The Innocents

by Francesca Segal

  Rachel as an independent sexual being was a foreign idea to him and not one that she herself had ever encouraged. Instead, she was merely the central benefactress of his own erotic subsistence. But thinking about Ellie’s choices not only made him momentarily envious, but also made it seem obvious that Rachel must have wondered. She might even have conjured it, have envisioned the way that her body would respond to another man, a different touch—although he could not believe she would do such a thing while she was actually in bed with him. She wouldn’t.

  The idea of anyone else with Rachel repelled him—but suddenly, without volition, he could hear her breath as other hands left their imprint on her hips, could see her head thrown back as someone else knelt and thrust. He felt a surge of jealousy so powerful he burned with it. It was sickening—and mesmerizing. Who might she imagine? Was this how Rachel felt when she thought about him with Kate? Did she wonder how it had been between them? Kate had been nothing like Rachel—muscled and broad-shouldered from rowing, a little stocky perhaps, she’d had strength that had lent her unions with Adam the controlled violence of a wrestling match. Like Ellie she had been far from virginal—not overtly sexual or flirtatious but instead frank, comfortable in her own skin, easy with her own needs, and far more experienced than he had been. Adam had once arrived at a house party at which Kate had done a single shot of tequila, spun round, and whispered to him what she wanted to do to him later, a long, low whisper that had ended with him pushing her, he remembered, straight back out of the front door and stumbling together back to her room and Rachel could never, ever know but later, the third time that night, Kate had let him, told him actually, to—

  A song had come into his head, the lyrics aggressive and insistent. Quickly he typed in “Akon, ‘I Wanna Fuck You,’” clicked on Purchase Song, and then took the laptop into his bedroom, closing the door firmly behind him.

  “Please don’t forget that we’ve got the recital at Rupert and Georgina’s this evening.” Michelle was on the phone and Adam had put on his headset. It came out of his desk drawer for conference calls and for his mother—both required lengthy periods on the telephone that otherwise made his neck hurt.

  “I know, you e-mailed me about it yesterday.”

  “No, I know you know, but just please don’t get stuck at work. They’re looking forward to congratulating you so please make sure today that Lawrence knows it’s important that you leave on time. You’ve got to get all the way to Holland Park.”

  Michelle believed that, because Adam worked for the firm at which Lawrence Gilbert was a founding partner, the two men spent their days in constant communication about their personal lives. In Michelle’s mind, fuzzed with maternal pride, her son spent his days with his future father-in-law in some sort of cozy office for two, accessorized with stacks of important-looking ring binders and perhaps behind a smoked-glass door, a team like Holmes and Watson. The reality of thirty employees, of a long corridor carpeted in fading chartreuse and of private, if shabby, corner rooms for the partners, did not gel with her imaginings. Adam stifled the urge to attempt—yet again—to correct this impression but then stopped. If he did have to work late, it would be helpful to be able to pass the blame on to Lawrence.

  “Okay. I’ll see you there.”

  “Lovely, darling. Make sure you wear a suit.”

  “I’m wearing a suit! I’m at work.”

  “Lovely, well, keep it on.”

  “I’ll do my best. Oh, wait—Mum?”

  “Yes?”

  “I was thinking, maybe you could get Rupert and Georgina to invite Ellie Schneider this evening? Everyone’s been a bit harsh since she arrived. It might be good for her to meet some people.”

  There was a rare silence on the line. On the screen in front of him small white boxes overlapped as e-mails arrived and were ignored.

  “Mum?”

  “Mmm, yes, I was just thinking. It’s a bit of a chutzpah to be honest, I mean, and God knows what the Sabahs will make of her, but it’s a good thought, I should probably do it for Lawrence and Jaffa. Tell Lawrence I’ll take care of it.”

  5

  They were proceeding very slowly up the Sabahs’ graveled driveway, as Rachel was wearing high heels for the occasion, a challenge that she did not attempt often enough to have mastered. Adam couldn’t understand why she’d bothered—all evening he would have to be on the lookout for chairs or sideboards on which she could lean if he had to leave her alone. He suspected that it was related to her cousin’s arrival. More than once recently he had come home to find Rachel inspecting herself from all angles, arching like a hooked fish and declaring woefully that she was too fat and too short. The fat was her usual complaint; the short was new.

