Sisteria (4 page)

Naomi finished going through the list. For once, the traditional abuse failed to erupt from her mouth and her frown disappeared. She looked up and gazed into the distance. The expression on her face flirted with becoming one of satisfaction, as she pictured the close-up of her holding the husband-killer's hands and urging her, with tears in her eyes and almost saint-like concern in her voice, to reveal every grizzly, blood-squirting moment of her tale. She would then turn to the nine children and bestow a beatific caress on each of their cretinous little heads.

Plum, registering his boss's rare approval, felt his pulse begin to slow down.

‘OK. That doesn't look too bad,' Naomi declared, suddenly coming back to earth, ‘the only thing you haven't mentioned is what's happening with the Armitage Shanks woman.'

Plum, feeling his heart rate beginning to gallop again, ran a hand over his bleached crop. He knew he must at all costs avoid doing what he inevitably did as Naomi's mercury level threatened to rise past critical - lapse in his nervousness into broad Lancashire. This happened at least once a week, and every time, without fail, Naomi would scythe him down with an exaggerated hand behind the ear and the same withering joke: ‘No, no, sorry, Plum, darling,' she would cut across him when he was halfway through briefing her, ‘all I'm getting is some strange noise. You'll have to run that lot past me in English this time.'

Plum's cheeks turned crimson. Finally he took a deep breath and started to speak in an overstated attempt at Home Counties English. ‘The Armitage Shanks woman will be here at half past two,' he said in the slow, studiedly baritone voice, his vowels ridiculously rounded. ‘And she's agreed to cry if we promise her four tickets for
Les Mis
. Said Michael Winner doesn't do a lot for her really.'

‘Brilliant, fucking, fucking brilliant.' Naomi was actually brimming over with excitement. ‘Well done, Plum. What I think we need to do now is find some suitable musical accompaniment for the stupid cow as she comes on. Instead of going for lunch, see if you can dig out a recording from somewhere of “Your Baby has Gorn Down the Plughole”.'

‘Right chew are, then, Nay-ohmi,' Plum said cheerily. Despite his accent and his uncontrollable nerves, he harboured ambitions to become a
Blue Peter
presenter and had no intention of jeopardising his career by challenging Naomi's capricious demands, or indeed her grotesque choice of music.

‘OK, now I need food,' Naomi declared, bashing the top of her desk with an outstretched hand. Her joy at having snared the Armitage Shanks woman had caused all thoughts of fasting to vanish.

‘Plum, be a love and go upstairs to the canteen and get me a green salad, no dressing, and some lean ham. And don't forget to take the scales. I must have precisely four ounces of salad and eight of protein. And make sure you wipe the leaves on a paper towel. Residual water buggers up the weight reading. Remember, my lettuce needs to be more than just green. It should be positively emerald, darling. If the canteen have only got that pale, limp stuff, then jump in a cab and pop up to Planet Organic.'

The moment Plum shut the door, Naomi dived into her Il Bisonte briefcase and began hunting for a Wagon Wheel. If she couldn't have bacon she would make do with chocolate. Rummaging furiously among the letters, documents and folders, all she could find were two Clubs, a couple of Penguins and a Walnut Whip. She couldn't make up her mind between a mint-flavoured Club and the Walnut Whip. She had just decided to sod it and have both when the phone started ringing. She left it for a few seconds while she ripped into the plastic Walnut Whip wrapper with her teeth. Then, with the piece of swirly chocolate on one hand, she picked up the receiver.

‘Beverley!' Naomi exclaimed, her voice meandering from falsetto to contralto between one end of her sister's name and the other. ‘Darling, it really is wonderful to hear from you after all this time. So, you got my letter.'

As Beverley spoke, Naomi brought the narrow end of the Walnut Whip slowly towards her mouth, clamped her teeth around it, paused for a second or so and decapitated it.

Chapter 3

‘So,' Naomi said warmly, breaking yet another awkward telephone silence, ‘how are you? I mean how are you
really
? Are things still difficult - you know - money-wise?'

‘Oh, you know. In the midst of life we are in debt,' Beverley said breezily.

