On Top of Everything (25 page)

‘Of course,’ Mr Worthington said. I thought he shot Crystal a funny look, but I was too busy trying to calm my pending hysterics to properly analyse it.

‘Florence, I’m going to give you some advice now that Nick may have already given you but it will help you enormously in the times ahead,’ he said in a very calm, authoritative voice, ‘no matter what the outcome.’

Outcome? Of what? The advice?

He handed me a tissue, which I took, giving my nose a healthy blow. I turned to look at Crystal and to my surprise she seemed totally shaken. As though some terrible news had just been delivered to her.

‘Only worry about what you absolutely know about,’ Mr Worthington said to me, putting my mind back where it belonged. ‘That’s the key. Worrying about anything else is just a waste of time and emotion. I know that seems obvious but honestly, the more information you have, the less your imagination can run away with you so the secret is to find out as much as you can about what your particular problem is — where the cancer is, how it can be treated — and you’ll be amazed at how this simplifies things. You no longer have to worry about the “what ifs”.’

‘But what if —’ I started.

‘Exactly,’ he said. ‘You know that feeling you have now?
That sort of overwhelming panic and dread and terror that life as you know it is never going to be the same ever again because it could be that or it could be this or it could be the next thing?’

I nodded. He’d hit the nail right on the head. That overwhelming panic and dread and terror was just part of my waking day now, like breathing.

‘We’re going to try to eliminate that feeling,’ Mr Worthington continued, ‘by finding out exactly what it is that we are dealing with and treating it.’

I liked it that he said ‘we’. I felt less like just me.

‘How will we do that?’ I asked and I knew I sounded scared but I felt less so than I had even a moment before.

‘I have to be honest with you,’ he said, ‘your histology shows that you have a very aggressive form of cancer.’

It felt like a punch. The air was sucked out of my lungs. I’d suspected it was bad. I’d known it was bad. And I was right.

‘Your tumour was large and flat,’ Mr Worthington continued, ‘quite unusual for a colon cancer, which makes it a little less predictable. But on the plus side, and it’s a big plus, it’s been detected fairly early. In terms of finding out more, to eliminate the unknowns, we need to operate, Florence, there is no doubt about that. We need to do a resection, which is when we cut out the bit of colon that has the tumour in it and then we join the bits of colon on either side together again. The operation is relatively straightforward, the recovery period quite manageable, the outcome extremely positive.’

This seemed like so much information I couldn’t process it all. The receptionist was right, the shock made it impossible to remember the words even as he said them.

‘Surgery?’ I asked him, amazed that my voice still worked, that I could control it. ‘Couldn’t I just have chemotherapy?’ I
didn’t want to lose my hair, of course I didn’t, but I didn’t want someone making sushi out of my body parts either.

‘I’m sorry, Florence, but there’s absolutely no doubt that you need surgery. The only truly reliable way to get rid of cancer in the colon is to remove it. Anything else simply doesn’t have the same results. It’s the first and may in fact be the only step, depending on what we find out when we do further tests. I would do the surgery, which would take around three hours, you would be in hospital for a week, and your recovery at home would take about a month — although someone as young and fit as yourself could well find it a total doddle.’

A week in hospital? A month of recovery? A doddle? I fought to grasp that this was me we were talking about.

‘And after this operation,’ I hated these words, these horrible sick, old people’s words, ‘after the recovery, everything would be OK? I would be OK?’

‘If the cancer has been contained in your colon, your chances of a full recovery are extremely good.’

If the cancer was contained in my colon, my chances of a full recovery were extremely good. Was that a yes?

‘And if it’s not contained?’ It was Crystal who asked this. She didn’t sound like herself. She was obviously as flabbergasted as I was.

‘If the cancer has gone through the bowel wall and travelled, there will be traces of it in Florence’s lymph nodes, some of which we will remove for testing when we are doing the resection,’ Mr Worthington explained. ‘Typically, if colon cancer moves it goes to the liver, which is closest, or sometimes the lungs. In either situation, I would most likely recommend more surgery, if appropriate, plus chemo and possibly radiotherapy. The outcome in these cases is not always as positive as the early detection scenario where the cancer is
contained, but full recovery is still a possibility.’

So, he could make sushi with my innards
and
I could end up bald?

‘Why has this happened to me?’ I asked him. ‘I’ve hardly ever been ill. I eat healthily, usually, and I’m fit, usually. What did I do wrong?’

‘You most likely did nothing wrong,’ he said, ‘and you’ve every right to feel aggrieved. You’re outside the statistics in almost every way so I can’t answer why this has happened to you. There could be a genetic predisposition that makes you more susceptible to certain cancers and we can test that once we’ve done the surgery, which will also have an impact on Monty, obviously, even if it’s just so he can get in the system in terms of surveillance or …’

‘Monty?’ Had he just mentioned Monty?

‘If the genetic testing shows up any faults in your DNA this will be good for Monty, Florence, because he can be tested from now on and early detection is the only really reliable way to …’

‘But you called him Monty,’ I said.

‘Of course,’ Mr Worthington smiled, ‘and if he and Crystal are going to have children then …’

‘If Monty and Crystal have children?’

Mr Worthington looked at Crystal, clearly puzzled. ‘Why, yes,’ he said. ‘I know it has been difficult for you but …’

‘What’s been difficult for me?’ I turned to Crystal, puzzled myself. She was chewing her bottom lip, looking sicker than I was. ‘What’s going on here? Did you talk to him before I got here?’

Mr Worthington laughed. ‘Well, of course, she’s talked to me,’ he said.

Then as I turned back to him, still totally bewildered, I
watched comprehension drop down over his face like a
dance-hall
curtain.

