On Top of Everything

by Sarah-Kate Lynch

  Actually, I thought it was rather lovely, just sitting there in the watery sunshine chatting like two ordinary friends and I told her so.

  ‘It would be jolly nice if we could have a cup of tea and some of your homemade brandy snaps while we were at it though,’ Marguerite said. ‘Such a shame about your tearoom, Florence. I really thought you were on to something with that but … Actually, run that past me again. You started it, then you stopped it, but that didn’t have much impact, is that what you said?’

  I nodded and kissed the warm sweet hollow at the back of her baby’s neck. ‘No impact at all as it turns out. I laid off Will, the builder, when I ran out of money and well, inclination, really, but he sort of didn’t listen to me so he’s still more or less working on it.’

  ‘How peculiar,’ Marguerite said. I couldn’t have agreed with her more. ‘So, apart from you saying that you’re no longer doing it, it is still actually happening?’

  ‘Well, yes, I suppose it is.’ I hadn’t thought of it like that but she was right.

  ‘So, given that, when do you think it might be open for business?’

  ‘Well, it won’t be,’ I insisted. ‘Because I’m not doing it.’

  ‘But if you were?’ she insisted right back. ‘If it was?’

  ‘If it was I suppose it would be about a month away.’ Actually, I didn’t have a clue. I would have to buy a kitchen and tables and chairs and I wasn’t sure how long that took or where you got those things and anyway I wasn’t going to do it. Will would know, but I could hardly ask him, what with him being fired and me not going ahead with it and his not wanting to waste a moment of precious life and everything.

  ‘I hope you’ll let us sad new mothers bring our babies to your tearoom,’ Marguerite said. ‘Not that I know any other sad new mothers but if you let them come there, then at least I could meet some.’

  ‘Well, I won’t because it’s not happening,’ I told her again. ‘There will be no tearoom for the sad new mothers to come to.’

  ‘But if there was?’

  ‘There won’t be.’

  ‘Oh, I know, but if there was?’

  She was persistent, I had to give her that.

  ‘If there was a tearoom at my house which is no longer going to be the case because I’m not doing it, then yes, I would love sad new mothers to bring their babies and meet each other,’ I finally agreed. It was quite a strange conversation when I thought about it afterwards.

  We chatted for a while about other things then, about her daughters, my son, Harry — whose departure she seemed to know about already — the possibility of the Formosa Street post office closing down, the weather: normal everyday woman-to-woman canal-side chit-chat.

  ‘Florence, I can’t tell you how much you have made my day,’ she said, when eventually she stood to leave. She took her baby girl from my shoulder, which was just as well as I had cramp in my arm, and put her back, fast asleep, in the stroller. ‘I was having such ridiculously dark thoughts this morning and you just swept them all away. I can’t thank you enough, really I can’t.’

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ I said. ‘I didn’t do anything. And by the way,’ I added as an afterthought, ‘I would love it if you’d drop by to see me at home next time you thought of it.’ I was pretty sure I wasn’t a dropping-by person either but I was a Marguerite person.

  ‘Who knows?’ Marguerite smiled. ‘Maybe so many people will start dropping by your house for a slice of cake and some company that you’ll find yourself running a tearoom without even meaning to.’

  The truth was, she had made my day too. Despite everything we hadn’t talked about, that she didn’t know and that I hugged close to me like an old vest, the weight of my problems felt lighter than it had in a long, long time.

  I was in such a good frame of mind after talking to her that I walked to Tesco and bought vast amounts of expensive chocolate and Dutch cocoa powder for my favourite brownie recipe but ended up giving half of it to Whiffy O’Farrell when I passed him trolling through the Formosa Street skip on my way home.

  ‘I miss our cups of tea,’ I told him, ‘at the antique shop, remember?’

  He gave me the loveliest smile, which I took to mean yes he did remember and that he too missed our cups of tea, but then he bit into one of the chocolate bars and ate it, wrapper and all, which somewhat shook my confidence in his judgement.

