Love Always

by Harriet Evans

  ‘You love the stall, Nat,’ he’d say. ‘You like meeting the people, it keeps you fresh. It’s not good for you, sitting at home or in the studio all day.’

  I started trying to become a brand. A brand like the ones Oli promotes. He thinks everyone is their own brand and I’m sure he’s right, but all I can say is, I was better off when everything was simple, when I could sketch in my book, pay the nice old man off Hatton Garden to make up my gold and silver pendants, and sit there in my studio happily making up the necklaces, cutting the chains, choosing the right pair of pliers from my set to bend gold and silver wire, researching suppliers, thinking up new ideas and just trying them out, listening to my iPod, and chatting to Ben and Tania, his girlfriend, who works with him. The trouble is, most of the time I’d prefer to be in their studio with them, instead of on my own. Everything’s OK when they’re around. There’s a distraction, someone to talk to, instead of sitting alone amidst the accessories and pliers, staring into space, wondering what on earth comes next. It’s so easy to pop next door and ask for a cup of tea, or bring them biscuits.

  Ben never seems to mind. He’s one of those open, friendly people who can work in Piccadilly Circus and still concentrate. He likes chatting and so do I. We like the same humour, the same old films, the same biscuits, we were meant to be office buddies, as we continually say. I think Tania is not quite so keen on me hanging around like a bad smell all the time while she’s trying to mark up contact sheets or negotiate with a magazine. I think she knows I’m lonely. She wants to tell me to back off and go and do some work. And so I’ve started limiting myself to one knock on the door a day.

  When I realise I’ve started thinking about it like that, I suddenly see that I have to control my loneliness – that crying all over Ben when Oli left, while Tania made some tea and went and got Jaffa Cakes (and she is French, so Jaffa Cakes are unfathomable to her, so I appreciated the gesture even more) is something you do once, because it’s a crisis point, not every week, every day.

  The new strong confident me looks at Clare Lomax to see if she’d understand this, the mind that has too much time to think. She wouldn’t. I wouldn’t either if someone else explained it to me. It’s as though my life has veered way off track, and although I still can’t quite see where it began, at least I can recognise this. I put my hands on the desk and take a deep breath.

  ‘Look, Miss Lomax,’ I say. ‘I have really screwed up, but I can show you how and why, and how I’m going to change things. I know I’m good at what I do, and I want to work hard. I’ve just taken bad advice, and I know how to fix it.’ I look at her imploringly. ‘Please, please believe me. I’ve ignored you and I’m really sorry, but I’ve been an idiot, keeping my head in the sand. I’ll get the money to repay the default loan payments, I can pay them with my credit card today. But please, please don’t withdraw my overdraft facility. I just need a bit more time, but I’m going to pay it off.’

  She narrows her eyes. ‘I am,’ I say. ‘I don’t want it to be like this any more. You need to trust me.’ I smile and I can hear my voice is shaking. ‘I know you’ve got no reason to, but I really hope you do.’

  I sit back in my chair and clutch the papers again.

  Clare Lomax sighs. ‘OK, look, there’s a way out of this.’ I hold my breath. ‘You will have to pay us back a regular amount each month and if you default just once more, that’s it. We’ll call in debt collectors. You’ll have to cut back on your company expenditure. And I see you’re married, right?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘The flat is in both your names?’

  ‘Just my husband’s.’

  ‘So they can’t take that.’

  ‘They can’t take what?’

  ‘You won’t lose your flat.’

  My head is spinning. ‘Lose the flat? No, of course we wouldn’t . . . would we?’

  She says musingly, ‘Miss Kapoor, I honestly don’t think you realise how serious this is.’

  ‘I do,’ I say, my voice practically begging. ‘Absolutely I do.’

  ‘Your husband’s working?’

  ‘Yes – yes, he is. But—’

  ‘You’re lucky,’ she says, pulling her papers together. ‘You can live off him for a few months while you sort yourself out. We’ll draw up a payment schedule for the overdraft too and then work out a new way for you to go forward with the business.’

