To my surprise, mid-afternoon there was a gentle knock at my bedroom door. It was Monty.
‘Crystal told me about Poppy,’ he said, his beautiful eyes filling with tears. ‘Mum, I’m so sorry.’
And when I held out my arms, he walked into them. For a while he was my gorgeous boy again, my perfect son. It was like old times. We hugged each other the way we used to before he got a wife. Despite the circumstances, it was lovely to have him back to myself for those few moments.
Of course, it didn’t last.
‘I’ve just spoken to Archie,’ he said, pulling away and, embarrassed, wiping a tear from his cheek. ‘We’re going to head up to Tannington for a few days. Crystal’s going to try some reflexology with Poppy. She thinks it could really help.’
I wanted to talk to him about Crystal and her baby, tell him that we’d spoken and she’d given me the telling off I so richly deserved, and that I was sorry for being such a sourpuss.
‘You used to call him Grandad,’ I said wistfully instead. ‘I loved it when you called him that.’
‘Yes, but he didn’t,’ Monty said, with a flash of his father’s exasperation. ‘Please Mum. Let’s not get into all that now. Why can’t you just let me be my own man?’
‘Because you’re not a man, you’re just a boy!’ I exclaimed before I could stop myself. I knew as I was saying it that this would blow away our tender moment yet out it popped. What was the matter with me? Like every other child in the universe, Monty had been telling me since he was two years old that he was a big boy now. Boys never wanted to be boys. They always wanted to be men. And anyone who disabused them of this notion was asking for trouble.
‘No, no, I didn’t mean that,’ I said quickly, trying to recover. ‘I know you’re a man.’ But that came out not the way I meant it either. I said ‘man’ as in ‘Charles’ like it was a swear word or a joke. I wished it had been my wrists Poppy slit. I couldn’t get anything right.
‘Yeah, right, whatever,’ my son said, his face teetering on the brink of disgust. ‘I’ll see you when I see you then.’
‘Please, Monty,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry. I’m just tired.’
He looked vaguely sympathetic for a moment then, my beautiful boy/man. The anger slid off his shoulders, relaxed his eyes, his mouth.
‘You used to say that all you wanted was for me to be happy,’ he said. ‘Do you remember that?’
‘Of course, I do,’ I said. It had been much on my mind of late.
‘So now I’m happy but it’s not what you want. What happened, Mum?’
It was a good question. What had happened? Well, for a start, it turned out I didn’t have a clue what happiness was. I thought I’d had it and I’d been wrong. For years, I had been wrong. And I did desperately want Monty to be happy but I wanted him to be the right sort of happy, the real sort, not the pretend sort or the wrong sort.
‘I don’t know,’ I told him because I didn’t want to admit I had no faith in his ability to find what I had not. ‘I’m just worried that …’ But my worries were so many and varied I didn’t know where to start. ‘I’m just worried,’ I said.
‘Well don’t be, please,’ Monty begged. ‘Despite not having a job, despite you and Dad, despite even poor Poppy, I’m having the time of my life, Mum.’
And isn’t that what I had always wanted him to have? Or had I wanted him to have the time of my life?
I hit my wine supply after I heard him and Crystal leave but I struggled to make the most of it. I probably could have managed a whole bottle on my own if I had started in the morning and kept sipping till bedtime but getting into it later in the day meant I ran out of steam before I got very far. I just didn’t fancy it really.
I tried starting earlier the following day but I was retching by the second glass. The trouble was that I felt sick to my stomach in the first place and because I didn’t know if this was just the worry or if it was the measles, that made me feel even more worried and therefore more like drinking yet at the same time sicker and less able to do so.
If I could have scored some crack, I probably would have, although I was never much chop at drugs, either. I’d smoked pot twice at student parties and both times fallen asleep and Harry had had to carry me home. And when someone suggested a line of coke at a party a few years later all I could think of was spending Monty’s childhood locked up in Holloway jail with all the drug mules and prostitutes. I’d burst into tears, embarrassing everyone there, including Harry, who’d again had to carry me home.
