The Innocents

by Francesca Segal

  “Wooden spoon,” said Barnaby and Adam together, well taught by their women. Ellie laughed. “Impressive. You’re quite the Betty Crockers.” She slid the contents of one bowl into the alpine peaks of cream in the other. Barnaby Wilcox stood and began to collect various belongings—a large bunch of keys, a wallet of cracked tan leather, a mobile phone and a small paperback, sliding these one by one into the pockets of a brown velvet jacket that he had retrieved from the arm of the sofa.

  “I’ve got to go,” he said, obviously. “Let me know how the pudding works out. If it’s good I’ll make it with my daughter this weekend.”

  That this statement was probably true did not, in Adam’s opinion, make it any less obnoxious under the circumstances.

  When the door closed behind him there was a long silence. Ellie was looking at Adam expectantly; Adam was looking at Ellie with the same expression. The standoff continued until Adam said, “I don’t want to know what he and his bananas were doing here.”

  “Okay,” she said easily, tipping the contents of Barnaby’s abandoned teacup down her throat and putting cup and saucer into the sink. Adam felt an urge to shake her.

  “Ziva’s spoken to Lawrence; she’s worried about you. He told me about the situation with Marshall Bruce.”

  In saying this he realized that he was succumbing to his urge to shake her, and it proved effective—she appeared fleetingly shaken. This result was less satisfying than he’d imagined. She drained her own cup but did not put it with the other one; instead she refilled it and made no move to offer anything to Adam. After a while she said quietly, “What did he say to you about Marshall?”

  “That you were about to be implicated in the whole thing.”

  She nodded, but whether it was assent or merely urging him to go on was not clear.

  “And that his wife’s team has evidence of substantial financial payments going back more than five years.”

  “Mmm.” She took a deep breath. “Will you help me finish making the pudding? We can do it while we talk. I’m not avoiding the subject”—this in response to his look of incredulity—“but I’ve started it now and I might as well finish it. I can think at the same time. I’ve decided I need to make things with my hands, it’s my new thing. Everything else is just so intangible and bullshit. And I know that really when you get down to it, cooking produces ephemera just like all the other crap we all do, or I do anyway, but at least for a moment there’s a thing, you know? I sometimes think I’d have been so damn happy working on an assembly line.” She paused. “Anyway. We just layer the stuff, the Nilla wafers, then the bananas in slices, then the pudding stuff, three times.” She sat down on the gray sofa with the bowl of vanilla-cream emulsion and a large Pyrex dish before her on the coffee table. Adam obediently brought over the open packet of wafers and a plate on which sat a bunch of bananas and a paring knife. He then poured himself a large cup of gin from the open bottle before returning to the sofa. He was going nowhere until he’d got some sense out of her.

  “Into rounds?” he asked, peeling a banana and picking up the knife. She nodded and looked at him, briefly and gratefully.

  For a while neither of them spoke. Adam peeled and sliced the browning bananas. Ellie arranged these and the light disks of biscuit on the bottom of the large dish in overlapping fish scales, alternating with satisfying dollops of cream. Her arrangements were neat and careful and she was breathing deeply and deliberately beside him, like a yogi. The end result showed perfect stripes of buff, white, and the pale suede banana slices through the glass sides. They admired it in silence.

  “So are you here as a friend, or as my lawyer?” she asked finally.

  “Both. Well, it depends on whether you want us to act for you. But of course as your friend, too.”

  “A friend would be nice. And I do want you and Lawrence to act for me, if you don’t mind doing it. Then I know I can trust my lawyers, which will make for a novel experience. I just want to know I’m doing everything I can to fix this for Ziva.”

  “Surely this is about fixing it for you?”

  She shrugged. “The right decision for Ziva is the right decision for me. I don’t care what the press write about me, but I can’t imagine it’s much fun for my grandmother to read it. For me it’s not a big deal and anyway, it can’t be worse than anything that’s been said before.” Her voice was quiet. “What was it? Bringing my depravity to Columbia University, endorsing the ‘degradation and humiliation of women’ in my ‘attempts’ to be an actress, and that of course means that I’m single-handedly setting back the women’s movement by decades.”

