Forty Years of Work Came to Twenty-Six Thousand Pounds

The house was worth about two hundred and forty thousand pounds.

The equity release taken out in 2014 stood at two hundred and eleven thousand, and was growing at a rate that had been explained to nobody in terms anybody had understood at the time.

There was four thousand one hundred pounds in a current account. A car worth perhaps nine hundred. A credit card balance of six thousand seven hundred.

Net, after fees, the estate came to something in the region of twenty-six thousand pounds. Split three ways.

---

“That’s it,” said Marcus, on the family call. “That’s forty years of work.”

“He was ill for six of them,” said Aoife. “It went on care.”

“I know where it went. I’m not saying he did anything wrong.”

“It sounds a bit like you’re saying he did something wrong.”

“I’m saying,” said Marcus, “that I’ve taken a week off for this.”

---

The three of them are not close, and it is worth being accurate about why, because the obvious explanation is not the right one.

There was no rift. Nobody had fallen out. There was no Christmas that went badly and got referred to afterwards in a particular tone.

There was simply distance. Marcus in Swindon with three children and a job that ate him. Jen in Dublin, for nineteen years, with a life there that was entirely hers. And Aoife, three miles from their father, and therefore, for eleven years, the one who did everything.

---

Aoife had done the hospital appointments. All of them, except two.

She had the key. She had had the key since 2013, when he came out after the first fall.

She had done the shopping on a Tuesday and again on a Friday for six years. She had sorted the boiler, twice. She had spent eleven consecutive Christmas mornings at her father’s house from eight until eleven, and then gone to her own house and cooked.

She had sat with him. That is the part that does not itemise.

Nobody disputed any of this. And nobody, in eleven years, had ever quite said it out loud either, which is a different thing and which Aoife had stopped noticing somewhere around year seven.

---

So when it came to the clearance, Aoife said, “I’ll do it.”

There was a pause on the call — a fractional one, the length of two people not volunteering.

“Are you sure?” said Jen.

“Are you sure?” said Marcus, about a second later.

“I’m sure. I’m here. It’s easier.”

“We can come down,” said Marcus.

“It’s fine.”

And that was that, and everybody got off the call feeling slightly better, which Aoife has since observed is what that particular kind of offer is for.

---

She booked a house clearance firm for the last week of September.

And then, on the advice of a friend who had done all this two years earlier and had a list of things she wished she had known, Aoife got a probate valuer in first. Two hours, a fixed fee, to walk the house and confirm there was nothing worth keeping.

“It’s a hundred and forty quid,” the friend said. “It is the best hundred and forty quid you will ever spend, and nine times out of ten he’ll tell you it’s all worthless, and you will sleep.”

---

The valuer was a man called Stephen, in his fifties, who had done about six hundred of these.

Aoife had been dreading it and found, within about ten minutes, that she did not mind him at all. He went through the house quickly and unsentimentally and was kind about the things that were worth nothing, which turned out to be almost everything.

The furniture: nothing. Not even the sideboard, which Aoife had assumed was something.

The pictures: nothing, though he liked one of them and said so.

The Royal Doulton, which their mother had collected for thirty years and had forbidden anybody to touch, and which lived behind glass and had been dusted weekly for three decades: about seventy pounds for the lot.

Aoife laughed when he said it. Then she had to go out into the hall for a minute, and Stephen let her, and was looking at a bookcase when she came back.

---

They did the front room last.

He looked at the fire surround, and the mirror, and the two brass candlesticks, and said “no” to all of them in a way that had become almost restful.

Then he got to the clock.