The Innocents

by Francesca Segal

  “What do you want me to say? I shouldn’t have come to Oxfordshire.”

  “I wanted us to talk. There was stuff I wanted to explain.”

  “I don’t want excuses.”

  “I didn’t say excuses. I don’t have anything to excuse. But I at least wanted you to know what was true and what wasn’t.”

  Adam looked away from her. It was one of those moments, he knew, in which he teetered on the edge of something vast and incalculable. On one side rationality, security and honor. On the other terror, oblivion and possibility. He felt her nearness as if she were touching him.

  “Can I see you tomorrow night?” he asked. Rachel was going to Lucy Wilson’s hen party in Paris and he, Jasper, Gideon and Simon had tickets to see Jeff Beck and Eric Clapton at the O2. They could go without him.

  Ellie nodded and then smiled, widely and brightly, a smile that was directed over his shoulder. “Did you find it?” she asked her grandmother. Softly, to Adam, she added, “Come to Casa Blue on Brick Lane at ten.”

  Ziva shuffled forward. “I have found it. I do not know why it is of such interest to her, but there you are. Ancient history. My family all now seem to be nostalgic for things they never themselves knew and I want to tell them, ach, it is all so much better now. Or rather, not so very bad as it was. Still, she can do with it as she wishes.”

  “Let’s see?” Ellie held out her hand for the photograph. It was small and square, printed in sepia on thin paper that curled at each corner. Adam looked at the image over her shoulder.

  At the center of thick white borders was a picture of a young girl standing beside a piano. She was delicate-featured, skin bleached white by the faded photograph, a thick plait of dark hair coiled and pinned around her head. She stood facing the photographer proud and erect, her hands by her sides and her feet crossed a little awkwardly, one over the other. Her dress was straight and plain, its light color now lost to the monochrome of the image. She was not smiling, but she looked very happy.

  “Is that you?” asked Adam.

  “Yes,” said Ziva. “I was very beautiful, no? But anyway, that is me on the morning of my wedding to my Yosef, the first Yosef. Take it to Rachele, she remembered it from when she was a little girl and wanted to see it again. Tell her she will be just such a beautiful bride.” She paused. “When I remember that day, you know, I remember most that after the chuppah a man spat at my father. One of the Austrians. But not a peasant, not one of the big, angry men who worked in the fields near to our farm and who would shout at us always, always throw things. This was an educated man, a landowner. And I think—so. Things change and change again. I did not think I would or could ever again live in Europe and nothing ever can be certain. It is right that we should celebrate, that your wedding day should be a happy one.”

  16

  The route to East London was now becoming a familiar one but each time he passed the pink brick expanse of the British Library and the gray-tipped neo-Gothic spires of St. Pancras, Adam would begin to get nervous. From that point east it was Ellie’s territory.

  The first half of this drive he had already done once that day, delivering an excitable Rachel to the station where she was met by an equally excitable group of her girlfriends, all in the customary hen party attire of matching pink T-shirts (in this instance emblazoned with a photograph of Lucy Wilson, the bride-to-be, taken when she was a toddler, with plump, creased arms raised toward the camera and a towel on her head like a veil). In addition they each wore bouncing, glittery deely-boppers extending from pink headbands. Rachel’s were fished out of a plastic bag by an officious Tanya Pearl (who was this weekend operating under the designation of Head Bridesmaid) and issued to her as soon as she stepped out of Adam’s car.

  Clustered on the pavement beneath the sleek glass flank of the Eurostar terminal, they were a swarm of fuchsia bumblebees fizzing and buzzing around their collective heap of luggage. These were the Nice Jewish Girls who populated Adam’s world; young, modern women, many fiercely bright, several equally ambitious; strong and forthright and intellectually emancipated. Among them, Rachel was the least conflicted. The rest were contradictions, these creatures, and that they did not see it was the wonder. Lucy Wilson herself was an excellent example—with an intercalated M.D.-D.Phil. from Oxford, she now worked at University College Hospital as a clinician and researcher but her highest ambition, Adam knew, was to be Mrs. Noah Cordova. She was a strange faun like so many of the others, with the head of a consultant oncologist and the heart of a shtetl daughter. And here they all were, preparing to send off one of their number into the halcyon paradise of matrimony. It was the thirteenth of February—nine girls were on their way to the City of Love, crossing the Channel to celebrate Lucy’s love-themed Parisian hen party, marking her passage into wifehood. Emotions of all hues would be running high—tenderness, nostalgia, sisterhood and womb-twisting envy. In London, nine corresponding men had heaved a sigh of relief that, for this year at least, they were released from the pressure of arranging a Valentine’s celebration.