  I nod numbly. Maybe I’ll have to, but I don’t like the idea. I want to get back together with Oli, but not because he’ll pay for everything. I’d rather lose him, and the business, than feel that I’m taking him back so I can ‘live off him’ the way Clare Lomax suggests. But I don’t say anything. After all, what choice do I have? I’ve got to make this work for myself. I’ve got to change the way things have been. I quiver with purpose, I’m surprised Clare Lomax doesn’t notice.

  ‘And then we’ll ask to see that you’re conducting your business more profitably. So it’s viable.’ She clears her throat. ‘Does that sound like a way forward to you, Miss Kapoor?’ She looks down at her pad. ‘I’m sorry. Is it Mrs Kapoor then?’

  ‘No,’ I say. ‘It’s Mrs Jones.’ I hate being Mrs Jones, for all the obvious reasons. I shift in my seat again, and the papers in my pocket wrap around my thigh.

  ‘Oh. Sorry.’ She isn’t really paying attention. ‘Don’t be,’ I say. ‘It’s fine. So—’

  ‘I think we’re going to be able to work this out,’ she says, pulling the keyboard out in front of her and swivelling round to face the computer. ‘Like I say, Miss Kapoor, things are going to have to change. The question is, are you willing to make those changes?’

  ‘Yes, I am,’ I say, nodding, and this time I hear myself speak and it’s clear, low, confident and I believe what I’m saying, for the first time in ages. ‘I really am.’

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  It is a cold day but sunny as I walk down from Liverpool Street towards the studio, hands in my pockets. I’m the other side of the City, heading back to my beloved East London. Pushing past me on either side are bustling City workers in black and grey, enlivened only by the flash of a red tie or the glint of a gold earring. I shiver in the icy wind, walking briskly.

  I hug the papers to myself, trying to keep warm. Now I’m out of it, the meeting seems almost funny, it’s so awful. And one thing’s clear: though Clare Lomax and I are not destined to be friends who meet in unlikely circumstances and form a life-long bond, she’s completely right. She could see it. Things need to change. I’ll be thirty-one in May. I’m a grownup, for God’s sake.

  Five minutes later, I am opening the door of the Petticoat Studios at the bottom of Brick Lane. ‘Studio’ is a euphemistic name for the room I rent. It is basically an old sixties warehouse that has been roughly divided up into different spaces of different sizes. My aunt Sameena says that when she was over visiting relatives in the seventies, she’d come to Brick Lane and see row upon row of Bangladeshi men asleep on the floors. They’d wake up in the morning and go to work on a building site nearby, and their beds would be taken by the night-shift workers who’d come back as they were getting up. Now it has exposed brick and steel girders, and Lily the textile designer has stencilled huge patterns onto the wall behind the erratically manned reception desk. Being bohemian and cool does not necessarily mean the heating works or the loos flush all the time, I’ve found.

  ‘Hello!’ I say to Jamie, one of the two receptionists whose salary is paid for by our extortionate rental fee. Jamie looks up and moves part of her blonde fringe away with her finger. She is wearing a black velveteen hoodie with the hood up, and is flicking through Pop magazine.

  ‘Hiya, Nat!’ she nods perkily. Jamie is very perky. She’s pretty and sweet and kind, like an East London version of Sophie Dahl. ‘How was the funeral?’

  ‘Fine,’ I say, reaching into my pigeonhole and pulling out the post. ‘Well, you know.’

  ‘Oh, of course.’ She nods understandingly. ‘It’s really hard, isn’t it?’

&nb
sp; I am in no mood for trite funereal conversations, and I’m in no mood for beautiful sunny Jamie, whom I sometimes want to punch in the mornings, she’s so upbeat. I smile and nod, then trudge up the cold concrete circular stairs and unlock my studio.

  It’s only been two days since I was here, but it feels longer. It’s very cold, and the big square windows don’t keep in the heat, though it’s always light. My own studio is about twelve square feet. It’s all painted white. There are floor-to-ceiling shelves next to the window and an alcove with a safe in it, covered with a curtain, a red, lemon and grey geometric fifties material from one of the bedrooms at Summercove. I keep my unsold pieces in there, and any metals I’ve bought. There’s a small wooden table with an old, battered, paint-spattered radio, a kettle and a few mugs on one of Granny’s old trays, and the rest of the room is taken up with the workbench with all my tools on it. A hammer, pliers, drills, wire and chain cutters, sharp knives, all covered with tiny pellets of old copper or gold wire, my apron which makes me feel super-professional, and my sketchbook, where I used to be constantly scribbling down ideas. I haven’t drawn or written anything new in it for months.