I’d had no wild youth, that was the trouble. And now that I felt like having one, it was too late, my youth had up and left me, and worse, so had everyone else.
Well, there was Will, who would have been perfect, but I was trying to fire him so that I didn’t have to see him or smell him ever again as long as I lived (however long etcetera etcetera etcetera).
This was going to make having a wild youth with him quite tricky.
Although, as the hole in the floor downstairs suggested, Will had not taken to being fired quite as much as I’d imagined. I heard him arrive the next morning and stayed in my room attempting to seethe, not easy given my conflicted feelings.
‘What are you doing here?’ I asked when I finally got dressed and went downstairs to talk to him. It was past lunchtime by then but I’d been rehearsing what I would say for hours. And I’d been changing my clothes. And I’d been putting makeup on and taking it off, then putting it on and taking it off again. Finally, I decided on clean jeans and an old but good button-up shirt, plus a light foundation and some lip gloss. I combed my hair but didn’t wear perfume. I wanted it to look like I was making no effort although he had already seen me in baggy-bottomed tracksuit pants and an old T-shirt of Monty’s so I didn’t know why I was bothering. He would know I had bothered.
‘What do you mean what am I doing here? I work here,’ Will said, his head and shoulders poking out of the hole, a cobweb smeared on his collar. ‘Nice week away?’
‘Not particularly, no,’ I said as he jumped out of the orifice with athletic ease and stood beside me, wiping his hands on his jeans, then pointing back down into the smelly pit.
‘Sid has a mate in the scaffolding business and so we got all this for two and six. Looks like Stan has found some matching recycled floorboards up near Cambridge too. He’s gone to have a look at them.’
This did not seem to tally up particularly well with what I had discussed with the two of them before I went to Tannington Hall.
‘But what about …’ I started to say.
‘The smell?’ he suggested, although that wasn’t what I was going to say. ‘I know, there was a fox down there, I’m afraid. Or an ex-fox, to be more precise. I gave him an agnostic burial while you were away but the smell might linger for a while. Do you have any scented candles?’
What kind of builder knew about scented candles?
‘But I thought I told you,’ I said, ‘I’ve gone off the whole idea of a tearoom. I don’t want to do it any more and now there’s this hole in the floor and all this scaffolding and the pong, not to mention the £30,000. The not having it, I mean.’
Dad’s cheque was burning a hole in my bedside table drawer upstairs. I could almost smell the smoke from where I was standing, guiltily unable to stop scratching my neck, which is exactly what body language experts looked for in liars.
‘Florence, we are going to do this,’ Will said, quite bossily, sort of, but in a gentle reassuring way. ‘We have to.’
‘But what about …’ I started again.
‘Trust me, Florence,’ Will said. ‘Can you not just do that? Can you not just trust me?’
The thing is, it’s very difficult to fire someone you absolutely want to have sex with on the grounds of never wanting to see them again because of course, deep down, you really do want to see them again no matter how much you try to tell yourself you don’t.
‘I just can’t afford it,’ I said, looking at the steel cap of Will’s left boot. ‘On top of
everything it’s just … I’m so sorry, but you really have to …’
‘Give me the week, Florence,’ Will insisted. Truly, he was making getting rid of him impossible. ‘How about that? Just give me the week?’
I’d run out of ways to fire him by then. I’d run out of ways to do anything. ‘Is that the time?’ I asked instead, pretending to be aghast, looking at the space on my wrist where my watch usually was. I couldn’t take another second of him. ‘I really have to go up to the kitchen,’ I announced agitatedly, and off I took.
The moment I was up there I whipped the cork off another bottle of something fruity from New Zealand. I was shaking my head at my idiocy and contemplating the first sip when Will appeared.
‘Tell me what’s going on, Florence,’ he said.
‘I haven’t any more money,’ I answered, wondering if my nose was growing like Pinocchio’s as I spoke. ‘I can’t pay you,’ I added, my snout positively tingling. ‘It’s all spent, gone, kaput.’ My nostrils were going to poke out the window on the other side of the room if I kept this up.
