Page 22 of Crazy in Love at the Lonely Hearts Bookshop
‘Or a princess,’ her five-year-old sister Ellie added.
‘Mermaid princess was the look I was going for,’ Nina agreed. ‘Where is everyone?’
It was no surprise that ‘Nana and Mum’ were in the kitchen cooking lunch and that Nina’s father and her brother Paul were performing some acts of DIY upstairs. It was all about the traditional divisions of labour in KT10, Nina thought, her lip curling.
‘Did you bring us presents?’ Ellie wanted to know. ‘We have both been very good.’
‘We’ve been excellent,’ Rosie said.
‘Well, in that case, I might have a small gift for both of you,’ Nina said because she always had presents for them whether they’d been excellent or not. Books, usually.
This time she had a book calledBad Girls Through History, a collection of stories about everyone from Cleopatra to Rosa Parks for Rosie, and a lovely picture book calledAda Twist, Scientistfor Ellie. Nina didn’t doubt that her mother was filling her granddaughters’ heads with all sorts of nonsense so it was up to her to redress the balance. Besides, she and her nieces had agreed that while it was perfectly all right to want to be a mermaid or a princess when they grew up, it was good to have other options.
Nina left both girls settled on the sofa with their new books and headed down the hall towards the kitchen where her mother, Alison, and sister-in-law, Chloe, had finished their lunch prep and were perched on stools with a big glass of white wine each.
That was the one other good thing about coming for Sunday lunch – there was alcohol. Chloe looked up as Nina came into the room.
‘Hope the girls haven’t been driving you mad,’ she said by way of a greeting. ‘They both had sleepovers last night but I don’t think either of them did much sleeping.’
‘No, they were lovely as usual,’ Nina murmured as she got close enough to brush her cheek against Chloe’s. ‘Did you and Paul go out for a date night with the girls away?’
Chloe shook her head and grinned. ‘No. We were in bed by half past eight. Solid twelve hours’ sleep. It was the best thing ever.’
‘Oh, Nina, whathaveyou done to your hair now?’
Nina exchanged a long, long,long-suffering glance with Chloe then turned to her mother.
‘It’s a pink rinse,’ Nina said evenly and this time she didn’t make skin-to-skin contact but kissed the air somewhere near her mother’s cheek. ‘You look nice.’
It wasn’t a word of a lie. Alison O’Kelly was a youthful fifty-three. On the very rare occasions that she and Nina were seen in public together, somebodyalwaysremarked, ‘Oh, but I thought you two were sisters!’ She was blonde, blue-eyed, went to great lengths to maintain her size-eight figure and was never anything less than impeccably put together.
For a family Sunday lunch she was wearing a blue-and-white striped Breton top, smart, slim-cut black trousers, discreet gold jewellery and a pair of patent black ballet pumps, no slippers for her.
Not that Alison was pleased that Nina was wearing a dress and heels, her own version of Sunday best. ‘You look like you’ve put on weight again,’ she commented, ignoring Nina’s compliment.
Ninahadput on weightagain. That was an unfortunate side-effect of having Mattie foist baked goods on the shop staff at regular intervals.I am not going to react, Nina reminded herself and she even managed to dredge up a smile. ‘Actually, talking of which, I’ve brought you cake. I told you about Mattie and the tearooms, didn’t I? You really should come for a visit.’ Nina pulled out a Tupperware box containing the best part of Mattie’s famous Raspberry Meringue Layer Cake. ‘Anyway, we’re shut on Sunday so on Saturdays we get to divvy up all the cakes and pastries that are left over. Thought we could have this for pudding.’
Alison shied away from the Tupperware that Nina was holding out as if it were covered in some kind of radioactive ooze. ‘You know I don’t eat cake!’ she hissed.
‘Well, everyone else can try a piece,’ Nina said through gritted teeth. Although she was meant to be not rising to the bait, her blood pressure was certainly climbing. ‘Dad can have some cake. Dad loves cakes.’
‘Meant to be watching my cholesterol,’ said a cheery voice behind her and then Nina smelt Davidoff Cool Water and a faint whiff of wood shavings and engine oil, and a pair of arms wrapped around her.
Nina was almost thirty, but when her dad put his arms around her, she felt the same as she did when she was almost five or almost ten or almost fifteen. That she was safe and she was loved and she was protected.
‘The cake has raspberries in it,’ she said, as Patrick O’Kelly kissed her cheek. ‘It’s practically a health food.’
‘Maybe just a little slice then,’ Patrick agreed and Alison’s lips tightened and Nina thought she was going to say something, but then the oven timer beeped at the same time as the doorbell rang.
‘The roast,’ she said over the sounds of squealing in the hall as Rosie and Ellie ran to the front door. ‘Somebody let Mum and Dad and Granny in.’
Then it was a flurry of activity. Nina’s grandmother, Marilyn and Nina’s great-grandmother, Hilda, came into the kitchen to supervise the last stages of the Sunday roast. Nina knew to stay well out of the usual heated debate over steamed veggies vs. boiling them for so long that they resembled sludge, so instead she poured herself a generous helping of Chardonnay then went to waggle her tongue piercing at Rosie and Ellie to make them shriek with horrified glee.
On the dot of one, Sunday lunch was served. Nina sat between her mother, so Alison could watch and comment on every piece of food that Nina put on her plate, and her great-grandmother, who had already been the grateful recipient of two large-print romance novels.
Of course, Nina’s grandparents wanted to know if she was seeing someone special. To which the answer was no. It was always no, even when Nina was seeing someone special because the thought of having to bring a man home to Worcester Park to meet the family was too terrifying to contemplate. Gervaise had been Nina’s last someone special and his bleached blond hair and unisex black clothing (often a black kilt over leggings) would have gone down like a ‘whore at a christening’, as her grandfather would have said once he’d had a couple more lagers.
It was the same old Sunday lunch chatter. Both her dad and her grandfather, Teddy, were black cabbies so they had a good old moan about how slow trade was. Paul was a plumber so he had a good old moan about the water company trying to get the local residents to fit smart meters. Chloe was a childminder so she had a good old moan about the parents of one of the children she looked after who were in the middle of an acrimonious break-up and were using the poor kid as a pawn.
