Harriet Evans - Love Always

Ben watches me, and then he says, ‘So, tel 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. Actual y, there’s a Hi-de-Hi! marathon on UK Gold I recorded last night.’

‘ Hi-de-Hi! ?’ I fal 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. ‘Real y 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 actual y 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 al in my opinion. Geoffrey Palmer is a comedy genius.’

I smile. ‘Wel , 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 actual y 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. Tel me the secrets of your family, which I’m hoping are that you’re al 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 footbal 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’l probably be watching it if there’s some big footbal 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 al stil 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 stil 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. Tel me al about it, my creative col eague.’

So I tel 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 tel 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 al in at the funeral. I was so worried, about Oli and the business.’ I pause. ‘It’s just now I’ve started real y thinking about it al , 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 Cornwal . 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 al there, that summer.’

‘Your gran dying, that must bring it to the surface,’ Ben says.

‘Wel , 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 al , like she hated us al , 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 al 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.

‘Wel , 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 al owance, 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.’

‘Real y? Wow.’

‘I know.’ I think back to Sunday lunch, the brand new kitchen, the warm under-floor heating, the comfort, the security of it al .

‘He’s done real y wel for himself. He sort of left them behind.’

‘What about your mum?’

‘Mum – wel , I don’t know. She doesn’t real y have a career or anything. I don’t know why.’

‘I thought she worked at some interiors shop,’ Ben says. ‘Wel , 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 al 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’l have some money from the sale of the house now,’ I say. ‘And she’s got the committee, too.’

‘What committee?’

I pul the invitation to the opening of the foundation out of my bag and show it to him. ‘Wow,’ he says. ‘That’s fast.’