“Is it?” Lawrence asked. When he looked at Adam, Adam felt the urge to look away. Lawrence held his eye. “I’m not so certain that it’s good for everyone.”
29
She was staying for him. He knew that she was staying for him. He knew it even before her text message arrived that morning—the one that stopped his heart with the single sentence: “Now I’ll be near you.” What now? He didn’t care. Whatever it was would be difficult and yet he felt sure that there was a way. A way now to see her whenever he could; maybe one day a way that he could be with her and her alone, somewhere else and always. He was walking home from the tube station. The Jewish New Year, Rosh Hashanah, began once again that evening and she would surely be in synagogue with her family and he could sit in the men’s gallery and look across at her and start the new year knowing that, however fucked up it all might be, the woman he loved loved him too. In the meantime, walking home to Primrose Hill past the bright graffiti and high, copper-green girders of the Chalk Farm footbridge, he felt sick with lust and manic with possibilities. Maybe Rachel would fall in love with someone else and leave him. He almost laughed aloud at the possibility. But—wouldn’t it be incredible! It would all be so easy. She could marry Dan Kirsch—no, not that schlemiel, someone he didn’t know and couldn’t picture but who nonetheless made her happy—and he could be blissfully and openly with Ellie, life would begin afresh, and when he and Ellie came to visit London from their loft in Tribeca then the four of them would have dinner in Notting Hill in an easy bohemian way while Hampstead Garden Suburb marveled at their amicable divorce. Stranger things have happened.
And then he thought, No, actually, they haven’t. That was the most improbable scenario, maybe ever, maybe in the world. It would happen when pigs, or any other earthbound, unkosher creatures, could fly. So, what? He didn’t need dinner in Notting Hill. There would be a way and they would find it and right now he felt recklessly, boundlessly joyful.
Rachel was out when he got home, which surprised him. It was already six and they had to be at synagogue at seven thirty for the erev Rosh Hashanah service; usually she would have been at home for hours checking her outfit, blow-drying her hair, trying different angles for her married-lady hat—this year a neat charcoal cashmere beret from Jigsaw in Brent Cross—and generally preparing herself to appear before the community.
Half an hour later he heard the key turn in the lock.
“Ads?”
“Hi, Pumpkin.” He had already changed into a suit for shul and was waiting in the sitting room. He got up to meet her in the hall. She looked tired. Her dark skin usually had a glow to it, as if her cheeks were lit from beneath the surface. Today she looked pale. She put down her bags and hugged him.
“Where’ve you been? We’ve got to go quite soon.”
“I know. I went to Islington to wish Ziva a shana tova and see how she’s doing at home.”
“How is she doing? I’ll go and see her tomorrow afternoon, after shul.”
“I sent her your love, don’t worry. But she’d like to see you so that would be nice, we can both go. She’s really well, she’s so happy to be back at home instead of in that horrible hospital. And I had such a nice chat with Ellie.”
Adam’s blood ran cold. He could almost feel as it slowed, freezing into ribbons of ice beneath his skin. He’d never seen Ellie rattled by anything but still—the idea of the two of them alone together made him panic. “Really?” he said.
“Yes, the lovely agency nurse was helping Ziva have a bath and so we had a really good catch-up. I’ve been a bit … off her, I suppose recently, and you know I get a bit jealous, over Ziva and I suppose even my parents, too, which I know is so silly. But she is my first cousin, and I do love her. We’re just different. But we really talked. It was nice to feel close to her again. I’ve missed her.”
“Let’s go, Pumpkin. We’ve got to get to your parents’ to light candles.”
The next day was Rosh Hashanah, the start of a new year in the lunar calendar, a time for renewals and fresh, clean beginnings. The challah is round instead of braided to represent a perfect cycle, and Jewish families eat sweet things—teigelach, tiny dough balls boiled in honeyed syrup; honey cake; and apples dipped in honey; wishing for a sweet year ahead. The Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur, is ten days later and this time marks a period of reevaluation, of repenting broken promises and of atoning for sins.