  Above the work table six big cork tiles are glued to the wall, onto which I have stuck photos – the one of Granny when she was younger; me and Jay at Summercove when we were five, squinting into the sun, both dark, fat, small and serious; and Ben and me last year when we went as Morecambe and Wise to the Petticoat Studios Christmas drinks. Tania didn’t get it, but as she grew up on the Left Bank that’s excusable. No one else did either, though. Their average ages are about twenty-three. The photo makes me smile every time I look at it; there’s such panic in our eyes as we realise what a mistake we’ve made, and behind us are grouped our effortlessly trendy fellow studio-renters in a variety of super-cool fancy dress outfits, from Betty Boo (Jamie, of course) to Johnny Depp as Captain Sparrow (Matt, one of the writers in the writers’ collective in the basement). I never remember that about fancy dress: that you’re supposed to look brilliant, but gorgeous as well. I always just look insane.

  Finally, there’s a picture of Oli and me on our wedding day two years ago at the Chelsea Physic Garden, he in a light khaki summer linen suit, me in white Collette Dinnigan. We’re in profile, black and white, laughing at each other, and we look for all the world as though we’re in a photo shoot in Hello!. Sometimes, in the middle of the afternoon, I’ll glance up from my work and catch sight of that photo, and I’ll have to remind myself it’s me. There are clippings from magazines, lots of pins just in case I have ideas for things, a cartoon from Private Eye about artists, and a Sempé cover from the New Yorker which Oli had framed for me on our first wedding anniversary.

  I have to call Oli now I’m back. We need to talk again. It’s been nearly three weeks, and coming back from Cornwall, from everything there and the meeting this morning, has made me see one thing clearly: this state of in-between nothingness can’t go on.

  There are window boxes outside with pansies and geraniums which have died. I need to sort them out now spring is nearly here, take a trip to Columbia Road and buy some more. Cheaply, of course. There’s nothing to be frightened of. I can get on with things. I want to channel my new-found, urgent sense of purpose, of the need for action. But still there’s something stopping me, I don’t know what. It’s more than Oli. It’s Granny’s funeral, it’s what Arvind and Octavia both separately said, this casual crumbling of the wall I’d always thought was around us all. It’s the scant pages of the diary I’ve read, enough to make me want to read more, desperately read more.

  Where’s the rest of it? Cecily didn’t just write that first chunk, that much is clear. What happened that summer, after the boys arrived? I’m holding the post in my hand and I feel myself screwing up the letters as I screw up my eyes, trying to think. To go from never hearing her name mentioned, to being able to hear her voice so clearly that it’s almost as though she’s talking just to me, is incredibly strange. To go from thinking that your family is sane and happy, if distant, to realising you don’t really know anything about them at all – where’s the rest of it? What happened afterwards, with my mother, with her, with all of them? I have to find out, but how? I have to find the diary. And I have to find some way of talking to my mother about it.

  I put the post down on the table. The letters fan out by themselves. At least two are from the bank. I can stop ignoring them. There are two more window envelopes, which always means a bill or a reminder. And there’s an invitation to a new trade fair, in June, in Olympia. I’ve been ignoring those for a while too: what’s the point? But now, flushed with enthusiasm, I feel as though anything’s possible. I realise that if I’m ever to make my own business work, I need to start designing again. Come up with a new collection that’s so amazing I’ll be on every fashionista’s blog, sold in Liberty’s in a year and have my own diffusion line in Topshop by next year. But more importantly, get it right. Do it because I love it, not because I have to. So what . . . what collection? What will it be?

  Then, as if someone else is telling me to do it, my hand steals slowly but surely to my neck. I feel the thin chain and Cecily’s ring hanging on it. I walk over to the tiny mirror hanging by the fridge and stare at myself. There are dirty brown circles under my eyes.

  The ring nestles against my skin, the almost pink gold soft against my skin. The twisted metal flowers are beautiful. I think about this ring, about Granny, about my dead young aunt. And suddenly, I hear my grandfather’s voice, as his dry fingers push Cecily’s diary towards me: Take it . . . And look after it, guard it carefully. It’ll all be in there.

