Part three February 2009

Chapter Twenty-One

'So. Miss Kapoor. Thank you for coming today.'

'Not at all,' I say. 'I'm as anxious as you are to sort this out?'

Unfortunately, I raise my voice at the end of this sentence so that it sounds as if it's a question, not an answer.

There is silence from across the grey plastic desk. I wipe my sticky hands on my skirt and I blink wearily; I've had not quite four hours' sleep. This is good for the sleeper train, where things fall onto the floor as the carriage judders suddenly or drawers fly out as you round a corner, rousing you from your too-light slumbers. But it's still not much in the grand scheme of things and I am very tired. I can't escape the feeling that I'm still there, lying in a rocking berth. The office in Wimbledon - where my business account manager is located and thus where I have to go if I want to stop the bank calling in debt collectors - is warm and my eyes are heavy. The bump on my head from my Victorian heroine-style fainting fit is still swollen, and has turned an impressive purple colour during the night. I haven't been home yet; I'm still wearing my funeral outfit, ironically appropriate for today as well as yesterday.

Yesterday seems like a world away. The pages of Cecily's diary are still in my skirt pocket. They make a crumpling sound as I shift in my seat. Ten pages, that's all, and then - what? Nothing.

When I climbed wearily off the train this morning, I wondered if I'd dreamed the previous twenty-four hours. It would make more sense, somehow. These scant pages in Cecily's scrawling, cramped handwriting, all too little an insight. I keep thinking of them all after the funeral, in the living room at Summercove. My family, standing around in knots, not talking to each other. The taxi ride with Octavia, the near-pleasure with which she thought she was telling me the truth about my mother. Was she?

I can't think about it now. I shut my eyes again. Opposite, Clare Lomax, Local Business Manager, stares impassively at me, her hands clasped neatly on the desk. Her suit jacket is slightly too big. It looks like a man's.

'So. We've been trying to contact you for a while about your overdraft, Miss Kapoor.'

'Yes.' I shift my focus back to the present moment. I nod, as though we're in this together.

'We've become extremely concerned about your ability to sustain a viable business. As you know. That is why we have decided to withdraw your overdraft facility and request immediate repayment of the amount in question.'

'Yes,' I say again.

Clare Lomax glances at her sheet. She reads, in a sing-song voice, 'You are five thousand pounds overdrawn at this time, and you have defaulted twice on repayments for the loan you took out with us last year, also for five thousand pounds. I see you also have considerable debt on your credit card, also held with this bank. And despite several letters requesting repayment we have not been contacted by you with regard to these matters, which is why you've left us no other option, I'm afraid, Miss Kapoor.'

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Yes,' I say again, still nodding, so hard now that my neck is starting to hurt. It is such a huge amount, it doesn't seem real. How has it come to this? What have I been doing? And the answer comes back to me, clear, booming, Octavia's persistent voice in my ear.Living in a dreamworld.

'If we look at the company's bank statements -' a flick through the sheaf on her desk, before one almond-shaped pearlescent nail smoothly drags the offending sheet of paper into the light - 'well, we can see what the problem is. Too many outgoings, not enough incomings. In fact the last payment into the company account was October 2008, for one hundred and thirty-five pounds.'

Bless Cathy. Those were Christmas presents for her mother and her sisters. But I flush with shame that these were the last payments into the account: I am being propped up by friends, by my husband. There have been no website sales since then.

'Miss Kapoor.' Clare Lomax shuts the folder with a flourish and puts her fingers under her chin. She stares at me. 'It's not good, is it?'

'No,' I say. 'And in the meantime -' the same nail scratches down a long list - 'we've got payments coming out of the account regularly, driving you further into debt.' I gaze down. 'Website hosting . . . three hundred pounds . . . Two hundred pounds to Walsh and Sons, Hatton Garden?'

'They make tools. Er - pliers and things.' It's the truth, yet I sound wholly unconvincing.

'Right. This payment here, for six hundred and forty-three pounds, in September, to Aurum Accessories.'

'That was for materials.'

'What kind of materials?'

My voice sounds high, like a little girl's. 'Um . . . gold wire, earring studs and clutches, that kind of thing?' I try to remember. 'I've got the receipts in my folder here, I'll check.' I've got every single piece of paper I could possibly need, neatly filed away, carried with me to Cornwall and back in preparation for today. I've documented the failure of my business meticulously.

