‘To be honest, I’m actually not much of a drinker,’ I confessed. ‘I thought I would try it for a while but it hasn’t really taken. I seem to go straight from choking it down to getting the most awful hangover and all I can think of is going to lie in a dark room with a cup of tea and a wet flannel.’
‘You should probably chuck it in, then,’ Will said. ‘Drinking doesn’t always pay even when you’re really good at it.’
A very pretty blonde waitress came to take our order and I found myself wishing the older, slightly pock-marked waiter on the other side of the room would come to replace her. The staff at Claridge’s were known for their inscrutable charm and efficiency but I couldn’t believe she wasn’t somehow invisibly flirting with Will.
‘I’ll have afternoon tea with Claridge’s Royal Blend,’ Will told her politely.
‘And I’ll have the same with the Rose Congou,’ I added crisply. The tea wouldn’t go so well with the sandwiches but it seemed wrong to order anything else, given that this was where Rose and I had had so many happy afternoons.
‘Is that what happened to you?’ I asked Will when the pretty blonde had left. ‘Drinking didn’t pay?
‘Among other things,’ Will answered, looking across the room at a spectacularly sculpted matron in her mid-sixties. I’d spotted her as we’d walked in. Chanel from head to toe, I suspected. ‘I can see why you like it here,’ he said. ‘There’s a lot to look at.’
‘And the lighting is kind,’ I said. There are very few places in the world where everything is just right and Claridge’s is one of them. ‘Spencer Tracy apparently said that when he died, not that he intended to, he didn’t want to go to heaven, he wanted to go to Claridge’s.’
I wondered if he was there now. It was definitely the sort of place that an elegant man might haunt, although I thought it was perhaps more of a Cary Grant sort of a place. Our sandwiches arrived and I was entranced to see how they’d been updated since I’d last been. It was now organic chicken and Scottish salmon and the cucumber came with rocket, which I couldn’t remember existing in Rose’s day.
The pretty waitress poured our tea, leaving it black. Then to my astonishment Will leaned over and delicately put about four drops of milk in my cup, just the way I liked it.
Do you know, in twenty years of marriage Harry had never remembered how I liked my tea? It hadn’t bothered me particularly at the time because he so rarely made the tea in the first place but still, he should have known.
I felt the wind quite blow out of my sails. Will couldn’t be this perfect, could he? I couldn’t deliberately not be having a love affair with the perfect man, could I?
‘How did your wife take her tea?’ I asked feeling a sudden urge to find his flaws.
‘She took it any way it came but she preferred it over-brewed with lots of milk.’
‘Right,’ I said. ‘And why aren’t you married to her any more?’
‘I treated her appallingly and she can’t forgive me,’ he said with such forthrightness I nearly choked on my rose-flavoured China leaf. ‘I’ve tried to make amends but it hasn’t been easy and it’s all my fault, I’m afraid. What’s more, it’s been terribly difficult for our daughters.’
‘You have daughters?’
I tried to hide my surprise, if that’s what it was. It had never occurred to me he’d have children. Little girl children. I took a soothing mouthful of tea and tried to ignore whatever was aching inside me.
‘Yes. Lucy has just turned eight and Ella is six next month. I don’t see them very often but I keep in touch as best I can so that they know how much I think of them.’
‘She must be very angry with you, your wife. What did you do?’ I asked. ‘Did you cheat on her?’
‘Yes,’ he answered. ‘More than once. More than a few times. I was a complete and utter shit, to tell you the truth. I worked in an ad agency in those days and spent most of my time there. I drank too much, I took too many drugs, I stayed out all hours, sometimes for days in a row, and finally I drove my car into a tree when our daughters were in the back seat.’
I put my Dorrington ham with English mustard sandwich back on my pale-green-striped plate. Perhaps I didn’t want to know his flaws. Perhaps it was better to imagine that he was perfect.
‘Why are you telling me this?’ I asked.
Will looked me straight in the eyes and said: ‘You know why I am telling you this.’
