On Top of Everything (7 page)

‘I know just how you feel,’ he said. ‘My missus left me without a word of warning and all. There was me thinking we was enjoying perfect marital bliss and there was her thinking she’d rather live in a tiny little flat on her own in Hounslow freezing to death and working at the local William Hill.’

He shook his head and got up.

‘Uff. My knees, I tell you.’

‘I don’t know what to do,’ I told Stanley Morris, even though he was just the plumber.

‘Not much you can do,’ he said, turning on the tap. No jet of water. ‘There we go. It gets better, that’s all I can tell you, although you couldn’t be blamed for not believing me. Know what my old mum told me when my missus run off? “It’s not an arm or a leg, Stan,” she said. Not an arm or a leg. Thought she was being bloody miserable at the time but the old girl was right. It don’t kill you. Life does go on.’

Just having him in my kitchen was the surest sign of this I could ever concoct.

‘We have a son,’ I said. ‘I just don’t know what …’

‘How old is he then, your boy?’ Stanley Morris asked as he started to pack away his tools.

‘Nineteen.’

‘Well, there you go. Old enough to understand it’s not an arm or a leg,’ he said with great confidence as he closed his tool box. ‘My Lizzie was fine. She was about the same age as that, maybe a year or two older, and she was fine. A bit down on her mum for a while but at the end of the day, she’s still her mum.’ He checked his watch. ‘Here, look at that. I’ve got a rendezvous with a blocked drain in Hammersmith in about half an hour but I could murder a cup of tea in the meantime.’

He was doing this for me — a complete stranger — I knew
he was. And I was pathetically grateful.

‘I’ll put the kettle on,’ I said, brushing fragments of a gravy boat off a kitchen chair. ‘I’ve got Earl Grey or Fortnum’s Royal Blend. Do you have a preference?’

‘Now there’s a woman after my own heart,’ Stanley said, picking up the handle of the gravy boat and dropping it in the rubbish bin. ‘Find Earl Grey a bit delicate at this stage in the day so I’ll take t’other, thank you kindly. Like your tea then, Mrs Dowling?’

‘Please, call me Florence,’ I said, getting Rose’s favourite cups out, switching the saucers and choosing a tea cosy that looked like a bunch of grapes that Poppy had knitted for me years before. ‘And yes, I do like my tea. In fact, I’m thinking of converting downstairs into a tearoom. What do you think of that for an idea?’

I don’t know what possessed me to come out with this because I wasn’t thinking about it at all or, if I was, I shouldn’t have been.

‘I think that’s brilliant, that is,’ said Stanley Morris with great enthusiasm. ‘What’s more, you’ll be needing a plumber.’

I knew the moment I clapped eyes on Mrs Dowling, or Florence as she asked me to call her, that she’d just had one hell of a shock. I suppose I looked just like that when Beryl bunked off on me and all. Still, if there’s one thing I have learned it’s that if you carry on as though nothing strange is happening, it usually stops being strange.

You get used to walking into disasters in my line of work, plumbing ones and otherwise. People can get all gussied up and pretend they’re one thing or another when they go out in the world, after all, but catch them at home and that’s pretty much the way they really are.

I felt right sorry for her, I can tell you that. Her husband coming out, as they say, and that tap of hers leaking all over the show. She was such a nice lady too, polite and helpful, despite what had just gone on. She told me over a cuppa and a slice of lemon cake that she’d just lost her job and all. On the same day. Ouch, that’s got to hurt, dunnit?

But I thought right away she could have been on to something with that tearoom idea. My sister Marion lives up in Ely, it’s the place with the nice cathedral near Cambridge. Anyway, there’s this tearoom there, Peacock’s, right on the river. Some lawyer chap got fed up with spending half his life in the Ely police station so turned his downstairs into a tearooms and it’s packed to the gunnels every weekend and most days during the week.
Sounds a bit like what Florence wanted to do with her place in Little Venice. Corker spot for it.

