She came down from Fenwick on the twenty-first, on a coach, at seven hours’ notice, and she stayed nine days.
And on about the fourth of those days she said something to me at my own kitchen table that took the legs out from under me.
She said: “She rang me in October, you know. After the dresser.”
Six weeks before the dinner. My wife rang her mother, said she had hurt her side, said it was nothing, and asked — and Brid was quoting her — whether a thing counts if nobody else sees it.
And Brid said: “I told her to tell you. And she said she would, and then she didn’t, and I let it go because I didn’t want to be the mother-in-law who makes trouble.”
And then she looked at me and said: “So that’s me as well. I’m in it too.”
Two women, forty miles apart, both of whom knew something in the October, both of whom decided not to be the one who caused a scene — and a third woman in a notebook writing down everything her son said on a Sunday.
Three people managing a situation quietly, in three different houses, so that nobody would have to have a difficult evening.
