He said — and he was crying by then, which he does about once every four years — “I didn’t think you minded.”
And I said, “You didn’t think about it.”
Which is the true version and which he has since accepted.
Saturday. Everybody was very jolly and slightly careful. Sylvan came back and did breakfast, which was not in the plan and which he did not charge for, because he is a good man.
The six children had the best two days of their lives and I want that on the record, because none of this was ever about them and I would have burnt the whole plan rather than have one of them go without.
Sunday. Solange asked me to go for a walk.
We went down Fentiman Row and up the lane by the old creamery, which takes about twenty-five minutes.
She did not apologise. I want to be honest about that.
What she did was tell me about 2016 to 2018. All of it, in order, for twenty-five minutes, and I had never heard any of it.
The debt was one hundred and ninety thousand and Fintan had not told her about most of it. The bank wrote to her nine days after the funeral. She had to have that conversation with Dermot in the September and it took her four months to be able to say the word “sell.”
And she said, at the top of the lane, looking at nothing: “I have never once thanked your father and I did not know his name until last night.”
Then she said, “That’s not an excuse. That’s just a fact about me.”
Which, from Solange Halloran, is roughly the equivalent of anybody else lying down in the road.
Monday. Ailish came at nine and I paid her and Solange tried to pay her and Ailish, who is very sensible, took the money from me because I’d booked her.
The marquee went at eleven. They all left at about one.
And Roisin — the younger sister, thirty-eight, who has said perhaps forty words to me in seven years — stopped at the car and said:
