hours
Date of insurance expiry: 06/11/2010 at 00:00 hours
Persons or classes of persons entitled to drive: Elise Gilpatrick,
Donal Gilpatrick
(providing the person driving holds a licence to drive the vehicle or has held and is not disqualified from holding or obtaining such a licence)
The policyholder, Elise Gilpatrick, may also drive with the owner’s permission a motor car that they do not own and that is not hired or leased to them under a hire purchase or leasing arrangement.
Limitations as to use: Social, domestic and pleasure purposes
I hereby certify that the policy to which this Certificate relates satisfies the requirements of the relevant law applicable in Great Britain, Northern Ireland, the Isle of Man, the Island of Jersey, the Island of Guernsey and the Island of Alderney.
Rosemary Vincent
Rosemary Vincent, Authorised signatory
Chapter 9
Monday 19 July 2010
I start to tell Sam Kombothekra about the first row Kit and I ever had. It was about Cambridge. We’d been together for nearly a month.
Kit didn’t mean to start a fight; he was trying to pay me a compliment. Technically I was probably the one who started the row, though it didn’t feel that way at the time. We were walking back from Thorrold House to Kit’s rented two-bedroom flat in Rawndesley; we’d been to Mum and Dad’s for lunch. It was about the fifth or sixth time Kit had met my family. It took him nine years to pluck up the courage to ask if he might sometimes be excused from the several visits a week that he could see were required of me.
My father, wanting to impress Kit, had suggested opening a particular bottle of wine that had been given to him two years previously by a grateful Monk & Sons customer. I know nothing about wine, and neither does Dad, but the customer had led him to believe that there was something special about this bottle – it was either very old or very valuable or both. Neither of my parents could recall the precise details, but whatever the customer had told them had been sufficient to impress on them the foolhardiness of opening the wine and drinking it, so instead they had consigned it to a safe place – so safe that when Dad decided that the arrival of a well-spoken Oxbridge-educated potential son-in-law at his dinner table was an occasion that merited the unleashing of the antique wine’s magic powers, neither he nor Mum could remember where they’d put it. Kit tried to tell them it didn’t matter, that he’d prefer water or apple juice, as he was driving, but Dad insisted that the special bottle must be found, which meant that Mum had to leave her food to go cold while she ransacked first the cellar and then the house. The rest of us followed Dad’s lead and carried on eating. ‘If you don’t tuck in while it’s piping hot, Val’ll have your guts for garters,’ Dad told Kit, who felt uncomfortable starting without Mum. Fran, Anton and I were used to it. Dad often decides he needs Mum to go and get something for him just as she’s about to sit down to eat. I think he looks at the food on her plate, panics slightly about how long it’s going to be before she’s next available to attend to him, and decides he might as well get his most pressing requests in early.
As we ate, we heard loud panting and a series of small groans coming from beyond the kitchen; Mum wanted us to know exactly what it was costing her to search for the sacred plonk. I could see that Kit was tense, feeling responsible even though he wasn’t. Then Mum called out, ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake! Cotton-wool brain strikes again. I know where I put it.’ We listened as a door creaked open. It was a creak Fran and I knew as well as we knew each other; it had been part of Thorrold House’s soundtrack since we were children. Dad laughed and said to Kit, ‘The cupboard under the stairs – I don’t know why she didn’t look there straight away. That’s where I’d have started. It’s the obvious place.’
‘Pity you didn’t share that insight with Mum,’ Fran said pointedly. ‘You’d have saved her about half an hour of her life – her only life.’ I remember wondering if she was angry because Dad was fawning over Kit and ignoring Anton, who wasn’t Oxbridge-educated, whose parents lived in a static caravan on the outskirts of Combingham.
A few