On Top of Everything (9 page)

‘I don’t care if Monty is gay,’ I said, realising as I said the words that it was true. It was one thing to have a gay husband, irritating for practical reasons as much as anything else, but to have a gay son, well, that was different. Entirely different. As long as Monty was happy I didn’t care what he was or with whom he was it. I just hoped with all my heart that if he was gay he would accept it from the word go and be proud of it instead of getting married and living with a woman for twenty years before blurting it out over the table the same afternoon she was fired from her job.

‘I don’t care either,’ Dad said quickly. ‘In fact we would welcome it, wouldn’t we Beth? Should we light a Tibetan hoping stick or two, do you think?’

‘Ooh yes,’ Mum said, quite excitedly. ‘Please do. Another layer of sexual complexity in the family? I think so. I’d adore a gay grandson. How wonderful. He can adopt, you know, they all do these days, so we needn’t be without great-grandchildren just because he’s travelling a different path.’

Poppy sniffed. ‘Well, I could still give you grandchildren, Beth,’ she said sadly. Poppy had bad luck on the romance front, the subject of much psyche-delving for her and my parents.

‘Of course, darling,’ my mother was quick to say. ‘We pray to the moon for those little redheaded angels to arrive.’

‘And anyway,’ Poppy continued, ‘Monty seemed to be taking the heterosexual route when I caught him shagging that little blonde with the enormous bosoms from the riding
school last time he stayed here.’

‘That doesn’t mean anything,’ Mum said candidly. ‘Harry’s been shagging Effie all this time and look at him.’

They all turned to me. In a normal family this would have been an embarrassing moment but I had learned years ago the only person who felt embarrassment in my family was me and it’s a pretty empty sensation when nobody else is sharing it.

‘Monty shagged a little blonde with enormous bosoms from the riding school?’ I asked Poppy instead. How could she not have passed on this vital piece of information about my darling only son, my precious virginal baby, sooner?

‘She was very pretty,’ Poppy shrugged, ‘and Jethro at the Black Swan has shagged her too and says —’

I held up my hand to stop her. Again, details such as these I did not need.

‘Have you spoken to him, to Monty?’ Dad asked and the concern on his usually blissfully carefree face touched me. ‘Does he know?’

‘No, I haven’t and yes he does,’ I answered, trying to maintain a semblance of control. ‘Harry spoke to him somewhere in Thailand. It wasn’t a good line but Harry swears he was quite calm about it. I can’t imagine what he thinks of it all but anyway he gets back this week. I’ve had an email …’ My semblance abandoned me. I could not speak.

‘Hang in there, Mum,’ was all the email had said. ‘I’ll be home soon. Everything will be OK. Love you lots. M.’

From the very start Florence showed a certain contrariness.

Fancy being fertilised in the ladies’ loo at Luton when she could have chosen the most romantic city in the world!

Anyway, there I was, all ready for one of England’s first water births. The Russians had been birthing babies underwater for years and it sounded like such a lovely way to bring a new life into the world. We had the swimming pool all ready and waiting in the sitting room at Primrose Hill. The midwife and I had even featured in the
Ham & High.
Such excitement!

But a month out from Florence’s due date she turned to the breech position and no amount of shoulder stands or cat stretches would turn her back again. In the end I had to go to hospital by ambulance and have every drug known to mankind, none of them organic, and to top it all off, a Caesarean. I never even got to dip a toe in the pool. The embarrassment, I can’t tell you. The midwife never spoke to me again. I had to go to University College Hospital to get one for Poppy.

She was such a serious baby, Florence, not at all relaxed like Archie and me. She seemed to prefer a routine, which of course wasn’t really on the cards for us at the time. But you can’t make someone free and easy if they’re not wired that way and Florence has certainly never been free and easy. Very gifted in many ways, but none of them easygoing.

I would never say we didn’t approve of Harry because there’s
no joy in being judgemental but I was surprised that she settled down so soon. Archie and I married young too but we both had marvellous fun playing the field first. I don’t think Florence even played the garden path.

She and my own mother were bonded in a past life, I think, maybe on the same side of a battlefield. The opposite side from me, I would imagine.

