I keep trying to feel better, but these things keep punching me in the face. The col apse of our marriage: he’s probably right, it was col apsing 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 al 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 wal , 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 stil . I hug myself again, blinking, my swol en 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 stil only ten in the morning. It could be midnight. I stand up, staggering slightly, and I lean against the wal , breathing hard, as if I’m out of breath. I feel dizzy, but as though something is clicking into place in the stil ness 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 real y isn’t. I look round, and I rol my head back and forth. OK. I’l cal Jay and Cathy. I’l 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 stil -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 al 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 stil .
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. Wel , 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 al 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 al their problems. I felt that was where the heart of my family stil 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 sel it, rent it, should I move out? The sun has barely come out al 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 til 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 real y 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 real y this hard, hard person, who’s built a shel 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 al ? 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 fal ing on the diary, and I sort of have to admit what I haven’t real y 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 al there. But al I have is ten pages of a diary and that tel s 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.
‘Hel o?’
I hesitate. Of course she’s stil there. ‘Louisa?’