  “Passport?” Adam had checked, leaning across the passenger seat and shouting through the open window. In return Rachel had waved it at him and blown him a kiss, nodding her deely-boppers so that they danced cheerily. The others had waved and blown him fond kisses alongside her for they were old friends of his too, and now doubly woven into his life as the girlfriends and wives of other childhood friends.

  And then later for the second time, he navigated through the dark back streets of King’s Cross toward the Euston Road where he would turn east, toward who knew what. He did not know what he was doing as he drove toward Brick Lane—only that he felt impelled to be doing it.

  Nothing had happened that he could not yet reverse. As the City Road nosed east toward the bleak expanse of rotating traffic at Old Street it was easier to pretend that he had crossed the Rubicon, but it was far from true. Since he’d left the Sabahs’ in December, shamed and confused and angry, he had stayed safe by avoiding Ellie and he could stay safe still, by continuing to do so. He did not need to keep driving. He could keep away from her until he was married. But now he was round the corner and had found a parking space behind a Tesco van where two men in reflective jackets were unloading pallets of Evian and 7UP onto the pavement. He was early and she, he imagined, would be late. He would order a drink and collect his thoughts. He would try to understand why he was there, a question he had not yet asked himself.

  What had not appeared, when he had scanned through a kaleidoscope of imagined beginnings to the evening, was the possibility that she might already be there with someone else. The time and location she had whispered to him turned out to be not an intimate assignation quickly invented; rather it had been a suggestion for him to join her on an evening already planned. He walked into the bar and saw Ellie immediately, perched on a low, crushed-velvet sofa and addressing a woman and two men with animation. That she had been on a shoot that day was evident even from across the room—her hair was backcombed and stiff with streaks of black that looked like tar; she wore false eyelashes so thick and heavy that their spidery tips reached her eyebrows. She looked as if she were in the middle of an anecdote, gesticulating with the nozzle of a shisha pipe held delicately between her fingers. Adam approached the group, irritated with himself for the shyness and embarrassment that had surged suddenly on seeing them all. Ellie’s face lit up when she saw him, and she handed the mouthpiece of the pipe to the girl beside her in order to commence introductions.

  To her left, she said, was the famous Theo, in whose studio she had been living (“my lovely squatter,” he called her and blew her a kiss), who had coincidentally been shooting her that day and was nothing like Adam had imagined—in reality, he was a tiny man and extremely thin, with a severely trimmed black goatee, kohl-rimmed eyes, and a sequined porkpie hat. On Ellie’s other side was a stout girl she identified as Theo’s assistant, Anoushka, now sucking greedily on the hose of the tall shisha, her wild red curls cut short into
a cloud, and a great deal of green glitter around her eyes. She wore a dress as short as Ellie’s usual attire but with a far less appealing result. Flesh strained at the holes in her artfully ripped fishnets; from his position standing over their low sofa, Adam could see directly up her skirt to the expanse of black lace beneath. He averted his eyes.

  On a stool opposite them was Chris (“He’s a talented social commentator,” Ellie said by way of introduction. “I write the odd London piece for New York magazine,” he amended), a square-jawed man with graying hair and the triangular build of a swimmer, his muscles visible beneath a faded white T-shirt that depicted—with deliberate irony, Adam assumed—Ellie in a controversial advertising campaign from several years ago. How she might feel about her friend wearing her own unclothed image on his broad chest Adam could not imagine. He felt instantly protective of her, but then so very little offended Ellie.

  “You’ve escaped NW11,” Ellie observed, pulling up a stool for Adam. On a low, scarred wooden table, a candle burned in a wine bottle fattened and distorted with tumors of wax; beneath this was a cocktail-sticky menu that she extracted and handed him. “How does it feel to break free?”

