I looked just like I had before the phone call.
How the hell could I have cheered up so quickly? It wasn’t right. Nothing was right. I couldn’t even go about having a fatal illness the normal way. I’d lost my job, been left by my husband, had a secretly married son and a half-renovated house, and now I was no doubt going to make a complete and utter mess of being poorly and, soon enough, dead.
This terrible truth made me ache all the more. And even the ache wasn’t normal as it wasn’t, the way one might expect, for a cure for cancer or the secret to eternal life. It was for dark chocolate and banana cake with fresh raspberries and sour cream icing.
Rose had made this cake for me once, after Janie McPherson invited everyone in the class but me to her twelfth birthday party. Truly, biting into that decadent slice piled high with gooey chocolate made me forget, if only briefly, the pain of such a bitter blow. It wasn’t the secret to eternal life, but it was bloody delicious.
So, I might not have the coffee enema thing but I had something: the will to bake.
Or the will to at least think about baking.
At least it was will.
ROSE
ROSE’S BANANA AND CHOCOLATE CAKE WITH FRESH RASPBERRIES
1¾ cups all-purpose flour
100g granulated white sugar
50g light-brown sugar
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
¼ teaspoon salt
150g dark chocolate
3 large very ripe bananas, mashed well
3 large eggs, lightly beaten
120g unsalted butter, melted and cooled
1 cup raspberries
Preheat oven to 180˚C and place the oven rack in the middle of the oven. Butter or spray a cake tin.
In a large bowl combine the flour, sugars, baking powder, baking soda, salt, and chocolate. Set aside.
In a medium-sized bowl combine the mashed bananas, eggs and melted butter. With a rubber spatula or wooden spoon, lightly fold the wet ingredients (banana mixture) into the dry ingredients until just combined and the batter is thick and chunky. Add raspberries and spoon the batter into the prepared tin. Bake about one hour or until a toothpick inserted in the centre comes out clean. Place on a wire rack to cool for five minutes and then remove from tin.
Let cool and ice.
Icing
250g dark chocolate
1 cup sour cream
⅔ teaspoon vanilla
Melt chocolate in a double boiler or a large metal bowl set over a saucepan of simmering water, stirring occasionally. Remove bowl from heat, then whisk in sour cream and vanilla. Cool to room temperature, stirring occasionally (icing will become thick enough to spread). You must work quickly and spread it before it becomes too thick. (If icing does become stiff, reheat over simmering water, then cool and try again.)
Top with a layer of fresh raspberries.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
As it happened, the will to bake, or think about baking, or live for that matter, came and went over the next couple of hours.
I stayed in my room to begin with, but the telephone tortured me with my inability to pick it up and use it to ask someone, anyone, for help. This gave me the shakes, which in turn meant more violent outbursts in the bathroom.
Meanwhile, my funeral had turned into a state event like Princess Diana’s during which no one would be able to get to the hairdresser’s or the supermarket, causing the population in general to end up hating me.
I needed a break from myself, I knew I did. Lurching between visualising my mourners and my diseased colon was starting to overwhelm me. Rose’s banana and chocolate cake with fresh raspberries would definitely sort this out, I reasoned, and I was trying to summon up the energy to go out and shop for the ingredients for it when I heard Will’s voice sail up the stairs and snake its way through the cracks in the door to find me.
‘Florence, fancy a cup of tea?’
Stanley must have gone home. I imagined Will standing at the bottom of the stairs by the kitchen, thinking of me, calling up to me.
‘Yes, please,’ I answered in a voice I knew he could not possibly hear.
‘Florence?’ He called again. And again. Then I heard his boots on the stairs, his voice getting closer until he was obviously just outside the bedroom door.
‘Florence, are you in there?’
‘Yes,’ I answered, dully, again. I was in a sort of a trance. Quite pleasant actually. In my own feeble way I was luring Will towards me. I don’t know why. Or I pretended I didn’t.
He rapped gently on the door.
‘I’m here,’ I said, although who knew for how long. And anyway, I had been ordered to seek out a friend, had I not?
Then the door opened and his head appeared around the side of it. ‘Florence, are you all right?’ he asked, looking around as if expecting to find someone else there.
I just looked at him. He had a white shirt on, as crisp as you like, and not at all dirty. How could that happen? He was a builder, for God’s sake. I couldn’t wear white from my bedroom to the bathroom without getting thirty-two different-coloured stains on it.
‘May I come in?’ When I didn’t reply, he stepped cautiously into my bedroom.
As I looked at him I felt every healthy cell in my body stand up and go, ‘Oh, yes, please!’
It was a bit like being electrocuted or shot with a Taser gun, only none of the outside of me moved. Just the inside. But it wasn’t a made-up thing, it was real. It was more real than the measles. I’d only been told about them — mysterious people in white coats had identified them under a microscope somewhere, had written reports, had maybe even felt a quiver of emotion themselves at delivering their malignant opinions — but I couldn’t feel the measles. I couldn’t feel them at all. Will, on the other hand, I felt. In the marrow of my bones, in the flow of my blood, in the goose bumps of my skin, I felt him.
