The Innocents

by Francesca Segal

  “Is everyone here?” Rachel asked again, sitting up. She swirled her hair into a tight bun and let it fall slowly, unfurling across shoulders she was now squaring in readiness. She looked around for her shoes. One was under the seat of her chair, the other by Adam’s own feet. He handed it to her.

  “Thanks.”

  “Not yet. Jasper and Tanya are in the kitchen; I didn’t see anyone else.”

  “I wish it was all over. I want everyone to go away.”

  He moved the second chair so that it was next to hers and sat, heavily. “Me, too. You can take him upstairs the second it’s done. Will you? We don’t have to pass him around like a parcel, they can all take care of themselves.”

  “He’s so …” She was leaning down, buckling the thin strap of a bronze leather sandal. Her hair fell forward, hiding her face. “It just seems so weird that everyone feels like this is something for all of them to celebrate. I mean, I know it’s not a big deal and everyone does it in America and people keep saying it’s tiny surgery and everything, but to turn it into a party.” She shook her head, still buckling. They had had this exchange, in various forms, ever since the scan at twenty weeks had introduced them to their son. “I wouldn’t want to go to a circumcision and then stand around eating bridge rolls.”

  “People want to celebrate the baby, though, I suppose.”

  “I know. I’m being mean. I’m just scared for him. I’ll be so happy when it’s over.”

  “I know,” said Adam, with feeling. “Me, too.”

  Her sandals were on and she straightened, her mouth set, a slight frown creasing her brow. She was wearing one of her maternity dresses, a navy cotton wrap that tied with wide black ribbon at the waist, modest and adjustable. It had fit her at nine months and now it fit still, pulled only slightly tighter around a healing body still softly slackened though contracting daily, a body remembering its tighter contours, and already no longer sore. She had rejected out of hand Jaffa’s offer to pop up to Hampstead for her and pick up a new dress for today.

  “Well,” she said. She reached down to brush the cream-pale cheek of the sleeping infant with her fingertips. “Little one, there are people in there waiting to meet you.”

  “The whole family’s coming,” Adam added.

  Rachel did not look up but still looking at the baby said, steadily, “Not the whole family.”

  Adam froze. He did not know how to reply; his blood was pulsing loud and hot in his ears. He waited a moment for it to pass and when it did not he said, “No.”

  He looked down at the top of the dark head bent over and felt tight with fear, and a powerful sensory memory of having felt a fear like this in just this way, pricking cold at the nape of his neck, many months before. It was not hard to touch it, when he chose to, or to touch the despair that had followed. But he did not choose to, anymore. He had set it aside.

  “You know she’s going to marry Marshall Bruce?” Rachel asked suddenly.

  “Ziva told me. Do you think she really will?”

  “Yes. I think so.” She paused. “I hope she does.”

  Adam remained silent, willing her to change the subject. Instead she continued.

  “You know, I was just so horrified by everything about him back then, when it all first came out. But being judgmental doesn’t really get you anywhere, does it? It’s not real life. She’s always defended him, always. And of course Ellie is unconventional, but she still needs … You know, I know that’s a funny way to see it, but he’s sort of taken care of her in a way. And she needs taking care of.” She did not look at him.

  Adam swallowed. “Well,” he said, evenly. “She went through a lot when she was younger. Loss…”

  “Yes. But it’s more than that, I mean. Because she came home and then …” Rachel paused. “She lost other things.” She stood up and met his eye unsmiling, but without challenge. “Other people.”

  “Rach—”

  “Ads, shush. Not—No, please. I just, I’m just—I think he’ll take care of her.” She still held his gaze, direct and urgent. “I want to know that someone’s taking care of her. She deserves someone to do that.”

  He watched her take a breath. She moved with a deliberate, slow grace; her shoulders rose and fell, her chest rose and fell. She raised her chin, tipping her face toward the sun in defiance of threatening tears. He said the only words he had.

  “I think you are magnificent.”

  She exhaled a quiet laugh. “Silly.”

  From the open doors the sound of voices reached them. A proud Linda Pearl could be heard admonishing Jasper with ostentatious volume, sounding scandalized by her treasured son-in-law and thereby securing him the attention she believed he deserved. Jaffa called for Ziva to sit down already, what did she think she was doing carrying that heavy teapot? Ziva’s reply was inaudible and then Jasper’s voice rose and there was laughter from all of them, at what was probably a circumcision joke, or one about Jewish mothers.

  Rachel began to smooth the creases from her dress. “Anyway, enough now. We should take him in. The sooner we take him in the sooner it’s over with.”

  “But it’s all going to be fine, he’s going to be fine.” He said this as much to reassure himself. They had said it, alternately, to one another.

  “Yes, of course. He’s fine. He’s here. I can’t quite believe it, I think. Do you ever just think—do you ever just think how lucky we are?” Her eyes were still too bright; her throat was flushed.

  They stood, silently, side by side. Adam reached for her hand. For a moment both thought the same thought, quietly, about a little girl who had almost been. Seven weeks is barely a baby, barely a life; only hospital analysis had told them that there had once been a daughter. During an ultrasound one morning they had heard a healthy heartbeat, whistling and throbbing like dolphin calls, and the first blood had been that night. Adam had known about the pregnancy for six days.

