The Innocents

by Francesca Segal

  “It’s got lovely balance,” Ian observed.

  Adam continued to stare without speaking. He knew at once that it was the picture taken for the Pirelli calendar and he would have given all he had in that instant to track down and destroy every copy. It was far worse than imagining a Times Square billboard on display before millions. That a few thousand men should feel ownership of her or any sort of private, exclusive access to her, even to this single photograph, was nauseating.

  He had known that she was in it—Jaffa had made a disapproving reference over dinner months ago. Ziva had been the only one at the table to defend the decision and had been staunch in her defense—“I have been researching it on the Internet. The photographs I have seen from the Pirelli are on occasion extremely elegant and she will insist, she has promised me, on keeping some control of the styling. The most beautiful women have posed for it in the world. Why should my Ellie not claim her place among them if she was invited?” Beside him, Rachel had wilted.

  Ellie had implied that Rachel might have resented more than just her beauty. Yet it had always been so clear to him that Rachel was the enviable one, and that she might have begrudged the attention her parents had paid to a bereaved little girl was not a sympathetic portrait. But almost as soon as he’d considered the idea he’d dismissed it. Despite a natural insecurity during moments when she measured herself against her cousin, Rachel adored Ellie and had always worried about her—he could call up a decade’s memories of her affection and concern. Ellie was resentful, and he understood why. But Rachel was blameless.

  And so during the Pirelli debate he had wanted to make her feel better and had disagreed with Ziva for the first time in his life, saying, “Yes but Ziva, if she wants to be taken seriously then she has to stop doing this stuff,” and beside him Rachel had sat up a little straighter and he had been glad he’d spoken. But it seemed that Ziva had taken a stand against the general disapproval—there was a space cleared above her sitting room mantelpiece for this picture that she’d asked Rachel to collect, a flag waved in public support of her favorite granddaughter.

  Now, standing before the photograph itself, he was awake and feeling for the first time in his life. Ellie was there in front of him and the sight of her had stopped his heart. Her eyes, huge and green and filled with shameless challenge, seemed to be staring only at him. They followed him. It had to be for him, for he could not bear the idea of her looking at anyone else with her heavy-lashed lids lowered, her face alight with the mockery he recognized and the yearning he’d only dreamed of seeing.

  “Is she your grandmother, Mrs. Schneider?”

  Adam blinked. “No, my wife’s grandmother.”

  “So Ellie Schneider is your wife’s sister?”

  “Cousin.”

  Ian whistled. “Wow. Have you met her?”

  “No.” Adam shook his head. “I’m all right, thanks,” he added as Ian tried to help him carry the photograph to the car.

  Olivia glanced up as he struggled to fit it in the boot but made no move to help him. She had given up on The Jewish Chronicle and had a stack of undergraduate essays on her lap and a green pen between her teeth, one hand entwined absentmindedly in the woolen pom-poms round her neck.

  “We can go now. Let’s just run this over to Ziva and we’ll head into town.”

  Olivia nodded. She had a fine streak of green pen on her chin and written on her hand in the same color were the words “Danube crossing? NB.”

  “So will you come up to the gaudy next weekend with Mum?” she asked, as they drove down Haverstock Hill. Her annual college garden party was approaching, an afternoon of strange speeches and dry, triangular sandwiches filled with neon coronation chicken, an event always scheduled just a few weeks too late in the year to be pleasant. But it was one of the few chances to see his sister in her element, a glimpse into her world of scarlet robes and Latin epigrams. He was faintly jealous of her in these moments, faintly jealous and fiercely proud. Olivia had forged her own path, had ignored their mother’s silent (and not-so-silent) disapproval and had sought a place in which she thrived. Olivia in Oxford was a fuller, richer version of herself, even when she was only walking down Cornmarket Street or having tea with Adam in the café she liked in the Covered Market, rickety tables across a narrow aisle from the butcher where haunches of venison and skinned, pale rabbits hung on steel hooks in the window, uplit like art. She made sense in Oxford, and it suited her. In London Adam worried for her, unwittingly imbibing his mother’s fears for her increasing eccentricities and seemingly endless romantic vacuum. When he saw her in her own world he regretted his patronizing assumptions. Olivia was more fulfilled than most people he knew.

