My sister rang at eight minutes past midnight and told me to kill the lights, get into the attic, and not tell my husband. Through a gap in the floorboards I watched him hand a stranger three passports.
PART 2 — THE PHOTOGRAPH
Two years before that night there was a party at my house for Ollie’s second birthday. About twenty-five people.
Ven came for forty minutes.
She had been like that since about the January. Short visits. Left before the food. Rang on birthdays and not much else.
I had a photograph for her. The two of us on a wall at our grandmother’s in 1996, which I had found and had printed properly and framed, because I thought if I put something in her hand she might stay for an hour.
I had it out and I was going over to her at the door.
And our mother came across the room and took it out of my hands.
She looked at it, put it face down on the hall table, and left her hand on it.
And she said, to twenty-five people:
“Give me that. Don’t make her stand there, Iona. She’s got a job. She hasn’t got a family. Put it away.”
There was a laugh. My aunt, and one of Devlin’s friends.
Ven put her coat on and said something about traffic and went.
Twenty-five people. My mother’s own sister. Devlin four feet away with a bottle in his hand.
Nobody said one word.
And I said, “You’re probably right,” and picked that frame up about an hour later and put it in a drawer in the kitchen, and it is still in that drawer.
I did not ring her about it. I did not ring her about anything for eleven weeks.
I decided that my sister had gone cold about my marriage and that if she wanted to say it out loud she could.
Two years. I never once asked her a direct question.