Ellie had not been in synagogue either last night or that morning. She had stayed in Islington with Ziva, and no one, Adam noticed, had mentioned her. He thought it odd that neither Rachel nor Jaffa had offered to visit Ziva during either of the services so that Ellie could go to at least one but perhaps, he reasoned, they did not think she would care about honoring the festival as much as they did.
After the morning visit to shul, all the Gilberts and Newmans had gathered for a buffet lunch at Leslie and Linda Pearl’s house on South Hill Park (“just be wherever you like, stand, sit, all very casual,” Linda had greeted them at the door, though it was clear when they went into the dining room that she had been cooking for several weeks). Dominating the conversation was the question of whether Ethan Goodman was repenting for his sins (Jasper argued vociferously that it should be a sin to be so stupid). Taking such risks with people’s futures—all agreed that it was unforgivable. Rachel worried aloud about Brooke Goodman, and the children. No one, it seemed, had been able to get hold of her and there was great concern among the community about their welfare. Adam was surprised to discover that his wife had been among those who had tried. “Those poor things will suffer because their father was so irresponsible,” Rachel said, quietly. “Brooke needs to be helped so that she can help them through all this.”
Michelle and Jaffa were in a particularly amicable phase and were in the kitchen together making and distributing cups of tea. Olivia was in the hall, talking to Leslie Pearl and Lawrence about the ramifications of Ethan Goodman’s idiocy.
“The repercussions reach beyond those financially affected; he’s done damage to the entire Jewish community,” she was saying, animated. “It won’t matter that he didn’t steal; history shows us that it’s enough that a Jew was involved and money was lost.” Her voice grew louder and she began to enunciate more distinctly, as if addressing an auditorium. It drove Adam wild with irritation when she slipped into lecturing mode like this, which interfered with his ability to appreciate her—usually very astute—theses. He noticed Leslie Pearl stifling a yawn as Olivia continued, “It’s a truism of course, but that’s one of the fundamental rights afforded by true freedom, the freedom to be just like everyone else. For each man to be judged as a man and not as a Jew. But we’re not there yet, we still have to be better than everyone else just to be tolerated. That’s the reality of anti-Semitism—we have to be unimpeachable. We can’t be normal, be average. What a gift Ethan’s misjudgment has given to all those who hate us.”
Lawrence was nodding sadly. Leslie Pearl was scanning the room behind her for the brownies.
Adam looked at his sister, earnestly lecturing the two men and gesticulating. Olivia had come down from Oxford but had not brought any clothes that Michelle considered acceptable for the High Holidays and had been forced, during an argument of such screeching vigor that it reminded them both of long-ago teenage years, into a suit of Michelle’s. The sharp navy tailoring was too short for her and very much too tight, but otherwise was unremarkable apart from the hiking boots she wore beneath it, scuffed brown leather decorated with Olivia’s own oil-paint butterflies. She had been girdled and squeezed into her mother’s clothes but nothing could be done about fitting her size six feet into Michelle’s size three pumps. They had been late for the service and Michelle had given up. At least in synagogue the boots had been hidden behind a pew.
Adam and Rachel were sitting in one corner with Jasper and Tanya.
“In any case, you’re meant to say you’re sorry to the people you’ve wronged before God can forgive you,” Tanya was saying.
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br /> “Goodman’s going to have a very expensive phone bill if he calls everyone whose pension he lost. In any case, I bet you anything they go back to America within the month. They’ll have to sell the house and they won’t stay here,” Jasper said with confidence, helping himself to another stuffed date. These were among Linda Pearl’s specialties and had been much applauded, plump Israeli dates filled with soft, mint-green pistachio nougat. Every few moments Jaffa would come over for another one or sometimes two, with rueful, jolly laughter that did not quite disguise her embarrassment. A complex dance had sprung up around these dates—Michelle, who would never have allowed anything so calorific to pass her own lips, had twice picked up the tray to offer them round; Jaffa would raise a hand in polite refusal when Michelle brought her the sweets but once the plate had been returned to the coffee table, she would swoop back as subtly as she could, unable to resist.
