On Top of Everything (5 page)

You don’t have to watch many movies to know that ‘we need to talk’ does not bode at all well for the future but I was so busy feeling relief, that good old whisky chaser of an
emotion, flood through me that I did not pick up on this vital clue.

‘You’re sure? He’s really OK? Oh, Harry, please tell me he is OK.’

‘I have told you that. I am sure. He’s really OK. It’s not Monty. He is fine, honestly Florence. It’s not Monty.’

Well, if it wasn’t something awful about our son, how bad could it be, I remember thinking, as my heart popped back to its original plumpness and my blood lightened and started flowing normally around my body again.

And Harry was right, I thought, as I followed him up to the kitchen, we did need to talk. I needed to tell him that I had just made a whopping £30,000 but that the news wasn’t all good. Would he be angry? I doubted it. He had always been so grateful that I had encouraged him to give up law, which he hated but was good at, and take up writing, which he loved but which had so far to earn him a penny. But we’d needed my income from the business, paltry as it sometimes was, to pay the bills and without it we’d need to think of a way to get some cash flowing. Could he write a novel that perhaps had more appeal to a bigger audience, or in the first place a publisher? That was maybe a bit more John Grisham/Dan Brown than Booker Prize? This had been suggested, I think, in one or two of his many rejection letters but I always sided with Harry because I believed in him. I always had. I didn’t really care about money, I realised, as I filled the kettle with water and warmed the teapot. We could live on baked beans and London smog as long as Monty was all right.

I think I even managed a feeble smile as we settled on either side of the old pine table his gran had given us when we married and he reached for my hands, cupping them in his.

I had forgotten by now that there was still something Harry
had come home early from his course to tell me, so thrilled was I that our son was alive and well and probably only scraping kangaroo carcasses off the front fender of an SUV not lying underneath it in a pool of blood.

‘The thing is, Charlotte fired me,’ I told him before he had a chance to speak. ‘Whiffy threw a chamberpot at the Regency mirror behind the counter and smashed it and she said she’d had enough of me and that I was keeping her from growing the business and she didn’t want me for a partner any more. She offered me £30,000 to go away and I took it, Harry, and I thought for a bit that it was the first rotten thing — which I know you don’t believe in but still — and I know I should have consulted you but the thing is I don’t really think it was a choice if you know what I mean, especially not the way Charlotte put it. Then suddenly it didn’t seem quite so dreadful anyway because Marguerite saw this amazing opportunity in a tea cup at the Warwick Castle.’

Harry’s jaw was hanging open and he was looking at me in a most peculiar fashion.

‘I know it’s not exactly a fortune,’ I rambled on, ‘but still, it is a lump sum and where else are we going to find one of those? What I’m thinking is — after talking to Marguerite and it might seem loony at first but actually it isn’t — that we could use the money to turn downstairs into, wait for it, Harry: a tearoom! Yes, it’s a little bit out of the blue but as one door closes another one opens and the pipes and what have you must already be there, the space is definitely there, plus we could have tables and chairs in the courtyard and now that I have had a moment to think about it, I can’t imagine a better way to spend my day than …’

Still, Harry was staring at me, a look of horror, I suppose you could call it, claiming his face.

‘It’s not the worst idea in the world,’ I suggested. ‘Is it?’ Perhaps it was. I hadn’t really thought about it that much at all, obviously. It had just sort of made sense. At the time. Or shortly afterwards. Now I wasn’t so sure.

‘You might have to work a bit somewhere, Harry, but not for long,’ I ploughed on, witlessly. ‘And I’m sure the tearoom would make money as long as we don’t spend more than we have and don’t expect it to happen overnight. But there’s nowhere else decent for miles, or nowhere sort of quaint, unless you count the barge across the bridge and that’s tiny and does eggs and sausages and I mean to do proper tea on cake stands and everything, like Claridge’s but, you know, smaller, not the food but the place and with a bit of a twist.’

No, it wasn’t horror on Harry’s face. It was worse. It was misery.

‘It’s only a tearoom, Harry,’ I said, getting a giant case of the speed wobbles. ‘Not even that. It’s only an idea about a tearoom.’

Misery was not a natural state for Harry. He was a calm, steady, contented person. Usually he sailed straight through the likes of grief and stress, was never tossed about by their peaks and troughs. Even his decision to abandon his job had been remarkably free of angst or drama. Stoic was the word, I suppose. Now though, with his face all drawn in, his eyes so dark and sorrowful, he seemed oddly unfamiliar to me. A miserable stranger.

‘I can’t think of any other way to do this, Floss,’ he said.

I had no idea what was coming. Any other way to do what?

‘The thing is that I’ve been putting it off for quite a while now,’ he continued, ‘and if I could, I would put it off forever, especially after what’s happened to you today. I mean the
timing is just appalling. Truly appalling. I can’t believe it, really, but I can’t put it off any longer. It’s not fair to you or me or …’

What in heaven’s name was he on about? I couldn’t work out how this was connected to the chamber pot or the money or my job. That cup of tea I’d had at the Warwick earlier, however, swirled clever and dark in my murky depths.

‘The thing is,’ Harry said, ‘there’s someone else.’

Now it was my jaw that dropped open. Was this a joke? ‘We need to talk’ followed so quickly by ‘There’s someone else.’ You’d think even a nitwit like me would start getting the gist of things about now but still, I remained bewildered.

‘There’s someone else, Florence,’ Harry said again. ‘And I’m afraid it’s not what you’d expect. Not who.’

Well it wouldn’t be, would it; I wasn’t expecting anything at all. Anyone.

‘What are you telling me?’ I asked dimly.

‘It’s a man,’ Harry said softly. ‘He is a man.’

