On Top of Everything (4 page)

Not that they are terrible people; heavens, far from it. They
are delightful people. Truly delightful. Everybody loves them, and I do too, deeply. We are, and always have been in many respects, very close.

Less close, I suppose, since they all upped stumps and moved to Tannington Hall, a Tudor farmhouse in Suffolk, where Mum and Dad talked about growing organic herb crops and Poppy helped. Dad remained embarrassed about his prosperity but he seemed able to make money almost by accident, investing in things everyone (including him) thought were totally mad only to find them the new best thing since sliced bread in five years’ time. The point being that he had no real need to actually farm organic herbs so talking was as far as he would ever go and in the meantime they loved it in the country.

The three of them formed a perfect loopy little unit who seemed never to tire of each other’s company nor lengthy discussions on the pointlessness of vegetarian pork scratchings. Look, if you’ve always dreamed of having a family who will endlessly discuss labial piercing or placenta pie over the dinner table, they are probably perfect. If you’re gagging to express every single feeling, even the ones so small as to hardly count, they are just the ticket. If you like to shock, bingo! My parents love being shocked. The best thing a daughter could do, in their eyes, is streak across the cricket pitch at Lords or run away and join the circus. My school friend Bettina Malone did both; the former after one too many snakebites at the Washington pub and the latter after falling for the juggling teacher at an extra-curricular gym class. My mother cried tears of actual envy. There was I studying for A levels instead of taking to the hills in a Humber 80 decorated like a clown’s head. How could I?

As an obedient teenager I felt like a letdown where my parents were concerned but I knew I was the light of Rose’s
life, which made everything all right. I just wish I’d had some idea that she was going to leave me so swiftly, cancer claiming all three grandparents in that one fell swoop. (Actually, we did not call it cancer. Despite the fact that my parents embraced everything far more than anybody ever really needed to, the word was never again spoken in our house after the funerals were done and dusted. It was referred to as ‘the measles’. And even then it was mentioned only in a whisper.)

In the months before Rose died I was busy being a girlie swot, poring over my schoolbooks and spending my remaining waking hours being madly in love with my boyfriend Harry, with whom I was not having sex, despite my parents’ insistence that I should.

For my sixteenth birthday, just months before she died, before we even knew she was ill, I begged Rose to eschew our traditional Claridge’s afternoon tea in favour of going to see
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
at the Odeon in Leicester Square. Afterwards, I chewed my way through a spectacularly overdone piece of indistinguishable meat at the Angus Steak House around the corner.

It’s not easy being the carnivorous daughter of strict
vegetarians
, I probably went slightly too far in the other direction. I think Rose liked the odd lamb cutlet but that was probably as meaty as she got and it is a credit to her that she handled this birthday fiasco as though it were also her idea of a perfect way to spend the day. I don’t recall her actually swallowing so much as a morsel of steak (if that’s what it was) but she had a lot of very nice things to say about Harrison Ford.

When she died I tortured myself about wasting that last birthday treat. How could I have been so selfish? We could have had cucumber sandwiches and scones and bite-sized pastries on those delicate Claridge’s plates one more time but instead
I was drooling over Harrison bloody Ford. I’ve loathed him ever since. I nearly had a bloody aneurism when he dumped his wife for Ally McBeal.

As for being left Rose’s house: that made me feel sick, utterly sick. Just thinking of it being there without her in it filled me with anguish. The memories of all the wonderful times we’d shared there together were just too awful to contemplate, I couldn’t bear them, so I told Dad to get rid of the place, to sell it, to give it away; a command he completely ignored. There’s nothing a pretend hippy likes more than collecting property in parts of London destined to become fashionable, after all.

The place was rented out for years and I couldn’t stand to even drive past for many of them. One day, though, I woke up after a particularly nonsensical yet stirring dream involving the giant Disneyland tea cups and Rose and a mountain of chocolate and felt the need to revisit it. I walked Monty over from Notting Hill in the push chair and sat on the stone wall by the boater facilities on the Delamere Terrace side of the canal where I had a perfect view of the window from which we used to spy on the patients. I still missed Rose dreadfully and thought about her every day. Sometimes I even caught the odd whiff of her delicate fragrance on a passing stranger or saw a silver chignon being patted into place across the room and that teenage sadness at losing her claimed me just as fiercely once again.

That spring afternoon though, I looked up and saw the two of us there, pointing out the window and making up stories. I could almost feel the crumbs of a coffee cake caught in the corner of my mouth, and I was suddenly overwhelmed with the happiness I’d felt sitting on her Sanderson sofa, helping myself to cream from one of her delicate jugs and wondering aloud if the lady with the enormous bosoms and thick ankles
had scurvy or was pregnant with quintuplets.

