There’s a knock on the door and a deep voice says, ‘Nat, hi.’
‘Ben! Hey,’ I say, and though it’s hardly a shock to see him, I’m particularly grateful for the diversion this morning. ‘I was just coming to ask you—’ I turn round and stop, open-mouthed. ‘Wow. Your hair! What happened to you?’
‘I had it all cut off.’
‘When?’
‘Last Thursday. You just haven’t been in since then.’
‘I was out visiting shops and stuff. My goodness. Why?’ He rubs the top of his head ruefully. ‘Um – I decided it was time for a change.’
‘All your lovely curls!’ I say. ‘And the stubble! All gone!’ He looks sad. ‘I know. My head feels cold.’ He is running his fingertips lightly over his scalp. I watch, transfixed, as his long fingers push through the thick short stubble of his hair and move down towards his smooth chin.
‘You look completely different,’ I say. ‘Strange.’
‘Oh, thanks,’ he says. ‘No, I don’t mean you look strange.’ I rush to correct myself. ‘It’s strange, I mean. You look – it’s like Samson.’
‘He lost all his strength and got murdered,’ Ben says. ‘You’re making me think I should put a bag on my head. Is it that bad?’
‘It’s really not. In fact it’s the opposite.’ I hear Cathy’s voice, it seems ages ago, that lunch – If he had his hair cut . . . Wow, he’d be absolutely gorgeous – and I can feel myself starting to blush. ‘You look great. Really – it really suits you. You look much better – not that you looked bad before. You always look good . . .’ I trail off. This is just pathetic.
His eyebrows pucker together and he frowns. ‘I don’t know if you’re trying to get yourself out of a hole or dig yourself into one,’ he says. ‘But I’ll console myself with the thought that it’ll grow out and I’ll have my shaggy-dog hair again soon.’
‘Yes,’ I say, ‘but give this a chance. Honestly, it suits you.’ He nods and smiles.
‘OK. I will.’
‘What happened to the jumpers?’ I say. ‘It’s officially the first day of spring tomorrow,’ he replies. ‘Back of the wardrobe with the jumpers.’
‘Well, the new you is so handsome I daren’t be seen out in public with you. You’ll have young girls throwing themselves at you. You’re like Jake Gyll-what’s-his-name.’
‘Who?’ He scratches his head again. ‘Oh . . . no one.’
There’s an awkward pause, as silence falls over the bantering conversation.
‘I was going to come and see you,’ I say eventually. We’d normally pop in and see each other mid-morning, for a coffee or a chat. We are easily distracted, it’s terrible. ‘What are you up to?’
‘I’m doing paperwork.’ He sounds tired. ‘It’s really boring.’ He advances into the room and then he stops, looks down. ‘Nat, this is beautiful.’
He holds up a piece of paper. It’s the design I was sketching last week before Mum arrived, the daisy-chain necklace. I’ve left it there, not quite sure what it needs, because I can’t think about it without thinking about Mum afterwards. ‘Oh, thanks,’ I say, blushing. ‘It’s nothing, it’s just a rough idea for something.’
‘I think it’s really lovely.’ He smiles, and I watch him, his bones under his skin. He has a vein curling into the side of his temple, it throbs as he speaks. ‘Really simple, beautiful, complex at the same time.’
‘Oh, no, it’s not.’ It’s been so long since anyone’s praised my work that I don’t know what to say. I sound like a pantomime villain. ‘But – that’s really kind of you.’ I’m flustered, and look around the studio. ‘Right. Best get on.’ I run a hand over my forehead. ‘Sorry. I’m operating really slowly today.’
‘What’s up?’
‘I don’t know,’ I say. ‘Just – stuff.’
‘Oli?’
‘Well, yeah. Everything really.’
Ben puts the sketch down and leans on the workbench. ‘It must be really hard.’
‘I know. It’s just I don’t know what comes next. You know – when do they ring the bell, say it’s officially over?’
‘I guess when you sign the final divorce papers,’ he says, and then holds up a hand. ‘I mean, if that’s what you want to do.’
‘Yes—’ I shake my head. ‘I don’t know. Probably. It’s so – freaky though.’ I pause. ‘There’s a lot going on at the moment. Other stuff.’
‘Like what?’ Ben says. ‘Are you – OK?’
‘I’m fine. It’s family stuff.’
‘Heavy?’