  As they approached the front door, Rachel squeezed his arm and whispered, “This house gets bigger every time we come here. I always forget how gorgeous it is.”

  “I never forget how gorgeous you are.”

  “You’re so sweet. I’m not sure, though, are you really sure it’s not too low-cut?”

  Adam sighed. Preparing an outfit for this evening had preoccupied Rachel since the previous weekend—the dress she was wearing was one of three she’d bought. Anything connected with Rupert and Georgina Sabah made her nervous, and finally she had announced that she was going shopping with Ellie who “knows about clothes,” and had indeed returned with the most flattering dress he’d ever seen her in. It was a little more revealing than any garment she’d have chosen alone but only subtly so, an enhanced version of Rachel’s own style rather than a grand deviation. “I thought you were going to come back dressed like her,” Adam had said when she showed him, and Rachel had screamed with laughter at the very suggestion.

  “Sorry, yes, I know it’s fine, I’ll stop going on about it,” she said now, cutting off his impatient reply, but nonetheless she patted the reassuringly voluminous pashmina that she had herself added to the outfit.

  Rachel was not the only guest to consider the evening significant. Unlike the Goodmans, Rupert and Georgina Sabah opened their house only on rare occasions, and invitations to these events were rarer still. As with all of the Sabahs’ entertaining, the motivation for staging this recital was philanthropic, for Georgina would tolerate the intrusion of other people into her home only when it was for a good cause. But this she did with grace if not with great frequency, for she felt keenly her own privilege and the corresponding responsibility to share it. This time, a Russian string quartet was visiting from Israel under Rupert’s patronage and, for a relatively modest charitable contribution, a select guest list was invited to a private concert. The charity was one of the Sabahs’ own, a children’s music school in Jerusalem dedicated to political as well as melodic harmonies, bringing Muslim and Jewish children together to play their instruments and to learn to play with each other. Next year, Georgina believed, the school orchestra would visit and perform at the Wigmore Hall, hope-filled and concordant. Already a few of the students had been to rehearse at one another’s houses.

  That sustaining image of two dark little children bonding over hummus and Handel was all that could have induced the frail and retiring Georgina to stand as she was now, greeting a glossily jeweled and furred procession of guests and saying faintly but earnestly to them, over and over, “So very good of you to come.” Rupert was nowhere to be seen.

  “Look at the fireplace!” said Rachel, and Adam stifled the urge to hush her. She had been here before, had made the same exclamation before, and in any case, alone he was far better at affecting nonchalance when he visited the Sabahs. This was ironic considering that it was Rachel’s grandmother Ziva through whom they were all connected. Newly married in 1946, Rupert and Georgina had toured the British Zone, and in the Bergen-Belsen Displaced Persons Camp they had made substantial contributions to the makeshift kindergarten and orphanage. It was there that they had met Ziva, fierce and fearsome with pride and rage. She had been their translator, and she and Georgina had been devoted to one another ever sin
ce.

  Behind Georgina loomed the fireplace in question, dove gray Italian marble veined with pale chestnut, as tall and broad as the doorway of a ballroom. The grate in the cavern beneath it was stacked with thick logs between which yellow flames licked and wavered, and above its mantel hung a gilt-framed antique mirror of similar proportions, mounted too high to reflect anything but the faded burgundy silk walls of the grand hallway. In the crowd Adam saw Sarah London, mother of Dan and Lisa London, talking earnestly to a man with a clipped blond beard who Adam believed was the father of someone he’d known from Sunday school. He was related, in some way Adam could not remember, to Rachel’s flatmate, Tanya Pearl. Rachel waved to Natalie Cordova, the young rabbi’s wife, who still looked alarmingly pregnant for a woman who’d given birth two months ago. She waved back and gestured that she would save them seats. Adam knew her from nursery school and had fond memories of her family poodle, Morris; Rachel had been in the same Brownie pack as Natalie and also remembered Morris, though he had by then been an elderly dog. Two years ago Natalie had married Rabbi Cordova, whom they both knew from Israel Tour, when he’d just been known as Ginger Josh.

