The Innocents

by Francesca Segal

“So how have you been keeping yourself busy out here?” he asked.

  “Writing a bit, actually. There’s not much to distract me, which is good.”

  “Have you always wanted to write?” He felt tense, the reason for this visit not yet acknowledged between them, and could hear himself sounding like an interviewer on Radio 4. But he couldn’t help it.

  “When I was really small I wanted to be a baker. And then—and I know how ridiculous this sounds, believe me—then for a couple of years I wanted to be a rabbi. God, I’d forgotten that.”

  Adam suppressed a smile. It was such an innocent fantasy, a little girl’s fantasy. “I wanted to be a Premiership footballer. Still do, actually. Why a rabbi?”

  She shrugged, biting at the cuticle of her thumb. “No one believes anything anymore. When my mom was killed everyone kept going on and on about heaven, that her soul was eternal, all the stuff that people say to kids. And I wanted it to be true, more than anything, I was desperate to be convinced. But I knew even then that no one really believed it, they were saying it because I was little. And Boaz never even said that stuff. He was honest with me at least; I’ll give him that much. Nothing else, nothing after. All over. But I remember Rabbi Isobel coming to see us—did you know her?”

  Adam shook his head.

  “She moved back to California a few years later. Anyway, she took me to the park for cherry brandy lollies a couple of times that summer, and she once took me ice skating, I have no idea why. She talked a lot about the indestructibility of energy, like, in physics rather than religion, and also about souls, but not the way other people did. I knew she really believed it, she wasn’t just making up stories for my benefit. I guess I felt like, if I became a rabbi I might start believing something. Nothing very noble. No great urge to serve the people or anything.”

  “She sounds lovely.”

  “She was. Is. She still e-mails me sometimes. She has a congregation near San Diego somewhere and she and her husband also keep donkeys. She’s awesome.”

  “I have no idea what I believe in except randomness,” Adam said, after a while. Beside him lay a slick of wet black leaves and he began to shred one carefully, dropping it piece by piece into the water. “It seems hard to reconcile randomness with any idea of a deity.”

  “Randomness is comforting, isn’t it. I’ve long thought that a firm belief in randomness is the only way not to feel persecuted. But do you need a deity to believe in heaven?”

  “I suppose not. I suppose heaven could just be another … phenomenon.”

  “Do you talk to your dad?” she asked.

  He paused. “Yes. In the last few years only ever when I’m in the cemetery though, for some reason.”

  “Maybe you needed to make some space for yourself so that there are times when you’re just you, alone. That’s okay. It’s a lot, thinking that someone is everywhere. And nowhere is unbearable.”

  Adam glanced up at her profile, watching her watch the river. Then he said, “I can’t stop thinking about you.” That awful cliché was the truth—he had tried to stop and failed.

  Ellie did not move. Beneath them their reflections blurred and rippled side by side.

  “I can’t stop thinking about you,” he said again. “All the time. I’ve been going crazy.”

  “Me, too,” she answered softly. “I miss you. I know that sounds stupid.”

  Adam felt his heart contract. He was aching to touch her. Behind him he heard the crunch of tires on gravel; Ellie’s head snapped up.

  “Shit,” she said softly. Her expression had altered and he turned to follow her gaze.

  Through the trees he could see the Sabahs’ driveway; beside his own car there was now an elderly Morris Minor, pumpkin orange.

  “Adam …” she started, but he did not look at her. She had scrambled to her feet and looked impatient that he should do the same, but he stayed seated where he was. “Adam, please, I’ve got to go back so that Rupert and Georgina don’t…”

  “Go.”

  “No, but I want to talk to you, just wait.”

  She was already walking backward away from him, torn between staying to explain and an urgent need to intercept Barnaby Wilcox who was even now adjusting his collar in the reflection of his car window and turning to approach the front door. At the gate Ellie called out and Adam, abandoned and obscured on his bridge by distance and iron railings, saw Barnaby turn and grin broadly at the sound of her voice. Adam saw her say something in greeting and then they both disappeared around the far side of the house heading, he presumed, into the gardens.