“They shouldn’t have to be banished,” Rachel disagreed. “He made a mistake, he’s not a criminal. People make mistakes. Human beings make mistakes.”
“He should be ashamed to show his face here,” said Jasper, who had no time for Rachel’s show of generosity to the man who might have ruined her father. “He should piss off back to the States as soon as he can scrounge up the money for the plane ticket. They could go to New York. I know, Rachel’s cousin could introduce them to Marshall Bruce if he’s looking for a new business partner, or some of her other sleazy friends. They could launch a chain of brothels. It’s perfect.”
Beside him, Adam felt Rachel stiffen at the same moment that his own fists clenched with anger. Before he could answer he heard Rachel say, “You will not talk about my family like that.” There was a break in her voice. Her ferocity made him turn to look at her in wonder and he saw tears brimming in her eyes. “How dare you say that to me? You will not be so disrespectful about my cousin.”
“Jasper,” Tanya scolded.
“Sorry, Rach. Sorry. I didn’t know that you—I mean, I was only joking. I’m sure she’s got nothing to do with Marshall Bruce anymore, I wasn’t saying that.”
Rachel sat, white and rigid, and fumbled for Adam’s hand. Jasper’s apology was interrupted by Leslie and Lawrence who came over to the “young people,” as Linda Pearl insisted on calling them, to say that they were all about to set off for tashlich on the Heath, to atone for their sins at a corner of the Hampstead Bathing Ponds.
Lawrence looked at Rachel anxiously. “Are you okay, poppet? You look upset.”
“I’m fine.”
She stood up and Adam, still holding her hand, stood with her.
“Let’s all go and say tashlich now, and then I’ll drop Jaffa and Rachel at Ziva’s so they can take her a honey cake and have some girls’ time,” Lawrence said. There was no suggestion of the men going with them, Adam noticed, with a mixture of disappointment and relief. He desperately wanted to see Ellie and to meet her eye for just a moment of complicity or reassurance, but he also felt that it would be impossible under those circumstances not to betray their feelings.
“Jasper’s going to be there till next year if he casts all his sins into the water,” said Tanya as they were putting their coats on.
From the Pearls’ house they walked down toward South End Green, stopping briefly outside the Magdala pub for Rachel to check her reflection and to adjust her hat, with which she was not entirely comfortable. They carried on until they could leave the road and turn, opposite the station, in to the quiet of the Heath.
When they reached the banks of the closest pond, they waited. Rachel’s parents were dawdling behind, talking in low murmurs. There was already a suitor for GGP, a midsize American practice keen to expand their London offices and with the resources to take on the pension liability. What few decisions remained had to be made in the next weeks; Adam imagined that Lawrence was explaining the structure of the potential new company and the GGP partners’ diminished roles within it. Lawrence and Jaffa were holding hands in a way that Adam had always thought touching and Rachel found embarrassing; Jasper and Tanya were even farther back, their heads together in an intense but less harmonious exchange. Adam suspected that Jasper was being told off for what he’d said about Ellie.
Tashlich had always been evocative for Adam—not necessarily of religious thought or of spirituality but of his father. Until he was eighteen and had begun spending part of the High Holidays with Rachel’s family he had not performed the ritual for ten years, not since Jacob had brought him here, to The Ponds, to recite it. After Jacob’s death, Michelle had felt conflicted about whether she was able, with any sincerity, to talk aloud to God. Such a vulnerable, exposing action—to stand by flowing water and to ask Him to cast her sins into the depths—had felt impossible without Jacob. Michelle didn’t do anything with the children that she couldn’t do with honesty, and she could not read the tashlich prayers, she once told Adam, because the only thing she ever asked God for was an explanation. Between Michelle and God, she was not the one who had something to apologize for. Until she’d cleared up that business between them there was nothing else to say. So they hadn’t done it. They’d stayed at home and stained their good clothes counting pomegranate seeds at the kitchen table because their Sunday school teacher had told Adam that there were 613 in each pomegranate, one for each of the 613 Jewish mitzvot, and Olivia had said it was rubbish.
