that I went to buy flowers.

It was all on the list.

You can laugh at lists — and the people who make them — but let me tell you this: some days, when everything else feels totally beyond your control, a few ticks on a piece of paper is about as good as it gets.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

When I woke the next morning I knew my life was about to change. Again. After all, my before and after worlds had collided when I spilled the beans to Crystal and it was inevitable that chain reactions would follow. The first of which was starting with my visit to the rooms of Mr Worthington, Harley Street, at eleven o’clock.

I pushed the unpleasant prospect of another ‘internal examination’ from my mind with a shiver and cuddled down beneath my quilt, my thoughts turning instead, without me directing them there, to Will. With all I have on my mind, I asked myself, why think of him? Then it occurred to me that I had just watched the bedside clock tick past seven-thirty and I had not heard him let himself in the front door.

Good, I thought, maybe he had finally got the message, given up, gone away. I turned over and curled into a ball. It’s just that I had become used to the sound of him letting
himself in. It seemed odd for it to be seven-thirty-five and not to have heard it.

I still hadn’t heard it by seven-forty-five, nor seven-forty-seven, nor seven-forty-eight. By the time I went downstairs to make my breakfast, it was past eight and I was feeling irritable in the way you do if your socks don’t match or your knickers are scratchy. These are not big problems but they can still ruin your day.

Since when had Will become someone I expected to be anywhere at any particular time anyway, I asked myself as I spread honey and apricot jam on a muffin? Mostly I expected him not to be there and he was. Strangely, I had not been as irritated by that as I was currently by finding him absent, as per my wishes. I wasn’t entirely sure what that was about.

After breakfast I started to reorganise the pantry alphabetically but ran out of steam by B for baking soda because the shapes weren’t working together. I was considering whether colour coding would cause the same problem when there was a timid knock at the front door.

It wasn’t going to be Will, because he had a key. Crystal had gone out and was meeting me at Harley Street so it wasn’t going to be her either. She had a key anyway, as did Monty, who was off somewhere doing his own thing and not telling me anything about it.

The timid knock repeated itself so I returned the almonds, anchovies and asparagus to their previous positions and went downstairs to see who it was.

Poppy stood on my doorstep, a red beret on top of her orange curls and a suitcase in one hand.

I was so surprised to see her I almost didn’t spend a split second scanning the street to see if Will’s truck was approaching, which it wasn’t.

‘Oh, Effie!’ Poppy cried, throwing herself at me. ‘Can you believe it? It’s me! I’m here! It’s so good to see you, how utterly divine! I hope you don’t mind me coming.’

Of course I didn’t mind, but I was astounded. She hated the city usually and I couldn’t remember the last time she’d come on her own. Plus, the timing wasn’t brilliant. I had Mr Worthington, after all, which I wasn’t ready to explain just yet so would have to leave her on her own and lie about where I was going or she would want to come too.

She must have seen the worry on my face. ‘Oh, I should have rung,’ she wailed. ‘I got the first train. Beth said I should have rung but I wanted it to be a surprise.’

I pulled her inside and shut the door.

‘Don’t be silly, it’s fine. It’s wonderful. I love surprises. It’s just I didn’t expect to see you. And — you look so good, Poppy.’ She did. Like a different person from the one I had left behind swaddled in a cashmere blanket near the vegie patch at Tannington Hall.

‘I’ve had the most wonderful idea and I wanted to come and tell you about it in person,’ she said, pulling off her beret, shaking her curls. She wore long sleeves to cover the scars on her wrists but otherwise she looked the picture of health.

‘Oh, look at all this lovely space,’ she cried, looking around the abandoned building site that was my home’s ground floor, not even noticing the gaping hole in the floor or the scaffolding stacked up or the dust or the lack of builder and plumber. ‘And the beautiful light! Oh, it’s gorgeous! It’s perfect!’

She twirled around from the office side to the TV room side and it was such a pleasure to see her back to being her over-the-top happy little self that the sick feeling I had about my own personal lack of Will in my life drained momentarily away.

