“I don’t…” Wendy began.
“Three million pounds,” Aunty Anne said, in a curious, toneless voice. “That’s how much he left you.”
Serena dropped back into her chair. She stared at Wendy. “You clever thing!”
Anne glared at her. “What do you mean by that?”
“Why… just… I mean, nothing.”
“You can take it back,” Wendy spluttered, as if her Aunty had offered her cash. “It’s not mine. Give it to Colin…”
“Won’t Colin be furious?” asked Serena. “He was the son and heir. Doesn’t this cut down his share?”
“Apparently,” said Anne, draining her glass, “he already knew about the whole thing. He didn’t want much anyway. Pat said so in the will.”
It sounded to Wendy like her uncle had been talking again, from beyond the grave. She wanted to hear him, to argue the toss with him. Just to hear him again. Parachuting, he had said, was like coming all over the sky. But trains made him vibrate too much. She wanted to ask, what did dying feel like, then? She started to cry and the others didn’t notice.
“That’s why Colin took himself out of the country,” said Anne. “To be out of the way when this happened.”
“Three million pounds,’ Serena repeated softly. Her hands, her long white hands, had flown up to her throat and they were still resting there.
“Can I contest it?” Wendy asked.
They looked at her sharply. “Can you what?”
“I don’t need it. I can do without it.”
“You Uncle Pat,” said Anne, “wanted you to prosper. He said as much. He said he wanted to put wind in your sails. To use your imagination. He wanted to see what came of you.”
“But he can’t,” Wendy mumbled through her tears. “He’s dead. The money won’t help that.”
Serena came to stand beside her. She touched Wendy’s hair. “It has its consolations, Wendy. You’ll see in the end, that life is all about finding consolations.”
Anne helped herself to another drink. “After I get the house underway, guess what’s next?”
They looked at her.
“Tummy tuck, bum lift, face lift, liposuction. The whole kit-kaboodle. I want to bring all of me into line with my legs before the new millennium.” Then she danced a quick two-step on Serena’s hand-woven rugs.
I was always thinking about the next thing. I know I gave
that impression of drifting along and latching onto people, or letting people latch onto me, whichever way you want to put it. I gave the impression there was nothing I wanted to do, nothing in particular. I couldn’t answer when they asked me what I wanted to do. My junior school teacher said I could sing. Miss Kaye made me sing out notes loud as I could go and she felt for my diaphragm, said it had a silent g. She said that I really could sing and that I should learn. After that I never thought about it again: I thought I already could, just by her laying hands on me. Mandy said, Linda said, Timon said, Aunty Anne said: ambitions are things you have to work at. I suppose they despaired at me that I never got behind one of my ambitions, like they said they did to theirs, and pushed for all I was worth. I got caught up in other things and if I gave the impression I didn’t care, well, it was false, because I did care. I was always thinking about the next thing.
The next thing would stun me into inactivity. I knew it was out there, Jaws-like, waiting for its moment. It hypnotised me. I went from friend to friend, home to home, knowing that, eventually, it would come to me.
Money comes as a great relief to anyone, of course, and it comes as a special relief to people who—forgive the cliché, Colin—live on their nerves. I was trapped moment to moment, unable, unwilling, to see the larger sweep of time. My mother was dead and I couldn’t get by inside her living experience. I had nothing to project my own experience against. When I got to know the hairdresser, Lisa Turmoil, I was jealous of her because she was doing the job, living the life, that her mother had done before her, and her mother before that. They slotted in like Russian dolls. If my women role models were Russian dolls, they were a mix-matched set, and no one got the right bottoms and tops and some were even left without one half.
I made excuses for myself.
I want you to see how I managed, or didn’t manage, to handle my life, my fortune, and my eventual husband.
I was aware of all the other lottery winners in London, in the country over. I was one of them now, by default. Since it had started in 1993 the National Lottery had created a fair number of overnight millionaires whose lives, although they various protested this wouldn’t be the case, were changed utterly. I was aware of my fellow millionaires, new to their lots, when Serena and Aunty Anne took me out to the big shops. We were like zombies, acquiring cards and new agendas, replacing everything we already owned, and dreaming up the things we had got by without until then. Funny thing was, I never saw a brazen new millionaire, mouthing off in a department store, demanding the best of everything and more. They were, we were, rather shy, as if the money had come to us through dodgy dealings. I felt a fraud.
When Uncle Pat won his fortune it was a Rollover week. That was what they called it when weeks had gone by without a jackpot winner, and the Saturday totals had rubbed up together and multiplied and the pile of dirty money mounted ever higher. He never went on the telly to receive his cheque and crow at the watching multitudes. No congratulations from a top star. No Astrology Annie, the bizarrely witchy presenter who used arcane lore to foretell
