On Top of Everything (19 page)

I lay there with my poor baby sister in my arms, so inconsolable with grief that she had tried to kill herself, and tried not to think about my rotting colon. Never mind out of sync, the biorhythms were totally fucked if you asked me.

Poppy drifted off to sleep eventually and I lay there for the best part of an hour, watching those long golden lashes on her pale cheeks, smelling her buttery breath and feeling something so complicated and painful and odd I couldn’t put it into words.

All I knew was that without Poppy the world was a truly shit place. I needed her in it. Forever. However long that was, etcetera etcetera etcetera.

When she was truly conked out and snoring the fluttery puppy-dog snore she’d long been known for, I extricated myself from the bed and crept downstairs to the kitchen where I knew Mum and Dad would be waiting for me.

‘How is she?’ my mother asked. ‘Oh Effie, I’m so pleased you are here. Your father and I are at our wits’ end. I thought she’d seemed better, didn’t you, Archie? Just lately I thought she seemed better.’

I pulled up a chair and helped myself to a goblet of whatever they were having. It tasted like gin, only worse.

‘I just don’t know where to start,’ I said, surprised that I
didn’t feel more angry with them. ‘What’s been going on? What do you mean you thought she seemed better? What’s the matter with her?’

‘I can’t tell her, Archie,’ my mother wailed. ‘You do it.’

Dad hitched at his corduroy trousers. He was looking quite conservative for him. But so old, the poor thing. His brow was furrowed so much his glasses sat higher on his nose than normal, which made him look quite foreign.

His hand shook as he raised his goblet to his lips and took a sip. Then shook again as he put it down.

‘Poppy’s been depressed,’ he said, with such disbelief I felt a huge surge of affection for him, living in his perfect happiness bubble. ‘You know, clinically. We tried St John’s wort and reiki and quite a lot of acupuncture but we had to resort to conventional medicine in the end. Pills and things,’ he said, still bewildered, ‘since the last time.’

‘The last time?’ I was aghast.

‘Ginseng tablets. About a hundred of them,’ my Dad said, his voice breaking. ‘Last year, just after Monty had gone to Australia. We didn’t want to upset you by telling you.’ He looked nervously at Mum as if to check he was getting this right. ‘She’s been so bloody fragile, Effie, and we’ve been trying to look after her, haven’t we, Beth, but it’s not been easy. She’s such a precious soul.’

‘Why didn’t she tell me?’ I was aghast, totally aghast, but also hurt, I think. ‘I’m her big sister.’

Mum blew her nose so loudly I was surprised her ears didn’t fly off.

‘Well, that’s just it,’ she said. ‘You’re her big sister. You’re the one who has done it all first and done it well and she doesn’t feel she can compare to you, Florence. She never has.’

Compare to me? Was I hearing things?

‘But I’m a mess,’ I said. ‘My marriage has collapsed, as has my relationship with my son, as have most of the interior walls in my house. And on top of that, I …’

Shit.

My parents were looking at me, both of them so crinkled and ground down with sorrow that suddenly I knew I could not tell them about the measles. Robust? What on earth had given me that impression? The two of them were as tough as spun sugar. They would snap at the gentlest of tweaks.

I just couldn’t bring myself to drop my bomb when they were so obviously already shellshocked by my little sister lying upstairs with her wrists bound up in cream crêpe bandages.

‘On top of that, what?’ my mother asked.

‘Yes, darling, whatever else is the matter?’ Dad’s goblet shook in his hands.

I just loved them then. I just truly, really, enormously loved them. They did such a good job of looking after Poppy and she needed them so much more than I did. I could get by without them in a way that she couldn’t, especially now. I’d got this far, hadn’t I? So I decided that I would tell them my awful news, but I would wait until the impact of Poppy’s suicide attempt had settled into the creases of the past. When it was not so much a real live tragedy but more of a whispered ‘remember when?’ under the covers at night or a stolen look between the two of them over the breakfast table.