‘Florence?’ he said softly again, moving towards the bed.
I did nothing, just kept looking at him, feeling him and wondering just how my insides and my outsides could be at such odds. I don’t think I had experienced that sort of distance from myself before. How strange, that in the space of a single day, my body would deliver two such peculiar revelations.
One: that I harboured a disease that was probably killing me.
Two: that Will and I were quite possibly made for each other.
Scientists may not have had a piece of that in a Petri dish to poke at but it was every bit as much a lethal diagnosis as the colon one. It was what my cellular structure was telling me. My silly cells had been looking the other way when the measles walked in the door but when Will arrived they had stood up and paid attention.
Did I believe in love at first sight? Yes, of course I did. It’s what I thought had happened with Harry. But in retrospect, what did a fourteen-year-old’s cellular structure know? That chocolate fuelled pimples and a boy with a cute fringe smiling at you meant you finally had a boyfriend. And a good boyfriend, too, there was no denying that. Well, I’d never worried about him cheating on me with my girlfriends, although as it turned out there was a reason for that. And we loved each other, there was no denying that either. From the beginning, we loved each other. But maybe it was a brotherly/sisterly sort of love? I couldn’t remember Harry setting me on fire with lust or whatever it was that set people in love on fire. It was more like he fanned whatever fire I already had.
Will and I, though, were two good old-fashioned sticks just made to rub together. I don’t mean that we were made for each other in a lovey-dovey romantic novel sort of a way; the way where it all falls perfectly into place just because one’s a square hole and the other’s a square peg and oh, whoopsie, here we both are, how marvellous.
No, it was chemical. I reacted to him. It was as simple as that. And it wasn’t because I’d just found out about the measles and was losing my marbles. From the moment I had first opened the door to him there’d been a whiff of it: a
stiffening of the arm hairs, a darkening of the pupils, a scent of something wonderful just around the corner. And then there’d been the moment at the kitchen table when he’d made the cup of tea when it became a tangible thing. Or as tangible as something invisible can get, especially something invisible that may or may not exist.
Yes, we were made for each other. I knew that now. Maybe that was a measles or a marbles thing but I still knew it. But what a truly, deeply awful time to figure it out because for a variety of different reasons — I was so much older than him and so recently separated from the love of my life, and mother of a son with whom I was engaged in a complicated sort of war I didn’t know how to fight or surrender from and I was ill — nothing could ever come of it.
Will crouched in front of me and put one hand on my knee, the chocolatey one. He had such concern for me, this surprise addition to my household. His eyes were full of it, his face was full of it, his body too. And there was something else. Something more than concern. In my current state I seemed to be able to see right through him, like Superman, and what I saw was that Will was full of all this wonderful love, wonderful endless unused love. I could tell that because I recognised the symptoms. I was full of wonderful endless unused love too.
This was how we were made for each other. It was too tragic for words.
‘Florence, you’re worrying me,’ he said. ‘You look so upset. Whatever’s the matter?’
The tears I had been holding back, keeping teetering within the brim of my eyes, spilled over and flowed down my cheeks. Why is it that sympathy brings them on? Shouldn’t sympathy dry them up? What was that about?
‘Oh, Florence,’ Will said. ‘Whatever it is, please tell me. Please let me help.’
If only he could. He squeezed my hand and I realised I could trace his calluses already, so familiar was the territory of his lovely, young, healthy body, its geography somehow already imprinted on my mind.
I looked into those blue eyes of his and right down at the bottom of my heart where I trusted only a few scant droplets of truth — like Monty was the best thing that ever happened to me, I actually had really good legs, my fresh date scones were better than anyone else’s — I knew that in this tiny pocket of time Will felt the same way about me as I felt about him.
But even if I’d had the guts to act on this instinct, I’d just been told in no uncertain terms by my body that it was not to be trusted and that it was the boss, so I could take my delicious chemistry and stick it up my arse, along with every gloved hand known to medicine.
While I was busy not acting on my instincts, however, Will kissed me. His lips swept away my fear like a smooth velvet curtain. I don’t think I had ever properly been kissed before, no offence to Harry, sort of, and actually I only thought of him embarrassingly fleetingly. To be kissed by Harry was lovely, is what I actually thought, but to be kissed by Will was exquisite. I felt it in my toenails.
His hand was on the back of my neck, stroking some little strip of me that I didn’t know until then only existed to be stroked just like that. The smell of him was like baking bread and sunshine and salt. His energy, without wanting to sound too Tannington Hall, pulsed from his lips to mine and down my body to the poisonous parts and I could almost feel it light up the dark like a shooting star or an emergency flare.
We perched on the end of the bed, twisted around each other, kissing like teenagers, although not the teenager I had been myself, and I could almost see a neon light blinking the word DESIRE above us. I desired him. I desired him like I had never desired anything before ever in my life. And because of our cellular bonding, I knew he desired me.
And then we were lying down and I could feel his weight on top of me, his hips on my hips, his thighs on my thighs, his chest on my chest, his tongue on my neck and the power of him, the good health of him, was suddenly too much to bear. I was damaged goods, in more ways than one, and he deserved better. Better, younger, stronger, other.
