And she was quiet and then she said: “When did you find out, love?”
And I said the February.
And there was a pause on that telephone of about four seconds, and then she said: “Right,” and asked whether I had eaten.
She has never raised it again. Not once in fourteen months.
She has been at my flat twice a week since the baby. She does the washing. She has never said one word about the fourteenth of February, 2025, and I know exactly why, which is that she has decided that saying it would cost her a daughter and a grandson and she is seventy-one.
So my mother stood in a register office in a coat she had bought specially, crying, while her daughter said four paragraphs about honesty — and the arrangement we now have is that neither of us is ever going to mention it.
She paid for that coat. It was a hundred and ninety pounds. She told me the price twice at the time because she was pleased with it.
