On Top of Everything (8 page)

‘Without even discussing it with me first?’ He was truly a
stranger to me now, my husband. I even felt a wave of being glad to be rid of a person who would do something like that. ‘You rang our son and told him you were gay and leaving us without even running it past me?’

There was an uncomfortable silence. Of course, I thought, he’s not actually leaving Monty, just me.

‘I wanted to face the music, Florence. I wanted it over and done with.’

‘Well as long as you get what you want obviously everything is all fucking right, Harry,’ I said and I threw the phone out the window, which was stupid because I was in the sitting room on the first floor and I heard it smash into smithereens in the courtyard below.

When my anger subsided, which took two more hours of screaming into a pillow and one glass of cooking sherry, I admitted quietly to myself that I was glad that Monty knew and glad that it was Harry who told him. When I’d tried to picture the two of us standing in a room with our son, breaking the news to him, every time the me I was trying to picture either attempted to strangle Harry or broke down and begged him to change his mind or covered Monty’s ears so he could not hear the terrible truth. He’d had such a wonderful life, our son, even less blemished by tragedy than my own. No one close to him had died, he had never been in trouble, we’d always been able to afford whatever he wanted. For him to suddenly be thrust into a world where his parents were splitting up and one was gay and the other was bloody furious just seemed too awful to contemplate. His heart would be broken, I was sure, as was mine.

But then I considered that at least he was on his way home, the truth had been told and our hearts would be broken together. I felt a little glimmer of hope then, a smug little glow
that Monty and I would be bound by something that Harry could only ever look in on. Having a son wasn’t like having a husband, it was for life. Monty could not change his tune and decide I wasn’t his mother. Even if he had a sex change, which I prayed to God was not the third rotten thing, I would still be his mother. Forever.

A couple of nights later, Harry came over, which was brave, in the circumstances, but he was in a mood to thrash things out and so we thrashed.

By then I had finally done a bit of research on the internet and found an astonishing number of sites dedicated to wives whose husbands were gay. Depressingly, very few of the stories ended in the husband changing his mind again and coming home.

There were countless religious sites, though, that vehemently exhorted gay husbands to deny their natural inclination and while they were equally depressing, I tested some of what I had learned on Harry.

People become un-gay all the time, I told him. Perhaps he could go to the US and be re-programmed or join a cult or something? Or, if not, perhaps we could stay married and living together but just doing our own thing, sort of, on the sex front.

If he were a non-practising gay man, Harry said gently, that might have almost worked. But there was Charles from the Whittington to consider.

Or there was Charles from the Whittington to bump into in a dark alley and stab a thousand times with the carving knife Harry’s hairy Aunt Molly had given him for his thirtieth birthday, I suggested.

Harry did not respond well to my anger, a psychologist would probably say, and he left on very poor terms after that
visit. But he came back a few nights later with a bottle of expensive pinot noir and by then, I don’t know how, the whole situation had somehow seeped into my consciousness.

I suppose the fact of Harry’s gayness was no longer such a shock. It had been a total bolt out of the blue when it first hit me but in not much more than a week there it was, bumpily woven into the fabric of our relationship. Like an amputated limb or annoying permanent house guest, it was something else to get through, to emerge from the other side of. A big something. A huge something. But still, just a something.

I’m not saying I wasn’t still desperately unhappy, of course I was. Totally desperate and likely to stay that way I thought, plus enormously angry to boot. And I wavered a thousand times a day between not believing it was happening to being overwhelmed that it was, to hoping against hope that some miracle would occur to make the whole horrible mess go away. But I was no longer surprised. That was the strange thing.

By that second visit, with the pinot noir, we actually managed a moment of strange companionship. It was by mistake, really. My fury would not openly allow such a thing otherwise. But it was the same wine we had drunk on a picnic a few years earlier up near Oxford somewhere, on the river. I only remembered exactly what it was because the entire outing had been highly memorable. Monty was off with a pal and Harry and I were making the most of having a weekend day to ourselves. We’d had ham sandwiches with the wine then both fallen asleep in a big grassy field in the afternoon sun and had woken only when a big hairy cattle beast of some description licked Harry’s cheek. Harry roared, like a bull actually, which gave me a terrible fright but it made the cattle beast look very angry and stamp its feet. We emerged unscathed but all the other people in the field who hadn’t been licked nearly died laughing.