‘No!’ I cried and turned my head away. ‘No.’
We lay there panting, then I pushed him off, sat up, buttoned my shirt, bit my aching lips, and ignored my invisible quivering.
Will stayed on the bed. I couldn’t look at him but I could see out the corner of my eye that he was lying on his side, up on one elbow.
I would have thought he would be embarrassed or apologetic, but he wasn’t.
‘But why not?’ he asked, with almost laughably polite curiosity.
I ran my fingers through my hair and straightened my collar.
‘Florence, why not?’ He reached for my elbow and I was amazed I didn’t burst into flames at his touch. ‘There’s something there, you know there is.’
Why was I being tortured like this? What woman in the world did not pray to God to be sent a man who looked and felt like Will and who said such things? But to be sent this man on this day? Someone somewhere was having a huge laugh at my expense. Someone somewhere knew that today was not the day to have sex with the man I was meant to be with.
If I had sex right now with the man I was meant to be with and I got pregnant then I would die and leave him with a poor little motherless baby. Although this was a slim chance because I was old and my ovaries were buggered and my body was riddled with some disease that no doubt ate pregnancy hormones for breakfast, it was still not a chance I could take. Even if I didn’t get pregnant I would still die and leave him anyway. And the fact of the matter was I couldn’t do that. Because if the shoe was on the other foot, if Will died and left me I would not want to survive without him. I knew now what it was like to be left and just imagining leaving Will, even for a really good reason like being dead, tore a piece from my heart and I couldn’t do it.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said, covering my face, shaking my head. ‘I’m so sorry.’
He sat up then and took me in his arms, rocking me gently and resting his perfect chin on the top of my head.
‘No, I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘It’s too much for you, Florence. It’s just all too much. And too soon. There’s time,’ he said, in a lullaby voice. ‘There’s plenty of time.’
Only now I didn’t believe him.
WILL
She tasted just the way I’d imagined. Like chocolate, but sort of floral. I’m not much good when it comes to flowers so I couldn’t exactly pinpoint it but there was definitely a hint of something rose-like, I think, or maybe lavender. It was a very feminine taste, anyway. Not girly, not even womanly, just feminine in all the best ways I could possibly imagine.
I shouldn’t have kissed her, I kicked myself afterwards, it really was too soon, but it’s just that the moment seemed so right. And a woman doesn’t kiss back like that, with her whole entire body, with everything she has, unless the moment is right. I’m sure of it.
But something was holding her back. The thing that had her holed up in her room in the first place, I suppose. It wasn’t Harry, or Monty, or Crystal, or the construction problems. It was something else.
I wished she’d tell me, let me help her. I could have, I was sure of it. But there was no point me having all the confidence in the world, because she was the one who needed it. She needed to have it in me because I was a step ahead of her. I already had confidence in her. Florence wasn’t a risk for me, she was a certainty.
Do I believe in love at first sight? I have to say, yes, I do. Unravelling it from lust at first sight is the problem but I’ve learned that the hard way. I’ve learned everything the hard way. But at least I have learned.
The timing for me and Florence was not perhaps right, although it also wasn’t wrong. She’d only just split up from her husband but at least she had split up from him. Because the truth is, if I’d met her anywhere else, at any other time, I would have felt exactly the same way about her. It’s an odd sensation: like having known a stranger already, intimately, forever.
I believed it would work out. I believed she would eventually trust me, trust herself.
Of course, I wasn’t exactly a catch. I didn’t h
ave much money. I didn’t even own a house or my own flat. Just my truck and a few bits of furniture and the odd painting. But I knew I could take care of Florence, I really could. And I knew I could love her like no one else could ever love her, no disrespect to anyone who has. I knew that for a fact.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
It was such a peculiar thing, being desperate to see Will and to avoid him all at the same time. It barely gave me time to concentrate on having the measles. I kept wondering what would have happened if I hadn’t gone to see Young Nick, if I hadn’t had the colonoscopy, if I hadn’t been given the awful diagnosis. Would we still have met on the edge of my bed? Would we have kissed? Kept on kissing? Ripped off our clothes and had wild, passionate sex? Got married and had babies? Grown old together and turned into one of those ancient couples that never go anywhere without holding hands?
Of course it was possible that had I not got that phone call, Will would not have come into my room because I probably wouldn’t have been in it. And I most likely would not have realised that we were meant to be together because I wasn’t usually the sort of person who thought like that. Staring death in the face had brought that on. I’d never stared death in the face before. I’d stared over its shoulder, I suppose, when I went into labour with Monty but even then I didn’t believe there was any reason for anything to go wrong. I was too young and silly to know how many complications the world was full of.
Now, I knew. And it changed everything.
Before Young Nick I’d felt something for Will but it was a by-the-by sort of a something upon which I don’t think I would have acted because I had so little experience in that field. Plus, I’d only been separated from my husband for five minutes and it seemed a trifle indecent to be contemplating a lover quite so quickly. Before Young Nick, I would not have admitted that the something I felt even involved contemplating a lover.
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