‘Tickets, please,’ says a voice above me. I jump, more violently than is warranted and the ticket inspector looks at me in alarm. I hand him my tickets – thankful y, I col ected them at Liverpool Street, knowing the queues at Paddington would be horrendous. I blink, trying not to shake, as the desire to be sick, to faint, anything, sweeps over me again, and slump back against the scratchy seat, watching the inspector. He raises his eyebrows as he checks them over.
‘Long way to be going for the day.’
‘Yes,’ I say. He looks at me, and I find myself saying, too eagerly, ‘I have to be back in London tomorrow. There’s an appointment first thing – I have an appointment I can’t miss.’
He nods, but already I’ve given him too much information, and I can feel myself flushing with shame. He’s a Londoner, he doesn’t want to chat.
The trouble is, I want to talk to someone. I need to. A stranger, someone who I won’t see again.
I haven’t told my family I’m coming back tonight. Growing up with my mother, I learned long ago that the less you say, the less you get asked.
The one person I would like to confide in is being buried today, in the churchyard at St Mary’s, a tiny stone hut, so old people aren’t sure when it was first built. In the churchyard there is the grave of a customs officer, one of many kil ed by desperate smugglers. There is a lot about Cornwal that is stil kind of wild, pagan, and though the fish restaurants, tea shops and surfboards cover some of it up, they can’t entirely conceal it.
Granny believed that. She was from Cornwal , she grew up near St Ives, on the wild north coast. She saw Alfred Wal is painting by the docks, she was born with the cry of seagul s and the wind whistling through the winding streets of the old town in her ears. She loved the landscape of her home county; it was her life, her job. She lived most of her life there, did her best work there, sitting in her studio high at the top of the house, overlooking the sea.
There are so many things I never asked her, and now I wish I had. So often that I wished I could confide in her, about al sorts of things, but knew I couldn’t. For much as I loved my granny, I was scared of her too, of the blank look she’d get in her lovely green eyes sometimes when she looked at me. My husband Oli said once he sometimes thought she could see straight into your soul, like a witch. He was joking, but he was a little scared of her, and I know what he meant. There are some things you didn’t ask her. Some things she wouldn’t ever talk about.
Because for many years, Summercove was a very different place, centre of a glittering social whirl, and my grandparents were wealthy, successful, and it seemed as if they had the world at their feet. But then their daughter Cecily died, two months short of her sixteenth birthday, and my grandmother stopped painting. She shut up her studio, at the top of the house, and as far as I know she never went back. I learned from a very early age never to ask why. Never to mention Cecily’s name, even. There are no photos of her in the house, and no one ever talks about her. I know she died in 1963, and I know it was an accident of some kind, and I know Granny stopped painting after that, and that’s about it.
We’re going past Newbury, and the landscape is greener. There has been a lot of rain lately, and the rivers are swol en and brown under a grey sky. The fields are newly ploughed. A fast wind whips dead leaves over and around the train. I sit back and breathe out, feeling the nauseous knot of tension in my stomach start to slowly unravel, as a wave of something like calm washes over me. We are leaving London. We are getting closer.
Chapter Two
My grandparents met in 1941, at a concert at the National Gal ery. When the war broke out, Granny was nineteen, studying at St Martin’s School of Art in London. She stayed there, despite her parents demanding she return to Cornwal . Not Frances, oh no. She volunteered to man the first-aid post near her digs in Bloomsbury, she was fire watch officer for St Martin’s, and when she had a spare hour, which was not many, she went to the National Gal ery, around the corner from the col ege, to listen to Dame Myra Hess’s lunchtime concerts.
Arvind (we have always cal ed him that, Jay and I don’t know why except he’s not someone you’d ever think of cal ing ‘Grandad’, much less
‘Gramps’) was born in the ancient Mughal city of Lahore, in 1919. His father, a Punjabi Hindu, was a teacher at Aitchison Col ege, an exclusive school for sons of maharajahs and landowners, so Arvind was entitled to a place there. Arvind was bril iant. So bril iant that the headteacher wrote to various dignitaries, and to people in England, and after two years of studying philosophy at Lahore’s Government Col ege (there’s a photo of his matriculation on the wal of his study, rows of serious-looking young men with arms crossed and neat cowlicks), Arvind was given a postgraduate scholarship to Cambridge, and it was on a research trip to London during the height of the Blitz in 1941 that he wandered into the National Gal ery.
I have a very clear image of them in my mind; Arvind, short and dapper, so politely dressed in his best tweed suit, his umbrel a hooked over his arm, his hat clutched in his slender fingers, his eye fal ing briefly on the girl in front of him, watching the performance with total absorption. Granny was beautiful when she was old; when she was younger, she must have been extraordinary. I keep a photo of her from around that age in my studio: her dark blonde hair careful y swept into a chignon, her huge dark green eyes set in a strong, open face, a curling, smart smile, perfect neat white teeth.
Frances and Arvind were married three months later. Bizarrely for a man who has outlived most of his contemporaries, Arvind was told he had a weak heart and couldn’t fight. He went back to Cambridge and finished his degree, where he and several other students were cal ed upon to try a variety of code-breaking formulae. He also knitted socks – he rather took to it, he liked the patterns – and volunteered for the Home Guard. Granny stayed in London, to finish her studies and carry on driving the ambulances.
Though Granny and Arvind never said anything, I often wonder what her parents must have made of it. They were respectable quiet people who rarely left Cornwal , with an elder daughter who had recently become engaged to a solicitor from a good family in Tring, and suddenly their wild, artistic younger daughter writes from a bomb shelter to let them know she’s married a penniless student from India whom they’ve never met. This was seventy years ago. There was no one from France, let alone the Punjab, in Cornwal .
After Granny and Arvind were married, they rented a tiny flat in Redcliffe Square. Mum and Archie, the twins, were born in 1946 and then a couple of years later, Cecily. Money was tight, Granny’s painting and Arvind’s writing did not bring in much; he was writing his book for years, paying the bil s with teaching jobs. The book became something of a joke after a while, to al of them, so the aspect of their married life that always took them by surprise, I think, is the money that came in when