There’s not a lot of good places for a cuppa around that neck of the woods, truth be told. Starbucks on every bleeding corner in the West End but try getting a good cup of tea and a slice of something baked by human hand and you may as well just go home. Not that I have anything baked by human hand at my place but I certainly can manage a good cup of tea and there’s nothing wrong with a HobNob.

Anyway, I said I’d keep in touch with Florence because I thought she was on to something and as I say, she would need a plumber. I also thought she might need a shoulder to cry on and happens I’ve got very reliable shoulders.

CHAPTER SIX

When I woke up the day after Harry left me and Stanley Morris fixed the tap, I had a few glorious ordinary moments before remembering my life had turned to custard.

I rolled over in the bed, all warm and toastily contented the way you are when you’ve slept badly most the night but deeply in the end. I saw with half-closed eyes through the gap in the curtains that it was a sunny day. I smiled and stretched out in the bed, my foot hitting a foreign object: Sparky. Lurch. What was he doing there? Lurch. Where was Harry? Lurch. What had happened to my life as a gainfully employed happily married mother of one? Lurch, lurch, lurch.

I would have given anything then to disappear back into that bliss of not knowing. I understood, for the first time perhaps, how drugs or drink or anything else you might end up in rehab for would help dull the pain of reality. I felt so wretched once real life overwhelmed me with its new hideousness that
I would have swallowed anything at all if I thought it might make me feel even the tiniest bit better.

But there was nothing to swallow, not in my room anyway, unless you counted Panadol. And there were only two of them and they both had fluff on them from being under the bed for at least a year.

I rolled over again, chilled now, and lay there wishing that I was dead, although I could never do that to Monty, so I wished that Harry was dead instead, then realised that would hurt Monty too. Instead, I wished that Harry wasn’t gay, that things were the way they always had been, that I did not feel so horribly bloody scared. I wished that it was night-time so I could go to sleep and wake up and have those few innocent moments again. And I wished that wishing got you somewhere other than where you started off in the first place.

Then I thought of little Edith, another regular customer/ visitor at the shop I had half owned until the day before. I stopped thinking about her for a few moments to revisit the minor horror of being dumped by my business partner just hours before being dumped by my husband then, finding that too unspeakably awful, thought of Edith again instead.

I’d initially met her when she came in to talk about selling some of her gorgeous Spode china after her husband Arthur died. They’d been married more than fifty years and never spent a single night apart, she told me that first day, as two tiny contained tears rolled down her small, perfectly made-up face.

‘The mornings are the worst,’ she’d confessed in little more than a whisper as I attempted to comfort her with some ever-so-slightly undercooked gingernuts. ‘There’s this little pocket of time between waking up and realising what has happened where everything is just fine. And then I remember.’

I’d felt sorry enough for her at the time, now I saw how truly excruciatingly cruel that was — to get a little island holiday from your grief just makes it feel worse when you come back home. And I was grieving, I recognised that. No one had actually died but the future I assumed I was going to have was certainly dead and buried. Even if Harry became un-gay we could never erase the fact that for a while at least he thought he was and there had been a Charles from the Whittington on the scene.

I looked at the phone on the bedside table and thought of ringing Poppy. But just imagining saying what I had to say made me feel so ill I couldn’t contemplate it further. Then I remembered she was on a face-reading seminar in Framlingham or some such so I wouldn’t be able to get in touch with her anyway. She and my parents didn’t believe in mobile phones because of the possibility of catching measles of the brain.

I thought then about ringing Mum or Dad but I just wasn’t the sort of daughter that easily confided her tragedies. Not that I’d had any real tragedies as an adult to confide. Or as a child, now I came to think of it. Other than Rose dying when I was sixteen and my ovaries being a bit of a disappointment, my life had been a delight. I’d been lucky.

Until now.

Now I was one job down, one husband down, and one rotten thing away from who knew what?

On top of that, I had no one to talk to. What had happened to my friends, my life outside being a wife and mother? When had I stopped making an effort to keep in touch with the outside world? When had I become so wrapped up in myself, in ourselves? Why was this only occuring to me now?

