Love Always (25 page)

‘Most people like Chloe?’ I say, picking up my coffee. I walk out into Brick Lane. He runs after me.

‘I didn’t mean it like that. I mean you’re my wife, and you look at me like I’m a piece of shit.’

‘You
are
a piece of shit, that’s why.’ I keep on walking, my bag swinging over my arm. ‘Go off to your meeting. Go away. I don’t – I don’t want to see you ever again.’

Oli says practically, ‘Nat, you have to give them the mug back. You can’t just walk off with it.’

I realise I have stolen Arthur’s coffee mug, but I try to brazen it out. ‘I don’t fucking care.’ He raises his eyebrows; Oli knows as well as I do that I am the most bourgeois person in the world and I would no more go off with a mug than I would walk down the street naked.

‘Fine,’ he says. ‘Fine.’

Some men driving a white van are coming towards us as I stride down the middle of the road. ‘Natasha, move onto the pavement.’

‘No.’ I carry on, hating myself. ‘Natasha, move!’ Oli says. The men are beeping their horn. One of them raises his fist at me, like a thwarted cartoon villain. Oli runs across and pulls me off the road onto the pavement, grabbing my arm, and the mug flies out of my hand, bouncing and then smashing into thick pieces on the kerb with a crunching sound.

‘For God’s sake,’ Oli says. ‘Nat, what are you doing?’

I’m sick of this.

I’m sick of hating him, of feeling like this, of the way our world has collapsed around us so quickly, when we should be building things together, not pulling them apart. He is gripping my elbows, glaring furiously at me.

‘I’m sorry,’ I say. And I mean it. ‘I do put you down, I know I do. I don’t know when it started.’ I shake my head, and I can feel my whole body shaking as I do. ‘I don’t know how that makes you feel, it’s like I don’t care.’

‘How it makes me feel?’ he says. ‘Knowing that you despise me? That you think you love me but you don’t? You really want to know?’

‘Yes,’ I say, taking a deep breath. ‘I want to know.’

He says quietly, ‘I don’t feel anything.’

There’s a silence, just the soft tread of pedestrians walking past us on either side and the wind whistling through the grey streets. I open my mouth, but nothing comes out. I nod.

‘Yep,’ Oli says. ‘I don’t feel anything at all.’ He looks at me, raising his eyebrows with a sad look of triumph. ‘And I don’t think that’s good.’

He turns and walks away and I follow him, like a dog at his heels, along the street. ‘Where are you going?’

‘I think I’m going to go to work now,’ he says. ‘Oh – OK,’ I say. I’m terrified. ‘Are you coming back?’

‘I don’t know,’ he says, but he looks at me, and his eyes are blank. I want to run to him, hug him, but I don’t know him any more. That’s when I realise.

‘I just don’t think you want to be happy, Natasha,’ he says. ‘And I can’t help you.’

I think back over the years, how I’ve known him for over ten years now, together for five of those. I think of my twenty-fifth birthday, at Jay’s flat, where we got together, how he walked me back home, all the way to West Norwood, on a warm May Sunday morning. Of our wedding night, how we were so drunk we passed out and couldn’t stop laughing about our hangovers the next day. How well I thought I knew him, and how I look at him now and I – I think we’re completely different.

‘We used to be a good fit,’ he says, putting his wallet in his back pocket. ‘I don’t think we’re a good fit any more. Do you?’

‘Yes,’ I say, but I’m lying, and he nods sadly. ‘I think I’d better go now,’ he says, and he walks away down the street.

I watch him until he disappears around a corner. I don’t know what to do next. What happens next. I turn and walk towards the flat, leaving the broken pieces of china in the gutter.

Chapter Twenty-Six

When I get back to the flat, something is wrong. Oli has left the door open, and the skylight outside is also open. The wind has knocked over the coat stand, which has fallen against the hall table, shattering a glass. There are papers everywhere, takeaway menus, minicab cards, fluttering around, scattered on the floor. I bend down to pick the coats up, and I right the stand again, patting it as if it’s a person, and I look around me at the mess left behind.

