As we sat there at the kitchen table, or I chased him around it, or I collapsed on the floor against the creaky dishwasher, I kept forgetting what was going on. My mind would race ahead to being a lonely old maid and I’d see myself sitting in a wheelchair (for some reason) dressed in black with lipstick à la Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? smeared all over my face and my mind would get stuck in this desolate future while Harry stood on the other side of the room, burbling on about being true to himself and doing what’s best for everyone.
Then I’d switch back to the moment, to him, only to lose myself instantly to the past. I had been with Harry for twenty-five years. Was it all bollocks? Had our sex life been abnormal? I didn’t know. I’d only ever slept with him. And it’s not like he’d ever tried to take me from behind or insisted on a Swedish strap-on or whatever the hell they’re called so I don’t know how I was supposed to fathom that he was bloody well gay.
He was loving, he was affectionate, he was engaged in me, in us, in our life. How had this happened? Where had it happened?
‘At the gym,’ he told me. ‘I met him at the gym.’
You know, it’s not until you absolutely lose your dignity that you realise just how much you need it in the first place. I cringe when I think of what happened that day, for many reasons, but mostly because Harry and I had never been ones to row. We had the odd grumpy silence, made the odd snarky comment, but we just weren’t shouters or screamers. But I shouted and screamed at him then with a venom I had not known I was capable of. I told him his mother was an alcoholic and his father a bully (almost true but never previously mentioned); I told him he was a turgid writer without a glimmer of talent (same); I told him he hitched his trousers up too high and shouldn’t wear thick white socks with his sneakers (I had mentioned the socks before). I went on.
I know now that Harry could not help who he was and how difficult it must have been for him to confront the truth and therefore me. He loved me, I know he did, and still does, and he truly did not want to hurt me. Ultimately he cared about that less than he cared about being true to himself, though, which is fine. Really. I mean for him, especially, but eventually even for me, fine. Who wants to live a lie? Who wants to make someone else live one?
Not me. Although that afternoon I could see none of this. All I could see was the life I thought I was so happily living whooshing away from me like those filthy, brown tsunami floodwaters. And as I was caught up in this hateful torrent and dragged downwards, the survival mechanism that kicked in was not one of grace and serenity and understanding but one of ferocious anger and bitterness and over-ripe fruit.
Worse, as Harry escaped the house, his ear caked with squashed banana, so many things still unsaid, I knew that I was right about the rotten things, that I was two really big ones down but still had one to go and it was bound to be a pearler. The universe had at least one more crappy treat in store for me and I had better gird my loins in preparation — especially as my loins were unlikely to get much other activity in the immediate future.
I had spent half my life being Mrs Harry Dowling and now I was to be what? Who?
I didn’t even have a job.
Sparky was beside himself with sympathy, which frankly just made me want to go outside and shoot my face off. His too.
I didn’t know what to do with myself as I sat in the kitchen, the debris of our broken marriage splattered and shattered around me. I couldn’t even think who to turn to, other than Harry, who was too busy leaving me, or Monty, who was still on the other side of the world.
Monty!
What were we going to tell him? How? I leapt to my feet and ran downstairs to the front door to see if Harry was still lurking outside somewhere, picking sludge from his hair, but when I pulled the door open, a ruddy-faced man with lowslung work-pants and a huge beer belly was standing on the doorstep grinning at me.
‘Afternoon, missus. Stanley Morris, plumber,’ he said, holding out the hand that wasn’t carrying his tool kit and looking over my shoulder down the hall. ‘I’m here about your leaky tap. Kitchen down the back, is it?’
My leaky tap. I had rung the plumber about a month before to come and fix it but had given up hope that anyone would ever show. Yet here he was. Now. Just after my heart had been ripped out of my chest and jumped on by the man I trusted most in the whole wide world.
Yet, the tap was indeed leaky. Life went on.
I remember my mother saying something to the same effect after the grandparent trifecta. She was smoking a joint and gazing out the window as the rubbish truck collected the next door neighbour’s rubbish.