I cried for a while then. Well, till lunchtime actually, Sparky curled up on top of the duvet, his wagging tail slapping against
my hip as he lapped up my unhappiness.

I cried all afternoon too, but I did that in front of the television watching
Countdown
and
Deal or No Deal.
I tried to drink a cup of tea but felt sick to the pit of my stomach. I had not known that despair was a physical sensation but my body surrendered to it. My innards felt sticky: thick and black, like tar. Everything about me felt poisoned by my misfortune.

It was pretty standard being-dumped-by-your-husband-and-losing-your-marbles fare, I suppose. The hours passed. I didn’t get out of my pyjamas, I didn’t brush my hair, I didn’t eat. About twenty-four hours after he left me Harry rang to see if I was all right, which plucked my useless bloody heart filaments so sharply I thought they were going to snap. I cried so much then I could barely get out a word and when he offered to come over the thought of being in his arms again lifted me for one wonderful moment above my cloud of misery. But when I asked him if he was still gay his answer was yes, so I told him to stick it up his arse along with everything else and there I was in the cloud again. I’m not even sure what I meant about the arse sticking but as I say I had not done much research.

He rang again and again after that but mostly I ignored the phone messages. I stayed in my mousy pyjamas, weeping and wondering how it was that I had poured all my love and energy into a man I didn’t even know. Worse, he was the only person I wanted to talk to. No, worse even than that, he was the only person I
had
to talk to. And now I no longer had him.

My best friend from school — sweet, sensible Caroline — had moved to Wales with her husband and three sons a few years earlier: why had I let that friendship fizzle out? At first I had made an effort to at least answer her calls but I’d never been to stay with her, no matter how often she begged me to. And now I couldn’t even remember if I’d sent her a Christmas card.

Then there was larger-than-life Laura, whom I’d met at antenatal classes when she was pregnant with her daughter, Treacle. Despite the ghastly name she’d chosen for her daughter, we’d been if not close confidantes then at least good friends for years until, well, until when? Until Monty was too grown up to play with a girl? That shouldn’t have been a reason for my friendship with Laura to wither and die, yet it had. All my friendships had withered and died, bar the so recently pruned one with Charlotte.

The truth was, at some stage I had worked out I didn’t really need friends. I had Harry and I had Monty and I met so many people during the day at the shop that I considered that my social life. In addition to Marguerite and Edith who dropped in probably twice a week there were others who were just as regular. Rosalie, the cat woman, came in to look at picture frames for photos of her moggies and always stayed for at least one cup of tea. Julia worked at the estate agency around the corner and had initially sought shelter in our shop from her creepy boss. We got talking and she bought the prettiest pearl ring, then became a regular. There was Rupert, the schoolteacher, who collected Poole pottery and had once whirled me around the jewellery cabinet when Jocelyn Brown came on the radio singing of all things, I wryly remembered, ‘Somebody Else’s Guy’. These were people whose lives I knew the details of, yet I didn’t have a single phone number. And had I, would I have rung them, then, in my hour of need?

No.

Sinead, maybe. Sinead was the Irish girl who came to clean every Friday and had the best-ever stories about bad boyfriends. She’d been cheated on, left in countryside inns, abandoned at sleazy nightclubs, shagged in the loos at Selfridges then dumped outside the hosiery department. She’d
had every relationship disaster known to womankind. Or had she? I couldn’t remember any boyfriend ever leaving her for another man.

And anyway, I didn’t have her phone number, it was at the shop with Charlotte, and I didn’t exactly feel like crawling over in my jim-jams with my hair all knotted and scary and asking for it.

So for the next two days I just stayed in bed or on the sofa and talked to Sparky. I had previously been ever-so-slightly sceptical of people who relied on their pets for emotional fulfilment but it turned out I was one.

And is it any wonder? Harry was no doubt getting his emotional fulfilment from this vile cruel nasty Charles person; Monty was on the other side of the world; my sister was with a bunch of face readers; and my parents had yet to provide the sort of emotional fulfilment I sought, so Sparky was actually all I had left.

