Love Always

by Harriet Evans

And now that Granny is buried, in the ground, the earth piling up over her as we stand here and talk, everything looks different. It is strange how often I’ve caught myself wondering if she’d like something I’m doing, these last two weeks. Makes me realise how much I wanted her to like it to begin with.

  ‘It’s for work. It’s—’ I can’t tell her. ‘It’s really important.’

  ‘More important than this?’ Mum waves her arms around the car. I don’t take her bait, though she’s right to be confused, upset. My voice sounds childish as I say, ‘No, of course not, but I’m here, aren’t I? I just have to go back early.’

  ‘It’s bad enough Oli not being here as well,’ my mother says. ‘Now you’re racing off as soon as you possibly can, and—’ She drops her hands by her sides, as if to say, This daughter of mine, what can I do with her?

  There is a pain in my heart. I wish I could tell her. I wish she was the kind of mother I could tell.

  ‘Help me, Archie,’ Arvind tells his son, and this creates a diversion, as Uncle Archie gently helps him down from the car. They walk behind us, slowly, Jay following in silence, and we walk towards the open front door. The wind creaks around us, but there is no rustling sound from the bare trees.

  Mum is still staring at me. She says slowly, ‘You know, Natasha, I’m really very upset with you.’

  I nod, unable to speak suddenly as we walk across the threshold. The lovely fifties Ercol sideboard has flowers on it, white lilies that are just starting to die; the smell is cloying. Granny must have bought them. Her presence is still here, the last tasks she performed still evident.

  There are clanging sounds as we turn left into the kitchen;

  Louisa is already in residence, assisted by Mary Beth and Octavia, who are taking out trays, fetching glasses, spooning out hummus from plastic tubs into my grandmother’s favourite porridge bowls. Again, it looks all wrong, this activity. Normally it would be Granny, pottering slowly but surely about her kitchen, calmly putting things together, in her domain. This whirlwind of activity is for her, for her funeral. I close my eyes.

  ‘And there’s another thing.’ Mum is still talking furiously. I am the one who has ignited the smouldering grief and anger she has been suppressing all day. ‘While we’re on this subject, Natasha. How come your own husband can’t even be bothered to come to Mummy’s funeral, doesn’t even write or ring to apologise? Doesn’t he care at all?’ She turns and faces me, her cheeks flushing dark cherry, her green eyes huge in her lovely face. I stare, she is so like Granny, so beautiful, always has been. ‘At all?’ she repeats.

  Louisa looks up. ‘Miranda,’ she says briskly. ‘Ah, you’re here at last,’ as if Mum had stopped off for a facial and a manicure on the way. ‘Can you please unpack the nibbles in those cartons there?’

  Mum simply ignores her; if this were a different situation I would love how much my mother and her cousin loathe each other, really so much that sometimes it’s a wonder they don’t simply take their shoes off and wrestle on the floor. Mum turns to me again. ‘Really, darling. I mean, he’s your husband.’

  There is a rushing sound in my head again. I look up to the ceiling.

  ‘He’s not any more,’ I hear myself say. ‘What?’ she says. ‘What?’

  The rushing is louder and louder. ‘I’ve left him. Or rather he’s left me. That’s why he’s not here.’

  They all turn to me. I feel myself going red, like a child caught doing something they shouldn’t. It’s weird. They look at me, Mum’s jaw drops open and the silence stretches out till it is overwhelming, until Mary Beth helpfully drops a glass on the floor. It shatters, which at least gives us all something to do.

  Mum flattens herself against the wall, away from the path of glass which has splintered closest to her, and pushes shards towards the centre of the room with one velvet toecap. ‘Oh, my gosh,’ says poor Mary Beth, her hand flying to her mouth. ‘Darn it.’ She crouches on the ground and Louisa flies in with a dustpan and brush screeching, ‘Don’t touch the glass! Careful!’

  There’s a brief moment’s silence. I watch them, watch the splinters and the stem of the glass, rolling slowly around the lino on its side.

  ‘Nat?’ Jay is still behind me, I hadn’t seen him. ‘You’ve left Oli? What? Why?’

  ‘I don’t want to talk about it,’ I say, and then helpfully, the floor feels liquid beneath my feet and is rising up to meet me. I step back, away from the glass, and shapes and colours swim before my eyes and it is almost a relief when gradually, everything goes black, and I sink to the ground in a dead faint.

