The Innocents

by Francesca Segal

  This was the first time Adam had gone to the Londons’ party, as he had always been in Eilat with Rachel. Indeed, it was the first winter holiday they were spending apart in many years, and so far it was as exhilarating as he had thought it might be. They were engaged—there was no need to waste energy missing her now that he knew they were to spend eternity together. Two weeks, in the meantime, stretched ahead of him as a rather welcome break. He planned to work less and drink more, had tickets to weekday football matches and two away games, and had accepted invitations to parties that Rachel would usually have vetoed (“It’s miles away, Adam! It’s in town, how will we park on a Saturday night?” or “Yes, I know, but your university friends are a bit … And anyway, it’s Tanya’s birthday and I said we’d be there so we can’t”). That afternoon he had driven the Gilbert clan to the airport—piloting Jaffa’s beloved thirty-year-old Volvo station wagon to accommodate their refugee-style packing—and had been guiltily unaffected by Rachel’s tears at Departures. She was going on a beach holiday after all, not being cast into perpetual exile. With a recently rediscovered Sonny Boy Williamson album blasting out of the fizzing, ancient speakers he had driven back, abandoned the ailing car in the Gilberts’ driveway, and gone straight home to change for the Christmakah party.

  They were mounting the stairs outside Dan and Willa’s building when a distinctly uncelestial voice spoke to them from above. “A-dam! Ja-sper!”

  “Li-sa!” Jasper mimicked and a laugh returned from the balcony.

  “When did Lisa get back?” Adam asked as the buzzer sounded. Lisa London was Dan’s twin sister, a famed beauty in the last years of summer camp who embodied that rare alchemy of a tomboyish ease among her brother’s friends with more distinctly feminine advantages. At twelve (when she was not yet beautiful, though the accolade benefited him retroactively), she and Adam had declared themselves boyfriend and girlfriend for two halcyon weeks until—it was too galling to remember, even these many years later—she had dumped him for a prepubescent (although admittedly not yet fat) Jasper Cohen. It was Jasper who had claimed the triumph of being Lisa London’s first kiss—on a rain-slick pavement, behind the graffitied photo booth in Golders Green tube station—even though she’d gone out with Adam again shortly afterward and had subsequently bestowed upon him the same favor. Which one of them had technically “got there” first was therefore under contention. For the last year she had been on a general surgery rotation in a Manchester hospital, and it had piqued both Jasper’s and Adam’s interest to learn that she’d finally broken up with a little-seen non-Jewish boyfriend who had been around, in rumored form at least, for some time. She was a tremendously accomplished and gratifying flirt, a valued commodity for men as long attached as Adam and Jasper.

  “Didn’t she call you, mate? She’s been back two weeks. Ha. She clearly can’t keep away from me, whereas you …” Jasper made a wavering hand signal.

  The door of the flat was open. Dan had made whiskey-laced hot apple cider, which he was distributing in red plastic pint glasses. Willa circulated behind him, her blond hair hidden beneath a red felt Santa hat, offering Chanukah doughnuts. From the speakers Harry Connick Jr. was crooning, sultry and smooth, that it was the most wonderful time of the year. The living room was hot and crowded, noisy with voices and laughter. Adam recognized almost everyone—either the long-known dramatis personae of North West London’s social scene or familiar faces from Willa’s birthday parties: her school friends and colleagues. The evening had a nostalgic feel to it—the Londons were not unduly concerned with keeping their soft furnishings pristine and had for many years been the only couple willing to throw a party of this scale. Most of Adam’s other friends from the Suburb had years ago begun hosting determinedly sophisticated dinners and admiring one another’s kitchen Corians and spotless carpets (this placed rather clear limits on entertainment, as their guests were required to use coasters, and often to remove outdoor footwear). Adam and Rachel had oohed and aahed obligingly along with the rest of them and, unable as yet to display their own home improvements, had rallied by conjecturing about them instead. But the Londons, it seemed, were still actually having some fun.

  “Hey, stranger.”

