On Top of Everything (26 page)

She’s a very attractive woman anyway, but when she laughs she’s quite beautiful. I could see then what Harry had seen in her, why it must have been so hard for him to leave, despite the circumstances. Without seeing her in the flesh I hadn’t truly appreciated his position. I’d just thought, if your heart’s not in it, get out, old man. But having her sitting there, laughing, after such a dreadful thing had just happened, I fell in love with her a little myself. She was quite captivating.

And then Crystal, poor Crystal, whom I really should have noticed had got such a fright to begin with, also started to laugh. An Australian laugh is never quite as catchy as an English one, of course, but hers was pretty infectious all the same. Despite the fact that mortification still clung to my own innards in spasms, I too joined in the laughter.

I laughed till Florence cried, and then Crystal cried too, and then Evelyn brought in the tea. She’s seen plenty of tears before so wasn’t at all fazed.

‘It just can’t keep getting worse,’ Florence said as I poured for her. ‘It just can’t. Not everything. Something has to start getting better.’

‘It will,’ I told her and that wasn’t an empty promise. I didn’t know all there was to know at that stage about her illness but I knew about her life. And just having Crystal there with her in my office to discuss her treatment was the beginning of the something getting better. ‘I can help you,’ I said.

And she thanked me. Very sweetly, she thanked me. Then told me her own lemon biscuits were better than the Duchy of Cornwall and the other ones put together.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

When my taxi pulled up outside the house Will’s truck was in my driveway and for the first time since I had met him I allowed whatever was stirring inside me to rise to the top.

Anticipation was the cherry on my cupcake in this particular instance.

Anticipation. It was a sensation that had been missing in my world in recent times and allowing it to envelop me felt like being rolled in chocolate and sprinkled with Cadbury Flake.

I ran up the outside stairs of the house and flung open the door to find Will mid-conversation with Poppy, who still had her gardening gloves on. I checked her face to see if he’d mentioned I had put a halt to the tearoom, at which point I noticed there were bits of what was obviously a semi-industrial kitchen stacked in the far corner by the back door.

‘Don’t be cross,’ Will said, ‘but I got it for a song. A mate
of Sid’s has just closed down his gastro pub in Mile End and he was virtually giving this away but I had to collect it this morning so —’

‘It’ll be perfect, don’t you think?’ Poppy interrupted, clasping her hands excitedly in front of her. ‘I was just telling Will about the plan, the me-helping-you plan.’

Will and I looked at each other. He was silently pleading with me, I could tell, to go ahead, to do it, and I was silently pleading the exact same thing.

‘Is something wrong?’ Poppy asked.

‘No,’ Will and I answered simultaneously.

Then more silence. Not the dread-laden, are-you-really-my-husband’s-boyfriend sort of silence that I had so recently experienced but an electric anticipatory could-you-really-be-my-own-boyfriend sort of silence, which is not really a silence at all. Well, you can’t hear anything, but you can feel it.

‘Oh my God,’ Poppy said, her jaw dropping open as she looked from me to him and back again. ‘You two!’

I had so much to say it had all got stuck in my chest then dropped to my hands, which hung heavy and motionless at my sides. I couldn’t remember what I usually did with them.

Even Will seemed incapable of speaking, of moving, his eyes still just searching mine.

‘I am just going to go outside and finish pruning the … erm, I’ll find something to prune,’ Poppy said and headed for the door. ‘Oh, my God,’ she mouthed at me behind his back before she disappeared. ‘Oh, my God!’

We stood there on opposite sides of the room for I don’t know how long. Probably not long at all but it felt like forever. I was almost scared to breathe. I was almost scared to do anything. Almost.

‘Whatever you have to tell me, it’s OK,’ Will finally said.
‘Honestly. It’s OK.’

And just like that, I wasn’t scared any more.

‘I believe you,’ I told him. Then we walked towards each other and he took me in his arms. That was it. He just took me in his arms. I nestled there, against his chest, breathing him in, feeling his heart beating against my shoulder, smelling him, and if I had died right then and there, I truly believe I would have died happy.

This is what it’s about, I thought. This is what life is about. And it could all end in a minute, or tomorrow, or next week, or next year, but it wasn’t ended just yet and it felt utterly glorious.

