Mine is perfect. I put it in a box in 2017 and I did not take it out again, because I had four actual children and no reason to look at a picture.
Hers is ruined.
I have thought about that for six months and I still do not know what to do with it, except that it is the most honest object in this entire account.
And the last thing.
On the flight back, on Christmas night, with three of them asleep, Saskia asked me something.
She is the one who notices. She has always been the one who notices.
She said: “Mum. Why did we go in a helicopter?”
And I said something about it being a long way and about it being Christmas and about how it had been an adventure.
And she looked at me for a bit and then she said: “We went in a car to Auntie Dalia’s and that’s further.”
Eight years old. Over a mountain road at night.
And I did not answer her, and she did not ask again, and I thought about it for about six weeks and then I did the only thing I could think of, which was tell her the truth.
I sat on the end of her bed in the February and I said that I had wanted their father to be surprised, and that I had wanted it to be big, and that I had used the helicopter to make it big, and that the big part had been for me and not for them.
And she listened to all of it with her hands under her chin.
And then she said: “Was he sad?”
And I said yes. I said he was frightened and sad and he sat down on the step.
And she thought about that and said: “Good.”
And then, about four seconds later, because she is eight and because she is better at this than I am: “No. Not good. I don’t know.”
And then she asked whether we could go in a car next time, because the helicopter was loud and Mirren was sick and you cannot see anything out of the windows when it is dark.
And so that is what we do.
It is a four-hour drive to Thornedge. We have done it eleven times this year. We stop at the same place on the way up and Linus has the same thing every time.
And the thing I would like on the record, at the end of all of it, is that the four of them have met their father and their grandmother and their grandfather, and none of them has ever once mentioned the lawn, or the matching coats, or the eleven seconds.
Not one of them. Not once, in a year.
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It turns out that was never their day.
It was mine, and I booked it, and it cost about eleven thousand pounds, and the only person in that entire snow-covered front garden who got anything out of it was a thirty-eight-year-old woman standing at the front with her coat open.
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