On Top of Everything (10 page)

My tears had slowed while I contemplated the whole axe-murdering thing, but stopped completely at the offer of truffles.

‘You made them yourself?’

‘My secret pleasure,’ he said with a smile. ‘Although no longer a secret.’

A delightfully spoken builder who looked like a nonsmoking Marlboro Man and made his own chocolates? I wondered if I was still asleep and dreaming. But my bottom was extremely sore. I thought I could feel the outline of a spanner in an emerging bruise. And the taste of the cherry and pinot noir truffle was real; deliciously, delightfully real.

‘My God, how do you do it?’ I asked Will, who was watching me roll my eyes in ecstasy.

‘I get the cherries sent over from a friend of mine in Spain,’ he answered, with the beginnings of a proud smile, ‘and I marinate them in pinot noir from Central Otago in New Zealand. Then I make a ganache using the wine I’ve soaked the cherries in, roll the cherries in the ganache and then cover it all in seventy per cent cocoa solids. French. It’s quite a cosmopolitan effort.’

‘They are really, really good,’ I said. They were. And I wasn’t just saying that because I hadn’t eaten all day. They were just other-worldly good chocolates. He offered me another one, not the squashed one either, and I took it, lingering on this one a little longer, savouring the tart cherry flavour, the almost bitter chocolate.

Two boozy chocolate cherries down the hatch and I felt a whole lot better about life. Did straight men make their own chocolates, I wondered dreamily? Will did not seem gay but
then neither did Harry. I was perhaps not the best person to pick a man’s sexuality. This was going to make dating a bit tricky, I imagined, not that I could even contemplate dating anyone. What was dating anyway? It hadn’t even been invented when Harry and I started going out.

‘Are you all right?’ Will asked.

‘Fine, thank you, yes,’ I answered him abruptly, snapping to attention. ‘You must think I’m very odd. I’m so sorry but I’m just having a bit of a time of it at the minute.’

‘Stan mentioned,’ Will told me simply. ‘I’m sorry.’

I managed a weak smile.

‘And my tool bag is sorry too,’ added Will, giving it a kick. ‘It wishes it could have provided a softer landing.’

The tool bag was made of what had once been black leather, which was now soft and scuffed. It looked like it had been around for a long time.

‘It should know better,’ I sniffed. ‘A bag that age.’

‘I can take it outside and give it a hiding if you like,’ he suggested.

I laughed and sort of floated off into the luxury of a world where you sat around the kitchen table and made easy conversation with a handsome visitor who brought his own hand-made chocolates.

Had I ever lived in that world before? I asked myself. I must have. Yet it seemed so unfamiliar. Was it because I was attracted to Will in a down-below way? I shocked myself with this thought. I most certainly was not. Who was I to find anyone attractive in any way at all? Let alone a man much younger than me whom I had only just met and with whom I no doubt had very little in common.

‘So, what do you think of the tearoom idea?’ I asked with a cough, returning myself to more practical territory. ‘Is it the
silliest notion anyone has ever had?’

‘Not at all. I think if anyone was going to convert their house into a tearoom then yours is possibly the best place for it,’ he said. ‘The TV room lends itself pretty easily to being turned into the kitchen and then you can use your office for the indoor seating — if we open it up a bit as you suggest — and the courtyard out the front for when it’s sunny. Who wouldn’t want to sit down and enjoy their cup of first flush Darjeeling looking out at that view?’

He made his own chocolates and knew about first flush Darjeeling?

‘I lived there,’ he said, as though reading my thoughts. ‘In India. In Darjeeling. I picked tea for a season when I was younger.’

‘I’m going to Paddington to meet my son,’ I said for absolutely no reason except that I was muddled, to say the least. ‘He’s been in Australia.’ Which is nowhere near Darjeeling. ‘He’s nineteen.’ I’m thirty-nine.

‘Where in Australia?’ Will asked.