That spring afternoon, for reasons I couldn’t fathom then nor now, the memory wasn’t painful at all, it was gloriously cheerful. It was as though someone had flicked a switch in my emotional fuse box. She was gone and I could never bring her back, sad — but she’d been there in the first place and nobody could erase the memory of her, wonderful. Time might take my youth and add a husband and a child and a fairly ho-hum career (at that stage in part-time reception and part-time shop assisting) but nothing, nobody could take away the times Rose and I had spent together. They were there for eternity. I don’t know why this hadn’t occurred to me before, maybe I was just growing up, maybe that’s how grief works, but I felt the weight of my sadness lighten as I sat there while Monty chewed on a rusk and cooed at the passing birds and Rose’s image faded from the upstairs window but stayed crisp and clear just like the spring day itself in my mind.

I went straight home and suggested to Harry that we sell our Notting Hill flat and move to the big house in Little Venice. From that day on remembrances of Rose were never sad affairs. I took every precious occasion I could remember and instead of squashing them in a box to save myself the pain of not having her with me still, I strung them up next to each other in my mind, like Christmas lights, so on darker days I could turn them on and still feel that she was right there with me.

The day I was booted out of my own business was obviously one such dark day.

I’d lost a job, a friend, a mirror, and a chamber pot in the time it took to brew a decent pot of tea. Days did not get much darker.

Or so I thought.

To my darling Florence

I found this the other day when I was doing a spring clean of the kitchen cupboards. How it got separated from my old recipe book I can’t imagine, but it strikes me as the sort of treat you would just adore. I can remember making this with my own grandmother, God rest her soul. Goodness knows where we got the eggs and sugar but I remember the smell of that cake coming out of the oven as though it were yesterday. It must be the tea, I think. I could have waited till I see you next week to give it to you but just found it and thought I’d pop it in the post as you no doubt need cheering up while studying for your exams, you clever girl.

Give my love to the family and Harry.

Rose

Cover sultanas with water or if you have cold Irish Breakfast tea left in the pot use that for extra flavour. Bring to the boil on the stove and simmer for five minutes.

Strain off the water/tea and add the butter, letting it melt. Meanwhile beat eggs and sugar in a large bowl till thick.

Add sultanas and melted butter to egg mix.

Sift in flour and baking powder, then add essence. Mix and put in a well greased or lined eight-inch round tin.

Bake for the first couple of minutes at 350˚F then reduce heat to 300˚F and cook for up to 1½ hours, checking after 1¼.

On removal from the oven, gently drizzle the sherry over the hot cake and rub in the brown sugar, which makes for an extra delicious crust.

CHAPTER FOUR

At home after the dreadful business with Charlotte and my strange experience with Marguerite, I didn’t quite know what to do with myself so opted in the end for collapsing on our big squashy brass bed, Sparky slumped pathetically beside me as I tried to conjure up one of my happy Rose moments.

I lay there, eyes closed, trying once again to recall the two of us spotting ailments from the front-room window. I could see her, I could see me, I could see the Sanderson sofa, and I could see the courtyard, but it wasn’t full of departing patients in flares getting into their Triumph 2000s, as it had been all those years ago. Instead it was planted with pale yellow roses and other flowering shrubs. There were tables dotted around these little garden areas and they were covered in pretty linen tablecloths. On top of the tables were tiered plates heaving with chocolate éclairs, fruit tarts, sponge cakes, shortbread, scones, tiny savouries and crustless sandwiches, plus teapots
and cups and milk jugs of every description. Around the tables were strangely faceless people, one of whom was dressed in a Vivienne Westwood top I had seen in a
Vogue
magazine the day before. They were modern healthy people, not ’70s sick people, and they were having a jolly good time. I could almost hear the clatter of teaspoons against cups; forks against cake remains.

This most certainly wasn’t the past I was looking into. So what was it?

I felt that odd burr of awareness shimmying up my body again, stopping behind my eyes, which instantly sprang open. I sat up and pushed the mournful dog away from me. Those people in my mind were having tea in my front garden. More correctly, they were being
served
tea in my front garden. To all intents and purposes, they were indeed treating my front garden like a tearoom. Could there actually be something in what Marguerite had seen in the tea leaves?

It was ludicrous, of course it was.

But it also made a strange sort of sense.

How hard would it be to turn this house I loved so much into a tearoom? I wondered, feeling a little tremor of excitement. Probably not as hard as a normal house because this one was already slightly higgledy-piggledy, thanks to part of it spending eighty years as a doctor’s surgery.