‘Pretty heavy. I found a – I found a diary,’ I say irrelevantly.
‘Aha.’ Ben rubs his hands over his hair again. ‘Some childhood diary you don’t want anyone to see? Or your diary of the studio and how you’ve got a crush on Les?’
Les is the leader of the writers’ collective downstairs. He is a large, fleshy man who loves talking about his days in the Socialist Workers’ Party and using words without pronouns, as in ‘Government needs to do this’ and ‘Council aren’t pulling their weight,’ just as wannabe trendy people say of the Notting Hill Carnival, ‘I’m going to Carnival this weekend.’ I know for a fact that he is from Lytham St Annes.
I nod at Ben. ‘Yes, it’s true,’ I say. ‘I am in love with Les and this is my journal of that love.’
‘Les is definitely More,’ Ben says, and we laugh, slightly too hilariously, as if to break up the atmosphere.
‘No,’ I say, looking round again. I don’t know why I feel as if someone might be watching us. ‘It’s weirder than that. It’s the diary my mother’s sister was writing the summer she died. In 1963. She was only fifteen.’
‘Wow,’ says Ben. ‘That is heavy.’
‘Yep,’ I say. ‘My grandfather gave the first part to me at the funeral. It’s just pages stapled together. But there’s more, I just don’t know where. I think my mum knows something, but when I asked her –’ I trail off.
‘I heard you guys shouting last week,’ Ben says simply. He pushes himself off the table and stands up. ‘Didn’t Sherlock Holmes say when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?’
I smile at him. ‘That is correct. I just don’t know what the truth is . . . I feel like if I can only read the rest of it I’ll know. It’s like I’ve hit a brick wall.’
‘Sherlock Holmes is usually right,’ Ben says, brushing his hands together. ‘So what remains is, someone’s got the rest of it, and they don’t want anyone to see it, for whatever reason.’
It’s true, but strange to hear it out loud. ‘That’s probably right.’
‘It’s a mystery. It needs solving, and you shouldn’t be sitting here stewing about it.’ Ben sticks his hands in his pockets and pulls out a tenner. I watch him, smiling. ‘Let me take you for a drink,’ he says. ‘A nice lime cordial.’
I look at my watch. ‘But Ben, it’s not even five yet.’
‘Exactly,’ he says cheerily. ‘We’ll get a table at the pub.’ He sees my face. ‘Come on,’ he says. ‘Give yourself a break for once and stop worrying about everything. Let’s get a drink.’
Chapter Thirty-Two
We go to the Ten Bells, which is one of my favourite pubs. It’s on Commercial Street, in the shadow of Hawksmoor’s magnificent Christ Church, and features on the Jack the Ripper trail, tediously, because two of his victims are known to have drunk there. It’s been around since the 1700s and it’s always really busy, but unlike other pubs round here it’s not too touristy or full of City types, and there’s a good laid-back vibe. Perhaps it’s because the loos are absolutely disgusting. I think they do it deliberately. There is no way Fodors or Dorling Kindersley could recommend a pub with bathroom facilities like that. We manage to squeeze onto a sofa squashed in by the bar and I check my phone while Ben gets the drinks.
There’s a text from Oli.
Hi. Can I come and pick up more stuff tonight? 9ish? Be good to see you. Ox
Immediately I know if I d
on’t reply right away I won’t be able to think about anything else. It’s not that I’m obsessing over him, it’s just to keep myself sane. I text back.
Gone for drink with Ben so text me when you’re near. In Ten Bells.
I put my phone back on the table as Ben reappears. ‘Hey, thanks,’ I say, slightly too enthusiastically as I take my vodka, lime and soda off him. ‘This is great.’
He glances down at the phone. ‘It’s my pleasure. You need a night out I reckon. Tough couple of months.’
‘Maybe you’re right. A gin and tonic,’ I say, changing the subject. ‘Nice.’
He laughs. ‘You a fan of the gin and tonic then?’
‘You don’t see men drinking gin and tonic enough these days, in my opinion,’ I say. ‘It used to be a classy, Cary Grant-ish thing to do and now hardly anyone has one. They have pints all the time.’
Ben looks amused. ‘Glad you’re pleased.’
‘Well, I like a man who drinks gin and tonics,’ I say. ‘Do you now.’ Ben gesticulates to an imaginary person next to him. ‘Waiter! Four more gin and tonics here, please!’ The woman opposite looks at him as though he’s a lunatic.
