Then he took Ellie in his arms and they waltzed down the hall. They ended up as they always did, in the kitchen with her grandmother shooing them out of her way as Morry kissed Ellie’s forehead, then cupped her cheeks, exclaiming, ‘What a beautiful punim. Oooh, I could just eat it all up.’
He did the punim routine with all of his granddaughters but only Ellie got serenaded and some nifty two-step action.
‘Morry, let the poor girl go, you’re crushing my flowers,’ her grandmother exclaimed sharply, elbowing her husband of sixty-odd years out of the way so she could take the freesias that Ellie had bought and demand a cuddle. Sadie Cohen was so short that Ellie could rest her chin on the top of her tinted strawberry-blond head. Not that she dared. Sadie got her hair shampooed and set every Friday morning after Pilates, and she’d have been furious if it didn’t hold for the weekend. ‘You’re getting so thin, my darling, I can feel every one of your ribs.’
Ellie backed away warily. ‘I’m going to leave this house at least seven pounds heavier,’ she declared, gazing round the stainless-steel and frosted-white fitted kitchen that was her grandmother’s pride and joy. Her eyes came to rest on the six-ring hob. ‘Not chicken soup, Grandma! It’s too hot.’
‘We have to have chicken soup for Friday night dinner,’ Sadie stated, as if on the sixth day God had stuck a boiling fowl in a huge saucepan, covered it in water and left it to simmer all afternoon. ‘The BBC said it was going to rain tonight and then the temperature will plummet and you’ll be glad of a nice warm drop of soup.’
The French doors that led out into the garden were open, which made no difference because it was still oppressively hot. The kitchen was steamy with the fragrant smell of chicken soup, the sweet onions that had been thrown into a dish with the chicken fat and rendered down into schmaltz, and lurking just underneath were warm base notes of apple and cinnamon because Sadie always made strudel for pudding.
‘My darling, would you like to give me a hand with the chopped liver?’
Ellie pulled a stricken face as she always did. ‘Can’t I lay the table instead?’ she asked, and predictably her grandparents chuckled indulgently, because Ellie didn’t cook. Ari had been adamant that women who could cook never had the time to achieve greatness. Then she’d laugh hollowly when Ellie mentioned Julia Child, Nigella Lawson or the two women who’d founded the River Café. Now, Ellie left Sadie to finish making the chopped liver while she laid the table.
As she set down the heavy silver cutlery, Ellie could hear Sadie and Morry through the hatch. Morry was intent on taking Sadie for a quick spin around the kitchen and she was intent on batting him away with a tea towel. ‘You’ll break a hip, you silly fool, and then you won’t be able to get up on the bima for little Daniel’s bar mitzvah.’ She turned her head and tutted at Ellie. ‘Not the good glasses, darling, and take the salt off the table. It’s bad for Grandpa’s heart.’
‘There’s nothing wrong with my heart, Sadie. It still beats faster at the sight of you,’ Morry said, and got another swipe with the tea towel for his trouble.
Ellie smiled. When she put all unhappy thoughts of Richey to one side along with the rest of her lame ducks, what she really wanted one day was a relationship like her grandparents’. A relationship built on mutual affection, humour, hard work and a hell of a lot of love.
Her grandparents had grown up together in a Samuel Lewis Trust building on Dalston Lane in Hackney, but lost touch when they’d both been evacuated during the war. They had found each other again on the dance floor of the Lyceum Ballroom on a Saturday night in 1952 and married four months later, a week after Sadie’s eighteenth birthday.
They’d started married life in a back bedroom of Sadie’s parents’ rented basement flat in Fremont Street, Hackney. Morry worked as a tailor in Savile Row; then when his father died, he took his small inheritance and used it to buy the lease on a tiny shop off Marylebone High Street and opened a dry-cleaners frequented by his old Savile Row customers. Morry had looked after front of house, Sadie had done the books. Then the Savile Row customers’ wives had started sending in their ballgowns and cocktail dresses. Sadie and Morry took the lease on the premises next door and moved into a tiny attic flat in Hampstead. They’d been the first members of either of their families to buy their own home.