The thing is that usually I kept what I was actually thinking to myself and talked about something completely different. I was under the impression that’s what most people did once they’d reached the age of about four. But when Will spoke it was as though his secret thought bubbles were being popped and escaping into the realm of audible conversation because what he said was so searingly frank. I didn’t quite know how to handle this. It felt frightening. I was a person with a lot of secrets to keep contained within my own personal silence, after all. If I contemplated them leaking out willy nilly I wouldn’t know where to start with the damage control.
‘Were the little girls all right?’ I asked retreating to a less confronting subject, although confronting enough, what with the drink and the drugs and the crashing into trees.
‘Thankfully, yes,’ he said. ‘But I could have killed them. And I don’t mean if I did it again or the weather was worse or I’d had more tequila, I mean that day, as it was, I could have killed them.’
‘I’m so sorry,’ I said.
‘So am I,’ he agreed. ‘I’m not trying to ruin your afternoon tea,’ he looked around at the room full of people chatting happily as they sipped tea and feasted on bite-sized delicacies, ‘but I want you to know everything about me, Florence, warts and all.’
‘Well, those are quite some warts,’ I had to admit. Although it wasn’t the biggest flaw someone had revealed to me in recent weeks and it was nice to hear about it up front instead of, for example, after twenty years of marriage.
‘Did your wife boot you out after the tree?’ I asked.
‘Yes, she should have done it sooner but I made that too hard for her. She’s married again now to a very nice sensible chap who my girls love and they’ve had another little girl of their own.’
How much that hurt I had only started to imagine when our cakes and pastries arrived. I downed a raisin scone and Marco Polo jam with almost obscene haste, then went to work on a chocolate macaroon with tea-flavoured cream filling.
It was divine.
‘I can’t imagine you being so wild and irresponsible,’ I said, when I finally stopped concentrating so hard on my cakes. ‘It just doesn’t sound like you.’
‘It doesn’t sound like me now,’ Will corrected me. ‘But it turns out I was one of those idiots who had to lose it all before they could appreciate what they had in the first place. You know the type, Nick Hornby writes books about us all the time. We’re a pretty sad bunch.’
‘But what made you like that to begin with?’ I asked. ‘Was it growing up somewhere wild like Africa or was it spending so much time at boarding school in England?’
‘I wish I knew the answer, or I wish there was an answer, but the truth is that I was just a spoiled little shit who got away with murder for far too long. There’s no excuse for it. I had great parents, a terrific wife, fantastic job, good friends — although not so much towards the end, they very wisely gave up on me, most of them — and I had many brilliant opportunities in my life but I blew them all because I was a selfish bloody idiot.’
‘Oh, I see.’
‘Don’t look like that, Florence, please. I’m just trying to explain why I am the way I am now. I wasted so much time when I was younger. I messed up a decent woman and two beautiful kids and if I could go back and fix it all I would, but I can’t. What I can do is make sure I am never so bloody stupid again.’
I looked at the perfect little fruit tart sitting on the plate in front of me and felt suddenly overwhelmed by the most awful hopelessness.
‘I try not to waste time these
days, Florence,’ Will continued, ‘that’s all I’m trying to tell you. It’s too precious. Life is too precious, every minute of it, that’s what I’ve learned, that’s what I’m getting at so — oh God, I’ve upset you again, I’m so sorry. More tea, I think. I’ll get the waitress.’
He motioned for the pretty blonde but I didn’t want more tea. I didn’t want my fruit tart. All I wanted to do was go home.
Life was too precious for Will to waste his time on me. And that was all he ever would be doing.
WILL
God, I dug myself such a hole at Claridge’s I couldn’t see how I would ever climb out of it.
It’s just that I wanted her to know everything there was to know about me. In fact, I couldn’t get it out quickly enough. I wanted to lump it all right in front of her in an enormous pile so she could see it all straight away and then we could just get on with the business of, well, whatever was going to happen next.
I suppose I was going gangbusters because I meant what I said when I told her I didn’t want to waste time, not a minute of it, and I was losing patience not with her but with the situation. It would never be right between us if I pushed her too far but then there would never be anything between us if she stayed too frightened or too closed off to trust me.
