And she sat at a solicitor’s desk at eighty-four, with arthritis in both hands, and signed eleven documents to build a wall around her granddaughter — and then went home and said nothing about it for two years, and took his phone calls, and let him drive her to the garden centre, and put sixty-one thousand of her own money on a table to see if he would take it.
He took it in eleven weeks.
Where we are.
My daughter is fourteen months old. Her name is Hester, which everybody shortens to Hettie, which her great-grandmother would have hated and would have pretended not to.
The trust holds. Ines Talbot is still one of two trustees and rings me every quarter to tell me about it in considerably more detail than I need.
We live in my grandmother’s house. I had it out of the trust in the January, properly, with valuations and advice, and it took four months and cost a great deal in fees, and I did every step in writing, because that is the thing this family has taught me.
