On Top of Everything (23 page)

I looked at the perfect little fruit tart sitting on the plate in front of me and felt suddenly overwhelmed by the most awful hopelessness.

‘I try not to waste time these days, Florence,’ Will continued, ‘that’s all I’m trying to tell you. It’s too precious. Life is too precious, every minute of it, that’s what I’ve learned, that’s what I’m getting at so — oh God, I’ve upset you again, I’m so sorry. More tea, I think. I’ll get the waitress.’

He motioned for the pretty blonde but I didn’t want more tea. I didn’t want my fruit tart. All I wanted to do was go home.

Life was too precious for Will to waste his time on me. And that was all he ever would be doing.

God, I dug myself such a hole at Claridge’s I couldn’t see how I would ever climb out of it.

It’s just that I wanted her to know everything there was to know about me. In fact, I couldn’t get it out quickly enough. I wanted to lump it all right in front of her in an enormous pile so she could see it all straight away and then we could just get on with the business of, well, whatever was going to happen next.

I suppose I was going gangbusters because I meant what I said when I told her I didn’t want to waste time, not a minute of it, and I was losing patience not with her but with the situation. It would never be right between us if I pushed her too far but then there would never be anything between us if she stayed too frightened or too closed off to trust me.

I thought about that a lot while I drove her back to the house. She looked so lost, gazing out at the traffic. Whatever was going on with her was shaking her, right down to the very marrow, as Stan would say.

Yet despite the many setbacks, I still felt what I had always felt; that there was something intangible but enormous hovering in the air between us, linking us, drawing us in as close as we would let it without exploding in our faces. It was still there. Not exactly dangerous, but almost.

And if I was wrong about us, then that almost-dangerous thing would surely be gone but if anything it was stronger.

I’ve seen it before, the moment when the potential is sucked out of the air; when the gorgeous girl you meet late one night in a bar and think you might just have to marry turns out the next day to love Celine Dion and smoke filterless Marlboros for breakfast and any hope of having a future disappears in an instant.

I’m sure most of us have experienced that moment: the evaporation of something you can’t even see in the first place. It’s promise, I suppose, mixed with desire but in the case of myself and Florence, or just myself at that point, there was real certainty. It had not evaporated. And if she didn’t yet see it, or was stopping herself from feeling it, it didn’t mean it wasn’t there.

But I knew, as I was driving home to my flat without her that afternoon, the smell of her perfume still wafting in the cab of my truck, that I would have to have enough certainty for the both of us until — well, until what?

It occurred to me then that whatever was stopping her from recognising what we had might not be anything to do with me.

CHAPTER TWENTY

Two days later I was sitting in the Rembrandt Gardens off Warwick Avenue, enjoying the blissful sunshine, literally smelling the roses, avoiding my builder, my son, my daughter-in-law, and my life, when a double stroller bearing two fat pink babies, one asleep and one awake and looking pretty grumpy, was wheeled past me.

The grumpy baby — who had a dissatisfied countenance and small dark eyes — struck me as bearing more than a passing resemblance to my mothball grandmother. Like my grandmother, it could have a pretty face if it put its mind to it, if it released itself, opened itself up, but it didn’t. It chose grumpiness.

‘Florence?’ the woman pushing the stroller asked. When I took my eyes off the contents of the stroller, I saw it was Marguerite, the tea-leaf reader.

‘What a lovely surprise,’ she said. ‘Do you mind if I sit
down?’ Before I could answer, she settled the babies in the shade of the London plane tree beside the seat and plonked herself down next to me.

‘I was thinking about you yesterday,’ she said. ‘I walked the girls past your old shop and it reminded me of what a lovely place it used to be to visit. I hardly bother to go in now you’re not there. There’s no tea, for a start, but there’s also too much French furniture — the place is full of it. You can’t swing a cat without hitting something from Louis XV. I’m more of a Scandinavian girl myself, when it comes to furniture. Danish especially.’ She stopped, as though embarrassed at talking so much, which she had been, and looked over at the babies. That was when I noticed how tired she looked, how her beautiful skin was almost grey, her white Capri pants and cashmere top were uncustomarily wrinkled, her pink coat was marked with something orange and slightly lumpy on the lapel.

‘How old are they now?’ I asked her as the wakeful, grumpy one started a half-hearted mewling.

‘Eleven months on Thursday,’ she replied, without the enthusiasm new mothers usually employed. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, registering how she sounded. ‘I’m just having one of those days.’

‘Is it the babies?’ I asked, knowing full well it would be. I loved babies but even the jolly good ones were hard work. ‘They’re such a handful, aren’t they? And no one ever tells you that. Or if they do, you never believe them because you think yours will be different. And you’ve got two. It must be exhausting.’