‘It’s so hard to believe that everything is just carrying on as usual,’ she said dreamily, her rings and bracelets jangling as she ran her fingers through her long, wiry grey hair. ‘We all think we are so important, but we’re not, are we? We can live, or die, and it makes no difference to the garbage man. There’s still the same amount of garbage in the world, with or without us.’
‘But we compost and recycle,’ I pointed out. It was a sore point: the compost bin was alive with a kingdom of tiny flying insects and it was my job to fill it. ‘So it would really make no difference to the garbage man if we lived or died because he doesn’t collect our garbage anyway.’
My mother looked at me, disappointedly I suspect, then went back to gazing out the window.
She was talking rubbish about the garbage man, but I remember silently agreeing that it didn’t seem right that one still had to do one’s homework and walk the dog and dry the dishes and change the loo roll when such a great gaping hole had been left in one’s universe by the death of a much treasured loved one.
Now, all these years later, here was my husband leaving me for another man one minute and Stanley Morris wanting to fix my leaky tap the next. And despite everything that had just happened, I really did want the tap fixed because every time I turned it on a jet of water shot out and got me square in the eye, no matter where my eye happened to be at the time, and no matter what the marital status of the body in which the eye belonged.
‘Upstairs,’ I said weakly to Stanley Morris, then followed his somewhat jiggly backside up to the kitchen. He could have hitched his pants up higher, frankly, but he kept up a friendly patter as we climbed.
‘Lovely old place you’ve got here,’ he said. ‘Used to be a doctor’s surgery, am I right? I used to come here when I was a lad, I think. We lived just around the corner in St John’s Wood. You know them council flats in Lisson Grove? Yeah, grew up there, I did. She still lives there, my old mum. Eighty-seven and not showing any signs of going anywhere else in a hurry either, God bless her. There was a doctor closer to us than this, of course, right across the road, but my old mum didn’t care for him. Said he had cold hands. Funny, innit, what they object to, the old ones, not that she was so old then but you can’t tell a young ’un that, can you? Or you can try but you won’t get very far. Now, let’s see what we have here.’
Standing at the kitchen counter, Stanley Morris paused to push a broken bread and butter plate out of his way with the side of his foot and wiped away some squashed banana with a J-cloth. I stared in embarrassment at the hideous mess strewn around us. It looked like a chimpanzee’s tea party gone horribly wrong, but Stanley Morris seemed to take it in his stride.
He turned the tap on and the jet of water hit him straight in the eye.
‘I see what you mean,’ he said jovially. ‘Cor, this is an old model, this mixer, but that’s not all bad, that is. You can still get replacement parts for the likes of this. The new ones? Nah, you’ve got to be joking. Cheaper to put a new one in than repair the old one, even if it’s brand spanking new. Makes you sick, doesn’t it? Makes me sick.’
As Stanley Morris continued to prattle on I quietly swept up the broken crockery and pieces of lamp shade, which reminded me of the chamber pot and the fact that I had been fired earlier — surely not the same day? It seemed a lifetime ago.
‘Beautiful part of London this, I reckon,’
Stanley chattered. ‘My old man’s old man worked the canal boats back in the dark ages. Hard to imagine everything being delivered by water though, innit? I ain’t been to the real Venice myself but my daughter has. She saw all sorts of things being delivered in them boats. Wotcha call ’em? Gondolas, yeah, gondolas: tables and chairs, cabbages, bottles of water, birds in cages, you name it.’
He opened the door beneath the sink and, huffing, got down on his hands and knees to peer in.
‘Never been anywhere in Italy me,’ he continued, his voice echoing around my kitchen cupboards as he rattled around with his spanner. ‘Probably wouldn’t bother with Venice anyway. All that walking. Not a single car. But Rome, I could handle that. The Colosseum, Trevi Fountain, Spanish Steps. My daughter’s been there, too. Says you can get a good cup of tea at the bottom of the Spanish Steps but you’d better make the most of it because it’s the only one you’ll find in the whole of Europe.’
He turned over and lay on his back, his torso and legs sticking out into the kitchen. His belly didn’t look anywhere near so beery lying down. It looked like the belly of a man who loved his mum and his daughter and was not fazed by smashed crockery and squashed banana.
