I hardly ever corrected her.
That is a sentence I have said lightly for years and I am going to come back to it, because it is not the small thing I have been pretending it is.
I did correct her once. Christmas 2017, at our aunt’s, when she told the table I had missed our grandfather’s eightieth because I could not be bothered.
I had been at sea. I said so. I said the dates.
And the table went quiet for about four seconds and then somebody asked about the potatoes, and afterwards, in the hallway, my aunt touched my arm and said: she didn’t mean it like that, love.
And that was the lesson.
Not that correcting her was dangerous. That it was expensive and it did not work.
So I stopped doing it, and I told myself that was maturity, and I was thirty years old.
The last time we spoke face to face was at our mother’s funeral in 2023.
She cornered me by the coffee urn and told me I had ruined the service by wearing dress blues instead of a black dress like a normal woman.
I walked outside instead of arguing.
That is what I always do.
I stood in that car park for about twenty-five minutes. Long enough to be noticed leaving and long enough to be noticed not coming back.
And three people came out to find me. My cousin, then my aunt, then a woman from Mum’s church whose name I still do not know.
All three of them said a version of the same thing, which was that Arabelle was grieving and that I was the strong one.
I have thought about that a great deal since, because it is true that I was standing in a car park in a uniform looking extremely composed.
And it is also true that I had walked out of my own mother’s wake, and that somebody had to go and find the widow’s other daughter and tell her it was all right.
There were two daughters in that building and only one of them was being managed, and everybody had agreed, without discussing it, that it was the one making noise.
PART 2
So when I saw her white catering van near Pier 12 that morning, I did not expect trouble.
She works for a private firm that does events on base sometimes, and I had known for years that she did, and there had never once been a problem, because our paths do not cross. She does a function room in the admin building. I am out on the water.