‘The house has rotten foundations,’ I answered, rather limply. ‘I know it seems silly in comparison with what’s happened to Poppy but the thing is that apparently the joists are all turning to dust and need fixing or the whole jolly house could fall down and it’s going to cost a bomb and, well, that’s it, really …’

My parents looked at each other, clearly thrilled, and I
swear they both sat up an extra two inches as they beamed. You’d have thought I just told them I’d converted to Hinduism and was going to live on an ashram in Goa.

‘If it’s money you want, darling, that’s no trouble at all,’ my father said, quite delighted.

‘Yes, get out the chequebook, Archie!’ my mother crowed.

This lottery-winning delight was not the reaction I had expected. I had expected them to collapse with relief that I wasn’t turning my house into a common cafe to which ne’er do wells with their white sugar addictions might flock, to their, and no doubt my, ultimate detriment.

‘Which drawer?’ my father shouted from the study.

‘The chequebook drawer, Archie,’ my mother shouted back, rolling her eyes.

I had never before asked my parents for so much as a penny and it felt totally despicable to be doing it now. Or, should I say, it should have felt totally despicable and I had always imagined it would feel totally despicable but then again, I hadn’t really asked them. Seeing what pleasure it gave them, I could not help but be warmed a little by their sheer delight.

Here, I realised, was a problem they could solve, just like that.

I had absolutely no doubt they had tried as hard as they humanly could to help Poppy, to curb her loneliness, to improve her sex life, to get her that little red-headed baby she so deserved, but really, against the will of the crooked universe, they were powerless.

Reinforcing the basement of Rose’s house so I could serve orange pekoe and lemon yo-yos, even though I wasn’t going to, now that was a different matter.

‘What will it take?’ Dad asked, taking the lid off his antique fountain pen with a dramatic flourish. ‘Twenty? I can’t see how
you’d fix dry rot for less than twenty.’

‘Well, the builder says ten,’ I started to say.

‘So, you can take that, double it, and add another ten,’ scoffed my mother.

‘Thirty it is then,’ Dad quickly agreed and again he and my mother shared such a triumphant look I damn near called them up on it. I wasn’t such a stubborn old goat that I would never let them help me, was I?

‘Thirty is more than enough,’ I said weakly, then snatched up my goblet and drained the hideous liquid that was settling, pond-like, within. If only they knew. Here I was letting them help me but not in the way in which I actually needed their help.

I took the cheque, kissed them both good night, then trudged upstairs and climbed back into bed with my poor sad darling sister.

I could have died all over again but properly this time when Effie walked into the bathroom. What a silly twit she must have thought I was. And she’d be right. All that’s going on in her life and I have to make a fuss about something as nonsensical as not having a boyfriend.

It’s just that it didn’t feel nonsensical. I really needed a boyfriend to get me my baby. And I always tried to throw so much light out into the world, I really did, but I just wasn’t attracting the right sort of light back in again.

Gideon, the face reader, I really thought he was it, my future force. He was so kind and thoughtful and gentle and brilliant at sex. He picked wildflower posies for me and took me on picnics with three different sorts of sprout sandwiches and gave wonderful massages with Fair Trade jojoba oil.

We lay in a meadow one afternoon laughing at the clouds, just holding hands and talking about what we wanted out of life and it was so beautiful. It felt so honest and hopeful. I mean never bloody once did he mention his wife and two daughters.

How could a kind, thoughtful, gentle person do that? He knew I was looking for a life partner, he knew how much I wanted a baby, and yet he lay there in the long grass with me and pretended to imagine our future together. Is it just me or is that the cruellest thing you could possibly imagine?

I met his wife at a Feldenkrais workshop in Sudbury, that’s
how I found out about her. She was this wonderful, tall, blonde, beautiful powerhouse of a woman with a perfectly toned body and the most warrior-like posture. She was telling me about her husband and how he collected
Tintin
first editions and I knew straight away it was Gideon and sure enough it was.

He came to pick her up with the two little girls in the car and when he saw me he didn’t even look surprised or worried or anything. His eyes just slid over me as if I wasn’t even there and I realised then that it had all been a big fat lie and he was just like Bruno the rugmaker and Jimmy the farrier and Gerald who managed the secondhand bookshop in Bury St Edmonds.

