The Innocents

by Francesca Segal

  “Nothing can really be perfect, there’s no such thing.”

  “No? Except Rachel, you just said.”

  He was annoyed that she’d made him contradict himself. “Settling and settling down aren’t the same thing.”

  “I said ‘settling down.’ You said ‘settling.’”

  “Okay,” he said, stiffly. The intimation of compromise touched a nerve, as it was a fear of precisely this that had made him vacillate for so long over his proposal. Compromise was right, of course. But they had met so young, and in weaker moments he had worried that his lack of experience meant he ought not to trust his own judgment. Not until the end of university had he begun to realize that he’d grown up to be an attractive man; by then it had been too late for him to deploy this advantage to any real purpose. There was no answer; it had taken effort to set aside such nonsense until the certainty of their engagement had rendered speculation pointless.

  “Okay.” She rested her chin gently on the dog’s silky head but did not look away from Adam. Antagonism hung between them. Eventually she said, “God, I’m tired.”

  He relented. “Shopping will do that to you. Going with Rachel is like an extreme sport, I’m always tempted to pack a Kendal Mint Cake.”

  “Sweet that you go with her.” She closed her eyes.

  “Are you all right?” She looked very pale; he crouched down to face her.

  She nodded. She opened her eyes and he stood up again hurriedly, feeling awkward.

  “Just tired. I’m not a very accomplished sleeper.”

  “Always or recently?”

  She shrugged. “Not sure. Just kind of a thing of mine. I can’t remember the last time I slept a whole night, or easily. Sometimes it feels like never, but I suppose that’s not possible.”

  “No. But the feeling of never must be horrible. Exhausting. Or isolating.” He stopped. He wasn’t quite sure what else to say.

  “Both exhausting and isolating, in fact. Exactly.”

  “So now do you not sleep at all?” he asked, curious. “What do you do all night?”

  “Interesting question. What would you do?”

  “I can’t imagine,” he said, and then immediately wondered why he’d said the very opposite of what he’d been thinking.

  “Can’t you? How very unimaginative you must be.” Her tone had changed; he sensed that he’d disappointed her.

  “Come in and see Rachel. Your grandmother has ordered Indian, it should be here soon.”

  “I’ll come in a second, I need to get Rocky’s eyedrops.”

  She stood up with the tiny animal tucked under her arm like a handbag. Looming above him on the stairs she no longer looked vulnerable and had become again the remote model he’d seen across the synagogue—too much exposed skin and clever, knowing eyes. Her sweater had slipped down over her shoulder, and he was acutely aware that her bare legs were at the level of his gaze, peach-soft flesh seamed lightly with long muscle. For one brief moment he felt an urge, vivid and intense, to reach out and slide a hand between her thighs.

  He stepped back and turned away embarrassed, and suddenly infuriated. He had thought himself immune to what was, after all, only a cheap casing concealing an even cheaper mechanism, and was troubled to find that he was not. He did not respect her, he told himself, and that ought to render her unattractive.

  But however easily he might dismiss Ellie in the abstract, it was different now that she was nearby. His body had responded to the sight of hers, and what he thought of her ceased to matter because he had ceased, in her presence, to think. He had never before experienced anything quite like it. It felt pathetic to watch her walk up the stairs. Compromising.

  She turned. “Wait, Adam, I want us to talk. Will you come back soon?”

  “Of course,” he said, wondering if he meant it. He could hear Ziva calling to them and he opened the door to the sitting room, longing for the reassurance of Rachel’s hand in his.

  3

  “Is it really true that Rachel’s cousin was actually in a porn film? Adam, it’s mortifying.”