‘Do you remember the big hairy cattle beast?’ I asked Harry, forgetting for a moment he was leaving me (which was when the accidental companionship crept in).

‘How could I forget it?’ Harry answered. ‘I couldn’t eat meat for a month afterwards. Why it chose me …’

Were all these wonderful memories that we shared soiled now, the way things had turned out, I wondered? Was it bollocks, the lot of it, the whole twenty-five years? Because it so hadn’t felt like bollocks at the time, when I assumed we would live happily ever after. Now that Harry was gay, I just didn’t know.

That picnic had reminded me of something else too. The Black Watch tartan rug on which we lay before and indeed during the cheek-licking was a wedding gift from Harry’s lovely Scottish cousin Emily.

(Why hadn’t I kept in touch with Emily? What was wrong with me?)

A few years after our wedding Emily’s husband John had been in a terrible skiing accident while on a boys’ trip to Austria and the last time we’d seen her she’d talked about it over homemade Florentines and a cup of fresh Ceylon tea.

One day her life had been happily tootling along in one direction with every i dotted and t crossed and the future all neatly mapped out in front of them, she had quietly recounted. Then with a single phone call the whole thing had been hideously derailed. John would probably live, she was told in that phone call, but might never walk again. That was her tsunami.

Yet, she informed me, she had found the phone call and the minutes, or hours, after it by far the worst part.

I found this hard to believe at the time. Surely, that was just the beginning of it? But no, she claimed it was the ambush, the
surprise, the shock that devastated her. And even by the next day she had got used to the new direction their life was headed in and by the end of the week she was talking rehabilitation and catheters like a pro.

It’s like the rubbish man collecting the rubbish all over again. The world keeps spinning. And it certainly didn’t bother to stop when Harry came out of the closet. Also, after the first few derailing minutes and hours when all I could think of was myself and Monty, I saw that Harry was just as inextricably tied to me as I was to him and conceded, secretly of course, that it would be easier for him not to be in love with this Charles person. But as they say, the heart wants what the heart wants. And takes other body parts with it.

Later that same night of the accidental companionship, I thought for a split second Harry was even going to change his mind and come home to me. I could see it in his eyes, in the quiver of his jaw, in the desperate way he looked at me, and I knew then how much he loved me. But far from being thrilled and relieved, I felt only pain, the deepest most wretched pain. For there truly was no going back now.

Especially for him. I could see it. While the trauma had given me the look of the wreck of the
Hesperus
, Harry looked good. He was a little grey around the face, as anyone leaving their loving wife would be, I imagine. But something in his eyes, in the square set of his shoulders, whispered of a new happiness.

I loathed him for that.

But I couldn’t stop loving him either.

So he went back to his bedsit where working out his position was obviously coming along quite nicely and I went about the business of lying on the couch in my pyjamas, screeching into cushions and talking to the dog.

You could have knocked me over with a feather when the funny little lady-boy who ran our hotel on the beach at Koh Tao told me there was a phone call for me.

I didn’t even realise they had a phone.

Anyway, I was in the beach-side bar enjoying an ice cold Changi beer and playing gin rummy with a drunken Dutchman at the time so at least the lady-boy didn’t have to go far to find me.

As soon as he said there was a call I knew it must be Mum or Dad and I knew it must be something pretty serious because I was on my way home and most things would have been able to wait. I didn’t panic though. For a start it was my second Changi beer of the morning. Also I thought if it was something really serious, you know, the most serious, the police would be coming to tell me, not the lady-boy in the midriff top and high-heeled flip flops with COOL SHIT carved into the soles. Still, it was pretty intense.

I don’t know what Dad thought I would say but pretty much ‘Wow’ was all I could come up with. I don’t mind about him being gay, God, far from it. As my friend Mischa says, what you do in bed is no one’s business unless they happen to be in bed with you. It was the shock, I suppose, more than anything else because my parents have always seemed like one of those creepy totally in love couples that make everyone else’s warring, bickering, ancient
parents look like sad bastards.

