City line carriage, clutching the overhead rail so hard my fingers ache. I have to catch this train; it’s a matter of life and death.
Quite literally, in fact – my grandmother’s funeral is at two-thirty today. You’re allowed to be an hour late for dinner, but you can’t be an hour late for a funeral. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime deal.
I’ve lived in London all my life. I know the best places to eat, the bars that are open after twelve, the coolest galleries, the prettiest spots in the parks. And I know the Hammersmith and City line is useless. I hate it. Why didn’t I leave earlier? Impotent fury washes through me. And still the carriage doesn’t move.
This morning, the sound of pattering rain on the quiet street woke me while it was still dark. I haven’t been sleeping for a while, since before Granny died. I used to complain bitterly about my husband Oli’s snoring, how he took up the whole bed, lying prone in a diagonal line. He’s been away for nearly two weeks now. At first I thought it’d be good, if only because I could catch up on sleep, but I haven’t. I lie awake, thoughts racing through my head, one wide-awake side of my brain taunting the other, which is begging for rest. I feel mad. Perhaps I am mad. Although they say if you think you’re going mad that definitely means you’re not. I’m not so sure.
7:18 a.m. I breathe deeply, trying to calm down. It’ll be OK. It’ll all be OK.
Granny died in her sleep last Friday. She was eighty-nine. The funny thing is, it still shocked me. Booking my train tickets to come down to Cornwall, in February, it seemed all wrong, as though I was in a bad dream. I spoke to Sanjay, my cousin, over the weekend and he said the same thing. He also said, ‘Don’t you want to punch the next person in the face who says, “Eighty-nine? Well, she had a good innings, didn’t she?” Like she deserved to die.’
I laughed, even though I was crying, and then Jay said, ‘I feel like something’s coming to an end, don’t you? Something bigger than all of us.’
It made me shiver, because he is right. Granny was the centre of everything. The centre of my life, of our family. And now she’s gone, and – I can’t really explain it. She was the link to so many things. She was Summercove.
We’re at Edgware Road, and it’s 7:22 a.m. I might get it. I just might still get the train.
Granny and Arvind, my grandfather, had planned for this moment. Talked about it quite openly, as if they wanted everyone to be clear about what they wanted, perhaps because they didn’t trust my mother or my uncle – Jay’s dad – to follow their wishes. I’d like to believe that’s not true, but I’m afraid it probably is. They specified what would happen when either one of them died first, what happens to the paintings in the house, the trust that is to be set up in Granny’s memory, the scholarship that is funded in Arvind’s memory, and what happens to Summercove.
Arvind is ninety. He is moving into a home. Louisa, my mother’s cousin, has taken charge of that. Louisa has taken charge of the funeral, too. She likes taking charge. She has picked everything that Granny didn’t leave instructions about, from the hymns to the fillings in the sandwiches for the wake afterwards (a choice of egg mayonnaise, curried chicken or cucumber). Her husband, the handsome but extremely boring Bowler Hat, will be handing out the orders of service at the funeral and topping up drinks at the wake. Louisa is organising everything, and it is very kind of her, but we feel a bit left out, Jay and I. As ever, the Leighton side of the family has got it right, with their charming English polo-shirts-andcrumpets approach to life and we, the Kapoors, are left looking eccentric, disjointed, odd. Which I suppose we are.
Cousin Louisa is also in charge of packing up the house. For Summercove is to be sold. Our beautiful white art deco house perched between the fields and the sea in Cornwall will soon be someone else’s. It is where Granny and my grandfather lived for fifty years, raised their children. I spent every summer of my life there. It’s really the only home I’ve ever known and I’m the only one, it seems, who’s sentimental about it, who can’t bear to see it go. Mum, my uncle Archie, Cousin Louisa – even my grandfather – they’re all brisk about it. I don’t understand how they can be.
‘Too many memories here,’ Granny used to say when she’d talk about it, tell us firmly what was going to happen. ‘Time for someone else to make some.’
Finally. The doors wobble open at Paddington and I rush out and run up the steps, pushing past people, muttering, ‘Sorry, sorry.’ Thank God it’s the Hammersmith and City line – the exit opens right onto the vast concourse of the station. It is 7:28. The train leaves in two minutes.
The cold air hits me. I jab my ticket frantically in the barrier and run down the stairs to the wide platform, legs like jelly as I tumble down, faster and faster. I am nearly there, nearly at the bottom . . . I glance up at the big clock. 7:29. Like a child, I jump the last three steps, my knees nearly giving way underneath me, and leap onto the train. I stand by the luggage racks, panting, trying to collect myself. There is a final whistle, the sound of doors slamming further along the endless snake of carriages. We are off.
I find a seat and sit down. My mother doesn’t drive, so I know the ways of the train. The key to a good journey is not a table seat. I never understand why you would get one unless you knew everyone round the table. You end up spending five hours playing awkward footsie with a sweaty middle-aged man, or surrounded by a screaming, overexcited family. I slot myself into a window seat and close my eyes. A cool trickle of sweat slides down my backbone.
This is the train I took every summer, with Mum, to Summercove. Mum would bring me down, stay for a few days and then leave before the rest of her relatives arrived, and sometimes – but not often – before she and Granny could row about something: money, men, me.
It was always so much fun, the train down to Penzance when I was little. It was the anticipation of the holiday ahead, six weeks in Cornwall, six weeks with my favourite people in my favourite place. Mum would be in a strangely good mood on the train down, and so would I, both of us looking forward to diluting our twosome for a few weeks, away from our dark Hammersmith mansion flat, where the wallpaper peeled away from the walls, and in the summer the smell from the bins outside was noticeable. Bryant Court didn’t suit summer. The noises inside and out got worse, scratching and strange, and the cast of characters in the building seemed to get less eccentric and more menacing. The hot weather seemed to dry them out, to make them more brittle and screeching. We were always euphoric to be out of there, away from it all.
Once, when we were on our way to Paddington and my mother was dragging me by the wrist towards a waiting cab, bags slung over our shoulders, Mrs Pogorzelski hissed, ‘Slut!’ at Mum, as she opened the door. I didn’t know what it meant, or why she was saying it. Mum bundled me into the black cab and we sat there grinning, surrounded by luggage, as we rolled up through Kensington towards the station, both of us complicit in some way that I couldn’t define. That was also one of the times Mum forgot her purse, and the cab driver let us have a ride for free after she cried. She forgot her purse quite often, my mother.
She is at Summercove already, helping Cousin Louisa sort out the funeral and the house. She is convinced Louisa has her eye on some pieces of furniture already, convinced she is controlling everything. Archie, Mum’s twin brother and Jay’s dad, is there too. Mum and her cousin do not get on. But then Mum and a lot of people don’t get on.
The train is flying through the outskirts of London, out past Southall and Heathrow, through scrubby wasteland that doesn’t know whether it’s town or countryside, towards Reading. I look around me for the first time since collapsing into my seat. I want a coffee, and I should have something to eat, though I’m not quite sure I can eat anything.
‘Tickets, please,’ says a voice above me. I jump, more violently than
