The Innocents

by Francesca Segal

  “But surely Ziva more than anyone doesn’t care how much you conform, or don’t?”

  “No I know, she doesn’t want to turn me into some perfect little North London clone”—Adam bristled on Rachel’s behalf—“but you know, my aunt’s driven by this urge to conform, even if my grandmother’s not. Jaffa feels this need to be safe and burrowed into the security of a community and she finds it genuinely traumatic when anything threatens that. That’s the legacy, you know?” She brushed a thread of tobacco from her lap. “The children of survivors are sort of ignored in terms of impact but I think that’s part of their legacy. Creating a sense of security and of routine and a very tight circle of friends after a generation when the world turned upside down. So I don’t mock it, honestly. It must feel vital to know where you’ll be ten years next Tuesday and who you’ll be there with and what you’ll all be wearing, because it’s safe, and they all grew up with evidence that the world is anything but. Obviously my grandmother’s generation, actually living through what they lived through, don’t give a shit about napkin rings. But for the kids they raised, with all their baggage, suburbia feels safe. The trivia matters precisely because it’s trivia. Being free to care about napkin rings is a luxury.”

  “I hadn’t thought about it.”

  “Ziva and I talk about it a lot. It’s one of the reasons why Jaffa cares so very much what people say about me, I think, and so she goes crazy about anything I do and Ziva takes the flak. And even Ziva must get exhausted defending me all the time. I want her to go to her lunches at Jewish Care and be able to boast to all her friends there about me for once.”

  This was the longest and most sincere speech he’d heard Ellie make. Her observations sometimes made her sound as if she had been airlifted into North West London on an anthropological mission, and each time Adam had taken offense at the implication that his world was so very, very foreign—but now he saw that she was protecting herself. She had set herself apart as a commentator before those whom she observed could exclude her with their condemnation. And she understood them, he thought, far better than they troubled to understand her.

  “I don’t have to agree with it all,” she continued, and despite his recent insight Adam immediately bridled once again at her implied criticism of anything, “but if I’m going to be here, then I should try. So come on, tell me. You’ll be my mentor. What do I have to do to become a Nice Jewish Girl?”

  “Well, you’re already Jewish, so you’re halfway there,” he said, but then realized he had misjudged his tone. She had tucked her knees beneath her and turned toward him unsmiling, awaiting his verdict.

  He felt awkward. With Rachel he would have been on more familiar terrain—she was too sensitive for frankness when it was unpleasant, and he knew from years of painful experience and subsequent training that they were both safer when he shielded her with soothing platitudes. Of course the headmaster didn’t mind that you missed the staff meeting, darling, he knows that everyone’s human; that haircut is beautiful on you, not too puffy at all. It would become the truth. The headmaster would forget; the hair would grow. It did her no good in the meantime to become panic-stricken, which she invariably did. Thus he protected her with forthcoming and predictable reassurances, and he knew that she expected him to. But Ellie, he sensed, was asking for something different.

  “Okay. Well, I guess if you’re specifically worried about what Jaffa’s friends think then the most obvious thing is the way you dress,” he said slowly. It struck him after he’d spoken that he had drawn attention to her bare flesh currently on display as they sat alone together. Her wet hair was dripping onto the enormous gray Rolling Stones T-shirt she wore; the seam around the neck had been torn so that it plunged deeply off one pale shoulder, and although the shirt reached almost to her knees, she did not appear to have anything on underneath. The iconic red lips and fat, licking tongue had been rendered in sequins, and the sparkling bow of the top lip aligned almost perfectly with the neat swell of her breasts beneath it. He looked down steadily at his own hands.

  She nodded, a serious expression on her face, as if she would like to be taking notes. “Okay. But just help me to understand—why does it matter?”