I have screwed everything up. I think about Granny’s coffin being inexpertly loaded into the ground. About Oli’s face when he first said, ‘I think I need some space.’ (What a cliché, what a fucking pathetic cliché.) Clare Lomax yesterday morning, telling me that she was extremely concerned about my ‘ability to sustain a viable business’ . . . Cecily’s diary, Arvind’s face, Oli’s face, Ben being nice to me, my bedroom in our flat at Bryant Court, all of it is going round and round in my mind as I stare at our huge, empty apartment and I can’t break the circle of thinking about it. I’m so tired of feeling like this, of wanting not to feel like this, of telling myself I’m being stupid – because I
am
stupid.

I keep trying to feel better, but these things keep punching me in the face. The collapse of our marriage: he’s probably right, it was collapsing long before Oli’s infidelity. The business going under. And Granny’s death, and what it has started to uncover. Now, it feels as though something fundamental has shifted, as if all my efforts to make everything nice in my life are coming to nothing. My marriage is a sham, it’s over. I can’t make a living doing the only thing I’m any good at. And Granny is gone, the person whose approval I most wanted, whose presence I most often missed, she is gone.

Shutting the door, I start picking up papers, but then I stop and lean on the table and start to cry. I realise I can’t stop myself. I turn around and sink to the ground, staring helplessly at nothing. The tears pour out of me, dripping like little streams onto the floor as I rock against the wall, hugging my knees. Everything is open, nothing can be concealed any more, and it is terrifying. I cry and cry, for Oli and me, for the end of our marriage, for how happy I wanted us to be; how wrong I was, the life I’ve got ahead of me now – I can’t see it, don’t know what I’m here for, what I should do, in my self-pity can’t remember anything worth working for. I cry for Granny and Arvind, for their lost daughter, for our weird, fucked-up family, for my difficult and strange mother, the father I don’t know. The wooden floor is covered with dark circles, my tears.

I cry until there aren’t any more tears left and I am sobbing softly, and after a while the roaring in my ears grows quieter and I look up and around me, expecting to cry again, but I don’t.

It’s very still. I hug myself again, blinking, my swollen eyes smarting.

It is strange, like coming to after an anaesthetic. I blink again and wipe my nose on my hand.

A car honks in the street. I look at my watch. It’s still only ten in the morning. It could be midnight. I stand up, staggering slightly, and I lean against the wall, breathing hard, as if I’m out of breath. I feel dizzy, but as though something is clicking into place in the stillness of the room. As if this is the bottom, I’ve hit the bottom, and now I can start to climb back out.

I stretch my arms out over my head, to ease my cramped back. I’m on my own, now. I understand that. Oli isn’t coming back. He really isn’t. I look round, and I roll my head back and forth. OK. I’ll call Jay and Cathy. I’ll ask Ben and Tania if they want to come to supper. Perhaps I should find some money from somewhere and go with Cathy to Crete this summer, she mentioned it a couple of weeks ago. If I’m not in limbo any more, I can start to plan for the future, can’t I? I think of the sketchbook in the centre of the table in my studio. My fingers itch, something they haven’t done for ages.

Is it possible that out of this something good might come? Immediately, doubt floods over me again, and I look helplessly around me. At first I see nothing. And then I spot Cecily’s diary, sticking out of my still-unpacked bag in the sitting room. It’s weird. In that peculiar brightness of an overcast day, against the brown of my bag, it is bright white. It is folded, and it looks as if it would like to spring out flat. I rub my eyes tiredly, go over and pick it up, and I stare at the pages once again.

‘What happened to you, Cecily?’ I ask out loud. ‘What happened, to all of you?’

There’s no answer to this. But I feel better for having asked the question. I look around the big, empty apartment, and I don’t recognise it. This isn’t my home any more. Perhaps it never was, not in the way Summercove was.

As I think this, I catch myself and it brings me up short. I glance down at those first few pages again, and stand still.

I remember the first time I took Oli to Summercove, being so immensely pleased that he liked it, that Granny liked him. Driving back to London, I turned my head away with tears in my eyes when he said he loved it. Well, of course he did. It’s not difficult to like a beautiful house by the sea, is it?

