Love Always (28 page)

‘No, go on,’ I urge. He frowns. ‘Natasha, it’s not your concern.’ I feel as though I’ve been slapped for being naughty. ‘She wanted you involved, she had her reasons, I’m sure. But for the moment you don’t need to do anything. When the estate is settled, and we know what the money is, we’ll be able to consider applications, and you’ll be involved then, vetting the applicants, their suitability. Perhaps talking to people, visiting their studios . . . I don’t know.’

‘How ironic,’ I say. ‘Can I apply for some money?’ I’m joking.

Archie doesn’t smile. ‘You’re going?’ I ask him then. ‘Next month, back to Cornwall?’

‘Yes, of course,’ he says. ‘Have you seen Arvind?’

Jay shoots me a glance.
Stop asking these questions
. It occurs to me then that’s why he’s been in a funny mood today: he knows my uncle is displeased with me, and Jay, close as we are, is much more respectful of his parents than I am of my mother.

‘I have not, no,’ Archie says. ‘We are going next week.’

‘Louisa’s been down there,’ Sameena says, and I’m sure it’s an innocent remark but Archie obviously doesn’t want to hear it.

‘Yes,’ I say. ‘She’s been wonderful.’

‘She has,’ Archie says. ‘We are lucky.’

Suddenly I can’t resist. ‘Archie, can I ask you something?’

‘Yes, Natasha?’ Archie breaks another poppadom between his fingers.

‘Why – well, why doesn’t Mum get on with her? Louisa’s been wonderful through this, organising the funeral, getting Arvind sorted, the foundation . . .’ My voice is loud in the silent dining room. ‘I don’t know what we’d all have done without her. And Mum – she thinks Louisa’s after her in some way.’

I know this is dangerous, but it is as close as I can get to asking Archie about the diary, about what happened to Cecily, and I don’t want to, here in front of Sameena and Jay, these people I love. I don’t want to start throwing accusations around about my mother when I have no real evidence myself.

Archie breaks the poppadom piece in half again. ‘You just said it. Louisa and your mother don’t get on. Never have done. That is all.’

I want to laugh, inappropriate as it seems. That’s only the beginning of it, I want to say.

But then he goes on: ‘Look, when we were growing up . . . it was a long time ago. We don’t really talk about it much, because of the tragedy of my sister.’ He raises his head, and a lock of carefully combed hair falls in his face, making him look much younger all of a sudden. ‘The truth is – they were very different. You know? Louisa was – well, I found her rather insufferable at times. Always offering to help. Much better behaved than us, our parents loved her. Always doing well in her exams, good at sports.’ He stops and rubs his arms. He seems surprised he’s saying all this, and then he ploughs on. ‘I was fascinated by her. So was your mother. She was everything we weren’t. We weren’t good at anything in particular. No artistic prowess, we weren’t intellectual. No good at sports. We weren’t blond, hearty. My mother was . . . disappointed with us. Always felt she’d rather Louisa and Jeremy were her children, not us. And Cecily, of course. She loved Cecily.’

He trails off. I know he’s telling the truth. He speaks in a low, clear voice, not very dramatic, just simply stating facts. The four of us are still. What he says and the way he says it, makes me so sad, but I can’t reach out and touch him, I know that.

‘That’s why –’ Archie begins, and then stops. He clears his throat and looks at Jay, then at me. ‘Well. Now that is why I have always been very pleased that you two – you cousins got on so well. That these things don’t matter, these days. As has your mother.’

‘Have you spoken to Mum?’ I ask him suddenly. I’ve called her since our row, several times, but once again she’s gone completely off radar.

‘Oh, yes,’ he says. ‘Where is she?’ I ask. ‘Is she around?’

‘She’ll be back in time for the foundation launch,’ Archie says. ‘Her work is important to her.’

He raises his chin, and nods expectantly at me. ‘We had a row –’ I hear myself say. ‘I know you did.’ Archie puts his napkin down. ‘Natasha, you upset her a great deal. I don’t think you realise how much.’

‘She –’ I begin, and then I stop. I look at Sameena and Jay, eating their curry in silence.

‘She’s your mother,’ Archie says. ‘You should respect her, no matter what.’

‘No matter what?’ I say.

He looks at me, then at his wife and child. ‘Yes.’

I can’t push this any more; I’m in their home.