‘Yes, I know that,’ Will said. ‘I’m doing it as a favour. Stan is doing it as a favour. Sid doesn’t work for cash anyway.’
I took a slurp of the sauvignon blanc. I’m blowed if I could work out what the fuss was all about. It tasted horribly acidic to me. Like gooseberry juice spiked with flea powder.
‘No good?’ Will asked, nodding in the wine’s direction.
‘Not exactly my cup of tea,’ I answered, wishing like hell that’s what it was but cups of tea don’t help you forget your troubles, that’s alcohol’s job. ‘Would you like a glass?’
Will shook his head. ‘Don’t drink,’ he said. ‘Sorry.’
I wondered if he was an alcoholic and if it would be rude or insensitive to ask for some pointers.
‘Health reasons,’ he answered, as though reading my thoughts. ‘Mental health reasons mainly. Florence, may I sit down?’
I pulled the bottle of wine closer to myself and nodded.
‘What’s going on? What’s made you change your mind?’ he asked as he sat. ‘About the tearoom? It can’t be the money because we don’t need any more just yet. That’s not the hold up. We’ll work that out, I’ve told you that. So I’m just wondering, Florence …’
I choked down another mouthful of vile gooseberry-flavoured flea juice and said nothing.
‘I’m just wondering if it’s me,’ Will said. ‘If it’s what happened the other day. Because we may just have gotten our wires crossed and if that’s the case then all I can do is say again how sorry I am. In fact, I can’t apologise enough. I just couldn’t forgive myself if you gave up your tearoom because of me. Because of a misunderstanding about what did or didn’t go on upstairs.’
I took another slurp and some sauvignon blanc trickled down my chin. I couldn’t even keep the wretched stuff in my mouth.
‘Florence?’ I nodded so he knew I was listening even though I didn’t really want to. ‘Because if our wires weren’t crossed,’ he continued, ‘if it wasn’t a misunderstanding, if there’s something else going on that isn’t about upstairs, I would really like to think we could talk about it.’
I nodded again. Swallowed. Licked the sticky wine off my chin. Found myself thinking about the feel of his ribs beneath his shirt, imagined my fingers running over them.
‘This is the part where you say something,’ Will pointed out, quite politely in the circumstances.
But sadly all the somethings I wanted to say were seriously off limits. I filled my wine glass to the brim again, took another gulp and was about to once more feign being aghast at the time on my non-existent watch when I was saved by the phone.
It was Harry, mortified at the news of Poppy, which he’d just heard from Monty.
‘How could you not tell me about this?’ he demanded furiously. I shrugged my shoulders at Will in an apologetic fashion and he stood, held up his fingers in an ‘I’ll give you five’ sign and pulling his cellphone out of his jeans pocket, took to the stairs.
‘I adore Poppy, Floss,’ Harry was saying, although my mind was still stuck on Will’s pocket. ‘You know that. I’m devastated she’d do something like this and that you wouldn’t even think to tell me.’
‘I’m devastated too, Harry,’ I said, ‘about a lot of things.’
‘Oh, for God’s sake!’ There it was, that exasperation that I was noticing so much more now that I felt differently about my husband. Had it always been there? Had I not noticed it before?
‘I know you’re devastated too,’ my exasperated ex-husband continued, ‘and I’m sorry, you know I am, but really Floss, just because I’m not there doesn’t mean we’re not a family. That you and Monty and I aren’t still a family.’
‘That’s exactly what it means,’ I cried, fairly exasperated myself by then. ‘You not being here puts the complete kibosh on the whole entire family thing, Harry. You have your own family now with the wonderful “Charles” and that stupid little chihuahua.’
‘That stupid little what? What are you on about?’
I’d forgotten Charles’s pocket-sized dog was only a figment of my funereal imagination. ‘I don’t have to tell you anything, any more, Harry bloody bollocky Dowling,’ I said. ‘That’s what you get for ruining my bloody bollocky life.’
‘Are you drunk?’