I remember trying to get Florence to help me make a dream-catcher when she was a tot. I had bamboo, I had feathers, I had beads, I had a glue gun and all she had to do was help but she did not want a dream-catcher, she told me. She did not want to catch her dreams, she said. She didn’t mind letting them go. How could we ever possibly have given birth to someone so removed from their inner self, I asked Archie, who was no help at all, as I recall.

He did point out, however, that I still had an aversion to handkerchiefs bearing cross-stitched initials because when I was a child my mother used to insist I cross stitch our handkerchiefs. She had such rigid ideas about things like that. It drove me batty. Initialled handkerchiefs? Really, who cares?

But I suppose what he was getting at was that Florence and I do share a sort of stubbornness. Although knowing him he was getting at no such thing and it’s just a coincidence I drew something sensible from it.

What did surprise me I suppose was that this beautiful, strong-minded, capable daughter of mine ended up hawking musty old antiques in suburbia. I thought she would do more, go further, but getting married and having Monty seems to have been it.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that and she certainly seemed happy enough and has done a splendid job with our wonderful grandson. Still, it seems a limited sort of life.

Of course, you could say the same about me except that my life
is full to the brim with my outside interests. I teach yoga for seniors three times a week at Woodbridge. I run the organic gardening co-op, I host the local poetry society, I play old-fashioned tennis in the summer, I swim in the public baths nearly every sunny day in the summer, and I am taking weaving lessons. I’ve given up pottery just recently, I stuck it out for longer than I should have, to be honest. It was so hard. And who needs that many ash trays? No one smokes any more. Not even roll-ups.

I was heartbroken on Florence’s behalf over Harry’s departure but that was mainly because if you took him out of her life, what else, apart from Monty, was in it?

CHAPTER EIGHT

After baring my soul to my family, I should have felt better and in one way I did. I was glad that the sorry chore was no longer hanging over me. But it was a bit like being glad the guillotine had dropped. So, I no longer had to worry about how much it would hurt, but then again I didn’t have a head.

Once the news was out there, even though ‘there’ was only Tannington Hall, the certainty of being alone truly set in. On the drive back to London I had to pull over twice because I thought I was going to be sick. And it wasn’t the nut roast, even though we’d had it both nights. Actually I suppose it could have been the nut roast but at the time I definitely put it down to nerves.

However, no sooner did I get back to my big empty house than something happened to brighten my bleak new world. It wasn’t a big something, but it alluded to a big something.

I checked the computer and there was another email from
Monty. It said he was on his way home, would be arriving in three days’ time, would get the Heathrow Express to Paddington, and could one of us pick him up there at around two-thirty in the afternoon?

Ever since Harry had moved out I had used Monty’s return as the light to which the moth-like quiver of my tiny reserves of hope fluttered. Awake in the middle of the night, trembling with anxiety, I would remember my son: the chubby flesh of his arm as a baby, the permanently scabby knees of his first year at school, the wispy sprouting whiskers on his lip as a teenager, the way that even at eighteen he would lean into me for a cuddle if he needed one or, I suspect, if he thought I did.

If I could just reach the point where my arms would once more surround my boy, I would tell myself, if I could just see him and have him back to myself again, then maybe the pain where my marriage used to be would go away, or at least not hurt as much.

It turned out Harry had received the same email — he was ever the diplomat, our son — and when I rang him he kindly agreed that I should pick Monty up and have him to myself for a few hours. You could take this to be a selfless gesture, given he was just as desperate to see him as I was, or you could take it to be a recognition that Harry had ‘Charles’ helping to massage any pain he might be feeling at the loss of his marriage.

I had taken to calling the man who stole my husband ‘Charles’ in a special tone that suggested his real name was something else and ‘Charles’ was the obscene nickname I had chosen for him.

‘I know what you are doing.’ Harry had called me up on it straight away. ‘You did the same thing when “Alan” Fairbanks
voted against me making junior partner and you did it when Hilary Nicholson’s husband got that job in “PR”.’

‘Oh, and “Charles” only ever says lovely things in the nicest voice about everyone else, I am sure,’ I’d said with a bitterness that sounded acrid even to me. ‘A real Father Teresa.’

‘Don’t,’ was all Harry said, which made me even angrier.

‘What? Don’t tease you about your “boyfriend”? Oh, OK!’