‘It is,’ Marguerite said, not without some relief at being able to admit it. ‘We had a nanny for a while but she left and I thought I could do it but on days like today I really miss my real job. I don’t have enough adult company. I think that’s the
trouble. I talk nonsense to these two all day long and then when Tim comes home from work I’m too tired to talk sense. I used to have opinions on all sorts of things: elections in foreign countries, complicated tax laws, human rights in China. Now … I’m lucky if I can rustle up a preference between mashed bananas and apple purée.’

I wasn’t sure I’d ever had an opinion on complicated tax laws but I did remember that frustration at not being able to choose between mashed bananas and apple purée. It was a symbol of having your own brain turn to mush, I suspected, after bringing a child into the world. I didn’t know why that happened. I didn’t know why anything happened. I was the wrong person for someone having a bad day to be talking to, I imagined. I was having a bad day myself. A bad month. A bad life.

‘I started turning my house into a tearoom,’ I told Marguerite, apropos of nothing, as her baby’s mewling increased in volume.

‘You did? How wonderful!’ Her face lit up and for a moment her weariness disappeared, restoring the delicate beauty I remembered. ‘I’ve thought about dropping by to see you but I’m not entirely a dropping-by sort of a person. It’s a hard habit to pick up if you’ve never developed it in the past. Like smoking, I imagine. When will it be opening? The tearoom? Then I’ll have the perfect excuse to come and visit.’

‘Oh, I
started
turning it into a tearoom,’ I explained, wishing I had never opened my mouth, realising that apropros of nothing was a stupid reason to say something, ‘but I didn’t finish. I ran out of … well, there are too many other things going on and there was all this rot in the basement and I couldn’t quite … Anyway, I laid the builder off, and the plumber, although that didn’t really have quite as much of an
impact as you’d imagine.’

The baby’s mewling turned into a full blown roar, which made Marguerite look a hundred years old again, so while she slumped there looking beaten half to death, I plucked the grumpy creature out of the stroller and put her over my shoulder, patting her cute little Tommy Hilfiger-clad back. The roar got louder for a brief moment, but soon turned back into a mewl, which then retreated into a snuffle.

Marguerite smiled gratefully. ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘I needed that. This.’

I jiggled her daughter against my neck. ‘Me too,’ I said as a memory flew into my mind from the depths of Monty’s babyhood. Me sitting in Holland Park, jiggling his pram and weeping for so long a plain-clothes policeman emerged from the undergrowth and asked me if I was all right at which point I was shamed into going home.

Maybe loneliness wasn’t as new to me as I thought it was.

‘I just remembered a bad day I had when Monty was about this age,’ I told her. ‘Which is funny, because if anyone ever asked me if I’d had one I would have said no.’

‘Frankly, I would feel a lot better if everyone remembered a lot more of them,’ Marguerite sighed. ‘I feel like they’re only happening to me.’

‘Yes, but isn’t it comforting to know that years from now you will have forgotten the bad days?’ I asked her. ‘That they will have faded away and you’ll only recall the good ones?’

She considered this. ‘I suppose that’s why people have more than one child. I had been wondering about that although I won’t be in any hurry myself. And anyway, I have two already.’

‘I could only ever have one,’ I said, ‘and I was apparently lucky to even get him.’

‘Oh, I am sorry, Florence,’ Marguerite was mortified, ‘I
must sound terrible. I don’t mean to whine or be insensitive, it’s just that, well, I don’t know what it is.’

I shifted her sleeping baby on to my other shoulder. ‘Don’t apologise,’ I insisted. ‘I’m not sure I could have coped with more than one, if the truth be told.’ I had never admitted that to anyone. But Harry had been busy lawyering when Monty was a baby and even though it was what I wanted, I had been on my own a lot of the time and it had been hard. ‘And I loved Monty so much I couldn’t imagine having any love left to give to a brother or sister.’

‘I worried about that too,’ Marguerite said, ‘with having twins. I wondered if they would only each get loved half as much as single children but I think actually love expands to cater for the crowd, if you know what I mean.’

‘Or shrinks,’ I suggested, which seemed a sad prospect.

‘I’m not sure about that,’ Marguerite argued gently (it seemed she still did have opinions), ‘because you don’t stop loving someone if they go away, do you? The amount of love you have for them is still the same, it’s just that they’re not there to get it. And if someone new comes along, the love for the one who’s gone away doesn’t get transferred to the new one, it’s a whole lot of new love. Oh shit, what am I talking about? You can tell I don’t get out much!’

Actually, I thought it was rather lovely, just sitting there in the watery sunshine chatting like two ordinary friends and I told her so.

‘It would be jolly nice if we could have a cup of tea and some of your homemade brandy snaps while we were at it though,’ Marguerite said. ‘Such a shame about your tearoom, Florence. I really thought you were on to something with that but … Actually, run that past me again. You started it, then you stopped it, but that didn’t have much impact, is that what you said?’

