I thought then about ringing Mum or Dad but I just wasn’t the sort of daughter that easily confided her tragedies. Not that I’d had any real tragedies as an adult to confide. Or as a child, now I came to think of it. Other than Rose dying when I was sixteen and my ovaries being a bit of a disappointment, my life had been a delight. I’d been lucky.
Until now.
Now I was one job down, one husband down, and one rotten thing away from who knew what?
On top of that, I had no one to talk to. What had happened to my friends, my life outside being a wife and mother? When had I stopped making an effort to keep in touch with the outside world? When had I become so wrapped up in myself, in ourselves? Why was this only occuring to me now?
I cried for a while then. Well, till lunchtime actually, Sparky curled up on top of the duvet, his wagging tail slapping against my hip as he lapped up my unhappiness.
I cried all afternoon too, but I did that in front of the television watching Countdown and Deal or No Deal. I tried to drink a cup of tea but felt sick to the pit of my stomach. I had not known that despair was a physical sensation but my body surrendered to it. My innards felt sticky: thick and black, like tar. Everything about me felt poisoned by my misfortune.
It was pretty standard being-dumped-by-your-husband-and-losing-your-marbles fare, I suppose. The hours passed. I didn’t get out of my pyjamas, I didn’t brush my hair, I didn’t eat. About twenty-four hours after he left me Harry rang to see if I was all right, which plucked my useless bloody heart filaments so sharply I thought they were going to snap. I cried so much then I could barely get out a word and when he offered to come over the thought of being in his arms again lifted me for one wonderful moment above my cloud of misery. But when I asked him if he was still gay his answer was yes, so I told him to stick it up his arse along with everything else and there I was in the cloud again. I’m not even sure what I meant about the arse sticking but as I say I had not done much research.
He rang again and again after that but mostly I ignored the phone messages. I stayed in my mousy pyjamas, weeping and wondering how it was that I had poured all my love and energy into a man I didn’t even know. Worse, he was the only person I wanted to talk to. No, worse even than that, he was the only person I had to talk to. And now I no longer had him.
My best friend from school — sweet, sensible Caroline — had moved to Wales with her husband and three sons a few years earlier: why had I let that friendship fizzle out? At first I had made an effort to at least answer her calls but I’d never been to stay with her, no matter how often she begged me to. And now I couldn’t even remember if I’d sent her a Christmas card.
Then there was larger-than-life Laura, whom I’d met at antenatal classes when she was pregnant with her daughter, Treacle. Despite the ghastly name she’d chosen for her daughter, we’d been if not close confidantes then at least good friends for years until, well, until when? Until Monty was too grown up to play with a girl? That shouldn’t have been a reason for my friendship with Laura to wither and die, yet it had. All my friendships had withered and died, bar the so recently pruned one with Charlotte.
The truth was, at some stage I had worked out I didn’t really need friends. I had Harry and I had Monty and I met so many people during the day at the shop that I considered that my social life. In addition to Marguerite and Edith who dropped in probably twice a week there were others who were just as regular. Rosalie, the cat woman, came in to look at picture frames for photos of her moggies and always stayed for at least one cup of tea. Julia worked at the estate agency around the corner and had initially sought shelter in our shop from her creepy boss. We got talking and she bought the prettiest pearl ring, then became a regular. There was Rupert, the schoolteacher, who collected Poole pottery and had once whirled me around the jewellery cabinet when Jocelyn Brown came on the radio singing of all things, I wryly remembered, ‘Somebody Else’s Guy’. These were people whose lives I knew the details of, yet I didn’t have a single phone number. And had I, would I have rung them, then, in my hour of need?
No.
Sinead, maybe. Sinead was the Irish girl who came to clean every Friday and had the best-ever stories about bad boyfriends. She’d been cheated on, left in countryside inns, abandoned at sleazy nightclubs, shagged in the loos at Selfridges then dumped outside the hosiery department. She’d had every relationship disaster known to womankind. Or had she? I couldn’t remember any boyfriend ever leaving her for another man.
