On Top of Everything (20 page)

‘He’s loaned me some money to fix it,’ I confessed, blushing,
because I felt so guilty about the money.

Poppy smiled, albeit wanly, and rested her head against the back of her chair closing her eyes, her gold-red lashes pearlescent on lily-white cheeks.

‘He’s so chuffed,’ was all she said. ‘I can’t tell you.’

She was so still, so lifeless, sitting there, I couldn’t even see her chest rising with her breath and it frightened me.

‘You’ll be okay, Poppy, won’t you?’ I asked her, suddenly desperate for something to go right, to be all right. ‘Will you promise me you won’t try anything, you know, again?’

She turned to look at me, pulling the cashmere throw closer around her shoulders and offering me another sad smile.

‘I’ll do my best,’ she said.

‘Because Beth and Archie would just die,’ I said, wondering how they would survive if both their daughters were taken from them.

‘And I would …’ But I couldn’t finish. For a million reasons I couldn’t finish. Poppy reached her hand out for mine.

‘Will you promise to make at least one gluten-free goodie at Rose’s?’ she asked, giving me a squeeze. ‘And while you’re at it, could you please just for me skip the dairy?’

She was so solemn, I meant to laugh but instead I just made a strangled gurgling noise. There wasn’t going to be a Rose’s, after all. I was more than likely going to spend the £30,000 on shoes and hair extensions. But I couldn’t tell her that. Not then.

‘Of course I will, silly,’ I croaked instead and I was off my chair and giving her a hug in the blink of an eye. ‘Just be good to yourself,’ I whispered into her hair. ‘Please, Poppy, just be good to yourself.’

The girls laugh at me for being in touch with my feminine side but it was my masculine side I worried about when Poppy was so ill.

I felt like I had failed her, as a father, that I hadn’t looked after her well enough. Beth doesn’t hold much truck with that line of thinking, she insists we’re on equal footing and we are, mostly, but just because I can do macramé doesn’t mean I don’t expect to be able to protect my family.

I’ve had the most wonderfully lucky life but by far the best part of it has been being a father to these two remarkable people, Florence and Poppy. They’re like chalk and cheese in so many ways, always have been. Florence is extremely self-contained whereas Poppy is open to the universe, too open, possibly.

She can’t take the blows the way her sister can. Just look at the way Florence handled Harry changing sides, or however they put it these days. She just boxed on, quite incredible really. She’s never been one to ask for help, ever since she was a tiny little thing insisting on walking around the place on her own, no hand-holding thank you very much, despite the falls and knocks and scrapes. ‘I do it myself!’ she would say. ‘I do it myself!’

That’s why I nearly fell off my chair when she told us about the hiccup with the tearoom and then, blow me down, accepted a bit of assistance. Money is the one thing we have enough of in this family. It’s embarrassing, actually. I’ve had the most
extraordinary luck with the share market and believe me it is luck, there’s no skill involved. Even when I make ridiculously risky investments that the white collars wouldn’t even sniff at, they seem to pay off. I can’t help it. Green stock mostly. Who knew being environmentally friendly would take off so well? We have more money than we need and even though we are funding an irrigation scheme in Darfur and a school in Sri Lanka, it keeps adding up.

If I could have solved Poppy’s problem with money I would have been a happy man but money couldn’t buy what she needed just then.

As for Florence, well, I was chuffed, obviously, when she took the cheque but then I saw the two of them sitting outside talking by the vegie patch. Florence was wearing an old jersey of mine and it swam on her. She looked so small inside it. So pale. She’d lost quite a bit of weight, I suddenly noticed. In fact, I couldn’t help but think both my girls looked like they were suffering.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

It wasn’t until I got in the car to drive back to London that I realised how much being a tower of strength had taken it out of me. I blubbed all the way back to Little Venice, thrilling the dog, of course.

I quite enjoyed feeling sorry for myself for a while, to be honest, but then I developed those hideous sad hiccups which gave me a hell of a stomach ache and encouraged me to pull myself together. When I got home it was after five and Will’s truck wasn’t there, but the secondhand mint-green scooter Monty had recently bought was. I hated it because scooters seemed such a dangerous way to get around in London and what if he was killed? Or lost a leg? Or suffered a terrible head injury and was in a coma for the rest of his life?

Inside the house, to my enormous shock, to the right of the front door where the floor of my old office used to be, there was now a large jagged hole, about the size of a dining
table, from which emanated a smell like a thousand rotting cabbages.

I stood there, my mouth hanging open, and stared, despite the vile vapour wafting around me. I could see some sort of complicated scaffolding holding up the bits of floor that weren’t a hole. It seemed glaringly obvious that the hole had not made itself and that Will and Stanley and possibly the rattly man had been working while I was away, despite my asking them to stop.

How dare they? When they knew I couldn’t afford to pay them!

