In his memoirs, Yitzhak Rabin described their first meeting in 1943 as “a look, a glance, a stirring within”. His widow’s memory of that encounter is similar: “We met on a street corner He looked and I looked. I was 16 at the time and in the Palmach [the Zionist Youth movement] and I had lots of boyfriends, but Yitzhak – boy, was he gorgeous He had these green eyes and red hair. We kept seeing each other, and after a while I asked a friend who he was. ‘Ah Yitzhak,’ he said, ‘now he’s something special.’ “Yitzhak and Leah Rabin’s eighth floor apartment is the symbol of the successful merging of their respective characters. Though it is small, purpose-built and unspectacular, the flat is filled with tastefully chosen pieces: an intricately carved wooden sideboard, a table set with fine green china, a huge modern painting of noughts and crosses And nothing is out of place. As a friend remembers, “Even as a young girl in the Palmach, Leah was the one with flowers in her tent.”I glance around.

“There’s so much light in here,” I say.”So much love,” she replies.It would be easy to suggest that Leah Rabin is idealising her marriage in the wake of tragedy. But little details suggest that she is not exaggerating the strength of the relationship. There’s the letter written by Yitzhak to Leah on the eve of their 24th wedding anniversary, a letter that says, “How lucky we are that we met.” There is the official photograph of the two of them taken last year in which Prime Minister Rabin’s arm is around his wife’s waist. Vardi Kahana, famous now in Israel precisely because of taking that portrait, remembers the photo session: “I watched them through the lens for a long time He straightened her clothes.

He said, ‘Leah, don’t smile too much, it doesn’t look good.’ He wanted her to look her best. He really adored her.”Both their children, Dalia Pilosof and Yuval Rabin, agree that their parents were a real team: “My mother could count to ten after every TV interview, after every radio interview, and my father would call and say ‘Well how was I?’ ” remembers Yuval.But they had far more to cement their relationship than the average couple. “We lived the life of the State of Israel together,” says Leah. They did; they married in 1948 and, had Yitzhak Rabin not been murdered, they would have celebrated Israel’s 50th anniversary with their own. When Leah Rabin speaks of her feelings for her husband, of the emptiness, the devastation, the nothingness, she could be any widow grieving the untimely loss of her husband: “We had,” she says, “breakfast together every day at 7am. It was a holy act.” But she is different, and there are reminders of that difference everywhere – the man, for instance, at the front door who checks the inside of every flower for explosives before he rings the bell to deliver the bouquet.