He sat in a solicitor’s office in the November and said, out loud, in front of that solicitor, that a woman should always have something of her own.
I cried in the car afterwards.
I believed it was love. It was a plan
with a solicitor as a witness.
PART 2
Lorna took another drag and said: she’s so easy to manage.
She said: that shabby little flat she took me to was pathetic.
My father is an engineer.
I have never told Lorna what kind. He is chief architect for one of the largest aerospace contractors in this country and he has been for nineteen years.
That shabby little flat belonged to my late grandmother. Two bedrooms, third floor, a kitchen that has not been touched since 1988.
Dad keeps it because his entire childhood is in it and he cannot make himself sell it, and I took Lorna there in the June because I wanted to show her where I used to do my homework.She looked at it once and decided my family had nothing.
And then Lorna said: she thinks she married up. A girl like that won’t fight
people who know how the world works.
And Grayson laughed and said: exactly.
He said: her father’s a nobody. She’ll be grateful for whatever we let her keep.
My eyes went, but not the way they had been going all day.
I had spent two years loving a man who had been studying me like an investment.
I had sat through that woman’s little comments at family dinners — about my job, about my shoes, about whether I would want to keep working — and listened to him tell me afterwards, in the car, to be patient, because she didn’t mean anything by it.
She meant all of it. She had meant it in a specific direction, for two years, with a date in mind.
Before she went out, Lorna stopped at the mirror and fixed something about her hair.
She said: remember. No weakness from the start.
She said: let her
know who makes the decisions in that house.