  Whatever she might be she was not mendacious; her look of horrified surprise when she’d seen his car made it clear that she had not expected Barnaby to come, or wanted to see him. But the interruption made Adam see his own visit in bleak terms. It was reckless, pointless—and reprehensible. His feelings for her were foolish, and he was not alone in having foolishly cherished them. Look at yourself, he thought, with sudden bitterness. Look at yourself, crouched here in the damp like an animal. So he’d not slept with twenty women before he settled down—so what? He was lucky to have Rachel, he was lucky to have Lawrence and all their family, and if he’d lived those years he so envied—the invigorating uncertainty and freedom; the sex, the possibility of sex, the thrill of possibility—if he’d had those things he would not have these. Had Barnaby Wilcox married his first girlfriend, too? Was that the excuse he gave himself for being here, slavering for what he thought he’d missed, chasing around after a nafka half his wife’s age? It didn’t matter—Adam loathed him, and all that he represented. That was not the marriage he’d dreamed of, growing up. That was not the union he had longed for. It was not who he wanted to be.

  When he was certain they had gone he squelched back to his own car and left, driving as slowly and silently as he could until he reached the road and then accelerating angrily. He retraced the route by which he and Barnaby Wilcox, two equally stupid men, had both arrived.

  13

  In the Early evening of the last day of the year, Adam landed at Ovda Airport. The flight had been crowded and the taxi queue was formidable, a line of passengers anxious to reach the city to begin their New Year’s celebrations and now shuffling their trolleys forward inch by inch, glancing repeatedly at wristwatches. But the Gilberts had a driver named Shachar whom they used every Christmas, and Adam had called him. Shachar, in stonewashed Levi’s cutoffs, a string vest, and a pair of purple plastic sandals, leading him toward an ancient white van, was currently the only person who knew that Adam had flown to Eilat.

  On the plane, the rest of his row had been a family whose three blond teenage daughters had boarded already dressed for New Year’s Eve, and who had managed to spend almost the entire five-hour flight on their makeup. Ceremonial unction, goo and glitter were passed from one to the other, the elder two obviously an inviolable pair while the third, maybe just fourteen, leaned eagerly across the aisle to participate. Adam had been unable to exclude their chatter even with his earphones turned up high, and so gathered that she had been permitted to join her sisters at the hotel club that night provided she walk in ahead of them; if she was asked for ID then the elder two—less obviously but still underage themselves—didn’t want to be dragged down with her. These were the conditions, and the only other choice was to spend midnight with Mum and Dad and their friends. Teenage girls ruled a principality with nakedly Darwinian governance. He watched the youngest accept without complaint, applying yet another layer of war paint for the battle ahead. Not for the first time he felt grateful to be a man. Rachel and her girlfriends had made one another cry improbably often when they were teenagers, and for reasons he had found incomprehensible. Not that women had become easier to understand in subsequent years.

  Adam was also already dressed for the night ahead. Rachel had told him that they were having dinner at the hotel and he hoped to arrive while they were still ordering, and to surprise her with her family. He slunk through the lobby with the air of a celebr
ity or politician traveling incognito, hiding his face beneath a baseball cap. The flame-haired, polyester-suited girl at the reception desk caught his eye and he fought the urge to wink and raise a silencing finger to his lips in complicity, as if everyone around him was in on the surprise.

  In the end it came off beautifully. The Gilberts were at a long table down the center of the restaurant and he had posed at the bar, sending over a bottle of champagne from a secret admirer. Rachel, in a white linen dress, had been sitting with her back to him, her dark hair loose and glossy over suntanned shoulders. He saw her look up at the waiter, turn in confusion and then leap to her feet with a scream that drew the attention of the room. The choreography of the entire evening from then on could not have been better. After some unfortunate—but luckily not fatal—mistakes, it was the right way to end the year.

  The setting for all this romantic excitement was a hotel on the North Beach, command center for Eilat’s British tourists. Among the London Jews who wintered in Eilat, everyone and their mothers were in attendance (literally, in many cases), and even those who stayed in the other, quieter establishments had come for the New Year’s Eve party. With each passing hour more people accumulated in the floodlit beach bar, piling out of cabs on the forecourt or appearing in clusters from out of the darkness having walked along the sand. In one group Adam recognized Gideon Press’s sister, Louisa, twenty-one and on holiday with three girlfriends, lodged no doubt in a dingy but far cheaper youth hostel away from the water. Across the bar Adam had seen Adele Summerstock’s mother talking to Jaffa’s cousin who had come down from Tel Aviv. Adele herself—née Summerstock now Rosenbaum—he had greeted earlier, sitting on a beach chair with legs spread to accommodate an unwieldy pregnant belly. The sisters from the plane were all there, united in a happy threesome by the giddy triumph of their admission to the bar and dancing together barefoot in the center of the dance floor. The youngest one, he noticed, was looking sleepy. Perhaps she wished she’d spent midnight with her mother and father after all. Behind them was a man to whom Adam nodded a greeting at least one morning a week in the England’s Lane Starbucks who might have been a distant cousin of Tanya Pearl’s, and to whom he had never actually spoken.