  Adam was driving his mother, Michelle, home from an early dinner at a sushi restaurant in Chalk Farm. “It was art house,” he corrected her. “Don’t think about it, everyone will forget it soon, I’m sure.” Michelle had met him with the news that two more boys from the Jewish Free School had been beaten up on their way home—one had a fractured cheekbone, the other was still in hospital but would make a full recovery. Over supper they had discussed other recent hate crimes and the rabbi’s wife’s prolapsed uterus, and Adam had been drawn into another lengthy analysis of why his sister, Olivia, might still be unmarried. Why, Michelle had interrogated, as if Adam might be personally responsible for his sister’s perpetual spinsterhood, had she not yet settled down? Why did she feel no urgency? Why, his mother had demanded as he looked down uncomfortably at his salmon roe, why did Olivia not feel the pressing diminution of her reproductive capacity? Adam welcomed this return to lighter topics, but he did not feel like discussing Ellie Schneider with his mother. Or anyone.

  “Well, I don’t know what the difference is. It must have been obscene to get her in such trouble.”

  “She is in trouble,” said Adam, changing the radio station before his mother could object to the loud U2 that had started with the engine. “She’s troubled.”

  “Of course I know she’s troubled; it’s terrible what she went through and such a little girl. I’m not sure there’s any recovering from that, you know.” Michelle shook her head. “Her mother was a lovely woman. Very beautiful and very, very funny. She was famously funny. It was all so awful. But Ellie can’t be allowed to throw her life away because of it. I mean, goodness. What’s being done for her?”

  “I don’t know. She’s come home, which is a good sign. There’s been this older man around for years. Rachel never knew much about him but thinks he’s married, but she’s pretty sure it’s over now. So I guess things are improving.”

  “Yes, Jaffa seemed reasonably positive about this visit. I hadn’t heard about the married man. Goodness me, that really is appalling.”

  “Hang on,” Adam said, feeling a sudden irritation. “She’s not married. If she’s sleeping with a married man then surely he’s the one at fault. He’s the one with a wife.”

  “Oh, but Adam, I’m sure she’s terribly promiscuous that girl, and she looks predatory, don’t you think?”

  “Promiscuous doesn’t mean the same thing as predatory.”

  “Well, it doesn’t mean anything good.”

  “Surely Ellie can sleep with whomever she likes; she doesn’t owe anything to anyone. It’s not our business.”

  He did not normally expend energy contradicting his quietly formidable mother, but this had come out before he could stop himself, and with unexpected vehemence. Michelle was looking at him in surprise. Adam remained dimly aware of the hypocrisy lurking in the corner he defended—Rachel’s innocence, and that blank sexual canvas on which he alone had daubed, was a tremendous part of her appeal. Had she half of the sexual history he’d imagined for her cousin, he wouldn’t have even glanced in her direction. Still, he found himself going on. “I mean, aren’t women nowadays meant to be emancipated? If she wants to shag around—”

  “Adam!”

  “Sorry. Never mind. I’m sure she doesn’t. And in any case, I’m sure Jaffa agrees with you, if that’s any consolation.”

  “I’m quite sure Jaffa’s beside herself,” said Michelle firmly, flipping down the sun visor to check her neat bob of caramel hair in its mirror. Husbands were a sensitive topic for Michelle, who had been without one for twenty years but could say with pride that she had never once touched anyone else’s.

  At sixty she still had the light step and ramrod posture of a dancer, a compliment she had received so often that she now took it for granted and had almost come to believe in her own childhood history at the barre, though in reality she had none. Instead she ran many miles in the gym (though never on Hampstead
Heath so as not to be seen in undignified Lycra) and ate very little.

  This discipline extended to all areas. Raised by Michelle, Adam could fold hospital corners into a bedsheet like an army man and had been drilled since childhood to be ten minutes early for everything. Almost always in a uniform of freshly dry-cleaned gray cashmere tracksuit and Scotchgarded new black Uggs, Michelle appeared flawlessly, resolutely self-contained. If she were not his mother Adam would have found her terrifying. As she was, he merely found her intimidating. The noisy chaos of Rachel’s family had been foreign and wondrous to him, having known only Michelle’s emotional and domestic tidiness.

  They were approaching Michelle’s house on Temple Fortune Lane but she gestured for him to keep driving. “You can drop me at the corner of Hoop Lane.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes, absolutely. It’s not yet seven. I’m going to pop in and visit your father.”

