On Top of Everything

by Sarah-Kate Lynch

  ‘And after this operation,’ I hated these words, these horrible sick, old people’s words, ‘after the recovery, everything would be OK? I would be OK?’

  ‘If the cancer has been contained in your colon, your chances of a full recovery are extremely good.’

  If the cancer was contained in my colon, my chances of a full recovery were extremely good. Was that a yes?

  ‘And if it’s not contained?’ It was Crystal who asked this. She didn’t sound like herself. She was obviously as flabbergasted as I was.

  ‘If the cancer has gone through the bowel wall and travelled, there will be traces of it in Florence’s lymph nodes, some of which we will remove for testing when we are doing the resection,’ Mr Worthington explained. ‘Typically, if colon cancer moves it goes to the liver, which is closest, or sometimes the lungs. In either situation, I would most likely recommend more surgery, if appropriate, plus chemo and possibly radiotherapy. The outcome in these cases is not always as positive as the early detection scenario where the cancer is contained, but full recovery is still a possibility.’

  So, he could make sushi with my innards and I could end up bald?

  ‘Why has this happened to me?’ I asked him. ‘I’ve hardly ever been ill. I eat healthily, usually, and I’m fit, usually. What did I do wrong?’

  ‘You most likely did nothing wrong,’ he said, ‘and you’ve every right to feel aggrieved. You’re outside the statistics in almost every way so I can’t answer why this has happened to you. There could be a genetic predisposition that makes you more susceptible to certain cancers and we can test that once we’ve done the surgery, which will also have an impact on Monty, obviously, even if it’s just so he can get in the system in terms of surveillance or …’

  ‘Monty?’ Had he just mentioned Monty?

  ‘If the genetic testing shows up any faults in your DNA this will be good for Monty, Florence, because he can be tested from now on and early detection is the only really reliable way to …’

  ‘But you called him Monty,’ I said.

  ‘Of course,’ Mr Worthington smiled, ‘and if he and Crystal are going to have children then …’

  ‘If Monty and Crystal have children?’

  Mr Worthington looked at Crystal, clearly puzzled. ‘Why, yes,’ he said. ‘I know it has been difficult for you but …’

  ‘What’s been difficult for me?’ I turned to Crystal, puzzled myself. She was chewing her bottom lip, looking sicker than I was. ‘What’s going on here? Did you talk to him before I got here?’

  Mr Worthington laughed. ‘Well, of course, she’s talked to me,’ he said.

  Then as I turned back to him, still totally bewildered, I watched comprehension drop down over his face like a dance-hall curtain.

  ‘Oh, fuck,’ he breathed, leaning back in his chair and closing his eyes. ‘Oh fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck.’

  Now, I wasn’t at all au fait with the medical protocol of the day but this seemed a mightily inappropriate response towards a patient discussing a life-threatening illness and its treatment.

  Crystal then totally floored me by saying to him: ‘I had no idea it was you. I didn’t know your surname. I didn’t know exactly what you did. And I didn’t know you did it here.’

  ‘Did what?’ I asked again, dimly. ‘Did what here?’

  ‘I assumed you came to me on purpose,’ Mr Worthington said to Crystal. ‘Because you knew this was my field. It never occurred to me for a moment — it just seems so outrageously bloody awful, otherwise. Oh fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck.’

  ‘Will someone please tell me what the hell is going on?’ I demanded. ‘What’s all this “oh fucking” about?’

  There was a hideous silence, while the other two stared at each other with ill-disguised horror.

  ‘I’m so sorry, Florence,’ Crystal finally said, ‘but this is Charles.’

  ‘Charles?’ I repeated dimly. Was I supposed to know what that meant? I only knew of one other Charles, or ‘Charles’ as I called him. And he was a something or other at the Whittington and I hadn’t even met him nor did I want to.

  Oh, please, no.

  ‘That Charles?’ Now I was in shock. ‘Harry’s Charles?’ No! Where was the dog, the green suit, the awful orange hair? It simply couldn’t be Charles, Harry’s Charles. It just simply could not be. For many reasons. Too many.

