I wanted to leave and I wanted somebody else to make it obvious.
And then his mother walked into my kitchen and reorganised the mug cupboard.
What actually happened after 1:14 a.m.
Rosalind rang me at nine. She is not a woman who sends emails back.
She asked me four questions in about ninety seconds. Was the deed in my sole name. Was the agreement executed properly. Was there any joint borrowing secured on it. Had I ever put him on anything.
Yes. Yes. No. No.
And then she said: “Right. Legally this is the simplest instruction I’ve had all year. Now let
me ask you the other question.”
“Is there a woman in your house who’s thirty-one weeks pregnant?”
I said yes.
And Rosalind Awe — who is sixty-one and who I have used since 2014 and who charges accordingly — said: “Then we’re going to do this properly, and slowly, and you’re going to hate me for about a month.”
And the four hours between the dinner and the email, which is the bit everybody skips.
I did not go upstairs and open the box at eleven o’clock in a rage. I went and did the washing up.
All of it. Six plates, the roasting tin, the lot, with the three of them in the front room and the television on, and Bernice calling through at one point that she’d have a tea if I was making one.
I made her a tea.
And I stood at that sink for about forty minutes,
and what I was doing was not seething.
I was checking the arithmetic. Start date, notice period, the Braemer handover, whether the posting survived a divorce, whether the posting survived a sale, what the tax position was on a property held before marriage.
I had done all of it before, in the April, in a folder called Insurance.
I was doing it again because I wanted to be certain that when I pressed the button at one in the morning it would look — to me, in the mirror, for the rest of my life — like a reaction.