‘All around, by the sound of it. You’ve been there too?’

‘To Perth for a while. And Sydney. Couple of months in Melbourne. Then on to New Zealand for a bit.’

‘You’ve been everywhere.’

‘Born in Kenya, schooled in England, on the trot for a few years there but happily back in London now,’ Will smiled. ‘And you?’

‘I’ve hardly been anywhere at all,’ I answered. ‘I went to France, once, on a school trip but I don’t much like boats and my husband, Harry — well, you know, he’s not my husband any more or he is but he doesn’t want to be or —’ I stopped and pulled myself together. ‘Harry wouldn’t fly and so neither did I. I’ve always said I was afraid of it but now I come to think
of it, he was afraid of it and I just went along.’

‘You’ve got a lot of making up to do then, Florence,’ Will said. ‘The world is your oyster.’

We both smiled, our eyes met and, as God is my witness, I felt something. I don’t know what it was but it wasn’t made up or airy-fairy. It was as real as feeling the sun on my face or the spanner on my bottom. It was also ridiculous. He was little more than a child. Thirty, tops. Thirty-one if I was lucky. And it wasn’t exactly my month. And thirty-one was still too young. It was even too young for Poppy, although he would definitely be a good match for her. What gorgeous babies they would have. What fun they would have making them. Hell! What was I thinking?

‘I was going to say something about the tearoom being your pearl,’ Will said. ‘But on top of “just dropping in because I was in the area”, I thought it might be a bit much. You know, corny-wise.’

‘Well, diamonds are a girl’s best friend but pearls are usually all we can afford,’ I said, ‘so you might be on to something.’ He laughed, an easy, cheeky laugh, and I felt ridiculously grateful at having such a kind, comfortable, easy person sitting there talking to me when I was so pitifully lame.

‘Have we got time before you go to Paddington’, he suggested, ‘to take another look downstairs?’

We went down again and he talked about structural bones, business zones, council permits, bench tops, electrical wiring and chocolate éclairs at the Ritz. It would only take a month, he said, to do the renovation if Stan was free to work with him and they could rope in an electrician who could come and go as he was needed and not charge too much. Usually zoning would be an issue, he said, because of us being in a residential area but as the house had been used as a business
premises before, and because of the pub and the antique store opposite the back gate and the ample parking, he did not think it would be a problem and assured me he could take care of it.

I was halfway through telling him that I would get back to him about going ahead when I had ‘checked with …’ when I realised that there was no longer anyone to check anything with. And there was not really much to check.

He had already said he could do it for the money. I didn’t know what the future held on that front but I currently had what was required. Plus I was short on other career options. Did people decide to open a tearoom in their house just like that, though? With less consideration than you’d give the purchase of a decent pair of shoes?

‘What’s worrying you?’ Will asked, seeing I was wavering.

‘That I don’t know what I’m doing, that it will be a complete and utter disaster, that no one will come, that if they do the food will be terrible, that Monty and I will end up bankrupt and homeless.’

‘Or it could be a massive success and you could end up a millionaire,’ Will suggested. ‘Or just comfortably off doing what you like doing. Although I’m making a few assumptions there. You like to cook?’

I nodded vigorously. ‘Bake. Despite the current state of my tins, I like to bake. It’s what got me fired from my last job.’

‘You were fired for being a bad baker?’

‘No, I was fired for being a good baker. From an antique shop. My own one, actually. It’s sort of a long story.’

‘But it was always your dream to open a tearoom?’

‘No, I never thought of it until a few weeks ago. A fortune teller gave me the idea.’ I realised how limp that sounded. How silly a notion it really was. ‘Well, not a fortune teller.
She read my tea leaves. She saw a house and a teapot and a rose and somehow that added up to mean I would set up a tearoom. Here.’

‘You need some roses then,’ Will said, leaning to look out the front window. He was good looking from the back, as well, the way some men are, although they’re usually Italian.

