Neurotica Read Online Free PDF

Furious, Anna made her take it back and exchange
it for a furry duck.
       
    E ven then, Brenda's taste in interiors was unconventional.
    “Tell me,” Gloria had said on the way home, “what sort of
a person keeps her panties in a filing cabinet?”
    But, like Anna, she had been bowled over by Brenda's
creations.
    Anna had never known Gloria to be silent for so long. She was like
a little girl gazing at her first party dress in the days when they
were pink and frothy with rosebuds and bows.
    Gently, she ran her fingers over Brenda's seams.
Analytically, she squinted at her buttonholes. Approvingly, she
stroked the outside of her sleeves. Anna knew they'd got it sorted
when, finally, Gloria took off her glasses and declared that the
last time she had seen lapels like these was on her uncle Manny at
the end of the war. Apparently, Manny had been a petty East End
crook who had once come into possession of a vanload of Savile Row
suits. Although he never got nicked for the suits, he went on to do
six months in Wormwood Scrubs for black-market onions.
    Gloria got home, marched into the kitchen where Harry was
munching on a pickled cucumber and reading the Social and Personal
column in the
Jewish Chronicle,
and informed him that he
was about to invest £30,000 in Brenda's business.
    Harry carried on reading.
    “Harry, put the paper down, stop making that awful noise and
listen to me. You've heard of Christian Lacroix. If you invest in
this Brenda Sweet person, I'm telling you, overnight you'll become
Yiddishe Lacroix.”
    Harry did as he was told and even prepared Brenda's business
plan for the bank. Three months later Sweet FA-UK was born.
       
    T enyears on, Brenda had a personal fortune of well over four million, plus an eight-bedroom house in Holland Park. Harry
had made enough money to retire at fifty-five, and he and Gloria
had bought a smart holiday flat in Eilat where they spent three
months every year. Gloria brought in an assistant to help her run
Maison Gloria, but refused to sell the shop because she adored
chatting and getting to know her customers. Over the years the
business had become her social life. Without it she would have been
lost.
    Brenda always said she would never be able to put into words
how grateful she was to Anna. Anna said she needn't bother—a
couple of free suits a year said it all as far as she was
concerned.
    In fact, Brenda did much more than supply Anna with clothes.
When Amy got pneumonia just after she was born, it was Brenda who
phoned one of her clients, who just happened to be a professor of
pediatrics, and persuaded her to have a look at the baby; when Dan
began going peculiar, it was Brenda she cried to and got drunk
with, and Brenda who listened. Now that she was about to cheat on
Dan, it was Brenda she had come to, partly for advice on how to go
about it, and partly because, despite her determination to go
through with it, she realized she still needed somebody to give her
permission.
    “God, Anna, you make me feel like the Mother Superior in
The Sound of Music.
What do you expect me to do, burst
into song and tell you to climb ev'ry mountain until you find your
dream so that you can waltz out of 'ere in some poxy brown burlap
jacket and silly hat singing to all and sundry down Kensington
Church Street that you have confidence in bleedin' sunshine and
rain? I don't think so. Anna, have you any idea what you'll be
risking if you go on this shagathon? I mean, what if Dan finds out?
You could lose the kids.”
    “But that's the whole point of the exercise,” Anna said
tetchily, annoyed that she wasn't getting the lavish approval from
Brenda she had hoped for. “According to Rachel Stern, you can only
do it if you know you have the wit not to get found out and the
strength not to tell. Perhaps the cow's right.”
    “And you reckon you've got all that?”
    “Yes. Look, I don't want heavy,
I'll-show-you-my-angst -if-you-show-me-yours-type relationships and
then we fall in love.