I felt an inexplicable rush of warmth for Stanley Morris.
‘My husband’s just told me he’s leaving me for another man,’ I told the bottom two-thirds of him.
His spanner stopped rattling. He scooted out from under the sink.
‘You all right then?’ he asked. He didn’t seem embarrassed. Or even surprised. Maybe it happened more often than I imagined.
I shook my head. I was not all right.
‘Come as a shock, did it?’
I nodded. It had come as a shock. ‘We’ve been together since we were kids,’ I said. ‘We’ve been married for twenty years. I had no idea. I thought we were happy.’
Stanley Morris nodded, sighed, then used his spanner to scratch a spot on his back in between his shoulder blades.
‘I know just how you feel,’ he said. ‘My missus left me without a word of warning and all. There was me thinking we was enjoying perfect marital bliss and there was her thinking she’d rather live in a tiny little flat on her own in Hounslow freezing to death and working at the local William Hill.’
He shook his head and got up.
‘Uff. My knees, I tell you.’
‘I don’t know what to do,’ I told Stanley Morris, even though he was just the plumber.
‘Not much you can do,’ he said, turning on the tap. No jet of water. ‘There we go. It gets better, that’s all I can tell you, although you couldn’t be blamed for not believing me. Know what my old mum told me when my missus run off? “It’s not an arm or a leg, Stan,” she said. Not an arm or a leg. Thought she was being bloody miserable at the time but the old girl was right. It don’t kill you. Life does go on.’
Just having him in my kitchen was the surest sign of this I could ever concoct.
‘We have a son,’ I said. ‘I just don’t know what …’
‘How old is he then, your boy?’ Stanley Morris asked as he started to pack away his tools.
‘Nineteen.’
‘Well, there you go. Old enough to understand it’s not an arm or a leg,’ he said with great confidence as he closed his tool box. ‘My Lizzie was fine. She was about the same age as that, maybe a year or two older, and she was fine. A bit down on her mum for a while but at the end of the day, she’s still her mum.’ He checked his watch. ‘Here, look at that. I’ve got a rendezvous with a blocked drain in Hammersmith in about half an hour but I could murder a cup of tea in the meantime.’
He was doing this for me — a complete stranger — I knew he was. And I was pathetically grateful.
‘I’ll put the kettle on,’ I said, brushing fragments of a gravy boat off a kitchen chair. ‘I’ve got Earl Grey or Fortnum’s Royal Blend. Do you have a preference?’
‘Now there’s a woman after my own heart,’ Stanley said, picking up the handle of the gravy boat and dropping it in the rubbish bin. ‘Find Earl Grey a bit delicate at this stage in the day so I’ll take t’other, thank you kindly. Like your tea then, Mrs Dowling?’
‘Please, call me Florence,’ I said, getting Rose’s favourite cups out, switching the saucers and choosing a tea cosy that looked like a bunch of grapes that Poppy had knitted for me years before. ‘And yes, I do like my tea. In fact, I’m thinking of converting downstairs into a tearoom. What do you think of that for an idea?’
I don’t know what possessed me to come out with this because I wasn’t thinking about it at all or, if I was, I shouldn’t have been.
‘I think that’s brilliant, that is,’ said Stanley Morris with great enthusiasm. ‘What’s more, you’ll be needing a plumber.’
STANLEY MORRIS
I knew the moment I clapped eyes on Mrs Dowling, or Florence as she asked me to call her, that she’d just had one hell of a shock. I suppose I looked just like that when Beryl bunked off on me and all. Still, if there’s one thing I have learned it’s that if you carry on as though nothing strange is happening, it usually stops being strange.
You get used to walking into disasters in my line of work, plumbing ones and otherwise. People can get all gussied up and pretend they’re one thing or another when they go out in the world, after all, but catch them at home and that’s pretty much the way they really are.
I felt right sorry for her, I can tell you that. Her husband coming out, as they say, and that tap of hers leaking all over the show. She was such a nice lady too, polite and helpful, despite what had just gone on. She told me over a cuppa and a slice of lemon cake that she’d just lost her job and all. On the same day. Ouch, that’s got to hurt, dunnit?
