They were lifting sixty-one thousand out of a fishing net while two point one million sat in a trust with two trustees and a deed neither of them ever saw.
Ines Talbot rang me in the September, when I was seven months pregnant, and put that folder on my kitchen table and said: “Your grandmother asked me to give you this when you needed it. I’d say this qualifies.”
And Ines Talbot, in the September, who I should describe properly.
She is sixty-one and she has done my grandmother’s work since 1998 and she wears a cardigan to a meeting and misses nothing.
She did not arrive with a speech. She arrived with the folder and a Victoria sponge, which she had made, and which we ate.
And she went through it the way she goes through everything — in order, slowly, with a pencil — and at the end of it she said one thing that I wrote down that evening.
“Noor. You are going to want to do something with this immediately, and you are seven months pregnant.”
“So here is my advice and you are free to ignore it. Do nothing with it until you have had the baby. Nothing at all. Because whatever you do now, you’ll do it frightened, and everything you do frightened is a thing they can use.”