I laugh: Ben is really funny. Then there’s an awkward silence, in amongst the noise and chatter of the pub. I start picking at a beer mat.
Ben watches me, and then he says, ‘So, tell me about it, then. The family stuff, I mean. What’s the deal with them?’
‘It’s a long story.’ I stare through the great glass windows of the pub, out at the church, at the traffic roaring down Commercial Street. It has started to drizzle, and the light is already fading. ‘It’s boring.’
‘It doesn’t sound boring,’ Ben says. ‘It sounds pretty interesting, if you ask me. Fire away. It’s a choice between this, doing my taxes, or watching the big match.’
‘Oh, what’s the big match?’ I ask. ‘Absolutely no idea. I was trying to sound blokeish. Actually, there’s a Hi-de-Hi! marathon on UK Gold I recorded last night.’
‘Hi-de-Hi!?’ I fall about with mirth. ‘You’re joking me.’
‘No, I’m not,’ Ben says. He is a bit red. ‘I love Hi-de-Hi!, it’s my secret shame.’
‘No, I love it too,’ I say. ‘Really love it.’ Ben is the only person I know who has a genuine penchant for cheesy British sitcoms. ‘I kind of love ’Allo ’Allo!, is that wrong?’
‘It’s sort of wrong, but I’m with you,’ Ben says. ‘You know, I went through a brief phase when I needed cheering up when I actually used to record As Time Goes By.’
‘No way.’ I stare at him. ‘Me too.’
He shakes my hand. ‘It is a fine programme. Nothing wrong with it at all in my opinion. Geoffrey Palmer is a comedy genius.’
I smile. ‘Well, great minds think alike.’ Then I ask, tentatively, ‘Do you also like Just Good Friends, with Paul Nicholas?’
Ben gazes at me. ‘Oh, Nat. You poor thing. No way.’
‘Oh, right.’ I am downcast. I actually have VHS tapes of it in one of the cupboards at home but I’m not going to say that now.
Ben shakes his head, more in sorrow than in anger. ‘There is a limit, you know.’
‘Sorry,’ I say. ‘Sorry.’
‘Just Good Friends? I thought you were a woman of taste.’ He exhales sadly. ‘Right, let’s move on. What were we discussing? Yes, what I’d be doing if I wasn’t here with you. So make it juicy. Tell me the secrets of your family, which I’m hoping are that you’re all half human half wolf, or you’ve got Jesus’s heart stored in a safe in the vaults of your ancestral home.’ He widens his eyes. ‘Latin quotation here. But I don’t know any.’
‘No, I’m afraid not,’ I say. ‘Although there is a Knights Templar society that meets regularly in the gazebo headed by Lord Lucan.’ He laughs politely and there’s a pause, during which I check my phone again and say, ‘So is the football on tonight, or not?’
He looks at me as though I’m insane, and he’s not wrong. ‘Er – like I just said. I don’t know. Yes? No? Probably?’
I can feel myself blushing, and it’s so embarrassing. I scratch my cheek. ‘I’m sorry,’ I say. ‘Just thinking Oli’ll probably be watching it if there’s some big football thing on.’ My voice is too high. ‘He might – he said he might pop over later, pick up some stuff.’
‘Oh, right,’ says Ben, and he looks out of the window as if he’s trying to spot him. ‘Have you seen him lately, then?’
‘No,’ I say, too quickly. ‘But it’s not a big deal. His things are all still in the flat. It’s fine if he picks them up. Just . . . I just was wondering.’ I stop. ‘Sorry,’ I say, sounding more normal. ‘It’s OK, it’s just everything’s still quite weird at the moment and when I hear from him—’
‘Yes,’ Ben says. ‘Nat, of course it is. I’m sorry.’ He pats my arm.
I have an overwhelming urge to put my hand on his, to feel human contact, but I stop and instead run my hands through my hair.
‘So shoot, Kapoor,’ Ben says, changing the subject. ‘Back to the diary. Tell me all about it, my creative colleague.’
So I tell him from the start. About going back to Summercove for Granny’s funeral, and being given the diary by Arvind, about Cecily – what I know about her, that is – and what Octavia told me about Mum; and I tell him about how I’ve tried to talk to Mum about it and how awful it ended up being, and when I get to that bit Ben whistles. ‘Wow,’ he says. ‘That’s a lot of stuff.’
