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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