‘Not roses, Rose,’ I explained, blushing gently at my own lewdness. ‘This house was left to me by my grandmother, Rose. That was the clincher really, at the time, although now I’m just not …’

‘My grandmother used to take me to tea at the Muthaiga Club in Kenya,’ Will said, filling in the gap. ‘There’s nothing quite like a high tea well done, is there? I think it’s the attention to detail, the effort that goes into it, when all it really is is a stopover between lunch and supper. I mean it’s a treat, isn’t it?’

Was he an angel, I wondered, sent from heaven to re-ignite my reason for living?

‘Yes,’ I answered. ‘It is a treat.’ I joined him at the window and we both looked out over the Grand Junction where a canal boat was passing slowly up the waterway towards Ladbroke Grove. ‘Rose used to take me to afternoon tea too,’ I said dreamily, tracing a pattern in the dust on the windowsill. ‘We went to all the best places: the Savoy, the Ritz, the Dorchester, everywhere. But our favourite was Claridge’s. Have you had tea there?’

Will shook his head.

‘It’s lovely,’ I said. ‘Really lovely.’

‘This could be really lovely too, you know, Florence,’ Will suggested.

‘I could call it Rose’s,’ I added, thinking of Sanderson sofas, of distant happiness. ‘With an apostrophe. She would love that.’
‘I don’t think she would be the only one,’ Will agreed, eyeing up the architraves.

Something shifted imperceptibly inside me then. Perhaps it was the fact that Monty was nearly home and my shrivelled heart was pumping with hope. Or perhaps it was Will’s enthusiasm and the spirit of cherry and dark chocolate still dancing in the air. Whatever it was, the tearoom had just been an idle possibility up until then, a joke, almost. But imagining walls being removed to accommodate it and giving it a name, a beautiful name, changed it into a promise.

‘When can you start?’ I asked.

I thought she was lovely from the moment I clapped eyes on her.

She talked nineteen to the dozen when I first got there but falling over the tool kit put a stop to that. I mean she was fantastic when she talked but fantastic when she was quiet too. Fragile, in a way, and who wouldn’t be in that situation, but substantial, too, if that’s the right word. Underneath it all. Yes, substantial.

The tearoom was a brilliant idea, if you asked me, and I knew Stan and I could knock it together, no trouble. It’s true about my grandmother, too, and the Muthaiga although actually we used to have tea at home every afternoon before I went to school in England: sandwiches on the verandah followed by biscuits and a slice of cake.

I can come across as corny, I know that, but it’s absolutely not bollocks. I made a vow years ago to be truthful and I try to stick by it, which means I can seem a bit in-your-face sometimes or fake, I’ve been told. More than once actually. Funny, isn’t it, that not telling lies can make you sound more like a liar than actual liars do.

Would I have been as interested in working on her renovations if it was some fat hairy old bloke’s idea? Some fat hairy old bloke’s house?

No.

I felt something when I was talking to Florence that first day
that I hadn’t felt in a long time and I think she did too. I knew it wouldn’t be easy, the future, if there was going to be one, if it was not too presumptuous to consider the possibility. I knew she’d need a lot of encouragement and that it would seem too soon and too fast and that I was too young and a bit strange and had too much history that she was yet to find out about.

But I also knew that feelings like that don’t come along every day and when they do, you have to grab them with both hands and never let go.

That’s what I wanted to do with Florence.

CHAPTER NINE

I thought I’d have a nervous breakdown on my way to Paddington Station. I was so close to having my son back yet the world appeared determined to keep me from him. Lampposts seemed to jump in front of me; oncoming buses swerved in my direction; cars pulled out from every angle with uncommon speed and no concern for my wellbeing.

When I finally found a park behind the taxi stand at the station and escaped the tired Golf, I was trembling like a leaf. I suddenly knew what tenterhooks were: they were pointy and sharp and it hurt to wait on them.