  He sat down. “It feels pretty good.”

  “Then we must toast your night of freedom.”

  “What are you all having?” Adam looked at the table where four identical cocktails stood at various stages of consumption, raspberries floating on their surfaces.

  “Chambord and bubbles,” said Anoushka, offering him the shisha, which he refused. “They’re nice, a bit sickly. But Theo will only have champagne or champagne-based liquids.”

  “Theo and Anoushka I’ve known forever through work, and I know Chris from Norwood in New York,” Ellie explained. “And I don’t know how you all met each other. Not through me?” she asked.

  Chris shook his head. “No, Noush and I met at a book launch at Lutyens and Rubinstein, and then we bumped into one another again the same week at the Lit Salon at Shoreditch House.”

  “Yonks ago,” confirmed Theo.

  Adam nodded, uncomprehending. Just as when he spoke to Nick Hall, he had the sense of other Londons swirling past and beneath and above him of which he was only liminally aware. In these places his contemporaries were photographers and poets and musicians, publishers and editors and foreign correspondents, and people who worked for think tanks. And they were there to be found—North London was awash with Jewish writers and artists and intellectuals, more than seemed probable from a population that constituted less than half a percent of the country. He wondered, for the first time, how many lives in Hampstead Garden Suburb were actually as homogenous as his own. Fewer than he’d always believed, no doubt.

  Ellie put down her glass. “I’m having candy cravings. What’s the closest thing to Swedish Fish in England?”

  “Ooh, I love Swedish Fish!” Theo exclaimed, uncrossing and recrossing his legs for emphasis. “There is nothing here I can think of that’s nearly as delicious. Maybe wine gums?”

  “What are Swedish Fish?” asked Adam.

  Theo looked appalled. “They are ambrosial,” he whispered and left it there.

  Ellie pulled her leather jacket from the pile slung over the back of the sofa and stood up. “Wine gums will do. Okay, I’m going round the corner. Amuse yourselves, kids.”

  As she clambered over Anoushka to get out, Adam said, “I’ll come with you.”

  “No problem, I’ll be back in a second, stay here.”

  “It’s late, I’ll come.”

  “No, thank you, really. And in any case, I need to make a phone call. I’ll be back.”

  Adam felt distinctly uncomfortable. Rachel and all the other women he knew would go nowhere at night unchaperoned—even if they’d driven themselves out for the evening they were likely to ask a man to walk them back the short distance to their cars. When he dropped Rachel—or Tanya or Jaffa or Michelle or any woman—home, he would always remain outside until the front door was safely closed and she had waved good-bye to him from an upstairs window. He would do so even when the front door and window in question were on a Neighborhood Watch cul-de-sac in Hampstead Garden Suburb whose residents had also clubbed together to employ a private security firm. Twenty-first century or not, Adam upheld these precautions and approved of them. Mothers, sisters, girlfriends—they should be protected, and he liked to protect them. Ellie was the one he felt the strongest urge to protect and she was the most resistant to his efforts.

  “I literally mean around the corner. You can count to a hundred and I’ll be back.”

  Her legs were bare; she hung her jacket over her shoulders and then disappeared half-naked to the corner shop, her phone already raised to her ear as she left.

  Anoushka turned blinking, green-glittered eyes to Adam, regarding him like a curiosity with which she could entertain herself in Ellie’s brief absence. Jade spangles had fallen on her cheeks, which looked acceptable, and also on her nose, which did not. She addressed him. “Ellie says you’re her lawyer. Are you going to be able to get her back into Columbia? What are you doing about Marshall Bruce? Is it true that the wife has threatened her if she goes back to New York? Surely she can’t do that?”

  “I can’t really talk about it,” said Adam, surprised that that wasn’t self-evident.

  She shrugged. “Okay. She’d tell me all of it anyway. She’d tell anyone anything. She’s a crazy one, that girl.”

  Theo shook his head in what looked like a combination of awe and disapproval. “She is definitely crazy. What was she doing with that terrible Marshall Bruce?”

  Chris laughed. “Do you mean actually, technically—what was she doing? You’d have to ask her yourself, Theodore. Get some pointers.”

