On Top of Everything

by Sarah-Kate Lynch

  Tim, my husband, rolls his eyes whenever he sees me peering into someone’s fine bone china but he has experienced enough in our life together that I have seen beforehand to know that there is definitely something in it. The leaves told me where to find him, after all.

  I’m a merchant banker, or was until I stopped to have our twins Lily and Georgina. I’ve missed it enormously since I’ve been at home with the girls. That’s why I love going into Drake Dowling to have a cup of tea with Florence, to chat with whoever else is in there and check out the cups.

  The best cup for a good reading is the finest china; the best shape the classic one that curves out gently from the base, letting the tea leaves rise unrestricted up the sides. White or cream or pale is better, and the less ornamentation on the inside the clearer the picture.

  The cups at the Warwick Castle weren’t perfect, to be honest, being slightly chipped and of the catering variety, but still, I saw Florence’s future as clearly as I’d ever seen anything and it was starting almost right away.

  I was terribly excited about that, as I never thought she was right for antiques, nor to work with someone like Charlotte, who is a hard-headed businesswoman and has a great future in a major auction house, actually, which is probably more up her alley than a back-street antiques shop. Anyway, I felt in my heart that Florence’s tearoom was a fait accompli, I truly did, especially when she told me about her grandmother. That made it a text-book reading. I’ve only ever had one or two others quite as clear so it was pretty thrilling.

  There was one black cloud though, which I didn’t mention to Florence as she’d already had such a blow that day. To the left of the handle of the cup, before the house, which meant timing-wise its impact would probably be felt sooner, was a heart. Or, to be more accurate, two parts of a heart, split down the middle.

  You don’t need any special knack to work out what that means.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Until I met Harry, my grandmother Rose was the love of my life.

  My mother’s mother, she had been the first to go in that awful grandparent trifecta of my teens and I was so heartbroken I wept into my scratchy hessian pillowcase non-stop for weeks. Everyone was terribly understanding, assuming it was the shock of losing three of them in such a short time that was crippling me so badly, but to be honest, I could not really drum up much grief for my paternal grandparents after losing Rose. I spent it all on her. Gorgeous, lovely, precious, sweet, adorable her.

  Don’t get me wrong, Poppa Phil and Nanny Mary, my father’s parents, were perfectly lovely, despite the smell of mothballs (her) and terrifying nasal hair (him), but Rose was something else. I adored everything about her. She smelt of freshly laundered linen sheets and jasmine, never had a hair out of place, was always spot on time, introduced me to scones and clotted cream, and was mine, all mine, preferring me to my cute redheaded younger sister Poppy — which never happened — and electing herself my living guardian angel.

  And I needed a guardian angel, believe me, or felt like I did, which is probably the same. A lot of the time, even when I was little, I thought my parents had brought the wrong baby back from the hospital; that I’d been swapped for someone else’s more conservative bundle. They were hippies, my parents, not that there’s anything wrong with that, but even as a toddler I was pretty square, so I found them a bit embarrassing really and vice versa, I’m sure.

  As with many young folk coming of age in the 1950s and ’60s, Mum and Dad had started out perfectly middle class. She had trained to be a nurse and he was at university studying accountancy when they met, although they keep that pretty quiet because it seemed too middle of the road, I suppose. It was Mum who first discovered reefers and free love at some event smelling heavily of patchouli oil, from what I can gather, and Dad followed slavishly behind her. Like many reformed people, they took to being born-again hippies with a verve that born-the-first-time ones often lacked. My mother’s armpit hair was so long I’m sure she took pills to hurry it along. And my father never wore underpants and didn’t notice if his harem pants had holes in them.

  I was a total throwback. I didn’t mean to be. It just turned out that way.

  They begged me to call them Beth and Archie but all I ever wanted was Mummy and Daddy.

  They dressed me in hemp and gave me wooden blocks to play with; I wanted pink frills and Barbie dolls. They loved acting out politically correct fairy tales and baking their own cement-like five-grain loaf; I liked The Brady Bunch and white bread. I dreamed of getting married and wearing a one-piece in the summer; they didn’t believe in marriage (although they were themselves married — the photos are hilarious) and loved any excuse to get their kit off and parade around in the nude.

