Ibrahim & Reenie (24 page)

‘What's the worst that could happen?' asked her flatmate, Cynthia.

‘Lots of things,' said Reenie.

‘Worst thing that could happen,' said Cynthia, ‘is you'll have nothing to talk about. And if that's the case, you'll have still had a free dinner. And I bet he'll take you somewhere posh, and all, if he's a doctor.'

‘No such thing as a free dinner,' said Reenie, but ultimately she gave in, and agreed to dinner. Not a
date
. Just dinner.

That meal, at a Chinese restaurant, was a disaster. She was on edge, he was coy. Reenie had never before eaten Chinese food, and she fumbled with her chopsticks before asking, bluntly, for a knife and fork, and spent an age staring at the beansprouts in disgust.

‘They look like worms.'

Even so, she agreed to a second date. After all, she was attracted to him, or to the idea of him. He was so unlike the lovers she'd had in London and Cardiff, all of them so pale-skinned and weasel thin; xylophone ribcages and artless tattoos. Everything about them colourless and malnourished from head to toe. Jonathan was everything they weren't. He was well-fed and fleshy in a way that made her feel safe, protected in his company. He had a ruddy complexion and eyes that weren't bloodshot, and a smile that promised a cheeky sense of humour, if he could only defeat his shyness. And yes, she was in some way attracted to his Jewishness. Admitting that to herself was embarrassing, like admitting she was attracted to his hairstyle, or his choice of tie, but there it was. He wore his Jewishness with ease, without anxiety, without having to prove or defend a thing.

For their second date – and this time she referred to it as a
date
– he took her to the Capitol Cinema, where they watched
My
Fair Lady
, and where he
didn't
grope her. Later they ate supper at an Italian restaurant on Churchill Way, and he was much less awkward, and she was less reserved. There were few lulls in their conversation – she spoke at an almost frantic pace, filling every pause with a joke – and he laughed until his face grew redder and there were tear tracks running down his cheeks.

‘I think,' he said, dabbing at his eyes with a napkin, and still laughing, ‘you are the funniest person I have ever met.'

Reenie raised an eyebrow. ‘Funny ha-ha or funny peculiar?'

He hesitated. ‘Both,' he said, and when Reenie scowled at him, ‘Funny ha-ha! Funny ha-ha!' He looked serious now, still flushed, but his expression more pensive. ‘I wonder where you find it.'

‘What do you mean?'

‘Your sense of humour. I've known people go through less, far less, and lose their smile altogether. But you? How do you do it?'

‘Well,' she said. ‘If I didn't laugh I'd cry.'

He nodded sympathetically, his eyes downcast. ‘Yes. But you know it's okay sometimes, not to smile? You do know that, don't you?'

‘What? Are you saying you don't like my smile?'

‘No, no. God, no. No. I
love
your smile…' Another pause, as if that one short word was a china plate dropped onto a stone floor. He closed his eyes, choosing his next words carefully. ‘What I mean to say is, if you're worried that the truth of whatever's happened to you will frighten me off, it won't.'

She nodded, and in that moment felt something lifted, or taken out of her, as if she'd coughed out a lungful of something toxic, and on breathing in again inhaled nothing but fresh air. ‘Thank you,' she said, and she felt his hand on hers, his grip gentle but firm. As if he would never let go.

By the end of the night they'd emptied two bottles of red wine, and the waiter brought complimentary glasses of some aniseed liquor, which he set alight with a dramatic flourish. It was a mild spring evening, and though he lived on the other side of the city Jonathan walked her home, the pair of them staggering tipsily the whole way. If anything, Jonathan was more inebriated than her.

‘You really know how to drink,' he hiccupped, half alarmed, half impressed.

If he expected anything more that evening he didn't show or demand it, but they kissed before saying goodnight, and from her living room window Reenie watched him walk away with an unmistakable swagger, whistling one of the songs from
My Fair Lady
as he went.

Her introduction to his friends and the community was staggered, and her progress made in baby steps. She found them intimidating, sometimes irritating, always suspecting that as polite as they were they looked down on her, with her dropped aitches and her accent still rooted firmly east of the River Lea. They talked about politics and art, and books she hadn't read, places she hadn't been, plays she'd never heard of. They had bid good riddance to Macmillan, but were equally scathing of Douglas-Home. They spoke about the escalating situations in Biafra and Vietnam with genuine concern, when Reenie couldn't have pointed out either country on a map of the world.

Only Jonathan never condescended to her. There were things she'd learned, experiences she'd had, in the years since leaving London that amazed him, but it was only when they first made love, in her flat on Cathedral Road, on a night when all her flatmates were at a dance, that Jonathan saw the physical scars from that time. They weren't many – the most prominent were a jagged white seam on her shoulder, and the triangular patch of milk-white flesh corresponding in shape with the tip of a knife – but each one made him shudder.

He introduced her to the music he loved, playing her old vinyl recordings of Count Basie, Horace Silver, Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday. He said Reenie reminded him of the latter; not in looks, obviously, but because they were both all the more beautiful for having endured. That was the word he used:
endured
. But Jonathan fell in love with her not out of pity, or a sense of obligation. He fell in love with her because she never demanded his love.

Even in the absence of a doting, match-making mother, he'd often found himself nudged – by aunts, great aunts, great-great aunts – towards desperate husband hunters. This was still a time and a world which frowned on single women in their late twenties, even more so those in their thirties, and this created a kind of wild-eyed panic in the women he met at parties and functions. Every introduction was followed by a moment when he felt himself being scrutinised, his prospects and his
edelkayt
weighed and balanced against every other available man in the room. He understood that men could be just as superficial, except for them it wasn't prospects and social standing, but rather those vital, hour-glass statistics and a pretty face. Reenie had neither of those things – her slight frame was vaguely boyish and her face a little hardened beyond her years – but nor did she look at him with cartoonish pound signs in her eyes. In her mind, at least, she'd done perfectly well – pneumonia notwithstanding – without him, and would go on doing well without him if he were to do as so many before him had done and toss her aside. She didn't say this in so many words, of course, but he understood it perfectly.

