The Innocents

by Francesca Segal

  “I am going nowhere, I have a cab,” said Ziva, sitting down neatly on a low brick wall. “I am an old lady, I will not walk back and no injunction says I must. I am eighty-eight. I am infirm. Pikuach nefesh. This morning I already call Addison Lee, and Ellie will come with me.”

  “Infirm? Eze meshugas? At lo chola, Ima!”

  “Sha shtil,” said Ziva, waving away Jaffa dismissively. At that moment a black Volkswagen drew up at the curb and Ziva hopped lightly to her feet, disappearing into it before Jaffa could intervene. Ellie folded herself into the front seat and the car departed. Adam watched her go with curiosity.

  “Eze meshugas?” Jaffa asked again, this time to herself, pouting and drawing her face farther back into her chins. She made no further comment, but the force with which she crossed her arms over her immense, velvet-clad breasts was sufficiently expressive. The engagement cast their family into the spotlight this Yom Kippur—absolute propriety was required beneath its glare. A look of anxiety crossed Lawrence’s mild face as they departed, Jaffa muttering an outraged monologue in rapid Hebrew to her partially comprehending but entirely supportive husband. Lawrence was a straightforward man. He lived, exclusively and devotedly, for his wife and daughter. He would be happy again only when Jaffa’s equilibrium was restored.

  Adam sat down on the wall that Ziva and Ellie had just vacated, nodding greetings to the many familiar faces among the congregation. Mostly, these were the occupants of the crowded outer stratum of his world, people with whom his life had intersected at an earlier stage and who now resurfaced often enough for him to know a little of their lives, though he did nothing to seek out either the information or the subjects of it. Such was the way in Jewish North West London—no one ever disappeared. Instead his contemporaries circled in its gravity, returning from college to rent houses in Hendon, or buy first flats in West Hampstead, held in orbit by the hot sun of the community. And during brief periods away—a year seconded to a law firm in Shanghai, for example, or a residency at an Edinburgh hospital—their parents were still in place and in contact, so that everyone’s coordinates remained logged. It had only been at university that he had understood just how unusual it was that he could list the whereabouts of all of his nursery school classmates. He could say if they were married or fat or employed by the civil service. He knew, for the most part, their sexual histories. Unless from a very small village, his fellow students found it incomprehensible. Even in a small village, in fact, when people leave there is little expectation of return.

  But tonight, on the eve of Yom Kippur, everyone was here—Hayley Pearl, who was Jasper’s girlfriend’s sister; Dan Kirsch, who had been in Adam and Jasper’s scout pack and had twice been on tennis camp with Rachel; Ari Rosenbaum, whose brother had married a girl who’d gone out with Dan Kirsch. Adam smiled at each of them as they passed, but his eyes always returned to the steps of the synagogue, waiting to catch sight of his future wife.

  2

  “She must.”

  “What, do it on purpose?”

  “Yes, of course. You can’t go to shul with your tits hanging out and not realize.”

  “Adam, that’s my cousin! And please don’t use that word.” Rachel swatted at his forearm and then immediately patted it, somewhat anxiously, as if to undo the simulated violence of her rebuke. It made her unhappy to disapprove of him. “Maybe in New York people are just less conservative at synagogue.”

  “It’s New York, Pumpkin, it’s not the moon. How different can it be?”

  “Well then, I don’t know. Everything about her’s different from me.”

  “That’s true,” Adam said. “Thank goodness.”

  They were parking outside Ziva’s house in Islington; as he turned to reverse into a space, he squeezed her shoulder fondly. She was right, of course. Absolutely everything about her was different from her younger cousin. Ellie seemed restless and too worldly. Rachel liked what she knew and was content for everything to remain precisely as it was, though it would be unfair to say she was ignorant. That there were worlds and lives beyond theirs had not escaped her, but she was certain enough of her own place to be resolutely incurious about the knowledge that those worlds might offer. At sixteen, Adam had been able to see in her eyes the home she would make for him at fifty. Rachel knew who she was.