‘I have cancer,’ I said into the softness of his shirt and he clutched me even tighter then, rocked me gently from side to side. ‘It’s in my bowel, or my colon, or whatever it’s called, and it’s very unsexy and it might be in other places too but I’m not sure. Although I think I’m going to die, which is why I didn’t want to open the tearoom and I didn’t want anything to happen between us because if this kills me you’ll be left all on your own and I just couldn’t bear that.’

He folded me tighter still into his body.

‘I knew there was something going on,’ he said. ‘I thought there might be someone else.’

‘But isn’t this worse?’ I asked, my eyes scrunched closed against the possibility. ‘Isn’t this much, much worse? I might die, Will.’

He pulled back then, but only enough to take me by my shoulders and look me in the eyes again.

‘But you might not,’ he said.

‘But I might,’ I said again.

‘Florence, you might
not
. And anyway, if we only have one hour together it will still be the best hour of my life.’

‘Are you telling me you only have an hour?’ I asked him. You don’t go from being glass-half-empty to glass-half-f in an instant, after all.

‘I’m telling you I have forever,’ Will answered. ‘We both do. I will look after you forever, Florence, no matter how long that is. In sickness and in health, I will look after you. I don’t care if you live till the end of next week or till you’re a hundred.’

‘I’m very close to a hundred now,’ I said. ‘But I’ve decided that doesn’t matter.’

I remembered my dream then, the one where Will had told me that he loved me, that he would always be there for me, that with him beside me I had nothing to fear and never would ever again.

So I surrendered, that moment: I surrendered to whatever life had in store for me. I’d survived on my own two feet without a job, without a husband, without my son, without a compliant digestive system. I knew I could do it, I knew I could survive, but I also knew now that there was more to life, more to living, than just surviving.

Maybe rotten things did happen in threes. Or maybe they happened in sixes. But do you know what I discovered that day? You don’t have to count them.

Will moved in more or less straight away. Time was precious, after all. And in the circumstances, once everyone knew what the circumstances were, everyone who knew and loved me agreed it was the best possible outcome.

I had my surgery — Charles did indeed do the honours — and it went exceedingly well. I recovered in less than four weeks. I took each day after that as it came.

One of the best days was about five months later when we opened Rose’s to the public. It took longer to buy tables and chairs and cake forks and napkins than I had ever imagined
and it took a while to fully regain my strength but everyone pitched in and helped. Even Marguerite, who became a regular at dropping in well before the doors were opened to the public, proved indispensable when it came to sourcing non-matching china. Plus she bumped into Sinead, the cleaner from my old shop, crying outside the tube station because she’d been dumped by her fiancé of one day, so we got a cleaner too. Then it was just a matter of me making the cakes and Poppy making the suggestions and taking the money.

We opened with a grand gala to which everyone near and dear to me, to us, was invited. The food was a triumph. There were plain scones and cheese ones and date ones made from spelt flour (for Poppy) yet still, amazingly, quite delicious. There were brandy snaps with triple sec filling, there were tiny strawberry tarts, there were chocolate cupcakes, berry cupcakes, lemon cupcakes, chocolate-berry-lemon cupcakes. There were éclairs, there were bite-sized quiches, there were cucumber sandwiches, there was tiramisu served in shot glasses (Monty’s idea) and sugar-free carob balls that were at least chock full of macadamia nuts (Crystal’s idea). There were cherry and pinot noir dark chocolate truffles, made by my gorgeous man and adorning the top stack of each three-tiered tray on every one of the tables in our beautiful garden.

Mum and Dad were there positively brimming with pride; Stanley Morris was there with his daughter; Marguerite with her husband and twins; Charlotte and Martin and the girls came (and brought a pockmarked French jardinière of course). We’d made friends again, Charlotte and I, partly because life was too short to keep grudges and partly because Abigail was very good at washing dishes.

Crystal invited her Earls Court crowd who turned out to be from her banking past and quite presentable, plus the exact
types who might like a spot of afternoon tea by the canal on a regular basis.

Rosalie, the cat woman, who used to come into the antique store to look at picture frames, arrived with Julia from the real estate agency. They’d started a film club together and got chatting with Rupert, the schoolteacher, who said he’d love to join and the three of them retreated to a corner to debate
Five Easy Pieces.

Even Whiffy turned up.

