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 real y 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 wil have to pay us back a regular amount each month and if you default just once more, that’s it. We’l cal in debt col ectors. You’l 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 practical y begging. ‘Absolutely I do.’

‘Your husband’s working?’

‘Yes – yes, he is. But—’

‘You’re lucky,’ she says, pul ing her papers together. ‘You can live off him for a few months while you sort yourself out. We’l 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’l have to, but I don’t like the idea. I want to get back together with Oli, but not because he’l 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 al , 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’l 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 al the obvious reasons. I shift in my seat again, and the papers in my pocket wrap around my thigh.

‘Oh. Sorry.’ She isn’t real y 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, pul ing the keyboard out in front of her and swivel ing round to face the computer. ‘Like I say, Miss Kapoor, things are going to have to change. The question is, are you wil ing 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 real y 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’l 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 basical y 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 stencil ed huge patterns onto the wal behind the erratical y manned reception desk. Being bohemian and cool does not necessarily mean the heating works or the loos flush al the time, I’ve found.

‘Hel o!’ 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 through Pop 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 pul ing out the post. ‘Wel , you know.’

‘Oh, of course.’ She nods understandingly. ‘It’s real y 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 al 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 smal 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 al my tools on it. A hammer, pliers, dril s, wire and chain cutters, sharp knives, al covered with tiny pel ets of old copper or gold wire, my apron which makes me feel super-professional, and my sketchbook, where I used to be constantly scribbling 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 wal , 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, smal 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 fel ow 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’ col ective in the basement). I never remember that about fancy dress: that you’re supposed to look bril iant, but gorgeous as wel . I always just look insane.

Final y, 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 Col ette Dinnigan. We’re in profile, black and white, laughing at each other, and we look for al the world as though we’re in a photo shoot in Hello! . Sometimes, in the middle of the afternoon, I’l glance up from my work and catch sight of that photo, and I’l 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 Sempé cover from the New Yorker which Oli had framed for me on our first wedding anniversary.

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?’