On Top of Everything (6 page)

The look on her face when it did sink in broke my heart. That beautiful face. Those big brown eyes. That thick, dark hair that drives her mad because there’s so bloody much of it but has strangers turning to watch it swing across her shoulders as she walks down the street.

What kind of a man can walk away from this, I asked myself, as I watched those eyes widen, a light come on, then go out in them. She seemed to sag to half her normal size. It crushed her. What kind of a man does that?

I suppose I had not known myself what kind of a man I really was until I met Charles. Even then I denied it as long as I could possibly manage. I’d always known I had more than a passing interest in that sort of thing but I thought this was probably on the acceptable side of normal. Besides, I was madly in love with my wife. I had been ever since she noticed me at the bus stop I’d been staking out for weeks, after first noticing her buying crisps at the corner shop. We were little more than children, really, now that I look back on it. When Monty was fourteen I used to spy on him watching cartoons on TV and think, I met the woman I married when I was his age. What did I know then?

Well, I knew I loved her and nothing will ever change that. But meeting Charles was different and nothing could change that either. Meeting Charles just made the rest of my life feel wrong. No, worse than that, it made it feel like a lie. And I may be many things but I have tried, especially where Florence has been concerned, especially at home, never to be a liar.

To be honest, the blow to the side of the head with the bananas felt good and I don’t even like bananas. But I deserved them. I deserved worse, much worse, but I also deserved better, and so did Florence.

CHAPTER FIVE

How does one get over something like that? The husband being gay thing, I mean, not the deadly assault with bananas.

And by ‘get over’ I’m not talking in a long term ‘how does one survive in a world without one’s previously heterosexual other half’ sense. I’m talking in a ‘how does one live through the very immediate seconds, minutes, hours, that keep ticking by after the world has been turned upside down’ sense.

How do you survive those? How do you get over that?

Well, the answer is simple. You don’t. Not exactly. There is the aforementioned bit of you that dies, then there’s a bit that wishes the rest would follow or that it had never been born in the first place, then there is whatever’s left over. This bit, rather astonishingly, can have quite a lot of pep. This is the bit that attacks your husband with rotting bananas, that tries to pull at his clothes, that tears at your hair and beats at your breast. The dead and the wanting-to-be-dead or never-born bits are
unbearably sad but the banana bit is angry.

Although it wasn’t Harry’s being gay that made me furious. It’s true. In the immediate aftermath of his bombshell, I believed I loved him too much for a tiny little thing like sexual persuasion to get in the way. In the fullness of time, I saw this to be completely untrue but for a few minutes there, after the bananas but before the lamp stand, I believed we could somehow work around it. But when I told Harry this he did not smile and look relieved as I imagined he might, he got that same miserable look on his face and I realised that there was more, that there was something else I was not getting. That’s when it occurred to me that being gay and meeting Charles from the Whittington combined with all that repetitive talk of being so sorry and endlessly begging my forgiveness was just a lead up to the real bombshell: Harry was leaving me.

Yes, leaving me. He was moving into a bedsit in Lancaster Gate, he told me, until he had ‘sorted out’ his position with Charles. He’d already signed the lease.

I couldn’t have felt more ambushed if he’d jumped out from behind a tree wearing a chamois leather loincloth (not out of the question in the new circumstances) and pointing a bow and arrow at me.

It was unfair enough that this was happening in the first place but it was worse that I’d had no warning. This is the thing no one prepares you for where disasters are concerned. There is no ominous black cloud, no spooky chill, no neon sign that flashes: Stop! Please! Go back to bed! There’s something really, really dreadful waiting to happen around the corner! I beg of you, do not continue!

If only. Instead I’d kissed my husband goodbye just two days before as he’d headed for Aldeburgh and carried on innocently as usual. But now I had this, this,
this
being dumped on me
from a great height. Bloody Harry had spent I don’t know how long thrashing out his plans, coming to his conclusions, making all his decisions, but I was totally new to the lot of it and the shock had me in pieces.

As we sat there at the kitchen table, or I chased him around it, or I collapsed on the floor against the creaky dishwasher, I kept forgetting what was going on. My mind would race ahead to being a lonely old maid and I’d see myself sitting in a wheelchair (for some reason) dressed in black with lipstick à la
Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?
smeared all over my face and my mind would get stuck in this desolate future while Harry stood on the other side of the room, burbling on about being true to himself and doing what’s best for everyone.

