Before Young Nick, I don’t think I had ever even used the word ‘lover’. Before Young Nick? Yes, it’s interesting. With the buzz of a dial tone my previous life as a healthy thirty-nine-year-old was whisked impossibly far, far away dividing my life into two separate chunks. I was in some other world now. The ‘after’ world. Everything after Young Nick, however long that may or may not be, would be in this strange new territory, I supposed. With that phone call I had stepped over an invisible line; I could look back but I could never step across it again.
For the next few days, as my before and after worlds were extricating themselves from each other, allowing my muddled emotions to settle, giving me time to adjust to my lack of future, I managed to avoid seeing a single soul, bar Sparky. I was astonished at how easy this was. I’d never had to do it before. I’d never wanted to. Usually when I heard Monty’s voice in the house I would follow it until I found him but I discovered the opposite was just as easy to do.
Monty. I couldn’t bear the thought of looking at him, knowing what I knew. The things I would miss if the cancer claimed me: him getting over this teenage nonsense and growing up properly; getting married, the right way, to a real wife and having gorgeous little grandbabies and a house in the country and a big golden retriever dog called Bill or Bob or Barney and a job in the City and a lovely car that didn’t make a knocking noise when you went around corners and beautiful clothes.
I would never hold those grandbabies in my arms, I now believed, I would never rock them to sleep, read them stories, take them to Regent’s Park to play on the grass. These were the things I had dreamed of for me and my son, the future I had stitched together for him as surely as if it was a patchwork quilt like the ones Charlotte made for her each of her girls.
In the present, Monty was making it easy for me to avoid him because he made such a bloody racket. He seemed to rattle the door a thousand times louder than anyone else when he came home from wherever he was going these days. I swear his feet were heavier on the stairs than even Stanley Morris’s. The sound of him getting a glass out of the kitchen cupboards could probably be heard in Chichester. And most of the time, to boot, there was the sound of his roaring laughter; his overwhelming, uncontrollable, ineffably audible joy at being in the company of Crystal.
He’d always had the best laugh, Monty, and a smile to go with it. A smile that took up his whole face. His entire school life I’d been told that his exemplary record had been helped enormously by that smile. It could right a hundred wrongs, his home room teacher Mrs Whiting told me once, not that there were a hundred wrongs involved, she hastened to add, but there were one or two, though only quite small and in fact hardly worth mentioning now she came to think of it.
Will had a lovely smile too. Not as wide as Monty’s, but then Monty was young. Younger. Will’s smile came with the baggage of having been around longer. But not much longer. Thirty-bloody-one? What had I been thinking? What was I thinking now? How much longer did I have to think?
In the days following our little incident in the bedroom, I married him in my mind sixty-five times, died a hundred more and imagined God knows how many lavish funerals.
I also baked not one but two chocolate and banana cakes, burning the first one while I was busy avoiding Monty and Crystal by taking a bath in the middle of the day. I got the second one right but icing it was a mission. I went three times to Tesco to get sour cream for the icing, forgetting it the first time and getting cottage cheese by mistake the second. Trips to Tesco were rather more complicated these days because I went out of my way to not go up Warwick Place past my old shop. As a result, my thoughts were often dark and filled with bitterness and resentment as I went the long way around, which in turn led to quite a bit of bungling on the shopping list front.
I’d been particularly addled on the sour cream expeditions, thanks to not passing the shop and not seeing Charlotte. The subject of Charlotte upset me just as much in the after world as before, if not more. I had, after all, a rather glaring hole in both places where a good friend should be.
As it was, with no one but my shattered self for company, I was starting to lose my grip. My poor mind bounced from cancer tragedy to motherless son despair to unrequited love angst without stopping for a breather until in one brief window of clarity I accepted that I was in danger of my inner turmoil getting the better of me. I was icing my stale cake when I decided, as I licked the spoon and tasted salt from my tears, that I really should drive to Tannington Hall and tell my family what was happening to me. On the cancer tragedy front, that is, not the unrequited love angst front, although I’m sure they would have preferred the latter. Not that there was really anything to report with the latter other than I had it and would have it forever, however long forever was.
