It Felt Like A Kiss

Chapter Six




Ellie had left Glastonbury early in a dark, despairing mood. It set the tone for the rest of the week.

Her mood wasn’t improved by the fact that Muffin had flown out to St Barts for two weeks with ten of her closest friends who all had names like Tiger and Flick (one of them was even called Poo), which meant that Inge was supposed to take over Muffin’s workload. Not that Muffin’s day-to-day duties were heavy, but Inge preferred to sit behind the reception desk daydreaming, when she wasn’t fending off pale young men who came into the gallery just to gaze adoringly at her.

‘Inge is lovely,’ Piers would say as he passed Ellie’s open office door on his way to find out why Inge had just cut off one of his calls, ‘but I wish she’d learn how to work the bloody switchboard.’

Ellie was also fed up with asking Inge to send out catalogues or order flowers for clients only to discover that she hadn’t done it. ‘Sorry,’ she’d sigh, waving a languid hand about to convey her dismay and generally looking as fragile as her celebrity doppelg?nger, Mia Farrow in Rosemary’s Baby, ‘I haven’t had time to get round to it.’

Inge’s father was a famous portrait painter – painted-HM-The-Queen famous – and her mother a Swedish countess who’d once come to the gallery to take Inge for lunch and spent two hundred thousand pounds on an avant-garde sculpture while Inge was fetching her coat and scarf, so Vaughn wasn’t going to sack her. Not that Ellie wanted Inge to get fired; she just wanted her to develop a work ethic.

Vaughn would have no compunction about sacking Ellie, though. In fact, he came pretty close to it on the Wednesday morning when a sale she’d been painstakingly working on for months had fallen through at the eleventh hour. Not even at the eleventh hour, but when she phoned to ask if there’d been a problem with the bank transfer and was told the deal was off.

‘Give me one good reason why I don’t fire you!’ he’d roared. His personal assistant, Madeleine, who worked on site only two days a week, had stood behind him shrugging helplessly and pointing at the picture on Vaughn’s desk of his wife Grace, which was office shorthand for ‘they had a row on the phone not five minutes before you walked in’.

Of course, after lunch, which Ellie had eaten at her desk with a martyred air, Vaughn had poked his head round her door.

‘I’ve been through the proofs of the catalogue for the Scandinavian exhibition,’ he said. ‘Don’t spell “fiord” with a j; it looks common. Apart from that, it will do.’

Obviously Vaughn and Grace had made up from their fight and her job was safe, but it was still irritating.

She was irritated with the weather, because it was hot and muggy with no promise of a good thunderstorm to ease the stickiness. Irritated with superfood salads and almond milk because she was detoxing after Glastonbury. Irritated with Tess and Lola, who were so overjoyed that she’d dumped Richey they kept trying to high-five her and were busy making plans to vet all her future boyfriends.

But mostly she was irritated with Richey for being her lamest duck yet. Once again, she was on her own after another relationship turned into a catastrophe. She was also regretting the what-might-have-been with a tall skinny man with really curly hair and deep blue eyes, whose name she didn’t know. Even if that woman he’d been with turned out to be his sister, pining for him was pointless. The in credulous, appalled look on his face would probably stay with Ellie until her last moments on earth.

When Richey did finally call late on Thursday night, Ellie tried to swallow down her bitterness and disappointment so she could graciously accept his apology.


‘So, like, I need to come round tomorrow morning to pick up my stuff,’ he said without preamble. ‘You going to be in around nine, then?’

‘I’ll be at work,’ Ellie said tersely, though the terseness took a lot of effort. Her natural inclination was to launch into a lecture about the dangers of hard drugs, then gently ask Richey to seek professional help. ‘Anyway, what stuff?’

Richey’s stuff amounted to a couple of T-shirts, a can of shaving foam and a six-pack of Stella, four of the cans already consumed by Lola.

‘I need my stuff,’ Richey insisted when Ellie asked why he had to collect it by nine tomorrow. ‘Those T-shirts have sentimental value, and it’s six cans of Stella, and I don’t get paid until next week.’

Richey couldn’t make much of a profit from dealing class-A narcotics.

‘You should have been honest with me and maybe I could have helped you,’ Ellie said reproachfully. ‘I wouldn’t even have been angry – well, not much – but to behave the way you did in front of those people was un acceptable. You humiliated me.’

‘Look, none of this was a big deal until you made it one,’ Richey muttered. ‘So, yeah, I do a bit of coke every now and again, and if I have a bit spare I try to make a profit on it. It’s what everyone does …’

‘I don’t! My friends don’t, because it’s wrong.’