Then I’d switch back to the moment, to him, only to lose myself instantly to the past. I had been with Harry for twenty-five years. Was it all bollocks? Had our sex life been abnormal? I didn’t know. I’d only ever slept with him. And it’s not like he’d ever tried to take me from behind or insisted on a Swedish strap-on or whatever the hell they’re called so I don’t know how I was supposed to fathom that he was bloody well gay.

He was loving, he was affectionate, he was engaged in me, in us, in our life. How had this happened? Where had it happened?

‘At the gym,’ he told me. ‘I met him at the gym.’

You know, it’s not until you absolutely lose your dignity that you realise just how much you need it in the first place. I cringe when I think of what happened that day, for many reasons, but mostly because Harry and I had never been ones to row. We had the odd grumpy silence, made the odd snarky comment, but we just weren’t shouters or screamers. But I shouted and screamed at him then with a venom I had not known I was capable of. I told him his mother was an alcoholic and his
father a bully (almost true but never previously mentioned); I told him he was a turgid writer without a glimmer of talent (same); I told him he hitched his trousers up too high and shouldn’t wear thick white socks with his sneakers (I had mentioned the socks before). I went on.

I know now that Harry could not help who he was and how difficult it must have been for him to confront the truth and therefore me. He loved me, I know he did, and still does, and he truly did not want to hurt me. Ultimately he cared about that less than he cared about being true to himself, though, which is fine. Really. I mean for him, especially, but eventually even for me, fine. Who wants to live a lie? Who wants to make someone else live one?

Not me. Although that afternoon I could see none of this. All I could see was the life I thought I was so happily living whooshing away from me like those filthy, brown tsunami floodwaters. And as I was caught up in this hateful torrent and dragged downwards, the survival mechanism that kicked in was not one of grace and serenity and understanding but one of ferocious anger and bitterness and over-ripe fruit.

Worse, as Harry escaped the house, his ear caked with squashed banana, so many things still unsaid, I knew that I was right about the rotten things, that I was two really big ones down but still had one to go and it was bound to be a pearler. The universe had at least one more crappy treat in store for me and I had better gird my loins in preparation — especially as my loins were unlikely to get much other activity in the immediate future.

I had spent half my life being Mrs Harry Dowling and now I was to be what? Who?

I didn’t even have a job.

Sparky was beside himself with sympathy, which frankly
just made me want to go outside and shoot my face off. His too.

I didn’t know what to do with myself as I sat in the kitchen, the debris of our broken marriage splattered and shattered around me. I couldn’t even think who to turn to, other than Harry, who was too busy leaving me, or Monty, who was still on the other side of the world.

Monty!

What were we going to tell him? How? I leapt to my feet and ran downstairs to the front door to see if Harry was still lurking outside somewhere, picking sludge from his hair, but when I pulled the door open, a ruddy-faced man with lowslung work-pants and a huge beer belly was standing on the doorstep grinning at me.

‘Afternoon, missus. Stanley Morris, plumber,’ he said, holding out the hand that wasn’t carrying his tool kit and looking over my shoulder down the hall. ‘I’m here about your leaky tap. Kitchen down the back, is it?’

My leaky tap. I had rung the plumber about a month before to come and fix it but had given up hope that anyone would ever show. Yet here he was. Now. Just after my heart had been ripped out of my chest and jumped on by the man I trusted most in the whole wide world.

Yet, the tap was indeed leaky. Life went on.

I remember my mother saying something to the same effect after the grandparent trifecta. She was smoking a joint and gazing out the window as the rubbish truck collected the next door neighbour’s rubbish.

‘It’s so hard to believe that everything is just carrying on as usual,’ she said dreamily, her rings and bracelets jangling as she ran her fingers through her long, wiry grey hair. ‘We all think we are so important, but we’re not, are we? We can live, or die,
and it makes no difference to the garbage man. There’s still the same amount of garbage in the world, with or without us.’

‘But
we
compost and recycle,’ I pointed out. It was a sore point: the compost bin was alive with a kingdom of tiny flying insects and it was my job to fill it. ‘So it would really make no difference to the garbage man if we lived or died because he doesn’t collect our garbage anyway.’

