And I said, "Let me think about it."
He said, "Sure."
And then came the March.
Audrey's birthday. Her flat, which holds about fourteen people comfortably and had twenty-five in it. The sherry she buys that nobody drinks and everybody accepts.
I had been in that kitchen most of the afternoon, which is what I do at those, because it is easier than the front room.
At about half four I was cutting the cake into twenty-five pieces on a board that was too small, and Bette's daughter had been in to take two pieces and gone again.
And through the doorway, from the front room, I heard Audrey say:
"And have you sorted that house business out?"
I had a knife in my hand and two plates on the counter and I stopped.
And my husband said: "All done. It's all gone through. We're both on it now."
"Both of you?"
"Both of us."
And Audrey Brace said, "Good. That's how it should be. A man ought to own his own house."
Somebody — I think it was her brother Ned — said something about solicitors and how long everything takes now, and the conversation went off, the way conversations do, and inside about eleven seconds they were talking about a conservatory.
I stood in that doorway with two plates in my hands.
I could have walked four steps into that front room and said one sentence.
I had the sentence. It was: no, actually, that's not right.
Six words, in a room where twenty-five people were already half-listening to something about a conservatory, and it would have been awkward for about ninety seconds and then it would have been over, and none of the rest of this would have happened.
And I stood there and did the arithmetic that I have done four hundred times in six years in that family.
If I say it, he is humiliated in front of his mother and his uncle and his sister.
If I say it, I am the one who said it.
If I say nothing, I have to live with a thing being untrue in a room, which I have got extremely good at.
I took the plates in and gave one to Ned and one to Audrey and I said, "There you are," and I went back to the kitchen.
That decision took about three seconds and I have spent a year examining it.