When he asked about her family Reenie answered with the only lie she would ever tell him, and go on telling him. In this version of her story she was picked up at Dovercamp by the Ostroffs, and they took her to a new home in East London. When the war came to an end they waited for news from Europe, but nothing came. Both her parents were dead. Though it was a lie with some basis in truth, she never quite forgave herself for telling it. Even so, she understood for the first time what had driven her father to hide her mother's portrait the day he married Vera. Occasionally life offers us the chance to close a door, and keep it closed. Hiding the portrait was his, telling Jonathan her father had died was Reenie's, and, more than that, this lie made them both orphans, the two of them against the world.

She almost slipped up a few weeks before the wedding, when she and Jonathan were strolling past the pet shop on the upper level of Cardiff's indoor market. There, in one of many cages, she saw a cockatiel, and pointing at the tiny bird, with its yellow and grey plumage and blushing orange cheeks, she said, ‘My dad had one of those.'

Jonathan looked at her and frowned. She'd already told him she remembered nothing of Vienna, very little of her parents.

Reenie felt her heart plummet and she shook her head. ‘I mean my foster father,' she said. ‘Mr Ostroff. He had one of those.' She'd never once referred to Mr Ostroff as her father before, never called him anything but ‘Mr Ostroff'.

From then on, any story involving her father would be changed, with his part now played by the blameless Mr Ostroff. For Jonathan this only made her situation before they'd met all the more despicable. How could Mr and Mrs Ostroff leave her, a girl of sixteen, to fend for herself in London? Why hadn't they taken her with them? (‘Though God knows you can count your lucky stars they didn't, the way
that
place is turning out…') What kind of people were they? And by now she couldn't tell him they were two of the kindest people she had ever met, that they treated her very much like a daughter, while still having the respect never to insist on being ‘Mummy' and ‘Daddy', or ‘Mama' and ‘Papa', or ‘Mammy' and ‘Tatsy'. She knew it broke their hearts when Albert Lieberman came for her, and when she left their house carrying the same paisley-patterned bag she was clutching when they first her met at Dovercamp. She knew, or rather she believed this loss may have been the thing, or one of the things, that sent them to Jerusalem. And now she had turned them into these neglectful, uncaring wretches. Her lie was like a weed, in that respect, taking root and spoiling everything around it.

Whatever Jonathan thought of her foster parents, he sensed her fondness for the bird and when they crossed the threshold of his house, their house, on their wedding night she found waiting for her a cockatiel in an ornate, gilded cage.

‘But what should I call him?' she asked. ‘I can't think of a name.' She remembered the name of her father's bird – Coco – quite clearly, but to have called it that would have been too much.

‘Solomon,' said Jonathan, without hesitation.

‘Solomon? Why Solomon?'

‘King Solomon? The Language of Birds?'

‘What're you talking about?'

‘The Talmud,' Jonathan said, hesitantly. ‘The story of how we lost the language of birds when we were cast out of the Garden of Eden. And how Solomon got it back.'

‘Jon, I'm not bloody Memnonides.'

‘Maimonides?'

‘Yeah, him and all.'

‘No. Of course. Well, anyway. That's how the story goes. I just thought it made a nice name.'

Reenie nodded, peering into the cage. ‘You're right,' she said, smiling. ‘It does.'

Typical of him to pick a name like that. A lovely name, no question about it, but so bookish. Jonathan had a vast collection of books, most of them inherited, so many that even he hadn't read them all, and as soon as they were living together she began reading as often as she could.

As a young girl, reading had been her passion. She may have played in the streets, like other girls, and run around in a gang, like other girls, but she was happiest when rainy afternoons kept her inside with a book. The Brontë sisters, Frances Hodgson Burnett, Anna Sewell, Charles and Mary Lamb's
Tales from Shakespeare.
All that had changed with the discovery of music and boys but, now married, she began reading again. While ploughing through Dickens she would read the dialogue aloud so she could hear it, and Jonathan laughed as she became Pecksniff, or Magwitch, or Noddy Boffin, the Golden Dustman. When, in
Vanity Fair
, George died at Waterloo, Reenie gasped, causing her husband to look up over the top of his
Sunday Times
.

‘Everything alright?' he asked, grinning.

Reenie nodded, shaken, and turned the page.

Reading wasn't just entertainment to her. It was ammunition. Dinner parties were when Jonathan's circle might judge her most of all, and she wouldn't go in unarmed. Let them sneer behind her back. She'd surprise them, and she did, many times, and each time she relished the stunned look of the person she'd put in their place. This was her life now. Dinner parties and functions. Shaking hands with the wives of Jonathan's friends and colleagues.

They knew early on there wouldn't be children, that having children was an impossibility. Discussed adopting just the once – so many parentless children in the world – but they couldn't do it. If they couldn't see their own child, reflecting something of themselves – same eyes, same nose, same mouth – back at them, they'd have no children at all. Besides, in time they became too selfish, too jealous of their time, and of the life they'd built, to consider sharing it with anyone else, let alone someone as demanding as a child.

They had settled into a routine; Jonathan working at the hospital, Reenie taking care of the house. Many of the other doctors' wives hired cleaners, elderly women who came around two or three times a week, but Reenie wouldn't hear of it. The very thought of it. Getting someone else to clean up after you. What did these women do with their time if they weren't running their own households? So there was no need for Reenie to work, not that there were many jobs for married women, and when not cooking or cleaning she filled her time by reading books and forgetting about the time before.