Friday night. Dermot and I had the worst row of our marriage, in his mother’s spare room, whispering, from about half eleven until nearly two.
Not about the party. He thought the party was — his word — “extraordinary,” and he’d been laughing about it since four o’clock.
It was about the sentence.
Because what my husband said, at about midnight, was: “You could have told me you were going to say that.”
And what I said was: “You could have said it yourself. Any time in seven years.”
He has known. Obviously he has known. He signed the same solicitor’s paperwork I signed in June of 2018.
He has stood in rooms and heard his mother say “we kept it in the family” and “we handed it on,” and he has let it go, every single time, for seven years, because correcting his mother in public is the single most frightening thing that man can imagine.
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.”
