I have to cal Oli now I’m back. We need to talk again. It’s been nearly three weeks, and coming back from Cornwal , 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 stil 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 wal I’d always thought was around us al . 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 real y know anything about them at al – where’s the rest of it? What happened afterwards, with my mother, with her, with al 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 bil 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 col ection that’s so amazing I’l 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 col ection? What wil it be?

Then, as if someone else is tel ing 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.

I take the pages out from my skirt and look at them, wondering what comes next.

‘Nat,’ a voice cal s outside. ‘Hey! I’m early!’

Of course she’s early. It’s Cathy, she’s always early. Quickly, I shove the pages into my bag as Cathy pokes her head round the door.

Cathy is very short; I am tal . It is one of the many differences that brought us closer together, since we were eleven-year-olds negotiating the nightmarish, unforgiving terrain of the al -girls West London grammar school. She is holding up a brown paper bag.

‘I went via Verde’s,’ she says. ‘I bought quiche. Terrible morning. I think I lost someone fifty grand.’ Cathy is an actuary, she works in Bishopsgate, the financial district on the edge of the City which encroaches daily ever further into Spitalfields, bringing glass office blocks and Pret a Mangers into the once-ramshackle, historic streets. ‘I’ve got salad. And cakes. And some real y expensive fruit juice.’ She comes towards me and kisses me on the cheek. ‘How are you, love?’

I lean down and hug her tightly, feeling her cold, silky, thick hair against my skin, her reassuring Cathy smel – I think it’s a combination of Johnson’s baby lotion and Anaïs Anaïs. She’s not one to experiment with new things, our Cathy. If she’s happy with something, she sticks to it. She found Anaïs Anaïs when we were sixteen and she’s worn it ever since. She likes Florida and goes there every winter with her mum, to the same hotel in Miami. If Horrific Ex Boyfriend Martin hadn’t chucked her out and changed the locks three years ago she’d stil be with him, which is worrying to me, as he was a bona fide psychopath. She doesn’t like change.

She sets the bag down on my workbench and pats my hair. ‘I kept thinking about you yesterday. How was it?’

‘It was OK. Awful, but you know what I mean.’ I kick my bag further under the table.

‘What’s that on your head?’ She points to the purple bump on my forehead and frowns. ‘Did you have a fight with someone? Did your mum behave herself? Or did she try and snog the vicar and you got in the way?’

Cathy knows my mother of old. She remembers our parents’ evening of 1991. She actual y saw Mum with Mr Johnson.

‘It’s fine.’ I laugh, though I feel a stab in my side as I think of my mother. I remember how jumpy she was al yesterday, see her distraught face as she remonstrated with Guy, waving me and Octavia goodbye, hear Octavia: ‘ Do you really not know the truth about her? ’

‘Just a bump.’ I don’t want to, can’t, get into that at the moment, not even with Cathy. ‘They’re al pretty mad, my family. You know that.’

‘They are,’ Cathy says briskly. ‘It’s a wonder you’re not a complete mentalist, Nat, I’ve often thought that. Or even more of a mentalist than you are, if you know what I mean.’

‘That’s so kind of you,’ I say. ‘I want to know how you are, though. What’s up with work? Why’s it terrible?’

‘I think my boss hates me. Genuinely hates me.’ Cathy is stil staring at my head. ‘Look, forget about that. How was the meeting this morning?’

There’s a noise in the corridor and my eyes dart to the door. I don’t know why I should care; I’m paranoid about anyone, apart from Cathy and Jay, knowing how stupid I’ve been. Even Oli doesn’t know the ful extent of it. I hid it from him, just as he hid things from me. I don’t want Ben, for example, to walk past and accidental y hear the reality of my idiocy. Why should I care what he and Tania think? I don’t know. But I don’t want him to feel sorry for me. I’m sure he already does, and I wish he didn’t. I don’t want him to know how stupid I am either.

‘Um—’ I put the cutlery and plates on the bench and reach for some napkins which I keep in my apron pocket. ‘It was pretty awful.’

‘Oh, no.’

‘No, it’s fine,’ I hasten to explain. ‘I have to find a thousand quid now to pay back the defaulted loan payments. But I can put that on my other credit card.’ Cathy whistles. ‘And I have to pay off the overdraft, two hundred pounds a month plus interest. And they won’t, like, cal the debt col ection agencies in, or the police, or take me to court.’

‘Ha-ha,’ says Cathy. She pul s her ponytail tight with both hands, as though she’s flexing her muscles. ‘Right.’

‘No,’ I say. ‘I’m serious. They were going to.’

‘Jesus,’ she says. She looks genuinely shocked. Cathy has never been in debt, always pays her credit card off each month. She never even gets the ticket gate beeping at her because her Oyster card’s run out. That’s how organised she is. ‘I didn’t realise it was that bad.’ Then she asks awkwardly, ‘How did it – er, how did it get to that stage then?’

‘I know how it got to that stage,’ I say. I gesture to the one chair and give her a plate and fork. ‘I’ve been a fool. Sit down. Eat some of your food.’ I pour her a glass of apple juice into a navy chipped mug that says ‘Tower Hamlets Business Seminars’. ‘Drink.’

Cathy cuts some of the quiche away with her fork. ‘It’s been a hard time for you though, Nat.’

‘Maybe, but it’s my fault. I haven’t been doing it properly,’ I say simply. ‘And I’m fucked as a result. If Granny knew she’d be horrified – she was so proud of me. Man alive.’ I shake my head when I think about Granny now, I think about her in the diary, her impatience with Miranda, her daughter, as though she knew she was a bad seed. Did she know?

No. I shake my head. I have to stop these thoughts, at least til I know more. ‘If she’d had any idea I’d be leaving her funeral early to come back for a business meeting to stop me being taken to court by the bank . . . if she knew how much I’ve screwed it up . . .’ I think of her and how much she loved me, how I felt that love al through my childhood. It’s hard to admit it but I plough on. ‘She’d be so disappointed.’

Cathy is concentrating on her quiche on the plate. She says after a pause, ‘I don’t think she would be.’

I laugh. ‘Bless you. But I think she would. She was real y proud I did fine art at uni. She was so disappointed when I didn’t become an artist, and she was OK with the jewel er thing because she thought it was arty. She didn’t expect me to go bankrupt, did she.’

‘I think you’re being too hard on yourself. It’s real y tough out there at the moment, apart from anything else,’ Cathy says. She swal ows and clears her throat. ‘Not to be rude, but you know, I always thought . . .’ She stops. ‘Actual y, forget it.’

‘What?’

‘Nothing.’

I’m laughing. ‘Come on, Cathy! What?’

‘I always thought she was pretty hard on you too, if you want me to be honest.’

‘Who?’ I don’t understand her. ‘Your granny, Nat.’

I scoff, it’s so unlikely. ‘No, she wasn’t!’