On Top of Everything (22 page)

I nodded again. Swallowed. Licked the sticky wine off my chin. Found myself thinking about the feel of his ribs beneath his shirt, imagined my fingers running over them.

‘This is the part where you say something,’ Will pointed out, quite politely in the circumstances.

But sadly all the somethings I wanted to say were seriously off limits. I filled my wine glass to the brim again, took another gulp and was about to once more feign being aghast at the time on my non-existent watch when I was saved by the phone.

It was Harry, mortified at the news of Poppy, which he’d just heard from Monty.

‘How could you not tell me about this?’ he demanded furiously. I shrugged my shoulders at Will in an apologetic fashion and he stood, held up his fingers in an ‘I’ll give you five’ sign and pulling his cellphone out of his jeans pocket, took to the stairs.

‘I adore Poppy, Floss,’ Harry was saying, although my mind was still stuck on Will’s pocket. ‘You know that. I’m devastated she’d do something like this and that you wouldn’t even think to tell me.’

‘I’m devastated too, Harry,’ I said, ‘about a lot of things.’

‘Oh, for God’s sake!’ There it was, that exasperation that I was noticing so much more now that I felt differently about my husband. Had it always been there? Had I not noticed it before?

‘I know you’re devastated too,’ my exasperated ex-husband continued, ‘and I’m sorry, you know I am, but really Floss, just
because I’m not there doesn’t mean we’re not a family. That you and Monty and I aren’t still a family.’

‘That’s exactly what it means,’ I cried, fairly exasperated myself by then. ‘You not being here puts the complete kibosh on the whole entire family thing, Harry. You have your own family now with the wonderful “Charles” and that stupid little chihuahua.’

‘That stupid little what? What are you on about?’

I’d forgotten Charles’s pocket-sized dog was only a figment of my funereal imagination. ‘I don’t have to tell you anything, any more, Harry bloody bollocky Dowling,’ I said. ‘That’s what you get for ruining my bloody bollocky life.’

‘Are you drunk?’

I think drunk was taking it a bit far. I was certainly feeling a foreign buzz of confidence that seemed to come with drinking in the early afternoon but I already had a headache and I hadn’t even made a dent on my third glass.

‘So what if I am?’ I challenged Harry.

‘Oh, Floss, please, for God’s sake. Can’t you just …’

‘Thank you, yes, I can,’ I said brightly. ‘I’ll pass that on. Good day.’ And I slammed down the phone.

He might still be a family, but I wasn’t. I was just me. I picked up my wine glass and was just about to knock the whole hideous lot back when Will reappeared. He stopped and looked at me and if I was another person, in another life, without all my horrible hidden baggage, I would just have thrown myself at him and begged him to take care of me and look after me and do sweaty, sticky, sensationally filthy things to me.

Pale blue really was his colour. And his face! Handsome, tick; tanned, tick; masculine, tick (underlined, capital letters); and somehow sort of completely understanding despite my obvious lunacy, tick. I could see it in the furrow of his thirty-one-year-old
brow, the slight cloudiness in his thirty-one-year-old eyes.

He strode across the kitchen towards me and for a nano second I thought it really was going to be a proper Mills & Boon moment. I even considered a swoon of the not losing consciousness variety. Instead he snatched my glass away, threw the contents down the sink and took me by the hand.

‘Come on, you,’ he said. ‘Go and get some shoes and a coat and meet me downstairs. I’ve got a surprise.’

Perhaps I was still in swoon mode, because I didn’t argue. I did what he told me and put more make-up on while I was at it, plus perfume, and met him down by the hole, which I did my best to ignore while trying very hard not to fall down it. Then we went outside where he opened the passenger door of his pick-up truck and indicated I should jump in.

The truck was yellow, or had been, before rust settled in the places where it had crashed into things or scraped along beside them. But his builder’s bits and bobs were neatly tucked away in two locked chests in the open tray at the back, and in the cab it was tidier than the Golf by a country mile.

He had a clipboard, even. And there wasn’t one single empty takeaway coffee cup rolling around on the floor. Or a thousand receipts stuck behind the visor. Or lipsticks melted into the dash.

And it smelt nice. Like oranges.

‘Where are we going?’ I asked as he pulled out of Blomfield Road into Warwick Avenue.

‘You’ll see,’ he said, smiling.