The contrast between brother and sister strikes me again. Archie may be a bit pompous, but he’s made his own life for himself, him and Sameena and Jay, and it’s not like Summercove. I can see what he did – I tried to do it myself, with Oli, create a world different from the one I grew up in. I think of Archie with his parents, how he’s never really present, like his sister. He turns up, bosses people around, shows everyone his flash new car or his nice new watch, and then he’s gone. It’s funny to read about him in those pages of Cecily’s: the idea that he’d have gone to Oxford or Cambridge isn’t really him at all. I don’t know whether he took the exams or not, but I know he went away for a long time, went travelling, like Mum. He got a job working in a car dealership, in the mid-sixties when I guess it still had a modicum of glamour attached to it. Archie worked his way up; his business is now pretty successful. You’d know it, even if he didn’t tell you. He lived all over the world, in Singapore, Tokyo. It was in Mumbai that he met Sameena.

I ask just one more question. ‘You don’t know where she is, though?’

‘No,’ he says. ‘As I said, she’ll be back.’

She’s always flitting off somewhere, with no notice, and usually you’re lucky to get a text. When I was about ten, she went to Lisbon for a week, and I only found out when she rang the school on her way to the airport and told them my aunt would be looking after me while she was away . . . I remember this now in light of what I know, sitting at the Kapoors’ table, as Sameena and Jay nudge each other and she laughs about something, and Archie helps himself to more mango chutney and I sit watching them. I feel very alone, all of a sudden. Archie got out, he got away from whatever it was. Poor Mum, dancing off around the world to find some freedom, some space, running away from her own thoughts, her own life.

Like I say, it makes me sad.

Chapter Thirty-One

On Thursday, the week after lunch at Archie’s, my alarm doesn’t go off and I wake up late. I lie in bed for about ten minutes, annoyed because the day is already off on the wrong foot. I have become very good at keeping myself busy with my lists and my actions and I know that lying in bed being annoyed isn’t the way to keep myself from going mad. Do something, anything. I get up, shower, get dressed and clean the flat from top to bottom, tidying things up, putting some more of Oli’s things away, dusting, scouring, scrubbing, singing along to the radio.

In the afternoon I head out for the studio, eager to stretch my legs, get outside. In the hallway I see the post has arrived, which even though it’s nearly three is still something of a miracle. I pick up the bundle and sort it out, putting the post for the two other flats in our building into their rightful pigeonholes.

I know he’s not coming back now, but some days events conspire to make it more difficult than others. This morning the post consists of a council tax demand, Oli’s Arsenal fanzine, one of his many gadget magazines, and a reminder to Mr and Mrs Jones that we have to renew our home contents insurance, which seems particularly cruel. There’s also a small, thick, stiff envelope, with my name written in handwriting I don’t recognise. I put the rest of the post in his pile – Oli is staying with his best friend Jason and his wife Lucy, nearby in Hackney, which is where he went before. He comes by the flat to pick his post up, just lets himself into the hall and goes again, we don’t see each other. I open the envelope addressed to me.

YOU ARE INVITED TO THE LAUNCH OF

THE FRANCES SEYMOUR FOUNDATION

A
CHARITY FOUNDED IN MEMORY OF
F
RANCES
S
EYMOUR

TO SUPPORT YOUNG ARTISTS

T
HURSDAY
9
TH
A
PRIL

2.30
PM
C
HAMPAGNE
R
ECEPTION
& B
UFFET
L
UNCH

3.30
PM
S
PEECH BY
M
IRANDA
K
APOOR
, F
RANCES
’
S

D
AUGHTER

3.45
PM
P
RIVATE
V
IEW OF
E
XHIBITION OPENS

At Summercove,

Near Treen,

Cornwall

RSVP

[email protected]

Overleaf: ‘Summercove at Sunset, 1963’

On the back is a painting, one I have never seen before. ‘Summercove at Sunset, 1963’ must have been painted from behind the white house, which is nestling against the black trees in the lane behind, the lawn and the terrace sloping gently towards the cliffs, the countryside lush and green, the grey terrace echoed by the grey-green of the lavender against it. There is a lone figure on the lawn, a tall man with a towel around his neck, walking towards the sea. It is very still, almost dreamlike; no feeling of movement in the branches or the lavender or the grass. The light is pale gold, casting long shadows. The man is striding but you feel he’s been frozen mid-step by the artist, that they wanted to capture this moment in time.

I stare at it, in the fading afternoon light; I’ve seen Granny’s paintings at Summercove, in galleries, in catalogues and books, but I’ve never seen anything like this before. It feels like a new approach, only it was one of the last things she ever painted. I turn the invitation over in my hand, letting the corners of the hard cardboard press into my palms. Who sent this out? Louisa, of course. It wasn’t Mum, that’s for sure.