  Louisa Press waved cheerily and was lost again in the crowd, amid others known or unknown but recognized—familiar faces plucked from around the upper branches of the Northern line and deposited on the banks of the Red Sea. Shortly after midnight Adam had found Anthony Blume, a barrister who now occasionally joined them for Monday night football. Rachel was talking intently to one of her cousins, retelling the story of Adam’s surprise arrival.

  “Well, it was just damage limitation in the second half, wasn’t it?” Anthony was saying when Rachel appeared. She was flushed from daytime sun and nighttime cocktails, and her eyes were still bright with the pleasure of their unexpected reunion. She tripped over to them with an impish smile, half a piña colada in a tall, neon pink plastic cocktail glass clutched in one hand. This was her third of the evening, but she usually drank so little and so infrequently that she was now unquestionably drunk. Her shoes had been abandoned in the sand beneath one of the tables. Anthony kissed her cheek in greeting and Adam opened his arms to her. She fell into them, giggling. She still could not believe he’d come—every few minutes she would reach out for him, or lay her head on his shoulder. At dinner she had found it impossible to go more than a few moments without turning to him and exclaiming, “I just can’t believe you’re here!” Jaffa had spent much of the meal beaming at Adam with her hands pressed to her bosom, presumably to still a heart beating wildly at the romance of the gesture. For every time Rachel had expressed her disbelief, Jaffa had exclaimed to her daughter, “Ach, motek. It’s a good man, that one.”

  “What are you boys talking about?” Rachel asked, burrowing her head into Adam’s chest and turning to look sideways back at Anthony.

  “Man U, Wigan,” he explained.

  “Oh.”

  She paused and then turned back to Adam. “Let’s go,” she said in a loud stage whisper and began noisily and enthusiastically kissing his neck, unselfconscious before a bemused Anthony Blume. Over her head Adam could see Lawrence and Jaffa sitting on the plastic beach chairs with a dwindling group—the younger guests had colonized the upper levels of the bar, taking over as the voluble and big-haired Israeli DJ upped his volume and dimmed the lights and began playing electronica instead of mild summer reggae, driving the middle-aged guests to retreat to the quieter seats near the water. Later they would retire completely and the beach too would be taken over by their children, to wax philosophical on their plans and resolutions as the new year entered its fourth and fifth hours, to watch the water and eventually to watch the sun rise.

  “Let’s go,” Rachel said again, insistently, and then turned back to Anthony who was exchanging indulgent smiles with Adam. “We’re going to go and have sex now,” she told Anthony, seriously. “We’re getting married.” Adam covered her mouth with his hand and laughed. Behind it she stuck her tongue out so that it protruded between his fingers.

  “Charming, Rach.”

  She blew a raspberry on his hand and giggled. “Come on. Let’s go and do it.”

  “Keep your voice down, your parents are just behind you.”

  She shrugged and stumbled slightly, steadying herself on his arm. “So? We’re getting married. We’re allowed to do it. We have to practice making babies! They want us to be doing it now, we have to practice making their grandchildren. Let’s go.”

  Adam turned to Anthony, who was laughing. “I’m going to take her back, I think.”

  “Good luck with all the baby making.” Anthony clapped him on the back and raised his bottle of Goldstar.

  “Thank yooou!” Rachel interjected and began to drag Adam up the beach toward the hotel.

