On Top of Everything (11 page)

I didn’t know what to do or think or feel but I knew I could not survive having him walk away from me just then.

He looked at my hand and then at Crystal, who nodded encouragingly. Then he asked where I had parked the car with a brusqueness that broke my heart before striding off in front of us.

‘Thank you, Florence, I know this must be hard for you and it means a lot to us that you’re trying to be understanding,’ Crystal said as we followed him out of the station.

‘You don’t have the tiniest clue about what anything means to me,’ I told her, keeping my voice light and non-threatening in case my son could hear me.

‘Well, thank you, I appreciate your honesty,’ she answered, without missing a beat, and skipped ahead to catch up with him.

I watched her tiny little skirt shimmy and shine as she moved in front of me and hoped against hope that this tough little nut would never get to meet my parents and sister because I knew for a fact that they would just love her.

It wasn’t my idea not to tell Florence and Harry but then they weren’t my parents, it wasn’t my deal. And Monty seemed pretty sure he knew the best way to handle it.

He definitely didn’t want them getting wind of it before we got married but I think he toyed with telling them soon afterwards. Then he got the call from his dad while we were in Thailand. No way could he drop anything else on his mother, he said, especially from a distance. It would freak her out too much.

I loved it that he was so concerned about her, that he thought so much about her reaction. I knew he was a little afraid of how his folks would take it, but I also knew he loved me with all his heart and was not afraid of what we had done.

She pretty much flipped out at the train station though.

At first she just stared at me blankly with her mouth opening and closing and then she kept saying, ‘What? What?’ in a louder and louder voice even though Monty was trying to tell her what.

When she finally got it, she was so angry I thought she was going to slap me. Monty was really pissed off too but you know I sort of understood how she might be feeling. When he’d talked about his mum while we were in Australia I had imagined someone older. I knew her age but I had still pictured someone much more matronly than Florence. It’s her name, I suppose, and the fact that she is my husband’s mum. When I saw her at the train station,
though, my first impression was that she didn’t look that much unlike me. Taller, obviously, and darker, but otherwise? And if I was thinking that, then so must she have been.

Don’t get me wrong, I have no problem with being an older woman, with Monty’s age. He’s wise beyond his years and besides, I fell in love with him before I knew he was only nineteen and I couldn’t fall back out again, no matter how hard I tried. Sure, I probably wouldn’t choose to get involved with a guy so much younger than me but if there’s one thing I have learned in my years on this earth, it’s that timing is everything. We met, we made an instant overwhelming connection and all obstacles had to be overcome. It’s as simple as that. I just couldn’t feel about someone the way I do about Monty and not pursue that simply on the grounds of our age difference. What if I never felt like that about anyone ever again? What if that was my big shot at true happiness and I gave up on it because of, basically, mathematics?

No, Monty and I were meant to be and so we were.

From a mother’s point of view, though, I could accept that I might not have been the sort of girl, the sort of woman, she had envisaged her boy ending up with and therefore just the sight of me, the idea of me, would be disappointing to her. Then, adding in the surprise factor, the unexpectedness of having a daughter-in-law, on top of the unexpectedness of Monty’s father having a boyfriend, she really deserved to be shocked and angry.

When I saw her standing there at the station, wanting to spit at me, but so desperate to have her son come home, I tried to put myself in her shoes.

How would I feel if my son turned up married to a woman fifteen years older than him?

I can’t answer that. I wish with all my heart and soul I could, but I can’t.

CHAPTER TEN

She came from Melbourne and was a massage therapist but dabbled in reflexology. She told me this in the car on the way home as I drove in astonished silence, concentrating on keeping my eyes on the road. They wanted to close, or spin like marbles in their sockets.

Monty was married? To an Australian massage therapist who dabbled in reflexology? Who was old enough to be his … well, I don’t know what, but she was old. Too old. And she was his
wife
.

I felt sick. Helpless. Furious. Sad. Frightened. Sick again.

Jobless, husbandless, and now, son-less. Oh yes, try arguing my theory of three rotten things with me now, Harry, you bloody gay bastard.

I rang him the moment I got into the house. But it was not my day, my week, my month, possibly my year, for it was not Harry who answered the phone at the Lancaster Gate bedsit.

‘Who is this?’ I asked of the polite male voice at the other end of the phone, some unknown emotion clipping my words, making them small and hard and mean.

‘It’s Charles,’ the voice said on the other end. ‘Is this Florence?’

Well, if Harry’s intention was to test my easily plucked filaments, this was definitely doing it. My heart was now officially not just broken, it was shattered. It was shattered and jumped on and burned and then the ashes were spread across the Arctic Circle and frozen and when that was melted they were eaten by some strange creature with a long nose and shat out again and picked at by birds.

I ached. Not just emotionally but in every part of my body. Even my hair hurt. The tiny holes in the corner of my eyes where the tears strained to leave my tortured body hurt.

‘Please ask Harry to ring me urgently,’ I told ‘Charles’, trying to sound cold and unforgiving but I was too upset for this to be truly authentic. So much for Harry being holed up in his bedsit crippled with remorse.