  Adam turned unsteadily, and the second pint of gin and tonic that Jasper had pressed on him moments before splashed over his wrist. Ellie stood on the balcony from which Lisa London had called down to them. A small heater glowed on the wall beside her, casting a strange orange light on her skin. He squinted at her blur in the darkness. He had earlier considered the possibility that she might be at the party and had dismissed it as there was no reason that she should be; it now felt as if he had conjured her appearance simply by willing it.

  “I didn’t know you knew Dan and Willa.”

  “Rachel introduced me to Willa on Yom Kippur, at the break fast. I thought you’d be in Israel with the in-laws.”

  “Too much work,” he said, joining her on the balcony. His head was spinning from loud music and gin, and the cold air whipping through his shirt felt fortifying. He stepped away from the heater.

  “Ah. Your girlfriend has too many troublemaking cousins making paperwork for you. Sorry about that.”

  “Fiancée,” he corrected, sitting down heavily in a folding garden chair.

  “Quite right. Fiancée,” she said, softly. She seemed impossibly tall that night—Amazonian, he thought, and it was as if the word had never been so perfectly embodied. She looked like a warrior princess, lifted high again on those impossible driftwood heels and looking down at him. Several moments passed before he broke the silence.

  “You smoke too many of those.” He nodded toward the joint in her hand, still unlit.

  The cigarette case was on the small aluminum table beside her; she returned the joint to its place and clicked the case shut again, dropping it into the pocket of her leather jacket. “There. I told you I would take your advice.”

  “Actually you said”—what had she said?—“you said you would do whatever I told you to.”

  “So I did. I wonder if that was wise.”

  “Bollocks to what’s wise,” said Adam, with sudden heat.

  “Are you drunk?” she asked, incredulous. “Don’t tell me Adam Newman is anything other than sober and controlled.”

  “Hell no. Sober as a judge.” He took a swig from his gin and tonic and squinted up at her. “I’m not allowed to drink. Rachel hates it. So of course I don’t.” This was unnecessarily disloyal, but Ellie rewarded his minor betrayal with a sly half smile. He could say what he wanted to her—anything at all, he realized. It was intoxicating.

  What he actually said was “I can’t sleep.” He surprised himself with the confession. She had once told him that she couldn’t sleep and he had not admitted it then; now it seemed important that she knew she was not alone. “It’s like torture, sometimes. So I know you think—I know you think you’re the only one. But you’re not. It’s an illusion.” He could hear himself elongating these last words, particularly iloooosion, as if he were doing a voice-over for a haunted house at the fair, and surmised that he must indeed be very drunk.

  “Yes. I know about that. Rachel told me.”

  “Told you what?”

  “A while back. She said you never sleep, she worries about your insomnia. She said you have nightmares.”

  “That’s not for her to talk about.” He felt a sobering flash of anger that Rachel had betrayed his confidence and also, irrationally, that she had appeared between them in the conversation, laying claim to private knowledge of him from which Ellie had been excluded.

  “She worries. I guess she doesn’t understand it, or you, or something.” Ellie picked up Adam’s glass from the table and took a sip.

  These words hung between them, immediately turned over and analyzed by Adam with forensic care. He rotated them, peered into them, under them, searching for their subtext. This line of thought danced away ahead of him, leading him into danger like a tantalizing and treacherous Tinker Bell,
and he was freed from its siren call by Jasper crashing onto the balcony with Tanya.

  “Hey, kids.” Jasper put an arm around Ellie; Tanya threw herself into a chair. “Ellie. Long time no see. How the devil are you?”

  She was nearly a head taller than Jasper; his casual attempt at flirtation left her hunched over in an acute scoliosis, his shoulder straining almost directly upward. She extricated herself firmly and stood upright once more.

  “Oh, you know. Trying to make London my home.”

  At these words Adam glanced up as she continued earnestly, “I find that the people here, they really do treat you so warm, so kind and cool.”

  Jasper looked bewildered, but Adam was transfixed—she was trying to quote the lyrics from the song he’d sent her. They locked eyes, and Adam was once more alone with her in the exclusive and delicious privacy of this reference.

  Tanya then shattered the moment by asking, “Are you really going to live in London forever? But you’re so American.”

