And when she told her daughter that I would be delighted to have a baby in the house — she was not inventing a woman out of nothing. She was using a real one.
The one from 2022.
Which is, I think, the actual cruelty. Not the mugs, not the chair, not learn to be useful.
She took the worst two years of my life and used them as the reason her daughter would believe I had said yes.
What I did about it.
Not enough, and later than I should have, and Rosalind made me do the first bit.
Skye had eight weeks. She had no deposit — her lease had ended for exactly the reason Bernice gave, which was the only true sentence in the whole business — and no realistic chance of getting a tenancy at thirty-four weeks with a mother’s-allowance income.
In the July I paid the deposit and two months’ rent on a one-bedroom in Carrowlea, through Rosalind, on the condition that it was never mentioned.
I want to be honest about why I did it that way.
Not out of
delicacy. Because I did not want a conversation with her. I wanted to be a person who had done the decent thing and I did not want to be in a room while it was done.
Skye found out in the November, because a letting agent said the wrong thing on the phone.
Her message about it was two lines.
***I’d rather you’d said. I’d have thanked you. I’m not my mother.***
Where Ivan is.
We divorced in the February. It was almost embarrassingly quick, because there was nothing to argue about, which is a sentence with seven years in it.
He moved into a flat above a chemist in Fairholt and then, in the November, back to Bernice’s.
He wrote to me once, in the October. Two sides of A4, most of which was about the house — the fence he put up, the tree he planted in 2021, a
list, essentially, of the things he had done to a building that was not his.