I thought about that a lot while I drove her back to the house. She looked so lost, gazing out at the traffic. Whatever was going on with her was shaking her, right down to the very marrow, as Stan would say.
Yet despite the many setbacks, I still felt what I had always felt; that there was something intangible but enormous hovering in the air between us, linking us, drawing us in as close as we would let it without exploding in our faces. It was still there. Not exactly dangerous, but almost.
And if I was wrong about us, then that almost-dangerous thing would surely be gone but if anything it was stronger.
I’ve seen it before, the moment when the potential is sucked out of the air; when the gorgeous girl you meet late one night in a bar and think you might just have to marry turns out the next day to love Celine Dion and smoke filterless Marlboros for breakfast and any hope of having a future disappears in an instant.
I’m sure most of us have experienced that moment: the evaporation of something you can’t even see in the first place. It’s promise, I suppose, mixed with desire but in the case of myself and Florence, or just myself at that point, there was real certainty. It had not evaporated. And if she didn’t yet see it, or was stopping herself from feeling it, it didn’t mean it wasn’t there.
But I knew, as I was driving home to my flat without her that afternoon, the smell of her perfume still wafting in the cab of my truck, that I would have to have enough certainty for the both of us until — well, until what?
It occurred to me then that whatever was stopping her from recognising what we had might not be anything to do with me.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Two days later I was sitting in the Rembrandt Gardens off Warwick Avenue, enjoying the blissful sunshine, literally smelling the roses, avoiding my builder, my son, my daughter-in-law, and my life, when a double stroller bearing two fat pink babies, one asleep and one awake and looking pretty grumpy, was wheeled past me.
The grumpy baby — who had a dissatisfied countenance and small dark eyes — struck me as bearing more than a passing resemblance to my mothball grandmother. Like my grandmother, it could have a pretty face if it put its mind to it, if it released itself, opened itself up, but it didn’t. It chose grumpiness.
‘Florence?’ the woman pushing the stroller asked. When I took my eyes off the contents of the stroller, I saw it was Marguerite, the tea-leaf reader.
‘What a lovely surprise,’ she said. ‘Do you mind if I sit down?’ Before I could answer, she settled the babies in the shade of the London plane tree beside the seat and plonked herself down next to me.
‘I was thinking about you yesterday,’ she said. ‘I walked the girls past your old shop and it reminded me of what a lovely place it used to be to visit. I hardly bother to go in now you’re not there. There’s no tea, for a start, but there’s also too much French furniture — the place is full of it. You can’t swing a cat without hitting something from Louis XV. I’m more of a Scandinavian girl myself, when it comes to furniture. Danish especially.’ She stopped, as though embarrassed at talking so much, which she had been, and looked over at the babies. That was when I noticed how tired she looked, how her beautiful skin was almost grey, her white Capri pants and cashmere top were uncustomarily wrinkled, her pink coat was marked with something orange and slightly lumpy on the lapel.
‘How old are they now?’ I asked her as the wakeful, grumpy one started a half-hearted mewling.
‘Eleven months on Thursday,’ she replied, without the enthusiasm new mothers usually employed. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, registering how she sounded. ‘I’m just having one of those days.’
‘Is it the babies?’ I asked, knowing full well it would be. I loved babies but even the jolly good ones were hard work. ‘They’re such a handful, aren’t they? And no one ever tells you that. Or if they do, you never believe them because you think yours will be different. And you’ve got two. It must be exhausting.’
‘It is,’ Marguerite said, not without some relief at being able to admit it. ‘We had a nanny for a while but she left and I thought I could do it but on days like today I really miss my real job. I don’t have enough adult company. I think that’s the trouble. I talk nonsense to these two all day long and then when Tim comes home from work I’m too tired to talk sense. I used to have opinions on all sorts of things: elections in foreign countries, complicated tax laws, human rights in China. Now … I’m lucky if I can rustle up a preference between mashed bananas and apple purée.’