A
man
? I was lost, totally lost, all coherent thought swirling about with that cup of Twinings’ finest.

‘What?’ I asked again, feeling Harry’s hands growing clammy on top of mine, reminding me mine were still there, his own bigger ones cloaking them. ‘A what?’

‘His name is Charles, he’s a doctor at the Whittington Hospital. I’m so sorry, Floss. I love you with all my heart, you know I do, but this is different. I just can’t keep on … I don’t want to hurt you, you must know that, it’s the last thing I would ever want to do but it’s time I … Oh God, Floss, I’m just so sorry.’

I can be slow at times. I used to blame my mother for smoking pot when she was pregnant with me, although she claims she cut down for the duration and never once took
magic mushrooms.

Then as I got older I realised it was a panic issue. My parents don’t believe in panic — actually catching fire on one occasion failed to so much as ruffle my father — but I think I was born with a massive panic gene. Because of faulty wiring and a lack of guidance, however, it tended to trip up. My body seemed to physically react to trauma in a flash. It just took my brain a while to catch up.

So as the contents of my stomach were lurching hysterically inside me across the table from Harry who apparently had someone else, my muddled mind continued to grapple with the meaning of his words. Why is he talking about this doctor, I thought? Was there something wrong with him?

‘What’s the matter?’ I asked, the Twining’s rising yet again. ‘Oh, please tell me it’s not the “measles”. I couldn’t bear it.’

Harry looked more stricken than ever as he shook his head. After twenty years of marriage he knew enough about my faulty wiring to know when I was getting something and when I was not. And I was definitely on delay.

‘Floss, listen to me,’ he said, squeezing my hands even tighter, pulling me into his safe, solid sanity the way he always had.

‘I’m not sick. I’m perfectly healthy. I’m just gay.’

I’m just gay.

Three words you never want to hear your husband say, by the way, and a reason to panic if ever there was one.

Indeed, my fingers and toes were tingling, my hearing was coming and going, I felt bile rising in my throat, and I was as cold as a stone. But that was as panicked as I got because it turns out that panicking isn’t what you do when the love of your life tells you he’s changed his colours.

Instead, you die.

It’s as simple as that. The bit of you that for all those years has been his loving wife and a devoted mother to your darling son, which, by the way you realise in that exact moment is most of you, just shrivels up and dies. In an instant. It is terrifying. Far more terrifying than panic, which you know from experience will pass. This feels permanent. Like death.

But how could he be gay? I heard a voice that sounded like me only much more frightened asking. When had he had the chance? We had grown up together, for heaven’s sake, were growing old together, I knew him like the back of my hand. How could I possibly have missed the fact that he preferred men?

‘But you have terrible taste in clothes,’ I said, utterly confused. He didn’t even use any product in his hair. He hated musicals. And Kylie. I knew these were the ridiculously stereotypical gay traits found pretty much only in
Will & Grace
reruns but I was caught off guard, I’d not had the chance to do any research.

‘I’m so sorry, Floss,’ was all he could say as tears started rolling down his face. ‘I’m so, so sorry. I know you probably won’t ever forgive me but that doesn’t mean I’m not sorry.’

It occurred to me that I had never seen him cry before or if I had it was so long ago I couldn’t remember. Gay for five minutes and a great big sissy already? Who was this man?

I stood up and hit him across the head with a bunch of bananas.

Never mind panic. Never mind death. Part of me was suffering from bits of both but the rest of me was alive and, as it turns out, bloody furious.

I won’t embarrass myself by recounting exactly what transpired next but it did involve a lot of fruit (some of it past its best), a selection of my mother-in-law’s fine bone china
(how could I?) and a lamp stand with a butterfly shade which I’ve always loved to bits so I can’t imagine why I smashed it against the kitchen counter and held the jagged end against Harry’s throat, then against my own, then back against his.

Well, yes, I can. I was devastated. I’d always thought devastation was a word that only truly applied to victims of natural disaster like those tsunami survivors you see on the news, the ones whose villages have been washed away taking their houses, their families, the lives they thought they were going to lead with them. I’d seen pictures of these broken mortals weeping inconsolably next to piles of sticks and rags that used to be their homes, and had thought that was devastation. They were devastated.

In fact, that was exactly how I now felt. Like an enormous wave had appeared out of nowhere without the slightest bit of warning and swept away my future.

My husband didn’t love me any more, that was my tsunami. No, it was worse than that. My husband did love me, he just loved someone else more, in a different way, a better way. Better for him, anyway.

And I’d thought we were blessed.

I could tell sitting across the fruit bowl from her that it hadn’t sunk in about Charles but for heaven’s sake, what is the right way to tell the only woman you have ever loved that you’re about to ruin her life? It was not a language with which I was familiar. If there had been any other way …

As it was, as we sat there, I cursed myself for not spending more time working out the correct phrasing, preparing her better, but in all honesty, I had already gone over it a thousand times in my mind, and in the end I think I knew that the words weren’t going to make much difference to the final outcome. Pretty peculiar really, considering words are what I’m all about. As a lawyer, it’s getting the words exactly right that counts and I suppose that’s true of writers, too, although obviously I have not yet perfected that craft and quite frankly probably never will.

On the other hand, who wants to be good at leaving their wife? Especially a wife as wonderful as Florence? I was bound to botch it up, there was probably no way around that. Even knowing her as well as I did, though, I couldn’t have picked that she would translate me telling her about Charles into me dying of some awful disease, although she always had quite an aptitude for ferreting out the worst possible scenario. Once she’d worked that much out, she told me years ago, she could relax because it might not be so bad in the end.

Is it worse, the truth, I remember thinking as I tried to tell her
about Charles? For her, anyway? When she gets it, when she finally gets it, will she wish I was dying; will she wish I was dead?