  ‘Please tell me,’ I implored him. ‘Please, please, please tell me that I haven’t been sitting here discussing my colo-rectum with my gay ex-husband’s new boyfriend.’

  There was another dreadful silence into which mushroomed the certitude that this was exactly what we had been doing.

  ‘Oh fuck,’ I said myself. Just when you think your life could not possibly get any worse, it does. Enormously.

  I wasn’t sure what the standard procedure was for dealing with this kind of colossal cock-up but as I reeled with the implications of what had just gone on, Charles leaned forward, pressed a buzzer on his desk and said into whatever contraption it was: ‘So sorry to bother you, Evelyn, but do you think we could have tea for three in here? The Lady Grey, if you wouldn’t mind, leaf of course. And some of those lemon biscuits from Fortnum’s, not the Duchy of Cornwall ones but the other ones. Thank you, Evelyn, much appreciated.’

  I knew from made-for-TV movies that alcoholics usually had to hit rock bottom before they could give up the booze and start to turn their lives around. But I’d often wondered how they knew where rock bottom was when everything before rock bottom could also have been rock bottom or at least felt like it at the time.

  And although I had made a hash of being an alcoholic, I wouldn’t be an alcoholic’s elbow as Rose would have said, but sitting there in Charles’s office I nonetheless recognised the skull-cracking thump of rock bottom being hit.

  When you get there, it’s obvious.

  I probably could have sunk further. It was humanly possible. I could have abused the man who stole my husband and stormed out of his office. I could have gone home, packed my bags and run away to a dingy bedsit in Brighton. I could have lived out my days all alone eating greasy fish and chips and watching telly and talking to no one.

  But here was the thing. In storming out of the office, I would alert Crystal and Charles to my departure. In going home to pack my bags I would alert Poppy who would tell my parents. Plus I also ran the risk of running into Monty who would find out anyway via Crystal, as would Harry via any of the three of them.

  And then there was Will.

  He would surely notice if I didn’t turn up to ignore his hole and remind him that his services weren’t needed. And even if he never came back to the house, Stanley probably would and he would hear from Crystal or Monty or Poppy and tell Will I’d run away to Brighton and Will might just come and fetch me, so that was that. My chances of living out a lonely life eating greasy fish and chips and watching telly were already shot.

  I had an aggressive form of cancer that required immediate treatment; I had a suicidal sister who believed her only chance at happiness was to work in the tearoom I was no longer opening; I had just spilled my guts — literally — to the chap who was shagging my husband.

  I should have felt like jumping out the nearest window but I didn’t. Something was nagging at me and stopping me from spiralling further downward, below rock bottom. Something was happening to me. Something had changed. Something was pointing me in a different direction.

  Maybe it was the realisation, the sudden urgent utter conviction that Crystal, Monty, Harry, Poppy, Mum, Dad, Stanley, and Will would all fight to keep me from my lonely bedsit in Brighton.

  Maybe it was that Charles, previously known as ‘Charles’, had just coped with excruciating embarrassment by producing a pot of Lady Grey, leaf of course, and lemon biscuits, for heaven’s sake.

  The truth was that I’d never felt more like a cup of tea and a biscuit in all my life.

  And the other truth was that I was no longer alone.

  CHARLES

  At first,
I just wanted the floor to open up and swallow me whole then spit me out in Mexico or China or somewhere far, far away where no one would ever find me no matter how hard they looked.

  Really, you could not dream up such a dreadful coincidence. But as Florence herself pointed out later, it really wasn’t such a coincidence at all when you thought about it. There was she, in London, being in need of a specialised surgeon, and there was I, in London, being one. I had assumed Crystal knew I had rooms in Harley Street as well as being a consultant at the Whittington but why would she? I’d never thought to spell it out.

  Had I, no doubt we could have avoided the whole sorry disaster altogether.

  Although of course it wasn’t a disaster, in the end. There was a moment, after it became clear to her who I was, when if she’d had a gun I think she would have pulled it out and shot me. And who could have blamed her? As it was, she did not appear to be armed. She just sat there looking like she really wished she was, during which all I could think to do was to ask Evelyn to bring in some tea.

