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Tuesday?’
    â€˜Fine.’
    â€˜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.’
    â€˜Oooh, brilliant,’ Beverley shot back. ‘I love it there.’
    â€˜No, darling, you misunderstand. I mean the Ivy, in Covent Garden.’
    â€˜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.’
    â€˜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