On Top of Everything (12 page)

Another traitor. Another enemy. Oh, the pain.

We all married in haste and repented at leisure in my day but that didn’t mean Florence should. I was only trying to be helpful. She was such a lovely young girl. Just a bit lacking in confidence, I always felt. Those sort of girls often marry young. I should know, I was one myself. My George was never gay, of course, but he wasn’t terribly interesting either. And talk about bossy. Wouldn’t let me plant marigolds in my own garden or try spaghetti. Foreign muck, he called it.

Still, it was a terrible shock when he died. He was such a stickler for his daily constitutionals. Who would have thought? Anyway, I’ve got marigolds as far as the eye can see now and I eat spaghetti all day long if I feel like it although it does give me wind, as it happens.

She didn’t listen to me, Florence, just the way I didn’t listen to my great aunt. Mind you, my ginger flapjack went down a treat. It always does.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Monty and Crystal made themselves scarce for the next few days and I suppose I could hardly blame them. Although they needn’t have worried about running into me because I barely ventured out of my room. I was tired, so tired. All I wanted to do was sleep. It was a blissful escape.

I woke up one morning however with a hammering in my head that seemed to shake not only my body but my bed, the floor, the whole bloody house.

I moaned but the hammering continued. I got up and went to the bathroom but the hammering continued. I closed the door and it dulled a little. That seemed odd. I opened the door and there it was again.

Then I remembered Will, the chocolate-making builder with the startling blue eyes and the magnetic calm. What had possessed me to tell him to go ahead with turning my house into a tearoom? To start today?

Despite my misery, I got up and threw myself in the shower then dressed in the True Religion jeans Monty had chosen for me before he went away. They were loose, the jeans, which surprised me as they most certainly had not been the last time I’d worn them. I’d had to lie on the floor and pull the zipper up with a coat hanger hook. Plucking at the waistband I moved to the full-length mirror to check myself out. I did look thinner. I also had black rings under my eyes and my cheekbones looked sharper than usual. I peered closer. I was pale too. In fact, I looked revolting. I delved into my make-up drawer and doing the best I could without having put lids on anything in the past five years or being able to find the necessary brushes, I made myself as presentable as possible.

Downstairs Will had started deconstructing the wall between Monty’s TV room and the hallway. It gave me a shock, to be honest, took my mind off my distress over the whole daughter-in-law business. I hadn’t thought about the process of changing the house into a tearoom as being noisy or brutal but it was. My house! My lovely house! The only thing it turned out I could rely on and here I was cutting into it, making it bleed plaster and scrim and ancient shards of wallpaper. Will had pushed all the furniture to the far end of the room and covered it in drop cloths before starting to rip off the lining to expose the wall’s framing. This was hardly dramatic, yet it changed everything. The light was different. The look was different. I had been coming to this house for my whole life and it had looked exactly the same: the carpet, the light fittings, the phone table without the phone. What had I done? Wasn’t there enough unwanted change in my life right now? What the hell was I thinking orchestrating more?

Will appeared through the doorway from the office and saw the panic in my eyes.

‘This is the worst bit,’ he said. ‘Don’t worry. It’ll be over by the end of the week.’

Indeed, by the end of the week he had transformed, albeit roughly, the bottom level of the house. Gone were the walls that separated the rooms from the hall and in their place was one admittedly delightful open space, filled with the natural light streaming in through the tall sash windows that looked out onto the canal.

‘It’s going to be a corker spot for a cuppa,’ enthused Stanley when he came by to work out his schedule with Will. ‘Better than the Spanish Steps any old day, I bet.’

It was a pleasure having the two of them in the house, to be honest. It cut through the tension that swelled between Monty and me like a fast-moving river full of rolling logs. Neither of us had the dexterity to try crossing at this point, so the twin distractions of a gobby plumber and a mysterious builder could not be more welcome.

‘Cope with it all right, did he?’ Stanley asked me after meeting Monty for the first time. ‘The news about you and your old man?’

‘He had some news of his own, as it turns out,’ I told him, as I delivered a pot of Prince of Wales tea on a tray along with a packet of chocolate digestives. ‘You’ll meet her any minute.’