'It's fine.' Clare Lomax scribbles something on her pad. 'Have you thought of using cheaper materials?'

'What, like string?' I smile, but there's a silence and I realise she's serious.

'I'm just saying there are some very nice necklaces and bracelets made out of waxy thread and beads. You know, you see them in Accessorize, Oasis. And so forth,' she adds, pulling out the 'th' of 'forth' on her tongue, as if to give weight to it. 'I'm just saying,' she repeats. 'You need to look at some other options, Miss Kapoor.'

'I don't make jewellery like that,' I explain. 'I work with metals, enamel, laser cuts mainly, it's different—'

'Miss Kapoor.' Clare Lomax raises her voice slightly and shifts her arms forward and then back into their clasp. I see the flash of a tattoo on her wrist, quickly hidden again by her polyester jacket. I wonder how old she is. 'We are here today to discuss your business and to work out a way to keep you from going bankrupt, which at the moment is looking likely.' Her voice is clipped, brisk, precise. 'You have defaulted on your loan repayments twice. You have refused to respond to us about your overdraft. If you want to avoid a consolidation repayment plan, where we charge you twenty per cent interest and demand repayment of the overdraft beginning now, we need to work out how you can change your working practice so that you don't accumulate debt.' She gives a thin smile. 'Otherwise, you will have no business. Is that clear?'

I nod. 'Yes. It's very clear.'

'Do you want to change the way things have been?' She's staring at me. I sit up straight and

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meet her gaze. This woman, girl really, whom I've never met before, is calling me out, pointing out my flaws in a way no one else has, in a way I could never do. If she can see them, they must be pretty obvious.

I clear my throat. 'Yes,' I say softly. 'What?' She leans forward. 'Yes,' I say again, more loudly. 'Yes. I really do want to. I want to change the way it's been. I don't want it to go on like this.'

As I hear my voice, soft and tentative, saying these words out loud, it gives me a jolt, and I realise again how true it is. I nod, as if confirming it. To her, and to myself.

Clare Lomax folds down a small corner of one of the bank statements in front of her. 'Right.' She permits herself a small smile and I want to smile too. 'Let's carry on, then. So - five hundred and fifty pounds paid out in November. To Aird PR Limited. There's a couple of payments to them last year. Who are they?'

'It's a PR firm. I hired them to publicise my jewellery.' She looks at me blankly, as well she might. 'They've worked with a few designers I know. People who have gone from having a stall or selling stuff through just a couple of shops to being featured in magazines, in blogs, so people write about you, look you out at the trade shows, and so on. It helps you to get a name for yourself.'

'And have they done that for you?'

'No,' I admit. 'Not really. They got me a mention in theEvening Standard, but they got my website wrong. So I didn't really get any uptake from it.'

Clare Lomax says, suddenly kind, 'You have to ask yourself if your product is right for the general public. If there's more you can do. We see this all the time with small businesses.'

Now I'm feeling more confident, I take a deep breath, to try and stick up for myself. 'Miss Lomax - we're in a recession. Two years ago I was getting interns to help me, I had orders for shops here and in Japan, the Far East, for fifty necklaces, a hundred bracelets a time. But that's all gone now.' I try to sound as though it doesn't bother me. 'People are still buying jewellery, but not like they used to. And if they are they won't take a punt on some random girl they've never heard of. It's really hard.' I sound as though I'm trying to talk herout of lending me more money.

'I can see that,' she says drily. She leans forward, so that a lock of her thin brown hair falls over her face. 'But if you'll allow me to say it, it seems to me you've been burying your head in the sand, Miss Kapoor. You've failed to keep up the repayments, you've not explained what's happening and why you're in difficulties, and most importantly you've failed to communicate with us despite many attempts on our part. And that makes you a bad risk in my book. You've got to face up to it. As it is, you'll probably lose the business if you go on at this rate.'

You've got to face up to it. I stare at her, my heart hammering in my chest. 'Right. Right.'

She says, not unkindly, 'I just don't understand why you've let it come to this.' She sounds for a second like a concerned friend. I blink. I can't stand it if I start to cry. Don't cry.

I clear my throat noisily and sit up. 'I don't understand either,' I say softly. 'I've had a lot of other shi— stuff going on. And it's been a hard time. Loads of my friends are going out of business. But I'm hopeful. I've got a new collection I've just finished designing.'

'Really?'

'Yes,' I say. This is a lie, but it's a hopeful lie. 'I've just got to get the cash together to get it made up. And take it to the shows. And I have to start doing the market stalls again. That brings in the money.'