  It had taken strength he hadn’t known he had, love he hadn’t known he’d felt, to make her turn back to him. It was only the force of Adam’s will, his sudden clear and urgent longing that had convinced her. And they were lucky, the obstetrician told them. It had been early; it had been swift and clean. Six weeks later was the beginning of their son.

  In his carry-cot the baby startled, inexplicably, shocking himself into a fleeting moment of wakeful fear that passed almost instantly into placid curiosity and then a look of utter exhaustion, a brief kaleidoscope of feeling. He yawned, gummy and hippo-wide. One eye opened, deep sapphire blue. A tiny fist shook as if in protest. They laughed.

  “Kobi,” Rachel whispered. “We have to take you in now, little one. It’s going to be horrible, but then it’ll be over, I promise.”

  She was tired, Adam could see, not simply the exhaustion of this first week’s motherhood but a deeper weariness. She had a pallor in her cheeks and dark, bruise-purple shadows beneath dark eyes now often clouded with anxiety. In these last months she had begun to look older. In the sunlight there were fine lines visible on her face, tracing new worries. She had lost the innocence that had been so long preserved. He wondered if she knew that it had gone. Her lack of awareness had enraged him once yet now, sometimes, Adam found himself pitying her that lost simplicity. Life had taught her suffering. Maybe he himself had taught her suffering—he could not bring himself to pursue that line of thought. But with the sacrifice of her innocence, it was undeniable, she had bought her strength. To Adam, she had never been more beautiful.

  Already in his tallit, Lawrence stood in the doorway, squinting at the dials of the camera that hung on a fraying leather strap around his neck, where it had been for almost every hour of the last eight days. Adam had increased the resolution on all the cameras in the family so that these first portraits could be reproduced in brilliant detail, meters wide. Clear enough to preserve every nuance, every moment, every cell. Frowning in concentration Lawrence cupped his hand over the screen, anxious to be prepared. As Rachel and Adam approached, hand in hand, he look
ed up and Adam caught his eye. Lawrence smiled.

  Reading Group Guide

  Reading Group Guide for The Innocents by Francesca Segal

  Introduction

  Adam Newman belongs to a strong and vibrant community of Jewish Londoners. His fiancée, Rachel Gilbert, and her large family have considered him one of their own for years. And as a junior member of his future father-in-law’s law firm, he’s entwined himself inextricably with the people among whom he has grown up. But it isn’t until one of Rachel’s cousins, the enigmatic and atypical Ellie Schneider, returns to London from New York, with the wake of a scandal at her heels, that Adam realizes just how inextricable his ties to the community really are.

  At first put off by Ellie’s worldliness, Adam gradually comes to see Ellie, Rachel’s polar opposite, as a product of both her past and her difficult present. He also comes to see her as a woman fully aware of her actions and their implications, but without regret—something that Adam finds both mystifying and compelling. His conversations with his fiancée’s cousin reveal her to be a woman better educated, more self-aware, and more complex than he ever realized. He also finds that he’s drawn to her intensely, and that perhaps his future life with Rachel is not the future that he wants after all.

  A modern-day recasting of Edith Wharton’s seminal novel The Age of Innocence, Francesca Segal’s The Innocents explores our intense and personal connections to family and community; the simultaneous dangers and protections of existence within such a community; and the seductive powers of experience beyond our own. Segal’s rich and evocative depiction of a contemporary London community reveals its strong parallels to late nineteenth-century New York, while her protagonist, Adam Newman, diverts from Wharton’s characters in important and enlightening ways.

  Discussion Questions

  1. Segal’s debut novel is a retelling of the classic novel The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton. For those of you who have read the book or seen the movie adaptation of The Age of Innocence, discuss the specific ways in which The Innocents parallels Wharton’s novel, and then consider the important ways in which it departs from it. Does knowledge of this parallel add to your understanding of Segal’s novel, or does it complicate it?

  2. Apart from Adam’s initial physical attraction to Ellie, what in the beginning of the novel foreshadowed the fact that Adam and Rachel were not, perhaps, as ideally suited to one another as he’d thought for the past twelve years?

  3. How did the backstory about Jackie’s death help you to sympathize with Ellie? What aspects of her personality seem most likely a result of her mother’s early death and her father’s subsequent emotional distance?

  4. Discuss Ziva’s relationship with Ellie and consider how the two women are similar in terms of being survivors. How much do you think this accounts for their mutual affection for one another? Could any of the others—Jaffa, Rachel, Adam—have truly understood Ziva? Why or why not?

  5. Compare Ellie’s character with that of Rachel, and discuss Adam’s inability to commit wholly to just one of them for most of the novel. Between the two women, whom did you prefer? With whom did you sympathize the most? Do you think Adam made the right choice in the end?