Harry had never let the dog on the bed but now he was rarely off it. On my third night alone I woke to find his head on Harry’s pillow, his paw beside it, like a dog impersonating a human. It may sound stupid, but this little piece of comedy made me smile. And because I had otherwise only had that one early morning moment — an infinitesimal speck of time so small as to hardly even count — when everything was simply marvellous before it all fell horribly to pieces, I needed my smiles.

After five days of my having been left by Harry, however, Sparky was not doing a good enough job and I was in a deeply disturbed place. I was husbandless, jobless and friendless, and could not see from my pit of despair how I would ever climb out of this hole. Not an ugly, stupid, boring, waste of space with the sex appeal of a pot-belly pig like myself.

‘Did you ever love me?’ I bawled down the phone to Harry when he rang late on that fifth afternoon and I finally answered him. ‘Has it all been a lie? A trick? Utter bloody bullshit? I can’t believe it. We were happy. I thought we were happy. Did you only love me because I looked like a boy, back then, at the bus stop, waiting for the 268?’ This was one theory I had come up with in the middle of the night. ‘Did I look like a boy? Were you pretending I was a boy? Oh, I want to die, Harry. I just want to die. I want to kill you with my bare hands. I want to rip you limb from limb! And then I want to die.’

Harry was in his Lancaster Gate bedsit sounding, in all fairness, every bit as desolate as I was.

‘I loved you with all my heart, Florence,’ he told me, ‘from the moment I first saw you. You did not look like a boy. You had that ridiculous padded bra on and blue eye shadow and your hair was down to your waist, which was where your skirt was up to.’ He was right. I had forgotten about the outfit. ‘I have never seen anyone look more like a girl. And you are as beautiful and sexy now as you were then and I still love you. I pretty much want to bloody die myself at making you feel as though there’s something wrong with you because there isn’t. This is not about you, it’s —’

‘How can this not be about me?’ I wept. ‘Five days ago I was happily married to you and today I’m all by myself. That’s me, Harry. The me who this isn’t about. You’ve got someone, this bloody Charles, but I’ve got no one now and no warning that this was going to happen. It might not have started out being about me but it certainly is now.’

‘I know, Floss, you’re absolutely right. If there was anything else I could do, I would do it and you must believe I love you with all my heart but —’

‘Why does there have to be a but?’ I interrupted so
vigorously that Sparky jumped off the sofa and flopped sulkily on the ground. ‘Why couldn’t you just keep on …?’

‘Pretending?’ Harry filled the gap in the most awful flat tone and I knew then it really was over. Not just a little bit over either. It was as over as anything ever could be.

‘Yes,’ I whispered back nonetheless and the silence between us said it all. If only he knew he was pretending, that was one thing. If we both knew, it was another. There was no going back.

‘Florence, I’m so sorry.’ He was crying again. My big strong Harry, crying like Monty had when he was four years old and fell off his tricycle. ‘I’m just so fucking sorry.’

Hearing him swear was even more alarming than hearing him cry and I felt another surge of banana-bashing fury at this. Who was this crying, swearing gay man? How dare he keep such things from me? How dare he?

‘So you bloody well should be sorry,’ I cried. ‘It’s all right for you, you have a whole new gang to belong to: the leather and whip crowd with all your bars and internet sites and God knows what else but what is there for me, Harry? For me and Monty?’ Oh, Monty! My poor darling Monty.

‘Monty is fine, Floss.’

I felt the pitter patter of more fury beating in my chest. ‘What do you mean Monty is fine?’ I had spent countless hours drumming up different scenarios for telling Monty about Harry. We had to be gentle, so he didn’t go into shock the way I had, but we had to let him know it was all Harry’s fault not mine, so he didn’t blame me, but …

‘I talked to him,’ Harry told me. ‘That’s what I’ve been ringing to tell you. I called him in Thailand. Yesterday. I thought it was the fair thing to do.’