But I thought right away she could have been on to something with that tearoom idea. My sister Marion lives up in Ely, it’s the place with the nice cathedral near Cambridge. Anyway, there’s this tearoom there, Peacock’s, right on the river. Some lawyer chap got fed up with spending half his life in the Ely police station so turned his downstairs into a tearooms and it’s packed to the gunnels every weekend and most days during the week. Sounds a bit like what Florence wanted to do with her place in Little Venice. Corker spot for it.
There’s not a lot of good places for a cuppa around that neck of the woods, truth be told. Starbucks on every bleeding corner in the West End but try getting a good cup of tea and a slice of something baked by human hand and you may as well just go home. Not that I have anything baked by human hand at my place but I certainly can manage a good cup of tea and there’s nothing wrong with a HobNob.
Anyway, I said I’d keep in touch with Florence because I thought she was on to something and as I say, she would need a plumber. I also thought she might need a shoulder to cry on and happens I’ve got very reliable shoulders.
CHAPTER SIX
When I woke up the day after Harry left me and Stanley Morris fixed the tap, I had a few glorious ordinary moments before remembering my life had turned to custard.
I rolled over in the bed, all warm and toastily contented the way you are when you’ve slept badly most the night but deeply in the end. I saw with half-closed eyes through the gap in the curtains that it was a sunny day. I smiled and stretched out in the bed, my foot hitting a foreign object: Sparky. Lurch. What was he doing there? Lurch. Where was Harry? Lurch. What had happened to my life as a gainfully employed happily married mother of one? Lurch, lurch, lurch.
I would have given anything then to disappear back into that bliss of not knowing. I understood, for the first time perhaps, how drugs or drink or anything else you might end up in rehab for would help dull the pain of reality. I felt so wretched once real life overwhelmed me with its new hideousness that I would have swallowed anything at all if I thought it might make me feel even the tiniest bit better.
But there was nothing to swallow, not in my room anyway, unless you counted Panadol. And there were only two of them and they both had fluff on them from being under the bed for at least a yea
r.
I rolled over again, chilled now, and lay there wishing that I was dead, although I could never do that to Monty, so I wished that Harry was dead instead, then realised that would hurt Monty too. Instead, I wished that Harry wasn’t gay, that things were the way they always had been, that I did not feel so horribly bloody scared. I wished that it was night-time so I could go to sleep and wake up and have those few innocent moments again. And I wished that wishing got you somewhere other than where you started off in the first place.
Then I thought of little Edith, another regular customer/ visitor at the shop I had half owned until the day before. I stopped thinking about her for a few moments to revisit the minor horror of being dumped by my business partner just hours before being dumped by my husband then, finding that too unspeakably awful, thought of Edith again instead.
I’d initially met her when she came in to talk about selling some of her gorgeous Spode china after her husband Arthur died. They’d been married more than fifty years and never spent a single night apart, she told me that first day, as two tiny contained tears rolled down her small, perfectly made-up face.
‘The mornings are the worst,’ she’d confessed in little more than a whisper as I attempted to comfort her with some ever-so-slightly undercooked gingernuts. ‘There’s this little pocket of time between waking up and realising what has happened where everything is just fine. And then I remember.’
I’d felt sorry enough for her at the time, now I saw how truly excruciatingly cruel that was — to get a little island holiday from your grief just makes it feel worse when you come back home. And I was grieving, I recognised that. No one had actually died but the future I assumed I was going to have was certainly dead and buried. Even if Harry became un-gay we could never erase the fact that for a while at least he thought he was and there had been a Charles from the Whittington on the scene.
I looked at the phone on the bedside table and thought of ringing Poppy. But just imagining saying what I had to say made me feel so ill I couldn’t contemplate it further. Then I remembered she was on a face-reading seminar in Framlingham or some such so I wouldn’t be able to get in touch with her anyway. She and my parents didn’t believe in mobile phones because of the possibility of catching measles of the brain.
On Top of Everything Page 6