'I don't understand why you haven't been doing that all along,' Clare Lomax says. 'According to my notes when you opened the account you were selling at a stall at least twice a week, and always Sundays.'

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'I don't do that any more.' 'Why not?'

Why not? Vanity, greed, wanting to spend time with Oli, his jealousy at not having me on Sundays, believing the hype of Joanna, the PR person I hired, who told me I didn't need to stand in the cold on a stall next to lots of other jewellers all vying for attention and space. After the up-and-coming pop star was photographed wearing my necklace the orders started flooding in, and the website was launched a few months later. I listened to them, to Oli and Joanna, when they said I didn't need to do that any more. And it was expensive - eighty quid a day for the stall, and the Truman Brewery near where I live has too many stalls anyway, and not enough customers, I told myself. I - Oli and I - decided I could live without it, that it'd be a better use of my time to take myself out of that scene, try and move up a level.

I was so wrong. I was wrong about that, about overpaying for the website, about the people I listened to, the way I changed my focus. Ben, in the studio next door, warned me but I didn't listen.

'You love the stall, Nat,' he'd say. 'You like meeting the people, it keeps you fresh. It's not good for you, sitting at home or in the studio all day.'

I started trying to become a brand. A brand like the ones Oli promotes. He thinks everyone is their own brand and I'm sure he's right, but all I can say is, I was better off when everything was simple, when I could sketch in my book, pay the nice old man off Hatton Garden to make up my gold and silver pendants, and sit there in my studio happily making up the necklaces, cutting the chains, choosing the right pair of pliers from my set to bend gold and silver wire, researching suppliers, thinking up new ideas and just trying them out, listening to my iPod, and chatting to Ben and Tania, his girlfriend, who works with him. The trouble is, most of the time I'd prefer to be in their studio with them, instead of on my own. Everything's OK when they're around. There's a distraction, someone to talk to, instead of sitting alone amidst the accessories and pliers, staring into space, wondering what on earth comes next. It's so easy to pop next door and ask for a cup of tea, or bring them biscuits.

Ben never seems to mind. He's one of those open, friendly people who can work in Piccadilly Circus and still concentrate. He likes chatting and so do I. We like the same humour, the same old films, the same biscuits, we were meant to be office buddies, as we continually say. I think Tania is not quite so keen on me hanging around like a bad smell all the time while she's trying to mark up contact sheets or negotiate with a magazine. I think she knows I'm lonely. She wants to tell me to back off and go and do some work. And so I've started limiting myself to one knock on the door a day.

When I realise I've started thinking about it like that, I suddenly see that I have to control my loneliness - that crying all over Ben when Oli left, while Tania made some tea and went and got Jaffa Cakes (and she is French, so Jaffa Cakes are unfathomable to her, so I appreciated the gesture even more) is something you do once, because it's a crisis point, not every week, every day.

The new strong confident me looks at Clare Lomax to see if she'd understand this, the mind that has too much time to think. She wouldn't. I wouldn't either if someone else explained it to me. It's as though my life has veered way off track, and although I still can't quite see where it began, at least I can recognise this. I put my hands on the desk and take a deep breath.

'Look, Miss Lomax,' I say. 'I have really screwed up, but I can show you how and why, and how I'm going to change things. I know I'm good at what I do, and I want to work hard. I've just taken bad advice, and I know how to fix it.' I look at her imploringly. 'Please, please believe me. I've ignored you and I'm really sorry, but I've been an idiot, keeping my head in the sand. I'll get the money to repay the default loan payments, I can pay them with my credit card today. But please, please don't withdraw my

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overdraft facility. I just need a bit more time, but I'm going to pay it off.'

She narrows her eyes. 'I am,' I say. 'I don't want it to be like this any more. You need to trust me.' I smile and I can hear my voice is shaking. 'I know you've got no reason to, but I really hope you do.'

I sit back in my chair and clutch the papers again.

Clare Lomax sighs. 'OK, look, there's a way out of this.' I hold my breath. 'You will have to pay us back a regular amount each month and if you default just once more, that's it. We'll call in debt collectors. You'll have to cut back on your company expenditure. And I see you're married, right?'

'Yes.'

'The flat is in both your names?' 'Just my husband's.' 'So they can't take that.' 'They can't take what?' 'You won't lose your flat.'

