“It was just a bit of fun. As Mum would say—it got me out of myself.”
Neither of us said anything for a moment or two. Hugh broke the silence. “Do you remember that amazing pizza place we used to go to in Soho? What was it called?”
“Reno’s.”
“That’s it,” he said. “Three quid for a Margherita. Another fifty pence if you wanted extra olives and anchovies.”
I looked at him. “We had some great times.”
“Didn’t we?” he said, throwing some bread at a couple of pigeons.
I’d just gotten back to the office when I got a text from Kenny:
In M&S this morning buying my pathetic TV dinners and ran into Steph. She looked amazing. Fancy helping me drown my sorrows in take-out pizza and a few beers?
I texted back, offering my sympathies, and said that pizza sounded great. We agreed that he would come to my place—funny how I was starting to refer to Scarlett and Grace’s flat as “my place.” I would also get the beer.
He arrived a few minutes early. I’d just gotten out of the shower and was wearing nothing but a towel. I buzzed him up, left the door to the apartment open and dashed back to the bathroom. I’d just put on my big terry-cloth dressing gown and was wrapping my head in a turban when I heard his voice.
“Knock, knock. Anybody home?”
“Be right with you.”
Kenny was standing in the hallway holding a seriously big pizza box. When I commented on the size, he said he wasn’t sure what topping I liked, so he got the pizza guy to divide it into quarters and put something different on each section. “That way, I figured I had a one-in-four chance of getting it right.”
I told him that was very sweet, but he needn’t have bothered because I ate anything except avocado. I hated the texture.
We agreed we would eat off our laps, so I went into the kitchen to fetch plates, a pizza slicer and beer while Kenny and the pizza box headed for the sofa.
I put the tray down on the coffee table. He opened the pizza box and picked up the slicer. As he wheeled it over the pizza, he admired the apartment and asked about Scarlett and Grace. He said he’d spoken to Scarlett at the wedding but had no idea who she was. “She’s making quite a name for herself as a comedian,” he said.
“She is. I’m really proud of her.”
I told him to make a start on the beer and food while I went to get dressed. I grabbed some old Gap sweats and a T-shirt and put a brush through my hair.
Back in the living room, I took the armchair opposite Kenny. “By the way, that is a seriously nice shirt you are wearing,” I said, helping myself to a slice of pizza. “Must have cost an arm and a leg. God, I just realized—here’s you going to all this effort with the shirt, the new jeans—what are they, Hugo Boss? And here’s me in my crappy old sweats.”
I couldn’t be sure, but I think he was ever-so-slightly embarrassed that I’d commented on him having made an effort with his clothes. “Actually, the shirt’s really old,” he said. “Can’t believe it’s kept so white for so long.” He paused, pulled this faux-sincere comedy face and picked up the pizza box. “Of course that’s because I use new Drift Ultra”—he tapped the pizza box—“with new advanced biological enzymes. Even at thirty degrees it tackles all those embarrassing understains.”
We were both laughing now—mostly about “understains” and how it was such a cowardly euphemism. “If it was left to me,” he said, munching on his pizza, “I’d go for something like ‘intimate secretions’ or ‘pit shame.’ I mean, at least then we’d all know what we were talking about. Please tell me if I’m putting you off your pizza.”
I assured him he wasn’t.
“So,” I said, eventually, “bumping into Steph today must have thrown you.”
“It did. I was just starting to feel I’d made some progress dealing with the breakup and then, wham, this happens and sets me back weeks. And of course she couldn’t resist telling me how happy she was.”
“That is so cruel. She broke your heart and now she has to rub it in. What’s her problem?”
He shrugged. “She was always pretty self-involved.” He drank some beer. “You know what?” he said. “We need some kind of activity—a hobby to fill the aching chasm that these two people have left in our lives.”
I was laughing again. “We’re going to mend our broken hearts by taking up quilting?”
“That works for me,” he said. “Or maybe we could get a giant jigsaw puzzle to keep us occupied during the long winter nights. I’m thinking something like the Girl with the Pearl Earring.”
“Or the Taj Mahal.”
“Either would be good.”
“How about learning to juggle,” I said. “No, no . . . what about forming a barbershop quartet?”