  And Ellie smiled, kissed only Tanya good night, and excused herself.

  11

  Once Ellie had left the party Adam no longer felt like staying. Lisa London joined them on the balcony, perching on the wall next to him and whispering, “Hello, you big gorgeous thing,” in a voice at once seductive and unthreateningly free from intention.

  The customary conversations were resumed. Tanya asked Lisa about Manchester; Jasper asked Lisa about her hospital’s supply of “hot nurses.” Tanya asked Jasper why he was such a pig; Jasper replied that it was what she loved him for. “That, and for my enormous … personality,” he finished, swinging back on his chair, legs splayed so that anyone who had missed the subtlety of his joke might be helped along by the illustration. His jeans strained over large, womanly thighs. It was business as usual. Adam felt tired, and strangely lonely among these people he had known for so long. Ellie had taken with her the fresh air that he had been sucking deep into his lungs. What remained was a fug of claustrophobia, of the perennially predictable. He was waiting for a break during which to make his exit when a man emerged through the doors, looked around in search of someone and then retreated. Adam was cheered.

  “Nick!” he shouted, and the man returned.

  “Adam! I didn’t see you lurking in the shadows out there. How are you?”

  Nick Hall stepped out to join them. He was a tall, lean man with strong features and subtly lopsided eyebrows that gave him a permanent expression of ironic disbelief. At university, where he and Adam had met, he had generally been considered attractive. But more and more these days he had a look of narrowed and appraising cynicism in his blue eyes, and didn’t seem to have adapted his wardrobe since his student days. He had come to this particular party in a T-shirt once white and now stained a dingy beige, and a pair of ripped corduroys of an indistinct mushroom gray. These hung from a carelessly malnourished frame, a body whose chief physical exertion was lifting a wineglass, or a fag. Nick considered exercise to be for morons or Americans, preferring instead to fester thoughtfully and smokily in his office, his living room, or his local. All this was manifest at a glance. Adam saw that Lisa, who assessed all new men she met with unabashed interest, had judged and found him wanting.

  “Nick, this is Lisa, who is Dan’s sister; Tanya, who is Rachel’s flatmate; and Jasper, who just is. This is Nick. We were at university together.”

  “Nice to meet you,” Jasper said, and rising from his chair, he stepped back over the threshold that Nick had just crossed. Jasper’s awkwardness with strangers surprised Adam afresh every time he witnessed it. That a vast ocean stretched beyond Jasper’s little tide pool was especially evident when someone tall and affable washed in from elsewhere. Nick was effortlessly and somehow charmingly rude, and slightly shambling, where Jasper, hunting for his own self-defining hallmark, was forced to settle for being an ostentatiously ethnic self-parody. Jasper was neurotic, hyperactive, driven to unconvincing self-aggrandizement, where Nick would have more effectively wielded witty self-deprecation. This schtick worked only with old friends. “I’m going to go in to get another drink,” Jasper said, to explain his departure. “Anyone want anything?”

  “I’ll come, I’m cold.” Tanya followed him. Lisa, who had assumed Ellie’s position beneath the small beam of the heater, jumped to her feet.

  “I’m so sorry, babe, you should have said! Come stand here.” She stepped aside to cede her place under the orange glow but Tanya shook her head.

  “It’s fine honestly. I want to get a glass of water in any case. Do you want to come? I wouldn’t mind finding something to eat, too. Willa made strudel, there’s loads in the kitchen.”

  Before answering, Lisa looked at Nick in a swift, final evaluation. He had some attractions but was altogether too gaunt and grubby for her taste. She followed Tanya.

  And so they had all disappeared almost as soon as Nick arrived and for Jasper, parties would continue to be what they had always been—opportunities to spend time with exactly the same people he spent time with everywhere else. Jasper was safe in the knowledge that the companions with whom he had sat tonight on a cold balcony in South End Green were precisely the same as those with whom he had sat in someone’s family’s kitchen fifteen years before. An iPod provided the sound track instead of a CD player; the place belonged to his friends and not the parents of his friends. Instead of a six-pack of Strongbow between twenty they had Dan’s spiced cider, made with cinnamon sticks and slices of fresh red apple. He was allowed to stay past midnight (though Tanya did not often let him take advantage of this freedom). But these discrepancies were merely superficial. Disaster averted—at core, all had successfully remained the same as ever.