  The music room evoked the same awestruck reaction from Rachel as the fireplace. The ceiling was lower here and the lemon walls, glowing in the light of Louis XVI candle sconces, managed to evoke both grandeur and coziness. The only electric bulbs in the room cast small, neat spotlights on the music stands; the flames of a hundred tapers were left to do the rest. The musicians sat poised, glancing at the Brahms on the pages before them and overseen, in turn, by the oil-painted eyes of Rupert Sabah’s ancestors, framed and sightless behind them.

  Ellie arrived at the beginning of the fourth movement, and the mounting agitation of the violin stirred the audience into even greater disapproval of her lateness. The doors were not at the back of the room but at the side and her slipping in was visible to absolutely everyone, except perhaps the far back corner. Tonight she had had the decency to cover herself up at least, but her tight jeans and brown leather jacket, aged and cracking at the elbows, made her even more incongruous amid this sea of sequins and velvet than her usual overexposure would have done. She had witnessed Rachel’s own anxiety about what to wear this evening, Adam thought in irritation, so the dress code could not have escaped her attention. Sitting between his fiancée and his mother, he heard them inhale in shamed stereo. Ellie looked at no one, merely took the empty seat on the end of the second row and leaned forward slightly to listen. When the music and applause ended she slipped from her chair and crossed the room to the window, and as the audience gathered their coats he watched as she unlatched the French doors and let herself out into the garden. He turned to see Rachel and his mother disappearing into the hallway together deep in conversation and so stayed where he was between the rows of plush chairs, observing Ellie through the departing throng.

  Open, the doors framed her, a cigarette between her lips, one hand shaking a gold lighter to encourage its disobedient flame. She stood in a circle of warm yellow light that spilled into the courtyard from the music room, but an icy November wind blew in around her, and her hair whipped forward. A gust of disapproval blew through the chamber with the cold air, and the candle flames guttered. Adam smiled in empathy at those murmuring their objections and crossed to greet her, and to tell her to close the doors.

  “Having a fag?” he asked, needlessly.

  “To Americans a fag is something else.”

  “Aren’t you an American?”

  “Unclear. Americans would say I’m English.” She hugged her jacket closed and shivered.

  Behind her rolled the Sabahs’ garden in which lights were hidden beneath rows of heavy yews, the lawn disappearing like a vast parkland into blackness. To the right, the courtyard was lined with topiaried orange trees in pots, and closed except for a small passage that led round to the front of the house. Between these embodiments of opulent tradition and of nature mastered and manicured stood Ellie, belonging to neither.

  “Well, you’re definitely not English.”

  She raised an eyebrow. “So we have a dilemma.”

  “We do.”

  “So.” She accepted the blazer that Adam had removed and handed to her. “What did I miss?”

  “You mean, apart from the first, second, and third movements? Not much. Rupert Sabah thanking us all for coming. A couple of rounds of tequila shots. The piñata. Chinese karaoke.”

  “Ah, Ziva will be devastated she missed it. She does a great ‘Bohemian Rhapsody.’”

  Adam laughed. Moss had darkened the seams between the broad York flagstones; Ellie began to follow one of these cracks with deliberation, walking heel to toe like a tightrope walker. After a few steps she turned and began to retrace the same slow, careful steps.

  “You know,” she reflected, “I really think Ziva’s my favorite person on the planet. I hadn’t even known how much I’d missed her till I came back. Everything else is worth it just to spend some time with my grandmother again.”

  “What sort of everything else?”

  “Oh, you know. Family stuff. Reacclimatizing.” She stopped pacing and pushed her hair back from her eyes. “So how go the wedding plans?”

  “No date yet. Rachel wants next August, but I’m pushing for sooner. And smaller.”

  “Keen to lock things down.”

  “Yes, that’s a spectacularly unromantic way of putting it, but yes.”

  “What’s the difference if it’s a few months more? Oh”—she laughed suddenly, exhaling smoke—“God, it’s not—I mean, no wonder. You’ve certainly waited long enough for the wedding night.”

  Adam laughed with her but then stopped short when he realized, horrified, that she was serious. “What?” he asked. “What?”

  “What what?”