My head is spinning. 'Lose the flat? No, of course we wouldn't . . . would we?'

She says musingly, 'Miss Kapoor, I honestly don't think you realise how serious this is.'

'I do,' I say, my voice practically begging. 'Absolutely I do.'

'Your husband's working?'

'Yes - yes, he is. But—'

'You're lucky,' she says, pulling her papers together. 'You can live off him for a few months while you sort yourself out. We'll draw up a payment schedule for the overdraft too and then work out a new way for you to go forward with the business.'

I nod numbly. Maybe I'll have to, but I don't like the idea. I want to get back together with Oli, but not because he'll pay for everything. I'd rather lose him, and the business, than feel that I'm taking him back so I can 'live off him' the way Clare Lomax suggests. But I don't say anything. After all, what choice do I have? I've got to make this work for myself. I've got to change the way things have been. I quiver with purpose, I'm surprised Clare Lomax doesn't notice.

'And then we'll ask to see that you're conducting your business more profitably. So it's viable.' She clears her throat. 'Does that sound like a way forward to you, Miss Kapoor?' She looks down at her pad. 'I'm sorry. Is it Mrs Kapoor then?'

'No,' I say. 'It's Mrs Jones.' I hate being Mrs Jones, for all the obvious reasons. I shift in my seat again, and the papers in my pocket wrap around my thigh.

'Oh. Sorry.' She isn't really paying attention. 'Don't be,' I say. 'It's fine. So—'

'I think we're going to be able to work this out,' she says, pulling the keyboard out in front of her and swivelling round to face the computer. 'Like I say, Miss Kapoor, things are going to have to change. The question is, are you willing to make those changes?'

'Yes, I am,' I say, nodding, and this time I hear myself speak and it's clear, low, confident and I believe what I'm saying, for the first time in ages. 'I really am.'

Chapter Twenty-Two

It is a cold day but sunny as I walk down from Liverpool Street towards the studio, hands in my pockets. I'm the other side of the City, heading back to my beloved East London. Pushing past me on either side are bustling City workers in black and grey, enlivened only by the flash of a red tie or the glint of a gold earring. I shiver in the icy wind, walking briskly.

I hug the papers to myself, trying to keep warm. Now I'm out of it, the meeting seems almost funny, it's so awful. And one thing's clear: though Clare Lomax and I are not destined to be friends who meet in unlikely circumstances and form a life-long bond, she's completely right. She could see it. Things need to change. I'll be thirty-one in May. I'm a grownup, for God's sake.

Five minutes later, I am opening the door of the Petticoat Studios at the bottom of Brick Lane. 'Studio' is a euphemistic name for the room I rent. It is basically an old sixties warehouse that has been roughly divided up into different spaces of different sizes. My aunt Sameena says that when she was over visiting relatives in the seventies, she'd come to Brick Lane and see row upon row of Bangladeshi men asleep on the floors. They'd wake up in the morning and go to work on a building site nearby, and their beds would be taken by the night-shift workers who'd come back as they were getting up. Now it has exposed brick and steel girders, and Lily the textile designer has stencilled huge patterns onto the wall behind the erratically manned reception desk. Being bohemian and cool does not necessarily mean the heating works or the loos flush all the time, I've found.

'Hello!' I say to Jamie, one of the two receptionists whose salary is paid for by our extortionate rental fee. Jamie looks up and moves part of her blonde fringe away with her finger. She is wearing a black velveteen hoodie with the hood up, and is flicking throughPop magazine.

'Hiya, Nat!' she nods perkily. Jamie is very perky. She's pretty and sweet and kind, like an East London version of Sophie Dahl. 'How was the funeral?'

'Fine,' I say, reaching into my pigeonhole and pulling out the post. 'Well, you know.'

'Oh, of course.' She nods understandingly. 'It's really hard, isn't it?'

I am in no mood for trite funereal conversations, and I'm in no mood for beautiful sunny Jamie, whom I sometimes want to punch in the mornings, she's so upbeat. I smile and nod, then trudge up the cold concrete circular stairs and unlock my studio.