  Adam was genuinely delighted to see Nick and had forgotten that they might meet at Willa’s party. As teenagers Nick and Willa had been at Bryanston together and it was Adam who had reintroduced them years after they had lost touch. In the meantime Willa had fallen in love with Dan London and had converted to Judaism, a decision confusing to her girlfriends as Dan himself was so clearly unobservant. But the traditions, if not the beliefs, were important to the Londons, and they had decided to raise a Jewish family—if nothing else the conversion classes, taken at a cozy Reform synagogue (and therefore gentler and far more inclusive than anywhere Orthodox), were an excellent primer for life with a Jewish man, with all the attendant relatives, quirks, and customs. The Londons now threw Shabbat dinners for friends and spent their Sabbath afternoons like most Jews, in fervent and near-religious contemplation at White Hart Lane. Willa was as happy and exemplary a convert as Adam had ever seen, and their marriage equally inspiring. She had fallen in love with Dan and everything about him—the Londons were a warm and chaotic family, and she had become one of them wholeheartedly. With Sarah London as her mother-in-law, she would return from every holiday for the rest of her life to find her flat clean, her ironing done, and a pint of milk, a moussaka and a crème brûlée in her fridge. There were certainly worse fates.

  Nick, by contrast, believed in only two things—atheism and the Labour Party. He had grown up in the country. His mother was lapsed Church of England; his father was Jewish and had been, for many years, the only Jew Nick had ever met. He had never ceased to find Adam’s North West London Judaism amusing, with its bar mitzvahs and weddings and festivals and endless series of family meals and obligations. Nick had never experienced anything like it. In his own Fens village he’d been known, only half in jest, as Jew-Boy.

  “So how goes life in the ghetto?” he asked Adam now.

  “All good. The usual. How’s everything with you?”

  Nick stretched out and crossed his ankles revealing odd socks beneath the frayed corduroy. “All right. I’m working like a bitch at the moment, which hasn’t done much for my Sisyphean extracurricular writing attempts. Still trying to push this bastard novel up the mountain.”

  “But it’s brilliant that you’re doing it,” said Adam with enthusiasm. “You’re going for it; it’s shaming for
the rest of us who just sit around in offices like monkeys.”

  “Yeah, well, it won’t be brilliant if the damn thing rolls back and flattens me. And Emily’s great, but writing with a kid”—here he shook his head—“we don’t get five seconds’ peace.”

  “How old is she now?”

  “Nineteen months.”

  “Bloody hell. I can’t believe it’s been that long since she was born.”

  “Ah, well. Time flies. No doubt in the meantime you’ve been busy being a moral pillar of the shtetl whilst I’ve been battling the conflicting tugs of literary glory, dissipation and parenthood.”

  This shtetl jibe had its origins in an old argument between them. Nick’s position was that religion was the root of all evil, Adam’s that fundamentalism of any sort was not to be confused with the faiths it subverted and that organized religion provided morality and community, and encouraged precisely the tolerance that Nick believed it lacked. It was hard to object to the Judeo-Christian attachment to the Decalogue when its suggestion not to murder, steal or tell porkies seemed to be incontrovertibly sensible. Adam thought Nick was a hypocrite to criticize moral guides when his überleft-wing politics equally abhorred the more libertarian suggestion that people would do good if left to themselves. But this evening he was not in the mood for a debate, and Nick was welcome company. He lived with his girlfriend, Marianne, and their little daughter, Emily, in a flat in Stepney Green, hours away from his parents in Cambridgeshire, and nearly four hundred miles away from Marianne’s mother in County Cork. Nick wrote for The Independent; Marianne had worked on the Sunday Times until Emily arrived and it transpired that she earned less than the childminder they required for her to go back to work. She now freelanced from home and wrote fiction, perennially unpublished. They had chosen their own paths. Their mothers did not have one another on speed dial. They were free.