‘There’s no need,’ Charles said. ‘He’s right here. I’ll pass you over.’

I heard the muffled sound of grown-up men talking and then Harry was on the line, sounding falsely cheerful and uncomplicated.

‘Floss, darling, is he here?’

‘Don’t you “Floss, darling” me, you snake,’ I hissed. ‘What’s he doing there, answering your phone? You knew I would be calling, Harry. Why would you do that? Are you trying to hurt me? Any more than you already have?’

Harry seemed genuinely surprised.

‘Of course not, no, oh Floss, I’m so sorry. I thought you would want to spend a couple of hours with Monty first and
actually I thought it would be he who rang me but I just didn’t think, really at all. The last thing I want to do is upset you more than I already have. Please believe me. Charles is just here to give me a hand with, ah, to help… I’ve been to Ikea.’

I had tried very, very hard over the past few weeks to not imagine what Charles was helping my husband with. Every now and then I caught a flash of something that made me gulp: two naked male torsos on a passing bus advertisement, two men holding hands walking along the canal, Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s ‘Relax’ blaring out of a passing car radio. It wasn’t that I was even interested in what grown men did with each other, I wasn’t, I didn’t care at all, that had nothing to do with it. What upset me was the reminder that out there existed another world, a world Charles had taken Harry into, where there was no place for me, no matter how hard I tried, no matter what I did or didn’t do.

‘Tell “Charles” to shove your bookcase and come home at once. I need you here,’ I said.

‘For God’s sake, Floss,’ Harry said tiredly.

‘Monty has come home with a wife,’ I then told him, doing my best to keep calm. ‘An Australian woman practically old enough to be his mother. She dabbles in reflexology, Harry. He’s married. Monty is married.’

There was silence at the other end.

‘That bloody idiot,’ Harry finally breathed. ‘What the devil has he done? He’s just a bloody kid.’

It should have been a bonding moment. It had potential to be our best since the split. Here we were joined again by virtue of being parents locked into the same nightmare. But I was still too raw to feel completely joined with Harry just at that point. Something to do with Charles giving him ‘a hand’ with his Ikea, no doubt. In fact, in a fit of complete contrariness
considering I felt pretty much the same way myself, I found Harry’s reaction thoroughly galling.

I was angry that Monty had married Crystal without mentioning it in passing, I told Harry. Not that he was young when he did it. Harry and I had indeed been the same age when we married and before Harry changed his tune we were the poster children for marrying young.

The battles we had to fight with those who thought they knew better!

‘Marry in haste, repent at leisure,’ my whiskery Great Aunt Violet had warned me three times in the course of one short visit before our wedding. Had it not been for the divine ginger flapjack she had the presence of mind to bring with her, I might have throttled her.

Harry’s parents had been totally against it too. They never quite made it clear just who they’d set their sights on for their younger son but did make it clear it wasn’t me, his childhood sweetheart, a secretarial college drop-out with a doo-lally family who never stopped kissing and hugging and all smelled overwhelmingly of lavender oil.

My own parents were hardly more encouraging although their objection was that I was getting married at all — such an over-rated institution according to them — not that I was doing it at nineteen.

We’d showed them though. For twenty years our detractors had been forced to eat humble pie. And even now the ones who were still alive couldn’t blame the age at which we were married for its awful end. They could blame Harry. And ‘Charles’.

‘It’s not him being a kid that is the problem,’ I whispered angrily down the phone to him because I could hear Monty and Crystal, or ‘Crystal’ as I was already calling her, clattering
around in the kitchen. ‘It’s her being old. Older. Harry, he’s just a boy and she’s a fully grown woman! It’s bordering on obscene. She only has another two minutes of child bearing left in her and Monty is not ready to be a father. Oh God, I can’t even believe I’m having to think these things. Monty, a father? Jesus Christ, Harry, you’re right. He’s still just a child. He’s got a pimple on his forehead, for heaven’s sake. There must be something we can do.’

‘Too bloody right there is,’ Harry agreed, full of bluster. ‘I’m going to come around and give that woman a piece of my mind and we will take it from there. Don’t worry, Floss, we’ll get Monty out of this mess.’

Don’t worry, Floss. You see, it’s things like that no one warns you about missing when you’re left by your husband: there’s no one to tell you not to worry. It’s a small thing, I suppose, which is why there aren’t books written about it, but it’s a big thing too. Because without there being someone you trust to tell you not to worry, what the hell is there to stop you from doing so?

Monty was making a terrible mistake and I was worried— beyond worried — I was beside myself that he was throwing his young life away and not visiting any of the promise that he had shown since, well, since he was born. Monty was just meant to do great things, everyone knew that. It stuck out like dog’s balls. But married at nineteen? He had a wife to look after now. It would tie him down. It would halve him.