Our family kitchen was on the first floor with the formal sitting room, which is where Harry and I spent most our time when we were both there, as had Cecil and Rose.

But on the ground floor where the doctor’s rooms had been, there was a kitchenette, a small bathroom and two large rooms, one of which Monty used mostly as a TV room and the other Harry and I used as an office. The backyard was a delightfully (I thought) overgrown jungle but it had its own
access out to Warwick Place. Rose had used this to come and go during surgery hours and I had used it to go to work when I had a job, which was up until that very day, or when I was walking anywhere via the lane as opposed to using the car, which was parked in the front. What it meant was that there were two separate entrances to our house. One at the front that patients, or customers, say, could use. And one at the back for us.

In my grandfather’s day the front courtyard had been cobbled and left neat and empty for the Triumph 2000s, but when the house was rented out (and indeed when we moved in) weeds were the dominating feature. It was still vaguely cobbled if you looked close enough but we never used it for anything. We just ignored it. Poppy couldn’t bear this wanton neglect and over one lentil-casserole-fuelled weekend planted wildflowers around the edges and between the cobbles. After that we continued to ignore it but it looked a lot prettier, even though people in nice clothes often looked at it balefully and shook their heads when they walked by.

It’s just that Harry and I were both hopeless gardeners. I killed things just by thinking about them and he completely didn’t care. We were both wildly impractical when it came to things around the house. I cooked but that was about it and Harry could clean, but sort of didn’t, and never even pretended to be handy, couldn’t straighten a picture on the wall, let alone fix a rattly doorknob or unstick a stubborn window.

These chores were either left undone or tackled by my father who did pretend to be handy, even though he also wasn’t. As a result, the house, while generally ultimately clean because eventually I would dust and vacuum, was otherwise a bit shabby. Wallpaper curled out cutely from the walls in various places up the two stairwells, the carpet was frayed in
popular parts of the house, the bathroom was not at all
House & Garden,
the kitchen cupboards needed painting and the oven replacing (not the least because it was brown). On one hand it was in need of major redecorating; but on the other hand, that wallpaper, the carpet and the once-upon-a-time ivory paintwork in the kitchen was what I had known and loved since seeking refuge from the fresh purple and oranges of Primrose Hill.

When Monty was about fourteen I had let him paint his bedroom in black and white stripes, which was really the extent of any renovating. The black was now more of a dark grey and the white was a little grubby in patches but he’d done a good job, better than his father or I would have done. I’d been so impressed that he’d known just what he wanted and that it was something out of the ordinary. He really was a treasure, my boy.

At the thought of him, I pushed myself off the bed and went downstairs to check my email.

Monty had been in Australia for more than nine months and was due back in the next few weeks. I’d been missing him desperately but was under strict instructions never to admit it. ‘If you turn into one of those creeps who says your son is your best friend, I will kill you,’ Monty had told me himself before he left. ‘You should have a best friend your own age.’

And really, he wasn’t my best friend. Harry was. But Monty was my best everything else.

At the risk of sounding like the sort of woman other mothers would like to clock over the head with a frozen chicken, he was the dream child. It started with an easy pregnancy in my then twenty-year-old body, which sprang back into shape as if by magic, then continued as we watched in wonder while our little treasure fed better than most, slept more than most,
and lavished his glorious smile on anyone who had the good fortune to come anywhere near him.

Monty was everyone’s favourite toddler, schoolboy, teenager, everything. He didn’t even get spotty. Or smelly. Or angry. I know people always think their own children are the bee’s knees, even the hideous ones who set sparrows on fire in their spare time and grow Mohawk hairdos, but Monty truly was head and shoulders above the lot of them. Practically every school report he ever got said almost exactly that.

Of course it had been a loathsome wrench to let him go all the way across the world to where the streets were thick with crocodiles and those silly hats with corks hanging off them but he was a sensible boy, a trustworthy boy, a good boy. He was master of his own destiny, I kept reminding myself. As Rose had believed in me, I believed in Monty. He had a very sure sense of himself, our son. If he wanted to go and discover himself on the other side of the world even though he was only eighteen, then it was the right thing for him to do and no one should stand in his way, not even me. Much. After the initial outburst.

So I lay in bed and sobbed my heart out for a week after he left but at least the pillowcases weren’t hessian and eventually Sparky got so depressed on my behalf I felt obliged to get up and get on with my life.