They’d all told me one thing and meant quite another, which I simply can’t understand, no matter how hard I try. Is it just me that these seemingly lovely men tell such terrible lies to or do they lie to everyone?

There are good men in the world, I know that. Daddy is a good man. Harry is a good man. Monty is a good man. That’s three just in my family. So where are all the others?’

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

I stayed on a few more days at Tannington Hall because Poppy, Mum and Dad each separately asked me to and in the circumstances, I could hardly say no. Besides I was scared to take my eyes off my sister. I didn’t think she would try to do anything silly again, she seemed embarrassed by it, really. But she was still undeniably sad.

When we were together, however, chatting about this, that and the next thing, she seemed to perk up. I could see the mist of loneliness and depression lift a little, and it did my own aching heart good to be of some help.

In this climate, again, keeping my own awful secret wasn’t as hard as I might have imagined. I’ve heard it said before of people who have been in terrible accidents that they don’t feel all their injuries at once, only the worst one: the head injury overwhelms the shattered leg, which covers up the broken wrist, which blocks out the multiple lacerations, and in a way
I suppose the same could be said of me.

I felt terror on Poppy’s behalf, first and foremost, and that obliterated my other worries. They would be there, waiting for me, when distress over my sister lessened, I knew that, but in the meantime every time I looked at her or my parents my own problems blurred into the background.

Apart from first thing in the morning, of course, when myself and my situation were crisply reunited in the harsh light of day and found each other extremely lacking. I’d wake up, stretch out in the bouncy single bed piled high with the goose-down quilts that I’d had since I was three and for those few blissful moments all would be right with the world. Then I’d remember that Harry was gone, Monty was married, Poppy wanted to kill herself, and I had cancer.

I thought I could feel it then, physically, my disease, lurking in my innards. It felt like a big, oily, slow-moving, dark mass that was oozily forcing its way into the various corners of my body, like some sort of sinister asphalt. Why me, I would think, over and over and over. What had I done to deserve this? As those bleak morning minutes ticked by, this historical disinterment took over my worries, shadowing my fear for the future. I upturned every flowerpot of my past looking for a hidden reason why I might have attracted cancer when I felt as though I had done nothing in my life but pay attention to my manners, be kind to strangers, and generally try to do the right thing.

Was it because I had turned my nose up at Mum and Dad’s alternative lifestyle? For all I knew cynicism was the number one cause of cancer. Or was it because I’d been secretly pleased when school bully Susan Steiner was hit by the number 18 bus and broke both legs and her big ugly nose? I didn’t know how far back cancer searched when it invaded a life looking for a
reason to visit hell upon it. Had it chosen me because I’d been a bit smug at ending up a happily married mother of one at such a young age? It had made life easy for me being Harry’s wife and Monty’s mother, I sort of knew that, although I only knew it around the edges, not down the middle. I hadn’t had to go out in the big wide world and find a husband or a career but that wasn’t a deliberate statement, it was just happy coincidence (or not so happy, as it turned out). And anyway, as far as I knew being unambitious and a tiny bit smug wasn’t a crime, especially not one punishable by what was being dealt to me.

It was more plausible, I supposed, that I should blame white flour and red meat and an absolute inability to meditate for more than a split second without wondering whether you can still buy those little mushroom things to darn socks with; or whether chocolate cream best fills the gap between the layers of a coffee cake or whether it should be coffee cream or just plain cream.

Whatever it was, I didn’t like to be left alone for too long applying such twitty forensics to my past life. This propelled me out of bed on those Tannington days, despite the cosiness of the goose-down quilts, and into the freezing cold bathroom for a shower so I could then get about the business of helping my family get over Poppy’s near-demise.

