What happened with Jock wasn’t the way Auntie hinted it would be. It hurt but somehow she knew it wouldn’t always. Jock was surprised she’d never done it before; he could hardly believe it just as he could hardly believe she was thirty-seven. He was younger but he never said how much.
“I’m yours now,” she said. “I’ll never do that with anyone else.”
“Good-oh,” he said.
She got up early in the morning because she’d had a bright idea before she went to sleep. She’d make a cup of tea and bring it up to him. And it would give her a chance to wash. When he woke up she was bathed and her hair washed, wearing clean trousers and T-shirt, standing meekly by the bed holding a mug of tea and the sugar basin.
“The first time,” he said. “No woman’s ever done that for me before.”
She wasn’t as pleased as he expected her to be. Who were these other women who hadn’t made him tea? Maybe only his mother and the one who’d been his wife. He drank the tea and got up, going off to work without having a proper wash, which shocked her. A week went by before she heard from him. She couldn’t understand it. She went up to Harvist Road on the bus and walked up and down the street, going up to some of the front doors to read the names on the bells. His wasn’t there. She looked along all the surrounding streets for the boneshaker but couldn’t find it. The phone rang twice that week. She touched three colors of wood before answering and prayed, Dear Auntie, let it be him. Please. But it was Corinne the first time, asking her to take a message to Sonovia because next door’s phone was out of order, and a salesman the next, wanting to double-glaze her house. By the time Jock phoned she’d given up hope.
“I didn’t know where you were,” she said. “I thought you’d died”-her voice full of tears.
“I didn’t die,” he said. “I went to the West Country to see my old mum.”
He was coming round. He’d be with her in half an hour. She had a bath, washed her hair, put on clean clothes, all this for the second time in three hours. When the half-hour was up and he hadn’t come, she prayed to Auntie and touched seven different colors of wood, the oak-stained living-room door, the cream front door, the pine table, the green-painted chair in the kitchen, upstairs for the white bath surround, the pink picture rail, and the yellow back brush handle. Ten minutes afterward he arrived. They went to bed, though it was the middle of Saturday afternoon. She liked it even more and wondered if there was something wrong with Auntie or was it with her? Jock took her to see Sliding Doors and then for a meal at the Café Uno in Edgware Road. Next day, because it was Sunday, she said she wanted him to see something special, and they went into the cemetery and she showed him Auntie’s grave.
“Who’s this Maisie Chepstow?” he said. “She’s been dead a long time.”
“She was my auntie’s grandma.” The fantasy seemed to come naturally. It might even be true. What did she know about Auntie’s ancestors? “I’m going to have a new gravestone done with her name on.”
“That’ll be expensive.”
“I can afford it,” Minty said airily. “She left me money. Quite a lot of money and the house.”
Jock didn’t go off to see his mother again for a month, and by the time he did they were engaged. They wouldn’t get married until he’d got a better job and was earning real money, he said. Meanwhile, he borrowed £250 from her to buy a ring. It was her idea. He kept saying, No, no, I wouldn’t dream of it, but when she insisted he gave in. He measured her finger and brought the ring round next day, three diamonds on a hoop of gold.
“I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt,” Sonovia said to her husband, “but they can make diamonds in the lab these days and it’s no more costly than making glass. I read about it in the Mail on Sunday.”
Jock stayed the night of 30 June and in the morning he turned over in bed, gave Minty a little pinch on the shoulder and a little punch on the arm and said, “Pinch, punch, first of the month. No returns.”
Another pinch joke. He said it brought you luck. But you had to be the first to do it. That was the point of the “no returns.” On 1 April, he said, it would be April Fools’ Day only till twelve noon and afterward Tailpike Day. You had to manage to pin a tail on someone without them knowing.
“What sort of tail?”
“Paper, string, anything, you name it.”
“So they get to walk about without knowing they’ve got a tail?”
“That’s the point, Polo. You’ve made a fool of them, right?”
It turned out that he was a general builder and could do anything. She asked him to see if he could do something to stop the bathroom window rattling and he promised he would, but he never did it any more than he mended the shaky leg on the kitchen table. If he had a bit of capital, he said, he could set up in business on his own and he knew he’d make a success of it. Five thousand in his pocket would make all the difference.
“I’ve only got two thousand and a half,” Minty said, “not five.”
“It’s our happiness at stake, Polo. You could take out a mortgage on the house.”
Minty didn’t know how. She didn’t understand business. Auntie had seen to all that, and since Auntie went she’d found it hard enough working out how to pay the council tax and the gas bill. She’d never had to do it, nobody’d shown her.
“Leave it to me,” Jock said. “All you’ll have to do is sign the forms.”
But first she handed over nearly all the money she had. She’d been going to give him a check, make it out the way she did the ones to the council but put “J. Lewis” instead of “London Borough of Brent,” but he said cash would be easier for him because he was in the process of changing his bank. The money would buy a secondhand van, an improvement on the boneshaker, and leave something over for advertising. She told no one, they wouldn’t understand. When he talked about the mortgage again he was sitting up in her bed at 39 Syringa Road, drinking the tea she’d brought him. He wanted her to come back to bed for a cuddle but she wouldn’t, she’d just had a bath. Her engagement ring had had a good clean, soaking in gin overnight. The house, he reckoned, was worth around eighty thousand. Laf had told her the same so she didn’t need convincing. The obvious thing to do was take out a mortgage on it of ten thousand pounds, one eighth of its value.
Minty wasn’t a very practical person, but Auntie had taught her some of the principles of thrift and neither a borrower nor a lender be. She’d already done the lending and now she was going to start borrowing-but all that much? “I’ll have to see,” she said. “I’ll have to think about it.”
Jock had been spending every evening with her and most nights. When he hadn’t come round or phoned for three days she phoned the number he’d finally given her in Harvist Road but no one ever answered. Perhaps it was just that he was with his mum again. If he never came back it would be because she’d hesitated over the mortgage. She imprisoned herself in rituals, praying, taking extra flowers to Auntie’s grave, hardly moving about the house without touching wood, walking round the room like an old person who couldn’t get about without holding on to the tables and chairs. The rituals brought him back, and the prayers and the flowers. She’d decided to let him have the ten thousand.