‘Not scaring you away, are we?’ Will asked with a sad smile when he caught me sidling down the stairs with my overnight bag.
I couldn’t meet his eyes, but I recognised his smell. It was like vanilla, only sort of lemony. Thoroughly delicious. Totally cruel. My eyes swivelled around erratically, landing every now and then on Stanley, who grew nervous under such odd scrutiny.
‘I’m going to see my parents,’ I said to the space where the wall between Monty’s TV room and the hall used to be. ‘I need to speak to them about something. Not much. But something. You know.’
I sounded twelve. It was atrocious.
‘What’s happening with the pipes?’ I then asked trying to claw my way back to appropriateness.
‘Pipes? Well, nothing just yet. We’re sort of working around that. It’s the dry rot we need to sort out first.’
‘Oh, yes, of course.’ I had actually completely forgotten about the dry rot.
‘We’ve had a mate of Stan’s around to give us a second opinion,’ Will said. ‘I thought you might have seen him? Or heard him?’
I shook my head. I’d been busy.
‘Rattly little bugger,’ Stanley laughed. ‘Could talk the hind legs off a donkey.’
‘He had quite a few suggestions, actually, that could save us a bit of money, if not time,’ Will continued. ‘The good thing is that the rot is contained to the foundations near the kitchenette plumbing and the floorboards above that so we just need to cut out the affected parts and take another metre from the floorboards to make sure it doesn’t spread.’
It hit me then, like a ton of the proverbial, that the house more or less had the bloody measles too. It had started in the joists and was spreading its poison throughout this whole safe, solid, precious building, threatening its very existence.
The rattly man with the donkey’s hind legs was in fact the glove inserting itself up my house’s basement and determining how long it had to live.
What sort of an unhinged universe was this?
‘But is it terminal?’ I asked abruptly. ‘The dry rot? Is it terminal?’
‘Terminal?’ Will repeated.
‘What do you mean by terminal?’ Stanley asked as I trembled pathetically on the stairs.
‘I mean terminally terminal as in the end!’ I blurted out. ‘I can’t have terminal rot in Rose’s house, I just can’t. This house is … it’s … if it’s terminal I can hardly have a tearoom. There would be no point, no future. It would be an utter waste of time. And money. Money I don’t even have. And who knows if a tearoom is …? I just can’t see now how it could work. No, I can’t see it at all. I think we need to stop. I need to rethink this. The tearoom is too much for me, I realise that now. It’s probably too much for me without terminal rot but with terminal rot it’s even more ridiculous. I can’t. I simply can’t. No, no, I think we need to stop this right away.’
I looked around at the debris, the exposed pipes, the crumbling walls, the flaking wallpaper, the dust. What had I done? I flopped down on the stairs, astonished at my own ludicrous enthusiasm. What had I been thinking?
Will and Stanley swapped a bewildered glance.
‘Well, Florence, I don’t really think you need to panic. Th
ere’s really no such thing as terminal rot,’ Will said, carefully. ‘The whole house isn’t rotten. Just bits of it and we can replace the bits. It’s really not a great big problem. It’s a medium-sized problem. Small to medium, even. And we can fix it completely. Honestly. There’s nothing terminal about it.’
‘There you are,’ Stanley agreed. ‘Listen to the expert.’
‘If anything, we can probably make the house stronger than it was to begin with,’ Will continued, ‘but it will just cost money and we know that could be difficult for you so Stan and I are throwing around some ideas — and Sid the rattler is helping us out — to see if we can come up with something.’
‘Make it more affordable,’ Stanley interjected again.
‘Just so as we’re clear on there being no such thing as terminal rot, Florence,’ Will repeated. ‘The tearoom is a fantastic idea. There is a point, of course there is. There is a future. It’s not ridiculous.’