  Adam took a deep breath and then practiced his nonchalance on his sister.

  “I’ll try. But there’s a chance I have to go to Paris next weekend.”

  22

  “Who did you say was running in this race?”

  Rachel was awake when Adam tiptoed out of the bathroom, lighting the way to the door with the screen of his phone. In the small, white light he saw that, though she had barely moved, she was stretching, her arm locked and straightened for a moment, her fingers flexed and curled around the edge of the bunched sheets. Her mouth was pressed into the pillow but the faint flaring of her nostrils betrayed a yawn. Surprised by her voice, he went back over to the bed and kissed her.

  “Why are you awake at five in the morning? Was I too loud getting up?”

  “No, just am.” She pushed her hair back from her face. She looked like a little girl roused too early from a nap, drowsy and pliant, and the pillow had imprinted a network of pink creases across a cheek flushed with sleep. “When do you get in?”

  “Ten thirty tonight. I’ll be back here by eleven, just a whirlwind trip. You won’t notice I’ve gone.”

  He had found himself doing this in the last few days—adding attenuating statements every time he talked about his journey. To his own ears it made him sound guilty; no one else seemed to have noticed. When explaining this impromptu visit to Paris he found it very hard not to babble.

  “No, I mean when do you get there?”

  “I think around ten A.M. French time.”

  “Oh, good, so you get a little time to play in Paris.” Her eyes were closed again but she smiled at him as he bent again to kiss her forehead. “My phone’s charging on the floor in the other room if you want Ellie’s French number.”

  This was the third time Rachel had suggested that he call her cousin. The previous times he had said that it was a good idea and that he would do his best, hoping that she would forget. Now he felt his back pocket for his passport and said, “I don’t think I’ll have time, to be honest. I’ll try and make it to Galeries Lafayette and pick up some macarons or something, like the ones you brought back from Lucy’s hen, and maybe a nice bottle of wine for us. But other than that, to be honest, the day will go pretty quickly I think.”

  He had half closed the door when he saw Rachel turning over, the sheets tangled around her legs and her hair fanned out on the pillow behind her. Watching her he felt a sudden surge of vertigo and rushed back, kneeling down to hold her. She kissed the shoulder closest to her and then pushed him gently away, murmuring, “Too hot.”

  “Have a lovely day, Pumpkin,” he said. He felt homesick looking at her, and a maudlin nostalgia for her untouched perfection.

  “Mmm, okay,” she murmured. He closed the door as silently as he could, though he knew that she could not yet be sleeping.

  It had been easy to make it happen, once he’d set his mind to it. Starting with that moment in the car a week ago when he had answered his sister’s inquiries with the lie about the race across the Paris bridges as easily as if he’d been rehearsing it for months. Seconds before, he had wanted to shatter the glass to climb into the image of Ellie and seize her. He had not been thinking coherently when he told Olivia about Paris—providence had provided the answer.

  It was only by chance that he knew about
the race; a colleague’s sister-in-law was running it for Cancer Research and had forwarded him the sponsorship e-mail. He had matched the bids on her webpage and then days later, thinking of his father, had gone back and donated again. It should have been sacrosanct, and yet it was an e-mail raising money to find a cure for cancer that had seeded his first lie, had given him a reason to dash to Paris and the means of seeing Ellie. And although fingers of guilt had crept into the corners of his mind he had not allowed them to take hold. The guilt had been easy to push aside, a discovery that was itself both frightening and energizing. All week, his overwhelming sensation had been of impatient excitement. He could not believe it was all so simple. He was actually on his way.

  The train drew up in the Gare du Nord, and he looked again at Ellie’s message:

  Curiouser and curiouser. I hope your friend runs fast enough to justify his fan club traveling so far. I’m working all afternoon but I’ll meet you for a coffee at the Gare du Nord at eleven. Sorry not to show you the best of Paris but needs must… A bientot.

