‘Shut up,’ I say. ‘Shut up, Oli, it’s not true.’ I want to put my hands over my ears.

‘You treat me like a little boy, Nat, like a stupid little boy with a sil y job. And I’m not.’ I am shaking my head, and he breathes in, his nostrils flaring. ‘I’m not, not any more. Most people don’t look at me that way. OK?’

‘Most people like Chloe?’ I say, picking up my coffee. I walk out into Brick Lane. He runs after me.

‘I didn’t mean it like that. I mean you’re my wife, and you look at me like I’m a piece of shit.’

‘You are a piece of shit, that’s why.’ I keep on walking, my bag swinging over my arm. ‘Go off to your meeting. Go away. I don’t – I don’t want to see you ever again.’

Oli says practical y, ‘Nat, you have to give them the mug back. You can’t just walk off with it.’

I realise I have stolen Arthur’s coffee mug, but I try to brazen it out. ‘I don’t fucking care.’ He raises his eyebrows; Oli knows as wel as I do that I am the most bourgeois person in the world and I would no more go off with a mug than I would walk down the street naked.

‘Fine,’ he says. ‘Fine.’

Some men driving a white van are coming towards us as I stride down the middle of the road. ‘Natasha, move onto the pavement.’

‘No.’ I carry on, hating myself. ‘Natasha, move!’ Oli says. The men are beeping their horn. One of them raises his fist at me, like a thwarted cartoon vil ain. Oli runs across and pul s me off the road onto the pavement, grabbing my arm, and the mug flies out of my hand, bouncing and then smashing into thick pieces on the kerb with a crunching sound.

‘For God’s sake,’ Oli says. ‘Nat, what are you doing?’

I’m sick of this.

I’m sick of hating him, of feeling like this, of the way our world has col apsed around us so quickly, when we should be building things together, not pul ing them apart. He is gripping my elbows, glaring furiously at me.

‘I’m sorry,’ I say. And I mean it. ‘I do put you down, I know I do. I don’t know when it started.’ I shake my head, and I can feel my whole body shaking as I do. ‘I don’t know how that makes you feel, it’s like I don’t care.’

‘How it makes me feel?’ he says. ‘Knowing that you despise me? That you think you love me but you don’t? You real y want to know?’

‘Yes,’ I say, taking a deep breath. ‘I want to know.’

He says quietly, ‘I don’t feel anything.’

There’s a silence, just the soft tread of pedestrians walking past us on either side and the wind whistling through the grey streets. I open my mouth, but nothing comes out. I nod.

‘Yep,’ Oli says. ‘I don’t feel anything at al .’ He looks at me, raising his eyebrows with a sad look of triumph. ‘And I don’t think that’s good.’

He turns and walks away and I fol ow him, like a dog at his heels, along the street. ‘Where are you going?’

‘I think I’m going to go to work now,’ he says. ‘Oh – OK,’ I say. I’m terrified. ‘Are you coming back?’

‘I don’t know,’ he says, but he looks at me, and his eyes are blank. I want to run to him, hug him, but I don’t know him any more. That’s when I realise.

‘I just don’t think you want to be happy, Natasha,’ he says. ‘And I can’t help you.’

I think back over the years, how I’ve known him for over ten years now, together for five of those. I think of my twenty-fifth birthday, at Jay’s flat, where we got together, how he walked me back home, al the way to West Norwood, on a warm May Sunday morning. Of our wedding night, how we were so drunk we passed out and couldn’t stop laughing about our hangovers the next day. How wel I thought I knew him, and how I look at him now and I – I think we’re completely different.

‘We used to be a good fit,’ he says, putting his wal et in his back pocket. ‘I don’t think we’re a good fit any more. Do you?’

‘Yes,’ I say, but I’m lying, and he nods sadly. ‘I think I’d better go now,’ he says, and he walks away down the street.

I watch him until he disappears around a corner. I don’t know what to do next. What happens next. I turn and walk towards the flat, leaving the broken pieces of china in the gutter.

Chapter Twenty-Six

When I get back to the flat, something is wrong. Oli has left the door open, and the skylight outside is also open. The wind has knocked over the coat stand, which has fal en against the hal table, shattering a glass. There are papers everywhere, takeaway menus, minicab cards, fluttering around, scattered on the floor. I bend down to pick the coats up, and I right the stand again, patting it as if it’s a person, and I look around me at the mess left behind.