“I can’t sing.”
“Me, neither.”
“We could always join one of those groups that does historical reenactments.”
I said reenacting the Battle of Culloden in April, up to my knees in freezing Scottish mud, didn’t hold massive appeal.
“Seriously, though,” I said, “I tell you what we could do. Why don’t we find a list of the hundred best films made since talkies began and start working our way through them? There are loads I haven’t seen.”
Kenny seemed to think that was a great idea. We went online and found
Entertainment Weekly’
s top hundred films. “Please, please can we start with
Ghost
?” I said. “It’s one of my favorite films. I must have seen it half a dozen times.”
“But surely, the point isn’t to watch our favorite films; it’s to educate ourselves and widen our horizons.”
I promised we could get educated and widen our horizons after we’d watched
Ghost.
He said OK, so long as next time we watched something that was more challenging and self-improving.
I went to the fridge to get more beer. When I got back he asked me how I was sleeping.
I shrugged. “Not great. First I tried drinking chamomile tea before bed. Then I switched to hot milk and a couple of melatonin tablets. I’ve tried all the herbal remedies, but nothing seems to work.”
“Have you tried lettuce?”
“Lettuce?”
“It contains valerian, which is a natural sedative. A mate of mine suggested I try it. I might give it a go. I’ll let you know.”
I said I didn’t think I’d need any help sleeping tonight, as it had been a pretty exhausting few days. I proceeded to tell him about the demo and Nana getting arrested.
He was full of admiration. “Women like her and my aunty Pearl have been through so much. They’re such fighters. We should be very proud of them.”
I said I was extremely proud of Nana. “Her experiences during the war had a real effect on me. She’s the reason I became a human rights lawyer.”
“So is your nana still trying to fix you up with dates?”
I told him that I thought I’d put a stop to it. “Saturday night was the last straw. She and her friend Millie hooked me up with a witch doctor . . . called Derek . . . from Battersea.”
“How can a witch doctor be called Derek?”
“That’s what I said. The point is that Millie thought he was a rich doctor.”
Kenny burst out laughing.
“You think that’s funny? That’s nothing. Let me tell you about the Elephant Man.”
By the time I’d finished the tale, Kenny was laughing so hard his eyes were watering.
Eventually we got back to our pizza. “So seriously,” he said, “what sort of man are you looking for?”
“Well,” I said, about to recite my father’s mantra, “I’m looking for somebody who’s educated, a professional who’s good at what he does and has a similar outlook on life as mine. I’m attracted to people who think about the world and want to make a difference. Josh did a lot of charity work in Africa. That was one of the things that drew me to him.”
“So with you, a guy has to meet predetermined requirements?”
“OK, maybe that sounds superficial, but the way I see it, if you’re looking for a soul mate, you need to find somebody with a similar background to you, who shares your worldview . . . So what about you? What sort of women do you date?”
“Steph was in PR. Rachel before her worked in advertising.”
“So is there anything particular that you look for?”
He shrugged. “Physical attraction aside, I’m not sure I look for anything specific. I think it comes down to that thing you can’t define. Chemistry, I suppose. You always know when you find it.”
We watched a couple of episodes of
The Office,
which I loved, but he clearly loved more because as the actors delivered their lines he would recite them simultaneously: “If I advance any higher, this would be my career. And if this were my career, I’d have to throw myself in front of a train.”
Each recitation ended with him bursting out laughing and saying “genius” or “brilliant.”
I asked him if he made a habit of learning sitcom scripts off by heart. “God, yeah. I know great chunks of
Seinfeld
.”
I said it had to be one of the best shows of all time, along with
Frasier
and
Friends
.
“And since it’s been on cable,” I said, “I’ve really got into Monty Python. I can do the entire dead parrot sketch.”
“Me, too.”
“‘’Ello, I wish to register a complaint,’” I began . . . “‘I wish to complain about this parrot what I purchased not half an hour ago from this very boutique.’”
“Hang on—how does that last bit go? ‘This parrot is no more. It has ceased to be . . . This is an ex-parrot.’”
By now we were laughing so hard that we couldn’t carry on.