And anyway, I didn’t have her phone number, it was at the shop with Charlotte, and I didn’t exactly feel like crawling over in my jim-jams with my hair all knotted and scary and asking for it.
So for the next two days I just stayed in bed or on the sofa and talked to Sparky. I had previously been ever-so-slightly sceptical of people who relied on their pets for emotional fulfilment but it turned out I was one.
And is it any wonder? Harry was no doubt getting his emotional fulfilment from this vile cruel nasty Charles person; Monty was on the other side of the world; my sister was with a bunch of face readers; and my parents had yet to provide the sort of emotional fulfilment I sought, so Sparky was actually all I had left.
Harry had never let the dog on the bed but now he was rarely off it. On my third night alone I woke to find his head on Harry’s pillow, his paw beside it, like a dog impersonating a human. It may sound stupid, but this little piece of comedy made me smile. And because I had otherwise only had that one early morning moment — an infinitesimal speck of time so small as to hardly even count — when everything was simply marvellous before it all fell horribly to pieces, I needed my smiles.
After five days of my having been left by Harry, however, Sparky was not doing a good enough job and I was in a deeply disturbed place. I was husbandless, jobless and friendless, and could not see from my pit of despair how I would ever climb out of this hole. Not an ugly, stupid, boring, waste of space with the sex appeal of a pot-belly pig like myself.
‘Did you ever love me?’ I bawled down the phone to Harry when he rang late on that fifth afternoon and I finally answered him. ‘Has it all been a lie? A trick? Utter bloody bullshit? I can’t believe it. We were happy. I thought we were happy. Did you only love me because I looked like a boy, back then, at the bus stop, waiting for the 268?’ This was one theory I had come up with in the middle of the night. ‘Did I look like a boy? Were you pretending I was a boy? Oh, I want to die, Harry. I just want to die. I want to kill you with my bare hands. I want to rip you limb from limb! And then I want to die.’
Harry was in his Lancaster Gate bedsit sounding, in all fairness, every bit as desolate as I was.
‘I loved you with all my heart, Florence,’ he told me, ‘from the moment I first saw you. You did not look like a boy. You had that ridiculous padded bra on and blue eye shadow and your hair was down to your waist, which was where your skirt was up to.’ He was right. I had forgotten about the outfit. ‘I have never seen anyone look more like a girl. And you are as beautiful and sexy now as you were then and I still love you. I pretty much want to bloody die myself at making you feel as though there’s something wrong with you because there isn’t. This is not about you, it’s —’
‘How can this not be about me?’ I wept. ‘Five days ago I was happily married to you and today I’m all by myself. That’s me, Harry. The me who this isn’t about. You’ve got someone, this bloody Charles, but I’ve got no one now and no warning that this was going to happen. It might not have started out being about me but it certainly is now.’
‘I know, Floss, you’re absolutely right. If there was anything else I could do, I would do it and you must believe I love you with all my heart but —’
‘Why does there have to be a but?’ I interrupted so vigorously that Sparky jumped off the sofa and flopped sulkily on the ground. ‘Why couldn’t you just keep on …?’
‘Pretending?’ Harry filled the gap in the most awful flat tone and I knew then it really was over. Not just a li
ttle bit over either. It was as over as anything ever could be.
‘Yes,’ I whispered back nonetheless and the silence between us said it all. If only he knew he was pretending, that was one thing. If we both knew, it was another. There was no going back.
‘Florence, I’m so sorry.’ He was crying again. My big strong Harry, crying like Monty had when he was four years old and fell off his tricycle. ‘I’m just so fucking sorry.’
Hearing him swear was even more alarming than hearing him cry and I felt another surge of banana-bashing fury at this. Who was this crying, swearing gay man? How dare he keep such things from me? How dare he?