Paddington itself seemed more full of people than I had ever seen before. A polite British voice made nonetheless indecipherable announcements; foreign languages hummed around me; a dodgy wheel squeaked on someone’s suitcase; an engine throbbed in the background and whistles blew on a distant platform, further frazzling my jangled nerves.

I wished that Harry was with me, that he hadn’t jumped the fence, that Charles had stayed a fat slob (if indeed he ever was one but I hoped he was) who never went to the gym or stole people’s husbands, that we were going to get Monty together.

Poor Monty, what was he coming back to? A father holed up in some hideous bedsit berating himself for his selfishness and deceit, and a heartbroken mother about to demolish his TV room and serve tea and biscuits to strangers in it. Everything about us, about our lives, had changed. I paced the forecourt nervously, feeling sick with equal parts of excitement and worry. This was not what I had wanted for my son’s homecoming. How would he handle it? Would he be angry at Harry? At me? Would he turn to drugs? To therapy? He was just a boy.

And then I saw him in the crowd of nobodies streaming towards me and suddenly everything was all right again.

I don’t think my son had ever walked towards me without my heart filling to the brim with happiness. His first steps on those huge chubby thighs, straight into my arms, sent me into an orbit of delight that kept me smitten with their memory to this day. His little feet running towards me after his first afternoon at kindergarten had the same effect. Ditto his big feet after his first day at high school. Monty heading towards my arms was home every bit as much as the four walls my grandmother had left me.

But how he had changed, this son of mine coming to me fresh from Australia! His hair was long and curly now and he was tanned a fantastically healthy, swarthy shade and was unshaven — plus he actually had enough whiskers for it to look that way, even from a distance. He wore faded linen drawstring trousers, which looked decidedly alternative I couldn’t help but notice, and to top it off, he was wearing a pale pink and orange striped muslin shirt with several of the
top buttons undone and some sort of a necklace on a leather thong around his neck. He’d lost weight and gained muscle. His cheekbones had taken over his face.

The teenage schoolboy I had sent away had come back as a hippy-chic rock star.

All this I registered in seconds as the hundreds of other plane and train commuters blotted into one indistinguishable blur behind him. This was the moment I had been waiting for since waving my darling off at Heathrow nearly a year before.

I couldn’t help it, I ran towards him and threw myself into his arms, making him drop his pack and causing another leather shoulder bag to slide down his arm to the ground. He’d grown about a foot, it seemed, and if I hadn’t known he was my little boy I would have taken him for a man. A fully fledged man. He hugged me back with his big grown-up body and I felt the happiest and safest and surest I had done for a long time. My gorgeous boy. It was him and me now. And together we could get through any amount of rotten things. Together, everything would be OK.

My anger at Harry, my humiliation, my grief, all drained away as I stood there in the flow of other sons and daughters the Heathrow Express was disgorging. With Monty’s arms around me, I knew that if I felt insecure as a wife, and I had every right to, I felt like the Rock of Gibraltar as a mother. Here was proof, my wonderful, handsome, clever, tall, tanned proof.

‘Mum,’ he pulled himself away and graced me with his face-wide smile. If I hadn’t been so busy drinking up the joy of being with him, I might have noticed a hesitancy around his eyes, eyes he got from me, brown and spaced wide apart. ‘There’s someone I’d like you to meet.’

I hadn’t even noticed the little blonde woman behind him.
She was in her late twenties, I thought, and petite, dressed in a little spaghetti-strap top and a colourful skirt.

I smiled at her. She wore leather sandals on slightly grimy feet and had toe rings and a tattoo made up of a band of tiny Chinese characters around her tiny little arm. Her hair was surf-girl bleached and curly and she too was carrying a pack.

How like Monty to pick up a damsel in distress on the Heathrow Express, I thought. What’s the bet he’d offered the woman a ride? He’d always loved his waifs and strays, my boy: guinea pigs, cats, dogs, motherless schoolboys, lonely pensioners — his heart had long been in the right place and as usual, mine swelled with pride at the thought.