Fifty-five years later they lived in a huge house in Belsize Park, had sixteen grandchildren, ten great grandchildren, and had passed their fifteen-shop dry-cleaning empire to their two eldest sons when they’d retired. Morry and Sadie hadn’t liked being retired very much so they’d opened a small alterations shop in Golders Green. Now they had ten shops in North London, but still joint-chaired the synagogue’s social committee, fund-raised for Jewish Care and hosted Friday-night dinners for their family on a four-week-rota basis. Tonight was the turn of the unmarried grandchildren, and just as Morry finally persuaded Sadie to join him in a very sedate waltz, there was a ring at the door. Ellie rushed to answer it.
It was her cousin Tanya, closely followed by sisters Emma and Laurel, the three of them falling on Ellie with cries of excitement and kisses. Bringing up the rear was Louis, who managed the family’s original dry-cleaners in Marylebone (frequented by the Vogue and Skirt girls). He wrapped the four girls in an extravagant group hug.
‘My favourite unmarried cousins,’ he exclaimed with a wicked grin as Sadie bustled into the hall to find out why the front door was still open.
Half an hour later they were all seated round the big table in the morning room. The proper dining room was only used on High Holy Days, and the second Friday of each month when it was the turn of married grandchildren with offspring.
Sadie waited until after the blessings and the lighting of the Shabbat candles, when everyone was eating the chopped-liver starter, before she sighed long and hard, ‘My unmarried grandchildren. So beautiful, so talented but so un attached. I don’t understand it.’
‘It’s not for want of trying, Grandma,’ Emma said. Laurel nodded in agreement and Ellie knew what was coming next. They finished the chopped liver, choked down a bowl of soup and were picking at the chicken and Emma and Laurel still hadn’t finished lamenting the lack of suitable Jewish men in their lives. This was despite attending charity balls, speed-dating evenings, nature walks, casino club nights and every other event organised by any Jewish-affiliated group in North London, Middlesex and the less tacky parts of Essex.
‘Don’t even talk to me about weddings,’ Laurel spat as she received a plate heaped with chicken, savoury lokshen pudding, tzimmes – a sweet stew made with carrots and prunes – and a couple of sugar snap peas because Ellie and Louis insisted on something green on their plates. ‘We’ve been to six weddings so far this year. All the good men are taken and the ones that are left are …’
‘… Mummy’s boys or total losers who’ve never even touched a woman, let alone spoken to one,’ Tanya, who’d been silent up until now, added darkly.
‘Try being Jewish and gay,’ Louis offered glumly. ‘Talk about a small dating pool. I should emigrate. Everyone and his mother is Jewish and gay in New York.’
‘So true,’ Ellie agreed loyally, but Sadie and Morry were having none of that kind of talk. They didn’t mind Louis being gay – it gave them a certain social cachet – but they weren’t having any of their grandchildren move from North London. After she’d graduated, Ellie had considered living in Hoxton but Morry had summoned her to his office and told her gravely that Hoxton was for ‘ladies of easy virtue and gangsters’. He refused to believe Hoxton was now full of poncy bars, art galleries and lots of young people in distressed clothing with hedge-trimmer hairdos.
Sadie sighed again. ‘There was never a problem finding nice Jewish boys when I was your age.’
‘Sometimes I think it would be so much easier if we still used matchmakers,’ Ellie said feelingly. She gestured at Morry and Sadie. ‘You could find me a nice boy from a good home, we’d get married and simply have to make the best of it.’
Sadi
e and Morry shared a hopeful look. ‘Is that really what you want, darling, because there’s always ads in the Jewish Chronicle for those kinds of services?’
Ellie almost spat out a mouthful of chicken. ‘No! I was only saying.’ But for a moment she was distracted by the thought of a nice Jewish boy – kind, solvent, who always put the toilet seat down – until Sadie reached across the table to prod her with the bread knife.
‘Are you not seeing anyone then, motek?’ she asked.
‘Not right now.’ Ellie grimaced. ‘I was but he turned out to be a very, very bad person.’
‘He wasn’t Jewish then?’
‘You can’t cross yourself, Grandpa! It only works if you’re Catholic!’
‘What about Marilyn Simons’ son?’ Sadie looked round the table hopefully. ‘Lovely boy. An accountant. Whoever heard of a poor accountant?’
For a second, Ellie was almost tempted. A Jewish accountant sounded like the dose of normal she needed to get the bad Richey taste out of her mouth and to stop her fevered dreams about tall, dark strangers, but then Tanya said doubtfully, ‘Justin Simons?’ and Ellie shuddered because she remembered Justin Simons from Hebrew classes. He’d always smelled of really eggy farts.