I watched his hands move around the steering wheel, shifting the manual gear lever, flicking on the indicators, as we moved towards Edgware Road. I started to relax. It was a glorious day despite the nip in the air and the city seemed to be exploding
with greenery. You could say what you liked about the grime of London but for those few wonderful months in the middle of the year, it shone like an emerald. All of a sudden, I didn’t actually mind where I was going, it was just lovely to be going somewhere with someone, especially Will.

As we rounded Marble Arch I started to get a light fluttery feeling in my stomach and when we turned from Park Lane towards Grosvenor Square it became a fully-fledged butterfly. He was taking me to Claridge’s.

He drove his truck up to the Brook Street entrance and handed the keys to the doorman who simply nodded a polite greeting, as though he parked such pre-loved vehicles all the time.

‘How ever did you get a booking?’ I asked, as we crossed the black and white tiled lobby. Usually, you had to book weeks in advance.

‘It’s always worth a shot,’ Will shrugged. ‘I called just after they’d had a cancellation, so here we are. Must be my lucky day.’

We were shown to a table in the Reading Room, tucked in the corner of the massive lobby, on the opposite side from the pianist and the double bass player who plonked and plucked soothingly as we passed tables of lunching ladies and businessmen.

The place was full and humming but one of the wonderful things about Claridge’s was that no matter how busy it was, there always remained an elegant ambience that spoke of nothing but good taste and extreme comfort.

‘You’ll be going for the champagne afternoon tea, I expect,’ Will said, opening the menu. ‘A thirsty person like yourself.’

I stroked the pale green stripes on my Bernardaud china cup. It was French, from Limoges as it happened, but it fit the
Claridge’s Art Deco sensibility to a T so I couldn’t do anything but love it.

‘To be honest, I’m actually not much of a drinker,’ I confessed. ‘I thought I would try it for a while but it hasn’t really taken. I seem to go straight from choking it down to getting the most awful hangover and all I can think of is going to lie in a dark room with a cup of tea and a wet flannel.’

‘You should probably chuck it in, then,’ Will said. ‘Drinking doesn’t always pay even when you’re really good at it.’

A very pretty blonde waitress came to take our order and I found myself wishing the older, slightly pock-marked waiter on the other side of the room would come to replace her. The staff at Claridge’s were known for their inscrutable charm and efficiency but I couldn’t believe she wasn’t somehow invisibly flirting with Will.

‘I’ll have afternoon tea with Claridge’s Royal Blend,’ Will told her politely.

‘And I’ll have the same with the Rose Congou,’ I added crisply. The tea wouldn’t go so well with the sandwiches but it seemed wrong to order anything else, given that this was where Rose and I had had so many happy afternoons.

‘Is that what happened to you?’ I asked Will when the pretty blonde had left. ‘Drinking didn’t pay?

‘Among other things,’ Will answered, looking across the room at a spectacularly sculpted matron in her mid-sixties. I’d spotted her as we’d walked in. Chanel from head to toe, I suspected. ‘I can see why you like it here,’ he said. ‘There’s a lot to look at.’

‘And the lighting is kind,’ I said. There are very few places in the world where everything is just right and Claridge’s is one of them. ‘Spencer Tracy apparently said that when he died, not that he intended to, he didn’t want to go to heaven, he wanted to go to Claridge’s.’

I wondered if he was there now. It was definitely the sort of place that an elegant man might haunt, although I thought it was perhaps more of a Cary Grant sort of a place. Our sandwiches arrived and I was entranced to see how they’d been updated since I’d last been. It was now organic chicken and Scottish salmon and the cucumber came with rocket, which I couldn’t remember existing in Rose’s day.

The pretty waitress poured our tea, leaving it black. Then to my astonishment Will leaned over and delicately put about four drops of milk in my cup, just the way I liked it.

Do you know, in twenty years of marriage Harry had never remembered how I liked my tea? It hadn’t bothered me particularly at the time because he so rarely made the tea in the first place but still, he should have known.

I felt the wind quite blow out of my sails. Will couldn’t be this perfect, could he? I couldn’t deliberately not be having a love affair with the perfect man, could I?

‘How did your wife take her tea?’ I asked feeling a sudden urge to find his flaws.

‘She took it any way it came but she preferred it over-brewed with lots of milk.’

‘Right,’ I said. ‘And why aren’t you married to her any more?’