Crystal duly appeared and proved to be utterly charming, wearing another cute-as-a-button surfer girl outfit and managing to talk plumbing at a fairly knowledgeable level with Stanley and tai chi with Will before skipping happily out the door with my surly son.

‘New girlfriend?’ Will asked me, and I felt a pang of something. Something ugly. Crystal was closer to his age. She should be with him. But …

‘New
wife
,’ I said in a clipped voice.

‘Woo-hoo,’ howled Stanley. ‘That must have come as a shock, eh? The little beggars never fail to surprise, do they?’

I bit hard on my lip to keep any more unwanted tears from paying another visit.

‘I suppose you’ve had enough surprises lately,’ Will said, gently. ‘But I bet you’re glad to have him home.’

And although I spent most of my waking hours trying very hard to imagine how I could keep myself from wringing his stupid bloody neck I was, I truly was. How could I not be? It’s just that I’d barely had a chance to talk to him. She was always there, Crystal. Never left him alone for a moment. We’d not had any of the heart-to-hearts I’d been dreaming of. I didn’t even really know what he thought about Harry, about us, about ‘Charles’.

News of the impending tearooms had been greeted with little more than a raise of his eyebrow. It was Crystal who said she thought the house had such a lovely feel that it should be open to more visitors. And what did she know?

I stood at the kitchen window one morning and watched as she and Monty hung out their laundry in the back yard. I’d never seen him hang out washing before. I’d always done it for him. They worked side by side, him helping her reach up to the clothesline Harry had strung between two trees at the back of the garden. They were laughing, nudging each other, stopping every now and then to kiss and mess about.

‘I got married without telling my mother too,’ Will said behind me.

‘You’re married?’ I asked, quickly trying to camouflage my distress.

‘Was,’ said Will, unloading the contents of the tea tray on to the kitchen counter. ‘Divorced five years now.’

‘Five years ago? You don’t look old enough to be married,
let alone divorced.’

‘I’m thirty-one,’ he said, and he looked at me with an unreadable expression, which nonetheless made me blush. Under such scrutiny, I turned my attention back to the laundering lovebirds.

‘He could have had any woman in the world and he chose her,’ I said. ‘Why? I just don’t get it. And why now when he has his whole life ahead of him?’

‘Maybe he wants his whole life to be spent with her and he just wants to get on with it,’ Will said as he rinsed the tea cups and put them in the dishwasher. ‘That’s what I felt like when I met Natasha.’

‘Well, we’re neither of us very good advertisements for marriage, though, are we?’ I challenged him, my voice more brittle than I meant it to be. ‘Yours was obviously short and not very sweet and mine turned out to be long and bollocks.’

He leaned back against the kitchen counter and shrugged. ‘Would you have it any other way though?’

I thought of the way Harry had looked at me on our wedding day, despite the width of the shoulder pads (what was I thinking?) in my white satin dress. Regardless of what had recently come to pass, he had loved me, truly loved me, that day, and I knew it, which was a precious gift. What’s more, he had loved me for many days after that and I knew that too. Then there was Monty, our darling boy, who burst into our world and exploded all my fears that he would break our magic spell of happiness, that there wouldn’t be enough to go around. There had been. So, he was currently breaking my heart but for nineteen years before now he had done nothing but fill it with joy.

‘No,’ I admitted. ‘I wouldn’t have it any other way. And you?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘There are a lot of things I would do differently, but getting married isn’t one of them.’

‘What happened then, with you and your wife? And please don’t tell me she left you for a woman.’

Will smiled. ‘I’ll tell you some other time. When you know me better.’

There it was again, that glimmer of something deep and wonderful between us, the promise of close encounters to come, but I stuffed it down beneath the complicated mixture of hurt and bitterness that didn’t involve him yet was churning inside me.

A mixture that was stirred, as it happened, when my family came for supper on the first Sunday after Monty’s return. It was bound to be fraught with tension as Monty had asked if Harry could come. I didn’t want him there, the sight of him still made me too angry, and sad, and angry and sad again, especially as he continued to glow with health and vitality while I shrivelled in comparison. But Monty, in a rare bout of speaking to me, had said it would mean a lot to him if we could all hold it together for a night so I told my inner fishwife to stick a sock in it, smiled as magnanimously as I could manage, and said, ‘Of course, darling, if that’s what you would like.’

