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.
Dermot put his glass down and did not pick it up again.
And Solange Halloran looked at me down the length of her own table.
And I said — and this is the only sentence I had planned in six weeks, and I had it word perfect, and I said it in a completely normal voice:
“He was my dad. He paid the deposit on Tullamane.”
Nessa said, “Oh.”
And then she said, “I didn’t know that.”
And I said, “No. Nobody does.”
Nobody said anything for about eight seconds and then somebody asked for the salad and it went on.
That’s it. That is the whole confrontation. Eleven words from me at a table.
I did not raise my voice once that entire weekend and I never mentioned nine thousand one hundred and forty dollars to a single person.
Here is what happened afterward.
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.
