Chapter 40: Gracious
The article appeared on the twenty-eighth of February, page seven of the county paper.
It is Margot Ashford at the hospice fundraiser at the Corn Exchange, in a dark green dress, holding a cheque.
The cheque was for forty-one thousand dollars. I counted that raffle two years running.
The article is four hundred words and the first three hundred are about the cheque.
The last hundred are about me.
A reporter had asked her. Of course a reporter had asked her. That is why she was standing there.
I am going to set down exactly what she said, because the wording is the whole point.
“We're not going to say anything about Nadia.”
“She's been part of this family for three years and she'll always be part of it.”
“Whatever the court decides, our door isn't closed to her.”
“I'd only ask people to be kind about her. She's had a very difficult life. Not everyone has had the start we've had.”
“Our priority now has to be my son's recovery and the wellbeing of our residents.”
Five sentences. Not one of them is false.
I want to take them one at a time, because it took me a week to see how they work.
We're not going to say anything about Nadia is a sentence that says something about Nadia.
It tells four thousand readers that there is a great deal which could be said.
She'll always be part of it is generosity. It costs nothing, and it makes anything I ever say sound like ingratitude.
Our door isn't closed is the one I could not stop looking at.
There is a court order. Five hundred feet. Applied for by her lawyer, on her instructions, on the twenty-sixth of December.
She stood in a hall in a green dress telling a newspaper her door was open, nine weeks after asking a judge to fence it.
Both things are true at once, and only one of them is in the paper.
She's had a very difficult life is the record.
It is the assault conviction, said out loud to two hundred people, without one word of it being said.
Not everyone has had the start we've had is the same sentence again in a better coat.
The wellbeing of our residents is Damon's line from the witness box, moved to a charity function, where it cannot be cross-examined.
I read it in the library on a forty-minute terminal. I read it eleven times and still had eighteen minutes left.
Then I read the comments underneath, which I should not have done and will not reproduce.
There were sixty-one. Four were kind. Two of those were from the same account.
Bev, at Kestrel House, saw it in print and brought it to me at breakfast, folded to the page, the way you bring somebody bad news.
“That's your mother-in-law, isn't it.”
“Yes.”
She looked at the photograph a while. “She's got a lovely way of putting things.”
That is the most accurate sentence anybody said to me all winter.
Marcus mentioned it at the four o'clock numbers. Not unkindly. “You're in the paper,” he said, and read out the pick rates.
Petro said nothing for two nights. On the third, at the barrier cream tub, he said one thing.
“Rich people never shout.”
I asked Ruth about it on the Tuesday, on a chair with a wobble in it.
I asked whether we could do anything.
She said no.
“There is nothing actionable in that article. She has not said you are guilty. She has not said you are violent. She has said she is praying for you.”
“She didn't say praying.”
Ruth checked. “You're right. She didn't. That is the point. She never says the sentence you could take to a judge.”
Then she explained what the article actually does.
A jury for the eleventh of May will be drawn from this county.
Four thousand people read page seven. Some number of them will be in the pool.
They will not remember the article. They will remember a feeling, which is that the Ashfords were gracious about a woman who had done something.
“Can we ask for a change of venue?”
“We can ask. We'll lose. And asking tells them the article worked.”
I asked her what I should do about it.
“Nothing. You do nothing about it. That is going to be the answer to a lot of things between now and May.”
By the end of February my locker held a letter about continuation coverage at four hundred and ninety a month.
There was an inventory of nineteen items with my signature at the bottom.
There was a photocopy of a body diagram with marks drawn on it in blue biro.
And a page seven, folded in four, that Bev had brought me at breakfast.
That locker had become the place where I kept everything I could not answer.
Thirty centimetres by forty, and not yet full.