  He hauled himself back to her question, with difficulty. There were always girls who wore short dresses, whose nails were fake, and who posted holiday photos of themselves on Facebook, cowboy-hatted and barely contained by tiny string bikinis. But theirs was a superficial daring, for everyone knew that these same girls still lived with their parents, obeyed their beloved daddies, and though they had been known to dance on the odd nightclub table, on Friday nights they could always be found having Shabbat dinner at home. But a girl like Ellie could not afford the provocative costumes. It was asking the impossible for everyone to forget what they knew of her past but if she wanted forgiveness, at least, then she would be expected to show penitence. If nothing else, it would be easier for him to concentrate around her if she covered up.

  “It’s not really the clothes, I guess, it’s more”—He wanted to say that it was about reputation, but that sounded so antiquated. Still, she seemed, for once, not to be laughing at him, and so he risked it—“it’s about reputation. Girls here are very careful about, about knowing their worth, I guess you could say. And people make mistakes, everyone knows that, and it’s fine that you—you made that film, for example, or that you’ve dabbled with … substances,” he said weakly, speaking into his glass to avoid looking at either the oddly childish flavored joint in her left hand, or the wine in her right. “But I guess you want to show everyone that you’ve left that stuff behind, and coming to shul on Kol Nidre dressed demurely would have helped.”

  The coconut scent was heady in his nostrils. She set her glass on the floor and looked down, holding the joint to the flame of her lighter. Then she said quietly, “But what if I don’t consider those things to be mistakes?”

  “You’ve lived here before. It’s not so very different from anywhere else,” he said, changing the subject in order to consider this question before he answered it.

  “It’s another planet. You’re in it, so you can’t see it. Those of us who were evicted can compare and contrast.”

  “Evicted’s a strong word, no?”

  “Twice, actually. People couldn’t really get past the cinematic horror of the way my mother died, and therefore we were essentially evicted from normal society. I mean, it’s not like she died of a heart attack, or something normal. And then literally, when Boaz decided to run away to New York.”

  “Couldn’t you have moved in with Jaffa and Lawrence if you’d really wanted to be here?” he asked. “I thought they wanted you to stay with them when your dad went to America.” She was right, of course. For most people who knew of her, the spectacular brutality of her mother’s death was her defining characteristic. She could not escape it.

  “Oh, and Rachel would really have loved that. I was enough of a pain in the ass being the charity-case first cousin without being foisted on her as a pseudosister. That would have gone down very, very badly, I suspect.”

  “Is that entirely fair?”

  He tried to ask this carefully, as her hostility had surprised him. The way Rachel told the story, she had been in as much torment as her parents—they had all desperately wanted Ellie to move in with them but had not felt able to suggest that she be separated from Boaz. Whatever he was, after all, he was her father. Had it been up to Rachel, Adam had always believed, the Gilberts would have taken the little girl in a heartbeat.

  “Which bit? Oh, I’m sure they’d have said I could move in with them if I’d begged. I do remember a few whispers about it, yes. But it was all crap. Rach didn’t exactly push for me to live with them. I’m sure that’s why Jaffa and Lawrence didn’t ever even bring it up with Boaz, I don’t think, in the end. But in any case, my inclination didn’t really come into it.”

  “Why?”

  “Oh, Boaz was pretty formidable then. The more irrational he’s being the m
ore determined he is and anyway, he never asked me. He needed someone to take care of him.”

  “But who was taking care of you?”

  “To stop me making all those mistakes, you mean?”

  He smiled. “Or not mistakes then, if you say so. Choices.”

  “You’re mocking, but I do say so. That’s exactly what I’d have said. Those ‘mistakes’ you cataloged—the film, whatever else I’ve done that you secretly disapprove of—I chose to do those things. No regrets.”

  “I still think you deserve someone to take care of you,” he said, after a moment.

  “You know the one thing I can’t stand?” she said suddenly, and he realized with horror that—out of nowhere—she had tears in her eyes. “I can’t stand the fact that everyone expects me to pretend all the time. Now that I’m here Jaffa is really trying, and Lawrence is—well, you know, he’s such a good man. He’s Lawrence. And they’re relieved I’m here, I know that, and they want to be allowed to make up for all these things that they feel guilty about, but everyone here wants me to leave everything behind and pretend to be something I’m not and abandon my whole life, or at the very least conceal my whole life, which is just so fucking lonely.”