‘God, really? Is it that bad?' Naomi said, her voice full of concern.

‘No. I'm exaggerating,' Beverley laughed. ‘We're doing OK. Honest.' Having found out that Naomi had just bought a three-quarters-of-a-million-pound flat in Holland Park (‘Complete wreck, of course. Daren't tell you what I've spent on it'), she was blowed if she was about to come across as a complete charity case.

‘In fact,' she went on, ‘things are really starting to look up. It's all a bit hush-hush at the moment, but Mel's just pulled off this amazing import deal with the Koreans.'

‘Oh, fabulous, I'm so delighted,' Naomi said. ‘Let's just hope it's more successful than the homeopathic-sticking-plasters-that-didn't-stick fiasco.'

‘Oh, God, that was yonks ago,' Beverley said, trying to convince herself as much as her sister. ‘I don't think he'd make a mistake like that again... Look, Nay, it was really good to get your letter. I've missed you.'

‘Yeah, me too.'

‘I meant to pick up the phone so many times, but there was just so much, you know, water under the bridge, and I didn't know what to...'

‘I know. You don't have to explain. Look, Bev, I'm truly sorry for the rotten things I said. You must hate me.'

‘Don't be daft,' Beverley said. ‘I was angry, but I never hated you.'

‘So, do you forgive me?'

Beverley didn't hesitate.

‘'Course I do,' she said kindly.

‘Bev, I can't tell you how happy that makes me,' Naomi said, sounding close to tears. ‘Listen, I'd really like us to meet. We've got so much to catch up on. Plus there's something really major I need to discuss with you.'

‘Sounds ominous... Oh God, Nay, you're not ill or anything, are you?'

‘No, no, I'm fine. It's nothing like that. Promise. Look, I don't want to talk about it over the phone. How about meeting for lunch?'

‘Great. When?' Beverley reached across the worktop for her diary.

‘What about one day next week. Say, Tuesday?'

‘Fine.'

‘Tell you what, let's go somewhere really posh. What about the Ivy? You won't have heard of it, darling, but it's simply
the
place to go. It'll be my treat.'

‘Oooh, brilliant,' Beverley shot back. ‘I love it there.'

‘No, darling, you misunderstand. I mean the Ivy, in Covent Garden.'

‘Yes, so do I. You remember Rochelle and Mitchell, our rich friends from round the corner? He made a fortune in the deli business, she's got breast implants and a four-wheel drive with interchangeable soft tops - pink for summer, green for winter? Well, they took me and Mel to the Ivy for our last wedding anniversary.'

‘They did?' Naomi said, coughing in disbelief. ‘Goodness, I had no idea its fame had spread quite so... so far afield.'

***

Beverley closed her diary and smiled. Her sister was still full of herself. Still the dreadful snob she'd always been. Those bits of her would never change. On the other hand, much as Beverley had predicted, she seemed calmer, less angry and more at peace with the world than she'd ever been. There was no doubt in Beverley's mind that she genuinely and desperately wanted to be friends again. Even the suspicion that Naomi had only got in touch because she wanted something from her had begun to fade. Beverley was also pretty sure she knew what Naomi wanted to discuss. Their mother. Naomi had spent her entire adult life hating Queenie - and not without reason. If she remembered, she sent her mother a cheap card on her birthday. When Queenie had gone into hospital for her hip operation, she'd sent a small bunch of carnations. For as long as Beverley could remember, that had been the extent of their relationship. They hadn't actually seen each other for six years. If Beverley's memory served her correctly, that had been at their mad hippy cousin Roma's welcome-to-the-world party for her first baby, at which Mad Roma had served up fried placenta on bridge rolls.

Now all that was about to change. At last Naomi was ready to make peace.

***

One thing the two sisters had never argued about was what a dreadful mother Queenie had been.

They always said her child-rearing methods had more in common with a sixteen-year-old unmarried mother living off benefit than a lower-middle-class Jewish mother with a husband living off a modest but adequate housekeeping allowance in Gants Hill. In a neighbourhood teeming with the kind of
kvetching
, overprotective Jewish mothers who fussed about overbites and breastfed their offspring matzo balls until they left home, Queenie's style of mothering stood out like a black pudding on Yom Kippur.

