So: sixty days.
Written notice with a date on it. Everything through her, nothing through me.
No board up until the eighth week, which cost me money.
And a letter to Ivan, and a separate letter to Bernice, and a third letter to Skye — which I did not know about until it was sent, and which was one paragraph long, and which said that arrangements were being made in respect of alternative accommodation for her and her child and that she should contact the sender directly and not the owner.
Rosalind wrote that on her own initiative and put it on the bill as correspondence.
I have never asked her why. I know why.
Bernice.
She did not go quietly and I did not expect her to.
She rang my mother. She rang my sister. She rang an aunt of mine in Tolbridge who has met me eleven times in forty years.
She
used the word evicting to all three of them and she used the word pregnant in the same sentence every time, which is correct, and which is the thing I have had to carry.
And she said something on my own drive on the second of July that I have not been able to put down.
“You waited. You had that paper the whole time and you waited until you could do it on a night when it would land hardest.”
She meant it as an accusation about the dinner.
She was wrong about which night and right about everything else.
Skye.
And here is the part that turned this from a story I liked telling into one I do not.
In the September, after the sale, after I had gone, Skye Calloway sent me a message.
Four paragraphs. No abuse in it anywhere, which I had braced for.
She
wanted me to know two things.
The first was that she had asked. Twice. In the April, before any of it, when her mother first raised it, she had said: does Saoirse know, though? And in the May, in the car, on the way over, with two suitcases in the boot: are you sure she’s alright with it?
