Love Always

by Harriet Evans

  We sit in the sumptuous dining room, with green watered-silk wallpaper, a glass dining table, elaborately cut crystal goblets – I remember when I was little thinking this must be what the table at Buckingham Palace was like. Archie munches slowly and steadily, like a grazing cow, not saying much. Sameena asks me and Jay how we’re getting on, we talk about my jewellery, about the new places in Columbia Road. We plan a trip for her to come East soon. I ask about her family, whom she’s just been visiting in Mumbai, her sister Priyanka who is having dialysis, her little nieces and nephews. She only sees them once a year.

  ‘Were you lonely when you first moved here, Sameena?’ I ask, thinking of my grandfather. ‘It’s so far away.’

  Archie doesn’t look up, but he’s listening to her.

  ‘A little,’ she says. ‘The weather got to me, you know?’

  ‘How old were you?’

  ‘I was young,’ she says. ‘Oh, twenty-five. We had no money, did we, Archie?’ Archie doesn’t meet her eye. He nods briskly. ‘We were living in Acton. In a tiny flat. I’d been to England but when I was a child, and I couldn’t remember it that well. I’d invented what it’d be like. In my mind, you know? I thought it was palaces, very elegant people in tea dresses. Instead, it rained all the time, like this—’ She gestures out of the window, at the faint patter that has started to sound on the conservatory roof. ‘Dog mess everywhere, cracked pavements, no one friendly. The old lady next to me, she was from Delhi, she would go to the shops in her shabby old duffel coat, covering up her beautiful sari. At home she wouldn’t have had to put her coat on and cover up her lovely colours, be drab. That’s what I remember most of all.’

  Jay looks at her. ‘I didn’t realise that, Mum,’ he says. ‘Oh, yes,’ Sameena says, pushing a bowl of dhal towards me. ‘But you know, these things pass. And then I was very happy. It’s my home, now. My home is with you. All of you,’ she adds hurriedly, looking at me. ‘You and your mother too, Natasha.’

  There’s a silence. We all eat some more. Sameena glances at her husband.

  ‘Are you looking forward to going back for the launch of the foundation, Natasha?’ she asks. ‘It sounds like a wonderful day. You know, they’re calling people up about it already. And everyone’s saying yes.’

  ‘I don’t really know much about it,’ I say. ‘Mum hasn’t told me a lot, and – well, Guy’s the other trustee. I don’t really know him either.’ I look down at my plate.

  ‘We’ve been contacting people about it all week,’ Archie says. ‘Very notable people.’ He sighs. ‘It’s going to be impressive, I think. Only two weeks to go.’

  ‘Do I need to do anything?’ I say. ‘Oh, no,’ he says. ‘Louisa’s got it all under control.’

  I take a spoonful of sauce from the fish curry. It is delicious. The chilli puckers my tongue. ‘I guess I still don’t know why it’s been so fast,’ I say.

  ‘Our mother wanted it that way,’ Archie says. ‘Wanted it to start as soon as she died.’ He shrugs his shoulders. ‘She spent a lot of time planning for it. And you know, the Tate Gallery had already scheduled a major exhibition of her work, in 2011. Before she died. I don’t think she wanted it to go ahead. It’s strange.’

  ‘Why did she plan it out so much?’ I say. I remembered how pleased she was, but also a little agitated. She won’t be here for it now.

  He sighs again. ‘I think she liked the idea that after she was gone, people could start to appreciate her paintings again, without her there. And you know, the foundation will help young artists too, like she and Arvind were helped. He was funded to come over to Cambridge, she had patrons when she was younger. People looked after them. I think she wants to help others, now – now she’s gone.’

  Sameena nods. ‘Very noble. It’s wonderful.’

  ‘Of course, that’s where most of the money’s going,’ Archie says. ‘We shall see.’ He looks at me, and at Jay. ‘Her children, we get very little. That is what distresses me, on your mother’s behalf. The solicitors say—’ He stops, as if he’s gone too far. ‘I’m sorry,’ he says formally. ‘Not suitable.’

