And he read it standing up in a car park.
And he had, on his own account, about three days.
Three days in which he had a document that said his father’s depot had closed an order on a barrier that did not exist, on the bend where his best friend and three children had gone off the road.
And he took it to his father.
And Garth Dale — and this is the part that Austen will not discuss with me and has discussed with other people — said something to him in a kitchen in Caddon Vale.
And eleven days later Austen Dale sat in my front room and told me there was nothing anybody could have done.
He did not falsify anything. He was not on the collision investigation; he was a liaison, which is a thing I did not know or care about at the time.
What he did was not say it.
For five years. Through the inquest, which was four hours long and which found what it found. Through the boiler and the fence and the nightmares. Through all of it.
I asked him why. Obviously I asked him why.
And he did not say his father. He could have said his father and he would have been halfway to something.
He said: “Because of what it would have done to you.”
And I said: “Me?”
And Austen Dale said: “You had four girls under sixteen and you weren’t eating. And I’d have been coming into that house to tell you your husband had sent four reports in and been ignored, and that the man who signed one of them off taught me to drive.”
I said he should have told me anyway.
And he said: “I know.”
He has said I know to every single thing I have put to him since the twenty-ninth of September. He does not argue with any of it. I have tried to make him argue with me twice and he will not do it and I have come to understand that this is not decency, it is the same thing he has been doing for five years, which is taking the softest available route out of a room.
And then there is the thing he said at the door, which he should not have said, and which I have not been able to put down since.
He said: “I didn’t come back because of your husband, Rhona.”
Meaning the five years. Meaning that if he had been managing me, he would have gone.
I believe that too. That is the trouble with all of it. I think that man loved my daughters and I think he loved me and I think he sat in my front room for five years with it in him, and I think both of those are true at once, and nobody I have said that to has been able to hold both of them.
PART 5 — THE BARBECUE
Which brings me to the part that is mine, and it is the summer of 2019, and there were about twenty-five people in my garden.
Vaughn’s birthday. The first weekend of August.
He had been on about that bend for about four months by then. Not constantly. But it had come up at my sister’s, and at a parents’ evening, and at a wedding in the June.
And people had started doing the face. You know the one. The here we go face, when a man gets on to his subject.
That afternoon he came out of the house with the folder.
He had photographs in it. He had gone up there with a camera and taken photographs of a bend in a road and brought them to his own birthday barbecue, and he was showing them to my brother-in-law.
And I came across that garden and took it out of his hand.
“Give me that, love. Nobody wants the road at a barbecue.”
And then, folding it under my arm, to everybody, laughing, with my other hand on his back:
“You’ve sent it in, haven’t you. Leave it now. Go and do the burgers.”
And about four people laughed. My sister said something about him and that road. Somebody topped a glass up.
And Vaughn Keel said all right, and went and did the burgers.
I have one clear image of the next ten minutes and I would give a great deal not to have it.
He was at that barbecue with the tongs and my brother-in-law went over and said something to him, and the two of them laughed.
And Vaughn did a thing with his shoulders. A sort of shrug-and-get-on-with-it.
That is a man deciding, at his own fortieth-odd birthday, in his own garden, to stop talking about something in front of his wife.
I did not see it at the time. I have constructed it since out of a few seconds of memory and I am aware that is what I have done, and I cannot make it go away and I have stopped trying.
He did not bring it up in company again. Not once, from the August of 2019 to the November of 2020.
He put in two more reports and he did not mention either of them to me.
The fourth one is dated three days before he died and the last line says he will be taking it further, and I did not know it existed until this September.
And the note in the bear is written to a woman who he knew would not be told anything by anybody, because she had made it plain in a garden, in front of twenty-five people, that she did not want to hear about it.
That is why it was in a teddy bear.
I have had four people try to take that off me and I am not having it taken off me.
A man with eight children did not leave that note with a solicitor, or in a safe, or with his brother.
He put it inside a toy belonging to the one person in that house who he knew would still be asking questions in five years’ time.
He was right about her. He was right about me as well.
Where it is now.
There is an investigation. There is a solicitor. There are two other families who have come forward about that stretch and I have met one of them, and there is a woman at Pennhallow who lost her husband on the same bend in the December of 2019, five weeks before my fourth report went in.
Austen has moved out. That was not a decision either of us had to say out loud.
He rings. He has not asked me for anything and he has not once said sorry in a way that required me to do something with it, which is the only thing he has got right in five years.
My older girls are divided about him, three to one, and I am staying out of that entirely.
And Pip has Barnaby back. He is mended — my sister did it, properly, in the October, and she left the stitching slightly different on purpose so that you can see where it was.
Pip asked her to do that.
And there is one more thing, which I only got in the November and which is the reason I have written any of this down.
I asked my daughter how that seam came open.
Because it bothered me. Five years, and then a Tuesday in September.
And Pip said she had done it.
Not torn it. She had been working at it, on and off, since about the August — because she had noticed, at some point over the summer, that Barnaby was heavier on one side.
She is eleven. She had picked up a bear she has had since before she could walk, and registered that the weight was wrong, and said nothing to anybody, and spent about five weeks quietly opening a seam under his arm with her fingers.
And when I asked her why she had not just told me, she said: “Because you’d have said it was the stuffing gone down one end.”
She was right. That is exactly what I would have said, at the back door, with a tea towel in my hand, on my way to do something else.
So that is two of them.
My husband worked out that nobody in this house would listen to him and put it in a toy.
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