  “You wield a lot of power, apparently.”

  She laughed. “I know, right?”

  “But still, it can’t be much fun to read all that about yourself. You can’t be unaffected.”

  “No. But it’s amazing how fast you get used to it.”

  “And now?”

  “Now it’s going to be a bit different. I’m here. I’m supposedly repenting, remember? And I feel bad for Marshall.”

  This statement seemed contrary to the point of being disingenuous, and after a day immersed in the man’s extensive and creatively sordid proclivities, Adam was unimpressed by her apparent generosity. He did not feel bad for Marshall Bruce, or take kindly to anyone else doing so.

  “How can you feel bad? He’s behaved like a total bastard.” Finding his cup was empty Adam refilled it, and Ellie’s, before continuing. “He’s supposed to be a respectable public figure; he’s got the whole deal, living the dream—gorgeous wife, kids, an amazing career, three galleries, he’s friends with everyone—and he’s always being interviewed sounding smug saying that his entire success and empire and whatever is down to his wife’s support so he looks like the perfect husband, and then he screws it all up like this.” Everyone had become familiar with the story of the Bruces’ marriage since the scandal had broken, and Adam’s afternoon with Ellie’s file had supplemented this information. “That poor stupid woman. Her family virtually disowned her for marrying him because he wasn’t posh enough or whatever; she worked for ten years supporting him whilst he did nothing except paint crap no one wanted and hobnob at New York charity functions as far as I can tell, and she was the one who encouraged him to use all her family contacts and start dealing instead, so it is all down to her, actually. And then as soon as he’s successful and hanging out with politicians and making obscene amounts of money he starts screwing around on her with all these strippers and waitresses and whores.”

  Ellie slid a brown polka-dotted joint out of her cigarette case and lit it before replying. She held it neatly between a bitten thumb and forefinger; a plume of blue-gray smoke snaked upward. “Well, I’m not a stripper, and I’ve never worked as a waitress, so I guess by a process of elimination I know what you think of me.”

  The passion of his previous speech evaporated in the heat of his embarrassment. “I didn’t mean you,” he said, weakly.

  “It’s all right. As I’ve said, I’ve been called worse. And no doubt will be again once this whole business comes out.”

  “It might not all come out; we’re going to do our best. Do you mind, though? It would really help to know how much of it is actually, you know, based on fact. I’ve brought a file.”

  “Oh, a file. Well, that makes it all official.” The air was heavy with the scent of coconut again. She took a deep drag on her joint and then balanced it on the side of the ashtray, reaching for her drink as she exhaled. Her voice was congested with smoke. “So what do you need from me?”

  “Well, why don’t you read it first and then tell me what happened? And whatever’s not true, we can begin by dealing with that. I mean, is it true?”

  “I don’t know what you’ve read. It’s true that we’re good friends. We care about each other, in different ways I guess. I’ve known Marshall a long time.”

  “Was he paying you five thousand dollars a month?” Adam asked, emboldened by the gin and Lawrence’s two pints.


  “He gave me money, yes. He knew I needed it, at that stage. I wasn’t modeling during term time. He had it to give.”

  “You were underage when all this started.”

  “I was nearly seventeen. So?”

  “Look, his wife is saying what looks very much like the truth—that you were underage when you started … your relationship … with him. Were you?”

  Ellie made a soft kissing sound with her lips and Rocky scampered over to her from the corner. She scooped the dog into her lap.

  “I’m not going to be the means by which Marshall’s wife punishes him because she’s angry. I don’t see why I should say anything one way or the other.”

  “It makes a difference. If you really were underage we can keep your name out of the press coverage for one thing—you’d be protected.”

  Ellie shook her head, idly stroking one of Rocky’s silky ears. “I’m not going to play that game.”

