‘She said, “I think it’s good news, Ruby-Tubes,” and out it all came: a lawyer had called from Australia of all places, to tell her that he worked for her father, and that her father had died, and he had left instructions in his will that Mum be contacted.’

I asked Ruby how she – meaning Ruby, not her mum – reacted to this news, and she said, ‘Oh, like I said, my first instinct was that it must be a prank, like a Nigerian email scam, saying, “You’ve inherited a great deal of money and we need you to sign some paperwork.” But Mum said, “No, no, this lawyer knows everything about me, he’s going to send me a letter.”’

Ruby opened her ‘Mum’ folder again and found a manila envelope of the type used to send important documents. It was a bit tatty, having made the journey from Deer Park to London and back again, this time in Ruby’s suitcase, and Ruby’s daughter Stella had apparently soaked the Australian wildflower stamps off some time earlier, but the letter inside was still intact. It was from Doug Grenfell on his office letterhead, explaining what he had already discussed with Agnes on the telephone: she was a beneficiary of Jim Olarenshaw’s estate, and quite a bit of money was at stake – around $1 million, depending on how much they could get for the land at Ocean Grove.

‘My brother, Steven, is better at numbers than me, and he did a quick conversion back to pounds,’ Ruby said. ‘He told Mum: “It’s around £650,000 they’re talking about.” And the strange thing about that was that Mum has always been absolutely sure that she’d win the lottery one day. I don’t know why she thought that. She’s just funny that way. Apparently a clairvoyant told her once that she would come into money, so she bought her Lotto tickets every week from the man on the corner and she kept them under one of those gold cats with the waving arm you get from Chinatown. If she had called one day to tell me she’d actually won, I wouldn’t have been surprised, because she was utterly convinced that it would happen and her belief in that never waivered, no matter how many times she took those dud tickets down to Mr Kumar on the corner to run through the machine. He’d shake his head, and say, “No luck this week, I’m afraid, Mrs Moore,” and she’d say, “Never mind, Kumar, it will happen one day. And when it does I’ll buy you a ticket back to India to see that family of yours.”’

I remember I asked Ruby, ‘Getting the call from Doug – that felt like winning the lottery to your mum?’

She put her tea cup down so suddenly that it rattled the spoon in her saucer.

‘Oh, no!’ she said, ‘absolutely not. It felt like that to us – to Steven and me – but not to Mum.’