I have said that out loud to one person and she is paid to listen and she did not let me off it, and she asked me the obvious question, which is what I thought was in it.
And the honest answer is that I thought it would be something that made him worse.
I was married to a man who had been kind to my daughter for four years, in a house I could not otherwise afford, and I found something in a drawer, and my first thought was that finding out would cost me both of those things.
So I protected the arrangement. Not him — the arrangement.
That is what I actually did in 2019 and it took me until the January to be able to say it in that order.
PART 4
The envelope had three things in it besides the letter.
My original birth registration, which I have never seen. I had a short-form one from the local authority and I did not know there was another kind.
My mother’s name. Her actual one, not the initial that was on everything I was ever given.
And an address in Halverston for a woman who is seventy-nine.
He had it from 1986. He had had it for thirty-nine years and he did not give it to me for five.
I have thought about that more than about the money, and I asked Prosper Aldene about it in the November, and he told me the only useful thing he has ever told me.
He said: he instructed me in 2021 to hold it until after. He was very clear that it was not to be given to you while he was alive.
And I said why.
And that man, who I do not like, said: because you’d have gone. And he knew he’d have had about six months left and he’d have spent them on his own.
Which is honest, and which is selfish, and which is the only genuinely selfish thing that man did in five years — and it was five years long.
I have not gone to Halverston yet.
It has been eleven months and the address is in a drawer in a house I have six more years on the lease of, and I have driven the first forty minutes of that journey twice and turned round both times.
Hattie is eleven. She asks about it roughly once a fortnight, the way she asks about everything, and I have stopped giving her a soft answer.