‘Think I’ll pass, Bubba,’ she muttered. ‘But he sounds like he’d be perfect for Laurel or Emma,’ she added, and that led to a good-natured argument that took them right through a game of kalooki over coffee and apple strudel.
It was gone ten by the time the cousins were lined up in the hall, all feeling slightly bilious and in need of fresh air.
‘I’ve got something for you,’ Sadie told Ellie, who was slumped against the wall, because the food baby in her belly was giving her backache. ‘Leftovers and a few things I had knocking about in the fridge.’
She handed over a cool bag straining at the seams, not just with leftovers but fishballs, potato latkes, salt beef sandwiches and an apple cake – all of Ari’s favourite foods.
‘Thanks, Bubba,’ Ellie said, bending down to kiss her grandmother’s cheek.
‘If there’s too much for you, you could share it with Ariella,’ Sadie said casually. ‘I’d hate for good food to go to waste.’ It wasn’t like mother and daughter were on no-speakers, but Sadie’s other children were always popping in for coffee or to show off recent John Lewis purchases while Ari only ever came round for the first night of Rosh Hashanah and Christmas lunch. Much as she loved Ellie – and Ellie was in no doubt of that love, not ever – Sadie would never forgive Ari for giving birth to a child out of wedlock or getting tattooed.
‘Well, I’m seeing Mum on Sunday so if I haven’t eaten it all by then, I’ll share it with her,’ Ellie said just as casually, and there was time for one last hug and a quick two-step with Morry before she staggered home.
Camden, London, 1986
Billy was gone when Ari woke up the next morning. Hadn’t even asked for her number, but left her to do the walk of shame up to the station.
Left Ari to fixate and obsess and agonise for two whole weeks and just when she’d worked through it, Billy Kay was back. Propping up the bar of the Lizard Lounge off Bayham Street where she pulled pints on Monday and Tuesday nights when she didn’t have a gig.
Ari still wasn’t going to be that girl. Anyway, he was married, for fuck’s sake, and he was a dick who thought he was too cool even to smile or say hello to her, or join in with the latest barroom gossip about that band who sounded like a tenth-generation copy of The Stooges that had signed to EMI for over a million pounds.
When it came down to it, no one was that dangerous or intense. Especially not Billy Kay, not when he’d been on Top of the Pops in a paisley shirt with really bad hair in his really shit former band who’d been dumped by their record label after they delivered their second album.
But Ari still somehow ended up going home with him most nights. Not home, because he lived in Powis Square with his wife, the honourable Olivia, and child. And not her home because she was illegally subletting a flat in a grim council tower block in Mornington Crescent with Tabitha and Tom, who’d made their feelings about Billy Kay really clear, and their feelings could be summed up in three words: ‘fucking poseur bastard’.
But it was OK, because Billy knew someone, Billy always knew someone, and this particular someone was a playwright who lived in Chalcot Square in Primrose Hill and Billy had squatter’s rights to the summerhouse in his back garden.
Sylvia Plath had once lived in a flat on the other side of Chalcot Square and Ari didn’t think that was a good omen. Still wasn’t enough to stop her, though.
Chapter Seven
After Friday-night dinner, there was always Hair Dye Sunday. Always. Ellie would go round to Ari’s to assist in the monthly session with bleach, a box of Manic Panic Rock ’n’ Roll Red hair dye, and to share her spoils from Sadie.
‘I can’t believe you went out in public in a tracksuit,’ Ari exclaimed when Ellie walked through the front door of her tiny flat and took the four steps that led into the kitchen. ‘Are you really my daughter?’
‘Yoga pants and a Uniqlo vest do not look like a tracksuit,’ Ellie said indignantly. ‘They look like I’ve been exercising. Tess got a voucher for a place in Islington that does that Pilates where they stretch you on Reformer machines.’
Ari looked up from her bowl of bleach solution. ‘Really? Sounds painful.’