I think drunk was taking it a bit far. I was certainly feeling a foreign buzz of confidence that seemed to come with drinking in the early afternoon but I already had a headache and I hadn’t even made a dent on my third glass.
‘So what if I am?’ I challenged Harry.
‘Oh, Floss, please, for God’s sake. Can’t you just …’
‘Thank you, yes, I can,’ I said brightly. ‘I’ll pass that on. Good day.’ And I slammed down the phone.
He might still be a family, but I wasn’t. I was just me. I picked up my wine glass and was just about to knock the whole hideous lot back when Will reappeared. He stopped and looked at me and if I was another person, in another life, without all my horrible hidden baggage, I would just have thrown myself at him and begged him to take care of me and look after me and do sweaty, sticky, sensationally filthy things to me.
Pale blue really was his colour. And his face! Handsome, tick; tanned, tick; masculine, tick (underlined, capital letters); and somehow sort of completely understanding despite my obvious lunacy, tick. I could see it in the furrow of his thirty-one-year-old brow, the slight cloudiness in his thirty-one-year-old eyes.
He strode across the kitchen towards me and for a nano second I thought it really was going to be a proper Mills & Boon moment. I even considered a swoon of the not losing consciousness variety. Instead he snatched my glass away, threw the contents down the sink and took me by the hand.
‘Come on, you,’ he said. ‘Go and get some shoes and a coat and meet me downstairs. I’ve got a surprise.’
Perhaps I was still in swoon mode, because I didn’t argue. I did what he told me and put more make-up on while I was at it, plus perfume, and met him down by the hole, which I did my best to ignore while trying very hard not to fall down it. Then we went outside where he opened the passenger door of his pick-up truck and indicated I should jump in.
The truck was yellow, or had been, before rust settled in the places where it had crashed into things or scraped along beside them. But his builder’s bits and bobs were neatly tucked away in two locked chests in the open tray at the back, and in the cab it was tidier than the Golf by a country mile.
He had a clipboard, even. And there wasn’t one single empty takeaway coffee cup rolling around on the floor. Or a thousand receipts stuck behind the visor. Or lipsticks melted into the dash.
And it smelt nice. Like oranges.
‘Where are we going?’ I asked as he pulled out of Blomfield Road into Warwick Avenue.
‘You’ll see,’ he said, smiling.
I watched his hands move around the steering wheel, shifting the manual gear lever, flicking on th
e indicators, as we moved towards Edgware Road. I started to relax. It was a glorious day despite the nip in the air and the city seemed to be exploding with greenery. You could say what you liked about the grime of London but for those few wonderful months in the middle of the year, it shone like an emerald. All of a sudden, I didn’t actually mind where I was going, it was just lovely to be going somewhere with someone, especially Will.
As we rounded Marble Arch I started to get a light fluttery feeling in my stomach and when we turned from Park Lane towards Grosvenor Square it became a fully-fledged butterfly. He was taking me to Claridge’s.
He drove his truck up to the Brook Street entrance and handed the keys to the doorman who simply nodded a polite greeting, as though he parked such pre-loved vehicles all the time.
‘How ever did you get a booking?’ I asked, as we crossed the black and white tiled lobby. Usually, you had to book weeks in advance.
‘It’s always worth a shot,’ Will shrugged. ‘I called just after they’d had a cancellation, so here we are. Must be my lucky day.’
We were shown to a table in the Reading Room, tucked in the corner of the massive lobby, on the opposite side from the pianist and the double bass player who plonked and plucked soothingly as we passed tables of lunching ladies and businessmen.
The place was full and humming but one of the wonderful things about Claridge’s was that no matter how busy it was, there always remained an elegant ambience that spoke of nothing but good taste and extreme comfort.
‘You’ll be going for the champagne afternoon tea, I expect,’ Will said, opening the menu. ‘A thirsty person like yourself.’
I stroked the pale green stripes on my Bernardaud china cup. It was French, from Limoges as it happened, but it fit the Claridge’s Art Deco sensibility to a T so I couldn’t do anything but love it.
On Top of Everything Page 21