Still, every morning as I dried myself in front of the pathetic one-bar heater in my room, I imagined myself telling Mum and Dad about what was happening to me. I could see Mum’s face crumple, Dad’s fade to ghostly white, him clutching her, she falling back into her chair. But when it came to picturing the words I would use, I choked. How would they bear it? How would Poppy bear it? If I was terribly ill, if I was terminally ill, and I had fairly much talked myself into the fact that I was,
what would be gained by talking about it now?

If I kept it to myself, I reasoned, teeth chattering, when it came the blow would fall short and sharp, as it had with Rose. Charlotte’s father, on the other hand, had died a year or so before after a very long drawn-out battle with pancreatic cancer. I swear the family had done so much grieving before he actually popped his clogs that his death and the funeral that followed it all seemed a bit of an anti-climax. Everyone was thoroughly exhausted by then, physically and emotionally. Charlotte’s sister had all but had a nervous breakdown trying to deal with her loss. An aunt had thrown a spectacular hissy fit at the graveside — over the matter of some dusty heirloom as it turned out. The stress had caused Charlotte to starve herself down to Posh Spice proportions and her mother had been hospitalised four times in a single week with what emerged to be panic attacks.

The old bugger damn near took his entire family with him and I most certainly did not want to do that to mine. Nor did I want the looks of pity and the hushed whispers behind my back and the gentle pats telling me how brave I was, which were all sure to come if I spilled the beans. It was all so horribly public. Like being pregnant, only in a bad way. When I was carrying Monty I had been embarrassed that my status was so apparent to complete strangers, some of whom felt the urge to actually touch my growing belly. I didn’t want to share my pregnancy. And I didn’t want to share what was happening to me now.

Until the time was right I would deal with it my way, without bothering anyone else. That was the decision I made shivering in front of the rusty three-legged Belling in the spare room at Tannington Hall, pulling my clothes on before I was properly dry for fear of freezing to death right then and there.
In my interest and the interests of the dwindling numbers who knew and loved me, it was better to not say anything, not do anything, not even know any more than I already did.

Poppy, meanwhile, remained as delicate as a rose petal and my parents remained utterly shaken by this, by her. I granted myself my wretched mornings, but for the health of my family I vowed to remain a pillar of strength otherwise.

After nearly a week of Mum’s kidney bean casserole, however, she and Dad seemed to be getting back to their old selves — their gas emissions were overtaking their rotating updates on Poppy’s state of mind as a topic of conversation — and I knew I needed to think about going home.

I did not want to talk about gas emissions. I was off the subject of digestive systems. And I did not like the bean casserole in its first incarnation, let alone when it returned as bean casserole ‘bake’, followed the next day by bean casserole bake ‘pie’ and, worst of all, the following morning, bean casserole bake pie ‘jazzed up breakfast fritters’.

I don’t even want to imagine what jazzed them up. A hundred million mould spores, most likely. Or hashish.

Had my digestive system been in perfect working order to begin with, it would have been lucky to survive such an insult. As it was, I could not help but feel extra concern for its welfare.

Also, I needed to do some real baking. I had been doing my best in Mum’s country kitchen but it just wasn’t the same with rice flour or spelt. Everything I made looked and tasted like bricks and no matter what anyone says, I just do not believe that carob is a proper substitute for chocolate. I do not believe anything is a proper substitute for chocolate.

I did what I could — carob zucchini cake (harrumph), dairy-free oatmeal cookies (not bad), blueberry and parsnip
muffins (disgusting). Dad ate everything and asked for seconds. Mum suspected me of sneaking butter on to the premises (if only) and refused to partake; Poppy picked sadly at whatever I placed in front of her before eventually pushing it listlessly away.

I felt confident that my parents were now in better shape to take care of her, though, even if she herself had not appeared to gain quite as much ground as I had hoped.

‘It’s not over for you, you know, Poppy,’ I told her as we sat out on the porch overlooking the vegie patch one crisp afternoon, Poppy tucked under a pale cashmere throw, me in one of Dad’s old jumpers. ‘Just because the face reader was a lemon, it doesn’t mean the right person isn’t out there for you somewhere. It doesn’t mean that there isn’t some way to get your baby girl.’