Just because I had almost completely accepted the marriage was over and attempted to understand the difficulty for Harry didn’t mean I couldn’t be a complete bitch. I had spent most of my life and all of our marriage being mature and sensible, not to mention pleasant, but I was now the wronged party. And I might not have had much practice at being a bitch, having never previously been wronged, but it turned out that when pushed, I could dish out the verbal abuse as well as the next harridan.

These outbursts of anger were never planned and indeed seemed to rise up out of me like projectile vomit. At the time, it felt liberating, powerful, to be cruel — but what soon followed, sometimes within a split second, was overwhelming shame and grief. This was Harry I was spitting obscenities at! My childhood sweetheart! How could I be saying these things to the man I had loved for so long and who had always seemed to love me?

I swung dangerously from one end of the emotional spectrum to the next, although at neither end did I feel any better.

Until that email from Monty pinpointing his return to me. Suddenly I had something other than a life of emptiness and penury to look forward to. There’d been another worry gnawing at me in the middle of the night after all. According to my calculations, I was still one rotten thing down. I couldn’t
believe that the universe would take my son from me as well as my job and my husband but then again, as I had recently learned, the universe was a shit of a place. Hearing from Monty made losing him less likely, I felt, although he was still in a disease-riddled country catching a taxi through lethal traffic — being driven no doubt by a semi-conscious drug addict — to board a plane filled with brainwashed suicide bombers.

Regardless of that, knowing he was getting closer relieved me of the default despair that had settled into my bones like damp in the past weeks. After the email, Sparky seemed to develop a low-level jauntiness I wasn’t sure I’d seen before. Warmed by the thought of my son back home I cleaned his room, I washed all his linen, I cleaned his room a bit more. I spent more time than I should have going through his drawers and sniffing his T shirts but at least it kept me from daytime TV.

I even thought at one stage that I would make a carrot cake — Monty’s favourite — but my will to bake had eluded me since Harry had left. The cupcakes I’d taken to Tannington had actually been from the Hummingbird in Portobello Road. I’d meant to make them myself but just couldn’t quite get my mojo back on that front. Rose always said that a good cake could sniff a drama a mile away and would not rise or would cook too quickly just to add to it, so you were better off going to Patisserie Valerie.

Besides, I loathed carrot cake. It had a touch of the Primrose Hills about it, if you asked me. Not that I’d ever told Monty that but I did try and steer him towards chocolate or fruit.

Anyway, despite the lack of the usual delicious smells, the post-email house had unquestionably lost the gloomy feeling it had adopted in recent weeks. Lemon Pledge, perhaps. Or hope.

And then on the morning of Monty’s arrival home,
something
else brightened my sad little world. Someone, actually.

On answering a knock at the front door I found a startlingly handsome young man smiling at me. This, as far as I could recall, had never happened before. Normally I opened the door to earnest Mormons or freckly Girl Guides or, on three separate occasions, drunken louts looking for ‘Rasheed’.

Not today.

‘You must be Florence,’ the startlingly handsome young man said pleasantly. ‘I’m sorry to just drop by like this but I’m Will, the builder, a friend of Stanley Morris. He might have mentioned me?’

He hadn’t but I nodded anyway. He was at least six feet tall with dark hair shot prematurely with just the right amount of silver, unlined olive skin and eyes like the Aegean — not that I’d ever seen it, but I’d seen pictures. He didn’t look like a builder nor sound like one for that matter. He was very clean, for a start, and not Eastern European, which most of the builders in London seemed to be. He seemed more like a well-brought-up actor who would play the part of a builder. Not Harrison Ford exactly, because of my feelings about him after the Claridge’s debacle and because he was now a hundred years old, but not un-Harrison-Ford-like either.

‘Stan said you were thinking of converting your house into a tearoom,’ Will the builder continued, ‘and that you might need a bit of advice. As I was in the area — no, I know that sounds corny but I actually was, just over in Shirland Street — I thought I would pop in and have a look. Is that all right? Is now a good time?’

He was wearing faded jeans, a chambray shirt in the same colour of sun-soaked blue, with a white T-shirt underneath, and buff-coloured Timberland boots. Most men dressed like
this would look like Village People impersonators. He did not.

I was acting rather gormlessly, I knew I was. I was imagining Harry in the same clothes and realising that he could never in a million years pull that look off. Although of course he probably loved the Village People these days. Meanwhile, Will stood patiently on the doorstep.

‘Sooooo,’ he eventually nodded at me encouragingly, ‘may I come in?’