‘So you bloody well should be sorry,’ I cried. ‘It’s all right for you, you have a whole new gang to belong to: the leather and whip crowd with all your bars and internet sites and God knows what else but what is there for me, Harry? For me and Monty?’ Oh, Monty! My poor darling Monty.
‘Monty is fine, Floss.’
I felt the pitter patter of more fury beating in my chest. ‘What do you mean Monty is fine?’ I had spent countless hours drumming up different scenarios for telling Monty about Harry. We had to be gentle, so he didn’t go into shock the way I had, but we had to let him know it was all Harry’s fault not mine, so he didn’t blame me, but …
‘I talked to him,’ Harry told me. ‘That’s what I’ve been ringing to tell you. I called him in Thailand. Yesterday. I thought it was the fair thing to do.’
‘Without even discussing it with me first?’ He was truly a stranger to me now, my husband. I even felt a wave of being glad to be rid of a person who would do something like that. ‘You rang our son and told him you were gay and leaving us without even running it past me?’
There was an uncomfortable silence. Of course, I thought, he’s not actually leaving Monty, just me.
‘I wanted to face the music, Florence. I wanted it over and done with.’
‘Well as long as you get what you want obviously everything is all fucking right, Harry,’ I said and I threw the phone out the window, which was stupid because I was in the sitting room on the first floor and I heard it smash into smithereens in the courtyard below.
When my anger subsided, which took two more hours of screaming into a pillow and one glass of cooking sherry, I admitted quietly to myself that I was glad that Monty knew and glad that it was Harry who told him. When I’d tried to picture the two of us standing in a room with our son, breaking the news to him, every time the me I was trying to picture either attempted to strangle Harry or broke down and begged him to change his mind or covered Monty’s ears so he could not hear the terrible truth. He’d had such a wonderful life, our son, even less blemished by tragedy than my own. No one close to him had died, he had never been in trouble, we’d always been able to afford whatever he wanted. For him to suddenly be thrust into a world where his parents were splitting up and one was gay and the other was bloody furious just seemed too awful to contemplate. His heart would be broken, I was sure, as was mine.
But then I considered that at least he was on his way home, the truth had been told and our hearts would be broken together. I felt a little glimmer of hope then, a smug little glow that Monty and I would be bound by something that Harry could only ever look in on. Having a son wasn’t like having a husband, it was for life. Monty could not change his tune and decide I wasn’t his mother. Even if he had a sex change, which I prayed to God was not the third rotten thing, I would still be his mother. Forever.
A couple of nights later, Harry came over, which was brave, in the circumstances, but he was in a mood to thrash things out and so we thrashed.
By then I had finally done a bit of research on the internet and found an astonishing number of sites dedicated to wives whose husbands were gay. Depressingly, very few of the stories ended in the husband changing his mind again and coming home.
There were countless religious sites, though, that vehemently exhorted gay husbands to deny their natural inclination and while they were equally depressing, I tested some of what I had learned on Harry.
People become un-gay all the time, I told him. Perhaps he could go to the US and be re-programmed or join a cult or something? Or, if not, perhaps we could stay married and living together but just doing our own thing, sort of, on the sex front.
If he were a non-practising gay man, Harry said gently, that might have almost worked. But there was Charles from the Whittington to consider.
Or there was Charles from the Whittington to bump into in a dark alley and stab a thousand times with the carving knife Harry’s hairy Aunt Molly had given him for his thirtieth birthday, I suggested.
Harry did not respond well to my anger, a psychologist would probably say, and he left on very poor terms after that visit. But he came back a few nights later with a bottle of expensive pinot noir and by then, I don’t know how, the whole situation had somehow seeped into my consciousness.
I suppose the fact of Harry’s gayness was no longer such a shock. It had been a total bolt out of the blue when it first hit me but in not much more than a week there it was, bumpily woven into the fabric of our relationship. Like an amputated limb or annoying permanent house guest, it was something else to get through, to emerge from the other side of. A big something. A huge something. But still, just a something.