  In the Newman household, the responsibility for upholding Jewish tradition had always been shouldered by Adam’s father, Jacob, who had wanted nothing more than to transmit to his children a love of Jewish culture. When he’d gone, therefore, Michelle had had no choice but to pick up the slack, furious with him for his abandonment and channeling this fury into perfect Purim costumes and elaborate succah decoration. The cancer might not have been his fault, but for years his dying had been awfully hard to forgive. Olivia had been twelve, Adam eight; there would be bat and bar mitzvahs looming and huge, aching family gaps to fill. But if she was going to do it, as with everything, she would do it properly. The children would not miss a festival.

  Jacob had guided her so clearly, shown her by such proud example his stance on culture, on practice, on tradition, and she knew how he would want her to raise his children—as active citizens in a congregation, individuals with a sense of family, of community responsibility and firm, proud Jewish identities. But for all that, Michelle reflected, he had talked to her so little about God. It is not a contradiction to be a Jew and an atheist—on the God question, Judaism might well be the broadest church of them all. There are rabbis (admittedly a rather small minority) who do not believe in Him. You can detest organized religion and still consider yourself Jewish. There is a place for you in a synagogue if you don’t believe, if you do believe, if you’re not sure, or if you only believe during brief moments of turbulence on airplanes or in the final five minutes of a football match in which only divine intervention might save you. But Jacob had never really told her where he stood. What would he think of her talking to him now that he was gone, for example? What had he thought of heaven, or of an afterlife? She didn’t know and it was disorienting, for he had been her navigator in everything. At his grave now, it hurt most of all that she did not know whether Jacob, in whatever form his spirit might or might not currently take, would think her silly for perching at the side of Mr. and Mrs. Lefkowicz to tell him all about recent events on the synagogue charity committee. Or had he believed that it ended in death? That silence and eternal sleep came next, and she was merely confiding in the ether? So many questions she had not had time to ask him and this the most important one of all. And so she was left to keep a Jewish home, to visit the silent Hoop Lane Jewish Cemetery, and to wonder.

  4

  The Prospect of being alone was unappealing on a night when Adam had no desire to be reflective. There were several lines of thought that he was actively choosing to ignore, pushed into the darker cavities of his mind where he felt their menace but could not clearly see their shape. Seeing Rachel would blunt their fangs, would probably banish them completely, just as her deep, untroubled sleep beside him usually made his own release into unconsciousness seem possible. Rachel did not lie awake thinking of sudden death or other calamities. In childhood no one had told her that dying—don’t be frightened—is just like falling asleep. Ever since then there had been nights when Adam could not quite let go, even when his eyes stung and his head throbbed with exhaustion. But now he would lie beside Rachel and force himself to breathe to the rhythms of her breath. He would focus on this rise and fall, the warm curve of her back pressed tight against his chest as if he might absorb her calm through his skin.

  But as he’d arrived home from dropping off his mother, Rachel had called to say that she was staying at her own flat. Jasper’s girlfriend, Tanya, was upset—Jasper had perpetrated some injustice that would be tedious or incomprehensible when it was later explained—requiring chocolate and ministrations and for Rachel to remain at home to provide them. Adam was disappointed.

  He had been imagining her waiting for him as he drove home to Primrose Hill, curled up on the sofa with the television whispering in the corner, mobile wedged under her ear, magazine on her knees on top of a pile of marking, nail file in hand, and his laptop open in front of her so that she could communicate in multimedia. Mission control. At the moment she was obsessed with a scandal unfolding in New York—a well-known art dealer named Marshall Bruce was in the throes of a brutal divorce after the New York Post had exposed his serial infidelities. Marshall Bruce was tall and silver-haired, and had the oblong jaw and oversize, dazzling grin of an American game show host. He was at least as big a celebrity as the contemporary artists whose work he sold and was known for his signature outfit of a cream suit and a tie in textured Nantucket red, and for having married a distant cousin of the Kennedys. He was a major Democratic Party donor and had, before the scandal, supposedly nursed political ambitions of his own.