  There’s no problem can’t be solved by a cup of tea, my grandmother always used to say, and while I didn’t particularly think of this when I first asked for it, I thought it afterwards because no sooner had I taken my finger off the intercom button than Florence started to laugh.

  She’s a very attractive woman anyway, but when she laughs she’s quite beautiful. I could see then what Harry had seen in her, why it must have been so hard for him to leave, despite the circumstances. Without seeing her in the flesh I hadn’t truly appreciated his position. I’d just thought, if your heart’s not in it, get out, old man. But having her sitting there, laughing, after such a dreadful thing had just happened, I fell in love with her a little myself. She was quite captivating.

  And then Crystal, poor Crystal, whom I really should have noticed had got such a fright to begin with, also started to laugh. An Australian laugh is never quite as catchy as an English one, of course, but hers was pretty infectious all the same. Despite the fact that mortification still clung to my own innards in spasms, I too joined in the laughter.

  I laughed till Florence cried, and then Crystal cried too, and then Evelyn brought in the tea. She’s seen plenty of tears before so wasn’t at all fazed.

  ‘It just can’t keep getting worse,’ Florence said as I poured for her. ‘It just can’t. Not everything. Something has to start getting better.’

  ‘It will,’ I told her and that wasn’t an empty promise. I didn’t know all there was to know at that stage about her illness but I knew about her life. And just having Crystal there with her in my office to discuss her treatment was the beginning of the something getting better. ‘I can help you,’ I said.

  And she thanked me. Very sweetly, she thanked me. Then told me her own lemon biscuits were better than the Duchy of Cornwall and the other ones put together.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  When my taxi pulled up outside the house Will’s truck was in my driveway and for the first time since I had met him I allowed whatever was stirring inside me to rise to the top.

  Anticipation was the cherry on my cupcake in this particular instance.

  Anticipation. It was a sensation that had been missing in my world in recent times and allowing it to envelop me felt like being rolled in chocolate and sprinkled with Cadbury Flake.

  I ran up the outside stairs of the house and flung open the door to find Will mid-conversation with Poppy, who still had her gardening gloves on. I checked her face to see if he’d mentioned I had put a halt to the tearoom, at which point I noticed there were bits of what was obviously a semi-industrial kitchen stacked in the far corner by the back door.

  ‘Don’t be cross,’ Will said, ‘but I got it for a song. A mate of Sid’s has just closed down his gastro pub in Mile End and he was virtually giving this away but I had to collect it this morning so —’

  ‘It’ll be perfect, don’t you think?’ Poppy interrupted, clasping her hands excitedly in front of her. ‘I was just telling Will about the plan, the me-helping-you plan.’

  Will and I looked at each other. He was silently pleading with me, I could tell, to go ahead, to do it, and I was silently pleading the exact same thing.

  ‘Is something wrong?’ Poppy asked.

  ‘No,’ Will and I answered simultaneously.

  Then more silence. Not the dread-laden, are-you-really-my-husband’s-boyfriend sort of silence that I had so recently experienced but an electric anticipatory could-you-really-be-my-own-boyfriend sort of silence, which is not really a silence at all. Well, you can’t hear anything, but you can feel it.

  ‘Oh my God,’ Poppy said, her jaw dropping open as she looked from me to him and back again. ‘You two!’

  I had so much to say it had all got stuck in my chest then dropped to my hands, which hung heavy and motionless at my sides. I couldn’t remember what I usually did with them.

  Even Will seemed incapable of speaking, of moving, his eyes still just searching mine.

  ‘I am just going to go outside and finish pruning the … erm, I’ll find something to prune,’ Poppy said and headed for the door. ‘Oh, my God,’ she mouthed at me behind his back before she disappeared. ‘Oh, my God!’

  We stood there on opposite sides of the room for I don’t know how long. Probably not long at all but it felt like forever. I was almost scared to breathe. I was almost scared to do anything. Almost.

  ‘Whatever you have to tell me, it’s OK,’ Will finally said. ‘Honestly. It’s OK.’