‘Of course, excuse me, how kind of you to think of me,’ I burbled, ushering him in and knowing as sure as eggs are eggs I was about to start in on a long stream of nervous bollocks.

In the three weeks that I had been ‘single’, I had not — before Will knocked on my door — even so much as considered the word. Single was a current position that announced somehow one’s intention not to remain that way. I was not in that position. I had been ‘left’, which while also a current position, announced that one had no intention of doing anything, that one was still dazed and confused by the hideous trauma of having been left in the first place.

My position, it turned out, upon having this deeply
heterosexual
person in my hallway, seemed ready to make a change.

‘This is the hall,’ I began rather pointlessly, wishing I had worn my good jeans, ‘and it has always been the hall whereas these two rooms here, that’s my office over there but this is my son’s TV room, used to be my grandfather’s office when he had his surgery here. He was a GP, and so was his father, and they saw the patients in here and there’s this little kitchen out here and a bathroom and this door goes out into the back garden where there is a separate entrance onto Warwick Place. So I was thinking, not that I’ve really actually seriously thought about it — it’s just something someone suggested to me a
while ago — but I was thinking that if the customers came in through the front door then Monty and I, that’s my son, he’s due back from his gap year this afternoon, could use this back door as our private access and this could be the kitchen and we could open up the hall into — oooh!’

I chose that moment in my scintillating monologue to step backwards and trip over Will’s satchel full of tools, which I hadn’t noticed him put on the floor. For a moment I clutched uselessly at the empty air in front of me but it was of no assistance whatsoever and I fell backwards, landing heavily on my bottom on top of the bag.

‘Oh shit,’ I breathed, winded, before feeling his hand on my shoulder. ‘Shit, shit, shit.’

‘Are you all right?’ he asked, mortified, as he crouched beside me. ‘Is your back okay? Your arm? I’m so sorry, Florence, that was my fault completely. I should never have dumped it there. What a fool. I meant to leave it in the hall but I was in a rush to hear your plans. Please, let me help.’ He held out his hand to me and dazedly, I took it. He pulled me to my feet. ‘May I?’ he asked politely, and he turned me slightly to the side and started to dust me down. The floor was grubby. I hadn’t vacuumed that room quite as vigorously as the rest of the house. I should have tried harder. I should have done more. I should have …

I don’t know what it was, if it was the enormity of all I hadn’t done, or the thought of a man’s hand (he wasn’t very old but I was sure he still counted as a man) so close to my body, or the ache in my buttocks, or my son about to arrive home, or my husband leaving me, or my third rotten thing still hanging out there somewhere, but as he gently swept dust and lint off my back with the lightest of touches, I started to cry. Not big loud sobs exactly. More a series of strangled snivels.

There was nothing I could do about it. Even in the circumstances I wasn’t prone to public displays of emotion and my mortification at being so unrestrained only made the snivels harder to strangle.

‘There!’ said Will, stepping back. ‘That’s better.’ At which point he must have realised I was having a reaction disproportionate to falling on my arse. Like Stanley Morris before him, he seemed wired to cope with such emotional outbursts, however, and instead of standing around looking awkward or stammering and running for the door, he calmly suggested that perhaps a cup of tea might be in order.

I nodded, still snivelling, and led him upstairs where he guided me to a chair and put the kettle on.

As I fought to get a grip on myself, he fossicked around the kitchen and found the loose leaf tea (not the bags), the cups and saucers (not the mugs), the milk jug, the sugar bowl, the spoons. He was really very handy.

‘I don’t have so much as a HobNob,’ I blurted out. This seemed a tragedy all on its own. ‘My cake tins are usually full but it’s all been so hopeless.’

Will set the teapot on the table and held his finger up as if to say ‘just one moment’, then disappeared down the stairs again. He arrived back with his satchel, from which he extracted a small plastic container, squashed on one side from one of my buttocks, no doubt.

It occurred to me then that he could be a heinous murderer about to jab me with a lethal poison and I should be frightened or at least suspicious but when he opened the plastic container and set it on the table, it did not contain a hypodermic syringe and a bottle of snake venom but rather four plump, round, dark, chocolate truffles. Well, three were plump and round and one was flat like a squashed thing.

‘Cherry and pinot noir,’ Will said. ‘Go on, have one. I made them myself.’