It took me one minute on Google and two phone calls to get an appointment with London’s most highly recommended colorectal surgeon. You have to love the internet, don’t you? His secretary told me there wasn’t a chance at first but then she spoke to the consultant himself and came back saying that it appeared they would be able to slot us in after all. I supposed they thought Florence’s case was that urgent.
Next, I rang Nick March back to get him to fax a referral over to the surgeon’s office. Th en I made an appointment for a CT scan the following day, and I changed the time for a job interview I had so I could go with Florence to her appointment. After that I went to buy flowers.
It was all on the list.
You can laugh at lists — and the people who make them — but let me tell you this: some days, when everything else feels totally beyond your control, a few ticks on a piece of paper is about as good as it gets.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
When I woke the next morning I knew my life was about to change. Again. After all, my before and after worlds had collided when I spilled the beans to Crystal and it was inevitable that chain reactions would follow. The first of which was starting with my visit to the rooms of Mr Worthington, Harley Street, at eleven o’clock.
I pushed the unpleasant prospect of another ‘internal examination’ from my mind with a shiver and cuddled down beneath my quilt, my thoughts turning instead, without me directing them there, to Will. With all I have on my mind, I asked myself, why think of him? Then it occurred to me that I had just watched the bedside clock tick past seven-thirty and I had not heard him let himself in the front door.
Good, I thought, maybe he had finally got the message, given up, gone away. I turned over and curled into a ball. It’s just that I had become used to the sound of him letting himself in. It seemed odd for it to be seven-thirty-five and not to have heard it.
I still hadn’t heard it by seven-forty-five, nor seven-forty-seven, nor seven-forty-eight. By the time I went downstairs to make my breakfast, it was past eight and I was feeling irritable in the way you do if your socks don’t match or your knickers are scratchy. These are not big problems but they can still ruin your day.
Since when had Will become someone I expected to be anywhere at any particular time anyway, I asked myself as I spread honey and apricot jam on a muffin? Mostly I expected him not to be there and he was. Strangely, I had not been as irritated by that as I was currently by finding him absent, as per my wishes. I wasn’t entirely sure what that was about.
After breakfast I started to reorganise the pantry alphabetically but ran out of steam by B for baking soda because the shapes weren’t working together. I was considering whether colour coding would cause the same problem when there was a timid knock at the front door.
It wasn’t going to be Will, because he had a key. Crystal had gone out and was meeting me at Harley Street so it wasn’t going to be her either. She had a key anyway, as did Monty, who was off somewhere doing his own thing and not telling me anything about it.
The timid knock repeated itself so I returned the almonds, anchovies and asparagus to their previous positions and went downstairs to see who it was.
Poppy stood on my doorstep, a red beret on top of her orange curls and a suitcase in one hand.
I was so surprised to see her I almost didn’t spend a split second scanning the street to see if Will’s truck was approaching, which it wasn’t.
‘Oh, Effie!’ Poppy cried, throwing herself at me. ‘Can you believe it? It’s me! I’m here! It’s so good to see you, how utterly divine! I hope you don’t mind me coming.’
Of course I didn’t mind, but I was astounded. She hated the city usually and I couldn’t remember the last time she’d come on her own. Plus, the timing wasn’t brilliant. I had Mr Worthington, after all, which I wasn’t ready to explain just yet so would have to leave her on her own and lie about where I was going or she would want to come too.
She must have seen the worry on my face. ‘Oh, I should have rung,’ she wailed. ‘I got the first train. Beth said I should have rung but I wanted it to be a surprise.’
I pulled her inside and shut the door.
‘Don’t be silly, it’s fine. It’s wonderful. I love surprises. It’s just I didn’t expect to see you. And — you look so good, Poppy.’ She did. Like a different person from the one I had left behind swaddled in a cashmere blanket near the vegie patch at Tannington Hall.
‘I’ve had the most wonderful idea and I wanted to come and tell you about it in person,’ she said, pulling off her beret, shaking her curls. She wore long sleeves to cover the scars on her wrists but otherwise she looked the picture of health.