I have screwed everything up. I think about Granny’s coffin being inexpertly loaded into the ground. About Oli’s face when he first said, ‘I think I need some space.’ (What a cliché, what a fucking pathetic cliché.) Clare Lomax yesterday morning, tel ing me that she was extremely concerned about my ‘ability to sustain a viable business’ . . . Cecily’s diary, Arvind’s face, Oli’s face, Ben being nice to me, my bedroom in our flat at Bryant Court, al of it is going round and round in my mind as I stare at our huge, empty apartment and I can’t break the circle of thinking about it. I’m so tired of feeling like this, of wanting not to feel like this, of tel ing myself I’m being stupid – because I am stupid.

I keep trying to feel better, but these things keep punching me in the face. The col apse of our marriage: he’s probably right, it was col apsing long before Oli’s infidelity. The business going under. And Granny’s death, and what it has started to uncover. Now, it feels as though something fundamental has shifted, as if al my efforts to make everything nice in my life are coming to nothing. My marriage is a sham, it’s over. I can’t make a living doing the only thing I’m any good at. And Granny is gone, the person whose approval I most wanted, whose presence I most often missed, she is gone.

Shutting the door, I start picking up papers, but then I stop and lean on the table and start to cry. I realise I can’t stop myself. I turn around and sink to the ground, staring helplessly at nothing. The tears pour out of me, dripping like little streams onto the floor as I rock against the wal , hugging my knees. Everything is open, nothing can be concealed any more, and it is terrifying. I cry and cry, for Oli and me, for the end of our marriage, for how happy I wanted us to be; how wrong I was, the life I’ve got ahead of me now – I can’t see it, don’t know what I’m here for, what I should do, in my self-pity can’t remember anything worth working for. I cry for Granny and Arvind, for their lost daughter, for our weird, fucked-up family, for my difficult and strange mother, the father I don’t know. The wooden floor is covered with dark circles, my tears.

I cry until there aren’t any more tears left and I am sobbing softly, and after a while the roaring in my ears grows quieter and I look up and around me, expecting to cry again, but I don’t.

It’s very stil . I hug myself again, blinking, my swol en eyes smarting.

It is strange, like coming to after an anaesthetic. I blink again and wipe my nose on my hand.

A car honks in the street. I look at my watch. It’s stil only ten in the morning. It could be midnight. I stand up, staggering slightly, and I lean against the wal , breathing hard, as if I’m out of breath. I feel dizzy, but as though something is clicking into place in the stil ness of the room. As if this is the bottom, I’ve hit the bottom, and now I can start to climb back out.

I stretch my arms out over my head, to ease my cramped back. I’m on my own, now. I understand that. Oli isn’t coming back. He real y isn’t. I look round, and I rol my head back and forth. OK. I’l cal Jay and Cathy. I’l ask Ben and Tania if they want to come to supper. Perhaps I should find some money from somewhere and go with Cathy to Crete this summer, she mentioned it a couple of weeks ago. If I’m not in limbo any more, I can start to plan for the future, can’t I? I think of the sketchbook in the centre of the table in my studio. My fingers itch, something they haven’t done for ages.

Is it possible that out of this something good might come? Immediately, doubt floods over me again, and I look helplessly around me. At first I see nothing. And then I spot Cecily’s diary, sticking out of my stil -unpacked bag in the sitting room. It’s weird. In that peculiar brightness of an overcast day, against the brown of my bag, it is bright white. It is folded, and it looks as if it would like to spring out flat. I rub my eyes tiredly, go over and pick it up, and I stare at the pages once again.

‘What happened to you, Cecily?’ I ask out loud. ‘What happened, to al of you?’

There’s no answer to this. But I feel better for having asked the question. I look around the big, empty apartment, and I don’t recognise it. This isn’t my home any more. Perhaps it never was, not in the way Summercove was.

As I think this, I catch myself and it brings me up short. I glance down at those first few pages again, and stand stil .

I remember the first time I took Oli to Summercove, being so immensely pleased that he liked it, that Granny liked him. Driving back to London, I turned my head away with tears in my eyes when he said he loved it. Wel , of course he did. It’s not difficult to like a beautiful house by the sea, is it?

I got that wrong. I got Oli wrong too. I got a lot of things wrong, it seems. Standing here now, I feel a fog start to lift in my mind. I’ve always thought Summercove was my real, spiritual home, the place where I longed to be for most of the year and where I was happy when I was there. I always liked the thought that Granny was the de facto head of a sprawling family, who didn’t al get on perhaps one hundred per cent, but who, like me, loved being down there, felt it was the place where they could escape from al their problems. I felt that was where the heart of my family stil was.