And both times Bernice told her that I was delighted. That I had offered. That I had said it would be lovely to have a baby in the house, which — and this is the detail that gets me — is a thing I might once have said, and which Bernice knew would land, because Bernice knows exactly what happened in 2022.
The second thing was about the dinner.
She was not smirking.
She was thirty-one weeks pregnant, she had not slept properly in a month, she had just watched her brother shout at
a woman in her own kitchen, and she looked down at her plate and her face did something.
And I, sitting opposite, filed it as a smirk, because I had already decided what she was.
She wrote: I was trying not to cry at the table because my mother has told me since I was nine that crying is a way of making things about yourself.
Twenty-four years old. In somebody else’s house. Told by her mother that the owner had offered.
And for three weeks I watched her not say thank you for the lifts and I built that into the case as well.
And 2022, because Bernice’s sentence about a baby in the house did not land by accident.
We tried for two years. I was thirty-three when we started and thirty-five when we stopped, and I am not going to put the medical part of it in
here because it is mine.
What belongs in here is this: Bernice knew. All of it. Because Ivan told her — not to be cruel, but because he is a man who rings his mother.
So there was a period in 2022 when I would find out, from Bernice, in the kitchen, at Christmas, what stage we were at.
And in the November of that year, when it was finished, she said one sentence to me by the sink, and I want to be exact: “Never mind. There’ll be babies in this family one way or another.”
That is the sentence. That is the file Bernice opened three and a half years before she arrived with the suitcases.