‘Oh, fuck,’ he breathed, leaning back in his chair and closing his eyes. ‘Oh fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck.’

Now, I wasn’t at all
au fait
with the medical protocol of the day but this seemed a mightily inappropriate response towards a patient discussing a life-threatening illness and its treatment.

Crystal then totally floored me by saying to him: ‘I had no idea it was you. I didn’t know your surname. I didn’t know exactly what you did. And I didn’t know you did it here.’

‘Did what?’ I asked again, dimly. ‘Did what here?’

‘I assumed you came to me on purpose,’ Mr Worthington said to Crystal. ‘Because you knew this was my field. It never occurred to me for a moment — it just seems so outrageously bloody awful, otherwise. Oh fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck.’

‘Will someone please tell me what the hell is going on?’ I demanded. ‘What’s all this “oh fucking” about?’

There was a hideous silence, while the other two stared at each other with ill-disguised horror.

‘I’m so sorry, Florence,’ Crystal finally said, ‘but this is Charles.’

‘Charles?’ I repeated dimly. Was I supposed to know what that meant? I only knew of one other Charles, or ‘Charles’ as I called him. And he was a something or other at the Whittington and I hadn’t even met him nor did I want to.

Oh, please, no.

‘
That
Charles?’ Now I was in shock. ‘
Harry
’s Charles?’ No! Where was the dog, the green suit, the awful orange hair? It simply couldn’t be Charles, Harry’s Charles. It just simply could not be. For many reasons. Too many.

‘Please tell me,’ I implored him. ‘Please, please, please tell
me that I haven’t been sitting here discussing my colo-rectum with my gay ex-husband’s new boyfriend.’

There was another dreadful silence into which mushroomed the certitude that this was exactly what we had been doing.

‘Oh fuck,’ I said myself. Just when you think your life could not possibly get any worse, it does. Enormously.

I wasn’t sure what the standard procedure was for dealing with this kind of colossal cock-up but as I reeled with the implications of what had just gone on, Charles leaned forward, pressed a buzzer on his desk and said into whatever contraption it was: ‘So sorry to bother you, Evelyn, but do you think we could have tea for three in here? The Lady Grey, if you wouldn’t mind, leaf of course. And some of those lemon biscuits from Fortnum’s, not the Duchy of Cornwall ones but the other ones. Thank you, Evelyn, much appreciated.’

I knew from made-for-TV movies that alcoholics usually had to hit rock bottom before they could give up the booze and start to turn their lives around. But I’d often wondered how they knew where rock bottom was when everything before rock bottom could also have been rock bottom or at least felt like it at the time.

And although I had made a hash of being an alcoholic, I wouldn’t be an alcoholic’s elbow as Rose would have said, but sitting there in Charles’s office I nonetheless recognised the skull-cracking thump of rock bottom being hit.

When you get there, it’s obvious.

I probably could have sunk further. It was humanly possible. I could have abused the man who stole my husband and stormed out of his office. I could have gone home, packed my bags and run away to a dingy bedsit in Brighton. I could have lived out my days all alone eating greasy fish and chips and watching telly and talking to no one.

But here was the thing. In storming out of the office, I would alert Crystal and Charles to my departure. In going home to pack my bags I would alert Poppy who would tell my parents. Plus I also ran the risk of running into Monty who would find out anyway via Crystal, as would Harry via any of the three of them.

And then there was Will.

He would surely notice if I didn’t turn up to ignore his hole and remind him that his services weren’t needed. And even if he never came back to the house, Stanley probably would and he would hear from Crystal or Monty or Poppy and tell Will I’d run away to Brighton and Will might just come and fetch me, so that was that. My chances of living out a lonely life eating greasy fish and chips and watching telly were already shot.

I had an aggressive form of cancer that required immediate treatment; I had a suicidal sister who believed her only chance at happiness was to work in the tearoom I was no longer opening; I had just spilled my guts — literally — to the chap who was shagging my husband.

I should have felt like jumping out the nearest window but I didn’t. Something was nagging at me and stopping me from spiralling further downward, below rock bottom. Something was happening to me. Something had changed. Something was pointing me in a different direction.

Maybe it was the realisation, the sudden urgent utter conviction that Crystal, Monty, Harry, Poppy, Mum, Dad, Stanley, and Will would all fight to keep me from my lonely bedsit in Brighton.

Maybe it was that Charles, previously known as ‘Charles’, had just coped with excruciating embarrassment by producing a pot of Lady Grey, leaf of course, and lemon biscuits, for heaven’s sake.

The truth was that I’d never felt more like a cup of tea and a biscuit in all my life.

And the other truth was that I was no longer alone.

At first, I just wanted the floor to open up and swallow me whole then spit me out in Mexico or China or somewhere far, far away where no one would ever find me no matter how hard they looked.

Really, you could not dream up such a dreadful coincidence. But as Florence herself pointed out later, it really wasn’t such a coincidence at all when you thought about it. There was she, in London, being in need of a specialised surgeon, and there was I, in London, being one. I had assumed Crystal knew I had rooms in Harley Street as well as being a consultant at the Whittington but why would she? I’d never thought to spell it out.

Had I, no doubt we could have avoided the whole sorry disaster altogether.

Although of course it wasn’t a disaster, in the end. There was a moment, after it became clear to her who I was, when if she’d had a gun I think she would have pulled it out and shot me. And who could have blamed her? As it was, she did not appear to be armed. She just sat there looking like she really wished she was, during which all I could think to do was to ask Evelyn to bring in some tea.

There’s no problem can’t be solved by a cup of tea, my grandmother always used to say, and while I didn’t particularly think of this when I first asked for it, I thought it afterwards because no sooner had I taken my finger off the intercom button
than Florence started to laugh.