Although she never raised a hand to the girls, she neglected them emotionally and physically from the moment they were born. Family gossip had it that even when Beverley and Naomi were babies, Queenie seemed to want nothing to do with them. She would leave them in their cots to scream for hours while she lay in the bath drinking tea and reading Harold Robbins. When the crying became too much she would feed them by putting a bottle of milk - complete with floating fag ash - in the cot, propped up on a pillow.

By the time Beverley was eight and Naomi was three she thought nothing of leaving them alone in the house while she spent hours drinking coffee in Lyon's in Ilford or wandering round West's and Bodgers picking up and putting down clothes she couldn't begin to afford. When she finally got back, she would barely react when Beverley cried and said they had been scared and hungry and asked her why she had been such a long time. Queenie would simply draw on her cigarette and tell her not to be such a baby. Occasionally she would console her by reading to her - usually from Harold Robbins, minus the dirty bits.

Their father, Lionel, was an equally inadequate parent. A meek, mild-mannered man with a girlish giggle, no eyebrows to speak of, and that bulbous bit on the end of his nose, he occasionally nagged his wife about the pissy smell in the lavatory and the festering piles of washing-up, which from time to time developed maggots. But because he feared losing his beautiful Queenie, whom he worshipped and who he was sure had only married him out of pity, he was too scared of saying or doing anything which might put their marriage at risk. He never reproached his wife for her neglect of the children.

By the time she was ten, Beverley had become a second mother to Naomi. Each afternoon, she would come out of the juniors at Gearies School, collect her sister from the infants, walk her home and let them both in with the front-door key she wore on a ribbon round her neck. Then she would make tea, which usually consisted of clumsily applied Marmite on toast and baked beans.

Both girls did surprisingly well at school, although their mother never showed the remotest interest in their academic progress. In her last couple of years, Naomi in particular developed a fierce ambition. She craved the plaudits which went with adult success, because at some subconscious level she saw them as a substitute for the maternal love and attention she still needed so desperately. She used university (Sussex, English) as a stepping-stone to a career. Beverley, on the other hand, went to university (Nottingham, history) in search of a husband and the care and security she hoped marriage would bring. She found this in Melvin. At the time, it didn't matter to her that, although she loved him, she wasn't ‘in love' with him, that for her he was a clone of every other sweet, intellectual but never quite alpha male lad she had ever met at the Ilford Jewish Youth Club. Because she was certain Melvin adored her, would wrap her in affection and do his best to take care of her, she chose to ignore the fact that she wasn't particularly attracted to him physically.

When Beverley and Naomi's father died in the mid seventies, a light seemed to go on - as opposed to off - inside Queenie. As the years passed she seemed to positively blossom. She gave up smoking, became a doting grandmother who baked the children slightly wonky Jane Asher birthday cakes and began taking a more than perfunctory interest in the state of Beverley and Melvin's finances. As Queenie began to get in touch with her Jewish mother within, it became clear to Beverley that Lionel hadn't quite been the devoted husband he'd always appeared. Exactly what had gone on between her father and her mother she had no idea - Queenie had never once spoken ill of Lionel - but there was no doubt in her mind that he had contributed in large measure to Queenie's behaviour.

By now Beverley's attitude to her mother had softened considerably. She knew she would find it hard to forgive her for the past, but she'd stopped hating her. Occasionally, over a cup of tea, she would broach the subject of their miserable childhood. Clearly distressed, Queenie would immediately change the subject. Beverley never had the heart to press her.

Time and again, Beverley tried to share her thoughts on their parents' marriage with Naomi, but her sister, who believed Lionel had been led a dog's life by their mother, wouldn't hear a word against him. She always made it clear that as far as she was concerned their mother had been spawned by Beelzebub and deserved absolutely no compassion.

