High summer 2014

The mercy was that they arrived at Shaun’s mother’s birthday party before us, by some half hour or so.

So by the time we got there, the air conditioning had already distributed the sewage about as far as it could spatter.

Bink, unsurprisingly, was so offended at Gatsby’s being refused entry as her “partner” to the family he had virtually made her a stranger to, that instead of cutting her losses and deciding to have an evening of culture at the opera instead – or, far better, telling him to go boil his head and enjoying the night with those of us who genuinely loved her so much that we wanted her well – she had hunkered down in the local with him so that the waves of absence and antagonism could be felt through the walls of the house.

She sent messages to her brothers asking them to join her. So of course kind-hearted, disingenuous Alex left the cousins, aunts and grandmother he so seldom saw, to do so.

And after a while returned.

She wants to see Rosie.

Rosie is right here. Bink is welcome at her grandmother’s birthday party.

She can’t come in. She wants Rosie to go out to her. She’ll talk to her on the pavement if you don’t want her Rosie in the pub.

How could she even think, for a moment, that this would be suitable?

So eventually Bink had to come in, just to talk to her sister. At the bottom of the garden. Away from the rest of us.

Watching from afar.

As if we were supervising her.

It was pitiful.

How had we come to this? We love Bink. We never wanted such a stand-off.

But the only alternative available was capitulation. Accepting Gatsby as her “partner”. Not minding that she wouldn’t have anything to do with any of us and only wanted her adored and unthreatening baby sister.

Could that possibly have been right or proper?

There is no doubt whatsoever.

Bink was desperately ill.

She just couldn’t see that she was.

And Gatsby? How could he, sane as he officially was and nearly twice her age, consider this an acceptable way to live?

After details Bink had confided in me about the sexual arrangements of his domestic ménage some decade earlier or so, I could only conclude that Gatsby liked to think of himself as a trendy teenage rebel: nearer our age than hers, he nonetheless liked to construct a scenario in which we were the repressive, wicked older generation, he the heroic Romeo of a hundred tales of disapproved true love.

The story, more or less, that was posted on social media.

That Shaun and I had parted two loving sisters, for no better reason than that we disapproved of a boyfriend. Whom we had even, outrageously, accused of being a paedophile.

There was so much more to worry about in Bink’s life that being portrayed as Cruella d’Evil Stepmother to a cohort of Facebook friends barely registered.

A week or two later, Bink wrote to my father.

When Gatsby and I come to the seaside, she asked, will you, too, refuse to let him in?

Not at all, he replied graciously.

Gatsby is welcome in my house... on condition that you agree to sit down and talk properly about what is going on.

To your parents, as well as to me.