  Their exteriors were equally at odds. Rachel was polished and pink with health, her dark hair sleek, her nails neat and Chanel-varnished. Ellie had looked slightly worn, he’d thought outside the synagogue, though she was only twenty-two; he’d noted the bitten nails and the angry red skin around them, had seen the shadows beneath her eyes. It had been months since Ellie had officially been expelled from the creative writing program at Columbia University—if she had sleepless nights, it wasn’t because she was studying.

  An evening rain had begun, light and silent, insistent enough to pixelate the world through the windscreen until it blurred. Adam jumped out to open Rachel’s door, holding his jacket aloft to shield her hair from the drizzle. Since the engagement, he had found himself taking a particular pride in these small gestures of gallantry. She looked different to him now, no longer simply his girlfriend but the woman to whom he had promised his future. He felt the weight of his responsibilities toward her, long unspoken, now confirmed. A twenty-eight-year-old matriarch to future generations of Newmans.

  He studied her now as she picked her way up the dark path to Ziva’s front door, his jacket covering her head and held tightly beneath her chin like a wimple. Entirely unlike Ellie’s long bones and sharp angles, Rachel was rounded and soft and had the same pneumatic breasts as her mother, cartoonishly large on her small frame and always strapped and scaffolded as high as she could cantilever them. These breasts had afforded her hours of backache and embarrassment, and afforded Adam just as many hours of pleasure. It was true that unless she was careful to emphasize her waist she could look a little dumpy. Loose clothes gave the misleading impression that her body thrust out equally far in all directions, a barrel all the way down to her bottom. But naked, they were magnificent. They had ripened into their current proportions only in the years after he and Rachel had got together—he could never have imagined that the size-eight floral bikini he’d admired from afar in Israel could have held such potential. But by the time she eventually undressed for him they were there, the first breasts he had ever touched. Even now he could imagine no better. Ellie looked like a boy when compared to her cousin. As he rang the doorbell he wondered, briefly, what getup she’d be in this evening.

  Ziva was alone, she informed them, but she had just made coffee and they were to help themselves to a little something. Many decades in London had not diminished a robust Austrian accent, and a faintly foreign grammar often shaped her speech despite a vocabulary—in what was her fifth language after German, Yiddish, French and Hebrew—wider than that of most native English speakers. Austria to Mandate Palestine; Israel to London—from Ziva to Jaffa to Rachel encompassed three generations, three accents, one typical Jewish family. When Adam and Rachel had children, they would be the first born in the same country as their mother for nearly a century.

  It had taken several visits before Adam had noticed that there were provisions in every room. As usual Ziva had set out a bowl of whipped cream on the coffee tray, though Adam had never seen anyone make use of it. Cut-crystal bowls on paper doilies held sugared almonds; a long boat of dark coconut wood set permanent sail on the coffee table and was heaped with small, dry chocolates sealed in individual sachets, of the type that came alongside airplane coffees. In a jar painted with green pears lived jellied fruits. Raisins gathered dust in a Waterford sugar bowl next to the telephone, and on the dining room sideboard, beside a tub of pistachios, were decanters filled with caustic plum and cherry brandies. Adam remembered the afternoon when Rachel had told him that her grandmother never fasted on Yom Kippur; instead it was the one day of the year when she baked, badly but doggedly, until stars pricked the sky and the fast was over. He remembered h
is sixteen-year-old outrage at the disrespect of it all—his sense of pious disapproval. And he remembered his shame years later when Ziva herself had explained with quiet dignity, “I have fasted enough days in my lifetime.”

  They now assembled in her sitting room, Ziva and Rachel perched on an enormous reproduction Chippendale sofa, mahogany-footed and upholstered in stripes of wine and mustard; Adam sat across from them on a black leather Bauhaus daybed entirely at odds with all the rest of the furniture, whose chrome legs had worn small tracks in the Persian rug beneath it.

  Ziva reached for her saucer with difficulty but as Adam sat forward to hand it to her she dismissed him with a frown, exhaling through her teeth and trying again. Her granddaughters knew by now that Ziva would accept assistance only if she had first issued an order—unsolicited offers were grave insults and met with disdain. It was nothing, just a little stiffness when she sat still too long, she insisted, and the cure was to move. Adam nonetheless found it extremely unsettling when he was not allowed to help.