‘Mum, this is Crystal,’ Monty said, smiling at the woman.

‘Hello,’ I greeted her back, tugging playfully at my son’s shirt tail, dragging my gaze reluctantly from him back to her. ‘I’m Florence, this one’s rather pathetic mother. I’m just so thrilled to have him back home, you’ll have to excuse me. Do you need taking somewhere? We’re going to Maida Vale, but anywhere in the inner west is fine. I just can’t believe it, Monty! I just can’t believe I’m standing here talking to you.’ I knew I sounded ridiculously bubbly and pleased with myself but I couldn’t help it.

‘Hi there, Florence,’ Crystal said in a low accent that I guessed might be antipodean. ‘It’s great to finally meet you.’

To my surprise Monty then stepped away from me and moved in behind her, laying an arm across her almost bare shoulder, at which she smiled almost apologetically at me, then shyly up at him.

My bubbliness vanished. My chattiness dried up. My gaze shifted from him to her and I was riveted: that delicate collarbone, the pretty mouth with just a dash of gloss, the tanned skin with a smattering of freckles, the clear green eyes.

I found myself nodding my head in a peculiar fashion as that old familiar feeling of not quite getting it started fluttering in my chest. Nice to
finally
meet me? The Heathrow Express was only a fifteen-minute ride. That didn’t warrant a ‘finally’. Even if she had been sitting next to Monty on the plane from Bangkok and he had started talking about me before they took off, a ‘finally’ was still surplus to requirements. How long had these two known each other? Why the ‘finally’?

I shifted my confused stare to my son.

‘What’s going on?’ I asked feebly, as the fluttering turned to a banging.

‘Don’t freak out, Mum,’ Monty said, a warning tone in his voice.

Me? Freak out? Why would I?

‘Crystal and I are together,’ he said with a casual shrug, the sort of slightly guilty shrug you might use if you’d just owned up to buying your second chocolate ice cream of the day. ‘Actually, we got married. Mum, this is my wife.’

‘You what?’ I asked. I could have sworn he had just said that he was married to this woman, this frizzy little over-cooked blonde with the ridiculous name of Crystal, that she was his wife. But Monty was just a boy. He didn’t have a wife.

He was talking to me, I could see that, but I couldn’t concentrate on what he was saying. I was looking at her, at Crystal, and she was looking straight back.

‘What?’ I asked again, wishing with every fibre of my being that Harry was with me, that I could share my panic and fear and disappointment and hysteria and did I say panic? I needed him to keep me from feeling that the world was spinning away from me. To grab me and pull me back to the earth’s surface.

‘… met at the health farm not long after I got there and we both knew straight away …’ Monty was moving towards
me, his lips still moving, but I no longer wanted to be close to him, this frightening stranger. I backed away.

‘… got married by a waterfall in the Currumbin Valley before we …’

If this wasn’t a dream, I thought, feeling my face ache with the effort of keeping it from collapsing, if this was true, if Monty had come back to me with some hideous dried-up Australian wife attached, then
this
was the third rotten thing in my current roll and it made having no job and a gay husband feel like items Julie Andrews would add to her list of favourite things.

Monty was just a boy, my boy. He would never do something like get married without telling me, without wanting me to help him choose the right person. We were a team, we did things together, we always had.

‘Mum!’ He reached out and grasped my arm and when I looked down at his hand it seemed so foreign to me that I started to shake it off. His hand was so big and brown. His nails were clipped neat and short. ‘Mum!’ his grip tightened. ‘I’m sorry I didn’t tell you. I’m really sorry. But —’

Crystal was still standing back with the bags, still looking at me, not defiantly, but not apologetically either.

‘But how old is she?’ I asked Monty.

‘What has that got to do with it?’ he fired back and I saw an unfamiliar glint in his eyes.

