style="font-size:15px;"> ‘I know Mum’s done an awful lot of cooking,’ Octavia says slowly. ‘She’s been flat out all 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 all know he’s a brilliant 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 still quite like to smack her though. I hope the feeling doesn’t stay with me all day. I wish I could. I wish I could get really 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 all the while about how someone had to do it, mind you, but still. ‘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 all so familiar. It is so strange to be here when it’s not high summer, but it is so wonderful all 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 all.
In the front, Archie turns to Julius. ‘So, Julius, how are the markets?’
‘Weulllll –’ 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 jewellery 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 collection.’
‘Wow, how great,’ Octavia says. ‘Where will you sell that, on a stall, or . . . ?’ She trails off, almost embarrassed.
It has been about two years since I sold my jewellery on a stall, 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 Hill 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 sell online through the website, and through a few retailers. But Octavia, a bit like Louisa, still likes to think that I’m standing behind a stall wearing a hat, gloves and change belt, shouting out, ‘Three pound a pair of earrings! Get your necklaces here, roll up roll up!’
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