  ‘No, go on,’ I urge. He frowns. ‘Natasha, it’s not your concern.’ I feel as though I’ve been slapped for being naughty. ‘She wanted you involved, she had her reasons, I’m sure. But for the moment you don’t need to do anything. When the estate is settled, and we know what the money is, we’ll be able to consider applications, and you’ll be involved then, vetting the applicants, their suitability. Perhaps talking to people, visiting their studios . . . I don’t know.’

  ‘How ironic,’ I say. ‘Can I apply for some money?’ I’m joking.

  Archie doesn’t smile. ‘You’re going?’ I ask him then. ‘Next month, back to Cornwall?’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ he says. ‘Have you seen Arvind?’

  Jay shoots me a glance. Stop asking these questions. It occurs to me then that’s why he’s been in a funny mood today: he knows my uncle is displeased with me, and Jay, close as we are, is much more respectful of his parents than I am of my mother.

  ‘I have not, no,’ Archie says. ‘We are going next week.’

  ‘Louisa’s been down there,’ Sameena says, and I’m sure it’s an innocent remark but Archie obviously doesn’t want to hear it.

  ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘She’s been wonderful.’

  ‘She has,’ Archie says. ‘We are lucky.’

  Suddenly I can’t resist. ‘Archie, can I ask you something?’

  ‘Yes, Natasha?’ Archie breaks another poppadom between his fingers.

  ‘Why – well, why doesn’t Mum get on with her? Louisa’s been wonderful through this, organising the funeral, getting Arvind sorted, the foundation . . .’ My voice is loud in the silent dining room. ‘I don’t know what we’d all have done without her. And Mum – she thinks Louisa’s after her in some way.’

  I know this is dangerous, but it is as close as I can get to asking Archie about the diary, about what happened to Cecily, and I don’t want to, here in front of Sameena and Jay, these people I love. I don’t want to start throwing accusations around about my mother when I have no real evidence myself.

  Archie breaks the poppadom piece in half again. ‘You just said it. Louisa and your mother don’t get on. Never have done. That is all.’

  I want to laugh, inappropriate as it seems. That’s only the beginning of it, I want to say.

  But then he goes on: ‘Look, when we were growing up . . . it was a long time ago. We don’t really talk about it much, because of the tragedy of my sister.’ He raises his head, and a lock of carefully combed hair falls in his face, making him look much younger all of a sudden. ‘The truth is – they were very different. You know? Louisa was – well, I found her rather insufferable at times. Always offering to help. Much better behaved than us, our parents loved her. Always doing well in her exams, good at sports.’ He stops and rubs his arms. He seems surprised he’s saying all this, and then he ploughs on. ‘I was fascinated by her. So was your mother. She was everything we weren’t. We weren’t good at anything in particular. No artistic prowess, we weren’t intellectual. No good at sports. We weren’t blond, hearty. My mother was . . . disappointed with us. Always felt she’d rather Louisa and Jeremy were her children, not us. And Cecily, of course. She loved Cecily.’

  He trails off. I know he’s telling the truth. He speaks in a low, clear voice, not very dramatic, just simply stating facts. The four of us are still. What he says and the way he says it, makes me so sad, but I can’t reach out and touch him, I know that.

  ‘That’s why –’ Archie begins, and then stops. He clears his throat and looks at Jay, then at me. ‘Well. Now that is why I have always been very pleased that you two – you cousins got on so well. That these things don’t matter, these days. As has your mother.’

  ‘Have you spoken to Mum?’ I ask him suddenly. I’ve called her since our row, several times, but once again she’s gone completely off radar.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ he says. ‘Where is she?’ I as
k. ‘Is she around?’

  ‘She’ll be back in time for the foundation launch,’ Archie says. ‘Her work is important to her.’

  He raises his chin, and nods expectantly at me. ‘We had a row –’ I hear myself say. ‘I know you did.’ Archie puts his napkin down. ‘Natasha, you upset her a great deal. I don’t think you realise how much.’

  ‘She –’ I begin, and then I stop. I look at Sameena and Jay, eating their curry in silence.

  ‘She’s your mother,’ Archie says. ‘You should respect her, no matter what.’

  ‘No matter what?’ I say.

  He looks at me, then at his wife and child. ‘Yes.’