  He nodded a very polite goodbye, however, and I continued on my way.

  At home, Will and Stan had obviously made progress with the dry rot because they were hauling the scaffolding out of the hole and stacking it out the front. I had developed quite a clever policy of not discussing the building project with them by then. It was as though they were working on a neighbour’s house, not my own. I tended to lift my eyebrows in mild interest as I passed but did not engage any further.

  ‘We can patch the floorboards and have the kitchen plumbed by this time next week,’ Will told me as I slipped through what used to be my hallway. The late sun was streaming in through the tall windows and I had to admit, it would be a jolly nice place to sit and flick through magazines with a good cup of tea and a brandy snap.

  I smiled at him and kept going. I’d thought he might have been wary of me since my strange behaviour at Claridge’s, but he had just been his usual concerned self as if nothing odd was happening between us at all. I kept catching him looking at me in that peculiar way of his, that knowing sort of way, and he didn’t even have the decency to look away and pretend he was doing something else. He just smiled in a slightly guilty fashion and went about whatever he was doing. It bugged me though, that knowing look, because there were very few things of which I could be sure in my life at that point, but one was that Will didn’t know me. Not at all. He might think he did, but he didn’t. No one did.

  When I got up to the kitchen, my mouth watering at the mere thought of my brownie, Crystal was there, mumbling quietly into the phone, but as I passed she raised the volume.

  ‘She’s just walked in, I’ll pass you right over,’ she said, and before I could fully register what was happening she had thrust the receiver into my hands.

  It was Young Nick, of course.

  ‘Florence, are you there?’ he asked. ‘Why haven’t you answered any of my calls? Or letters? I’ve been desperately trying to get in touch with you. We need to talk about your options, to work out what to do next. This isn’t something you can sweep under the carpet, I’m afraid. I’m terribly worried about you.’

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ I said, trying to keep my voice light and friendly even though what I really wanted to do was shout at him to fuck off and leave me alone and then strangle Crystal with the phone cord until her eyeballs popped out and her nose exploded. She stood just out of arm’s reach, her nose looking small and neat, her eyeballs tidily in their sockets, not even pretending she wasn’t listening. ‘I’ve been run off my feet with work,’ I said gaily, ‘and my sister’s been very ill.’

  ‘With work?’ Nick asked. ‘So you went back to the antiques business? You sorted things out with your partner?’

  Bugger! I’d completely forgotten I’d told him all about that. ‘No, no, another sort of work. Another business,’ I said rather lamely, blushing under Crystal’s scrutiny.

  ‘Well, just tell them they’ll have to wait,’ I heard Nick telling someone in the background at his end. ‘I don’t care. Get a bucket!’ I felt a droplet of remorse, then, at causing trouble. But it dried up almost instantly when he turned his attention back to me. ‘You just can’t ignore this,’ he said. ‘This is very serious, Florence. We could be talking about your whole life.’

  ‘Yes, I’m well aware of that,’ I said, opening the pantry door and stepping into it, to avoid Crystal’s unwavering gaze.

  ‘But are you aware that we could also be talking about nothing more than the equivalent of having a wart removed? The danger lies in not finding out, Florence. With the not knowing. You need a CT scan and a consultation with a surgeon. It’s the cruc
ial next step. There’s just no way around it. You really must deal with this.’

  ‘Why thank you,’ I said as evenly as I could manage considering I’d just noticed a whole lot of pongy Asian herbs in the pantry that I certainly hadn’t put there. ‘I’ll take that on board and get back to you, shall I?’

  This might assuage my nosy daughter-in-law, I thought. Although when I looked over my shoulder, she had not budged from her watchful position. Nor did she appear particularly assuaged.

  ‘Have you told anybody?’ Nick persisted. ‘Are you getting any support? You can’t do this on your own, Florence. No one can.’

  ‘Oh, that won’t be necessary,’ I said, a little too quickly perhaps, and then threw in a forced laugh for good measure. ‘It’s fine just the way it is, thank you so much.’