I’d given him his invite at the Formosa Street skip, and while he wouldn’t come inside or sit at one of the tables in the courtyard, he drank a cup of lapsang souchong sitting on the kerb and ate three wild duck sandwiches in quick succession before making a very polite thank you and peeing through the rails on the bridge into the canal.

More exciting than that, though, and infinitely better smelling, Will’s ex-wife Natasha came. He’d asked her to but she’d given him every reason to think she would rather stick needles in her eyes so it was an extra thrill to see her climb out of her car with Terry, her husband, and the three children. Will’s two girls were beautiful, just like their mother. Terribly polite, especially towards him, but I suspected they had inherited his kindness and compassion just by the way they treated other people, and he was amazing with them. I know he must have wanted everyone to leave so he could just concentrate solely on them, not waste a precious moment, but he stayed low key, subtly getting them to help so they were always near, but not making a fuss that would embarrass them, or Natasha.

‘They take after you,’ I said to her as I offered her a cupcake. ‘What beautiful children.’

‘Thank you,’ she said and we watched Will pour a cup of tea for Edith, of the bad mornings, whom I’d bumped into at
Tesco and invited along, to her great joy. She had a gentleman friend, Ted, who she’d met at the library.

‘He’s so different now,’ Natasha said, looking at Will, with perhaps a trace of wistfulness. ‘I wish he could have been like that …’

I knew what she meant. I’d done more than my share of wishing things could have been different. As if to prove this point, Charles and Harry arrived and I pointed them out to her.

‘My ex,’ I said, ‘with his boyfriend.’

Her mouth dropped open, but she had the presence of mind to close it as Charles and Harry came over to kiss me hello.

‘You get on so well with him,’ she marvelled when they moved in the direction of Poppy who was surrounded by children. ‘How do you do it?’

‘Well, once I finished hitting him with bananas, hating him, resenting him, and, oh, did I mention hitting him with bananas? I had to admit that he was happier and so, the way things have worked out, am I.’

Natasha looked at her husband, Terry, who was wiping raspberry jam off the hands and face of their littlest girl and smiled.

‘You might just be on to something there,’ she said, and then she got a look on her face I had well become accustomed to. ‘And you,’ she said, her head listing to one side, ‘are you all right? Will said you’d not been well.’

‘I’m well right now,’ I said. ‘And that’s what counts.’

I couldn’t tell her that as long as Will was with me, telling me he loved me, that I was beautiful no matter what scars, internal or external, I bore, I was all right. He and the moment we were in were all that mattered. Everything else was a bonus. 

Life wasn’t perfect, of course it wasn’t. I was moody, sometimes scared, sometimes angry. Will did his best to stay on an even keel but I drove him mad sometimes, I knew that. He told me. We argued. We made up. We expressed our feelings!

Natasha and I watched as he picked up his younger daughter Ella and sat her on a table to do up her shoe.

‘I am a bit
carpe-diem
-ish these days,’ I suddenly said to her, ‘so forgive me if I am speaking out of turn but Will would love to see more of the girls and so would I. The odd weekend, perhaps, or a few days in the school holidays, if you thought that was appropriate? Whatever you think. We’d fit in completely.’

I knew what it felt like to let go of anger, resentment, hurt. I knew how hard it was.

‘He always had it in him to be a good father,’ Natasha said, softly. ‘I suppose the timing just wasn’t right. Let me talk to Terry.’ We smiled at each other and it was a rather lovely, hopeful moment.

I sat down then, a familiar tired-but-happy feeling washing over me and I watched Poppy dance around with one of Marguerite’s twins: the one that looked less like mothball Granny.

Will took the opportunity to sweep Ella up in his arms then and danced her over to my sister, where the four of them did an impromptu family waltz around the cosmos she had planted and he had fertilised.

I caught Monty’s eye. He was sitting on the steps in the sunshine and when I looked at him he smiled at me and I felt so loved, so understood, I wanted to weep tears of sheer gratitude.

Here was my family, drinking tea and eating cupcakes in
my grandmother’s garden and together we could face whatever rotten things came our way.

Because if I’d learned anything in recent months it was that there really is no escaping the fact that life can simply be horribly unfair.

In the past I think I had corralled rotten things into groups of three because at some level it gave me the impression I was controlling them, keeping track of them. In my world I believed the universe would only dish out so much shite before it realised it had overdone it and corrected matters.