Every cruel, managing, unasked-for arrangement that woman has made in four decades is the same afternoon, performed again, from the other chair.
The seating plans. The opinions about other people’s careers. The way she describes her own daughter’s treatment to strangers.
And a set of papers, printed in advance, in a room with a woman who could not sit up.
She was nineteen years old and somebody did it to her in about forty minutes, and she has been doing it back to the world ever since, and I expect she would describe her entire life as having been in control of it.
That is an explanation.
It is not a defence. I have never once offered it as one and I have corrected two people who tried to offer it on her behalf.
Plenty of people have had an afternoon like that in 1979. Almost none of them print documents.
She did it in a room with a woman five hours out of surgery.
And my husband knew about the papers.
He saw them in her handbag two weeks earlier, at a dinner, when she was getting her glasses out.
He said nothing to me.
Because he decided she would never actually do it.
And because telling me would have meant a conversation with his mother — an actual one, with a sentence in it like you cannot do this — and he has been avoiding that particular conversation since approximately 1998.
He is not a coward in any other part of his life. He is extremely good in a crisis and he has stood up to people considerably more frightening than his mother in a boardroom.
It is one woman. It has always been one woman. And the price of two weeks of not having that conversation was paid, in full, by somebody else, five hours out of theatre.
That is the piece of this I am still working on.
Eleven months later, with help, on a Tuesday evening every fortnight, in a room with a woman who asks me the same question in four different ways until I answer it properly.
The question is not can you forgive him. I could do that in an afternoon and I have always been able to.
The question is what I do with the fact that he saw it, and weighed it, and decided the risk was acceptable — because the cost of being wrong was going to land on me and not on him.
