The Other Son by Nick Alexander Page B

kitchen is clean – when the only sound in the house is the rhythmic chug of the dishwasher – she pulls the old flour tin from the cupboard. She sits and stares at it on the kitchen table, then prises open the lid and peers inside as if to prove to herself that she really has done this, that it wasn’t a dream.
    It’s pure stupidity, to have kept the money in cash for so long.
    The money had been a Premium Bond win, and the true significance of the event had been that it was the first time she ever kept anything from Ken.
    Her “aunt” Beryl (who was no aunt, but her mother’s best friend, in fact) had bought her the tickets. She had given five to Alice and five to Robert. And when Robert had died, she had somehow transferred Robert’s numbers to Alice’s name as well.
    Alice has never been sure whose actual tickets had won the prize. She purposely never checked the numbers. Knowing that the prize had been destined for her deceased brother would have been too hard to bear. And it would have taken all of the pleasure out of the win.
    She had taken Tim, still less than a year old, to visit her mother. She was still, after two years, grieving her husband’s death, and the only thing that seemed to cheer her up back then was to see little Timothy.
    Her mother had handed her the letter and once she had ripped it open, they had struggled to believe their eyes. They had gone to the post office to claim the cash together. “Safety in numbers,” her mother had said.
    Five hundred pounds, well, five hundred and sixty, to be precise. She had given fifty to her mother (she wouldn’t take a penny more) and had stopped on the way home to buy a bonnet for Tim. It had been January and a cold January at that, and Tim’s bonnet was insufficient to the task at hand.
    She had been so excited at the prospect of telling Ken the news, had suffered no qualms at the idea of handing over the money.
    They had just bought their first house, and though they have never really struggled – Ken always earned a good living – money had been tighter than usual. Four thousand six hundred pounds the house had cost, she remembers. She wonders now if that’s really possible. Perhaps she has got that wrong. But five hundred pounds was a lot of money, of that she’s sure. It had been more than most people earned in a couple of months.
    When she got home, she had found Ken drunk and angry. It happened a lot in those days. He had been too angry for her to want to tell him about the money, and too drunk to take any pleasure from it anyway, so she had tucked the money in the food cupboard. She would tell him, she thought, in the morning.
    But when Ken had got up the next day, he had been no longer drunk and angry, but hung-over and angry instead. And that was almost as bad. He had shouted at her about wasting money on the bonnet, too. Did she have any idea how much this house had cost? he asked. Did she really think they were rich enough to waste money on silly, pretty baby clothes?
    So she had moved the money to the flour tin. She would wait for a more propitious moment to break her good news. And with each day that passed, it got harder to tell him. And with each day that passed, her desire to tell him faded.
    The tin, eventually, had rusted, so she had bought a new one to replace it. And she had had to change the banknotes twice, once in the seventies – that must have been when decimalisation happened – and once because the banknotes simply changed for no apparent reason, in the nineties, perhaps?
    And yes, Dot was right. If the money had been invested, it would have doubled, tripled, even quadrupled by now. But in the sixties, it would have been no easy matter to open a bank account without your husband knowing. And by the eighties, when such things were conceivable, she had all but forgotten about the money in the tin. The galloping inflation of the seventies had made it worth much, much less. And the truth was that they weren’t hard up,