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

home. Not that I have anything baked by human hand at my place but I certainly can manage a good cup of tea and there’s nothing wrong with a HobNob.
    Anyway, I said I’d keep in touch with Florence because I thought she was on to something and as I say, she would need a plumber. I also thought she might need a shoulder to cry on and happens I’ve got very reliable shoulders.

 
    CHAPTER SIX
    When I woke up the day after Harry left me and Stanley Morris fixed the tap, I had a few glorious ordinary moments before remembering my life had turned to custard.
    I rolled over in the bed, all warm and toastily contented the way you are when you’ve slept badly most the night but deeply in the end. I saw with half-closed eyes through the gap in the curtains that it was a sunny day. I smiled and stretched out in the bed, my foot hitting a foreign object: Sparky. Lurch. What was he doing there? Lurch. Where was Harry? Lurch. What had happened to my life as a gainfully employed happily married mother of one? Lurch, lurch, lurch.
    I would have given anything then to disappear back into that bliss of not knowing. I understood, for the first time perhaps, how drugs or drink or anything else you might end up in rehab for would help dull the pain of reality. I felt so wretched once real life overwhelmed me with its new hideousness thatI would have swallowed anything at all if I thought it might make me feel even the tiniest bit better.
    But there was nothing to swallow, not in my room anyway, unless you counted Panadol. And there were only two of them and they both had fluff on them from being under the bed for at least a year.
    I rolled over again, chilled now, and lay there wishing that I was dead, although I could never do that to Monty, so I wished that Harry was dead instead, then realised that would hurt Monty too. Instead, I wished that Harry wasn’t gay, that things were the way they always had been, that I did not feel so horribly bloody scared. I wished that it was night-time so I could go to sleep and wake up and have those few innocent moments again. And I wished that wishing got you somewhere other than where you started off in the first place.
    Then I thought of little Edith, another regular customer/ visitor at the shop I had half owned until the day before. I stopped thinking about her for a few moments to revisit the minor horror of being dumped by my business partner just hours before being dumped by my husband then, finding that too unspeakably awful, thought of Edith again instead.
    I’d initially met her when she came in to talk about selling some of her gorgeous Spode china after her husband Arthur died. They’d been married more than fifty years and never spent a single night apart, she told me that first day, as two tiny contained tears rolled down her small, perfectly made-up face.
    ‘The mornings are the worst,’ she’d confessed in little more than a whisper as I attempted to comfort her with some ever-so-slightly undercooked gingernuts. ‘There’s this little pocket of time between waking up and realising what has happened where everything is just fine. And then I remember.’
    I’d felt sorry enough for her at the time, now I saw how truly excruciatingly cruel that was — to get a little island holiday from your grief just makes it feel worse when you come back home. And I was grieving, I recognised that. No one had actually died but the future I assumed I was going to have was certainly dead and buried. Even if Harry became un-gay we could never erase the fact that for a while at least he thought he was and there had been a Charles from the Whittington on the scene.
    I looked at the phone on the bedside table and thought of ringing Poppy. But just imagining saying what I had to say made me feel so ill I couldn’t contemplate it further. Then I remembered she was on a face-reading seminar in Framlingham or some such so I wouldn’t be able to get in touch with her anyway. She and my parents didn’t