He was asking me whether I wanted him to tell me.
I have worked that out since — from the letter, where he writes that he tried twice and could not find a way in, and gives the month of one of them, and the month is that August.
Eleven words on a bench, and I gave him before what, and he took it as the answer it was.
He passed in the October.
He had no family. Nobody. I had been to enough appointments with that man to know that there was not one person to ring, and I was the one who rang everybody at the end.
So I assumed the house and whatever there was would come to me.
I want that in here plainly, because people always ask and then look at me a certain way. Yes. I assumed it. I had assumed it for five years.
The day after the service, his solicitor came to the door.
There were about thirty people still in that house. The car was outside and Hattie was already in it with a book.
And Prosper Aldene smiled at me — properly smiled, the way you do when you are about to hand somebody a routine document — and got hold of my wrist and said it loud enough for all of them:
The will leaves you nothing. He knew you’d say yes anyway.He did not let go. He leaned in and said:
Don’t make this difficult. Well?
I said: what are you talking about?
And he let go of my arm and sighed and put an envelope into my hand, and said: you never knew who he was. But he did leave you something. Open that and you’ll understand all of it.
I have gone back to that man’s face about four hundred times.
He was not being cruel. That is the thing that took me longest.
He had been told, by a client, to say a specific sentence, and he had a diary and a service to get to and a hallway full of people, and he delivered it exactly as instructed to a woman he had met twice.
Ambrose wrote that sentence. He wrote it in 2022 and it is in the file with his initials next to it.
I have not forgiven him for that one and I have decided I do not need to, and it is the only thing in this entire account that I am still angry about.