‘I am your mother,’ my voice was getting louder, people were starting to stare, ‘and you have just informed me that the “woman” I am looking at over there, the complete stranger about whom I know not a single thing, is married to you, my nineteen-year-old son. I think I have the right to ask how old she is.’

‘You married Dad when you were nineteen,’ Monty said
forcefully, looking much less like a fully-fledged man and much more like an angry teenager in a way he never really had before.

‘I know how old we were,’ I tried to smile, ‘and I’m not saying I have a problem with you being nineteen.’ Which was not true because I most certainly did. ‘And let’s not get onto the subject of your father right now.’ I had so many things to be angry about, I didn’t know where to start or stop. ‘I just want to know how old this “wife” of yours is.’

‘I’m thirty-four,’ Crystal said.

She had snuck up on me, was standing at my shoulder now, somehow carrying all their bags, which she placed carefully back on the station floor. ‘I’m really sorry this has come as such a shock but I really love your son, Florence, and I hope you will come to respect that.’

‘Respect?’ I felt a terrible urge to slap her. Indeed my palms were itching. ‘Where was the respect for me when you took my son and married him without telling me? He’s nineteen years old, Crystal. He is just a boy. What does a thirty-four-year-old woman want with a boy?’

‘Oh, Mum, for fuck’s sake, you’re embarrassing yourself. Just listen to what you’re saying. She didn’t take me! Jesus, and what does age matter? You’re being ridiculous.’ Monty was laughing at me and this hurt so deeply my inner fishwife lashed out at him.

‘I’m being ridiculous? Just a year ago you relied on me for bus money. Your teddy bear slept in your bed. You cried because Beckham stayed with Real Madrid. Now you have a wife? You don’t think that’s ridiculous?’

‘Fine, be like that then,’ Monty said, snatching up his pack and his shoulder bag. I had never seen him like this. I had never dreamed of seeing him like this. ‘We don’t need this
shit,’ he said to Crystal. ‘Come on, babe. We don’t need to go back to her place.’

To ‘her’ place? When did it stop being
his
place?

‘Monty, wait a mo,’ Crystal said calmly to my son’s angry back and he stopped. Then she turned to me. ‘I know you’re angry, Florence, and I appreciate you believe you have the right to be and that you are having a difficult time at the moment but if you think about Monty and me, it’s not the end of the world, is it? That your son is married and, well, happy?’

What did this little strumpet know about the world and its end?

‘I’m not so bad, when you get to know me, despite my age,’ she continued with an ill-timed attempt at humour. ‘I hope you’ll come to see that. Don’t you have any faith in the choices the son you brought up would make? Don’t you think he would choose a wonderful person to share his life with?’

This kind of talk made me feel weak at the knees, and not in a good way. I’d had a lifetime of this kind of talk. The worst thing about it was that it somehow made perfect sense — just not the right sort of perfect sense. Of course I had faith in Monty’s choices. Supreme faith. I just wanted to be there when he made those choices to make sure there weren’t any hiccups. Crystal was a hiccup. And just like a hiccup, she needed to be suppressed. But as I stood there wishing I knew kung fu or some other more lethal form of martial art to aid me in this suppression, I caught Monty’s eye and he looked so hurt, so wounded, my need to inflict severe physical harm on his wife
(wife?)
evaporated.

I never could bear to see that look in his eyes, let alone be the one to cause it.

Oh, I loved that boy. With what was left of my heart, I just loved him. He was the best thing I had ever done. I couldn’t
bear that he’d hurt me like this but neither could I bear to hurt him. I was the adult (although Crystal came a pretty close second) in the situation. It was up to me to lead the way. I took as deep a breath as my shock would allow and held out a hand to him as though he was four years old and I needed to get him out of the playground and inside for his afternoon sleep. ‘Don’t go like this, Monty,’ I pleaded. ‘Please, come home. Please. I’m sorry.’