I’m not saying I wasn’t still desperately unhappy, of course I was. Totally desperate and likely to stay that way I thought, plus enormously angry to boot. And I wavered a thousand times a day between not believing it was happening to being overwhelmed that it was, to hoping against hope that some miracle would occur to make the whole horrible mess go away. But I was no longer surprised. That was the strange thing.
By that second visit, with the pinot noir, we actually managed a moment of strange companionship. It was by mistake, really. My fury would not openly allow such a thing otherwise. But it was the same wine we had drunk on a picnic a few years earlier up near Oxford somewhere, on the river. I only remembered exactly what it was because the entire outing had been highly memorable. Monty was off with a pal and Harry and I were making the most of having a weekend day to ourselves. We’d had ham sandwiches with the wine then both fallen asleep in a big grassy field in the afternoon sun and had woken only when a big hairy cattle beast of some description licked Harry’s cheek. Harry roared, like a bull actually, which gave me a terrible fright but it made the cattle beast look very angry and stamp its feet. We emerged unscathed but all the other people in the field who hadn’t been licked nearly died laughing.
‘Do you remember the big hairy cattle beast?’ I asked Harry, forgetting for a moment he was leaving me (which was when the accidental companionship crept in).
‘How could I forget it?’ Harry answered. ‘I couldn’t eat meat for a month afterwards. Why it chose me …’
Were all these wonderful memories that we shared soiled now, the way things had turned out, I wondered? Was it bollocks, the lot of it, the whole twenty-five years? Because it so hadn’t felt like bollocks at the time, when I assumed we would live happily ever after. Now that Harry was gay, I just didn’t know.
That picnic had reminded me of something else too. The Black Watch tartan rug on which we lay before and indeed during the cheek-licking was a wedding gift from Harry’s lovely Scottish cousin Emily.
(Why hadn’t I kept in touch with Emily? What was wrong with me?)
A few years after our wedding Emily’s husband John had been in a terrible skiing accident while on a boys’ trip to Austria and the last time we’d seen her she’d talked about it over homemade Florentines and a cup of fresh Ceylon tea.
One day her life had been happily tootling along in one direction with every i dotted and t crossed and the future all neatly mapped out in front of them, she had quietly recounted. Then with a single phone call the whole thing had been hideously derailed. John would probably live, she was told in that phone call, but might never walk again. That was her tsunami.
Yet, she informed me, she had found
the phone call and the minutes, or hours, after it by far the worst part.
I found this hard to believe at the time. Surely, that was just the beginning of it? But no, she claimed it was the ambush, the surprise, the shock that devastated her. And even by the next day she had got used to the new direction their life was headed in and by the end of the week she was talking rehabilitation and catheters like a pro.
It’s like the rubbish man collecting the rubbish all over again. The world keeps spinning. And it certainly didn’t bother to stop when Harry came out of the closet. Also, after the first few derailing minutes and hours when all I could think of was myself and Monty, I saw that Harry was just as inextricably tied to me as I was to him and conceded, secretly of course, that it would be easier for him not to be in love with this Charles person. But as they say, the heart wants what the heart wants. And takes other body parts with it.
Later that same night of the accidental companionship, I thought for a split second Harry was even going to change his mind and come home to me. I could see it in his eyes, in the quiver of his jaw, in the desperate way he looked at me, and I knew then how much he loved me. But far from being thrilled and relieved, I felt only pain, the deepest most wretched pain. For there truly was no going back now.
Especially for him. I could see it. While the trauma had given me the look of the wreck of the Hesperus, Harry looked good. He was a little grey around the face, as anyone leaving their loving wife would be, I imagine. But something in his eyes, in the square set of his shoulders, whispered of a new happiness.
I loathed him for that.
But I couldn’t stop loving him either.
On Top of Everything Page 7