‘Oh, look at all this lovely space,’ she cried, looking around the abandoned building site that was my home’s ground floor, not even noticing the gaping hole in the floor or the scaffolding stacked up or the dust or the lack of builder and plumber. ‘And the beautiful light! Oh, it’s gorgeous! It’s perfect!’
She twirled around from the office side to the TV room side and it was such a pleasure to see her back to being her over-the-top happy little self that the sick feeling I had about my own personal lack of Will in my life drained momentarily away.
‘You’re pretty gorgeous yourself, Poppy,’ I told her, kicking myself for not having the slightest vestige of gluten-free confection in the house. ‘You’ve got some life back in your face.’
She twirled back over to me, took my hand and beamed. ‘I feel good. I feel, well, maybe not gorgeous,’ she said, ‘but so much better and it’s because of you.’
‘Because of me?’ I had spoken to her on the phone every few days and sent a couple of funny cards but other than that I thought I’d been too preoccupied to be much help.
‘Yes!’ She was practically quivering with excitement. ‘Because of what you said to me in the garden at home, about needing to be out in the world not hidden away at home and then I thought of your rot and Daddy’s cheque and you having something to look forward to and I knew then that was what I was missing in my life. Something to look forward to. Because the thing I had been most looking forward to never happened to me and that’s what was getting on top of me. So I decided I needed another something to look forward to, one that could happen, and then it hit me and it was so obvious, I couldn’t imagine why none of us had thought of it before.’
I had no idea what she was talking about but still, just looking at her dancing eyes and twittering hands and radiant face made me want her to have it.
‘So are you going to tell me what it is?’
‘Well, it’s the same thing as you,’ she said, with a sweet happy smile, as one arm swept around the vastness of my new over-sized open-plan venture-that-never-was-to-be.
‘The tearoom! I want to come and help you run the tearoom.’
An engine roared outside and I used this as an excuse to look out the window to see if it was Will and to plot how I would handle the next few moments. I was in shock. This was a disaster.
‘It was Archie’s idea really,’ Poppy continued, oblivious to my stalling tactic, ‘because we were having one of his brainstorming afternoons where he was helping me workshop my skills and to be honest it was getting a bit depressing until we remembered last year at the village fair.’
‘The village fair?’ I echoed, my mind whirring, as I picked up Poppy’s suitcase and headed upstairs.
‘Yes, last year I helped on the bric-à-brac stall,’ Poppy chirruped behind me, ‘doing the change and suggesting things to people. Even Mrs Parsons, you know, the big bosomy lady who plays the Church of England organ, said I had done a wonderful job and she’s the one who adds everything up at the end so she should know. So Archie said, “What about Effie’s tearoom? Maybe you could do the change and the suggestions at Effie’s tearoom?” And at first I thought that was the most ridiculous idea because I wouldn’t know what to do. I’d be useless. I’d just get in everybody’s way and drive them mad and I don’t know the first thing about
flour or icing sugar or any of that sort of thing.’
‘Lemon verbena tea?’ I asked, nodding encouragingly, hoping I didn’t look as wretched as I felt. ‘Crystal loves it.’
Poppy’s eyes, which had been glistening already, moistened even more at this.
‘You’re getting on? Oh, how wonderful! I’m so proud of you, Eff. And anyway, then I thought, well you could be in the kitchen, doing the baking and making things with the flour and icing sugar, and I could be showing people to their tables and giving them menus and taking their money. I wouldn’t ruin everything, I promise I wouldn’t.’
‘Of course you wouldn’t ruin everything!’ Why would she think that? Oh, shit! Could I just have one single day when life wasn’t full of the most ridiculous complications? How could I tell her there was going to be no tearoom? How could I tell her the thing she had chosen to look forward to was as unlikely at this point as her little redheaded baby?
Another car backfired outside and I crossed to the kitchen window to have a look.
‘Are you waiting for someone? Am I in the way?’