  I can’t push this any more; I’m in their home.

  The contrast between brother and sister strikes me again. Archie may be a bit pompous, but he’s made his own life for himself, him and Sameena and Jay, and it’s not like Summercove. I can see what he did – I tried to do it myself, with Oli, create a world different from the one I grew up in. I think of Archie with his parents, how he’s never really present, like his sister. He turns up, bosses people around, shows everyone his flash new car or his nice new watch, and then he’s gone. It’s funny to read about him in those pages of Cecily’s: the idea that he’d have gone to Oxford or Cambridge isn’t really him at all. I don’t know whether he took the exams or not, but I know he went away for a long time, went travelling, like Mum. He got a job working in a car dealership, in the mid-sixties when I guess it still had a modicum of glamour attached to it. Archie worked his way up; his business is now pretty successful. You’d know it, even if he didn’t tell you. He lived all over the world, in Singapore, Tokyo. It was in Mumbai that he met Sameena.

  I ask just one more question. ‘You don’t know where she is, though?’

  ‘No,’ he says. ‘As I said, she’ll be back.’

  She’s always flitting off somewhere, with no notice, and usually you’re lucky to get a text. When I was about ten, she went to Lisbon for a week, and I only found out when she rang the school on her way to the airport and told them my aunt would be looking after me while she was away . . . I remember this now in light of what I know, sitting at the Kapoors’ table, as Sameena and Jay nudge each other and she laughs about something, and Archie helps himself to more mango chutney and I sit watching them. I feel very alone, all of a sudden. Archie got out, he got away from whatever it was. Poor Mum, dancing off around the world to find some freedom, some space, running away from her own thoughts, her own life.

  Like I say, it makes me sad.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  On Thursday, the week after lunch at Archie’s, my alarm doesn’t go off and I wake up late. I lie in bed for about ten minutes, annoyed because the day is already off on the wrong foot. I have become very good at keeping myself busy with my lists and my actions and I know that lying in bed being annoyed isn’t the way to keep myself from going mad. Do something, anything. I get up, shower, get dressed and clean the flat from top to bottom, tidying things up, putting some more of Oli’s things away, dusting, scouring, scrubbing, singing along to the radio.

  In the afternoon I head out for the studio, eager to stretch my legs, get outside. In the hallway I see the post has arrived, which even though it’s nearly three is still something of a miracle. I pick up the bundle and sort it out, putting the post for the two other flats in our building into their rightful pigeonholes.

  I know he’s not coming back now, but some days events conspire to make it more difficult than others. This morning the post consists of a council tax demand, Oli’s Arsenal fanzine, one of his many gadget magazines, and a reminder to Mr and Mrs Jones that we have to renew our home contents insurance, which seems particularly cruel. There’s also a small, thick, stiff envelope, with my name written in handwriting I don’t recognise. I put the rest of the post in his pile – Oli is staying with his best friend Jason and his wife Lucy, nearby in Hackney, which is where he went before. He comes by the flat to pick his post up, just lets himself into the hall and goes again, we don’t see each other. I open the envelope addressed to me.

  YOU ARE INVITED TO THE LAUNCH OF

  THE FRANCES SEYMOUR FOUNDATION

  A CHARITY FOUNDED IN MEMORY OF FRANCES SEYMOUR

  TO SUPPORT YOUNG ARTISTS

  THURSDAY 9TH APRIL

  2.30PM CHAMPAGNE RECEPTION & BUFFET LUNCH

  3.30PM SPEECH BY MIRANDA KAPOOR, FRANCES’S

  DAUGHTER

  3.45PM PRIVATE VIEW OF EXHIBITION OPENS

  At Summercove,

  Near Treen,

  Cornwall

  RSVP

  rsvp@seymourfoundation.org

  Overleaf: ‘Summercove at Sunset, 1963’

  On the back is a painting, one I have never seen before. ‘Summercove at Sunset, 1963’ must have been painted from behind the white house, which is nestling against the black trees in the lane behind, the lawn and the terrace sloping gently towards the cliffs, the countryside lush and green, the grey terrace echoed by the grey-green of the lavender against it. There is a lone figure on the lawn, a tall man with a towel around his neck, walking towards the sea. It is very still, almost dreamlike; no feeling of movement in the branches or the lavender or the grass. The light is pale gold, casting long shadows. The man is striding but you feel he’s been frozen mid-step by the artist, that they wanted to capture this moment in time.