  Chapter Six

  When I awake, I’m not sure where I am, or what’s going on. It’s dark. I sit up and look around me, blinking in confusion, and slowly, it all comes back to me.

  The first thing I notice is that I’m in my old bedroom. The curtains are half drawn. They took me up here, Jay and the Bowler Hat lugging me up the wide staircase, and I fell into bed and fell fast asleep – a sort of narcolepsy, I could barely keep my eyes open.

  I look at my watch; it is a quarter to five but I don’t know how long I’ve been up here. I stretch and yawn, running my hands through my hair. I have a throbbing feeling, as if I don’t have a headache but am about to get one. I run my fingers slowly, experimentally, over my skin. There is a plaster on my forehead, and underneath a swollen lump forming, hot to the touch. Perfect. A massive bruise should be there by tomorrow. Just in time.

  Oh dear, I think again. I fainted like a lunatic. My elbow is very sore, from where I must have hit it on the way down. As is my thigh. I feel dreadful, as though I’m hungover and I’ve been beaten up, but more than that I am embarrassed, mortified, even.

  I didn’t want to tell my mother my marriage was over, not like that. She didn’t deserve that – none of them did. At Granny’s funeral too – I wince; it’s awful.

  There’s a soft tap at the oak door. ‘Come in,’ I say.

  The door opens slowly, and Jay’s handsome face appears around it. ‘How are you?’ he says.

  ‘You want the truth? Pretty rotten,’ I tell him. I crane my head, to see him better. ‘And sorry. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean you to find out like that.’

  ‘What the hell, Nat? What’s going on with you?’ he says, advancing into the room. He sits down heavily on the bed next to mine and switches on the bedside lamp, his body casting a huge shadow on the opposite wall. ‘You’ve left Oli? But you guys were – he was your life!’

  He is looking at me as if I’ve just killed his pet rabbit.

  ‘Yeah?’ I say. ‘Right.’

  ‘Yeah!’ Jay says, almost angrily. ‘What’s up with you?’

  ‘It’s not me,’ I say. I laugh. ‘Well, perhaps it is. He – he slept with someone else.’

  It sounds so weird when you speak those words. They’re such a cliché but you never expect to be saying them out loud, and in relation to your own life.

  ‘He what?’ Jay looks blank, as though he doesn’t understand the words.

  I swing my legs off the side of the bed. ‘She’s a client. It was after a conference.’ I am looking for my shoes. I can say it out loud if I just disassociate myself from it, completely pretend it’s not happening.

  ‘But . . .’ Jay is frowning. ‘But it’s you two. You’re like my perfect couple. You can’t split up.’

  ‘We’re not a perfect couple.’ I want to cry. He looks bewildered. I say gently, as though it’s him I’m breaking up with, ‘Things . . . things have changed. I don’t know him any more.’

  ‘But – you’ve known him for ever, Nat. He hasn’t changed.’ I met Oli at college. He was the first person – the only person – to tell me my green eyes in my sallow skin were beautiful. We were already friends by then. It was in the student union bar; we were both in Dramsoc, celebrating the end of our successful run of HMS Pinafore with a themed nautical party Oli had organised. I think I fell in love with him a little bit then, though we didn’t get together for years after that. Six years, in fact. I hugg
ed him, when he said it. He looked so pleased, he was easily pleased back then.

  I have to remind myself of this now, but Oli wasn’t a cool kid when I met him. Over the years, he transformed himself from an earnest young man from a small Yorkshire village with a spluttering manner of speech and a terrible habit of blushing. Now his enthusiasm is much more high-octane. He likes doing the deals, meeting the clients, pressing the flesh; he wants people to like him, I guess. He always did. I used to find that intensely endearing. Until the way he got them to like him turned into shagging them. That I don’t find endearing.

  ‘But that’s just it,’ I say. ‘I don’t think I do know him any more. Even before he told me about . . . about it. Things haven’t been right. With either of us.’

  Jay stares at me. He looks as if he’s about to say something, and then stops. We’re both silent, listening to the rumble of conversation from downstairs.

  It seems such a long way away from here, that London life we have, full of expensive meals and hospitality suites, the cool flat with its seventies film posters on the walls and the bright red Gaggia espresso machine. From our disinte-grating marriage and secrets that we – both of us – have been keeping from each other. Small secrets, biting the lip here and there, not talking, not telling the truth, the kind of secrets that grow and grow until they fester within you, and you can’t go back and make them right. We started lying to each other too long ago for that. I see that now I’m here, far away from it all.