I looked at him, albeit fleetingly, and thought my heart would break. The tearoom was too much for me, rot or not, and so was seeing him, smelling him, imagining him, imagining the life we would never have.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said, getting to my feet. ‘It’s just not going to happen. The money, I mean, there’s no way … I just don’t … You’ve both been so lovely but I’m sorry.’ And like the mature thirty-nine-year-old I was, I fled out the door, leaving the two of them standing there like stunned mullets, while I flung myself into the tired Golf.
I cried all the way to Suffolk, Sparky at one point howling in sympathy next to me as I sped up the M11. It was so unfair! How was I supposed to deal with all the rotten things? How was one person supposed to — oh my God, I thought, just about swerving off the road at Newmarket. This was the beginning of another roll of three! I’d had the job-husband-son threesome and now there was the house-with-its-sodding-dry-rot and there was me-with-mine. Which meant there was one more rotten thing to come. How inconceivable! I howled myself then, which actually shut Sparky up. He looked most put out: I’d out-saddened him.
My howling became hiccups by Bury St Edmonds and by the time I turned into the lane leading up to Tannington Hall I had quite a firm grip on myself.
That loosened, however, when I pulled into the driveway.
There was an ambulance there, the back door of it open, nobody inside. The front door of the house was swinging open, almost closed and open again with the sway of the gentle breeze.
Rotten thing number three? Stage two? So soon?
Sparky slumped down on the front seat and put one paw over his eyes.
I wished with all my heart I was able to do the same.
STANLEY MORRIS
Things got very strange over at the Dowling house there for a while, I’ll tell you that for nothing.
I’ve known Will for years, he’s a good lad is Will, the very best. And a ruddy good builder too. But the day the boss headed off to see her family in a bit of a lather, it occurred to me that Will had a bad case of the galloping hots for her.
Well, in some ways, you’d be mad not to fancy her — she’s a corker — but the poor girl had been in such a state, what with all that had been going on in her personal life, not to mention the effing dry rot. That was a shock to me and Will and all. Who’d have guessed? We was both gutted when we found it but these old places, honestly, you don’t know what’s lurking about down below until you get in there and have a look.
We’d already decided to help her out, me and Will, call in a few favours, get the materials on the cheap and throw in the labour for next to nothing. Frankly, I already had all the money I needed and it was worth coming to the Dowling house for the company. Will, he didn’t have tuppence to rub together but as I say, my guess was he was mad for Florence.
Good luck to him, that’s what I reckoned. It probably wasn’t the best idea in the world to get involved with a lady with quite so much on her plate but there’s no such thing as the perfect woman, so they say, and she’d be closer than most.
Of course, her giving us the sack, even though we were working for free anyway, was a bit of a fly in the oinkment, as my uncle Jimmy (a pig farmer) used to say. But I’ll hand it to Will, it did not make a dent in the lad.
He’s a dark horse, is Will.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
An eerie sort of stillness descended on me as I stepped away from the car and moved toward my parents’ house, my own turbulent concerns retreating to the corner of my anxiety vault, whipped into submission by whatever dreadful news the ambulance heralded.
Such moments tell a girl a great deal about herself, a great deal about her lot. I had long joked about not really belonging to my family. It was what someone who felt like an outsider did to deflect the twinge of feeling that way. But as I loped along the empty hall, swept through the deserted kitchen and mounted the gloomy stairs, I realised I would be lost without them. Especially now. They were bonkers, they really were, yet I suddenly needed them in a way I had never needed them before. Dress code and lentil preferences aside, I was one of them, we were all part of the same nutty unit. If something was happening to me it was happening to them too; and if something was happening to them, vice versa, although I already had quite a lot of somethings to be getting on with, but still … Together perhaps we could get through the worst of whatever the universe had to throw at us. Even if one of us thought vegetarian burgers tasted like wet toilet paper and the other three thought salt was the work of the devil.