I nodded and kissed the warm sweet hollow at the back of her baby’s neck. ‘No impact at all as it turns out. I laid off Will, the builder, when I ran out of money and well, inclination, really, but he sort of didn’t listen to me so he’s still more or less working on it.’

‘How peculiar,’ Marguerite said. I couldn’t have agreed with her more. ‘So, apart from you saying that you’re no longer doing it, it is still actually happening?’

‘Well, yes, I suppose it is.’ I hadn’t thought of it like that but she was right.

‘So, given that, when do you think it might be open for business?’

‘Well, it won’t be,’ I insisted. ‘Because I’m not doing it.’

‘But if you were?’ she insisted right back. ‘If it was?’

‘If it was I suppose it would be about a month away.’ Actually, I didn’t have a clue. I would have to buy a kitchen and tables and chairs and I wasn’t sure how long that took or where you got those things and anyway I wasn’t going to do it. Will would know, but I could hardly ask him, what with him being fired and me not going ahead with it and his not wanting to waste a moment of precious life and everything.

‘I hope you’ll let us sad new mothers bring our babies to your tearoom,’ Marguerite said. ‘Not that I know any other sad new mothers but if you let them come there, then at least I could meet some.’

‘Well, I won’t because it’s not happening,’ I told her again. ‘There will be no tearoom for the sad new mothers to come to.’

‘But if there was?’

‘There won’t be.’

‘Oh, I know, but if there was?’

She was persistent, I had to give her that.

‘If there was a tearoom at my house which is no longer going to be the case because I’m not doing it, then yes, I would love sad new mothers to bring their babies and meet each other,’ I finally agreed. It was quite a strange conversation when I thought about it afterwards.

We chatted for a while about other things then, about her daughters, my son, Harry — whose departure she seemed to know about already — the possibility of the Formosa Street post office closing down, the weather: normal everyday woman-to-woman canal-side chit-chat.

‘Florence, I can’t tell you how much you have made my day,’ she said, when eventually she stood to leave. She took her baby girl from my shoulder, which was just as well as I had cramp in my arm, and put her back, fast asleep, in the stroller. ‘I was having such ridiculously dark thoughts this morning and you just swept them all away. I can’t thank you enough, really I can’t.’

‘Don’t be silly,’ I said. ‘I didn’t do anything. And by the way,’ I added as an afterthought, ‘I would love it if you’d drop by to see me at home next time you thought of it.’ I was pretty sure I wasn’t a dropping-by person either but I was a Marguerite person.

‘Who knows?’ Marguerite smiled. ‘Maybe so many people will start dropping by your house for a slice of cake and some company that you’ll find yourself running a tearoom without even meaning to.’

The truth was, she had made my day too. Despite everything we hadn’t talked about, that she didn’t know and that I hugged close to me like an old vest, the weight of my problems felt lighter than it had in a long, long time.

I was in such a good frame of mind after talking to her that I walked to Tesco and bought vast amounts of expensive
chocolate and Dutch cocoa powder for my favourite brownie recipe but ended up giving half of it to Whiffy O’Farrell when I passed him trolling through the Formosa Street skip on my way home.

‘I miss our cups of tea,’ I told him, ‘at the antique shop, remember?’

He gave me the loveliest smile, which I took to mean yes he did remember and that he too missed our cups of tea, but then he bit into one of the chocolate bars and ate it, wrapper and all, which somewhat shook my confidence in his judgement.

He nodded a very polite goodbye, however, and I continued on my way.

At home, Will and Stan had obviously made progress with the dry rot because they were hauling the scaffolding out of the hole and stacking it out the front. I had developed quite a clever policy of not discussing the building project with them by then. It was as though they were working on a neighbour’s house, not my own. I tended to lift my eyebrows in mild interest as I passed but did not engage any further.

‘We can patch the floorboards and have the kitchen plumbed by this time next week,’ Will told me as I slipped through what used to be my hallway. The late sun was streaming in through the tall windows and I had to admit, it would be a jolly nice place to sit and flick through magazines with a good cup of tea and a brandy snap.

I smiled at him and kept going. I’d thought he might have been wary of me since my strange behaviour at Claridge’s, but he had just been his usual concerned self as if nothing odd was happening between us at all. I kept catching him looking at me in that peculiar way of his, that knowing sort of way, and he didn’t even have the decency to look away and pretend he was doing something else. He just smiled in a slightly guilty
fashion and went about whatever he was doing. It bugged me though, that knowing look, because there were very few things of which I could be sure in my life at that point, but one was that Will didn’t know me. Not at all. He might think he did, but he didn’t. No one did.

When I got up to the kitchen, my mouth watering at the mere thought of my brownie, Crystal was there, mumbling quietly into the phone, but as I passed she raised the volume.