  “Look,” said Adam, exasperated, “was he or was he not paying you to sleep with him?”

  He must now be drunk, he realized, and she was frustrating his attempts to show her that he was different. That men could be different. He wanted her to trust him so that he could take charge and give her the help she so clearly needed, whether she was aware that she needed it or not. He could never predict any of her interpretations of the world beyond the certain knowledge that they would not be the same as his own.

  She sighed. “It must be nice to see everything so simply.”

  “You’re so bloody patronizing,” he heard himself saying.

  “I’m not,” she answered, unblinking. “I really mean it. You have such certainty. ‘This is wrong.’ ‘This is right.’ ‘This should be here.’ ‘Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s whatever.’ It sounds peaceful. In my life everything is a little less categorical than that.”

  “I covet lots of things,” Adam said, slowly, and then looked at her. “But I know what’s important in life, that’s all. Values. Family. Love.”

  “Family I’m learning to value—it’s been a long time since I’ve known what it’s like to have family batting for you, although I was the one rejecting Ziva’s efforts so maybe that’s my own fault. Maybe everything would look different if I’d—But you know, I was mad at them all for a long time. Whatever. So yes, I suppose that’s new for me. But God, I value love. I value love like nothing else, you’ve no idea how much. And you know what? I think Marshall values love too. It just looks a little different to yours. He’s not a bad person, you know, although I’m sure you won’t believe me. He’s been a good friend to me.”

  “He’s exploited you.”

  “How?”

  Adam had been furious all day about Marshall Bruce’s exploitation of Ellie. Now, with her sitting before him, it seemed as if the idea of exploitation had merely been a construct by which he might absolve her of responsibility. The reality was far less appealing than the role he had earlier created for her.

  “You know,” she continued, “sometimes people make a choice because they know it’s the wrong one. Self-destruction can be very seductive, sometimes.”

  She had taken off the apron when Barnaby left and was wearing only the soft gray T-shirt and tiny, black cotton running shorts. She folded her legs up beneath her and now sat, cross-legged, beside him.

  He followed her gaze. On the inside of her thigh extended four faint silvery scars, as fine as blades. He swallowed. As she remained beside him, unmoving, he saw into her. It was as if she had stepped, for a moment, into an X-ray. The fine scars wavered and blurred before his eyes. He saw her head bent with rage, saw her fingers shaking but determined, pressing a razor blade and slicing across her own vulnerable flesh, could see her watching her own bright blood slide and drip. He understood it then—it was a reminder that she was alive, and her penance for living. He wanted, with violence, to protect her. He wanted to crush her to his chest until the images that had tormented her were muffled and invisible beneath his weight.

  He took a slow breath and asked, “Who knows?”

  “Only strangers. Lots of them, I guess. Every time I do a shoot they have to airbrush. And no one’s ever said anything but I guess anyone who I’ve … But if you mean people who matter? No one.” She shook her head. “Only you.”

  He watched as she ran her thumb lightly, almost fondly, over the fine white scars. Aligned like fingers, they would be perfectly shielded by his hand if he reached out and touched them.

  She said, “I want you to know me. Who I was. Who I am.”

  He nodded. He felt the weight of this new secret, combined with a strange, heady gratitude that she had chosen him.

  “I want that, too.” He paused. “Did it help?”

  “A little. Temporary relief.”

  “But you don’t … anymore.”

  “No. Not since my eighteenth birthday. Never.”

  “That sounds like quite a birthday party.” He risked this joke so that she would know he did not see her differently, would know that he believed it was something she’d left behind and that he wasn’t frightened away by what she had confided. He was glad to hear relief in her laugh.

  “Yes, I’ve had better. It was years ago now, though. And I know you don’t think so but I’m pretty good at taking care of myself these days. I feel very different from how I did then.” She turned to look at him. “Which doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate having a beautiful man appearing to help me out with his legal wizardry.”