  ‘There’s only one thing you can be sure of,’ Nick said, and his voice dropped even lower, became yet more grim, ‘and that is that it’s not fine just the way it is. Whether what you have is rust or forest fire, Florence, you deny its existence at your peril. At Monty’s peril. Do you understand that? I wouldn’t be doing my job if I didn’t spell it out for you this clearly. And when I say Monty’s peril, I don’t just mean that if it’s not like removing a wart, if it is more serious, that he might lose his mother. I mean you may have a genetic predisposition to colon cancer. You’re young and healthy but something is not right, so it could be a flaw in your genes. And if that’s the case, it could be a flaw in Monty’s genes too. He might be predisposed as well, Florence. Does that make a difference to you? Monty needs to be tested too. Do you understand?’

  My heart was thumping abnormally low in my body. It felt like it was in my stomach.

  ‘Thank you so much for calling,’ I said as brightly as I could manage, although my bravado felt like it was being mulched in the kitchen disposal unit. ‘I have to go now. I’ll speak to you soon. Goodbye.’

  I stepped out of the pantry and carefully placed the phone down in the cradle and stood there, staring at the calendar that I noticed for the first time in three months was three months out of date, trying not to shake. Monty? Cancer? I hadn’t thought of that at all. If Monty had cancer it would be the end of me, if I wasn’t ended already. He could die. Is that what Young Nick meant? Or that he could pass it on to his children and they could die and Crystal had already had one baby die and how terrible would that be if it happened to her again? That would be the most terrible thing of all. And for it to happen to Monty a first time, for his baby to die, it was almost more than I could bear. I was bearing so much already.

  I felt the warmth of my daughter-in-law’s small tanned hand on my arm then. I wanted to swat it away, to cast her aside, but I couldn’t. I was frozen to the spot. ‘Florence?’ she said. ‘What is it? What’s the matter?’

  ‘There’s asafoetida in my cupboard,’ I said. ‘And tamarind paste.’

  ‘Florence, you’re pale as a ghost! And you’re trembling. Please come and sit down.’

  ‘And pomegranate syrup. What do I want with pomegranate syrup?’

  ‘Florence, I think you should …’

  ‘How dare you!’ I was suddenly so full of uncontrollable rage I could not help but unleash it on her. Poor Crystal. Always there when my fury was getting away on me. I reeled around to face her, flinging her hand off my arm, backing away from her as though she were toxic waste. ‘How dare you put these peculiar foul-smelling things in my pantry without telling me first,’ I shouted. ‘How dare you just march in here with all this foreign bloody muck and throw it about the place, just leave it everywhere, on the shelves, in the pantry, in the kitchen, in my house, in my house! Without any permission, without any warning, without checking with me first, without me having asked for any of it, without so much as a by-your-bloody-leave! It’s unconscionable! It’s bloody criminal! It’s so incredibly unfair, I mean how dare you? How, how, how …’ I don’t know when I had started to cry but deep wrenching sobs appeared out of nowhere and, mixed with this awful uncontrollable anger, temporarily removed my ability to breathe.

  She should have slapped me, or pushed me out the window, or chopped me into tiny bits and fed me to the dog as I stood there quivering and swallowing great gulps of air, but she didn’t.

  She steered me to a chair, pushed me gently down into it, got me a glass of water, and then said: ‘I don’t think this is about pomegranate syrup.’

  She sat down next to me, so close I could all but feel her even breath on my hot cheek. ‘What’s happening, Florence?’

  I willed myself not to say a word, to keep quiet, to hold my horrible secret to myself but it was too strong for me. Suddenly, my own thought bubble popped and the terror I felt at what lurked within me burst out into the realm of great gasped half-suffocated spoken-out-loud words.