My worrying binge was exacerbated by the realisation that perhaps this was what I had done to Harry. Had I arrested his development, tied him down, stopped him from being the best he could be? I didn’t think so, I thought I’d always encouraged him to do exactly as he pleased. But perhaps a more mature person might not have done so. Perhaps a more
mature person might have guided him differently, challenged him more. All I knew for sure was that what I had done had ended up with the wrong result, which left open a multitude of different courses I could have taken but didn’t. I’d always simply supported Harry because I believed in him. I didn’t care if he was a lawyer or not, and encouraged his decision to chuck it all in to become a writer even though, truthfully, it seemed an odd choice. He was never much of a fan of reading, after all. Still, I didn’t care. I just wanted him to be happy.

And that was what I wanted for Monty too. I wanted him to be happy. But although I had thought, when briefly considering he might be gay, that I wouldn’t mind who he was happy with, I realised now that was not the truth. I wanted him to be happy on his own or with a nice girl about his own age in a few years’ time. Not right now with an aged Australian wife who dabbled in reflexology.

Any brief respite I got from having Harry tell me not to worry, even though I had everything in the world to worry about, disappeared when he showed up about an hour later and his bluster seemed to have blown.

For all his talk of giving Crystal a piece of his mind he seemed to have changed it. For a start, he couldn’t contain his joy at seeing Monty and I could hardly blame him for that. Then when it came to talking to Crystal I could see he was somewhat fazed by her good looks and cool demeanour. Plus, rather annoyingly, she really didn’t look thirty-four.

‘You must understand our concerns about having this dropped on us with such unexpectedness,’ he told the pair of them as we stood somewhat awkwardly in the sitting room, Harry and I sipping wine, Monty a beer, Crystal a glass of water at room temperature.

‘Dad, I was going to tell you but you have to admit —’
Monty started but Crystal put her tiny hand on his arm and quieted him instantly. The look he gave her! Such adoration.

‘Of course we understand, Harry,’ she said coolly. ‘I’m sure any parent would feel the same way in the same situation and of course he is your son, your child, but Monty is also an adult. He has adult feelings and based on them he makes adult decisions, one of which was to ask me to marry him.’

‘And you had to say yes?’ I couldn’t help asking, thinking as I did that she was talking about Monty as though he wasn’t even there, which seemed pretty bloody rude.

‘Didn’t you?’ Monty shot back at me, his venom stunning me, making me think he didn’t mind having Crystal talk for him.

‘Yes,’ Crystal jumped in. ‘When Harry asked, didn’t you?’

‘We’re perhaps not the best people to be canvassing right now,’ I answered, in a sour tone I hadn’t been aiming for but which got the better of me anyway. ‘Our marriage having just finished.’

‘Oh, Mum …’ Monty shook his head and looked at his feet while Crystal consoled him with another irritating pat.

‘Come on, Floss, is now really the time for that?’ Harry was using his grown-up lawyering voice on me and I didn’t like it. It made me feel … well, I couldn’t put my finger on it but I was experiencing an awful sort of shrinking sensation.

‘It is a difficult time for you to speculate on the sense of marrying young, I can appreciate that,’ Crystal said earnestly. ‘But you and Harry have had twenty amazing years and if Monty and I have half as long and half as solid a relationship then I think we will be doing brilliantly.’

I looked at Monty to see if he was devastated by this spectacularly gloomy marital forecast.

‘You’d give it ten years?’ I faced her, aghast.

‘Well, if you are angry that we’re married shouldn’t you be pleased it’s not going to last?’

Monty was looking at me in such a way that I all but disappeared. There was not a trace of adoration in that look. There was not a trace of anything I recognised. Where was the son who had done nothing but make me happy all these years? The boy who cared so deeply how I felt? The angel that everyone adored, no one more than I?

‘What have you done to him?’ I burst out at Crystal. ‘This is not the Monty I know. We were a really happy family before and now …’

And now what? Now my son was back yet I felt more lonely than ever. Lonely. That was the feeling that was shrinking me, making me disappear. The recognition of this stunned me into silence.
Lonely?

My husband, my son and his wife were all staring at me with variations of the same look on their faces.

They think I am the enemy, it dawned on me.

But I had never been the enemy before and on top of my new-found loneliness and the awful bitterness that kept erupting from the darkest, deepest parts of me, I was suddenly overwhelmed by being such a foreigner in my own beloved country. I froze, right there in the middle of the Persian rug I’d been given by my mothball Granny and had never really liked, never less than right at that minute.

How was it that my darling husband and my gorgeous son could both be looking at me this way when just a month ago I had believed the former to be wildly in love with me and the latter utterly devoted?

Either I was the unluckiest person in the world to have these two things so suddenly not be true, or I was the stupidest person in the world for not realising it sooner.

And to feel lonely, truly lonely at the same time, for the first time?

I could not for the life of me imagine what I had ever done to deserve such hurt. I turned on my heel, grabbed the wine bottle and a glass, and taking the stairs two at a time I fled to my bedroom. It wasn’t until I was settled under my duvet with one glass already down the hatch and
The Bill
blaring on the telly as the tears slid down my cheeks that I realised Sparky had stayed in the sitting room.