‘You’re pretty gorgeous yourself, Poppy,’ I told her, kicking
myself for not having the slightest vestige of gluten-free confection in the house. ‘You’ve got some life back in your face.’

She twirled back over to me, took my hand and beamed. ‘I feel good. I feel, well, maybe not gorgeous,’ she said, ‘but so much better and it’s because of you.’

‘Because of me?’ I had spoken to her on the phone every few days and sent a couple of funny cards but other than that I thought I’d been too preoccupied to be much help.

‘Yes!’ She was practically quivering with excitement. ‘Because of what you said to me in the garden at home, about needing to be out in the world not hidden away at home and then I thought of your rot and Daddy’s cheque and you having something to look forward to and I knew then that was what I was missing in my life. Something to look forward to. Because the thing I had been most looking forward to never happened to me and that’s what was getting on top of me. So I decided I needed another something to look forward to, one that could happen, and then it hit me and it was so obvious, I couldn’t imagine why none of us had thought of it before.’

I had no idea what she was talking about but still, just looking at her dancing eyes and twittering hands and radiant face made me want her to have it.

‘So are you going to tell me what it is?’

‘Well, it’s the same thing as you,’ she said, with a sweet happy smile, as one arm swept around the vastness of my new over-sized open-plan venture-that-never-was-to-be.

‘The tearoom! I want to come and help you run the tearoom.’

An engine roared outside and I used this as an excuse to look out the window to see if it was Will and to plot how I would handle the next few moments. I was in shock. This was a disaster.

‘It was Archie’s idea really,’ Poppy continued, oblivious to my stalling tactic, ‘because we were having one of his brainstorming afternoons where he was helping me workshop my skills and to be honest it was getting a bit depressing until we remembered last year at the village fair.’

‘The village fair?’ I echoed, my mind whirring, as I picked up Poppy’s suitcase and headed upstairs.

‘Yes, last year I helped on the bric-à-brac stall,’ Poppy chirruped behind me, ‘doing the change and suggesting things to people. Even Mrs Parsons, you know, the big bosomy lady who plays the Church of England organ, said I had done a wonderful job and she’s the one who adds everything up at the end so she should know. So Archie said, “What about Effie’s tearoom? Maybe you could do the change and the suggestions at Effie’s tearoom?” And at first I thought that was the most ridiculous idea because I wouldn’t know what to do. I’d be useless. I’d just get in everybody’s way and drive them mad and I don’t know the first thing about flour or icing sugar or any of that sort of thing.’

‘Lemon verbena tea?’ I asked, nodding encouragingly, hoping I didn’t look as wretched as I felt. ‘Crystal loves it.’

Poppy’s eyes, which had been glistening already, moistened even more at this.

‘You’re getting on? Oh, how wonderful! I’m so proud of you, Eff. And anyway, then I thought, well you could be in the kitchen, doing the baking and making things with the flour and icing sugar, and I could be showing people to their tables and giving them menus and taking their money. I wouldn’t ruin everything, I promise I wouldn’t.’

‘Of course you wouldn’t ruin everything!’ Why would she think that? Oh, shit! Could I just have one single day when life wasn’t full of the most ridiculous complications? How could I
tell her there was going to be no tearoom? How could I tell her the thing she had chosen to look forward to was as unlikely at this point as her little redheaded baby?

Another car backfired outside and I crossed to the kitchen window to have a look.

‘Are you waiting for someone? Am I in the way?’

‘Of course you’re not! I’m delighted that you’re here. But I do just have to dash out for a bit to a …’ I tried to think of something Poppy really wouldn’t want to do with me. ‘To a cheese tasting, I’m afraid,’ I told her. ‘Twelve different sorts, cow, goat and sheep. But mainly cow,’ I emphasised, in case goat and sheep weren’t dairy. ‘Sorry, didn’t know you were coming when I arranged it.’

She grimaced. ‘Oh well, I can’t be much help in the cheese department, I’m afraid. But I could do a bit of gardening out the front while you’re gone,’ she suggested. ‘It needs a bit of work before we open if we’re going to put tables and chairs out there. I thought we could make a couple of sort of garden “rooms” so people could hide away a little bit. What do you think? Rose bushes, obviously, but maybe some tall cosmos and a bit of box hedging and something fragrant like jasmine or daphne?’