‘Of course you’re not! I’m delighted that you’re here. But I do just have to dash out for a bit to a …’ I tried to think of something Poppy really wouldn’t want to do with me. ‘To a cheese tasting, I’m afraid,’ I told her. ‘Twelve different sorts, cow, goat and sheep. But mainly cow,’ I emphasised, in case goat and sheep weren’t dairy. ‘Sorry, didn’t know you were coming when I arranged it.’
She grimaced. ‘Oh well, I can’t be much help in the cheese department, I’m afraid. But I could do a bit of gardening out the front while you’re gone,’ she suggested. ‘It needs a bit of work before we open if we’re going to put tables and chairs out there. I thought we could make a couple of sort of garden “rooms” so people could hide away a little bit. What do you think? Rose bushes, obviously, but maybe some tall cosmos and a bit of box hedging and something fragrant like jasmine or daphne?’
‘Lovely,’ I said. ‘Garden away.’
I wasn’t going to close her down now. I had Crystal to meet at Mr Worthington’s offices. I’d get through that and then I would break Poppy’s heart.
I walked to Harley Street: along Regent’s Canal, cutting through the park, past the rose gardens, which were blooming in all their glory. The smell was almost hypnotic. For a fleeting moment, I toyed with sitting among the blooms and missing my appointment but as Crystal now knew my situation, I knew any avoidance tactics could only be temporary.
Nonetheless, ‘I’ve got such a headache,’ I told her when we met outside Mr Worthington’s rooms. ‘I wonder if we should come back another time?’
‘There is no other time, we were lucky to get this appointment,’ Crystal said, opening up her shoulder bag and rustling around inside it. ‘I have some tiger balm in here,’ she offered. ‘Would that help? You can rub it on your temples and it will help calm you.’
I can’t imagine what would have calmed me at that point. What with Will not turning up to do the renovations I didn’t want and Poppy arriving to help me with the tearooms I wasn’t going to have, I was a bundle of nerves. A bundle of nerves who mostly wanted to run away and hide under a rock and never come out again. But that would be at Monty’s peril, I had to keep reminding myself.
Mr Worthington’s waiting room was a pleasant, peaceful sort of a place but I couldn’t keep my legs from jiggling or my hands from fidgeting. After three layers of tiger balm, my eyes were watering but nothing about me was calm.
When the receptionist finally called my name I nearly jumped out of my skin. Crystal stood to come with me, taking me by the elbow and heading me towards Mr Worthington’s door.
‘No, no!’ I cried, panicked. I didn’t want anyone talking about my innards in front of her. ‘I’ll be fine! You wait here. I’ll tell you about it afterwards.’
‘Actually,’ the receptionist intervened, ‘we recommend you take a friend in with you, dear. Sometimes it’s good to have someone else listening to what Mr Worthington says in case you get confused.’
‘He doesn’t speak English?’ I asked, dimly. It sounded like such an English name.
‘No dear, it’s more the shock. Sometimes it’s hard to remember everything you’ve been told when you’ve had a bit of a shock.’
I found it hard to believe that I could be more shocked than I already had been in the past couple of months but while I was trying to work out how to protest further, Crystal steered me towards Mr Worthington’s door and into his office — a room that looked so much like the library of a stately home that I almost expected an octogenarian butler to creak through the side door and offer me a sherry.
‘It’s all a bit Brideshead Revisited, isn’t it?’ I whispered to Crystal as the side door did indeed open. But instead of an elderly manservant, Mr Worthington emerged. He wasn’t old and bent over and bearing a silver tray clinking with crystal. He was tall, particularly upright, in his forties I guessed, and dressed dapperly in dark grey, with similarly grey hair and a square jaw.
Crystal made a strange squeak upon seeing him and I guessed she too was expecting someone different but I didn’t give it much more thought. I was too busy concentrating on him. He really was very good looking and had lovely warm, twinkly eyes.