It’s been over a week now since Mum and I had our showdown, and I still haven’t heard back from her. I don’t know what comes next. This gives me another reason to be in touch, I suppose. Tapping the invitation thoughtfully against my hand, I walk towards the studio.

The sun is – sort of – out, a silvery sheen of cloud covering the sky but there are shadows on the ground and it’s kind of warm, for the first time this year, over halfway through March. I am lost in thought as I walk round to Fournier Street and out at the back of the Hawksmoor Christ Church, its looming, sinister bulk casting the streets into shade. I need more time to think.

Cathy often says in her wise way that your life is made up of three sides of a triangle: home (where you live and how settled it is), relationships (friends, family and of course romantic), and work (having a job, having a fulfilling job, one that doesn’t make you cry every night or mean you’re a sex worker). Cathy’s triangle dictates that you don’t have to have all three sides working to be happy, but you need two sides to be able to function properly. We used to discuss this in the long evenings around the time of Horrific Ex Boyfriend Martin, three years ago – a psycho doctor who kicked her out of her flat and changed the locks, the week after she lost her job in her previous company. No home, no boyfriend, no job. No sides of triangle: bad. But strangely, it was OK, because it was relatively easy to get two sides of the triangle up and running again. She got a job quite quickly, bucking the trend of my other friends at publishing houses or law firms or small start-ups who suddenly lost their jobs: it was obviously some kind of slow period in the actuary recruiting world. She stayed with Jay, who has a spare room in his flat, and whom she has known almost as long as me, and the weird thing is that we remember that period with a lot of happiness. We were out a lot, loads of us, drinking in Spitalfields and Shoreditch, there were great new bars opening up each week and it wasn’t a stop on a tourist trail the way it is now. Oli and I were getting ready for our wedding, and finding the whole thing surreal and weird: Cathy and Oli and I all went to a wedding fair at ExCel, and had to leave after five minutes when the first stand we came across was a production company that will make a DVD of your wedding day set to a song that is specially composed for and about you; it was next to a stand that sold you fluffy toys with the pet names you and your partner call each other embroidered on for you to give away to guests as wedding favours . . . We went to Summercove for a fortnight, the four of us, and I remember we ate fresh crab nearly every day, with pools of garlic butter and fresh bread. We helped Granny clear out Arvind’s study while he was away giving a lecture at Bologna, one of his last trips abroad, and threw out a huge amount of papers. I have since wondered what we threw out . . . probably the secret to happiness in the Western Hemisphere, or a cure for cancer, but it’s hard to tell when you’re confronted with a box containing a copy of
Woman’s Own
from 1979, two packets of crisps that went out of date in 1992, and assorted scraps of torn-up paper, which is what it mostly seemed to be. I remember Granny so well that summer, laughing over boxes, a scarf tied over her hair like Grace Kelly. She would have been in her mid-eighties then and she still looked like a star.

* * *

It seems a long time ago, that period in our lives. Rose-tinted spectacles, perhaps, but I look back on it now and smile. I clutch the invitation in my hand, bending the hard card over into the shape of a tear.

At the studio, I put it on the little shelf by the safe. I stare at the painting on the back, thinking. It is very still; starting to get dark outside and the traffic seems distant. I shake my head. Where is the damn diary? Where is it? I feel as if I’m no nearer to finding out. I should have gone back to look for it and now I’ve made things worse, not better. I feel like a failure. I’ve let Cecily down.

There’s a knock on the door and a deep voice says, ‘Nat, hi.’

‘Ben! Hey,’ I say, and though it’s hardly a shock to see him, I’m particularly grateful for the diversion this morning. ‘I was just coming to ask you—’ I turn round and stop, open-mouthed. ‘Wow. Your hair! What happened to you?’

‘I had it all cut off.’

‘When?’

‘Last Thursday. You just haven’t been in since then.’

‘I was out visiting shops and stuff. My goodness. Why?’ He rubs the top of his head ruefully. ‘Um – I decided it was time for a change.’

‘All your lovely curls!’ I say. ‘And the stubble! All gone!’ He looks sad. ‘I know. My head feels cold.’ He is running his fingertips lightly over his scalp. I watch, transfixed, as his long fingers push through the thick short stubble of his hair and move down towards his smooth chin.

‘You look completely different,’ I say. ‘Strange.’

‘Oh, thanks,’ he says. ‘No, I don’t mean you look strange.’ I rush to correct myself. ‘It’s strange, I mean. You look – it’s like Samson.’

‘He lost all his strength and got murdered,’ Ben says. ‘You’re making me think I should put a bag on my head. Is it that bad?’