My mother looked at me, disappointedly I suspect, then went back to gazing out the window.

She
was
talking rubbish about the garbage man, but I remember silently agreeing that it didn’t seem right that one still had to do one’s homework and walk the dog and dry the dishes and change the loo roll when such a great gaping hole had been left in one’s universe by the death of a much treasured loved one.

Now, all these years later, here was my husband leaving me for another man one minute and Stanley Morris wanting to fix my leaky tap the next. And despite everything that had just happened, I really did want the tap fixed because every time I turned it on a jet of water shot out and got me square in the eye, no matter where my eye happened to be at the time, and no matter what the marital status of the body in which the eye belonged.

‘Upstairs,’ I said weakly to Stanley Morris, then followed his somewhat jiggly backside up to the kitchen. He could have hitched his pants up higher, frankly, but he kept up a friendly patter as we climbed.

‘Lovely old place you’ve got here,’ he said. ‘Used to be a doctor’s surgery, am I right? I used to come here when I was a lad, I think. We lived just around the corner in St John’s Wood. You know them council flats in Lisson Grove? Yeah, grew up there, I did. She still lives there, my old mum. Eighty-seven
and not showing any signs of going anywhere else in a hurry either, God bless her. There was a doctor closer to us than this, of course, right across the road, but my old mum didn’t care for him. Said he had cold hands. Funny, innit, what they object to, the old ones, not that she was so old then but you can’t tell a young ’un that, can you? Or you can try but you won’t get very far. Now, let’s see what we have here.’

Standing at the kitchen counter, Stanley Morris paused to push a broken bread and butter plate out of his way with the side of his foot and wiped away some squashed banana with a J-cloth. I stared in embarrassment at the hideous mess strewn around us. It looked like a chimpanzee’s tea party gone horribly wrong, but Stanley Morris seemed to take it in his stride.

He turned the tap on and the jet of water hit him straight in the eye.

‘I see what you mean,’ he said jovially. ‘Cor, this is an old model, this mixer, but that’s not all bad, that is. You can still get replacement parts for the likes of this. The new ones? Nah, you’ve got to be joking. Cheaper to put a new one in than repair the old one, even if it’s brand spanking new. Makes you sick, doesn’t it? Makes me sick.’

As Stanley Morris continued to prattle on I quietly swept up the broken crockery and pieces of lamp shade, which reminded me of the chamber pot and the fact that I had been fired earlier — surely not the same day? It seemed a lifetime ago.

‘Beautiful part of London this, I reckon,’ Stanley chattered. ‘My old man’s old man worked the canal boats back in the dark ages. Hard to imagine everything being delivered by water though, innit? I ain’t been to the real Venice myself but my daughter has. She saw all sorts of things being delivered in them boats. Wotcha call ’em? Gondolas, yeah, gondolas:
tables and chairs, cabbages, bottles of water, birds in cages, you name it.’

He opened the door beneath the sink and, huffing, got down on his hands and knees to peer in.

‘Never been anywhere in Italy me,’ he continued, his voice echoing around my kitchen cupboards as he rattled around with his spanner. ‘Probably wouldn’t bother with Venice anyway. All that walking. Not a single car. But Rome, I could handle that. The Colosseum, Trevi Fountain, Spanish Steps. My daughter’s been there, too. Says you can get a good cup of tea at the bottom of the Spanish Steps but you’d better make the most of it because it’s the only one you’ll find in the whole of Europe.’

He turned over and lay on his back, his torso and legs sticking out into the kitchen. His belly didn’t look anywhere near so beery lying down. It looked like the belly of a man who loved his mum and his daughter and was not fazed by smashed crockery and squashed banana.

I felt an inexplicable rush of warmth for Stanley Morris.

‘My husband’s just told me he’s leaving me for another man,’ I told the bottom two-thirds of him.

His spanner stopped rattling. He scooted out from under the sink.

‘You all right then?’ he asked. He didn’t seem embarrassed. Or even surprised. Maybe it happened more often than I imagined.

I shook my head. I was not all right.

‘Come as a shock, did it?’

I nodded. It had come as a shock. ‘We’ve been together since we were kids,’ I said. ‘We’ve been married for twenty years. I had no idea. I thought we were happy.’

Stanley Morris nodded, sighed, then used his spanner to
scratch a spot on his back in between his shoulder blades.