  I draw my legs up and hug my knees. ‘Open the curtains,’ I say.

  ‘It’s getting dark, you know.’

  ‘I know.’

  The light is fading and the moon is just appearing, full and yellow. The sky is gun-metal grey, the sea an oily lavender-black. It feels too soon for it to be dark; we’ve only just got here. Suddenly I wish with all my heart I could stay, that I didn’t have to go back to any of it, to tomorrow. We are silent for a moment, Jay sitting next to me, and above the voices downstairs I can hear the faint roar of the sea outside, like a shell against my ear.

  ‘We should go down,’ I say. ‘Sure, in a minute.’ Jay wrinkles his nose, and takes his watch off his wrist, holding it in his hand, an old habit of his. ‘What you going to do, then? Are you going to kick him out?’

  ‘He’s gone already, that was the night he told me.’ Two weeks ago.

  ‘Seriously? And you didn’t tell anyone?’

  ‘He wants to come back, he didn’t want to leave. He keeps saying how sorry he is, what a mistake it is.’ I drum my fingers on my forehead, and wince as they touch my bruised flesh. ‘I didn’t . . . know what to do.’

  ‘You could have talked to someone about it. So – no one knows?’ He looks incredulous. I take a breath.

  ‘Cathy knows. And – well, Ben.’

  ‘Ben?’ Jay makes a loud clicking sound with his tongue. ‘You told Ben but you didn’t tell me? Or your mum?’

  Ben has the studio next to me. He’s a photographer, an old friend of Jay’s from college, that’s how I heard about the studio in the first place. We have tea most days. Ben wears woolly jumpers and loves Jaffa Cakes, like me; he’s a very comforting person to be working next to all day, like a shaggy dog, or a nice old lady who runs a sweet shop. I cried all over him the day after Oli left.

  ‘You should have told us about this, not Ben,’ Jay says. ‘Should have kept it in the family.’

  Jay does have a tendency to talk like a Corleone. ‘Oh, Jay, honestly.’ He is frowning. ‘I couldn’t! And then Granny died, like, a week later. I’m hardly going to email everyone and go, “See you at the funeral, and by the way? I’m separated from my husband, fill you in then!”’

  Jay shakes his head. ‘You’re mental.’ He gets up and stares out of the window, then turns to me. ‘Nat, it’s me. OK? It’s me. Of course you should have told me. I – I’m here for you, you know that?’

  ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘I know you are. I just couldn’t.’ My eyes are filling with tears. Jay squeezes his watch in his hands; I hear the links of the metal strap clinking together.

  ‘Sometimes . . . I just feel like I don’t know you any more,’ he says, after a pause. ‘You’re a different person these days, Nat. Quiet, subdued. You’re not yourself.’

  I don’t look at him. I don’t want to talk about it, to acknowledge that he might be right, how wrong everything is. ‘I spend a lot of time on my own,’ I say, blankly. ‘In the studio, at home.’

  He shakes his head. ‘That’s not it. I feel like you . . . you’re sad, and I don’t know why.’ He puts his finger under my chin. ‘Nat. What’s the meeting tomorrow about?’

  I’m silent. He looks at me, and the kindness and concern in his eyes are like pains in my heart. It’s just easier if he doesn’t care. If he leaves me alone.

  ‘It’s with the bank.’ I stare back at him, hugging myself. ‘It’s not good.’

  ‘How come?’

  My voice is croaky. ‘I’ve defaulted on my loans. They want to take me t-to court.’ Jay opens his mouth, shocked. ‘I’m probably going to lose the business. It’s not working. Well – it’s me. I’m not working.’ I swallow.

  ‘Yes – yes, you are!’ Jay says, in outrage. ‘You’re brilliant, Nat!’

  ‘I’m honestly not,’ I say. ‘Not any more. Don’t think I ever was. I haven’t drawn anything for months.’

  ‘But you’re always – you’ve always had your pencil going, sketching something –’ he waves his hand round, indicating, here, here – ‘coming up with some design for a tiara when you were a kid, some earrings, a ring – you love that stuff! You’re brilliant!’ He says it again, and it just sounds hollow.