  ‘I have colon cancer,’ I sobbed. ‘Bloody bollocky colon cancer. And if I die, no one will care. No one will even notice. It could kill me, it could be killing me right now, as I speak, and it could kill Monty too if I have faulty genes, and I should have done something about it weeks ago when I first found out but I was so scared and then there was Poppy and Will and the rot and I don’t want to turn into one of those tragic people you see on the TV, all great big bald head and sad eyes and skinny arms and trying to raise money to go to some far-flung corner of the earth for wheatgerm therapy or …’

  I was weeping so hard by then my stomach muscles had started to spasm, and I collapsed on the table, my head on my arms, and surrendered to my tears.

  Which was when I felt Crystal stroking my hair. This woman I hardly knew and to whom I had been nothing but evil ever since meeting her, sat next to me while I wept, and stroked my hair.

  Why this made me even more sad, I don’t know. Well, actually, I worked it out. I felt vulnerable. Accepting sympathy means you’ve dropped any pretence of not needing it and that leaves you raw. Plus I knew that there was no going back from this. It was out. My situation was out. And even if I could contain it as a tiny leak for a while, it would eventually become a raging torrent, claiming the few people I knew and loved just as it was claiming me.

  The hair stroking helped, mind you. I know from experience with Monty that it’s quite hard to keep that sort of thing up after the first few minutes — it’s hard on the wrist — but Crystal never wavered at all.

  Finally, I got the sobs under control and eventually the tears. Then she got up to make me a cup of lemon verbena tea. She was very good at being quiet. At waiting. I really liked that about her, actually.

  ‘So, tell me everything,’ she said. ‘And maybe I can help you figure out what to do next.’

  She was the last person in the world I would have imagined baring my soul to but as the secrets leached out of me I began to realise that in a way she was perfect. I didn’t have to worry about my relationship with her, for a start, because up until then we hadn’t really had one. Or not a meaningful one at any rate. I wasn’t in love with her, I wasn’t her mother, she hadn’t married me then cheated on me with a man, she hadn’t given birth to me, she wasn’t suicidal. She was probably the person with the least investment in my existence in the whole wide world, other than to not want Monty to bear unnecessary pain on my account, which was something we had in common.

  Plus despite her alternative leanings, it turned out Crystal was not particularly psycho-babbly or airy-fairy or tree-huggy, as one might have expected.

  In fact, the first thing she did was write a list. She said writing lists helped calm her down when she was stressed about anything because it put problems in order. You could look at a list of things and see how you could tackle each one separately without feeling sick about it, she said. Whereas if they all just stayed jumbled in your mind in one great big sticky ball you never got to consider them individually.

  She actually spoke a lot of sense for someone with toe rings and a Chinese tattoo.

  And she was enormously efficient, in a secretarial sort of way, which she said was the result of having been
a bank manager in her previous life! A bank manager? Within an hour she had secured an appointment with one of London’s top surgeons at his Harley Street clinic the following day. How did these people get bookings so easily? I’m sure I couldn’t if I tried — which I supposed I generally didn’t.

  She offered to come with me and I accepted partly because I was in shock at learning she had once been a bank manager, partly because I had expected her to recommend alternative treatments involving odd herbs and strangely spelt clinics in Switzerland not a Harley Street consultant, and partly because I wanted to keep her on my side so that she wouldn’t tell Monty.

  ‘You’re going to have to tell him eventually,’ she said. ‘And Archie and Beth and Poppy and Harry, too, for that matter. They can help you, Florence. We can all help you.’

  ‘But they all have their own problems right now,’ I argued. ‘And I can’t bear to make matters worse.’

  ‘You might make matters better, had you thought about that? You’re putting a lot of pressure on yourself trying to keep everyone else happy and it’s not necessarily the best thing. Try having a little faith in your family.’

  ‘Can we just try to get through the next couple of days?’ I begged her. ‘Nick says it might be no big deal, just a little deal, a wart-sized deal. And then I would have worried them all for nothing.’

  She agreed, as I knew she would. I wasn’t quite ready to let go of my one great big sticky ball.

  CRYSTAL

  Nobody expects me to be practical — maybe because I’m small and blonde — but I am and I always have been.

  When Florence told me about her diagnosis the best thing I could think of was to write a list of all the things we needed to do and organise them in order of priority.