I got that wrong. I got Oli wrong too. I got a lot of things wrong, it seems. Standing here now, I feel a fog start to lift in my mind. I’ve always thought Summercove was my real, spiritual home, the place where I longed to be for most of the year and where I was happy when I was there. I always liked the thought that Granny was the de facto head of a sprawling family, who didn’t all get on perhaps one hundred per cent, but who, like me, loved being down there, felt it was the place where they could escape from all their problems. I felt that was where the heart of my family still was.

So it turns out I was wrong. I’ve never questioned it before, but I never questioned a lot of things, and apparently I should have done. I stand there for a long time, lost in thought.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

I spend the rest of the day in the flat. I don’t speak to anyone, I don’t know how to ring up Jay or Cathy and say the words out loud. ‘We’re splitting up.’ What happens next? Do we get a divorce? A solicitor? What happens to the flat, should we sell it, rent it, should I move out? The sun has barely come out all day, and it is dark by six. I have a glass of wine, and then another, and it goes straight to my head. And the more I think about things, the more I start to wonder, and the more I find myself thinking, just how blind was I? I think again about Oli’s birthday last September, the fact that I’d booked us into the Hawksmoor for dinner, and he didn’t show up till ten. The boys from work had taken him out for lunch, and in the evening he’d had to have a drink with a client. He was drunk, I knew it, though he tried to pretend otherwise. I’d been in the studio most of the day and then at home, waiting for the evening, waiting for him. I remember it now, as I pour myself another glass of wine and sit on the floor. I don’t know if he was sleeping with Chloe by then, but in a way it doesn’t really matter. The fact is, he didn’t want to be with me. Because it wasn’t an isolated incident, it happened at least once a week, more like two or three times before he moved out and I just accepted it. I didn’t pretend to understand his job.

Was I so cold, so unresponsive, so uncaring of him? Am I really this hard, hard person, who’s built a shell around herself so she can’t get hurt? Is he right, have my family screwed me up so much? Should I try and find my dad? Should I confront my mum? Is Cathy right, did I want Granny’s approval too much, did we all? It’s so strange, these events at the same time: Granny’s death, the end of my marriage. It feels like the end of things, and yet as this long, strange evening goes on, and I just sit there and think and think, my bottom sore from the hard floor, my eye keeps falling on the diary, and I sort of have to admit what I haven’t really wanted to since I came home.

Perhaps Arvind is right. Whatever happened that summer in 1963, our family is poisoned, and one of them must know what happened, they were all there. But all I have is ten pages of a diary and that tells me very little. So the question is, what happened to the rest of it?

Just before nine o’clock, I stand up. I make myself a sandwich and drink some water, and then I pick up the phone and dial.

‘Hello?’

I hesitate. Of course she’s still there. ‘Louisa?’

‘Yes. Who is this?’

‘Louisa, it’s – it’s Natasha. Hello.’

The voice softens a little. ‘Natasha! How are you, darling?’ Her voice is comforting, it makes you feel safe. For a second, I wonder if I’m just being stupid. I take a deep breath, feeling light-headed from the wine.

‘I’m OK. OK. I was just ringing to see how Arvind is doing. Is he there?’

‘He’s here, but he’s pretty tired – we were about to go to bed.’ Apparently Louisa does not think this sentence sounds weird. She says loudly, ‘Weren’t we.’

I smile to myself. ‘Fine, I’m sorry. I know it’s a bit late to be calling. I only wanted to say hi. How’s – how’s it all going?’

‘OK, you know,’ Louisa says. ‘Oh, yes. We got a lot done yesterday, and today, we’re really clearing a lot out, and the solicitors have been very efficient too, you know, it’s all going pretty smoothly.’ She clears her throat; she sounds tired. ‘It’s so sad, though.’

I feel a stab of guilt. ‘Why don’t I come down and help you? I feel awful I had to skip off on Wednesday.’

‘Oh, no, it’s absolutely fine, darling,’ Louisa says. ‘To be honest, Natasha, it’s actually easier to just get on with it by myself.’ She pauses. ‘I mean, of course, your mother’s done a lot, so has Archie, but the nitty gritty – you know, I’m an old busybody! I rather like sorting it all out.’ She’s trying to sound light-hearted but I can hear that note in her voice again, and I’m not sure I believe her.

