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 fa
ulty 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.
HARRY
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?
The look on her face when it did sink in broke my heart. That beautiful face. Those big brown eyes. That thick, dark hair that drives her mad because there’s so bloody much of it but has strangers turning to watch it swing across her shoulders as she walks down the street.
What kind of a man can walk away from this, I asked myself, as I watched those eyes widen, a light come on, then go out in them. She seemed to sag to half her normal size. It crushed her. What kind of a man does that?
I suppose I had not known myself what kind of a man I really was until I met Charles. Even then I denied it as long as I could possibly manage. I’d always known I had more than a passing interest in that sort of thing but I thought this was probably on the acceptable side of normal. Besides, I was madly in love with my wife. I had been ever since she noticed me at the bus stop I’d been staking out for weeks, after first noticing her buying crisps at the corner shop. We were little more than children, really, now that I look back on it. When Monty was fourteen I used to spy on him watching cartoons on TV and think, I met the woman I married when I was his age. What did I know then?
Well, I knew I loved her and nothing will ever change that. But meeting Charles was different and nothing could change that either. Meeting Charles just made the rest of my life feel wrong. No, worse than that, it made it feel like a lie. And I may be many things but I have tried, especially where Florence has been concerned, especially at home, never to be a liar.
To be honest, the blow to the side of the head with the bananas felt good and I don’t even like bananas. But I deserved them. I deserved worse, much worse, but I also deserved better, and so did Florence.
CHAPTER FIVE
How does one get over something like that? The husband being gay thing, I mean, not the deadly assault with bananas.
And by ‘get over’ I’m not talking in a long term ‘how does one survive in a world without one’s previously heterosexual other half’ sense. I’m talking in a ‘how does one live through the very immediate seconds, minutes, hours, that keep ticking by after the world has been turned upside down’ sense.
How do you survive those? How do you get over that?
Well, the answer is simple. You don’t. Not exactly. There is the aforementioned bit of you that dies, then there’s a bit that wishes the rest would follow or that it had never been born in the first place, then there is whatever’s left over. This bit, rather astonishingly, can have quite a lot of pep. This is the bit that attacks your husband with rotting bananas, that tries to pull at his clothes, that tears at your hair and beats at your breast. The dead and the wanting-to-be-dead or never-born bits are unbearably sad but the banana bit is angry.
Although it wasn’t Harry’s being gay that made me furious. It’s true. In the immediate aftermath of his bombshell, I believed I loved him too much for a tiny little thing like sexual persuasion to get in the way. In the fullness of time, I saw
this to be completely untrue but for a few minutes there, after the bananas but before the lamp stand, I believed we could somehow work around it. But when I told Harry this he did not smile and look relieved as I imagined he might, he got that same miserable look on his face and I realised that there was more, that there was something else I was not getting. That’s when it occurred to me that being gay and meeting Charles from the Whittington combined with all that repetitive talk of being so sorry and endlessly begging my forgiveness was just a lead up to the real bombshell: Harry was leaving me.
Yes, leaving me. He was moving into a bedsit in Lancaster Gate, he told me, until he had ‘sorted out’ his position with Charles. He’d already signed the lease.
I couldn’t have felt more ambushed if he’d jumped out from behind a tree wearing a chamois leather loincloth (not out of the question in the new circumstances) and pointing a bow and arrow at me.
It was unfair enough that this was happening in the first place but it was worse that I’d had no warning. This is the thing no one prepares you for where disasters are concerned. There is no ominous black cloud, no spooky chill, no neon sign that flashes: Stop! Please! Go back to bed! There’s something really, really dreadful waiting to happen around the corner! I beg of you, do not continue!
If only. Instead I’d kissed my husband goodbye just two days before as he’d headed for Aldeburgh and carried on innocently as usual. But now I had this, this, this being dumped on me from a great height. Bloody Harry had spent I don’t know how long thrashing out his plans, coming to his conclusions, making all his decisions, but I was totally new to the lot of it and the shock had me in pieces.
On Top of Everything Page 5