‘Florence,’ he said holding out one of his large, clean hands in my direction. I shook it. It too was warm, which I wasn’t sure was such a good thing for a surgeon, sweating on the instruments and all that, but it felt nice anyway. Stanley Morris’s dear old mum would certainly approve.
‘Google says you’re the best person for colons,’ I said, my fascination with his good looks waning as I remembered why I was there, My teeth, I realised, were on the brink of chattering.
This was it, the moment of truth. I was in a Harley Street consulting room talking to a surgeon about my disease. On my own. Well, Crystal was there too, of course, but who was she anyway? And why was she sitting slightly behind me and not saying anything?
‘I think Nick March sent you my test results,’ I said, somewhat shakily. ‘He says it’s important to know if it’s rust or forest fire — not so much for me, but I have a son …’ I lost my composure at the thought of Monty.
‘Of course,’ Mr Worthington said. I thought he shot Crystal a funny look, but I was too busy trying to calm my pending hysterics to properly analyse it.
‘Florence, I’m going to give you some advice now that Nick may have already given you but it will help you enormously in the times ahead,’ he said in a very calm, authoritative voice, ‘no matter what the outcome.’
Outcome? Of what? The advice?
He handed me a tissue, which I took, giving my nose a healthy blow. I turned to look at Crystal and to my surprise she seemed totally shaken. As though some terrible news had just been delivered to her.
‘Only worry about what you absolutely know about,’ Mr Worthington said to me, putting my mind back where it belonged. ‘That’s the key. Worrying about anything else is just a waste of time and emotion. I know that seems obvious but honestly, the more information you have, the less your imagination can run away with you so the secret is to find out as much as you can about what your particular problem is — where the cancer is, how it can be treated — and you’ll be amazed at how this simplifies things. You no longer have to worry about the “what ifs”.’
‘But what if —’ I started.
‘Exactly,’ he said. ‘You know that feeling you have now? That sort of overwhelming panic and dread and terror that life as you know it is never going to be the same ever again because it could be that or it could be this or it could be the next thing?’
I nodded. He’d hit the nail right on the head. That overwhelming panic and dread and terror was just part of my waking day now, like breathing.
‘We’re going to try to eliminate that feeling,’ Mr Worthington continued, ‘by finding out exactly what it is that we are dealing with and treating it.’
I liked it that he said ‘we’. I felt l
ess like just me.
‘How will we do that?’ I asked and I knew I sounded scared but I felt less so than I had even a moment before.
‘I have to be honest with you,’ he said, ‘your histology shows that you have a very aggressive form of cancer.’
It felt like a punch. The air was sucked out of my lungs. I’d suspected it was bad. I’d known it was bad. And I was right.
‘Your tumour was large and flat,’ Mr Worthington continued, ‘quite unusual for a colon cancer, which makes it a little less predictable. But on the plus side, and it’s a big plus, it’s been detected fairly early. In terms of finding out more, to eliminate the unknowns, we need to operate, Florence, there is no doubt about that. We need to do a resection, which is when we cut out the bit of colon that has the tumour in it and then we join the bits of colon on either side together again. The operation is relatively straightforward, the recovery period quite manageable, the outcome extremely positive.’
This seemed like so much information I couldn’t process it all. The receptionist was right, the shock made it impossible to remember the words even as he said them.
‘Surgery?’ I asked him, amazed that my voice still worked, that I could control it. ‘Couldn’t I just have chemotherapy?’ I didn’t want to lose my hair, of course I didn’t, but I didn’t want someone making sushi out of my body parts either.
‘I’m sorry, Florence, but there’s absolutely no doubt that you need surgery. The only truly reliable way to get rid of cancer in the colon is to remove it. Anything else simply doesn’t have the same results. It’s the first and may in fact be the only step, depending on what we find out when we do further tests. I would do the surgery, which would take around three hours, you would be in hospital for a week, and your recovery at home would take about a month — although someone as young and fit as yourself could well find it a total doddle.’
A week in hospital? A month of recovery? A doddle? I fought to grasp that this was me we were talking about.