  She did not bury her face in her hands as Rachel might have done, or collapse into emotional submission that might have permitted him to lean over and hold her. She did not even look at him. She sat rigid just as she had before, but for a single, mascara-gray tear that painted a faint track down her cheek. “You know, they’re all so worried about me all the time. I know that when they look at me they feel this … pity.” She spat the word. Her BlackBerry began to ring, a cheery calypso tinkling, and she silenced it. “And there’s all this guilt for the years that they feel they missed. But they did miss them, for whatever reasons, and they either want me to be perfect like Rachel or expect me to be broken and helpless in a way that would be more … palatable, I guess, or sympathetic. I’m not allowed another option. The idea that I don’t want to collapse and weep about it, that I might want to live … I know that sounds melodramatic but you have to live, because people just disappear. They’re there, and then they disappear. Gone. And you can never touch them again. I can never tell her anything again. You know?”

  Adam nodded.

  “You know …” She began to comb her fingers slowly through her hair, separating loose tangles that were now almost dry. “I might not live the way that my family want and God knows I’m not Rachel. But I’m living, and that should be enough. Call me a mess if you want, but still, you know, I get through the day. Do what you’ve gotta do. I don’t know about someone to look after me, I look after myself okay. But it would be”—she paused—“nice, I suppose, if someone got it. Just a little. Just a part of it.”

  The ache that Adam felt at that moment was surprising and acute. He hurt for her. With her self-possession and guarded irony, Ellie did not encourage anyone to remember what she had suffered; until now he had not really let himself imagine. And he felt ashamed—of himself, and of all of them. Minutes before he had been lecturing her pompously about her necklines, and she had shown him that he was ridiculous. She had come home to her family and was lonelier here than anywhere, and that could not be right.

  “I’m lonely,” he said, suddenly.

  She sighed, and the timbre of her sigh could have resonated with anything from exhaustion to despair. She let her head drop back on the arm of the sofa. Beside him he could see nothing but the curve of a white neck, light gleaming across her jutting collarbone; the shadowed hollow at the base of her throat. There was such exposure in the position that she seemed naked before him and the desire to touch her, which he had battled ever since she stood over him in Ziva’s hallway, became unbearable. Whatever it was that she had awoken in him, it was both impossible and indefensible. He got up and crossed the small room, heading for anything that might save him.

  “Adam—” she started, but her BlackBerry began to ring, a different song this time. Now it was Jay-Z in an Empire State of Mind, and she scrambled to her feet to answer it with more fervor than he had ever seen in her. Jay-Z was barely in his flow when she had snatched up the phone and breathed, “Hi, baby,” in a voice that made Adam’s stomach turn. It was the sight of his jacket hanging by the front door that galvanized him into action, and he was already holding it and striding out into the courtyard before he realized what he’d done. Rocky barked. Through the window Ellie was waving him back, but that she did not call aloud to him made him all the more determined to leave. She shrugged and turned away, and as he passed between the moss green benches, he heard her saying, “But how was the auction, baby?”

  That evening Adam had no trouble choosing Rachel’s song. “She’s the One” by Robbie Williams was a return to his previous form—a simple melody and an expression of the overwhelming relief that he had felt when, driving home from Bethnal Green, he reached King’s Cross and the streets became familiar. He had regained his bearings then and had known for certain that he was heading in the right direction. Rachel was the one. But the knowledge hadn’t stopped him from listening to the Jay-Z song that Ellie had saved on her phone in order to glean any clues that it might offer to her relationship with the mystery caller, nor could it erase the memory of her sinking into the sofa, head thrown back, the image of a vast, provoking tongue glittering across her chest. And it did not prevent him, an hour later, from returning to his computer laughing with delighted satisfaction that he had finally been able to capture the strains of a tune that had been tickling at the edges of his consciousness. He found it online, an American blues track called “I’m Trying to Make London My Home,” and sent the song, with its glorious harmonica riffs and simple, apposite lyrics, to Ellie. She might associate Manhattan with the men of her past life, but London was still up for the taking.

