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“I’ll deal with Mrs. Jinks,” she said at last. “And then the boy will be yours…”

4
    GRANNY VS. NANNY
    M rs. Jinks liked to say that she belonged to “the old school,” which was strange because she had never actually been to school in her life. She had been Joe’s nanny for five years—but the truth is that she would never have taken the job in the first place if it hadn’t been for a mistake.
    Before she had come to Thattlebee Hall, Mrs. Jinks had earned her living as a dancer. A plump, blond woman with shapely legs, she worked at a Soho club where she performed exotic dances with a snake called Anna. The owner of the club had a stutter and introducing the snake—“Anna, an anaconda”—sometimes took him three-quarters of an hour. For this reason Mrs. Jinks decided to get a new job and this was when the mistake was made.
    She applied to be a dancer at another club, the Blue Balloon in Battersea, but in her haste she dialed the wrong number and got through to Mrs. Warden. Now, as it happened, Mrs. Warden had placed an advertisement in the newspaper that very day. Her current nanny, Miss Barking, had just handed in her resignation in order to go and fight in the war and she herself was about to go on vacation. So she needed somebody fast.
    Ten minutes later, Mrs. Warden had hired Mrs. Jinks in the belief that she was a nanny and Mrs. Jinks had taken the job in the belief that it was as a dancer. By the time the two of them had realized the mistake, it was too late. Mr. and Mrs. Warden had left for a four-week safari in South Africa. And Mrs. Jinks was on her own at home with Joe.
    For his part, Joe was quite delighted by the error. Aged seven at the time, he had endured six and a half years of Miss Barking—a woman so tough and so muscular that he had often wondered if she was really a woman at all. There was something very attractive about Mrs. Jinks. Maybe it was her round, cheerful face, her loud laugh, and her generally unsuitable appearance. Maybe it was her pet snake. But she was unquestionably different.
    So, over the next four weeks, Joe taught her everything he knew about nannying—and the fact is that at the end of the day children know more about nannying than nannies themselves. He took her to the library and together they browsed through books such as Child Care Made Easy and Tips for Top Nannies. He took her through such activities as bathing, dressing, and tidying. He even showed her how to tell him off.
    The result was that when Mr. and Mrs. Warden returned from their safari, they found the house more organized and tidier and Joe cleaner and quieter than ever before and the two of them decided to forget how entirely unsuitable the new nanny was.
    As for Mrs. Jinks, she had soon decided that life as a nanny was much more pleasant than life as an exotic dancer. She wore fancier clothes and became a little more severe and soon it was impossible to tell that it was not she who had taught Joe but Joe who had instructed her.
    When she had been with the family for one year, Mrs. Jinks took a two-week vacation in the Amazon basin, where, one evening, she quietly returned her anaconda to the wild. She never spoke about the snake again. But she always kept a photograph of it in a frame beside her bed.
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    Joe mentioned the tea with Granny only once—and that was the following day.
    â€œWhat’s an enzyme?” he asked Mrs. Jinks, remembering the word Granny had used.
    â€œI don’t know,” Mrs. Jinks replied, a frown on her face. She sighed. “We’d better look it up.”
    And so they did. They went to the library and looked up the word in a medical dictionary and this is what it said:
    Enzymes.The organic substances which accelerate chemical processes occurring in living organisms. Enzyme mechanisms are the key to all biological processes.
    â€œWhat does that all mean?” Joe asked.
    Mrs. Jinks slammed the