  I take the pages out from my skirt and look at them, wondering what comes next.

  ‘Nat,’ a voice calls outside. ‘Hey! I’m early!’

  Of course she’s early. It’s Cathy, she’s always early. Quickly, I shove the pages into my bag as Cathy pokes her head round the door.

  Cathy is very short; I am tall. It is one of the many differences that brought us closer together, since we were eleven-year-olds negotiating the nightmarish, unforgiving terrain of the all-girls West London grammar school. She is holding up a brown paper bag.

  ‘I went via Verde’s,’ she says. ‘I bought quiche. Terrible morning. I think I lost someone fifty grand.’ Cathy is an actuary, she works in Bishopsgate, the financial district on the edge of the City which encroaches daily ever further into Spitalfields, bringing glass office blocks and Pret a Mangers into the once-ramshackle, historic streets. ‘I’ve got salad. And cakes. And some really expensive fruit juice.’ She comes towards me and kisses me on the cheek. ‘How are you, love?’

  I lean down and hug her tightly, feeling her cold, silky, thick hair against my skin, her reassuring Cathy smell – I think it’s a combination of Johnson’s baby lotion and Anaïs Anaïs. She’s not one to experiment with new things, our Cathy. If she’s happy with something, she sticks to it. She found Anaïs Anaïs when we were sixteen and she’s worn it ever since. She likes Florida and goes there every winter with her mum, to the same hotel in Miami. If Horrific Ex Boyfriend Martin hadn’t chucked her out and changed the locks three years ago she’d still be with him, which is worrying to me, as he was a bona fide psychopath. She doesn’t like change.

  She sets the bag down on my workbench and pats my hair. ‘I kept thinking about you yesterday. How was it?’

  ‘It was OK. Awful, but you know what I mean.’ I kick my bag further under the table.

  ‘What’s that on your head?’ She points to the purple bump on my forehead and frowns. ‘Did you have a fight with someone? Did your mum behave herself? Or did she try and snog the vicar and you got in the way?’

  Cathy knows my mother of old. She remembers our parents’ evening of 1991. She actually saw Mum with Mr Johnson.

  ‘It’s fine.’ I laugh, though I feel a stab in my side as I think of my mother. I remember how jumpy she was all yesterday, see her distraught face as she remonstrated with Guy, waving me and Octavia goodbye, hear Oct
avia: ‘Do you really not know the truth about her?’

  ‘Just a bump.’ I don’t want to, can’t, get into that at the moment, not even with Cathy. ‘They’re all pretty mad, my family. You know that.’

  ‘They are,’ Cathy says briskly. ‘It’s a wonder you’re not a complete mentalist, Nat, I’ve often thought that. Or even more of a mentalist than you are, if you know what I mean.’

  ‘That’s so kind of you,’ I say. ‘I want to know how you are, though. What’s up with work? Why’s it terrible?’

  ‘I think my boss hates me. Genuinely hates me.’ Cathy is still staring at my head. ‘Look, forget about that. How was the meeting this morning?’

  There’s a noise in the corridor and my eyes dart to the door. I don’t know why I should care; I’m paranoid about anyone, apart from Cathy and Jay, knowing how stupid I’ve been. Even Oli doesn’t know the full extent of it. I hid it from him, just as he hid things from me. I don’t want Ben, for example, to walk past and accidentally hear the reality of my idiocy. Why should I care what he and Tania think? I don’t know. But I don’t want him to feel sorry for me. I’m sure he already does, and I wish he didn’t. I don’t want him to know how stupid I am either.

  ‘Um—’ I put the cutlery and plates on the bench and reach for some napkins which I keep in my apron pocket. ‘It was pretty awful.’

  ‘Oh, no.’

  ‘No, it’s fine,’ I hasten to explain. ‘I have to find a thousand quid now to pay back the defaulted loan payments. But I can put that on my other credit card.’ Cathy whistles. ‘And I have to pay off the overdraft, two hundred pounds a month plus interest. And they won’t, like, call the debt collection agencies in, or the police, or take me to court.’

  ‘Ha-ha,’ says Cathy. She pulls her ponytail tight with both hands, as though she’s flexing her muscles. ‘Right.’