  Anoushka sighed, heavily. “She doesn’t value herself. It’s a question of self-respect I think, or self-esteem, and she’s just not able to separate her value as a woman—as a person actually—from her value as a sexual commodity.”

  There followed much earnest analysis. Chris believed that the tragedy of her mother’s death had not only deprived her of a female role model but taught her a destructive fatalism. Theo sniffed. “That father, Boaz. I called him Bobo the Clown. I saw him in New York; he was just never there for this splendiferously wonderful daughter even when she needed him, and she was always coming alone on jobs even when all the other girls still had their mothers tagging along and quite rightly, too. Now she doesn’t even know where he is, I don’t think.” Anoushka believed that all this was true and was further compounded by a lack of self-worth derived both from a double parental loss and from teetering on the brink of flawlessness—there was a theory, she explained, that very beautiful, very intelligent women suffered because absolute perfection felt tantalizingly attainable for them, just beyond reach of their beautiful, capable fingers, whereas for normal mortals it was abstract, impossible, and therefore not worth worrying about.

  It was several minutes before Adam identified what was bothering him about this conversation. The surprising element was the utter lack of surprise—he had heard these discussions about Ellie, held in these terms and this tone, many times before. What he had not expected was to hear them from these people.

  Chris had just finished saying that Ellie had cheapened herself irreparably with some of her editorial campaigns even before he’d known about Marshall Bruce, and was pointing to the image on his own T-shirt by way of illustration, when Adam finally entered the conversation.

  “Isn’t it a bit off to wear it then, if you think it cheapens her?” he asked, surprised by what he took to be such clear hypocrisy on the part of someone who moments ago had claimed liberality above all other virtues. Chris’s disapproval bothered him much more than Jaffa’s, or his mother’s, or Rachel’s. More than that of anyone in North London, whose clucks and tutting he could dismiss. “After what you said before about the diminishing importance of marriage I thought you’d be the first person to speak out against adherence to empty convention.” In her own circles
at least, Adam had imagined that Ellie would not be judged for her actions.

  Chris looked at him with a strange expression. “I hardly consider a sense of self-worth to be empty convention.”

  “She has self-worth, but she’s choosing to discard conventional expectations. She’s brave. Just before, you sounded like you were advocating for us all to break free of cultural and social expectations.”

  “Again—bravery”—here Chris raised his left hand, cupped as if holding in it the virtue he discussed—“and stupidity.” He raised his right hand in the same way, and then separated the two hands to illustrate the difference between them, the distance between them. “I like Ellie, she’s a great girl, but I can’t agree with you that she has an adequate sense of her own value and as a result of that lack she’s made some absolutely moronic decisions. Destructive, stupid, generally unwise. Just because I don’t believe two people need a legal contract or a discriminatory tax advantage to join their lives together doesn’t mean I applaud the girl for rogering a married man for money. That’s not at odds with, as you say, objecting to an adherence to empty convention. Empty convention, yes. Of course I object. But there’s a place for meaningful, constructive social convention and principles. I’m not actually an anarchist, whatever misleading impression I might have given you.”

  He was laughing a little as he said this, but it was clear that he was affronted. Adam in turn felt foolish. That something was condemned by North West London’s gossiping mothers did not, he realized, automatically make it brave. They weren’t wrong about everything—their censure was not, in fact, an endorsement. But why had that never occurred to him before?

  17

  It was not turning into the evening that Adam had expected. Shortly after Ellie disappeared she sent Theo a text message to say that she would be gone for longer than she’d thought—she had remembered that she had to speak to someone in New York before they went into the theater and it was getting late. Adam found himself sharing a platter of garlicky, paprika-dappled hummus and oily stuffed vine leaves with Anoushka and Chris, while Theo pursed his lips and nibbled unenthusiastically on a stiff triangle of pita bread. Around them the bar had slowly filled with big-haired boys in women’s jeans and short-haired girls in Ray-Bans and even here, in the heart of the laid-back hipster East End, there was a charge of Valentine’s Day madness in the air. Everyone in Casa Blue was too hip, too cool, too ironical and countercultural to care about greeting card holidays and yet—gazes were roaming; eyes were meeting. If you were out tonight, you were probably looking for some action.