I did not just ignore a warning.
I took it, within sixty minutes, straight back to the two people it was warning me about, wrapped up as a story about how difficult his poor sister is.
She was not invited to anything after that. The hen weekend. The dress fitting. The dinner in the July.
I did not notice. I noticed that things were calmer.
Her name is Saoirse. She is twenty-eight.
She was not at the wedding.
Somebody told me in the September that she had said she was away, and I
accepted that without one second of thought, because it made the seating plan easier.
There was an empty chair at the brunch the next morning with her name card still on it, because the hotel sets to the original list and nobody had told them.
Lorna saw it before I did. I watched her see it.
She picked the card up, read it, and put it face down on the tablecloth, and then carried on with her conversation.
Four seconds. She did not look round to see whether anybody had noticed.
I looked at that chair for a long time while Lorna had hold of my wrist.PART 5
And here is the part about my father, which I did not understand until I was thirty-one and lying under a bed.
For thirty years he has let people get his job wrong.
He says engineer. He lets them picture a
man in a van. He does not correct them at parties, at parents’ evenings, or at his own brother-in-law’s sixtieth.
And he has told me since I was about nine that being underestimated is an advantage and that you should never give it away for free.
He is proud of it. It is the closest thing our family has to a philosophy.
So I grew up extremely good at being underestimated. I am better at it than almost anybody I know.
And completely unable to tell the difference between somebody getting me wrong by accident, and somebody doing it on purpose, with a plan, over two years.