  For all he knew she was in love and playing house with a Parisian or was having an affair with the rage-inducingly pretty male model who was fondling her in the first Balmain editorial campaign, her stilettoed heel resting on his thigh as they lounged together on the bonnet of a vintage Porsche. Months before there had even been a photo in the tabloids of Marshall Bruce skulking beneath a New York Yankees baseball cap and leaving a hotel in St.-Tropez. Far too close for comfort. Even so, something in Adam’s guts told him not to let it stop him. Whatever might be happening in Paris—and he could not, however much it repelled him, delude himself that there were no men—he would not believe that her heart was taken. Yet he had lied to her, too, about his reason for coming. If he’d told her the truth she might not see him and it was possible, then, that he might go mad. So he had been casual and had suggested a coffee, but only if she had time. That had been on Monday. And now it was 10:00 A.M. on Saturday and he was walking through the Gare du Nord and somewhere in it, Ellie Schneider would be waiting for him, if only for a few hours. Outside the station café he took a single breath and went in.

  Ellie was sitting on a red banquette behind a row of small square tables, bent over a novel. A large mirror above her head reflected back his own anxious face and he had a brief moment to adjust his expression before she looked up and saw him. The deep tan he’d seen in the Duchess of Kent had gone and she looked as ashen as he first remembered her, with dark circles of exhaustion under her eyes. She had no makeup on, and her full lips had the same pallor as her cheeks. She was twenty-four now, almost two years older than when he’d seen her on Kol Nidre, but she could have been sixteen, or thirty. Already, fine lines were forming around her eyes and yet she still looked vulnerable, fragile, brittle. She took the fingernail that she’d been biting out of her mouth and smiled.

  “Hey, stranger.” His voice sounded high and unsteady to his own ears; his pulse was racing. “Hi, Rocky,” he added, noticing the dog curled in her lap.

  “Hey.”

  Ellie was all in black, her only jewelry that single gold ring on a fine chain round her neck. He sat down on the rickety mahogany chair across from her and smiled back. His pulse slowed.

  “How are you?”

  “Happy you’re here,” she said, simply.

  “Me, too.” He paused. With Ellie, always, he had a simple compulsion to speak his thoughts aloud, uncensored. It drew him to her. “Everything just—realigns—when I see you. Straight away.”

  She nodded, almost imperceptibly. “So.”

  “So.”

  She picked up the laminated menu that lay between them but then asked, without looking at it, “Will you have a hot chocolate with me?”

  Adam nodded. He wasn’t going to tell her that since Rachel’s pudding campaign he was trying to diet when he was out of the house. The waiter approached.

  “Deux chocolats Viennois s’il vous plaît. Merci.”

  “How’s your French?”

  Ellie laughed. “Spectacular, as you can see. If I only order items that appeared on my high school vocabulary lists then I speak flawless French. But actually it’s getting better. It comes back fast.”

  “Assuming you ever had it. We had this French teacher, she must have been in her first or second year out of university. Poor woman. Jasper and I did nothing but play fantasy football in the back. I made it through five years of French lessons entirely unscathed. I learned nothing.”

  “That’s an achievement in itself.”

  “Yes, I’m very proud. No, that’s not true, actually, I did accidentally learn how to say ‘Le chien a mangé mon devoir.’”

  “Impressive. And how did you do in the football?”

  “Oh—brilliant. Top of the league two years running.”

  “Did you at least buy French players?”

  “Erm, only Cantona. But he was one of my stars, until he retired.”

  “I had no idea you were such a rebel.” Ellie shook her head. She had been fiddling with the menu, opening and closing the concertina of its folds, but then set it down with a decisive action as if telling herself, firmly, to stop. “Well, I don’t know about their soccer players but I do love it here. Which is lucky, as I can’t go back to New York.” A strand of hair slipped out of her ponytail and she pushed it back idly. She was white-blond at the moment and her hair looked dry and unkempt, longer than he’d ever seen it but just as neglected. He wanted to scoop her up and take her somewhere with sunshine and feed her fresh fruit and vegetables. Instead he asked, “Why not?”

