Harriet Evans - Love Always

‘I’m sorry about Granny,’ I tel him. ‘I am too,’ Archie says soberly. ‘I am too.’ He scratches the bridge of his nose vigorously, suddenly, and turns away. ‘Let’s be off.’ His hand is on the boot of the car. ‘Bags?’

‘No bags,’ I say.

Archie looks at me as if I’m insane. ‘No bags? Where are your things?’

I take a deep breath. ‘I can’t stay tonight, unfortunately,’ I say.

He stares at me. ‘Not staying? Does your mother know? That’s crazy, Natasha.’

‘I know,’ I say, trying to sound calm, col ected. ‘I’m real y sorry, but I’ve got a meeting tomorrow I can’t get out of.’ I wish I could tel them why. But I can’t. They mustn’t know, not yet.

‘I should have thought . . .’ Archie mutters, trailing off. Jay, who is watching me intently, jumps in.

‘The sleeper’s much better and if you have to get back for a meeting, there it is.’ His father frowns at him, opens his mouth to say something, but Jay presses on. ‘Come on, Nat,’ he says, slinging his rucksack into the boot. ‘We’re cutting it fine anyway, aren’t we? Let’s go.’

Suddenly, I remember Octavia and Julius. ‘I saw Octavia and Julius on the train. I mean, think I saw them,’ I amend. ‘Should we—’

‘Oh,’ Archie says, ruffled, he hates any interruption to his plans, to being told what to do by anyone except my mother. And indeed, our cousins are emerging from the station and looking around. ‘I’m sure they’l have made their own arrangements . . .’

But they haven’t, it turns out. Octavia and Julius are the kind of ruthlessly efficient people who expect others to be at their beck and cal . They’re like the answers to those survival guide questions: both of them could survive on a raft floating on the Indian Ocean with only a mirror and a comb for days, I’m sure. But they’d never think of getting round to booking a car or a taxi. They assume that someone else wil have got the train down too and wil furnish them with a lift. And they assume rightly, of course.

‘I must say, it’s extremely strange we didn’t bump into either of you on the train,’ Octavia says, as Archie drives off along the harbour. ‘I suppose you two were sitting together.’ She makes it sound as if we were planning a high-school shooting.

‘No,’ Jay says simply. ‘Meeting you al is a lovely surprise on this sad day.’

‘Jol y sad. So,’ Julius, already red in the face, looking more than ever like a fatter, less patrician version of Frank, his father, asks, ‘what’s the order of things today? Straight to the church? Or nosh first?’

Squashed next to Octavia in the back of the car, Jay and I dare not exchange looks. It’s as though we’re children again.

‘Hrrr.’ Archie clears his throat, self-importantly. ‘The funeral is at two, so we’re going straight to the church,’ he says. ‘Don’t have time to stop off beforehand and we couldn’t have it any later, some people –’ he raises his eyebrows – ‘ some people came down last night and are going back to London this evening.’ I nod politely.

‘We’l meet the others there, then?’ Jay says. ‘Yes, yes,’ Archie says briskly, as though he’s got it al under control and supplementary questions are ridiculous. ‘Father’s going with Miranda – with your mother, Natasha – to the church. Then we’re al off back to Summercove afterwards, for some food.’

‘I know Mum’s done an awful lot of cooking,’ Octavia says slowly. ‘She’s been flat out al week, poor thing. It’s been pretty stressful for her.’ She sighs. ‘And clearing out the house, getting poor Great-Uncle Arvind settled somewhere new – I mean, we al know he’s a bril iant man, but he’s not exactly easy, is he!’ She laughs.

Don’t let Octavia wind you up , I chant to myself. She signed up for an Oxbridge-graduates-only online dating service and she fancies George Osborne. That is the kind of person she is .

I would stil quite like to smack her though. I hope the feeling doesn’t stay with me al day. I wish I could. I wish I could get real y drunk at the wake and start a fight, EastEnders style. Perhaps I should. Archie and Jay are silent. I make a non-committal sound.

‘Your mum’s been wonderful,’ I force myself to say instead because it’s the truth, despite being annoying to admit. Louisa is the one who gets things done, she always has been. She is the one who’d take me into Truro to buy me new socks and shoes for the autumn term at school, muttering al the while about how someone had to do it, mind you, but stil . ‘Oh, Louisa, she is wonderful,’ is sort of her shoutline. That’s what you say about her, in the absence of anything else to say.

We are climbing up and out of Penzance. Below us, the sea is frothing and churning. There are dark, restless clouds on the horizon. We drive in silence for a while, going further inland. Here on the south coast the country is wild, but lush, greener than the rest of the country, even though it’s February. We pass Celtic crosses, their intricate decorations long worn away by the wind from the sea, and soon we are driving past the Merry Maidens, the ten girls who were turned to stone for dancing on a Sunday. They’re al so familiar. It is so strange to be here when it’s not high summer, but it is so wonderful al the same, and then I remember why I’m here. Granny would have loved a day like today, walking through the winding lanes and over the high exposed fields, a silk head-scarf covering her hair, her eyes alight with the joy of it al .

In the front, Archie turns to Julius. ‘So, Julius, how are the markets?’

‘Weul l l –’ Julius begins, in his low, blubbery voice. ‘Patchy, Archie. Patchy . . .’

I am spared the rest of his answer by Octavia turning to me.

‘How’s your jewel ery stuff going then?’ she asks, curiously. As ever I grit my teeth at this question, which makes it sound as though I’ve been to the Bead Shop and threaded a few plastic hearts onto a string for a friend’s birthday, rather than that it’s my job.

‘Fine, thanks,’ I say. ‘I’m just finishing a new col ection.’

‘Wow, how great,’ Octavia says. ‘Where wil you sel that, on a stal , or . . . ?’ She trails off, almost embarrassed.

It has been about two years since I sold my jewel ery on a stal , first in Spitalfields Market, then at the Truman Brewery nearby. I got lucky when one of my pieces, a gold chain made of tiny interconnected flowers, was featured in Vogue a couple of years ago, and a minor but quite trendy pop star wore it in a magazine, after which a boutique in Notting Hil and one just off Brick Lane started stocking my stuff. That’s how it works these days. Someone I’d never heard of wore a necklace of mine and I ended up hiring a PR to promote myself and paying someone to set up a website.

Now I sel online through the website, and through a few retailers. But Octavia, a bit like Louisa, stil likes to think that I’m standing behind a stal wearing a hat, gloves and change belt, shouting out, ‘Three pound a pair of earrings! Get your necklaces here, rol up rol up!’

There’s an implied snobbery there too which is hilarious. I made as much on the stal as I do now. In fact, often I’d sel more there in a day than I do in a month online. Plus the stal was a great way of meeting customers and other designers, seeing what was sel ing, talking to people, finding out what they liked. Pedro, who used to have a veg stal in the old Spitalfields market and upgraded it to an upmarket deli stal in the new, updated, boring Spitalfields, has a house in Alicante, a timeshare in Chamonix and drives an Audi TT. Sara, the girl whose stal 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 stal would move me to the next level, and I suppose it did.