Although, of course, now it turned out that I could afford to pay them three times over so I needed to come up with a whole different excuse to keep them from turning my house into the tearoom that I would soon be too sick to run.

It was all quite tricky really, but I couldn’t stand there another second contemplating the trickiness because the smell was making my eyes water and I’d only just finished an extensive bout of eye watering and did not fancy another one.

I stomped tiredly up the stairs, leaving the putrid stench of rotten whatever-it-was behind me, and to my great dismay found Crystal in the kitchen making a cup of lemon and fresh mint tea.

‘Would you like one?’ she offered me but I shook my head. ‘Monty’s gone for a job interview in the West End,’ she told me, ‘so it’s just me here.’

Despite my overwhelming bone weariness, I felt a terrible almost electric urge to be bitingly snippy, but remembering my promise to Poppy, struggled to suppress this.

‘So, he didn’t take the scooter?’ I asked.

‘I hate that thing,’ Crystal said, frowning for the first time
since I’d met her, as she stirred a teaspoon of honey into her drink. When did sugar become public enemy number one? ‘Fastest way to do yourself a serious injury, if you ask me, which he didn’t when he bought it or I would have begged him not to.’

Don’t expect me to gang up against my son with you, I thought to myself, even though it fell into the snippy category and I totally agreed with what she was saying.

I made myself an instant coffee and loudly poured lashings of full fat milk into it while Crystal got about the business of marinating tofu in a low sodium organic soya sauce and some strange foreign-looking herb that looked a bit like green armpit hair.

‘Nick March, your doctor, has probably rung six times over the past few days,’ she said, quite matter of factly. ‘He’s pretty stressed out that you haven’t called him back. He wanted me to pass that on. You might want to consider giving him a call?’

I was so shocked that Young Nick had dobbed me in like this, with Crystal of all people, that I could not think of a single thing to say. He had left a message or two before I’d gone to Tannington Hall but I had not been in the right frame of mind to answer them and still wasn’t.

‘I haven’t mentioned anything to Monty’, Crystal continued, threading cubes of tofu onto a bamboo skewer, ‘because I don’t want to worry him — but I get the feeling Nick wasn’t just ringing to remind you the verruca clinic is coming up.’

My mouth opened, but still nothing came out.

‘If there’s something wrong, you can tell me, Florence,’ she said evenly. ‘I may even be able to help.’

As if I would tell her! Crystal? As if she could help me! I was suddenly overwhelmingly furious. Furious at Nick for talking to her, furious at there being anything to talk about, furious
at the hole in my house, at Poppy, at Harry, furious at this strange woman spraying soy around my kitchen and stealing my lovely gorgeous beautiful son.

‘What on earth makes you think you could ever help me?’ I snapped. ‘What on earth makes you think anything at all to do with anything about me in any way whatsoever? You’re just a bloody interloper bloody well interloping in my life! In my house! Doing stupid bloody things with your stupid bloody tofu!’

I knew that this was snippy gone wild, that Poppy would be ashamed of me, that it was not really Crystal I wanted to shout at, yet I seemed unable to stop.

‘You know nothing about me,’ I raged. ‘You have no idea, you can’t begin to fathom what it feels like to, to, to …’

‘To what, Florence?’ Crystal asked, remarkably unmoved by my hysterics although she had stopped making the tofu kebabs.

Where could I start? Oh, why was my life like this? ‘To lose a son!’ I cried, plucking at the closest excuse I could find.

‘That’s what! To lose a precious son! To someone like you!’ This was not the me I had always tried to be. This was the opposite. So much for minding my manners and doing the right thing. I was lucky she didn’t clock me on the head with the meat tenderiser but then she probably didn’t know what one was.

A shutter came down over her face though and she leaned back against the kitchen counter and looked at me pretty coldly, for her. Whether I liked her or not, there was no denying she was a warm person. As a rule, she positively radiated warmth.

‘Not to someone like me,’ she said with glacial calm. ‘Yes, that’s true, but otherwise I can definitely fathom it.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ I shot back. ‘You can’t possibly know
what I’m talking about. You don’t have a son.’

She kept looking at me in such an expressionless way then that it occurred to me that I might perhaps be approaching back-foot territory. Her eyes were landed steadily on mine as if waiting for me to reach some sort of conclusion. My anger started to dissipate and I began to feel that slow, creeping, hot sort of frost that crawls over you when you start to realise you have said or done something really, really awful.

‘You can’t possibly know,’ I said again, all the same, although the conviction was missing and I was no longer sure I was talking about losing a son. I was talking about losing in general. Actually, I didn’t really know what I was talking about.

‘Well, you say I know nothing about you but you know nothing about me, either, Florence,’ she said. ‘You’ve jumped to your own conclusions without bothering to ask me so much as one single question about myself, about my life. But for your information, I did have a son but he died.’