I wish I could go back and search through the house for the rest of the diary. But even my befuddled, tired brain knows it would look highly suspicious if I turned up again, so soon after leaving abruptly, to go through Granny’s things. And that’s not how I want to see Arvind again anyway, or the house. I feel like a criminal. So I say, trying to keep my voice casual, ‘Have you found anything interesting?’

‘Like what?’ she asks. ‘It’s all being properly catalogued, Natasha. There are a lot of items that need to be valued, and Guy’s coming down soon to do it . . .’

‘No, I don’t mean it like that—’

‘With a sinking feeling, I wonder what Mum’s been saying to her. ‘Just interesting things about the family, you know. Photos and all that.’

‘Oh.’ Louisa unbends a little. ‘Well, there are a couple of things. Let me think. Oh – yes! I’ve found some old clothes of Miranda’s. All just bundled up in a cupboard.’

I sit down on the sofa, hugging a cushion against my body. ‘How do you know they’re Miranda’s? I mean, Mum’s?’

‘Well, I remember she bought them with the money her godmother sent her. She’d never really been a clothes horse before, and suddenly she started turning up for dinner in these absolutely amazing dresses and things. And they’re all there, just stuffed into a bag and hidden in the back of a cupboard. I’d forgotten all about them! And there’s an hilari ous picture of Julius and Octavia I found in a kitchen drawer, when they were children down on the beach, covered in sand and wearing buckets on their heads. Ever so funny.’ Louisa laughs heartily, and leaves a pause for me to laugh heartily too which I do, even though my heart is beating so fast it’s painful.

‘Oh, that’s funny,’ I say unconvincingly. ‘Anything else?’

‘No,’ says Louisa. ‘Franty, your grandmother, she was a very organised woman. There’s hardly anything left, really. I think she got rid of a lot . . . a lot of things.’

I think back to my room at Summercove, which used to be my mother’s and Cecily’s, and know Louisa is right. When I think about it, it is rather odd. There is nothing in the wardrobe now – I know it by heart – apart from an old backgammon set, some old books, and a moth-eaten fur that Granny never wore. Certainly no diary. And yet somehow this makes me even more convinced she must have kept the rest of it somewhere. Out of sight. I take a deep breath.

‘What about the studio? I went in, just before I left.’

‘Well, it is strange, having it open again, being able to go in,’ Louisa says. ‘I was never allowed to before. But no,’ she says, ‘nothing there really either. So, you’re OK then?’ She changes the subject. ‘All all right? I was worried about you, Natasha dear.’

When I was thirteen, I was running back towards the house from the beach and my newly long legs betrayed me, and I fell over, dislocating my shoulder in the process. The pain was excruciating, but Louisa took me to the hospital as I wailed and screamed loudly, all pretence at maturity abandoned. She waited with me for a doctor for what seemed like hours, and fed me sweets and read out extracts from her new Jilly Cooper novel to keep me entertained. I’m sure she’s forgotten it, but I never have. I don’t want her to worry about me, but it’s comforting to know she cares. Like I say, she is a comforting person, and I feel really guilty about how mean I’ve been about her, these last few days.

‘Actually – Oli and I have split up. Permanently,’ I say. ‘You and Oli? What?’ Louisa makes a querying sound at the back of her throat, as if she doesn’t understand. ‘When?’

‘Earlier today.’ It seems longer ago than that, this morning. Like a morning from a week ago, a year ago.

‘Oh, Natasha,’ Louisa says, her voice sad. ‘Oh, that’s awful.’

‘It’s OK,’ I say. ‘Really, it is. I mean, it’s not, but – you know.’

‘My dear. Where are you, at home?’

‘Yes,’ I say. ‘On your own?’

‘Yes,’ I say again. ‘That’s not very good. Do you want – should I get Octavia to come round? Keep you company? She’s only in Marylebone, you know.’

Yes, I want to say. Do send Octavia round. Her cheery face and happy modes of passing the time are just what I need. ‘Oh – that’s very kind, but don’t worry. I’m better off on my own.’ This is probably true. I’m on my own, for the first time in years. ‘I need some time by myself.’