  6. Also, compare and contrast the novel’s “Evan Goodman” financial scandal with recent events in the financial sector of our own culture, such as the Bernie Madoff scandal. Discuss how the ordeal operates as a catalyst and as a complication of the plot within the novel. Do you think it can also work as a symbol with any of Segal’s themes in the book? Why or why not?

  7. How well does Segal portray the social, psychological, religious, and emotional lives of the Jewish community in North London? Do you feel that she conveys a reasonable and realistic portrait of this large and diverse group of people? What were the greatest strengths in her depiction, and what were weaknesses?

  8. Similarly, how did characters like Ziva Schneider help you to understand the Israeli immigrant experience? In particular, what did the novel help to show about the Jewish survivors of World War II, and their difficulties with nationality and assimilation into post–World War II European society?

  9. Is Rachel’s character a passive one? Would you call her passive-aggressive? Why or why not? By the end of the novel, in what significant ways has her character changed?

  10. Discuss how Segal incorporates the subject of death into her novel. Would you call her handling of the subject matter sensitive? Objective? Realistic? Consider the many moments in the novel where death is encountered or referenced, and discuss Segal’s success when it comes to writing about the end of life and its impact on those who remain.

  11. Similarly, discuss Segal’s choice of setting for this adaptation of Wharton’s novel. In what important ways does the Jewish community of North London in the early 2000s parallel late nineteenth-century New York? Discuss the key characteristics that these communities share, and then discuss their important differences.

  12. Discuss the significance of Segal’s title as it relates to the characters in her book. Not only does the title recall Wharton’s novel, but it reflects a characteristic of the group of people she’s writing about, as well as of specific characters. Discuss the ways in which The Innocents is both a sincere title and an ironic one.

  A Conversation with Francesca Segal

  While Edith Wharton’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel provided you with a plot, what difficulties or challenges did you encounter when attempting to reimagine this story? What led you to retell this story in a new time and place?

  I’d read The House of Mirth when I was about twelve and barely remembered it, and I think I tried the odd Henry James around the same time and had struggled a bit. But whenever I’m trying to get under the skin of a place, I read its writers—I discovered Salman Rushdie, who’s now one of my favorite writers, on a press trip to India—and a few years ago when I was living in New York I went back to James and to Wharton. And I just fell in love. I think The Age of Innocence was the sixth or seventh of hers I read in succession and so, by the time I reached it, I was familiar with some of her central preoccupations—the opposition of the individual and the group; the vulnerability of women in all social strata; the disparity between the declared motivations and the deeper currents that stir human society, whether it was her own, upper-class world satirized so exquisitely in a novel like The House of Mirth and The Reef, or an entirely different milieu, in tales like Summer or Ethan Frome.

  I would never have chosen to start, spontaneously, with a classic on which to base a novel of my own—the self-consciousness and fear of comparison would have held me back. But I didn’t really have a choice, in the end. It just happened, almost from the moment I started reading The Age of Innocence: a portrait of a world entirely removed from my own era or experience that nonetheless felt instantly, immediately familiar, with all the support systems and pressures and judgments and long-interwoven lives. It was, I think, the one and only moment when a large cartoon lightbulb pinged on above my head like the Roadrunner. I read that glorious opening scene at the new opera house, in which all of Old New York high society is assembled to hear Faust. And it just seemed immediately obvious—it was just like going to synagogue on the High Holidays. After that, I simply had to do it. I had always known that I had certain ideas about life in a small, suburban community that I wanted to explore, and suddenly I had the perfect vehicle for them.

  The tone at the end of your novel is less bleak and more optimistic than that of The Age of Innocence. What do you feel are the most important differences between Wharton’s novel and your own?

  I had a slightly different message from Wharton. The Age of Innocence is already less scathing and condemnatory than The House of Mirth, written fifteen years before. But still—it’s pretty damning. I wasn’t willing to condemn North West London in quite the same way, nor did I believe it fair to suggest that the fulfillment of Adam’s life would be that “his days were full, and they were filled decently. He supposed it was all a man ought
to ask.” Newland Archer has a loveless, emotionally sterile marriage with May Welland, and his only consolations are society and status. And even the value of these is subtly undermined by the liberations of the next generation—Newland’s son Dallas is in love with Julius Beaufort’s daughter Fanny, and therefore is doing precisely what society long before had believed would mark the apocalypse—“marrying Beaufort’s bastards.” But it’s not the apocalypse—it no longer matters. They’re marrying, unimpeded, for love. Newland and Ellen were thirty years too early for their love affair. And it is explicitly stated that they are the grand loves of each other’s lives. In that way, my novel is very different. I didn’t want it to be clear-cut.

  I would never tell a reader whether I believe Adam’s decision was right or wrong in terms of their future together beyond the book—I’d love to know what conclusions people draw by themselves, actually. But yes, in either case, my message is far less categorical and more optimistic than Wharton’s.

  About the Author

  Francesca Segal was born in London and studied at Oxford and Harvard University before becoming a journalist and critic. Her work has appeared in Granta, The Guardian, and The Observer, among other publications. For three years she wrote the Debut Fiction column in The Observer and was, until recently, a features writer at Tatler. She divides her time between New York and London.