Love Always

‘Fine, thanks,’ I say. ‘I’m just finishing a new col ection.’

‘Wow, how great,’ Octavia says. ‘Where wil you sel that, on a stal , or . . . ?’ She trails off, almost embarrassed.

It has been about two years since I sold my jewel ery on a stal , first in Spitalfields Market, then at the Truman Brewery nearby. I got lucky when one of my pieces, a gold chain made of tiny interconnected flowers, was featured in Vogue a couple of years ago, and a minor but quite trendy pop star wore it in a magazine, after which a boutique in Notting Hil and one just off Brick Lane started stocking my stuff. That’s how it works these days. Someone I’d never heard of wore a necklace of mine and I ended up hiring a PR to promote myself and paying someone to set up a website.

Now I sel online through the website, and through a few retailers. But Octavia, a bit like Louisa, stil likes to think that I’m standing behind a stal wearing a hat, gloves and change belt, shouting out, ‘Three pound a pair of earrings! Get your necklaces here, rol up rol up!’

There’s an implied snobbery there too which is hilarious. I made as much on the stal as I do now. In fact, often I’d sel more there in a day than I do in a month online. Plus the stal was a great way of meeting customers and other designers, seeing what was sel ing, talking to people, finding out what they liked. Pedro, who used to have a veg stal in the old Spitalfields market and upgraded it to an upmarket deli stal in the new, updated, boring Spitalfields, has a house in Alicante, a timeshare in Chamonix and drives an Audi TT. Sara, the girl whose stal used to be next to mine, bought her mum a house in Londonderry last year and paid for the whole family to go on holiday to Barbados. I thought taking myself off the stal would move me to the next level, and I suppose it did.

But increasingly I’ve come to wonder whether I was right. Things have been difficult, the last year or so. The recession means people don’t want jewel ery. And even though Jay designed my site for free, bless him, other costs keep mounting up – hiring the studio, paying for materials and for the metals and stones, the PR who I hired, the trade fairs which you pay to attend . . . It adds up. I haven’t heard of the pop star who wore my necklace since, incidental y. Perhaps that explains it.

A few months ago, it didn’t seem to matter. We had Oli’s salary too. Mine was ‘pin money’, as he cal ed it, which I found super-patronising. But it’s true. It used to be joyful, exciting, stimulating. Lately, it is almost painful. I’m no good. My thoughts are no good, my head seems to be blank. And it shows.

‘On the website, through some shops,’ I tel Octavia. ‘The usual.’

‘Oh,’ she says. ‘That’s good – wel done.’

I sink lower down into my scarf and look out at the dramatic, wind-flattened black trees, the yel ow lichen, the startling green of the sea, crashing against the grey rocks, as the car bowls through the empty, muddy lanes, deeper into the countryside. I chew my lip, thinking.

I wonder if anyone has opened her studio since she died? I wonder, for the thousandth time, how Granny could have stopped painting al those years ago when I know how much the landscape around her meant to her, how it inspired her. But though no one ever says it, it’s obvious something died inside her with Cecily, and it never came alive again.

Archie slows down, and al of a sudden we’ve arrived at the church, perched high on the edge of the moor. I squint, and see the hearse pul ed up outside the door. They are unloading the coffin. There, twisting an order of service over in her hands, is Louisa, and next to her, ramrod straight, stands my mother. The pal bearers are sliding the long coffin out – Granny was tal – and it hits me again, that’s her inside the wooden box, that’s her. Archie turns the engine off. ‘We’re here,’ he says. ‘Just in time. Let’s go.’

Chapter Four

Granny always knew what she wanted and so the funeral service is short and sweet. We slip into our seats and the coffin is carried in, my mother, Archie and Louisa walking behind it. I stare at Mum, but her head is bowed. We sit and listen to the minister in the smal chapel with big glass windows, no adornment, no incense, everything plain. Outside, the wind whistles across the moors. There are two hymns, ‘Guide Me, O Thou Great Redeemer’ and ‘Dear Lord and Father of Mankind’. The col ection is for the RNLI. Louisa reads from Exodus. Archie reads an extract from A Room of One’s Own, by Virginia Woolf. At Granny’s request there is no eulogy. That’s the only thing that is weird. No one gets up and speaks over Granny’s body, there in its oak coffin in the aisle of the church, and it feels strange not to talk about her, not to say who she was, how wonderful she was. But that was her instruction and, like al the others, it must be fol owed to the letter.

As we are al bashful y singing the second hymn, accompanied by a worn-out, clanging old piano, I look past my mother, to see if Arvind is OK.

There’s no space for his wheelchair in the pews, so he sits in the aisle next to the coffin of his wife. It is rather ghoulish, but Arvind doesn’t seem to mind. He is the same as always; shrunken to the size of a child, his nut-brown head almost bald but for a few wispy black hairs. His eyes are sunk far into his head, and his mouth is pursed, like an asterisk.

He stares at me, as if I am a stranger. I smile at him, but there is no reaction. This is Arvind’s way, I’m used to it. It was only when I was old enough to know that a ‘That coat is lovely on you!’ means ‘That coat is garish and vile’ or a ‘Wow, I love your hair!’ means ‘Good God, who told you you could carry off a fringe?’, that I began to realise how lucky I was to have Arvind as my grandfather. He simply cannot dissemble.

Ignoring the hymn, he holds up the flimsy order of service and waves it at me. ‘Is it recycled?’ he says, in his incredibly penetrating, sing-song voice, which stil has a strong Punjab accent sixty-odd years since he came to the UK. ‘Is their carbon footprint reduced? This is very important, Natasha.’

Separating us is my mother, in her sixties but stil ravishing, in a long black tailored coat with an electric blue lining, her thick dark hair cascading down her back, her green eyes huge in her heart-shaped face. Now she looks down at Arvind.

‘Be quiet!’ she hisses.

‘We must al recycle everything, every little thing,’ Arvind tel s me, leaning forward so he can catch my eye and speaking completely normal y, as if it were just the two of us taking tea together. ‘China can carry on emitting more CO2 than the rest of the world put together, but it wil be MY

FAULT if the world ends, because I did not recycle my copy of PLAY. BOY.’ He finishes loudly, his voice rising.

‘Dad, shut up,’ Mum grips the top of his arm in rage. ‘You have to be quiet.’

‘Father,’ Archie says, rather pompously, behind us. ‘Please. Be respectful.’