Solange got the four hundred and ten thousand. It cleared the debt on the farm and it bought her the bungalow on Fentiman Row in Ashglen village that she has lived in ever since, outright, with a good deal left over.
And in seven years I have heard my mother-in-law describe that transaction, out loud, to other people, in about four different ways.
“The children took over the farm.”
“We kept it in the family.”
“Dermot came back to the land.”
Once, at a christening in 2022, in front of about nine people, she said: “We handed it on.”
She has never once, in seven years, in my hearing, said the name Hugh Bright.
Neither has Dermot.
That is the thing that actually sits under all of this, and I did not understand that myself until about the middle of June.
It is not that they eat my food.
It is that I am the help in a house my dead father bought.
So here is what I did, and it took six weeks and it cost two thousand eight hundred and forty dollars.
The twenty-eighth of May. I rang a man called Sylvan Doole who does outdoor catering out of a van and who did the Ostler wedding in 2023, which is the best food I have ever eaten in a field.
I booked him for the fourth of July. Twenty-one covers. Whole shoulder of pork, chicken, two salads, flatbreads, the lot. One thousand four hundred and sixty dollars.
The second of June. I booked a marquee. Six by nine metres, delivered and erected Friday morning, collected Monday. Six hundred and forty dollars.
Twenty folding chairs and three trestle tables. A hundred and ten.
A portable loo, because there would be thirteen extra people and a bungalow has one bathroom. A hundred and eighty.
The ninth of June. I booked Ailish Vane, who cleans for two of my bookkeeping clients, for four hours on the Monday morning. A hundred and sixty.
Two crates of beer, three bottles of prosecco, soft drinks for the children and four bags of ice, delivered. Two hundred and thirty.