Or maybe it was just Mum that seemed totally in love. Maybe Dad has always been a bit, I don’t know, distant? Of course I might just be thinking that to stop feeling like a complete idiot for not noticing anything gay about him. Although to be honest I don’t think there is anything gay about him. I don’t mean I don’t believe that he’s gay, I mean I don’t think there was anything I missed. He was a great father, he is a great father, and I had a brilliant childhood so it doesn’t really matter much to me what he gets up to now. He’s an adult. He can do what he likes.

No, it was Mum I was worried about. Him being gay might not have had much impact on me but it was certainly going to have an impact on her. I didn’t know about the ins and outs of the split, we didn’t really get into that on the phone. Would she stay in the house? Shit, I hoped so. She really loved that house. Actually, that would have made me feel sad, if the house had had to go. But in a way it would also have made things easier for me.

I had a surprise of my own, after all.

God. Poor Mum.

CHAPTER SEVEN

A few days later it occurred to me that I was crying less and shouting at the TV more. So, on waking up the next morning, two weeks after being left by Harry, I enjoyed my brief blissful moment before despair again set in, then decided to have a shower and wash my hair. Just doing that improved my world immeasurably.

I was still the blind, stupid idiot who married a gay man but at least I didn’t smell like a field mouse.

Anyway, I had worked out that if I was going to survive, I had to talk to someone other than the dog and in the absence of any other field mice with which to converse — and believe me, I was only moments away from considering such a thing — I packed Sparky into the tired Golf and headed for Tannington Hall to break the news to Mum and Dad and Poppy.

I should have told them already, of course I should have,
and it wasn’t that I hadn’t meant to. I’d eyed up the phone in the bedroom (no longer having one in the sitting room) often enough but I just could not bring myself to do it. And when they rang me, well, to my astonishment I seemed extraordinarily capable of failing to mention that I’d lost my job and my husband and was pretty much just sitting around waiting for the next calamity to befall me.

Poppy was wildly excited about some chap she’d met at her face-reading course. Dad was considering growing some strange herb from the highlands of China that had been proven to reduce the side effects of female menopause. Mum had injured her groin getting out of the lotus position but was getting Dad to rub arnica cream into it every hour which meant they were spending a lot of time having sex, him on top for a change.

In the eye-popping conversational ping-pong surrounding these subjects, whether or not I was still working or still married never came up.

In my defence, I don’t imagine anyone exactly jumps at the chance to tell their family their husband is gay. Or bonking his secretary. Or going backpacking on his own in the depths of India. Or whatever he is doing that is going to make him very soon not your husband any more. It felt like a failure, that was all, even though I’d had nothing to do with its architecture. Still,
my
marriage was over.
My
childhood sweetheart was in a Lancaster Gate bedsit doing who knows what with Charles from the Whittington.

Millions of women before me had broken similar news to their loved ones and lived to tell the tale, I knew that. I just didn’t know how many came from a family so barking mad they were quite likely to commemorate such catastrophic news with an interpretive dance or an incense-burning festival.

Finally, I just closed my eyes, blurted to my mother that I was coming to visit and just hoped to God that the arnica cream had done its job by then.

Harry thought I should have gotten it over and done with sooner. In fact, at one stage he had suggested he take me there and help me do it. He had already broken the news to his broom-handle-up-the-bottom brother in Edinburgh who told him not to bother ringing again, but had decided against saying anything to his parents other than we were splitting up. I should have resented this probably but I didn’t. My parents were loony but loving, his parents were neither. Apart from birthday phone calls we didn’t have much to do with them. They showed so little interest in us that although I had forced it a bit when they lived in London and Monty was smaller, I pretty much let them go when they moved to the Scottish Highlands. Mind you, as I had recently come to understand, I’d been doing a bit more letting go of my nearest and dearest than was perhaps wise.

Despite that, I actually agreed with Harry about not giving his parents the intimate details of our marital failure although what I said to him was: ‘Tell them what you like. See if I care.’

‘Well, you might not care about mine but I care about yours, Floss. Please, tell them. I’ll come and do it with you if it makes it any easier.’

