On an Estranged Father’s Will, Deciding Not to Make a Claim, and Watching Sense and Sensibility Alone in a Small Cinema — a writer’s diary entry, 3rd of October

Back since Thursday night, and it has taken me until now to be able to write anything down about it.

I went over to the UK for five days because of my father’s will. I had not seen him in a very long time and the reasons for that are mine and they are not going on this page, except to say that they were good ones and I have never once had to talk myself into them. A solicitor’s letter is a strange thing to get about a man you have spent decades putting at a distance. Very polite. Very long. Entitled to a share, it said, should I wish to make a claim.

And it threw me completely, which I had not expected at my age. Not grief. I want to be careful about that, because people will offer you grief and it is easier to accept than the truth. What I felt was the whole thing coming back up through the floor, the way it does when somebody puts an envelope with a certain name on it into your hands.

I have decided not to pursue it. Months of correspondence and a solicitor of my own and statements to make, for a sum that would be useful and would not change my life, and every single week of it spent back in that house in my head. It is not worth it. I would be paying for it in the only currency I actually mind spending now, which is sleeping well and getting four hours of work done. I have written to say so and that is the end of it.

Whilst I was over I went to the cinema on my own on the Tuesday afternoon, which is the most restorative thing I did all week. The new Sense and Sensibility, which has only just come out over there, at a little independent with about eleven people in it. That book has been with me since I was seventeen so I knew every beat of it coming, and I cried in the places I always cry, and I was very glad of the dark and the eleven strangers. Elinor holding the entire household together with her face perfectly still is the most accurate thing anybody has written about being the capable one. Daisy Edgar-Jones does it with her jaw, mostly. I sat there at fifty-seven being told the same thing I was told at seventeen, and it landed differently, because this time I have actually done it. There is no therapy on earth cheaper than that.

Home Thursday night to the smell of the house and the cat affronted. The letter went into the second drawer of the desk with a piece of black tourmaline on top of it, which is the one I always reach for when something needs holding where it is and not allowed back into the room. It has done that job for me before. I shut the drawer and I felt the difference in the house straight away.

And I have made a rule. Afternoons are the novel. Two until six, every day, whatever else is going on and whoever wants me. The mornings can have the website and the emails and the post and the hundred small things, because they always win anyway. The afternoons are not available. It took a week of somebody else’s paperwork to show me how quickly this life gets eaten when I leave the door open.

The moon came to the half this afternoon, waning, and it was up over the barn this morning looking like something half rubbed out. Going down toward the dark now. Good timing, as it happens. I am letting the whole lot go down with it.