‘Lovely,’ I said. ‘Garden away.’

I wasn’t going to close her down now. I had Crystal to meet at Mr Worthington’s offices. I’d get through that and then I would break Poppy’s heart.

I walked to Harley Street: along Regent’s Canal, cutting through the park, past the rose gardens, which were blooming in all their glory. The smell was almost hypnotic. For a fleeting moment, I toyed with sitting among the blooms and missing my appointment but as Crystal now knew my situation, I knew any avoidance tactics could only be temporary.

Nonetheless, ‘I’ve got such a headache,’ I told her when we met outside Mr Worthington’s rooms. ‘I wonder if we should come back another time?’

‘There is no other time, we were lucky to get this appointment,’ Crystal said, opening up her shoulder bag and rustling around inside it. ‘I have some tiger balm in here,’ she offered. ‘Would that help? You can rub it on your temples and it will help calm you.’

I can’t imagine what would have calmed me at that point. What with Will not turning up to do the renovations I didn’t want and Poppy arriving to help me with the tearooms I wasn’t going to have, I was a bundle of nerves. A bundle of nerves who mostly wanted to run away and hide under a rock and never come out again. But that would be at Monty’s peril, I had to keep reminding myself.

Mr Worthington’s waiting room was a pleasant, peaceful sort of a place but I couldn’t keep my legs from jiggling or my hands from fidgeting. After three layers of tiger balm, my eyes were watering but nothing about me was calm.

When the receptionist finally called my name I nearly jumped out of my skin. Crystal stood to come with me, taking me by the elbow and heading me towards Mr Worthington’s door.

‘No, no!’ I cried, panicked. I didn’t want anyone talking about my innards in front of her. ‘I’ll be fine! You wait here. I’ll tell you about it afterwards.’

‘Actually,’ the receptionist intervened, ‘we recommend you take a friend in with you, dear. Sometimes it’s good to have someone else listening to what Mr Worthington says in case you get confused.’

‘He doesn’t speak English?’ I asked, dimly. It sounded like such an English name.

‘No dear, it’s more the shock. Sometimes it’s hard to remember everything you’ve been told when you’ve had a bit of a shock.’

I found it hard to believe that I could be more shocked than I already had been in the past couple of months but while I was trying to work out how to protest further, Crystal steered me towards Mr Worthington’s door and into his office — a room that looked so much like the library of a stately home that I almost expected an octogenarian butler to creak through the side door and offer me a sherry.

‘It’s all a bit
Brideshead Revisited,
isn’t it?’ I whispered to Crystal as the side door did indeed open. But instead of an elderly manservant, Mr Worthington emerged. He wasn’t old and bent over and bearing a silver tray clinking with crystal. He was tall, particularly upright, in his forties I guessed, and dressed dapperly in dark grey, with similarly grey hair and a square jaw.

Crystal made a strange squeak upon seeing him and I guessed she too was expecting someone different but I didn’t give it much more thought. I was too busy concentrating on him. He really was very good looking and had lovely warm, twinkly eyes.

‘Florence,’ he said holding out one of his large, clean hands in my direction. I shook it. It too was warm, which I wasn’t sure was such a good thing for a surgeon, sweating on the instruments and all that, but it felt nice anyway. Stanley Morris’s dear old mum would certainly approve.

‘Google says you’re the best person for colons,’ I said, my fascination with his good looks waning as I remembered why I was there, My teeth, I realised, were on the brink of chattering.

This was it, the moment of truth. I was in a Harley Street
consulting room talking to a surgeon about my disease. On my own. Well, Crystal was there too, of course, but who was she anyway? And why was she sitting slightly behind me and not saying anything?

‘I think Nick March sent you my test results,’ I said, somewhat shakily. ‘He says it’s important to know if it’s rust or forest fire — not so much for me, but I have a son …’ I lost my composure at the thought of Monty.