It was so hard to be left by Harry, he irritatingly seemed to feel the need to help me do it. You can’t just knock a twenty-five-year relationship on the head like that, as it turns out, no matter what the circumstances. I had every right to hate him to bits and I did, at times, mostly when he wasn’t there and I was just thinking about what a truly rotten thing he had done to me. Then, when we spoke, the conversations were
usually vile to begin with but sometimes that strange chatty companionship crept in. When I realised that was happening, I tended to hang up or revert to the vileness. This was confusing for him but I didn’t actually give a shit about that. It was just something I noticed.

Anyway, telling my family was something I needed to do on my own but as I pulled into the driveway of Tannington Hall, I felt sick to the pit of my stomach and not just because I knew Mum was cooking her famous nut roast, a truly vile concoction that looked like dog vomit. Even Sparky wouldn’t eat it.

‘Are you ready?’ I asked the dog as I pulled to a stop. He looked at me sadly. But then he always did.

Poppy emerged from the front door at that point, excitedly waving a wooden spoon at me.

‘Just so as you know,’ she greeted me, kissing me on each cheek, ‘Archie’s back in his caftan phase. I know you can’t bear them and it probably would be better if he bought new ones or had the old ones mended — how does he make so many holes in things? — but remember Effie, it’s just another way of expressing himself and with his prostate the age it is, well, it can only help to have the air circulating so please, Flower, don’t say a word.’

She snatched my Charles and Diana wedding memorial cake tin out of my hands and peered inside. ‘What? Cupcakes? Made with flour? And chocolate? Oh, really, Effie. How many times do I have to ask? All this gluten and dairy will blow me up like a balloon. I thought you might bring nut bars from Daylesford’s. All very well for you with those great long legs and that flat stomach. Gosh, have you lost weight? You have! How do you do it? Some people get all the luck. Bloody carnivores, it’s just not fair. Crumbs, Eff, are you all right?
You’re ghastly pale now I come to look at you. I hope you’re getting enough iron. Still eating meat though, I suppose. Oh, Effie, whatever is the matter? Are you crying? Oh, hell! I mean better out than in, let it go, let it go, but, oh hell! Breathe, Effie, breathe. Mummy! Daddy!’ Poppy always could holler well.

An hour later we were sitting inside by the fire, I had developed a pleasant glow from two and a half goblets of I don’t know what but it had a lot of alcohol in it, and had told them my awful news.

Poor Poppy was beside herself. She’d had her frustrations with the conventional nature of my life but I know she thought Harry and I were made for each other and I think we’d given her hope that her soul mate might be out there somewhere too, just in need of the universe doing a bit of wrangling to throw them in each other’s way.

‘Oh, darling,’ my mother said with uncustomary sympathy, ‘what you must be going through. I can only imagine. I am so sorry. A very difficult growth period for you both. Truly.’

Then she just sat there glaring at Dad and nodding in my direction in a ‘Go on, say something useful’ way although Lord knows why because the man is as sweet as a nut but not generally known for saying anything useful.

‘Yes, well,’ he eventually managed, hitching his caftan up as he sat so if I dared look I would no doubt see that he had yet to rediscover underpants, ‘I always thought he was a bit, you know, queer.’

‘Archie!’ My mother was aghast. Even she could tell this might not be considered useful. ‘You did not! Although,’ she added, as a politically correct afterthought, ‘there is nothing wrong with being queer. All Buddha’s creatures and all of that.’

‘Archie, that’s rubbish anyway, you thought he was a macho
swine.’ Poppy said. ‘Remember? When he came and gave you some advice on how to chop the firewood last winter? He said you were doing it all wrong and took the axe off you and you said he had too much testosterone and needed to drink more liquorice tea.’

‘You mean queer in a gay way, Dad? Did you really think that?’ I asked, my heart thumping desperately in my chest. Naturally, I had been turning myself inside out trying to recall signs from the past few decades that might have alerted me to any signs of queerness in my husband. But I swear, the man was not even
metro
sexual. He’d been going to the same barber for thirty years, didn’t moisturise, didn’t even wear aftershave. He played rugby, for goodness sake. He had a deep voice. He loved Cameron Diaz. He loved his son, our son. He was such a good father. Not that gay men aren’t but — oh, shit, it was actually quite hard, for the record, to be in my situation and remain politically correct.

