It was not noble and he did not call it noble. He said it was cowardice and organisation in the same sentence, and then he said: “I knew exactly what I was doing, Lornie, and I did it anyway, and it cost you your life as much as mine.”
I want that on the record because people keep telling me it was selfless.
It was not. It was a twenty-year-old boy protecting his own marriage from himself, and I was the thing that got moved out of the way.
And the ring box, which I have not described and which was the first thing I actually touched.
It is navy, with a hinge that has gone, so it does not stay shut.
Inside the lid, on the silk, somebody has written in biro — very small, very neatly, and not by Gil, whose handwriting was appalling at twenty and appalling at sixty.