  One by one, young blondes were coming forward to give interviews and to reveal the “real truth” about Marshall Bruce. He had sold Hockneys and Hirsts and had made his fortune; meanwhile he had sold himself as a family man who owed it all to his loving wife. His downfall had been this—the endless sound bites given over the years with compulsive frequency, in which he praised his wife and referred, smugly superior, to old-fashioned American family values. Rachel had been transfixed by the crumbling edifice that was Marshall Bruce and had been spending even more time than usual in Adam’s living room. He had cable television and therefore the best American gossip channels.

  The flat, empty hours of Sunday evening now stretched ahead, and Adam had already pulled on a bleached and fraying pair of Arsenal tracksuit bottoms and collapsed with the remote control when it occurred to him that he had almost forgotten to send Rachel a song. Since he had proposed he had e-mailed her a song every evening, carefully chosen to capture the particular tenor of his feelings that day. A great deal of consideration and energy had gone into these selections. He had begun, elated, with “You Are the Sunshine of My Life” by Stevie Wonder and had subsequently included some more soulful, commitment-themed selections, such as “I Do It for You” by Bryan Adams and “I Will Always Love You” sung by Dolly Parton (he had rejected the Whitney Houston recording in order, he hoped, to reduce the cheesiness). A few days ago had been an edgier choice, “Lovesong” by the Cure. Yesterday he had woken up knowing, immediately, that he would send her “Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic” by the Police. But the muse was not with him today—for the first time since he’d begun this series of romantic gestures it felt like a chore.

  That Ellie could “sleep with whomever she likes” and it not be anyone’s business had been a disingenuous cry. It was merely what one was meant to say; he had come of age in the nineties when girls around the country were downing celebratory pints and shagging indiscriminately to the encouraging librettos of Britpop—just as they had done for decades perhaps, only now believing that the zeitgeist had finally made it irreproachable. But even if they were right—and the tabloids of intervening years would suggest that they were not—sexual movements left North London’s Jews unmoved. The double first of marriage and babies was still the ultimate accomplishment desired of one’s twenties. He had been arguing only to grant women vague, hypothetical liberties, for Rachel herself had told him that she could never imagine even wanting to sleep with a man she didn’t love. But then—growing up where she did, had Rachel ever re
ally had a choice but to feel that way? When Adele Summerstock had done “everything but” with Dan Kirsch during his seventeenth birthday party (a scandalously precocious age in North West London, and particularly shocking as they had not been going out for the essential six months that lent respectability to teenage sexual congress), it was not only their classmates and friends from synagogue who knew about it but also the parents of their classmates and friends from synagogue. No one would ever admit to having confided such things in their mother and father, and yet somehow information would leak between the generations, from child to parent to parent to child. Eventually, quietly, everyone in Hampstead Garden Suburb would know.

  That night, Adele Summerstock’s reputation had not fallen to its knees alongside her—it was not a society anywhere near that condemnatory. But years later when she married Ari Rosenbaum’s older brother, Anthony, it was probable that ninety percent of her wedding guests knew the tale, and its unfortunate coda, that in her inebriation, she had subsequently brushed her teeth with Dan Kirsch’s mother’s toothbrush. It was likely that her new mother-in-law was mentally attempting to suppress these details even as Adele Summerstock was processing down the aisle. In such a climate, of course Rachel would not want anything other than that which she had.

  She had been Adam’s first too, of course. But later there had been that time at university—those six months in their second year, a glitch of which no one was permitted to speak—when they had broken up, and he had been a single man of twenty. During that dark period Rachel had twice kissed Ari Rosenbaum, with whom she had long ago slow-danced at several bar mitzvahs and had also kissed once before, at an “evening in” watching Pulp Fiction at Gideon Press’s house when they were all fifteen. But not even Ari had been granted access to her celebrated assets—only Adam had ever unhooked that hardworking brassiere, let alone removed the matching briefs. When they reunited she was wiser only in the ways of making Adam jealous (at school Ari had been in the First Eleven, Adam only in the Second). Adam had notched up a one-night stand and a three-month relationship with a girl named Kate Henderson. He was therefore a man of the world.