  When Poppy came along, she proved to be their perfect child. This could have caused some resentment on my part except that Poppy was and continues to be the most adorable creature in the world. Plus, her arrival got me off the hook. I had been a major disappointment to my mother by weaning myself off the breast when I was seven months old — a crime tantamount to eating a Wimpy hamburger and enjoying it in her world — but pliable Poppy kept suckling away until she was four. A bit beyond the pale, if you ask me, but no one did.

  So, my parents, with their philosophy of knit-your-own-peanut-butter-and-wear-a-poncho-while-you’re-doing-it, thought (in a loving way of course) that I was something of an oddity — but my grandmother, Rose, did not. She got me. She just plain old got me and you are so lucky to have that as a child, I think: an adult from the grown-up world who thoroughly understands who you are and assures you that it’s perfectly all right to be that way. Take my name, for example. My parents had christened me Florence thinking I had been conceived in that most romantic of Italian cities. It was quite a way-out thing to do in those days although they had to constantly explain that I was named after a shagging marathon in the Hotel Caravaggio on Piazza Indipendenza, not some dusty old maiden aunt. Anyway, when I was six months old they were reminded by the friends with whom they’d hooked up in Italy that they’d actually missed their first connection. They subsequently realised my beginnings were most likely formed in the ladies’ loo at Luton Airport. As a result of this blunder, they veered away from Florence and tended to call me Flower or Effie, two names I never really liked even though obviously they were both a lot better than Ladies’ Loo at Luton Airport (depressingly likely to be shortened to Lula and loved by one and all if given half the chance).

  When I was three, I told Grandma Rose that I did notlike being called Flower or Effie. I liked being called Florence because that was my name. Grandma agreed it was the better choice and said that as we were on the subject, she didn’t particularly care for Grandma and would I be ever so kind as to call her Rose. It was the first real conversation of my life.

  This must have irritated my poor mother enormously, given that I wouldn’t call her Beth. But in my eyes Rose could do no wrong.

  It was Rose who took me to Hamleys to buy toys because my parents didn’t believe in them; Rose who bought me a pair of bespoke red Mary-Janes after Mum gave me orthopaedic brown sandals for my birthday; Rose who let me bake cakes with white flour (outlawed in our house) from her enormous supply of recipe books; Rose who let me play tea parties with black tea instead of garden clippings in the front room with her best china.

  In my teens I would visit her as often as I could in the house across the road from the Warwick Castle. I lived with my parents in a ramshackle house in Primrose Hill that was painted psychedelic colours and furnished largely with beanbags. We lived on mung beans and made our own yoghurt but unlike real proper hippies, we didn’t have to, we chose to. Dad may have kept his accountancy background a secret but he obviously had some skill and his fair share of luck because he made a quiet killing playing the stock market. I mean we had central heating and new underwear and good haircuts and insurance. There was a compost heap out the back and a vegetable garden but that’s about as self-sufficient as we got. And I say the house was ram
shackle but it more had the appearance of being ramshackle. It needed attention on the outside (the windowsills flaked paint and ivy grew wild and fierce) but inside everything was in perfect working order and should it ever fail to be, someone was brought in quick smart to fix it.

  But the house was busy, in more ways than one. Bright colours hummed from the walls, Indian cotton cushions were strewn from wall to wall, unannounced visitors dropped in constantly, music pounded from the stereo. It was modern and edgy and loose. Poppy thrived. She was a little girl who went with the flow. I, on the other hand, went to Rose’s.

  Her house was the opposite of my parents’. It was quiet and structured, even to look at. It was three storeys, as Marguerite had seen in the tea leaves, plastered brick that was painted a calm creamy colour. Georgian, with large sash windows, a delightfully overgrown garden at the back and a cobbled courtyard at the front. The only thing that kept it from being symmetrical — I loved symmetry, was obsessed by it, to my parents’ further shame — was a boxy twentieth-century addition at the ground level on the Warwick Place side.

  From the front it looked out on the pretty blue Westbourne Terrace Road Bridge and the sparkling (as I always thought of it) expanse of water that is the junction where Regent’s Canal meets the Grand Union Canal. This was my favourite view in all the world.

  Little Venice, nestled into the elbow of Maida Vale and Paddington, wasn’t really anything like big Venice but those two waterways with their collection of colourful canal boats and cobbled walkways did give it a charm you could not find anywhere else in the city.

  Regent’s Canal curled from our junction to the Thames at Limehouse, while the Grand Union meandered all the way to Birmingham in the north, I believed. There, right in front of our house, the two met in a large pool with Browning’s Island in the middle. The poet Robert Browning had lived in the area and was rumoured to have given Little Venice its name, which certainly made sense given the poetic license employed.