Just seeing Harry there on the day, however, catapulted me into a foul temper, as did watching Dad eye Crystal up with what was unquestionably a pervy look.

‘Monty, you sly old thing, eh?’ he said, ruffling his grandson’s hair. ‘Quite the looker. And a masseuse as well, lucky boy!’

Crystal and Poppy bonded instantly over their twin skills in the homemade dream-catcher department, of all things. Mum had long been mad for them and Poppy had made one for me the year before, a twitty circular thing made of twigs and feathers,
which hung on the rear-vision mirror of the tired VW for about twelve seconds before Sparky pounced on it, attempted to have sex with it, then ate it. I’d not asked for a replacement and upon hearing of its demise, she’d not offered one.

Now, she and Crystal were joined at the hip at one end of the table twittering on about the Ojibwe native American tribe while my mother was gazing at them so thrilled and delighted and full of the joys of the universe I wanted to poke her in the eye with a crochet hook, although of course I didn’t have one.

Afterwards, I retreated to the sitting room and let Harry and Dad and Monty do the dishes as was the habit after our Sunday suppers. Crystal excused herself, saying she was off to visit friends in Earls Court, giving Mum and Poppy the opportunity to practically cream themselves offering their congratulations, welcoming her to the family and insisting she come and stay at Tannington Hall as soon as was humanly possible.

‘You could always take her tonight,’ I suggested sweetly once she was out of earshot.

‘What is it about her that threatens you so much, Florence?’ my mother wanted to know. She had her psychologist hat firmly wedged on her out-of-control hair, never a good metaphorical look. Mum had not trained as a psychologist but you would never guess this by talking to her. She had read a lot of books on the subject and could have made quite a career out of offering unsolicited advice to those she felt were in need of her particular brand of ‘therapy’.

‘She doesn’t threaten me at all, Mum,’ I answered. ‘But allow me a little room to express my “feelings” about a woman Poppy’s age arriving on my doorstep announcing herself as Monty’s wife.’

I had long learned to throw the whole expressing-your-feelings business back in my mother’s face but on this occasion it fell flat.

‘Hostile,’ Mum mouthed to Poppy.

Harry’s cellphone, which was sitting on the coffee table, started to ring at that point but when I reached for it I saw that the name ‘Charles’ was flashing up on the caller ID.

I had been extremely pleasant to my husband all evening despite fighting a dreadful urge to fling myself across the dinner table and rip his throat out. He was so much his old self it just didn’t seem right that he in fact lived around the corner and had a boyfriend. He wasn’t even uncomfortable with my family which he jolly well should have been because he had betrayed me so awfully. And they should have been very cross and quite mean to him in a show of solidarity for me, their actual daughter and sister. Instead there was a slightly congratulatory mood in the room. Jovial almost. This enraged me so much that when I saw ‘Charles’ flashing on the phone I opened the window and threw it out into the courtyard.

Hostile, my foot.

My mother pursed her lips in a very cat’s bottom fashion and decamped for the kitchen.

‘Oh, Florence, please, please, don’t be angry,’ Poppy pleaded, her freckles sticking out adorably below her imploring blue eyes. ‘I can’t bear to see you like this. I know you’re hurt but anger won’t help you heal, you know it won’t.’

‘Am I not allowed a moment or two of wanting to kill the former love of my life for abandoning me?’ I asked her.

‘Yes, of course you are, but you’ve already had those moments,’ she said. ‘You must think about moving forward. And anyway, it’s not Harry I’m worried about. He can look after himself. It’s Crystal.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean she seems like a thoroughly decent person and the universe has brought her and Monty together so you shouldn’t be the one to drive them apart.’

‘How exactly am I driving them apart?’ I asked my sister. ‘By having them living here in my house, by feeding and watering them?’

‘You are not being very nice to her,’ Poppy said. ‘In fact, you’re being quite horrid. And she’s Monty’s choice. They’re in love!’