Nineteen Thousand Pounds, and a Barbecue in August

Here is what had happened, in the order Erin eventually assembled it, which was not the order in which anybody told her and took most of a year.

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In March, Gerry borrowed nineteen thousand pounds from Faye and Sean.

Not borrowed, exactly. That is the word everybody used afterwards and it is the word that caused most of the trouble, because it was not a loan in the way Faye understood a loan. The money went into the business. There was paperwork. Sean, who is careful, had insisted on paperwork, and everybody had been slightly embarrassed about the paperwork, and it had been done quickly on a Sunday.

The paperwork turned out to mean something different from what Faye had understood it to mean. It made them investors rather than creditors. Which meant that when the business went the way it went, they were not people owed nineteen thousand pounds. They were people who had lost nineteen thousand pounds.

Gerry has always maintained he did not know there was a difference. Sean has always maintained that he explained it. Both of them may be telling the truth. Erin has decided she will never know and that it does not much matter now.

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By June it was clear the money was not coming back.

By July, Faye and Sean had taken advice, which cost four hundred pounds and confirmed what they already suspected.

In August there was a barbecue.

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Nobody will tell Erin exactly what was said at the barbecue.

She has asked three people. Lorraine described what Sean said to Gerry as “unforgivable”. Faye said Sean had been “pushed to it”. Her mother, who was not there, has a version that she got from somebody who was, in which Sean said something about Gerry’s father.

What everybody agrees on is that Gerry said something back, and that what Gerry said back was worse.

Erin’s wedding was on the ninth of September.

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So that is the timeline: a loan in March, a collapse in June, advice in July, a barbecue in August, a wedding in September.

Six months. Four people knew. Not one of them told her.

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Her mother knew.

Her mother had known since the day after the barbecue, when Lorraine rang her in tears, and had made a specific decision not to tell Erin, on three grounds which she later laid out with a fluency that suggested she had gone over them in advance.

That Erin had enough on. That it would probably blow over. And that it would be a terrible shame to spoil things.

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Her father knew, and took the same view by the method he applies to everything, which is to never mention it.

Erin has long since stopped expecting anything else from her father. She describes him, without much heat, as a man who has genuinely never once in his life brought up a difficult subject, and who is therefore reliable in a very narrow way: you can be completely certain he will not say anything.

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Faye knew that Erin did not know.

That is the one Erin has thought about most, and the one that was hardest to get past, and the one that turned out — eventually, in a car park, fourteen months later — to be the easiest to forgive.

Faye had accepted the invitation. She had replied to the dietary requirements email, nine days late, with no nuts for Sean. She had come to the wedding and put on a dress and stood in the photographs.

And she had said nothing, because, as she put it later, crying, with the engine running: “What was I supposed to do? Ring you up six weeks before your wedding and make you choose between us?”

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And Gerry knew.

Gerry, it emerged, had rung the venue directly. Two days before, at about five in the afternoon, and asked to be moved.

The events manager had told him, politely, that seating was a matter for the couple, and had left Erin a voicemail about it which Erin had listened to twice while driving and had assumed was about a highchair.

Gerry had not rung the couple.

He had put his phone down and decided, by himself, that he would simply turn up and sit where he was put and get through it, which is either extraordinary cowardice or a peculiar sort of good manners, and Erin has never fully decided which.

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So they all arrived.

They parked, and had their photographs taken, and came into a room with round tables and a plan on an easel by the door.

And they walked up to it, one at a time, and found their names, and found each other’s names, and went and sat down.