Even though we were having a great time and it was barely ten o’clock, we decided to call it a night. The next morning, Kenny was catering a corporate breakfast in the City and he had to be in Liverpool Street by eight, frying bacon and eggs.
Fifteen minutes after Kenny left, I was in bed. For once, my eyelids were drooping. Tonight I wasn’t going to have any trouble sleeping.
I was just dozing off when the phone rang. I sat bolt upright. Whenever the phone rang late at night, my thoughts always went to Nana and that she was ill or had had an accident. “Hey, it’s me, Kenny. I wasn’t sure whether to call this late, but I imagined you lying in bed tossing and turning and I thought you’d want to hear this. I just got home and made a lettuce sandwich, with a touch of mayo to give it some flavor, and already I’m feeling drowsy. I really think you should give it a try.”
“Wow, that’s amazing. Thanks for that, Kenny. I really appreciate it.”
“My pleasure.”
I lay back down and tried to sleep. An hour later I was still wide-awake. There was only one thing to be done. I got up and headed to the fridge. There I found the limp, brown-edged remains of a lettuce. I managed to find a few fresh-looking leaves, which I washed, shredded and lay on a slice of buttered bread. I drizzled some mayo over the top and covered the whole thing with a second slice of bread. I couldn’t be bothered to cut it in half. I took the sandwich back to bed and switched on the TV. I don’t know if it was the lettuce or
Bulging Brides
that sent me to sleep, but the next thing I knew, sunlight was flooding into my bedroom and the radio alarm was going off.
Chapter 12
The next morning, I was about to leave for work when I got a call from Scarlett to say she and Grace were on the M1, heading to London. They were back for just a couple of days. Grace’s great-aunt had died the previous week and the funeral was this afternoon. I wanted them to stay overnight at the flat and said that I would decamp to the couch, but they wouldn’t hear of it. They had already arranged to stay with Grace’s cousin Loretta. We agreed to catch up for lunch the next day before they went back up north.
That evening, I was having dinner with Hugh. From the first moment he’d tasted Nana Ida’s cooking, he developed a passion for Jewish food. Since being back, he’d discovered that a new kosher restaurant called Zvi’s had just opened in Temple Fortune and he was desperate to try it.
When he picked me up—in the little Fiat he’d hired—he was already planning what to eat: chicken soup with noodles, salt beef with potato latkes, lokshen pudding. “I hope they put loads of cinnamon in it like your nana does.”
Zvi’s didn’t take bookings and there was a queue into the street. It seemed that the whole of North West London wanted to try the new place. After forty-five minutes we were finally offered a table, but it meant sharing. By then we were both so hungry that we said we didn’t mind. The waiter, in a velvet yarmulke, led us to a table next to a mural of the Dead Sea.
“Tally! Bubbie!” Omigod. I knew that voice. It was cousin Stella, daughter of smelly Uncle Alec. Sitting next to her was her husband, Maury. “How are you?” she said, heaving her bulk off her chair and pulling me to her bosom. “On second thought, I shouldn’t ask. Look at you. There’s nothing of you and you were always such a buxom girl.”
“Gosh . . . Stella,” I said. “What a surprise.”
“Don’t refer to the girl as buxom,” Maury said. He was on his feet now, hand extended towards Hugh. “It’s not polite.”
“Sit down, Maury. You eat with your top pants button undone. What do you know about polite?” She was looking at Hugh and smiling. “So . . . is this your new young man? I have to say, you didn’t waste any time.”
“This is Hugh,” I said. “He and I go way back. We’re just catching up.”
“Of course you are,” Stella said, winking. “Maury, move up. Let Tally and Hugh sit down.” She paused for breath, albeit briefly. “So, tell me, Tally—far be it from me to pry, but have you heard from Josh?”
I knew this was coming—this was Stella, after all—but it didn’t stop me feeling sick. “No. Nothing.”
“So, was it another woman? Or did he turn out to be . . . ? You know.”
“If you mean is Josh gay—no, he isn’t. And he didn’t leave me for another woman. He simply got cold feet.”
“Huh. What a thing.”
“Wish I’d had the guts to get cold feet,” Maury muttered.