Love Always

was my grandfather. I don’t know why.

While The Modern Fortress was sel ing thousands of copies a week, Granny’s paintings were becoming more acclaimed too and suddenly Frances and Arvind were richer than they’d ever expected to be.They could afford to buy the house they’d rented for a couple of summers in Cornwal for Frances to paint in, a dilapidated twenties art deco place by the sea cal ed Summercove. They could send the children to boarding school. They could keep the flat in London and a housekeeper for Summercove, and they could have their nieces and nephews to stay, and provide a degree of largesse to al they knew that meant, for the rest of the fifties and the early sixties, Arvind Kapoor and Frances Seymour, and Summercove, were bywords amongst artistic and intel ectual circles in London for an elegantly bohemian way of life, post-colonial poster children: the couple that seemed to have everything.

* * *

In Granny’s bedroom at Summercove, there is a curved dark wooden dressing table, with a beautiful enamel hairbrush set, old glass crystal perfume bottles and two jewel ery boxes. The dressing table has little drawers with wrought-iron handles on each side, and once when I was little and I’d crept upstairs to surprise her, I found my grandmother sitting at that table, gazing at a photo.

She was very stil , her back straight. Through the long suntrap windows you could see across the meadow down to the path, the bright blue-green sea glinting in the distance. I watched her as she stared at the photo, stroking it with her finger, tentatively, as if it had some talismanic quality.

‘Boo,’ I’d said softly, because I didn’t know what else to do, and I knew it wasn’t right to jump out at her now. I didn’t want her to be angry with me.

She did jump though, and she turned to me. Then he held out her hand. ‘Oh. Natasha,’ she said, as I stood looking at her.

I adored my grandmother, who was beautiful, funny, charis matic, in charge of everything, always in control: I found her hugely comforting, thril ing too, but the truth is she was also a little terrifying. Compared to her happy, open relationship with Jay, I felt sometimes, just sometimes, she looked at me and wished I wasn’t there. I don’t know why. But children like me – with an overactive imagination and no one with whom to exercise it

– are often wrong. And I knew that if I ever tried to talk to my mother about it she’d tel me I was making things up, or worse, confront Granny, and have a row with her.

‘Come here,’ she said, looking at me, and she smiled, her hand outstretched. I walked towards her slowly, wanting to run, because I loved her so much and I was so glad she wanted me. I stood in front of her and put my hands on her lap, tentatively. She stroked my hair, hard, and I felt a tear drop from her eyes onto my forehead.

‘God, you’re just like her,’ she said, her voice husky, and clutched my wrist with her strong fingers. She twisted the fingers of her other hand over to show me the photo she was holding. It was a smal , yel owing snap of a girl about my age; I was then around seven or eight. I wish I could remember more, because I think it was important. I remember she had dark hair, but of course she did, we al did. She looked like Mum, but also not: I couldn’t work out why.

‘Yes, you’re just like her.’ Granny drew a great shuddering breath, and her grip on my arm tightened. ‘Damn it al .’ She turned, her huge green eyes swimming with tears, her lovely face twisted and ugly. ‘Get out! Get out of here, now!’

She was stil gripping my arm, so hard it was bruised the next day. I wrenched myself free and ran away, feet clattering on the parquet floor, out onto the lawn, away from the dark, sad room. I didn’t understand it, how could I?

Later, when we were having tea and playing hide-and-seek, she came up and gave me a hug.

‘How’s my favourite girl?’ she said, and she dropped a soft kiss onto my forehead. ‘Come here, let me show you this brooch I found in my jewel ery box. Do you want to wear it tonight, at supper with the grown-ups?’

I didn’t know it then, but I saw a side of her that day that she rarely showed anyone any more. She kept it locked away, like the photo, like her studio. I tried to push it out of my mind that summer, and when I got back to London. And now. It’s not the way I want to remember her.

We are heading further and further west, the landscape is wilder, and though spring feels far away, there are tiny green buds on the black branches fringing the railway tracks. We go through southern Somerset, past Castle Cary and the Glastonbury Tor. I stare out of the window, as if wil ing myself to see more.

Oli and I went to Glastonbury last summer, because of his job – one of his clients gave us VIP tickets, with backstage passes. We were very lifestyle that weekend – I wore my new Marc Jacobs city shorts and some Cath Kidston polka-dot wel ies, Oli was in his best Dunhil shirt: we felt like a low-rent Kate Moss and Jamie Hince. We saw Jay-Z, and Amy Winehouse, and the Hoosiers, who I love but Oli thinks are crap. It was great, of course, although I remember going in a camper van when I was nineteen with Jay and my best friend Cathy, the year of the legendary Radiohead gig, not washing for three days and being stoned the whole time, and that was better somehow, less complicated, no one in a mood, no one looking dissatisfied because there are only two free beers in the wanky hospitality tent where everyone’s terrified they’re less important than everyone else. Oli complained when they wouldn’t give him another one. Oh, Oli.

I look out of the window, blinking back tears, and nod: there is the perfect little vil age with a beautiful house and golden-yel ow church, plonked seemingly in the middle of nowhere, that I kept my eyes glued to the window looking for every year when I was little. The fields are flooded; there are confused ducks swimming in the water, not sure what to make of it. Up on the banks by the tracks, cobwebby Old Man’s Beard covers everything, the beautiful tracery concealing the hard branches beneath. Thankful for the distraction, I stare, wondering where my sketchbook is, anything to take my mind off it al .

Granny loved jewel ery. I’m sure that my interest in it stems from the hours I spent with her looking at her pieces, holding them up and thril ing to the sensation of metal and stone on my skin, against my face. The two big jewel ery boxes on that dressing table were neatly stacked with al kinds of wondrous things: a chunky jade pendant, worn on a thick silver chain, tiny diamond dangly earrings that she bought for herself when she had her first show (it occurs to me now that these were valuable; she kept them quite blithely with the costume jewel ery), delicate strings of creamy coral, a gold Egyptian-style col ar necklace that she got from the Royal Opera House, a prop from Aida which she used on a model for a painting, a large amethyst ring that was her mother’s, and final y the two that were never in the box, because she was always wearing them. The thick gold-linked bracelet studded with turquoises which Arvind gave her for her thirtieth birthday, and the pale gold ring she always wore on her right hand, of three sets of two intertwined diamond flowers, like tiny peonies. It is a family ring: Arvind’s father sent it from Lahore when they were married. That was my favourite piece of them al , a link with Arvind’s family, the country he left long ago. Because I vaguely remember Granny’s father, but I never met Arvind’s father, nor any of his family. Two of his brothers died during Partition, and his father stayed in Lahore. He