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 is warranted and the ticket inspector looks at me in alarm. I hand him my tickets – thankfully, I collected them at Liverpool Street, knowing the queues at Paddington would be horrendous. I blink, trying not to shake, as the desire to be sick, to faint, anything, sweeps over me again, and slump back against the scratchy seat, watching the inspector. He raises his eyebrows as he checks them over.
‘Long way to be going for the day.’
‘Yes,’ I say. He looks at me, and I find myself saying, too eagerly, ‘I have to be back in London tomorrow. There’s an appointment first thing – I have an appointment I can’t miss.’
He nods, but already I’ve given him too much information, and I can feel myself flushing with shame. He’s a Londoner, he doesn’t want to chat. The trouble is, I want to talk to someone. I need to. A stranger, someone who I won’t see again.
I haven’t told my family I’m coming back tonight. Growing up with my mother, I learned long ago that the less you say, the less you get asked. The one person I would like to confide in is being buried today, in the churchyard at St Mary’s, a tiny stone hut, so old people aren’t sure when it was first built. In the churchyard there is the grave of a customs officer, one of many killed by desperate smugglers. There is a lot about Cornwall that is still kind of wild, pagan, and though the fish restaurants, tea shops and surfboards cover some of it up, they can’t entirely conceal it.
Granny believed that. She was from Cornwall, she grew up near St Ives, on the wild north coast. She saw Alfred Wallis painting by the docks, she was born with the cry of seagulls and the wind whistling through the winding streets of the old town in her ears. She loved the landscape of her home county; it was her life, her job. She lived most of her life there, did her best work there, sitting in her studio high at the top of the house, overlooking the sea.
There are so many things I never asked her, and now I wish I had. So often that I wished I could confide in her, about all sorts of things, but knew I couldn’t. For much as I loved my granny, I was scared of her too, of the blank look she’d get in her lovely green eyes sometimes when she looked at me. My husband Oli said once he sometimes thought she could see straight into your soul, like a witch. He was joking, but he was a little scared of her, and I know what he meant. There are some things you didn’t ask her. Some things she wouldn’t ever talk about.
Because for many years, Summercove was a very different place, centre of a glittering social whirl, and my grandparents were wealthy, successful, and it seemed as if they had the world at their feet. But then their daughter Cecily died, two months short of her sixteenth birthday, and my grandmother stopped painting. She shut up her studio, at the top of the house, and as far as I know she never went back. I learned from a very early age never to ask why. Never to mention Cecily’s name, even. There are no photos of her in the house, and no one ever talks about