‘I was only trying to help,’ Dad said, looking at me over his bifocals, hitching at his caftan again then running his hands through what remained of his unruly white hair. ‘So no, I suppose he was more of a macho swine than a poof. We thought that’s what you were after, Eff. One of those rugger bugger types. What?’ He looked cluelessly at Mum who was gesticulating wildly. ‘What have I said now? What? Bugger?’

‘It’s OK, Mum,’ I said. ‘Really.’

‘Well, was he OK in the sack?’ Dad continued, still trying to be useful. ‘You know, performance-wise? I mean you never mentioned anything was awry so we all just assumed …’

Mum and Dad and Poppy talked endlessly about sex, never tiring of this erection or that orgasm or the missionary position twice removed with whipped cream on top. Seriously, it wouldn’t surprise me if our parents had actually demonstrated
positions for Poppy to try with each new boyfriend. These were the perils of being thirty-five, single and living at home although Poppy seemed to not find it particularly perilous.

‘I never mentioned anything because there was nothing to mention,’ I told them stiffly, blushing at even going that far. ‘And when I say “nothing” I don’t mean nothing at all I mean nothing out of the ordinary. We had a perfectly normal sex life.’

It was true. Normal for normal people anyway. We had sex as often as we felt like it, sometimes initiated by me, sometimes by him. It had never once ever ended in Harry flopping back onto the pillows and me saying, ‘Don’t worry, darling, it happens to all men at some point.’ He was very affectionate, easily — you know,
interested
.

‘Well, I hate to be the one to ask you this,’ my mother said, rather enthusiastically, recovering from her sympathetic mode. ‘But have you had an AIDs test? I mean the statistics are …’

‘He didn’t cheat on me,’ I said loudly. ‘He says he didn’t cheat on me and I believe him. It’s just that he wanted to. For a long time he wanted to and now that we’re separated I am sure he has. With Charles from the Whittington Hospital.’

‘Oh, poor Flower,’ Poppy whispered, reaching out and squeezing my hand.

‘Didn’t Shirley Haverstock’s mother get some awful bug and die at the Whittington?’ Dad asked Mum.

‘Or was it Julia Whiteley’s mother?’ Mum asked him back. ‘And did she die or did she go blind or lose a kidney or something? Either way she was about a hundred. And they all made such a fuss. But yes, I’m pretty sure it was the Whittington.’

‘Oh, poor, poor, Flower,’ Poppy said again as she launched herself at me, throwing her arms around my neck and hiding
her face in my collar. ‘You’re separated? Oh, I can’t bear it.’

‘Of course we’re separated, Poppy,’ I answered although it had taken me a while to work that out too. ‘That’s what happens when your husband is gay. And we thought it was a good idea that he had moved out by the time Monty gets home. So it’s not too confusing for him.’ Our son’s name stuck in my throat. How I longed to be on the other side of him coming home.

‘Oh, poor, poor Monty,’ Poppy breathed into my collarbone. ‘He’ll be heartbroken. Oh, that poor darling boy.’

At the thought of their poor darling grandson being heartbroken, Mum and Dad looked pretty sick as well. They were undeniably wacky and inclined, for its alleged antibiotic properties, to drink their own urine (or so they said although no one ever saw them actually do it), but they loved my son to within an inch of his life.

‘He’ll be fine,’ Dad said nervously, adding with an encouraging nod in my direction, ‘I mean he’s a bit poofy himself.’

‘Archie!’ My mother, who is not surprisingly rabidly against any form of violence, looked ready to clout him.

‘You think Monty is poofy?’ I should have been offended and on one level I was but I must admit our son had a sensitive side that did sometimes verge on the effeminate. I’d wondered about his sexuality myself, in the past, but that was before I knew about Harry. Could gayness be hereditary?

‘Actually, you’re a bit poofy too, Archie,’ Poppy said sitting up and dabbing at her eyes. ‘You’re the poofiest of anybody. You’re very in touch with your feminine side, we all know that, plus your voice is sort of high and you are wearing a dress.’

‘Trust me, there is nothing gay about your father,’ Mum said with a roll of her eyes. ‘If you could have seen him earlier
on today with his —’

‘No!’ I cried. ‘Please, Mum, not now.’ My mother started to raise her eyebrows in her traditional how-repressed-are-you look but then relaxed a little when she considered perhaps I might not want to hear stories of heroic heterosexuality just at that point.