  The whole Gilbert family had been touched by his coming. Lawrence’s delight had been the greatest of all when a confused (and back then, sober) Rachel had seen Adam sitting on a barstool, his holdall still at his feet. Lawrence’s expression alone had been enough to make the trip worthwhile—he had looked quite misty-eyed. To Lawrence, there was only ever one thing that was important, and that thing was family. For his own family Lawrence would cross not only oceans but continents, stratospheres—galaxies if necessary. What he would not do for Jaffa and Rachel could not be done. He had known that Adam had turned the holiday down in order to man his, Lawrence’s, own office. He had understood that this drive to work hard was a drive to provide for a future with a new wife. Still, he had been disappointed that the young couple were to start the year apart. Success was important for the security it provided, Lawrence knew that, and if it protected his girls then Lawrence would work until he fell. But nothing was more important than being together. Adam had realized it, acted, and Lawrence was tremendously proud.

  Adam’s appearance reaffirmed a secret plan that Lawrence had long been hatching. Once they were officially related, he would find a way to fly Michelle out to Eilat with them each Christmas without embarrassing her, and Olivia too, though it was an imaginative stretch to picture Adam’s sister on a beach. But she would appreciate the Neolithic excavations at Nahal Ashrun, he thought, and if she came he would take her to them.

  Until now he had been holding back, not wanting the Newmans to feel so keenly the imbalance between the sides—Michelle and Olivia teetering high on a seesaw that was weighted heavily on the other arm by all the Gilberts and Schneiders, heaped and jostling on top of one another. It was an improbably large family in which relatives kept appearing like clowns tumbling out of a Mini, and Adam had been lovingly enveloped by the flock. But there was room for Michelle and Olivia too, and now that Adam had demonstrated his commitment to Rachel’s every happiness, Lawrence was determined to bring them into the fold. The evening had been a magical one. For his part, Adam was equally pleased with his decision. It had worked out better than he’d even imagined, although the family’s elation had done little to assu
age his guilt. If recently their praise seemed sometimes to evoke a mild claustrophobia, now he pushed this aside with deliberation.

  “Do you want to say good night to your parents before we go up?”

  “Oh.” Rachel stopped and pushed her lip out in an exaggerated sulk. “Do we have to?”

  “No, we can just go to bed. I thought you might want to.”

  They had reached the decking that led through the restaurant back into the hotel and Rachel spun round, a mischievous smile on her face. “I want to see you! You’re here now, I still can’t believe you’re actually here. Oh—let’s go back down to the beach, let’s go and have sex on the beach!” This was so loud that he feared she’d been overheard by the patrons around them—among them several members of their synagogue, a young cousin of her father’s squash partner or a neighbor no doubt—but no one appeared to react. He had never seen Rachel so uninhibited, and her behavior had been out of character from the start of the evening. He was uneasy about this unfamiliar, daring Rachel, sensing a nervous hysteria simmering beneath her new, bold exterior. He felt a dull throb of shame and anxiety, and for a moment he wondered if she had suspected something and was competing to outsex her cousin. Still, it was not an offer he was willing to turn down. He followed her back through the bar, circumnavigating a constellation of yellow plastic beach chairs that contained Lawrence, Jaffa, and assorted Schneider cousins. They walked together into the darkness that fell on either side of the hotel, padding across the hard, wet sand near the water’s edge. At one point Rachel stopped and, leaning on Adam’s forearm, pulled off her knickers, tripping as she stepped free of them, and flung them into the air toward the sea with an accompanying shriek. They fell anticlimactically, six inches in front of her, where they lay sopped and wavering gently in the shallow water like pink cotton seaweed. Adam and Rachel carried on walking.

  They had been stumbling together for a while, Rachel’s hand groping unsteadily at the waistband of his trousers, before they reached anywhere with privacy. The sand had widened and low dunes had appeared, standing between the empty beach and what looked like the dark staff quarters of a big hotel. She seemed to have sobered a little and her gleeful laughter had subsided to awkward, intermittent giggles. Before the sand dunes he picked her up, and she squealed as he carried her into the black shadows of the palm trees. There was hope then, he reflected, for adventure with this girl whom he loved so tenderly. Maybe she’d guessed nothing. Maybe it was the long, long-awaited engagement ring—glittering even in the deep blue desert night—that held magic for her that might yet free her like a djinn. Perhaps it really was enough to make her feel safe, liberated under its protection to be someone bigger, someone braver. And why shouldn’t she change? Here was the evidence. This was a new Rachel for him—more adventurous, less careful, and now on her back on the cool sand, pulling him on top of her with urgency and parting her legs beneath his weight, and driven by needs that he hadn’t seen in her since they were teenagers. He pushed aside her fumbling hands to undo his buttons himself.