‘Well, I don’t recommend it on a hangover,’ Ellie said as she slumped on a stool. Ari’s décor style could be summed up as rock ‘n’ roll kitsch meets Victorian clutter. The flat was stuffed full of paraphernalia, from assorted taxidermy including a pair of ravens, a one-legged squirrel and a motheaten fox to Mexican Day of the Dead masks on the shelf over the cooker, three ceramic hula girls dancing above the mantelpiece in the living room, and posters, flyers and photographs of Ari’s musical past and present covering the walls. There were also amps, guitars, an accordion and other pieces of musical equipment stacked wherever there was space. Ellie lived in dread of a frantic phone call from Ari to say she was trapped and unable to get to the front door because there was so much crap in the way. ‘Your Mexican Day of the Dead masks are looking at me funny.’
‘You’re so cranky when you have a hangover,’ Ari said. She tossed something at Ellie. ‘Put on your turban. It will make you feel better.’
There were certain rituals that had to be observed on Hair Dye Sunday, and one of them was that Ellie had to wear a maroon velvet turban of the sort favoured by chic Parisian geriatrics. Then, once she’d applied bleach to Ari’s roots, they sat on Ari’s bright pink Chesterfield and watched the Grey Gardens documentary. They’d both seen it so often that they could recite the lines from memory with only one eye on the screen. Ellie was Little Edie, Ari was Big Edie, and when Ari said, as she always did, ‘Do you think we’ll end up as two mad old women living in a big, decaying house full of feral cats?’ Ellie would tell Ari that she planned to stick her in a care home before that could ever happen.
They also doggedly ate their way through Sadie’s food parcel. Eventually all that was left was the apple cake, which they were saving to have with a cup of tea once the dye had been washed out. Ellie felt as if the worst of her hangover had receded and she could tell Ari about the night before.
Tess and Lola were adamant that Ellie shouldn’t waste a single night crying about Richey so Lola had dragged her to a Blitz-themed party in Shoreditch. They’d dressed in vintage frocks with stocking seams drawn down the backs of their legs with eyeliner, ordered cocktails from a menu designed like a ration book, danced to Glenn Miller tunes and tried and tried and tried to find a normal bloke for Ellie to hook up with.
‘I don’t think normal blokes hang out at Blitz-themed club nights in Shoreditch,’ Ellie said, her feet propped up on Ari’s lap as Ari painted her toenails a glittery red. ‘I know you’re probably not down with me going out with some normal guy who wears a suit and has a pension plan but I really need normal in my life right now.’
??
?I’m down with whatever makes you happy,’ Ari said. ‘But you should know that there’s no such thing as a normal person. What you need is a man who’ll make you feel normal, even when you feel like you’re the biggest freak in the world.’
‘Is that how my dad made you feel?’ Ellie asked. She didn’t even know what had prompted that question, because it wasn’t something they ever talked about. Ari occasionally ranted about how he’d sold out as a musician, but she never talked about him as her lover, or about the year they’d been together, and the little Ellie did know had been gleaned from Tabitha, Tom and Chester (who would clench his jaw so painfully that Ellie had stopped asking him). ‘Did he make you feel normal?’
Ari didn’t answer at first. She applied a second coat of polish to the little toenail on Ellie’s left foot, screwed the top back on the bottle and only then did she look up. Even with a carrier bag tied around her head so she didn’t get red dye everywhere, she looked sad and pensive. But mostly sad. ‘God, normal was the last thing he made me feel,’ she said quietly, and before Ellie could apologise for dredging up painful memories, Ari patted her leg. ‘Come on, Little Edie, help me wash this crap off my head. It’s starting to itch.’
All the way through the rest of the hair-dyeing process, which involved some hardcore conditioning, Ari kept up a stream of inconsequential chatter about The Fuck Puppets’ next gig and the guitar class she was running at a rock ’n’ roll summer camp for girls in the school holidays. She even talked about the weather, or rather speculated if it was ever going to rain again ‘because this relentless sunshine is going to give me a tan and you know how I feel about tans’.
It meant that Ellie didn’t have the opportunity to ask any more questions Ari couldn’t or wouldn’t answer. Ellie understood. She’d never had her heart broken quite like that, but there had been times when her heart had taken a beating, and even getting out of bed, much less talking about the person responsible, had made the ache almost unbearable. Still, her curiosity was piqued and when she got home and started to organise her outfit options for the coming week, ‘It Felt Like A Kiss’ was playing on the radio. It was a sign from God to stop what she was doing so she could sit on her bed and rummage through her Dad box.