In many respects she reminded Leona of some of the elderly widows she had met in Florida. Though she lacked their genuine warmth and had not resorted to cosmetic surgery, her preoccupation was to captivate a man.

But how did a woman like her manage to captivate a man like my dad? thought Leona with distaste. There was something kittenish about her, including her small round face, and the hazel-green eyes made feline with the aid of carefully applied eyeliner. Not to mention her cuddly shape, accentuated by an angora dress of a hue that made her look like a ginger kitten.

Tonight she had shown her claws. But only Leona and Ann had noticed them. Sybil’s effect upon men of all ages was plain. They wanted to protect her. The few occasions on which Leona and her husband had been in Sybil’s company were enough to display that even sensible Frank had fallen under her spell.

As for my father – there was little doubt that the tiny woman he had met at a Bar Mitzvah made him feel the macho man he most certainly wasn’t, and that had to be the answer, Leona decided while helping Ann stack the soup plates in the dishwasher.

‘What’s all that clattering going on in the kitchen?’ Harry shouted through the serving hatch.

Only Leona venting her feelings, thought Ann, hoping that it wouldn’t result in her Passover china being chipped.

‘All we need now is that woman in the family!’ she exclaimed to Leona. ‘Take a peep through the hatch—’

‘If you don’t mind, I’d rather not.’

‘Sybil is mopping soup off Harry’s chin and he’s actually letting her! He is able to do it for himself, but he never does.’

‘Since he’s male, I’m not surprised he’s joined her list of conquests.’

‘She’s welcome to change places with me,’ Ann snapped, ‘but heaven help your dad if she hooks him, and it looks as if she’s going to. Bridie will walk out the minute Sybil walks in.’

Ann rested against the sink and said after a pause, ‘This takes me back to Sigmund Moritz’s big mistake.’

Leona recalled the ageing baby-doll face of the woman Sigmund had married. There was too another parallel. Like Sigmund, Nathan was a clever man – and Sybil as unintelligent as Sigmund’s lady-love.

When boredom set in, and it had not taken long, he had bade her farewell and put her from his life and his mind. The large sum of money that came to him when she died intestate was a shock, and he had not spent a penny of it on himself. He had, however, willed it to Frank, in the certain knowledge that money slipped through Henry’s fingers and Frank would not see his twin go short.