Late summer 2014

Rosie was not having an easy summer.

It isn’t easy, being Bink’s sibling. Or grandparent. Or indeed parent.

Least of all Bink herself.

You put up with something for a long time... not knowing whether it is damaging you.

Consider children of abuse. Would you know, talking to them? Would they themselves?

She was not long into term, and already I wondered whether she should come home for a day or two.

She has duties in the cathedral. You come here, her head mistress said.

So I took a train up North. Rosie was given leave of absence for the rest of the day. Including the school hockey match.

She was worried

They don’t have anyone to take my place...

For goodness’ sake, the head said. You can be too responsible: let that be our problem.

She said the moment Rose walked into her study and saw me, her face lit up; the sun came out.

Lovely to have a daughter actually wanting to see me...

We spent the day wandering among the first leaves of the city. Going out for lunch. Sitting in the sun outside a pub.

Rosie had been allowed to change out of uniform.

Lara – we were getting used to calling her that – would like to come and see you. This weekend. With a friend: we wouldn’t let her come alone.

Would you like that?

Rosie was the kindest child in the world. Almost unnaturally, worryingly so. I often wondered whether she was shoring up problems for the future by being so well-behaved about the present.

The silence should have told me everything.

No pressure, I said. Don’t worry.

Rose isn’t stupid. (I’ve just been telling her school today – she is in the middle of GCSEs, and picked up the bug which made me so sick last weekend – you don’t have to bother to put pressure on her about her exams, I said: she puts quite enough on herself.)

She knew, aged eleven, what it would mean to Bink if she didn’t want to see her.

We finished lunch and went for a stroll along the river. Moseyed around the market. Stopped somewhere for tea.

That would be all right, she said eventually. If she wants to come for the weekend.

How can you blame a child for doing what all the adults around are doing, have been doing, for all her life: treading on eggshells lest we hurt Bink.

We all tried to put the child’s welfare first. But we all, including the child, knew who the most vulnerable child was.

The irony is that by letting Bink visit Rose – which wasn’t, I’m sure of it now though I couldn’t see it then, the best thing for Rose herself – we did Bink herself no favours at all.

We couldn’t have known, but she had joined a huge and rather good choir, and that Saturday evening was the concert they’d been working towards for months.

Yesterday I found Gatsby’s email. As with so much, it could be read either way:

Hi Anne and Ben,

Lara was going to be singing in a concert tomorrow night, and [a friend] and I were going to go to hear her. Jenkins “The Armed Man” and Haydn’s “Mass in Time of War". Since [the friend] and Lara are now going to miss the concert (by going to visit Rosie), and I don’t suppose I will go on my own, Lara thought perhaps you might like to go instead. Let me know if you are interested in the tickets. They were £21 each.

Why would we want to spend over forty quid going to a concert over fifty miles away that Bink wasn’t going to be in?

Buy his unwanted tickets?

Thanks, but no thanks.

It was long after the weekend that Bink told me. She knew the concert was going to be superb. Everyone said it had been, fabulously. She was deeply sorry to have missed it. She had wanted us part of it, somehow.

So she’d asked Gatsby to give us her tickets.

Of course she hadn’t wanted money for them!

She just thought we’d love it.

I’m so sorry you weren’t there.

But why did you miss it yourself, Bink?

Because she considered Rosie so much more important than anything she might be involved in. And the choir was so large, she wasn’t really letting them down…

She just wished she could have been part of it. Having us there instead would have made up for it, a bit.

But Bink, the following weekend would have been just as good!

(And of course, that was when I realised we’d given permission for the visit for the same reason Rosie had said yes. For Bink’s sake: no more nor less. Would have done her far more good to sing.)

It’s not that I mind calling her Lara, Rosie said to me that early autumn summer.

It’s just that I miss Bink.

So much. So very, very much...