At eight o’clock I walked into my own dining room with nineteen people already sitting down.
I am not going to write out what happened in there, because a great deal of it was undignified and because most of it was other people.
What I will write is what my wife did.
She let my mother finish.
The whole thing. The statement, the concern, the phrase about protecting the family, the solicitor’s folder placed in front of me, all of it, in front of nineteen relatives.
And then Amara took a single sheet out of a plastic wallet and put it on the table in front of Hesper Corriden, face up, and said:
“Say it again. The bit about owning nothing.”
That was all she said.
The house has always been hers and it still is.
My mother moved out eleven days later. She lives forty minutes away in a place I pay for, and I will go on paying for it, and I have seen her four times in a year.
Marin is not spoken to. That was Amara’s line and I have not crossed it and I am not going to.
The forty-seven thousand came back over fourteen months. My mother is seventy-one and has a pension and it has been humiliating for her and I made it happen anyway.