  I stare at it, in the fading afternoon light; I’ve seen Granny’s paintings at Summercove, in galleries, in catalogues and books, but I’ve never seen anything like this before. It feels like a new approach, only it was one of the last things she ever painted. I turn the invitation over in my hand, letting the corners of the hard cardboard press into my palms. Who sent this out? Louisa, of course. It wasn’t Mum, that’s for sure.

  It’s been over a week now since Mum and I had our showdown, and I still haven’t heard back from her. I don’t know what comes next. This gives me another reason to be in touch, I suppose. Tapping the invitation thoughtfully against my hand, I walk towards the studio.

  The sun is – sort of – out, a silvery sheen of cloud covering the sky but there are shadows on the ground and it’s kind of warm, for the first time this year, over halfway through March. I am lost in thought as I walk round to Fournier Street and out at the back of the Hawksmoor Christ Church, its looming, sinister bulk casting the streets into shade. I need more time to think.

  Cathy often says in her wise way that your life is made up of three sides of a triangle: home (where you live and how settled it is), relationships (friends, family and of course romantic), and work (having a job, having a fulfilling job, one that doesn’t make you cry every night or mean you’re a sex worker). Cathy’s triangle dictates that you don’t have to have all three sides working to be happy, but you need two sides to be able to function properly. We used to discuss this in the long evenings around the time of Horrific Ex Boyfriend Martin, three years ago – a psycho doctor who kicked her out of her flat and changed the locks, the week after she lost her job in her previous company. No home, no boyfriend, no job. No sides of triangle: bad. But strangely, it was OK, because it was relatively easy to get two sides of the triangle up and running again. She got a job quite quickly, bucking the trend of my other friends at publishing houses or law firms or small start-ups who suddenly lost their jobs: it was obviously some kind of slow period in the actuary recruiting world. She stayed with Jay, who has a spare room in his flat, and whom she has known almost as long as me, and the weird thing is that we remember that period with a lot of happiness. We were out a lot, loads of us, drinking in Spitalfields and Shoreditch, there were great new bars opening up each week and it wasn’t a stop on a tourist trail the way it is now. Oli and I were getting ready for our wedding, and finding the whole thing surreal and weird: Cathy and Oli and I all went to a wedding fair at ExCel, and had to leave after five minutes when the first stand we came across was a production company that will make a DVD of your wedding day set to a song that is specia
lly composed for and about you; it was next to a stand that sold you fluffy toys with the pet names you and your partner call each other embroidered on for you to give away to guests as wedding favours . . . We went to Summercove for a fortnight, the four of us, and I remember we ate fresh crab nearly every day, with pools of garlic butter and fresh bread. We helped Granny clear out Arvind’s study while he was away giving a lecture at Bologna, one of his last trips abroad, and threw out a huge amount of papers. I have since wondered what we threw out . . . probably the secret to happiness in the Western Hemisphere, or a cure for cancer, but it’s hard to tell when you’re confronted with a box containing a copy of Woman’s Own from 1979, two packets of crisps that went out of date in 1992, and assorted scraps of torn-up paper, which is what it mostly seemed to be. I remember Granny so well that summer, laughing over boxes, a scarf tied over her hair like Grace Kelly. She would have been in her mid-eighties then and she still looked like a star.

  * * *

  It seems a long time ago, that period in our lives. Rose-tinted spectacles, perhaps, but I look back on it now and smile. I clutch the invitation in my hand, bending the hard card over into the shape of a tear.

  At the studio, I put it on the little shelf by the safe. I stare at the painting on the back, thinking. It is very still; starting to get dark outside and the traffic seems distant. I shake my head. Where is the damn diary? Where is it? I feel as if I’m no nearer to finding out. I should have gone back to look for it and now I’ve made things worse, not better. I feel like a failure. I’ve let Cecily down.