To begin with, Monty emailed nearly every day — in fact I worried he wasn’t having enough of an adventure — but as he’d moved about Australia, bartending in Darwin, gardening in Perth, valeting in Sydney (a boy who had never picked up a towel in his life? I never said he was
perfect
), the correspondence had dropped off. In recent months we were lucky if we got more than a couple of lines a week. He was somewhere near the New South Wales/Queensland border working at a health
spa set in the rainforest. His access to email was limited, he’d told us, but he was having the time of his life.

That’s the best you can hope for your children, I kept reminding myself: that they are having the time of their life as often as they can manage it.

I switched on the computer and sure enough, there was nothing from him, just a bunch of irritating jokes from my mother who had embraced the computer age with all her tie-dyed might and drove me potty sending long lists of why cucumbers were better than men and the like.

I was contemplating telling her just what to do with her latest cucumbers when I heard the front door open and the sound of the Grand Junction filter in.

‘Floss?’ It was Harry, calling out in a strange tone, sort of half-heartedly as though he didn’t really want me to answer. ‘Floss, are you home?’

What was Harry doing here? He wasn’t due back from Aldeburgh for another two days. I blinked at the computer screen, Monty’s name glaringly absent from my inbox, and I knew as sure as I know that white chocolate is not really actually chocolate and shouldn’t even be called by that name that rotten thing number two was heading my way.

‘Floss?’ Harry called out again in the same odd voice.

I could tell from the noise of cars crossing the bridge and a police siren wailing in the background that he was still standing inside the open front door.

Monty, I thought, my heart clenching like a fist. Something had happened to our son.

Suddenly losing my stupid job seemed utterly meaningless. That blow had been vicious but other than stepping dazedly into the path of oncoming traffic I had emerged unscathed. That was only my career. This was far more brutal. My blood
turned to lead, slowed in my veins, dragging my weight down, rooting me to my chair. I tried to move. I tried to keep breathing. I managed a strangled squeak.

I heard the front door being pushed shut, Harry’s boots on the worn floorboards, one step muffled as he crossed the worn hall runner, then felt a rush of cold air as he opened the door to the office.

‘Floss, here you are. Didn’t you hear me calling you?’

I had loved Harry Dowling from the first day I saw him, waiting for the 268 bus. We were both fourteen at the time: me just turned, him eleven months into it. He was tall and as good-looking as boys that age got, but not in a way that he was aware of, which made him far less intimidating to a shy girl like myself who could nonetheless recognise his potential. He was standing by the kerb wearing a nerdy scarf wound around his neck and had a long dark fringe that he seemed to hide behind, although it couldn’t disguise the wicked dimple on his left cheek that appeared when he smiled. Which he did, that morning, cutely at me and I felt the world stop spinning. For a moment there was only the two of us in the universe.

It sounds silly but it’s true. Or that’s how I remember it. And I certainly never felt the same ever again. It only ever happened to you once, I imagined. Or did it happen the first time and then you stopped expecting it? I didn’t know because I never so much as looked at another bloke after I met Harry: even when Eddie Carmichael, the captain of the first XV, confessed his undying passion for me after three glasses of rum punch at a toga party during our sixth form year. And he was gorgeous, Eddie Carmichael. But, no, I only ever had eyes for Harry.

Right from the word go, when we started going out together, about seven minutes after I spotted him, I remember
thinking how lucky I was that no one else had snapped him up before me. I was not what you would consider a catch at that time, being tall myself and gangly for a fourteen-year-old, but Harry was a catch, anyone could see that. Good-looking, kind, witty people are few and far between in the teenage world, in any world. The very fact that he chose me over all the short, blonde strumpets waiting for the 268, and there was a surprising number of them, just added to my good fortune. And as the years passed, as we got engaged, then married, moved into a flat, had Monty, moved into our house, I never lost that feeling of being lucky to have found him. Not many people have this, I used to think. And by ‘this’ I meant not just the happiness but the recognition of the happiness, which is an entirely different thing because sometimes you can be happy and not even know it. Usually, when I looked at Harry, I knew it, and I felt quite simply and beautifully blessed.

Not today though. Harry’s face was pale and his fists were clenched at his sides. Something was deeply not right. It was not a time to feel blessed. It was a time to feel terrified. My innards, often one step ahead of me, turned to jelly.

‘Is it Monty?’ I asked, taking in a huge gulp of air, pushing my chair back against the wall, preparing my body for the physical pain that was already tingling at my edges. ‘What’s happened? Is he hurt? Is he dead?’

‘Floss, please, it’s nothing like that,’ Harry said, his voice more sure now, more serious. Harry never squeaked. ‘It’s not Monty. He’s fine. Truly. It’s not him. Florence, look at me.’ I looked. ‘It is not Monty. This is not about him. It’s just … well, it’s about me, actually. Florence … we need to talk.’