***

Five years ago, when Queenie began to develop severe arthritis in her left hip as well as very high blood pressure, it was Beverley who began to worry about her falling over in the bath or having a stroke. It was also Beverley, fed up with phoning her mother ten times a day to check she was still alive, who decided Queenie could no longer live on her own. One Sunday morning while Melvin was in the park playing maladroit football with his usual gang of wobbly, overweight Jewish professionals, Beverley invited Naomi over to discuss what should be done.

Things had got off to a shaky start the moment Naomi arrived. Even though she was earning a fortune in her spare time presenting corporate videos, she was still working as a local TV news reporter in Luton. Nevertheless, she swanned into the house looking down her nose like a dowager who'd taken a wrong turning and ended up in Moss Side. Clearly fearing contagion, she air-kissed Beverley on both cheeks, actually, to Beverley's astonishment, saying ‘Mwah' as she did it.

‘Oh, come on, Naomi,' Beverley said, laughing and giving her sister a proper hug, ‘this is me. Your big sister, not one of your telly-kissy chums.' She then led Naomi into the living room, which had just been redecorated.

‘Oh, so you went for pale lemon anaglypta,' Naomi said as she took in the new colour scheme. ‘And ruched nets with just a blush of pink. Do I detect an ironic nod towards fondant fancy?' She lowered her voice. ‘Who did you get to do it, Mr Kipling?'

‘Sorry?' Beverley said, missing her sister's last remark.

‘Oh, no, nothing. It doesn't matter.'

‘Actually,' Beverley went on, ‘we didn't give it much thought. To be quite honest, interior design isn't my and Mel's strong point.'

‘Really? You'd never have guessed.'

***

A few minutes later, over coffee and a couple of slices of Beverley's home-made marble cake, Beverley mooted the idea of Queenie moving in.

It was a full five seconds before Naomi spoke.

‘Move in? With you?' she repeated flatly, clearly astonished at the suggestion.

‘Yes. Why not? I've sort of mentioned it vaguely and she seems to be up for it.'

‘I don't doubt it. Three meals a day. You running round after her. Who wouldn't? You're mad, Bev. For Christ's sake, the woman fucked up both our lives. Now you want her living with you? Sharing your house? Why can't we just put her in a home? Then we wouldn't have to do much more than visit her on her birthday with a couple of giant bars of Fruit and Nut.'

‘Come on, Nay, she's a bright, intelligent woman. She'd die if she had to spend all day sitting in front of the telly with a load of old people.'

‘And your point is?'

‘Stop it, Nay,' Beverley came back at her. ‘Even you don't wish her dead.'

‘No, I suppose not,' Naomi said reluctantly. ‘Well, it's no skin off my nose, I suppose, if you have her come and live with you. Just don't involve me, that's all.'

‘Oh, God, no,' Beverley said. ‘This would be entirely our responsibility. Although it did occur to me that you might have her from time to time - for the odd weekend or few days here and there - just to give us a break.'

Naomi nearly choked on her marble cake.

‘Let's get one thing straight,' she snapped. ‘If you think I am having that neglectful, self-centred old bat living in my flat then you've got another think coming. Plus, it may have escaped your notice, darling, but we are not all little home bodies. Unlike you I have a career. I am up at six and don't get home till ten at night. There is no way I can look after her. What's more, I've just bought a new white sofa from Conran and I'm not having her sitting and weeing all over it.'

While Naomi brushed cake crumbs off her expensive navy trousers on to the carpet, Beverley made the point that Queenie was still perfectly continent and reiterated that it would only be a couple of times a year, but Naomi wouldn't budge.

‘Great,' Beverley said. ‘So I get landed.'

‘No, Beverley, you haven't simply got landed,' Naomi said, about to shoot from the lip. ‘You've chosen to get landed. There's a big difference. Do you know something, Bev, you're a fool. You're a fool for giving a damn and you're a fool because you've made nothing of your life. You married too young, you had children too young and all you've succeeded in doing is turning yourself into a sad domestic drudge, a fat semi-animated matzo pudding with nothing better to do all day than worry about whether her children are wearing vests. Now you want to martyr yourself into the bargain.'