Nine years of Mondays and Wednesdays with her two. Four thousand pounds in 2017 that was called a loan by both of us and was not. The deposit on the car in 2021.
And when I sold that house, she said one thing to me on the telephone before she went, which I did not understand at the time and which I understand now.
She said: "So what am I supposed to do?"
Not how could you. Not what about us.
What am I supposed to do.
I had spent eighteen years being that woman's infrastructure, and then at sixty-nine I took the infrastructure to Australia, and a forty-five-year-old woman stood in her own kitchen and genuinely did not know what the arrangement was any more.
That is not an excuse for a year of silence and she is not a child.
But I built it, the same way my mother built her own version of it in Marley Bridge, and I have had to stop describing my children as ungrateful and start describing them as people who were given one role and never offered another.