‘I treated her appallingly and she can’t forgive me,’ he said with such forthrightness I nearly choked on my rose-flavoured China leaf. ‘I’ve tried to make amends but it hasn’t been easy and it’s all my fault, I’m afraid. What’s more, it’s been terribly difficult for our daughters.’

‘You have daughters?’

I tried to hide my surprise, if that’s what it was. It had never occurred to me he’d have children. Little girl children. I took a soothing mouthful of tea and tried to ignore whatever was
aching inside me.

‘Yes. Lucy has just turned eight and Ella is six next month. I don’t see them very often but I keep in touch as best I can so that they know how much I think of them.’

‘She must be very angry with you, your wife. What did you do?’ I asked. ‘Did you cheat on her?’

‘Yes,’ he answered. ‘More than once. More than a few times. I was a complete and utter shit, to tell you the truth. I worked in an ad agency in those days and spent most of my time there. I drank too much, I took too many drugs, I stayed out all hours, sometimes for days in a row, and finally I drove my car into a tree when our daughters were in the back seat.’

I put my Dorrington ham with English mustard sandwich back on my pale-green-striped plate. Perhaps I didn’t want to know his flaws. Perhaps it was better to imagine that he was perfect.

‘Why are you telling me this?’ I asked.

Will looked me straight in the eyes and said: ‘You know why I am telling you this.’

The thing is that usually I kept what I was actually thinking to myself and talked about something completely different. I was under the impression that’s what most people did once they’d reached the age of about four. But when Will spoke it was as though his secret thought bubbles were being popped and escaping into the realm of audible conversation because what he said was so searingly frank. I didn’t quite know how to handle this. It felt frightening. I was a person with a lot of secrets to keep contained within my own personal silence, after all. If I contemplated them leaking out willy nilly I wouldn’t know where to start with the damage control.

‘Were the little girls all right?’ I asked retreating to a less confronting subject, although confronting enough, what with
the drink and the drugs and the crashing into trees.

‘Thankfully, yes,’ he said. ‘But I could have killed them. And I don’t mean if I did it again or the weather was worse or I’d had more tequila, I mean that day, as it was, I could have killed them.’

‘I’m so sorry,’ I said.

‘So am I,’ he agreed. ‘I’m not trying to ruin your afternoon tea,’ he looked around at the room full of people chatting happily as they sipped tea and feasted on bite-sized delicacies, ‘but I want you to know everything about me, Florence, warts and all.’

‘Well, those are quite some warts,’ I had to admit. Although it wasn’t the biggest flaw someone had revealed to me in recent weeks and it was nice to hear about it up front instead of, for example, after twenty years of marriage.

‘Did your wife boot you out after the tree?’ I asked.

‘Yes, she should have done it sooner but I made that too hard for her. She’s married again now to a very nice sensible chap who my girls love and they’ve had another little girl of their own.’

How much that hurt I had only started to imagine when our cakes and pastries arrived. I downed a raisin scone and Marco Polo jam with almost obscene haste, then went to work on a chocolate macaroon with tea-flavoured cream filling.

It was divine.

‘I can’t imagine you being so wild and irresponsible,’ I said, when I finally stopped concentrating so hard on my cakes. ‘It just doesn’t sound like you.’

‘It doesn’t sound like me now,’ Will corrected me. ‘But it turns out I was one of those idiots who had to lose it all before they could appreciate what they had in the first place. You know the type, Nick Hornby writes books about us all the
time. We’re a pretty sad bunch.’

‘But what made you like that to begin with?’ I asked. ‘Was it growing up somewhere wild like Africa or was it spending so much time at boarding school in England?’

‘I wish I knew the answer, or I wish there was an answer, but the truth is that I was just a spoiled little shit who got away with murder for far too long. There’s no excuse for it. I had great parents, a terrific wife, fantastic job, good friends — although not so much towards the end, they very wisely gave up on me, most of them — and I had many brilliant opportunities in my life but I blew them all because I was a selfish bloody idiot.’

‘Oh, I see.’

‘Don’t look like that, Florence, please. I’m just trying to explain why I am the way I am now. I wasted so much time when I was younger. I messed up a decent woman and two beautiful kids and if I could go back and fix it all I would, but I can’t. What I can do is make sure I am never so bloody stupid again.’