  “You can’t seriously think that.”

  “Don’t shout. People are looking at you and I know how much you all hate that here. Think what? That you’re getting impatient, or that your love is still pure?”

  “The second one. For God’s sake.” He was freezing now, although he still stood shielded in the doorway, and he wanted his jacket back. He had come outside because he’d pitied her the disapproval of the room, but she had managed within seconds to make him furious. “Are you insane? It’s not the bloody eighteenth century, I’m not some sort of mad, retrogressive frummer …”

  “Sorry. What do I know?”

  “Something about something, surely. I mean, what tipped you off? My peyot? The clank of Rachel’s chastity belt?”

  “You’re mixing metaphors like crazy, or religions at least. I’m sorry, really. It’s just that everything here is so”—she paused—“traditional. And so much of it surprises me, and I still don’t really know anything about how things work, or at least I don’t remember. I was surprised that you and Rach don’t live together after dating so long, but when I asked her about it last weekend, it was like I’d suggested, I don’t know, a threesome or something. And so I had to guess why. And there was that time when you chucked her and went off ‘wiz dat shiksa’”—this affected Middle Eastern accent was presumably her impression of Jaffa’s outrage, and he felt a sharp discomfort at the thought of the Gilbert family discussing his behavior—“and back then I thought that it might have been about sex.”

  “I didn’t chuck her! I just needed some spa—That’s actually none of your business. And it’s not that, thank you.” Once more he turned to leave her, hot with annoyance and aware that she had pushed him into sounding priggish and defensive, while she remained unmoved by his temper. He was stopped by his mother, who had returned to pick up Rachel’s pashmina for her and came over to demand that he do something about the temperature.

  “Adam, close those now, please. It’s really far too cold, and all the candles are going to blow out.”

  Michelle wore a navy silk scarf around her throat, pinned into its perfect whorl with a small gold scarab. She fingered this as she spoke, minutely adjusting its already
precise arrangement. “And you should take Rachel home soon, her shoes are hurting her.” She smiled briefly and unconvincingly into the garden toward Ellie and then returned to her beloved daughter-in-law elect, with whom she had been gossiping before the satisfying glow of the immense fireplace. Adam reached up to bolt the left-hand door, leaving the right one open for Ellie.

  “Thank you.” She put out her cigarette and came in holding the stub between her fingers, and then stepped back out into the garden. “I’m going to go, actually. I’ll go out this way so I don’t disturb everyone.” She pointed at the path that led around from the courtyard to the driveway, and then disappeared down it into the shadows. An usher standing nearby looked quizzically at Adam, who shrugged in answer. Sure, close the doors. Leave her out there, I don’t care. And then he remembered—

  “You’ve got my jacket!”

  From the darkness she called back, “I’m in all tomorrow night, you can pick it up then.”

  6

  When her children were teenagers, Ziva Schneider took a position at the Israeli embassy in London and the family moved from Tel Aviv to Temple Fortune. The job was the only possible inducement for her to leave the country that had rescued her. Fresh, vibrant, healthy Israel had healed the body that Bergen-Belsen had almost destroyed and had woven muscle around fragile bone, had cured her malnutrition with kibbutz ideology and sweet oranges. In the British internment camp in Haifa, she had married the second Yosef, Yosef Schneider; the bridegroom a twenty-two-year-old widower, the bride a twenty-four-year-old widow. Both their families had been murdered in Belsen and they had married because they had not died. But that was not enough, in the end, to sustain the union. Like many of the marriages formed in the aftermath of the Holocaust it ended almost immediately, two human beings drawn together by the immensity of their renewed, impassioned life forces and pulled just as quickly apart by the immensity of their trauma. Ziva did not mind very much. The second Yosef had given her the children, Jaffa and Boaz—that was what life force was, after all, and the second Yosef himself was of very little consequence. The love of her life had been the first Yosef, and would now be Israel. Israel meant freedom from persecution. Israel meant Never Again. Israel had nourished her heart, breathed sunshine and hope and comradeship and youthful, optimistic socialism into her soul. She would leave its threatened borders only to represent it, with staunch pride, elsewhere. Rupert Sabah had helped them to find the house.