‘Mum, Dad!’ I called up the stairs. ‘Mum!’
It would be her, I was sure. The measles would have got to her first. They were in our genes, our filthy bloody genes, and she had never had a camera up her colon and was probably riddled with it and didn’t even know and now it would be too late and I had been such an awful daughter. Such an ungrateful girl, woman, person.
Then she appeared at the top of the stairs, looking terrifyingly frail, for her. Her yoga posture had gone to pot; her shoulders were slumped, making her look unrecognisably small, even in her voluminous peasant blouse; and her lovely face was lined with worry, her organic mascara that was prone to smudging anyway blotched beneath her eyes.
‘Oh, Effie,’ she cried, bursting into fresh tears. ‘I can’t believe you’re here. We haven’t called a soul.’
I threw myself into her arms, which is not something I usually did, and she clutched me as though she would never let go.
‘What’s happened?’ I whispered, my voice faltering. ‘Is it Daddy?’
He was such a trouper, my Dad. I mean pretty much all he ever did was go along with my mother, no matter how twitty her persuasions, but really what was wrong with that? He was happy if she was happy. And he had nearly always been happy. Without him …
But then he came out of the corner bathroom, alive and upright, and he too was crying.
‘Oh, Eff,’ he said, brokenly, in a repressed sort of a gasp. ‘Oh, Beth.’ He came up behind my mother and caught us both in a heartbroken bear hug.
‘They think she’ll be all right,’ he said, into my mother’s hair. ‘They think they got here just in time. They think it will be OK. Oh, Beth!’ And he wept as if his heart would indeed break.
I stood back from them then. They moved in closer to take up the space where I had been, clasping each other desperately as though each was stopping the other from toppling off the edge of a cliff.
Now I could hear the sound of shallow murmurings from within the corner bathroom and as if in a dream, a nightmare, I moved slowly down towards the open door. When I looked in, all my fears for myself, for my health, for my future, slithered away.
Poppy lay in the bathtub, which in this bathroom was dramatically stationed in the middle of the room, with two ambulance men kneeling on either side of her. Someone had emptied the bathwater and covered her with a towel but there was still blood everywhere. One of her wrists was bandaged with a mass of cream crêpe, and one of the ambulance men was attending to the other.
Poppy’s head w
as leaning back against the end of the old-fashioned claw-foot bath. Her eyes were closed but tears slid down her white, white cheeks, those crazy freckles now seeming to float a foot above her miserable face.
‘Poppy?’ I knelt beside her, one of the men moving aside to let me in. I took her hand, the one that belonged to the already bandaged wrist. Her fingers were icy cold. I squeezed with all my might.
‘It’s me, Poppy. It’s Effie.’
She opened her eyes and turned slowly to look at me, the tears not stopping for a moment.
‘I just wanted to die, Flower,’ she said in a tiny, tired voice. ‘I just wanted to be done with it all.’
I saw one of the ambulance men raise his eyebrows as he fastened the bandage on her other wrist and for a moment I felt an anger so pure I could have slit his wrists for daring to react like that. But then he looked at me with such sympathy that the anger slid down the drain with the rest of Poppy’s blood. Poppy’s blood!
‘It’s OK, precious,’ I said kissing her fingers the way I remembered I had when she was little and I very first adored her. ‘It’s OK. Don’t worry. Everything will be OK.’
‘We can help get her out now if you’d like,’ the other ambulance man offered.
‘No, I’ll do it,’ I said. ‘Thank you. But I will do it. Mum and I will do it.’
I kept holding her hand while they cleared up and quickly left us. Then Mum came back in, her eyes falsely bright and her mascara smudges gone, and we picked my little sister’s curvy white body out of the bath, wiped her down till there was not a trace of her dreadful attempt left, other than those tell-tale bandages, and we dressed her in a pink flannelette nightie with big orange flowers that she had made at school when she was fifteen.
On Top of Everything Page 17