The hot creeping frost spread down from my face to my chest, my heart. I didn’t want to hear another word. I wanted to know what happened. I ached for her. I hated her. I hated myself.

‘How old was he?’ I finally asked, even though it was the wrong question.

‘Seven and a half months,’ she answered.

A baby? Oh, why was the world, my world, so cruel?

‘When?’

‘Six years ago,’ she told me in a voice devoid of its usual upbeat twang. ‘Six years, two months, three weeks and four days ago.’

The heartbreak of counting those days.

‘I’m so sorry,’ I said. ‘Truly, Crystal.’

‘Cot death,’ she told me then, ‘if that’s what you call it here. I got up to feed him in the night and … well, anyway. We couldn’t wake him up. We called the ambulance but we already knew.’

A ghastly silence filled the room and throbbed in my ears. I felt sick to my stomach. She had actually lost a son? A baby? Who was ‘we’? She’d been married before? I was a horrible human being and I deserved everything I had coming to me. But why hadn’t anybody told me? How was I supposed to know that this foreigner who had pinched Monty away from me was a, a, a … A what? A real live woman with her own hideous torments, just like me?

I slid into a chair, my good legs no longer able to hold up the horrible rest of me. ‘I’m so sorry,’ I said again.

Crystal’s eyes flickered, and she too pulled out a chair at the other end of the table and sat in it.

She looked totally different to me now. That serene smoothness I had taken to be some sort of Aussie default position now seemed a veneer as obvious as an alpaca poncho. She perhaps wasn’t the cocksure blasé son-snatcher I had initially taken her for.

I was evil. That’s why I had cancer.

‘I don’t know what to say,’ I told her. ‘I can’t imagine how you even …’

‘Survived?’ She finished my sentence.

I nodded. She was silent, then: ‘It took six months before I could even truly believe he was gone,’ she said. Her voice changed again, as though she still couldn’t believe it. She looked out the window, into the patchy blue sky, as if expecting to see a little cherub perched on a cloud out there. ‘I checked his empty cot about fifty times a day. Wouldn’t let Steve change a thing in the room. And I felt him in my arms sometimes, when
I was daydreaming, you know? Actually felt his skin on mine, for a long time. Then after a while I couldn’t even remember exactly what his cry sounded like or how he smelt. That was almost the saddest of all. The not remembering.’

There was nothing I could say to her. Nothing.

‘Yep, that was almost the saddest thing,’ she said again, smiling, but it wasn’t a happy smile, it was the sort that you force on your face to keep it from crumpling. ‘So don’t tell me I don’t know what it’s like to lose a son because my son is actually lost, Florence, forever, whereas yours is right here, just with someone like me.’

I deserved her disdain. I deserved much worse. ‘And you know what?’ she continued although her voice faltered, making me hate myself even more. ‘I make Monty happy, I know I do.’ A tear slid out of one clear green eye and travelled determinedly down her cheek. ‘And he makes me happy, which I never thought anyone else in the world would ever, ever be able to do.’

I wanted to tell her right then that I was dying of cancer to show her that I was not a spoiled bitter housewife or a frightful old bitch, just not my usual self. Blurting it out now though would only seem like I was trumping her in the tragedy stakes and I couldn’t do that.

‘I’m so sorry, Crystal,’ I said again. ‘I didn’t know. Monty never said.’

‘If you don’t want to get to know me that’s fine,’ Crystal told me and I admit I admired her strength then; her ability to survive her baby dying and stand up to a prickly old sourpuss like myself. ‘Really, that’s OK, up to a point. But I am a human being with feelings just like you are, Florence, and we need to find a way to somehow exist together in some sort of harmony while Monty wants to stay here.’

I felt a glimmer of something vaguely joyful at hearing that Monty wanted to stay, but it was quickly overshadowed by the grief I felt at her dreadful loss and my awful behaviour.

‘Poppy tried to kill herself,’ I said, feeling only slightly ashamed at pulling this out of my hat. I would have told her anyway, most likely. ‘I’ve been at Tannington Hall with my parents as she begins the, you know, healing process.’

I coughed, although it could have been a choke. I never used words like ‘healing process’. I wasn’t stooping, I told myself, and I don’t think I altogether was. I was trying to speak Crystal’s language. And I think she got it. Her face returned to its usual understanding self.

‘That’s terrible,’ she said. ‘What did she do?’

This question took me by surprise, I admit. It seemed so practical.

‘She slit her wrists in the bath,’ I answered. Hearing it out loud like that, in the kitchen of my house, having just learned that this woman I’d been so horrible to had lost a child, I felt shocked to the core all over again.

The world was an appalling place and I was an appalling person.

I could see that Florence was struggling with something huge. I saw it in her aura actually, that first day at the train station although I don’t think she was aware of it herself then. Her colours were fuzzy greys and browns then whereas by the time she came back from Tannington Hall they were crisper but much, much darker.