  7

  The next day the sky was pale November white, and the stiff grass of Hampstead Heath crunched frozen underfoot. The Heath was quiet, sparsely populated with dog walkers and the odd brave, chilly family. A magpie, ink black and striped with azure, scratched and hopped beneath the beeches.

  “Thank you for the Robbie song, honey.” Rachel was waiting for him on Hampstead Way as he parked, with her parents’ ancient retriever, Schnitzel, collapsed at her feet. “She’s the One” had been a good choice—he had awoken that morning to a long and grateful e-mail. “They’re always so different that I know how much thought you must put into choosing them,” she’d written, “and I’m marrying the sweetest man in the world.” He had made up for the ground he’d lost over the Akon “I Wanna Fuck You” debacle (the lines about bouncing titties had gone down particularly badly), which she had found “just so insulting to be honest, Ads, did you press the wrong thing?” But today all was harmonious, and her face had lit up when she’d seen him. She and Schnitzel had bounded over to the car with equal spring in their steps.

  “Hey, Pumpkin, hello, Schnitzel. My two favorite girls.” He patted Schnitzel’s hollow blond flank. “Now you see, that’s a real dog. Who wants one of those rats when you could have a proper animal?”

  Rachel handed him the lead and slipped her arm through his, and pushing past the nettle bushes, they crossed into the Heath Extension. Once they were safely on the grass Adam unclipped the dog, who continued to plod along beside them as if still tethered. The appeal of gamboling had worn off; these days she was happy to meander along at the pace of her human companions.

  “Did you see the attachment to my e-mail?” Rachel asked.

  “No, I read it on my phone. What was it?”

  “Ads! I wanted you to tell me today if you liked it. It was a photo of the function rooms at the Berkeley. They’ve still got one Sunday slot free next August, but they have to know tomorrow.”

  “But I don’t want to get married in August.”

  He realized that this sounded petulant and he was about to neutralize it with a more playful statement but then stopped himself. Until now, setting the date had been a point o
n which they teased one another. But he had begun to feel faintly emasculated by his own lack of control, and increasingly irritated that not Rachel, or Jaffa, or even his own mother had taken a second to listen to his thoughts on the subject. Whenever the wedding was discussed, the women treated him as if he were a small child clamoring for adult attention, whose conversational contributions were to be indulged and then ignored.

  They had reached the bridle path that bisected the Heath Extension, the chips of black bark beneath their feet rimed gray with frost. At the children’s play area he stopped and leaned against the wooden fence. Schnitzel flopped to her belly beside him, already grateful for the pause.

  “I don’t want to wait that long,” he continued, rocking back and forth on his heels. “I don’t understand why planning a party has to take nearly a year,” and then, knowing that the trivializing word party might have put him under threat, went on quickly, “I want you to be my wife, Pumpkin, that’s why I proposed to you in the first place. I want us to be married, I want us to live together, I want to get on with our life together as a married couple. And if it’s the hotel and the guest list and the caterers that are holding it all up and takes all that time, then why do we need that stuff?”

  She cocked her head and regarded him for a moment before reaching out to touch his hand. “We don’t need that stuff, Ads, but we’ll only do this once, and isn’t it more romantic to do it properly?”

  “No!” He was shouting now, taking full advantage of their isolation. So often when they talked he had to be careful, unconsciously modulating his tones to avoid anyone overhearing. At Rachel’s flat, Tanya was usually padding around with her ears pricked for gossip, and in the restaurants they frequented Rachel was always convinced—not without reason—that they were likely to be sitting within earshot of someone they knew. To be able to raise his voice was a rare luxury. It felt energizing.