‘I know,’ I say. ‘And what with me and Oli – I didn’t take it all in at the funeral. I was so worried, about Oli and the business.’ I pause. ‘It’s just now I’ve started really thinking about it all, and looking at – everything, I guess, and it’s driving me mad.’
‘Like what?’
‘Like . . .’ I am searching for the right way to describe it. ‘I spent every summer of my life in the house in Cornwall. Mum used to drop me off there as soon as the holidays began and go off somewhere afterwards. I loved it. It was where I thought of as home. But it’s where Cecily died. They were all there, that summer.’
‘Your gran dying, that must bring it to the surface,’ Ben says.
‘Well, yeah,’ I say. I pick at the beer mat again. ‘Arvind told me something, at the funeral. He said I looked just like Cecily. And it explained quite a lot. Why she was sometimes cold, off with me.’ I pile the shreds of cardboard into a pyramid. ‘I sometimes felt she didn’t want to be there at all, like she hated us all, she’d chosen the wrong life.’
Ben looks interested, and I am relieved; I don’t want to bore him. There’s a large part of me that thinks this is all in my head. ‘The wrong life? Why do you think that?’
‘Don’t know.’ I shrug. ‘I think it probably started after Cecily died, but who knows?’ I chew my lip, trying to explain. ‘I can’t explain it, but it was sort of like she was play-acting her own life a lot of the time.’
‘How?’
‘Like she was going through the motions,’ I say. ‘As if she stopped being herself when Cecily died, when she gave up painting. She stopped being that person, for whatever reason.’
‘That can’t have been easy for your mum, whatever the truth is.’ Ben stares into his pint.
‘Well, that’s true,’ I say. ‘And Archie’s done OK for himself. Mum hasn’t. She’s never quite worked out what to do with her life. If she hadn’t had an income from my grandparents, back in the day, she’d never have been able to survive.’ I give a short laugh. ‘Me either.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Granny and Arvind, they gave them both an allowance, when times were good,’ I say. ‘Not much, just enough to pay the rent. Archie used it to set up the car business, he provides fleets of cars for hotels and things, and he deals in classic cars too.’
‘Really? Wow.’
‘I know.’ I think back to Sunday lunch, the brand new kitchen, the warm under-floor heating, the comfort, the security of it all.
‘He’s done really well for himself. He sort of left th
em behind.’
‘What about your mum?’
‘Mum – well, I don’t know. She doesn’t really have a career or anything. I don’t know why.’
‘I thought she worked at some interiors shop,’ Ben says. ‘Well, yeah, but it doesn’t pay much. It’s in Chelsea, she knew the owner back in the good old days and she gets to hang out with posh, glamorous people all day and go on buying trips. Believe me, it’s never been enough.’ I don’t say what I want to, which is that one term at school she wouldn’t buy me new shoes, because she said my feet were growing too fast and I’d just need another pair in a few months. It sounds ridiculous when you say it out loud, but it was kind of normal back then. ‘I guess she’ll have some money from the sale of the house now,’ I say. ‘And she’s got the committee, too.’
‘What committee?’
I pull the invitation to the opening of the foundation out of my bag and show it to him. ‘Wow,’ he says. ‘That’s fast.’
‘That’s how she wanted it. Like she wanted people to remember her as soon as she’d gone. It’s weird, when she was alive she didn’t seem to care about all that, her reputation as a painter. Almost like, I’m dead now, you can start looking at me in the way I want.’ I shake my head. ‘That’s what my uncle said, too.’
‘Who’s on the committee?’
‘Louisa, Octavia’s mum. She and Mum aren’t exactly close.’ I pause and check my phone. Ben watches. ‘Me. And Guy.’
‘Guy?’
‘He’s the Bowler Hat’s brother.’ He looks blank. ‘Louisa’s brother-in-law. He’s a nice guy.’ I snort at this unintentional pun; Ben shakes his head. ‘And that’s it.’ I stop and raise my hands, to buy some time. Two girls behind us at the bar shriek with laughter, and I look over at them; they’re both in vintage pin-tucked shirts, jeans and boots, and one, who has her hair in a loose bun and wears an apple-green cardigan, has a beautiful gold necklace hung with about five different antique charms: a bird, a heart, a little apple. I take a mental picture of her.
Love Always Page 29