  I touch his hand. ‘I can’t do it any more. I don’t know why.’ I look down, I can’t bear to meet his gaze. ‘I’ve got no new ideas. And the stuff that’s out there already – no one’s buying it. The business, me, it’s all –’ I take a deep breath, to steady myself – ‘it’s screwed. Not that the website doesn’t look beautiful, Jay.’ I want to reassure him of that. ‘It’s just we’re in a recession. People aren’t treating themselves to a nice bracelet from some jewellery designer they’ve never heard of.’

  Jay looks bewildered. ‘But you’re going places, you’ve had your stuff in magazines, that celebrity girl wore your necklace thing? I don’t understand.’

  ‘That was ages ago. And I got too big for my boots,’ I say. I am trying to sound chipper, but I am very scared. This is my job. I don’t know how to do anything else, and it terrifies me that I’ve let myself come so low. ‘Oli’s been keeping both of us, the last couple of years,’ I say, and my eyes fill with tears again. ‘It was fine, at the start. We knew it’d take a while. I’ve had to buy gold, and materials, and pay for the business cards and the stationery and everything – and the rent on the studio. Plus the accountants and all that, to do with the company accounts. But . . . I’m about fifteen grand in debt.’ I breathe in . . . I hate saying it out loud. I hate it all.

  It’s the look on Jay’s face I can’t stand, this is why I don’t want to tell people, to see the disappointment, the surprise in their eyes. He shakes his head, as though he doesn’t understand it, as though I’m an idiot, which I have been.

  ‘I didn’t know things had got that bad,’ he says eventually. ‘What will you do?’

  ‘I have no idea,’ I say. ‘But I have to do something. I’ve known it for a while, and then Oli – Oli told me about the girl, and then Granny died, and it’s all I can think about, how disappointed she’d be, how I’ve let her down . . .’ My throat is closing up; I don’t want to cry. ‘I never used to think I’d find someone, or be able to do something I’d like. I thought I’d end up like Mum, you know? In a horrible flat, lying about everything and pretending she’s in a film, not reality. I thought I’d got away from it . . . me and Oli, the two of us, my job, you know . . .’ I ball my hand into a fist and push it into my stomach. ‘Oh, God.’

  ‘Granny dying was always going to do this, unleash a lot of cr
ap,’ Jay says. He puts his arm around me. ‘Oh, Nat. Man, I’m sorry.’ He squeezes me tight. ‘Hey, why don’t you come and stay with me? I’ve got that little study, I hardly use it.’

  I smile. ‘That’s really kind. No . . . I hope – I don’t know what’s going to happen.’

  ‘You mean you hope he’ll come back?’

  ‘I think he wants to come back,’ I say. ‘He keeps texting, asking to talk about it some more, wanting to meet up. I just don’t know if that’s right or not. I don’t know anything any more.’ I look up at him. ‘What’s going to happen, Jay?’

  ‘It’s going to be OK.’ Jay pats me on the back. ‘Come on,’ he says. ‘It’s getting late. You need to show your face back downstairs, especially if you’re running away in an hour or so.’

  ‘Yep,’ I say. ‘I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have put all this on you now.’

  ‘I’m glad you did, Nat,’ he says. ‘You should have earlier.

  I’ve been worried about you. Look, you’re talented, OK? This meeting tomorrow, it’s going to go fine. And then you can talk to Oli, work things out . . . it’s going to be all good again. Promise.’

  I nod. ‘If you say so.’

  ‘Trust me. Family.’ I give a mirthless laugh, pull on my boots and we head towards the light, out of the dark, echoing corridor downstairs to Granny’s wake. Arvind’s chairlift is at the top of the stairs; he must be up here, having a nap. I hear a noise next to us and look round, half-expecting to see Granny in the shadows, standing behind the banister, coolly enquiring where we’re off to, what we think we’re doing? But she’s not there. No one’s there.

  Chapter Seven

  The gathering in the sitting room has a desultory, unreal air. There aren’t as many people as there were at the funeral. I suppose most have gone by now. The large room looks odd; people don’t usually stand around in knots, talking softly, politely. I scan the room, checking off the members of my family. When was the last time we were all together, in the same room? I honestly cannot remember. Her seventy-fifth birthday? It’s been years, and even then infrequently. This – this formal, tepid tea party – it’s not Granny. It’s not anything.