Free On Top of Everything by Sarah-Kate Lynch Page A

me. Know what my old mum told me when my missus run off? “It’s not an arm or a leg, Stan,” she said. Not an arm or a leg. Thought she was being bloody miserable at the time but the old girl was right. It don’t kill you. Life does go on.’
    Just having him in my kitchen was the surest sign of this I could ever concoct.
    ‘We have a son,’ I said. ‘I just don’t know what …’
    ‘How old is he then, your boy?’ Stanley Morris asked as he started to pack away his tools.
    ‘Nineteen.’
    ‘Well, there you go. Old enough to understand it’s not an arm or a leg,’ he said with great confidence as he closed his tool box. ‘My Lizzie was fine. She was about the same age as that, maybe a year or two older, and she was fine. A bit down on her mum for a while but at the end of the day, she’s still her mum.’ He checked his watch. ‘Here, look at that. I’ve got a rendezvous with a blocked drain in Hammersmith in about half an hour but I could murder a cup of tea in the meantime.’
    He was doing this for me — a complete stranger — I knewhe was. And I was pathetically grateful.
    ‘I’ll put the kettle on,’ I said, brushing fragments of a gravy boat off a kitchen chair. ‘I’ve got Earl Grey or Fortnum’s Royal Blend. Do you have a preference?’
    ‘Now there’s a woman after my own heart,’ Stanley said, picking up the handle of the gravy boat and dropping it in the rubbish bin. ‘Find Earl Grey a bit delicate at this stage in the day so I’ll take t’other, thank you kindly. Like your tea then, Mrs Dowling?’
    ‘Please, call me Florence,’ I said, getting Rose’s favourite cups out, switching the saucers and choosing a tea cosy that looked like a bunch of grapes that Poppy had knitted for me years before. ‘And yes, I do like my tea. In fact, I’m thinking of converting downstairs into a tearoom. What do you think of that for an idea?’
    I don’t know what possessed me to come out with this because I wasn’t thinking about it at all or, if I was, I shouldn’t have been.
    ‘I think that’s brilliant, that is,’ said Stanley Morris with great enthusiasm. ‘What’s more, you’ll be needing a plumber.’

     
STANLEY MORRIS  

    I knew the moment I clapped eyes on Mrs Dowling, or Florence as she asked me to call her, that she’d just had one hell of a shock. I suppose I looked just like that when Beryl bunked off on me and all. Still, if there’s one thing I have learned it’s that if you carry on as though nothing strange is happening, it usually stops being strange.
    You get used to walking into disasters in my line of work, plumbing ones and otherwise. People can get all gussied up and pretend they’re one thing or another when they go out in the world, after all, but catch them at home and that’s pretty much the way they really are.
    I felt right sorry for her, I can tell you that. Her husband coming out, as they say, and that tap of hers leaking all over the show. She was such a nice lady too, polite and helpful, despite what had just gone on. She told me over a cuppa and a slice of lemon cake that she’d just lost her job and all. On the same day. Ouch, that’s got to hurt, dunnit?
    But I thought right away she could have been on to something with that tearoom idea. My sister Marion lives up in Ely, it’s the place with the nice cathedral near Cambridge. Anyway, there’s this tearoom there, Peacock’s, right on the river. Some lawyer chap got fed up with spending half his life in the Ely police station so turned his downstairs into a tearooms and it’s packed to the gunnels every weekend and most days during the week.
Sounds a bit like what Florence wanted to do with her place in Little Venice. Corker spot for it.
    There’s not a lot of good places for a cuppa around that neck of the woods, truth be told. Starbucks on every bleeding corner in the West End but try getting a good cup of tea and a slice of something baked by human hand and you may as well just go