Harriet Evans - Love Always - A sweeping summer read full of dark family secrets from the Sunday Times bestselling author

There’s an implied snobbery there too which is hilarious. I made as much on the stall as I do now. In fact, often I’d sell more there in a day than I do in a month online. Plus the stall was a great way of meeting customers and other designers, seeing what was selling, talking to people, finding out what they liked. Pedro, who used to have a veg stall in the old Spitalfields market and upgraded it to an upmarket deli stall in the new, updated, boring Spitalfields, has a house in Alicante, a timeshare in Chamonix and drives an Audi TT. Sara, the girl whose stall used to be next to mine, bought her mum a house in Londonderry last year and paid for the whole family to go on holiday to Barbados. I thought taking myself off the stall would move me to the next level, and I suppose it did.

But increasingly I’ve come to wonder whether I was right. Things have been difficult, the last year or so. The recession means people don’t want jewellery. And even though Jay designed my site for free, bless him, other costs keep mounting up – hiring the studio, paying for materials and for the metals and stones, the PR who I hired, the trade fairs which you pay to attend . . . It adds up. I haven’t heard of the pop star who wore my necklace since, incidentally. Perhaps that explains it.

A few months ago, it didn’t seem to matter. We had Oli’s salary too. Mine was ‘pin money’, as he called it, which I found super-patronising. But it’s true. It used to be joyful, exciting, stimulating. Lately, it is almost painful. I’m no good. My thoughts are no good, my head seems to be blank. And it shows.

‘On the website, through some shops,’ I tell Octavia. ‘The usual.’

‘Oh,’ she says. ‘That’s good – well done.’

I sink lower down into my scarf and look out at the dramatic, wind-flattened black trees, the yellow lichen, the startling green of the sea, crashing against the grey rocks, as the car bowls through the empty, muddy lanes, deeper into the countryside. I chew my lip, thinking.

I wonder if anyone has opened her studio since she died? I wonder, for the thousandth time, how Granny could have stopped painting all those years ago when I know how much the landscape around her meant to her, how it inspired her. But though no one ever says it, it’s obvious something died inside her with Cecily, and it never came alive again.

Archie slows down, and all of a sudden we’ve arrived at the church, perched high on the edge of the moor. I squint, and see the hearse pulled up outside the door. They are unloading the coffin. There, twisting an order of service over in her hands, is Louisa, and next to her, ramrod straight, stands my mother. The pallbearers are sliding the long coffin out – Granny was tall – and it hits me again, that’s her inside the wooden box, that’s her. Archie turns the engine off. ‘We’re here,’ he says. ‘Just in time. Let’s go.’

Chapter Four

Granny always knew what she wanted and so the funeral service is short and sweet. We slip into our seats and the coffin is carried in, my mother, Archie and Louisa walking behind it. I stare at Mum, but her head is bowed. We sit and listen to the minister in the small chapel with big glass windows, no adornment, no incense, everything plain. Outside, the wind whistles across the moors. There are two hymns, ‘Guide Me, O Thou Great Redeemer’ and ‘Dear Lord and Father of Mankind’. The collection is for the RNLI. Louisa reads from Exodus. Archie reads an extract from A Room of One’s Own , by Virginia Woolf. At Granny’s request there is no eulogy. That’s the only thing that is weird. No one gets up and speaks over Granny’s body, there in its oak coffin in the aisle of the church, and it feels strange not to talk about her, not to say who she was, how wonderful she was. But that was her instruction and, like all the others, it must be followed to the letter.

As we are all bashfully singing the second hymn, accompanied by a worn-out, clanging old piano, I look past my mother, to see if Arvind is OK. There’s no space for his wheelchair in the pews, so he sits in the aisle next to the coffin of his wife. It is rather ghoulish, but Arvind doesn’t seem to mind. He is the same as always; shrunken to the size of a child, his nut-brown head almost bald but for a few wispy black hairs. His eyes are sunk far into his head, and his mouth is pursed, like an asterisk.

He stares at me, as if I am a stranger. I smile at him, but there is no reaction. This is Arvind’s way, I’m used to it. It was only when I was old enough to know that a ‘That coat is lovely on you!’ means ‘That coat is garish and vile’ or a ‘Wow, I love your hair!’ means ‘Good God, who told you you could carry off a fringe?’, that I began to realise how lucky I was to have Arvind as my grandfather. He simply cannot dissemble.

Ignoring the hymn, he holds up the flimsy order of service and waves it at me. ‘Is it recycled?’ he says, in his incredibly penetrating, sing-song voice, which still has a strong Punjab accent sixty-odd years since he came to the UK. ‘Is their carbon footprint reduced? This is very important, Natasha.’

Separating us is my mother, in her sixties but still ravishing, in a long black tailored coat with an electric blue lining, her thick dark hair cascading down her back, her green eyes huge in her heart-shaped face. Now she looks down at Arvind.

‘Be quiet !’ she hisses.

‘We must all recycle everything, every little thing,’ Arvind tells me, leaning forward so he can catch my eye and speaking completely normally, as if it were just the two of us taking tea together. ‘China can carry on emitting more CO 2than the rest of the world put together, but it will be MY FAULT if the world ends, because I did not recycle my copy of PLAY . BOY .’ He finishes loudly, his voice rising.

‘Dad, shut up ,’ Mum grips the top of his arm in rage. ‘You have to be quiet.’

‘Father,’ Archie says, rather pompously, behind us. ‘Please. Be respectful.’

‘Respectful?’ Arvind shrugs his shoulders, and waves his arms around in a grand gesture. ‘They don’t mind.’

I turn around, partly to see if he’s right and catch my breath as I see for the first time how many people are here. I hadn’t really noticed as we hurriedly took our seats, and more have arrived since then. They’re standing at the back, three deep in places, crammed into the small space. They are here for Granny. I blink back tears. Who are they? A lot of them are rather advanced in years. I guess some are friends from around here, some are people down from London, old friends from the golden days. I don’t recognise many of them. They are all watching this scene at the front of the chapel with interest.

Around me, my relatives are unamused. Archie is furious. Octavia looks as though a nasty smell is troubling her. Louisa is flustered, staring beseechingly at Arvind; her lovely brother Jeremy and his wife Mary Beth, who have flown in from California for the funeral, are studiously still singing. The Bowler Hat is officiously, soundlessly, opening and shutting his mouth, like a minister for Wales who doesn’t know the Welsh national anthem. Arvind catches my eye, winks, and goes back to the hymn. I stare at the sheet, unable to concentrate on the words, not sure whether to laugh or cry.

As the service ends and we process out to the churchyard for the burial, following Granny’s coffin, I realise I am leading my mother who has Archie by the arm while Jay pushes Arvind next to us. Louisa, the architect of this, has respectfully dropped behind, and it is just the four of us, my cousin and our parents, who have their arms around each other. I don’t know what we should be doing, other than following the minister. I grip Mum’s arm, feeling strange, and wishing someone else was here with us. I especially wish Sameena were here, but she’s in Mumbai visiting her sister who is not well, and she’s not flying back till next week.