It's only been two days since I was here, but it feels longer. It's very cold, and the big square windows don't keep in the heat, though it's always light. My own studio is about twelve square feet. It's all painted white. There are floor-to-ceiling shelves next to the window and an alcove with a safe in it, covered with a curtain, a red, lemon and grey geometric fifties material from one of the bedrooms at Summercove. I keep my unsold pieces in there, and any metals I've bought. There's a small wooden table with an old, battered, paint-spattered radio, a kettle and a few mugs on one of Granny's old trays, and the rest of the room is taken up with the workbench with all my tools on it. A hammer, pliers, drills, wire and chain cutters, sharp knives, all covered with tiny pellets of old copper or gold wire, my apron which makes me feel super-professional, and my sketchbook, where I used to be constantly scribbling

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down ideas. I haven't drawn or written anything new in it for months.

Above the work table six big cork tiles are glued to the wall, onto which I have stuck photos - the one of Granny when she was younger; me and Jay at Summercove when we were five, squinting into the sun, both dark, fat, small and serious; and Ben and me last year when we went as Morecambe and Wise to the Petticoat Studios Christmas drinks. Tania didn't get it, but as she grew up on the Left Bank that's excusable. No one else did either, though. Their average ages are about twenty-three. The photo makes me smile every time I look at it; there's such panic in our eyes as we realise what a mistake we've made, and behind us are grouped our effortlessly trendy fellow studio-renters in a variety of super-cool fancy dress outfits, from Betty Boo (Jamie, of course) to Johnny Depp as Captain Sparrow (Matt, one of the writers in the writers' collective in the basement). I never remember that about fancy dress: that you're supposed to look brilliant, but gorgeous as well. I always just look insane.

Finally, there's a picture of Oli and me on our wedding day two years ago at the Chelsea Physic Garden, he in a light khaki summer linen suit, me in white Collette Dinnigan. We're in profile, black and white, laughing at each other, and we look for all the world as though we're in a photo shoot inHello!. Sometimes, in the middle of the afternoon, I'll glance up from my work and catch sight of that photo, and I'll have to remind myself it's me. There are clippings from magazines, lots of pins just in case I have ideas for things, a cartoon from Private Eye about artists, and a Sempe cover from the New Yorker which Oli had framed for me on our first wedding anniversary.

I have to call Oli now I'm back. We need to talk again. It's been nearly three weeks, and coming back from Cornwall, from everything there and the meeting this morning, has made me see one thing clearly: this state of in-between nothingness can't go on.

There are window boxes outside with pansies and geraniums which have died. I need to sort them out now spring is nearly here, take a trip to Columbia Road and buy some more. Cheaply, of course. There's nothing to be frightened of. I can get on with things. I want to channel my new-found, urgent sense of purpose, of the need for action. But still there's something stopping me, I don't know what. It's more than Oli. It's Granny's funeral, it's what Arvind and Octavia both separately said, this casual crumbling of the wall I'd always thought was around us all. It's the scant pages of the diary I've read, enough to make me want to read more, desperately read more.

Where's the rest of it? Cecily didn't just write that first chunk, that much is clear. What happened that summer, after the boys arrived? I'm holding the post in my hand and I feel myself screwing up the letters as I screw up my eyes, trying to think. To go from never hearing her name mentioned, to being able to hear her voice so clearly that it's almost as though she's talking just to me, is incredibly strange. To go from thinking that your family is sane and happy, if distant, to realising you don't really know anything about them at all - where's the rest of it? What happened afterwards, with my mother, with her, with all of them? I have to find out, but how? I have to find the diary. And I have to find some way of talking to my mother about it.

I put the post down on the table. The letters fan out by themselves. At least two are from the bank. I can stop ignoring them. There are two more window envelopes, which always means a bill or a reminder. And there's an invitation to a new trade fair, in June, in Olympia. I've been ignoring those for a while too: what's the point? But now, flushed with enthusiasm, I feel as though anything's possible. I realise that if I'm ever to make my own business work, I need to start designing again. Come up with a new collection that's so amazing I'll be on every fashionista's blog, sold in Liberty's in a year and have my own diffusion line in Topshop by next year. But more importantly, get it right. Do it because I love it, not because I have to. So what . . . what collection? What will it be?

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Then, as if someone else is telling me to do it, my hand steals slowly but surely to my neck. I feel the thin chain and Cecily's ring hanging on it. I walk over to the tiny mirror hanging by the fridge and stare at myself. There are dirty brown circles under my eyes.

The ring nestles against my skin, the almost pink gold soft against my skin. The twisted metal flowers are beautiful. I think about this ring, about Granny, about my dead young aunt. And suddenly, I hear my grandfather's voice, as his dry fingers push Cecily's diary towards me:Take it... And look after it, guard it carefully. It'll all be in there.