‘Yeah, but you stress out about everything,’ Richey explained, though Ellie didn’t think she stressed out about everything. Only some things, and not all the time. ‘Look, there’s no point in dragging this out. I just need my shit.’

‘Fine,’ she said thinly, though it wasn’t at all fine. ‘Whatever.’

It took some tense negotiations but Lola agreed to deal with Richey at nine the next morning because she was currently working in Tabitha’s vintage clothes shop in Spitalfields and didn’t start until eleven. Ellie would leave Richey’s pitiful collection of ‘things’ by the front door and he wasn’t to be allowed in the flat.

Lola even got up early the next day to make sure Ellie left for work at her normal time because ‘I know you. One whiff of his cheap aftershave and you’ll be begging him to give it another go, and all the progress you’ve made will count for nothing.’

Ellie was sure that she’d do no such thing but at least it would all be settled. She could put a line through Richey. Get on with getting over him, then get on with the rest of her life. So she set off for her breakfast meeting with the arts critic from the International Herald Tribune with a spring in her step. Or a half-spring, because she wasn’t over Richey yet, not by a long shot, and at quarter to eight it was already hot enough that the boating lake in Regent’s Park seemed to shimmer in the heat and her pale blue Zara dress was wrinkled before she’d even arrived at the Riding House Café on Great Titchfield Street.

By the time breakfast was over and Ellie had prised the last bit of gossip out of the critic and seen him into a taxi, it was almost ten o’clock.

‘Hey, it’s me. Did it go all right?’ she demanded as soon as Lola answered her phone. ‘Has Richey been? Did he get his stuff? Was he an arse about the Stella?’

‘Hello to you too,’ Lola rapped back. ‘And yes, yes and yes. He was a total arse about his bloody Stella but I told him that the cans of Stella were compensation for the emotional distress he’s caused. He wasn’t too happy about that.’

‘I’m not surprised,’ Ellie said, but she still couldn’t unclench. ‘He didn’t take anything he shouldn’t? Like, he didn’t come in, did he?’

There was a pause, which made Ellie’s blood pressure rocket because Lola never paused before speaking. Usually she just said whatever she had to say without letting tact cramp her style. ‘Well … maybe he did come in for a little bit,’ she said at last. ‘Something about a CD or DVD he lent you.’

‘What?’ Richey had listened almost exclusively to dub-step so there had never been a time when Ellie had asked to borrow any of his CDs, though he had bought her a Justin Bieber DVD as a joke and if he wanted the present back – and not even a good present, but a present that had cost two quid from a bloke in a pub selling DVDs out of a carrier bag – then Ellie really was well shot of him. ‘I can’t believe he’d be that petty. You didn’t leave him in my room alone, did you?’

‘Of course I didn’t,’ Lola snapped indignantly. ‘Except, when he came round I was in the middle of washing my hair and I had shampoo in my eyes, then the postman rang the bell because Tess has been buying more of that home-made crap from Etsy.’

‘Lola! You didn’t!’

‘Look, he was on his own in there for five minutes. OK, OK, maybe ten, but I checked and nothing’s missing. TV, DVD player, jewellery box, it was all there. I can’t guarantee that he didn’t go through your knicker drawer for a souvenir but what’s a pair of pants between friends?’

Quite a lot actually, especially if they were from Agent Provocateur, but there wasn’t much Ellie could do about it when she was due back at work to personally take delivery of a light installation that had been overnighted from Brazil.

She always left work early the first Friday of every month to go to her grandparents’ for dinner, but as Vaughn was on a yacht somewhere near Monaco with a Russian oligarch, Ellie left work even earlier so she could race home, fly up the stairs and burst into her room.

It looked the same as it had done when she’d left that morning. All consumer durables were present and correct. The bed was still neatly made. All the potions and makeup and beauty accessories were still in an orderly fashion on her dressing table and her knicker drawer, thank God, was firmly shut.

Ellie opened it just to be on the safe side. All appeared to be in order. Even the twenty-pound note for emergencies was still there. She sat on the edge of her bed and breathed deeply in and out until her pulse slowed to a manageable rate.

The panic had made Ellie hot and sweaty. She thought longingly of having a quick shower but made do with a damp flannel and a lot of body lotion. There was just time to change into a loose cotton dress and flats, then she was heading out of the door to get even hotter and sweatier as she walked up the hill to Belsize Park.

‘Ellie, Ellie, you make me shake like jelly,’ Morry, Ellie’s grandfather, sang to the tune of ‘Jeepers Creepers’, when he opened the front door. ‘Ellie, Ellie, you should be on the telly.’

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.’

Sadie 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 f*ck’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: ‘f*cking 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.