It came back fine. Champagne comes out. That is the one genuinely useful thing I learned in all of this.
And then it hung in a wardrobe for eight months, and in the July I gave it away — not dramatically, not to make a point, just into a bag with four other things for a charity shop in Arden.
My aunt saw it in the bag and said: “Isn’t that the one?”
And I said yes.
And she said: “Good,” and carried the bag out to the car, and that was the whole of the ceremony.
Somebody in Arden County is wearing a navy dress that two hundred executives watched a man ruin, and she has no idea, and I find that genuinely cheering in a way I cannot defend.
And the last thing.
The minutes of the eleventh of September.
I read them in the February, on a Tuesday afternoon, in a room on the fourth floor, going through board papers because I had just joined the board and was doing my homework.