I wasn’t sure I’d ever had an opinion on complicated tax laws but I did remember that frustration at not being able to choose between mashed bananas and apple purée. It was a symbol of having your own brain turn to mush, I suspected, after bringing a child into the world. I didn’t know why that happened. I didn’t know why anything happened. I was the wrong person for someone having a bad day to be talking to, I imagined. I was having a bad day myself. A bad month. A bad life.
‘I started turning my house into a tearoom,’ I told Marguerite, apropos of nothing, as her baby’s mewling increased in volume.
‘You did? How wonderful!’ Her face lit up and for a moment her weariness disappeared, restoring the delicate beauty I remembered. ‘I’ve thought about dropping by to see you but I’m not entirely a dropping-by sort of a person. It’s a hard habit to pick up if you’ve never developed it in the past. Like smoking, I imagine. When will it be opening? The tearoom? Then I’ll have the perfect excuse to come and visit.’
‘Oh, I started turning it into a tearoom,’ I explained, wishing I had never opened my mouth, realising that apropros of nothing was a stupid reason to say something, ‘but I didn’t finish. I ran out of … well, there are too many other things going on and there was all this rot in the basement and I couldn’t quite … Anyway, I laid the builder off, and the plumber, although that didn’t really have quite as much of an impact as you’d imagine.’
The baby’s mewling turned into a full blown roar, which made Marguerite look a hundred years old again, so while she slumped there looking beaten half to death, I plucked the grumpy creature out of the stroller and put her over my shoulder, patting her cute little Tommy Hilfiger-clad back. The roar got louder for a brief moment, but soon turned back into a mewl, which then retreated into a snuffle.
Marguerite smiled gratefully. ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘I needed that. This.’
I jiggled her daughter against my neck. ‘Me too,’ I said as a memory flew into my mind from the depths of Monty’s babyhood. Me sitting in Holland Park, jiggling his pram and weeping for so long a plain-clothes policeman emerged from the undergrowth and asked me if I was all right at which point I was shamed into going home.
Maybe loneliness wasn’t
as new to me as I thought it was.
‘I just remembered a bad day I had when Monty was about this age,’ I told her. ‘Which is funny, because if anyone ever asked me if I’d had one I would have said no.’
‘Frankly, I would feel a lot better if everyone remembered a lot more of them,’ Marguerite sighed. ‘I feel like they’re only happening to me.’
‘Yes, but isn’t it comforting to know that years from now you will have forgotten the bad days?’ I asked her. ‘That they will have faded away and you’ll only recall the good ones?’
She considered this. ‘I suppose that’s why people have more than one child. I had been wondering about that although I won’t be in any hurry myself. And anyway, I have two already.’
‘I could only ever have one,’ I said, ‘and I was apparently lucky to even get him.’
‘Oh, I am sorry, Florence,’ Marguerite was mortified, ‘I must sound terrible. I don’t mean to whine or be insensitive, it’s just that, well, I don’t know what it is.’
I shifted her sleeping baby on to my other shoulder. ‘Don’t apologise,’ I insisted. ‘I’m not sure I could have coped with more than one, if the truth be told.’ I had never admitted that to anyone. But Harry had been busy lawyering when Monty was a baby and even though it was what I wanted, I had been on my own a lot of the time and it had been hard. ‘And I loved Monty so much I couldn’t imagine having any love left to give to a brother or sister.’
‘I worried about that too,’ Marguerite said, ‘with having twins. I wondered if they would only each get loved half as much as single children but I think actually love expands to cater for the crowd, if you know what I mean.’
‘Or shrinks,’ I suggested, which seemed a sad prospect.
‘I’m not sure about that,’ Marguerite argued gently (it seemed she still did have opinions), ‘because you don’t stop loving someone if they go away, do you? The amount of love you have for them is still the same, it’s just that they’re not there to get it. And if someone new comes along, the love for the one who’s gone away doesn’t get transferred to the new one, it’s a whole lot of new love. Oh shit, what am I talking about? You can tell I don’t get out much!’
On Top of Everything Page 22