  “You think when I am alone I never pick up a teacup? I only sit?” Saucer in hand, she sat back in the deep sofa with satisfaction and looked from one to the other. “So. Now you will tell me how you have been.”

  “It’s so lovely, Granny,” Rachel said. “Everyone’s been so lovely since we got engaged. All these people we barely know keep congratulating us, everyone seems to know already. We went to that party at Ethan and Brooke Goodman’s house the other night and there must have been about a hundred people there, and it felt like every single one of them asked us over for dinner.”

  “It is a pleasure to invite a new couple. There are not so many good things in life that people want to miss them. Ach, I forgot. Will you get the Sacher torte? It’s on the table in the kitchen. And plates.”

  “Oh, no thank you.” Rachel placed a protective hand over her stomach.

  “Shh. Not for you, for Adam. You, I know, will probably not eat again until the wedding. But I would also like a little something.”

  Rachel blushed at this, prompting Adam to realize, as he retrieved the torte, how many slices of cake he had seen her refuse since their engagement. He was amused by the uncharacteristic development and intrigued to know the outcome; the many, many diets that she’d begun over the years had never yet resulted in her losing any weight. But he sensed that this one might be different.

  “And the wedding will be when?” Ziva asked.

  “We were thinking of next August,” Rachel said, looking across at Adam as she said this because, she knew, he had not been thinking of next August—he wanted to get married this December. But Rachel and her mother insisted that it took many months to plan a wedding, and it was hard to care about anything as much as Jaffa Gilbert, perpetually fervent, seemed to care about everything. Even without Jaffa’s interference he would have capitulated to Rachel, he suspected, for these days he could refuse her nothing. She had never seemed so sweetly beautiful to him, and there was a new shyness in her dark eyes that stopped his heart. He looked up sometimes to see her regarding him with a mixture of strange fear and hope, and despite their many years together, there was a freshness between them that came, he felt, from the sheer immensity of the vista on which they looked out together. Compared to the long lives that lay ahead, they had barely met. He felt very young at the thought of it yet this, he knew, was the true start of adult life. He smiled back, despite her rebellion.

  “I will by August be dead. Danke,” she added, accepting a plate from Adam.

  “Granny!”

  “But it could be true. Why so long?”

  “Hear, hear,” said Adam, gratified to have found an ally.

  “Weddings take ages. We need to find a hotel, I need a dress, there’s flowers …”

  “So we’ll get married on a weeknight at synagogue and Ziva will throw the reception for us here, won’t you?”

  “I will do no such thing, because my daughter will not allow it. You will have a whole hotel geschichte. But why not sooner?”

  “The weather will be bad before then.”

  “But I believe most hotels these days have roofs. A miraculous invention.”

  “It’s going to be in August, Granny, and God willing you’ll be there.”

  “Ha. God. For someone who does not exist He has caused me a great deal of trouble.”

  Rachel, who chattered to God almost as often as to her mother, was opening her mouth to protest when Ziva continued, “Anyway, Rachele, tell me about the Goodmans’ party.”

  “You said,” said Rachel, still faintly petulant, “that you didn’t want to go to it because it would be ‘a production.’”

  “Very true, I did, and it was no doubt a production. But it is a production about which, if you will oblige me, I would like very much to hear. He is a nice man, Ethan Goodman, he has in private done very considerate things. I do not know why it is that he persists in throwing for every Tom, Dick, and Harry these parties.”

  “They’re for charity,” Adam offered.

  “They are for social advantage and showing off,” countered Ziva.

