I did not do it to be clever. I did it because I had spent ten days on my own with three six-month-olds and worked out, somewhere around the fourth night, that I was not going to survive being the only person in that house who did anything.
And on the Tuesday I rang my old head of department.
I went back four days a week in the November. Not full time, not the same role, and about eleven thousand a year less than I was on in 2023.
So when Roman Falk came home there were three things on that kitchen table.
The agency agreement, signed.
The bank letter confirming the standing order.
And a printed offer from a company he has heard of, with my name on it and a start date.
He did not shout. He sat down on the other side of that table and said one thing that I will give him full credit for.
He said, “Three thousand one hundred?”
And I said, “That’s the going rate for what I’ve been doing. That’s four days of it. There are seven.”
PART 3 — THE FLAT
The treatment cost about forty-one thousand pounds between 2018 and 2023.
It came out of my savings, and out of a flat in Carrow Gardens that I owned before I met him and sold in the spring of 2021.
Roman did not pay for any of it.
That is not a betrayal and I am not putting it here as one. In 2019 and 2020 he was between two jobs and it was a bad time for him, and I said it was fine, and I meant it, and I would do it again.
He knows all of this. There is no secret in it. He was in the room when the flat was sold.
What happened is that between about 2022 and that September, in his own head, it turned into something else.
It turned into I paid for this family.
Not deliberately. It happened the way a path appears across a field. Somebody says it at a christening and you do not correct them, and then somebody says it at Christmas, and by about the fortieth time it is just what everybody in the room knows.
Including him.
PART 4 — THE NAMING DAY
In the June there was a naming day for the three of them. About twenty-five people in his mother’s garden.
I stood up at the end to say thank you. I had a card with four lines on it because I knew I would not get through it.
And Ottoline came over and took it out of my hand.
She put it down by her own glass and patted my arm.
And she said, to twenty-five people:
“Give me that. Roman’s the one who paid for all this, everyone. Sit down, love, let him say it.”
There was a noise of agreement. Somebody said, “Hear, hear.”
My own mother was at that table and she looked at me and I gave her a small shake of the head, because I did not want a scene at my children’s naming day.
Nobody said one word.
And Roman got up and made a lovely speech, and he was not lying, because by the June he genuinely believed it.
That garden is where the sentence have you earned a holiday came from. It did not come from nowhere three months later.
It came from twenty-five people nodding, and from me shaking my head at my own mother.
PART 5 — WHAT HE DID
I am going to be fair about the last part because the easy version is not what happened.
Roman did not leave and I did not throw him out.
He sat in that kitchen on the night he got back until about two in the morning, and then he did the four o’clock feed, which he had done twice in six months.
He has done it every night since. Fourteen months.
He gave up the five-a-side and the Thursdays and he is not a martyr about it, and about once a fortnight he is very quiet in a way I have decided not to poke at.
We did eleven months with somebody. It was his idea, which I did not see coming.
The thing that came out of it, in about the seventh month, was not the holiday and not the kitchen.
It was Carrow Gardens.
He had to sit in a room and say out loud that his children exist because his wife sold her flat, and that he had let a different sentence be true in his family for three years because it was more comfortable to be the man who provides than the man who was provided for.
And I had to say out loud that I let him. Every single time. For three years, in that garden and at that table and at every Christmas, because correcting it would have embarrassed him in front of his mother.
Frieda is still with us three days a week.
Roman’s the one who paid for all this, everyone.
His mother said that in her own garden in front of twenty-five people, holding a card I had written four lines on.
Nobody at that table knew it was wrong.
Except two people. And one of them shook her head at her own mother to keep the afternoon nice, and the other one made a lovely speech.
THE END
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