This year they stood, a little group huddled self-consciously on the balding grassy bank while joggers passed them and on either side mothers led their toddlers to throw small fistfuls of bread for the glass-eyed, red-beaked moorhens that bobbed and slid across the black pond. Jaffa linked her arm into Lawrence’s and he kissed the top of her head; Leslie and Linda Pearl stood proudly behind Tanya and Jasper who had resolved their dispute and had their arms around one another, her hand resting comfortably on the plump swell of his hip. Michelle and Olivia stood behind the Pearls, shoulder to shoulder and also friends again since Michelle, picking her way across the wet grass of the Heath, had conceded that Olivia’s hiking boots at least had practicality to recommend them. Rachel slipped her hand into Adam’s coat pocket with his and he squeezed the tips of her fingers. Lawrence began to read.
“Who is like You, God, who removes iniquity and overlooks transgression of the remainder of His inheritance. He does not remain angry forever because He desires kindness. God will take us back in love, and He will conquer our iniquities, and He will cast off our sins into the depths of the seas. Give truth to Jacob, kindness to Abraham, like that You swore to our ancestors from long ago.”
As Lawrence spoke the words “He does not remain angry forever because He desires kindness,” Adam watched him. He was not stooping in apology—today, Lawrence looked like a patriarch. Tall and erect in the old black overcoat that Jaffa had brushed with extra care for the occasion, Lawrence had his arm around a zaftig and voluble wife he worshiped, a beautiful daughter beside him listening with respect and adoration, his prayer book in his hands as he read—and Adam breathed and hoped and prayed, fervently, that Lawrence meant those words for him. You are my family now; I will not remain angry forever. He would deserve Lawrence’s anger when it came, though he did not know if he could bear it. At the wedding Lawrence had taken him aside and had helped Adam to adjust Jacob’s prayer shawl around his shoulders. He would never replace Jacob, he knew that, nor did he want to, he’d said softly, fastening the fine wool folds together with a small silver tallit clip—two delicate stars of David set in deep indigo enamel shields. But Adam was his son, too. We love you, he’d said. We love you like our son.
It was around the words “God will take us back in love” that Adam understood that he would have to leave Rachel, would have to leave Lawrence, and that he was losing this beautiful, precious family that he and his first love had brought into being and that would be broken by his betrayal. He could see his own father standing on the same bank, hear him reading those same words, and his sense of shame was overwhelming. This was not the man his father had wanted him
to become. Now he could make it right only with honesty. He turned and began to walk away so that they would not see his face.
“Ads.”
Rachel came running after him.
“Ads. What happened? Are you okay? I know you miss him, it must be so hard. I was thinking of your dad, too.” She caught up with him and grabbed his arm to slow him down. One hand was pinched at her waist as if she had a stitch. He was already at the road when she reached him—as soon as the path had turned out of sight he had begun, mindlessly, to jog. He would tell her tonight, he decided. He would tell her now.
“Let’s walk back to our flat instead, we don’t have to go back to my parents’,” she added. They were walking together through South End Green, passing the station fruit vendor, piles of autumn apples and green punnets of blackberries arranged on flowing sheets of bright plastic grass. Adam nodded his assent.
“Rachel—” he started and then fell silent again. They had reached the tiny triangular memorial park outside the hospital. Two defunct red phone boxes stood on one flank, leaning toward one another companionably. The benches were all empty. It was sitting here that Rachel had told him she hated Ellie; only days ago, it felt like another lifetime. His life had fractured as Ellie touched him—now there was only before that moment, and after it.
Rachel stopped and looked at him intently. For a moment her brow was creased and her eyes were dark and grave, and he felt certain that she could read his thoughts. But then she smiled brightly and said, “Thank goodness Granny is out of this horrible place. And I really think that she’ll be happy with the lovely agency nurse after Ellie goes.”
The Innocents Page 25