  The Goodmans were something of an enigma. No one seemed to know how Ethan Goodman had made his money; even those who were also in finance were unable to account for it with any satisfaction. He and his wife, Brooke, had appeared from California rich and had since gotten richer after starting several private investment funds in Mayfair. Most of North West London took no interest in the mechanics of their apparently unstoppable acquisition—of greater relevance was their immediate and unreserved involvement in the synagogue community, that they had been elected to boards and councils, had opened the ballroom of their Bishop’s Avenue mansion to any organization or event that needed a large venue, and were almost professionally philanthropic. The Goodman Charitable Foundation was in the small print of every charity letterhead that Adam had ever seen. Brooke Goodman, a gym-honed blonde in her late forties whom Adam’s mother admired as much for her triceps as for her generosity, once wrote a personal check for a million pounds when the appeal video at a rather low-key fund-raising supper for Barnardo’s made her cry, and Ethan had been seen paying two hundred thousand pounds in an Alzheimer’s charity auction for a painting that he himself had donated. The Goodman ABS Fund was reported to be that rare thing—a safe, low-risk portfolio that had delivered consistently high returns. Ethan Goodman now managed the assets of a few close friends, and they had been, it was reported, greatly rewarded for their trust in him.

  The doorbell rang. Adam rose to answer it.

  “That is Ashish—will you give him please a pound?” Ziva called after him. Rachel’s grandmother could not cook. Instead she took two buses to Golders Green every afternoon to eat lunch at the Jewish Care survivors’ group and, on the rare occasions when Jaffa hadn’t prepared and delivered a roast chicken and a side of salmon for the week, subsisted entirely on takeaways.

  Fishing out change from his pocket Adam opened the door, expecting to receive a warm plastic bag of foil-wrapped naan bread. Instead Ellie Schneider’s hand was in his extended one and she was stepping over the threshold in vertiginous, thigh-high boots that she immediately began to remove using Adam for balance. A minute black dog scampered in after her and emitted a rasping yap.

  “Ellie.”

  “Hey, Cousin.”

  A car beeped twice and she released him, turning to wave. Over her shoulder Adam saw a very old Morris Minor pulling away from the curb, patches of rust visible on its lurid orange paintwork. The convertible roof was down, exposing the back of a head, bright Scandinavian blond, belonging to the man driving. The hand raised in farewell wore a thick gold wedding ring.

  Adam watched the car disappearing around the corner and turned back to Ellie who said only, “A friend. We’ve been shopping.”

  Nothing followed this. Instead she sat down at the bottom of the stairs and began to massage her toes, exhaling with pleasure. The dog, two bulging eyes deep-set in a mop of long, silky fur, began to yelp and whee
l around in circles. Its jerking hysteria reminded Adam of the whining mechanical hare at the dog races.

  “Rocky, Rocky! Shh, baby. God, I shouldn’t have worn those.”

  “For many reasons,” Adam agreed, looking in disapproval at the long columns of black suede on the floor that had clung to her legs until moments ago. Thigh-high, all that set them apart from the classic arsenal of a streetwalker were their heels—playful stacks of knotted, polished driftwood. But as soon as the words were out he regretted them. He was six years older than she after all, not sixty, and what she wore wasn’t his business. It wasn’t as if it were Rachel.

  She looked up at him and said nothing, her eyes huge and expressionless, a clear, pale green. She was hunched over, one foot in each hand. Without the boots to distract him, he noticed that the sweater she was wearing was enormous and shapeless, faded black cashmere that hid her body, and her thumbs protruded from symmetrical holes in the woolen cuffs. Her socks were now visible and were blue and ankle-high, and printed with smiling white rabbits. He felt he’d been unkind.

  “So, we’re going to be cousins,” he said, softening his voice.

  “Yup. Mazel. Welcome to the family.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Although you’re more a part of it than I am, probably. I think my aunt has been planning this wedding for about five years.”

  Adam smiled. “More like ten, I reckon.”

  Ellie pulled her sweater down over her bare knees and drew her hands back into her sleeves. Rocky leapt up into the hammock of sweater across her lap. “Weren’t you worried about settling down so young?”

  “No, I was just pleased to have it sorted.” And then realizing this sounded unromantic he added, “Rach is perfect.”

  “Everything here’s perfect,” said Ellie, making it sound like an affliction.

  “Are you not happy to be back?”

  “Just … culture shock. I’d forgotten what it was like here. It’s a little overwhelming. Everyone’s happy and the houses are beautiful and everyone’s friends with everyone, and you grow up sweet and pretty and contented and settle down with a sweet, pretty boy.” She looked at Adam. “Perfect.”