‘Have you told your mother, or Jay, or anyone?’

‘No, actually,’ I say. ‘Er – you’re the first person. Sorry, I didn’t mean it to be that way. I was really just ringing to find out how Arvind is and – I don’t want to bother you with it all.’

‘It’s not a bother,’ she says. ‘Darling, it’s no bother at all. You poor thing.’ I have to remind myself that Louisa’s not a fusser, though she so often acts like one. I wish again that I’d known her when she was eighteen, before she became this person who does things for other people all the time, when she was the pretty girl in Cecily’s diary with a new lipstick and a scholarship to Cambridge, dreadfully ambitious and clever. And it occurs to me now that I’ve never heard her mention Cambridge or university or anything like that. Did she not go in the end? Where did she go, that girl? She’s always pretended she loved her Tunbridge Wells life. What if she didn’t? What if that wasn’t the life she’d expected for herself?

‘Look,’ she says, breaking into my thoughts. ‘Your grand-father’s just about to go to sleep, and he’s going into the home on Monday. I want him as rested as possible before then, it’s going to be strange at first, I’m sure.’

‘It is,’ I say. ‘I mean, I’d love to stay down here longer, but you know, I can’t. I’ve been here for two weeks, and he can’t stay here on his own, it is for the best,’ Louisa says, all in a rush. ‘Frank needs me back at home, too, I don’t like being away from him for too long either.’

I can’t believe she feels guilty about it. ‘Louisa, you’ve been amazing,’ I say, and it’s true. ‘Please! What are you talking about?’

‘Not everyone feels that way,’ she says. ‘I’ve been accused of – well, it doesn’t matter.’

‘Do you mean Mum?’ I say reluctantly, though this could easily apply to me, too.

‘I’m afraid I do,’ Louisa’s voice hardens. I wish I’d never asked. ‘I suppose there’s no need to keep up a pretence at civility, now your grandmother’s dead. She’s made that quite clear, anyway.’

‘Oh, I’m sure she doesn’t mean it,’ I say desperately. ‘She’s very grateful, I’m sure.’

‘Natasha –’ she starts. ‘Your mother—’

‘Yes?’ I say.

‘Well . . . she’s a complicated person. OK?’

‘I know that,’ I say carefully. ‘She always has been.’

‘Yes, but—’ She stops. ‘Never mind. There’s no point.’ Tell Octavia that, I want to say. I know what you’re getting at. It’s too late.

‘Well,
I’m
very grateful to you, anyway,’ I say instead. ‘I don’t know what we’d do without you.’

‘It’s my pleasure,’ Louisa says simply. ‘I’d have done anything for Franty. She knew that. I loved her very much.’

After I’ve said goodbye to Louisa I feel reassured somehow. At the very least, Arvind is all right. My mother is unpredictable, and I never know how she’s going to react to certain situations. It’s true, often those situations were connected with Summercove or the people there. When we were going, when we were leaving, who was going to be there, how long she’d stay. It’s only now I remember that I said I’d go round for supper with her next week. I don’t quite know what I’ll say to her when I see her. About anything, really.

I make some tea, and I get into bed. It’s cold. I hug the same cushion against me for warmth and comfort, and I take out a pen and write a list.

1. Get a solicitor? – Ask Cathy. File for divorce??

2. Flat. Mortgage? Move out?

3. Trade fair. x3 applications to diff. ones by end of week.

4. Call/visit x10 shops by end of week.

5. Jay: update website?

Fatigue gives me a curious focus and it’s easy to write these things down. Closing my eyes briefly, I think about what else I need to sort out. I write:

6. Mum.

7. Find diary.

But I don’t really know what to do about those two. I put the list by my table, so it’s the first thing I see in the morning, and turn off the light. I sleep. I sleep for ten long hours, a heavy, velvety sleep, where nothing and no one troubles me, no dreams come to me, and when I wake up the next day and blearily blink at the dark room, I realise how tired I’d been. I feel new, different. I pull back the curtains, it’s another grey day in London. But it’s not so bad, maybe.