  “It’s complicated. I’ve been in touch with Marshall a little—not like that,” she said, interrupting herself as Adam looked horrified, “and it’s become this very—awkward situation. Lawrence must have told you that he and his wife are back together now and trying to make it work, and I guess I hope for him that it does, but it’s obviously a little delicate. Anyway, in the course of the investigations when they were apart her lawyers have done some pretty extensive research into my life. It’s not really in her interests to draw too much attention to me anymore I suppose, so they’ve not done anything with it, but Marshall said that if I came back to New York then he couldn’t say what she’d do. She doesn’t want me around because I’ll remind people that her marriage is—not exactly perfect. She works in television now, she’s pretty well connected and she’s put together this list …” She trailed off. The rest of the sentence was unnecessary. “Other people would be hurt,” she said finally.

  Adam extrapolated, unhappily. An image of Barnaby Wilcox flashed into his mind, seducing Ellie with his dimples and erudition, and his wondrous tales of pagan ritual and folklore. Adam did not care if Barnaby Wilcox, or any others like him, got hurt. But then there was Mrs. Wilcox. And Wilcox Jr. And of course there would be other men, probably someone else in the public eye, probably someone else with a family. And Ellie herself, at the center of all this.

  “So you can’t be in New York,” he said, pushing a series of images aside with effort. “Will you come back to London?”

  “I can’t be there either.”

  He briefly considered a joke here, something about other angry wives, and then reconsidered. Instead he raised an eyebrow, inviting her to go on.

  “It’s just easier for me to be here.” She looked at him and paused. “For many reasons. Don’t you think?”

  The waiter had returned and Adam sat back, moving his arms from the table.

  “No. I don’t. I think you should be in London. There are people in London thinking about you. Missing you.”

  “In which case, merci,” she added, accepting a glass of creamy hot chocolate. On top quivered a drift of whipped cream the size of a tennis ball beneath a mound of shaved chocolate curls. “In which case, why didn’t you come over and talk to me when I was, in fact, in London? In the pub?”

  “Oh, Ziva told you I looked for you? I couldn’t find you anywhere…”

  She paused with a spoonful of whip
ped cream halfway to her mouth. “That’s horseshit. I was standing at the bar, I saw you. I knew you were there.”

  Adam felt himself redden. “Well, if you saw me there…” He trailed off.

  “Because you had come looking for me, remember? And if you wanted to stand there in the doorway, if you wanted to stay away from me you must have had your reasons. And I was going to come after you when you left but I figured it would be selfish. You decided something else was more important, I guess. You were fighting with something, I could see it. I didn’t want to stand in the way of that.”

  “I was fighting with something.”

  “Me, too. And we both won.” She smiled again, but without warmth. “Right? We both won. Everything’s as it should be.”

  “But it’s not. Nothing’s as it should be.” Adam pushed aside his own glass and reached for her across the table but she reared back, spoon in hand and held aloft as if to defend herself.

  “What the hell are you doing?”

  “Sorry, sorry,” he mumbled. He pulled his saucer back toward him and, for lack of anything better to do with his hands, clasped them around the hot glass.

  Ellie sat forward again and said, softly, “I’m sorry. I am—I didn’t mean to talk to you like that. But, Adam, everything’s different. You’re married now. To my cousin. You married Rachel. You chose.”

  He ignored what he felt to be the unfairness of that comment. “I know. But just tell me—”

  “Let’s not talk about it now. Is that okay? I’ve only got another hour. Can I have you till then? Can we just have a little time not talking about how fucked up everything is? I promise—I’m not avoiding anything. I’m not pretending anything. I am well aware that you’re Rachel’s. But I just want to”—she dropped her spoon on the saucer with a clatter and circled her hands, searching for words—“I just want to enjoy having you here for a while. Before either of us says anything out loud that means it’s not okay for us to sit here together. Okay?”