And the two things I asked her in that car park, which were not the questions I had driven there with.
I had driven there with about nine questions, and every one of them was really the same question, which was did you sleep with my husband.
And I sat down opposite her and she pushed a cup of tea across and I heard myself say: “How long has she been in there?”
Six years. Since the November of 2019.
And then: “Does she like it?”
Which is a stupid thing to ask about a specialist unit and which is the only question I have ever asked that made Verity Cobb’s face move.
She said: “She likes the radio. She’s got a chair by the window and they put the radio on at ten and she’s — yes. She’s alright. It’s a good place. It’s the reason it costs what it costs.”
And then she said the thing that finished off whatever I had arrived with.
“He’s been twice, Wynn. In six years. Twice.”
“He pays for everything. He does the reviews on the phone. He rings the manager every month and asks about her feet and her weight and whether the chiropodist’s been.”
“And he can’t go in the building.”
The twenty-fourth of October.
Imelda Foyle died the following afternoon.
I was there.
Not in the room — Grady was in the room, and Verity, and a nurse called Oyin who had known her eleven years.
I was in the corridor on a chair, because I had driven four hours on the strength of a car park conversation and I did not know what else to do with myself.
And at about two o’clock Verity came out and said: “He wants to know if you’d come in.”
So I met my mother-in-law for the first and only time for about forty minutes, on the last afternoon of her life, six days after I married her son.
She was very small. She had her hands folded like somebody waiting for a bus.
I did not say anything meaningful. I said hello and I said my name and I said that I had heard she used to grow dahlias, which Verity had told me in the car park.
And Grady sat on the other side of the bed and did not look at me once in forty minutes.
The smile.
People always ask me about that first.
Under the porch light. On the phone. That smile.
I built four days of certainty on it. I sat in my mother’s kitchen and described it to her and she went pale, because a smile like that on a man walking to another woman’s car at two in the morning means one thing.
I found out what it was in the February.
Verity told me, because I asked her directly, because by then we had got to the point of asking each other things directly.
At 2:11 in the morning, two minutes before he came out of the house, the night nurse at Ferrow Lodge rang him.
Not about the pneumonia. They had already told Verity about the pneumonia; that is why she had driven four hours and was sitting outside my house.
The nurse rang because she thought he would want to know that at about eight that evening, while the radio was on, Imelda Foyle had said a word.
She had not spoken since the January of 2024.
The word was Grady.
That is what he was smiling at, under the porch light of the house we had just got married into, with his bag in his hand, at thirteen minutes past two in the morning.
And I watched it from an upstairs window and decided I knew exactly what it was.
What I have had to take.
A great deal, and in an order I did not choose.
But if I am honest the worst of it is not the lie about his mother, and it is not the money, and it is not the test he will not take.
It is that he was right about me.
Because I have asked myself, properly, more than once, at three in the morning: if he had told me in 2022 — my mother is alive, she has this, I have a one in two chance, I don’t want to know —
would I have left it?
No.
I would have been kind about it. I would have given him six months. And then I would have started. Gently, reasonably, with articles, with the phrase for the children we’re going to have, with my particular way of making a thing inevitable by being endlessly understanding about it.
I would have got him into that clinic within two years and I would have told myself he chose it.
He knew that. He knew it in 2022 and he was correct, and the thing he chose instead of telling me was five years of fraud and a dead woman who was not dead.
That is not a defence of him. He had about nine hundred better options and he took the worst one available.
But I cannot sit here and write that I would have been no trouble, because I would have been the exact kind of trouble that made a man kill off his own mother at a kitchen table.
The funeral.
It was on the sixth of November at a crematorium outside Lindhaven and there were nine of us.
Grady. Verity and Pell. Oyin, the nurse, on her day off. Two women from the unit. A cousin. A neighbour from the road Imelda had lived on until 2019, who had brought dahlias, which I have not been able to think about calmly since.
And me.
I had been dismissed from his life three days earlier in the legal sense — the auditors had gone to the police on the third — and I sat at the back in a black coat and nobody asked me to leave and nobody spoke to me except the neighbour, who assumed I was staff.
Grady spoke for about four minutes. He was steady, and he was good, and he told a story about his mother taking him out of school at eleven to see a house she was thinking of buying and then not buying it.
He did not mention the unit. He did not mention Verity, who had done fifty-odd round trips. He did not mention me.
He thanked everybody for coming.
