The newspaper’s open in front of me at the property section and I carelessly pick it up to peruse expensive houses. Where shall I live? Chelsea? Notting Hill? Mayfair? Belgravia, I read. Magnificent seven-bedroom detached house with staff annex and mature garden. Well, that sounds all right. I could cope with seven bedrooms in Belgravia. My eye flicks complacently down to the price and stops still with shock. Six point five million pounds. That’s how much they’re asking. Six and a half million.
I feel stunned and slightly angry. Are they serious? I haven’t got anything like £6.5 million. I’ve only got about. . 4 million left. Or was it 5? I stare at the page, feeling cheated. Lottery winners are supposed to be able to buy anything they want — but already I’m feeling poor and inadequate.
I shove the paper aside and reach for a freebie brochure full of gorgeous white duvet covers at £100 each. That’s more like it. When I’ve won the lottery I’ll only ever have crisp white duvet covers, I decide. And I’ll have a white cast-iron bed and painted wooden shutters and a fluffy white dressing gown. .
“So, how’s the world of finance?” Mum’s voice interrupts me and I look up. She’s bustling into the kitchen, still holding her Past Times catalogue. “Have you made the coffee? Chop chop, darling!”
“I was going to,” I say, and make a half move from my chair. But, as always, Mum’s there before me. She reaches for a ceramic storage jar I’ve never seen before and spoons coffee into a new gold cafétière.
Mum’s terrible. She’s always buying new stuff for the kitchen — and she just gives the old stuff to charity shops. New kettles, new toasters. . We’ve already had three new rubbish bins this year — dark green, then chrome, and now yellow translucent plastic. I mean, what a waste of money.
“That’s a nice skirt!” she says, looking at me as though for the first time. “Where’s that from?”
“DKNY,” I mumble back.
“Very pretty,” she says. “Was it expensive?”
“Not really,” I say. “About fifty quid.”
This is not strictly true. It was nearer 150. But there’s no point telling Mum how much things really cost, because she’d have a coronary. Or, in fact, she’d tell my dad first — and then they’d both have coronaries, and I’d be an orphan.
So what I do is work in two systems simultaneously. Real prices and Mum prices. It’s a bit like when everything in the shop is 20 percent off, and you walk around mentally reducing everything. After a while, you get quite practiced.
The only difference is, I operate a sliding-scale system, a bit like income tax. It starts off at 20 percent (if it really cost £20, I say it cost £16) and rises up to. . well, to 90 percent if necessary. I once bought a pair of boots that cost £200, and I told Mum they were £20 in the sale. And she believed me.
“So, are you looking for a flat?” she says, glancing over my shoulder at the property pages.
“No,” I say sulkily, and flick over a page of my brochure. My parents are always on at me to buy a flat. Do they know how much flats cost?
“Apparently, Thomas has bought a very nice little starter home in Reigate,” she says, nodding toward our next-door neighbors. “He commutes.” She says this with an air of satisfaction, as though she’s telling me he’s won the Nobel Peace Prize.
“Well, I can’t afford a flat,” I say. “Or a starter home.”
Not yet, anyway, I think. Not until eight o’clock tonight. Hee hee hee.
“Money troubles?” says Dad, coming into the kitchen. “You know, there are two solutions to money troubles.”
His eyes are twinkling, and I just know he’s about to give me some clever little aphorism. Dad has a saying for every subject under the sun — as well as a wide selection of limericks and truly terrible jokes. Sometimes I like listening to them. Sometimes I don’t.
“C.B.,” says Dad, his eyes twinkling. “Or M.M.M.”
He pauses for effect and I turn the page of my brochure, pretending I can’t hear him.
“Cut Back,” says my dad, “or Make More Money. One or the other. Which is it to be, Becky?”
“Oh, both, I expect,” I say airily, and turn another page of my brochure. To be honest, I almost feel sorry for Dad. It’ll be quite a shock for him when his only daughter becomes a multimillionaire overnight.
After lunch, Mum and I go along to a craft fair in the local primary school. I’m really just going to keep Mum company, and I’m certainly not planning to buy anything — but when we get there, I find a stall full of amazing handmade cards, only £1.50 each! So I buy ten. After all, you always need cards, don’t you? There’s also a gorgeous blue ceramic plant holder with little elephants going round it — and I’ve been saying for ages we should have more plants in the flat. So I buy that, too. Only fifteen quid. Craft fairs are such a bargain, aren’t they? You go along thinking they’ll be complete rubbish — but you can always find something you want.
Mum’s really happy, too, as she’s found a pair of candlesticks for her collection. She’s got collections of candlesticks, toast racks, pottery jugs, glass animals, embroidered samplers, and thimbles. (Personally, I don’t think the thimbles count as a proper collection, because she got the whole lot, including the cabinet, from an ad at the back of the Mail on Sunday magazine. But she never tells anybody that. In fact, I shouldn’t have mentioned it.)