We’re going past Newbury, and the landscape is greener. There has been a lot of rain lately, and the rivers are swollen and brown under a grey sky. The fields are newly ploughed. A fast wind whips dead leaves over and around the train. I sit back and breathe out, feeling the nauseous knot of tension in my stomach start to slowly unravel, as a wave of something like calm washes over me. We are leaving London. We are getting closer.
Chapter Two
My grandparents met in 1941, at a concert at the National Gallery. When the war broke out, Granny was nineteen, studying at St Martin’s School of Art in London. She stayed there, despite her parents demanding she return to Cornwall. Not Frances, oh no. She volunteered to man the first-aid post near her digs in Bloomsbury, she was fire watch officer for St Martin’s, and when she had a spare hour, which was not many, she went to the National Gallery, around the corner from the college, to listen to Dame Myra Hess’s lunchtime concerts.
Arvind (we have always called him that, Jay and I don’t know why except he’s not someone you’d ever think of calling ‘Grandad’, much less ‘Gramps’) was born in the ancient Mughal city of Lahore, in 1919. His father, a Punjabi Hindu, was a teacher at Aitchison College, an exclusive school for sons of maharajahs and landowners, so Arvind was entitled to a place there. Arvind was brilliant. So brilliant that the headteacher wrote to various dignitaries, and to people in England, and after two years of studying philosophy at Lahore’s Government College (there’s a photo of his matriculation on the wall of his study, rows of serious-looking young men with arms crossed and neat cowlicks), Arvind was given a postgraduate scholarship to Cambridge, and it was on a research trip to London during the height of the Blitz in 1941 that he wandered into the National Gallery.
I have a very clear image of them in my mind; Arvind, short and dapper, so politely dressed in his best tweed suit, his umbrella hooked over his arm, his hat clutched in his slender fingers, his eye falling briefly on the girl in front of him, watching the performance with total absorption. Granny was beautiful when she was old; when she was younger, she must have been extraordinary. I keep a photo of her from around that age in my studio: her dark blonde hair carefully swept into a chignon, her huge dark green eyes set in a strong, open face, a curling, smart smile, perfect neat white teeth.
Frances and Arvind were married three months later. Bizarrely for a man who has outlived most of his contemporaries, Arvind was told he had a weak heart and couldn’t fight. He went back to Cambridge and finished his degree, where he and several other students were called upon to try a variety of code-breaking formulae. He also knitted socks – he rather took to it, he liked the patterns – and volunteered for the Home Guard. Granny stayed in London, to finish her studies and carry on driving the ambulances.
Though Granny and Arvind never said anything, I often wonder what her parents must have made of it. They were respectable quiet people who rarely left Cornwall, with an elder daughter who had recently become engaged to a solicitor from a good family in Tring, and suddenly their wild, artistic younger daughter writes from a bomb shelter to let them know she’s married a penniless student from India whom they’ve never met. This was seventy years ago. There was no one from France, let alone the Punjab, in Cornwall.
After Granny and Arvind were married, they rented a tiny flat in Redcliffe Square. Mum and Archie, the twins, were born in 1946 and then a couple of years later, Cecily. Money was tight, Granny’s painting and Arvind’s writing did not bring in much; he was writing his book for years, paying the bills with teaching jobs. The book became something of a joke after a while, to all of them, so the aspect of their married life that always took them by surprise, I think, is the money that came in when The Modern Fortress was finally published, in 1955. It argued that post-war society was in danger of reverting to a complacency and ossification that would lead to another world war of the magnitude of the one we had only just barely survived. It was translated into over thirty languages and become an instant modern classic, debated and argued over by millions, followed ten years later by The Mountain of Light, which initially sold even more, though it is now seen as the more ‘difficult’ of the two books. When I was fifteen, we had to read The Modern Fortress for GCSE History, as part of the course was about post-WW2 Europe. I am ashamed to say I understood not very much of it; even more ashamed to say I didn’t tell the teacher at school that Arvind Kapoor was my grandfather. I don’t know why.
While The Modern Fortress was selling thousands of copies a week, Granny’s paintings were becoming more acclaimed too and suddenly Frances and Arvind were richer than they’d ever expected to be.They could afford to buy the house they’d rented for a couple of summers in Cornwall for Frances to paint in, a dilapidated twenties art deco place by the sea called Summercove. They could send the children to boarding school. They could keep the flat in London and a housekeeper for Summercove, and they could have their nieces and nephews to stay, and provide a degree of largesse to all they knew that meant, for the rest of the fifties and the early sixties, Arvind Kapoor and Frances Seymour, and Summercove, were bywords amongst artistic and intellectual circles in London for an elegantly bohemian way of life, post-colonial poster children: the couple that seemed to have everything.
* * *
In Granny’s bedroom at Summercove, there is a curved dark wooden dressing table, with a beautiful enamel hairbrush set, old glass crystal perfume bottles and two jewellery boxes. The dressing table has little drawers with wrought-iron handles on each side, and once when I was little and I’d crept upstairs to surprise her, I found my grandmother sitting at that table, gazing at a photo.
She was very still, her back straight. Through the long suntrap windows you could see across the meadow down to the path, the bright blue-green sea glinting in the distance. I watched her as she stared at the photo, stroking it with her finger, tentatively, as if it had some talismanic quality.
‘Boo,’ I’d said softly, because I didn’t know what else to do, and I knew it wasn’t right to jump out at her now. I didn’t want her to be angry with me.
She did jump though, and she turned to me. Then he held out her hand. ‘Oh. Natasha,’ she said, as I stood looking at her.
I adored my grandmother, who was beautiful, funny, charismatic, in charge of everything, always in control: I found her hugely comforting, thrilling too, but the truth is she was also a little terrifying. Compared to her happy, open relationship with Jay, I felt sometimes, just sometimes, she looked at me and wished I wasn’t there. I don’t know why. But children like me – with an overactive imagination and no one with whom to exercise it – are often wrong. And I knew that if I ever tried to talk to my mother about it she’d tell me I was making things up, or worse, confront Granny, and have a row with her.
‘Come here,’ she said, looking at me, and she smiled, her hand outstretched. I walked towards her slowly, wanting to run, because I loved her so much and I was so glad she wanted me. I stood in front of her and put my hands on her lap, tentatively. She stroked my hair, hard, and I felt a tear drop from her eyes onto my forehead.
‘God, you’re just like her,’ she said, her voice husky, and clutched my wrist with her strong fingers. She twisted the fingers of her other hand over to show me the photo she was holding. It was a small, yellowing snap of a girl about my age; I was then around seven or eight. I wish I could remember more, because I think it was important. I remember she had dark hair, but of course she did, we all did. She looked like Mum, but also not: I couldn’t work out why.
‘Yes, you’re just like her.’ Granny drew a great shuddering breath, and her grip on my arm tightened. ‘Damn it all.’ She turned, her huge green eyes swimming with tears, her lovely face twisted and ugly. ‘Get out! Get out of here, now!’
She was still gripping my arm, so hard it was bruised the next day. I wrenched myself free and ran away, feet clattering on the parquet floor, out onto the lawn, away from the dark, sad room. I didn’t understand it, how could I?
Later, when we were having tea and playing hide-and-seek, she came up and gave me a hug.
‘How’s my favourite girl?’ she said, and she dropped a soft kiss onto my forehead. ‘Come