  And just like that, I wasn’t scared any more.

  ‘I believe you,’ I told him. Then we walked towards each other and he took me in his arms. That was it. He just took me in his arms. I nestled there, against his chest, breathing him in, feeling his heart beating against my shoulder, smelling him, and if I had died right then and there, I truly believe I would have died happy.

  This is what it’s about, I thought. This is what life is about. And it could all end in a minute, or tomorrow, or next week, or next year, but it wasn’t ended just yet and it felt utterly glorious.

  ‘I have cancer,’ I said into the softness of his shirt and he clutched me even tighter then, rocked me gently from side to side. ‘It’s in my bowel, or my colon, or whatever it’s called, and it’s very unsexy and it might be in other places too but I’m not sure. Although I think I’m going to die, which is why I didn’t want to open the tearoom and I didn’t want anything to happen between us because if this kills me you’ll be left all on your own and I just couldn’t bear that.’

  He folded me tighter still into his body.

  ‘I knew there was something going on,’ he said. ‘I thought there might be someone else.’

  ‘But isn’t this worse?’ I asked, my eyes scrunched closed against the possibility. ‘Isn’t this much, much worse? I might die, Will.’

  He pulled back then, but only enough to take me by my shoulders and look me in the eyes again.

  ‘But you might not,’ he said.

  ‘But I might,’ I said again.

  ‘Florence, you might not. And anyway, if we only have one hour together it will still be the best hour of my life.’

  ‘Are you telling me you only have an hour?’ I asked him. You don’t go from being glass-half-empty to glass-half-full in an instant, after all.

  ‘I’m telling you I have forever,’ Will answered. ‘We both do. I will look after you forever, Florence, no matter how long that is. In sickness and in health, I will look after you. I don’t care if you live till the end of next week or till you’re a hundred.’

  ‘I’m very close to a hundred now,’ I said. ‘But I’ve decided that doesn’t matter.’

  I remembered my dream then, the one where Will had told me that he loved me, that he would always be there for me, that with him beside me I had nothing to fear and never would ever again.

  So I surrendered, that moment: I surrendered to whatever life had in store for me. I’d survived on my own two feet without a job, without a
husband, without my son, without a compliant digestive system. I knew I could do it, I knew I could survive, but I also knew now that there was more to life, more to living, than just surviving.

  Maybe rotten things did happen in threes. Or maybe they happened in sixes. But do you know what I discovered that day? You don’t have to count them.

  Will moved in more or less straight away. Time was precious, after all. And in the circumstances, once everyone knew what the circumstances were, everyone who knew and loved me agreed it was the best possible outcome.

  I had my surgery — Charles did indeed do the honours — and it went exceedingly well. I recovered in less than four weeks. I took each day after that as it came.

  One of the best days was about five months later when we opened Rose’s to the public. It took longer to buy tables and chairs and cake forks and napkins than I had ever imagined and it took a while to fully regain my strength but everyone pitched in and helped. Even Marguerite, who became a regular at dropping in well before the doors were opened to the public, proved indispensable when it came to sourcing non-matching china. Plus she bumped into Sinead, the cleaner from my old shop, crying outside the tube station because she’d been dumped by her fiancé of one day, so we got a cleaner too. Then it was just a matter of me making the cakes and Poppy making the suggestions and taking the money.

  We opened with a grand gala to which everyone near and dear to me, to us, was invited. The food was a triumph. There were plain scones and cheese ones and date ones made from spelt flour (for Poppy) yet still, amazingly, quite delicious. There were brandy snaps with triple sec filling, there were tiny strawberry tarts, there were chocolate cupcakes, berry cupcakes, lemon cupcakes, chocolate-berry-lemon cupcakes. There were éclairs, there were bite-sized quiches, there were cucumber sandwiches, there was tiramisu served in shot glasses (Monty’s idea) and sugar-free carob balls that were at least chock full of macadamia nuts (Crystal’s idea). There were cherry and pinot noir dark chocolate truffles, made by my gorgeous man and adorning the top stack of each three-tiered tray on every one of the tables in our beautiful garden.