That is what I have had to take. Not the sale.
That I am extremely good at being the reasonable one, and that being the reasonable one has meant, for most of my adult life, never once saying a true difficult thing to somebody’s face and then arranging events so that I never have to.
Bernice is a bully and everything she did
was worse than everything I did.
And I still would not have got out of that marriage by myself. She did that for me and she does not know it and I will never tell her.
And the twenty-first of August, which was completion, and which I did on my own.
They had gone on the fourteenth. Ivan to the flat over the chemist, Bernice back to hers, Skye to Carrowlea with a two-day-old.
I had the house for seven days, empty, with my own things in boxes and a camping chair.
And on the last morning I walked round it the way you do, and I stood in the doorway of the room that had been my office, where the fireproof box had been, and I stood in the doorway of the room that had been a spare room and then a nursery for eleven weeks.
There was a
Blu-tack mark on the wall at about shoulder height where something had been put up and taken down.
I have thought about that mark a great deal. I did not know what had been on it and I still do not.
And then I sat in the camping chair in the kitchen and waited for the call from Rosalind’s office, and it came at eleven forty, and I said thank you and put the phone down and sat there for another twenty minutes.
I did not feel triumphant. I had expected to. I had, if I am honest, been looking forward to it since one in the morning in the June.
What I felt was the thing you feel when a very long piece of admin finishes.
And that is when I understood that it had never been about the house at all, and that I had spent sixty days