‘It’s really not. In fact it’s the opposite.’ I hear Cathy’s voice, it seems ages ago, that lunch –
If he had his hair cut . . . Wow, he’d be absolutely gorgeous
– and I can feel myself starting to blush. ‘You look great. Really – it really suits you. You look much better – not that you looked bad before. You always look good . . .’ I trail off. This is just pathetic.

His eyebrows pucker together and he frowns. ‘I don’t know if you’re trying to get yourself out of a hole or dig yourself into one,’ he says. ‘But I’ll console myself with the thought that it’ll grow out and I’ll have my shaggy-dog hair again soon.’

‘Yes,’ I say, ‘but give this a chance. Honestly, it suits you.’ He nods and smiles.

‘OK. I will.’

‘What happened to the jumpers?’ I say. ‘It’s officially the first day of spring tomorrow,’ he replies. ‘Back of the wardrobe with the jumpers.’

‘Well, the new you is so handsome I daren’t be seen out in public with you. You’ll have young girls throwing themselves at you. You’re like Jake Gyll-what’s-his-name.’

‘Who?’ He scratches his head again. ‘Oh . . . no one.’

There’s an awkward pause, as silence falls over the bantering conversation.

‘I was going to come and see you,’ I say eventually. We’d normally pop in and see each other mid-morning, for a coffee or a chat. We are easily distracted, it’s terrible. ‘What are you up to?’

‘I’m doing paperwork.’ He sounds tired. ‘It’s really boring.’ He advances into the room and then he stops, looks down. ‘Nat, this is beautiful.’

He holds up a piece of paper. It’s the design I was sketching last week before Mum arrived, the daisy-chain necklace. I’ve left it there, not quite sure what it needs, because I can’t think about it without thinking about Mum afterwards. ‘Oh, thanks,’ I say, blushing. ‘It’s nothing, it’s just a rough idea for something.’

‘I think it’s really lovely.’ He smiles, and I watch him, his bones under his skin. He has a vein curling into the side of his temple, it throbs as he speaks. ‘Really simple, beautiful, complex at the same time.’

‘Oh, no, it’s not.’ It’s been so long since anyone’s praised my work that I don’t know what to say. I sound like a pantomime villain. ‘But – that’s really kind of you.’ I’m flustered, and look around the studio. ‘Right. Best get on.’ I run a hand over my forehead. ‘Sorry. I’m operating really slowly today.’

‘What’s up?’

‘I don’t know,’ I say. ‘Just – stuff.’

‘Oli?’

‘Well, yeah. Everything really.’

Ben puts the sketch down and leans on the workbench. ‘It must be really hard.’

‘I know. It’s just I don’t know what comes next. You know – when do they ring the bell, say it’s officially over?’

‘I guess when you sign the final divorce papers,’ he says, and then holds up a hand. ‘I mean, if that’s what you want to do.’

‘Yes—’ I shake my head. ‘I don’t know. Probably. It’s so – freaky though.’ I pause. ‘There’s a lot going on at the moment. Other stuff.’

‘Like what?’ Ben says. ‘Are you – OK?’

‘I’m fine. It’s family stuff.’

‘Heavy?’

‘Pretty heavy. I found a – I found a diary,’ I say irrelevantly.

‘Aha.’ Ben rubs his hands over his hair again. ‘Some childhood diary you don’t want anyone to see? Or your diary of the studio and how you’ve got a crush on Les?’

Les is the leader of the writers’ collective downstairs. He is a large, fleshy man who loves talking about his days in the Socialist Workers’ Party and using words without pronouns, as in ‘Government needs to do this’ and ‘Council aren’t pulling their weight,’ just as wannabe trendy people say of the Notting Hill Carnival, ‘I’m going to Carnival this weekend.’ I know for a fact that he is from Lytham St Annes.

I nod at Ben. ‘Yes, it’s true,’ I say. ‘I am in love with Les and this is my journal of that love.’

‘Les is definitely More,’ Ben says, and we laugh, slightly too hilariously, as if to break up the atmosphere.

‘No,’ I say, looking round again. I don’t know why I feel as if someone might be watching us. ‘It’s weirder than that. It’s the diary my mother’s sister was writing the summer she died. In 1963. She was only fifteen.’

‘Wow,’ says Ben. ‘That is heavy.’

‘Yep,’ I say. ‘My grandfather gave the first part to me at the funeral. It’s just pages stapled together. But there’s more, I just don’t know where. I think my mum knows something, but when I asked her –’ I trail off.