‘I’ve thought about a sperm donor, of course I have,’ Poppy answered, patting Sparky, who’d made a suitably mournful companion during our stay. ‘But I’m not sure if I’m a sperm donor sort of person. I want to know where my angel’s come from. Is that wrong? I think I have to aim for a life partner, even though I am thirty-five and people are writing books and making movies all the time about how hard it is when you’re thirty-five. Or about how everyone thinks it’s hard but it’s not, if you follow a few simple rules like … oh, I don’t know, settling for someone who bores you to tears and kills puppies for a living and has buck teeth and no hair. And a sperm donor could be a puppy killer too, couldn’t he? I bet they don’t ask specifically on the form. No, I think an actual non-puppy-killing flesh-and-blood man is the way to go, although I’ve got more chance of getting hit by lightning than finding one at my age.’ She shuddered suddenly and her jaw dropped open, her eyes widening in horror. ‘Oh, I’m so sorry, Effie, I don’t mean
…I didn’t want to … oh, what is the matter with me?’

It took me a moment to realise why she was upset but it soon dawned on me that if it was hard to get a life partner when you were thirty-five, it was most likely impossible when you were four years older.

‘God, don’t worry about me,’ I laughed, and I meant it. ‘That’s the last thing on my mind.’ The last in a pretty impressive list, mind you, I thought, a collage of faded blue denim and tanned skin flashing in my brain.

‘But if it wasn’t the last thing on your mind,’ Poppy said wistfully. ‘What would you do?’

If my life was totally different, if my world was turned upside down again, or right way up again, to be more precise? If finding a life partner, oh bugger that, a boyfriend, a husband, a whatever, was the first thing on my mind? I knew what I would do. I had an option. I would find Will, wherever he now was since I’d fired him from my house, and I would spend all day and all night having wild, abandoned, extremely un-gay sex with him, and then I’d live happily ever after with him.

If.

‘Oh, Effie, please don’t look like that,’ Poppy said desperately. ‘I’m just a total ninny talking nonsense, as usual. Why would you be thinking about that with everything else that’s going on in your life?’

‘Of course I’ve thought about it,’ I said breezily, my balloon of blue denim popping. ‘In fact, I saw an episode of
Oprah
after Harry left and she said San Jose in California was the best place to get a husband. All the men there are apparently super fit and healthy and straight and what’s more there are a lot of them.’

‘San Jose?’ Poppy didn’t look convinced. ‘I wouldn’t last five minutes in the Californian sun. And all the fit, healthy, straight
men would like the tanned girls better than me anyway.’

I couldn’t truly see Poppy as a Californian either, but nonetheless perhaps Oprah was on to something. If the life partners weren’t coming thick and fast wherever Poppy was, perhaps the trick was to go somewhere else.

‘Do you think you could bear to get out in the world a bit more, Poppy? Maybe move to Bury St Edmonds or maybe Norwich or …’ I couldn’t see it. She needed too much looking after and she knew it, she was shaking her head.

‘I’m a home body and that’s the truth,’ she said. ‘If my life partner isn’t going to find me here then he’s probably not going to find me at all. I’m not like you, Effie, I don’t feel at home in the city. I feel lost. You, you just fit in so well.’

Was that true, I wondered?

‘I just love that house,’ I said. ‘And I’ve never wanted to live anywhere else so I suppose I must fit in there.’

‘And you like the Tesco,’ she said, ‘even though the organic department is woeful.’

‘True,’ I agreed.

‘And the Formosa Dining Room, even though it’s a rort.’

‘True again. And Gordon Ramsay’s bought the Warrington pub just up the road.’

‘Never mind him, soon you’ll have your tearoom!’ Poppy crowed, colour crawling across her cheeks. ‘Something to really look forward to. How wonderful for you.’

It was a delight to see her face wrenched away from its sadness and I only wished I could hand Poppy something to really look forward to.

‘Did Dad tell you about the dry rot?’ I asked her.

‘Yes, but he said half of London is rotten. And the other half is radiated. And anything that’s left is politically incorrect.’