  Something had shifted between them, a subtle realignment, as though a trauma had not only been confessed but lived through together in fast forward and they had emerged, strengthened and energized by having survived it. She had not taken her eyes from his, and it was only then that Adam realized, from the manic pounding in his chest, how close they were to one another, how right it would feel to lean forward and kiss her; how much she wanted him to. He stood up abruptly from the low sofa to look around the studio.

  On the white-painted bricks above the mattress in the corner hung a photograph, the spaghetti-fine curve of a banister soft amid a rigorous grid of straight lines; a door frame, a table. At the center of the picture five stems thrust upward from the bulb of a vase, four leaves and a single flower arranged at perfect angles. A small rectangle of brass tacked to the bottom of the frame said “Chez Mondrian” in small, light italics.

  “I like this. The light and dark is beautiful. Who’s it by?”

  “André Kertész. He’s an awesome photographer, Theo’s started collecting his work. It’s artificial.”

  He paused. He could feel her behind him, though he knew she had not moved. “What’s artificial? The photograph?”

  “No, the flower in the middle. Mondrian colored it to match his studio. I don’t know what it means but it feels significant. Or maybe significant precisely because it doesn’t matter. Does that make any sense?”

  “No.” He remained with his back to her and breathed deeply.

  “I suppose I just thought—it made me think that it’s one way of saying that substance isn’t important. Only the appearance.”

  “That’s so superficial.”

  “It doesn’t need to be, it can be precisely the opposite. It can also mean that what matters is the face you show to the world and the way you treat the people in it, and that your private inner life isn’t judged. It resonates with Jewish thinking actually—that actions are what truly matter, and thoughts aren’t sins unless you act on them.”

  “Well, I certainly hope that’s true,” he answered. The pounding of his heart had slowed; he was suddenly exhausted and turned back to her to take his leave. For the last few moments he had been tormented by the thought of her lips on his skin; it was time for him to be safely away, at home. He would walk until he found a cab. “I’m going to leave the file with you. Call me when you’ve read it.”

  “Okay.” She stayed where she was, looking up at him. “I trust you. Whatever you tell me to do, I’ll do.”

  10

 
Adam met jasper at Belsize Park tube station on the way to Dan and Willa London’s Christmakah party, an event that had begun partially as a joke and had since burgeoned into an institution. Willa had converted to Judaism when she married Dan, and they had since decided to combine the best of both families’ traditions into a single hybrid.

  “Hi, mate. Right, let’s go.”

  They set off up Haverstock Hill, Jasper rubbing his hands together in the cold. His round face was chilled pink; Adam had a startling preview of what his friend might look like at sixty, puce and multichinned.

  “God. It’s freezing. Remind me why you didn’t go to Eilat again?”

  “Too much work this year.”

  “You’ve been shagging the boss’s daughter for a decade; surely he would have given you the time off.”

  “He would have,” Adam conceded. “But I don’t like asking. And we’re going to end up taking loads of time off for the wedding in the summer so I thought … Anyway, Rachel didn’t give me any schtick for having to go without me; she actually didn’t seem to mind when I said I was staying here. Once we’re married we might not end up going away with them every Christmas”—at this Jasper snorted in disbelief, which Adam ignored—“so it’s her last year to go away alone with her family, blah, blah.”

  “Whatever. If Tanya’s parents wanted to pay for me to be lying by the pool at the Hilton right now, you wouldn’t catch me saying no.”

  “Leslie and Linda would probably pay you to stay away from their family holidays.”

  “Mate—I don’t know what you’ve been hearing. The Pearls love me. They can’t get enough.”

  They had turned off the main road and were now descending Pond Street where the looming bulk of the Royal Free Hospital, newly enlarged by a refurbishment almost as hideous as the original concrete architecture, dominated the sky. Its front was uplit in garish violet; the huge Christmas tree blinked with red and yellow lights that flashed only a little more slowly than the rotating blue strobes of the incoming ambulances.