I said: that would have been a strange thing to do, given they’ve had a photograph of him on their bookshelf since 2014.
And there was a silence on that phone that went on for a long time.
She asked me about the maintenance. I told her the truth, which is that between 2012 and 2019 he paid nothing at all, that the arrears were enforced in 2019 through the courts, and that it has been paid by direct deduction ever since and has never once been late, because it is not up to him.
She did not know any of that either.
And what the boys said to me in the car on the way home, which is the conversation I had been dreading since 2012 and which lasted about four minutes.
We were on the ring road. Cai was driving, on his provisional, with me white-knuckled in the passenger seat, which rather took the ceremony out of it.
And Idris said from the back: “Were you ever going to tell us he’d be there?”
And I said I did not know he would be.
And he said: “No, but — if you’d known.”
And I had to sit with that for about a mile, because the honest answer is that I would have told them on the morning, in the car park, at the last possible second, so that there was no time for anybody to decide not to go in.