  Once upon a time the canals had provided the city with an important industrial transport route but then fast moving white vans took over, I suppose, although officially the railway got there first. Boats were now just a delightful decorative addition. Anyway, my great-grandfather had bought the house in the 1920s when the elegant eighteenth-century mansions on either side of the flagging canal were going for a song. A doctor, he’d built the boxy extension that housed his surgery and my grandfather, also a doctor, used it for the same purpose although had ‘modernised’ it sometime in the ’60s.

  My grandfather and Rose must have rattled around in such a big place but it was an oasis of off-white and peace compared to my hectic home life and I loved it. Everything was in its place and the place never changed. When I came to stay, Rose would always make a big fuss about meals because meal times were not recognised at home, apparently being a contrived archaic structure. This was the cause of much sourness between my parents and Rose and me, for that matter.

  At Rose’s we had dinner in the dining room at seven, breakfast in the kitchen at eight, lunch in the garden — weather permitting — at half-past twelve and if we didn’t bake something ourselves for afternoon tea at three, which we usually did, we would go out for this most refined of eating opportunities.

  We went to the Ritz, to Simpsons of Picadilly, to Fortnum and Mason, to Harrods. On my tenth birthday Rose took me to Claridge’s, for a silver tray stacked high with tiny bite-sized morsels accompanied by bottomless pots of tea, poured with unerring politeness by unobtrusive yet attentive staff. The Art Deco glamour and seductive ambience of Claridge’s seemed to me the height of grown-up sophistication.

  We took tea at the Dorchester for my eleventh birthday, at the Savoy for my twelfth, then went back to Claridge’s to see if it really was our favourite for my thirteenth (it was, so we went there for my fourteenth and fifteenth too).

  It was a treat that I utterly treasured but I treasured having tea at home with Rose too. When my grandfather, Cecil, was alive, Rose and I would wait for him to join us in the sitting room, spying out the upstairs window at his patients as they came and went, guessing what was wrong with them. The slings and crutches were easy to spot but gentlemen who sprang up the front steps two at a time or ladies who skipped under the tree of heaven and across the road afterwards had us guessing for hours.

  ‘It could be leprosy, you know,’ Rose would suggest in her gentle voice. ‘The way she’s hiding inside that great big coat.’

  ‘Or scarlet fever,’ I would counter. I loved the idea of scarlet fever. ‘She might be going blind and deaf like Helen Keller did after she got scarlet fever. Any minute now it will hit her, I expect.’

  At three on the dot, my grandfather would walk in and Rose would pour his tea and arrange a plate of homemade goodies for him, always including a couple of Rich Tea biscuits, the only things he ever actually touched. My mother had been an only child and a wilful one who had distanced herself somewhat so in their later years my grandparents mostly had just each other. Although I can barely remember Cecil saying a word, I remember the way he looked at Rose and that told me everything.

  When he died, pre-dating the grandparent trifecta by nearly a decade, my grandmother retained the composure for which I loved her so dearly. She grieved, but delicately. Not for her the weeping and wailing and Buddhist chants, the likes of which were going on at Primrose Hill even though Mum barely spoke to her father while he was alive. No, Rose suffered in silence. Even as a six-year-old I could spot the pain, the loneliness she felt, but her sadness did not overwhelm her or anyone else.

  One thing did surprise me in the wake of Grandad’s departure though. Rose had the most beautiful collection of china, mostly Royal Doulton, about which she was justifiably proud, much of it chosen and bought for her by my grandfather. But from the day of his funeral onward, she mixed the cups and saucers from different sets, quietly insisted on it. Should a cup end up accidentally with its true partner, she would lean across and switch the saucer. I asked her why she did this once and she just smiled and gave a little continental shrug.

  This mismatching habit of hers said a lot about her because it was a cheeky kink in her otherwise silky smooth armour. She was conservative with a twist, Rose, as I suppose was I. In truth it probably kept us from being dead boring. Mum and Dad and Poppy, on the other hand, would rather gouge out their eyes with macramé hooks than admit to a single ounce of conservative. For them it was pretty much all about the twist. Mum and Dad’s twists were quite deliberate, of course, because they were really still rebelling against their upbringing but Poppy’s twist came naturally.

  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 form
er 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.