Nobody at that table would have believed a stranger.
They would all believe Nerine.And the only one I could think of, in four minutes, was to make somebody else’s body say it out loud in front of eleven relatives.
It has been eleven months.
Nerine is alive and she is at home and she is eighty now.
She has given a full account and it is on a record and it does not spare her, and she began it — I am told — by saying that she had wanted the house to stay in the family.
That is the whole motive of a woman who has known me since I was twenty-eight. The house.
Not even for her. For him.
She is eighty now. She has her own place and she was never once going to live in mine.
She did it so that her son would not be the one in that family who ended up with nothing, which is a sentence she has apparently used, and which is about a man of fifty-seven.
There is a version of this where I find that monstrous. There is another one, which I get to about once a fortnight, where I understand it completely and cannot bear it.
She was not protecting a house. She was protecting the story she has been telling about her son since about 1974.
I have seen her twice. Both times were arranged by other people and both were extremely short.The first was four days after, in a corridor, and she was asleep and I stood at a distance and then left.
I do not know why I went. I have decided it was twenty-one years of Sundays operating on their own, the way a hand goes to a light switch in a house you have moved out of.
The second time, in a hospital corridor, we were alone for about a minute, and I said the only thing I have ever said to her about any of it.
I said: you ate it too.
She did not answer.
There is no answer. I have thought about it a great deal since and I am not sure I said it to be cruel, and I am not sure I did not.
What I know is that I had eleven months to prepare a sentence and that is the one I used.
Four words. Not why. Not he is your son and I was your daughter-in-law for twenty-six years.
