The Innocents

by Francesca Segal

  “How’s Marianne doing?”

  “Very well. Going a bit stir-crazy at home with the baby, but very well. Emily’s sleeping better now so she’s getting a bit more writing done. But not much. We’re both too knackered.”

  “I’m impressed you’re doing it at all.”

  “Brutal. It’s brutal. Hold off a while, that’s my advice. Worth it, but brutal. Still, weekends are all right. Marianne gets Friday nights out, and I get Saturdays.”

  “So you don’t go out together?”

  Nick looked at him, head cocked. “What do you want us to do with Emily? Order her a pizza and leave her to it?”

  “Babysitter?”

  “On whose trust fund?” Nick demanded, somewhat bitterly. “Even kids now expect ten quid an hour, we can’t afford it. I just saw Josh Cordova inside. Do you know where his kid is this evening? At his parents’ house—where she is every Saturday night. Every single one, and she stays. They drop her off at six and pick her up at lunchtime every Sunday. Every bloody week! I couldn’t believe it—and he said it was his mother’s idea! My parents were happy to get me off their hands years ago; they’re not about to start slaving over my own kids now. Every time she’s in her cups, my mother threatens to make me pay back my school fees with interest. She worked it out once and claims they could have had a yacht instead. Can you believe Cordova’s parents take the kid every week?”

  “Yes,” said Adam, simply. There was nothing remarkable in Josh Cordova’s arrangement. In North West London, grandchildren were considered the source of life’s highest pleasure; more, Adam sometimes suspected, even than the children who begat them. He knew without ever having considered it that if his own mother lived where Nick’s parents did, two hours away from Adam’s children, she would still offer to drive down to look after them so that Rachel could go back to work; she would offer to take them home with her for a night; if none of those things were possible she would offer to pay—nay, insist upon paying—for the babysitter. Aunt Judith and Uncle Raymond would not be far behind. Michelle’s older sister Judith was a rounder, softer version of Michelle, wild-haired and mostly unkempt. She worked as a GP in Stanmore and was married to full-bellied, cinnamon-bearded Uncle Raymond, who was a GP at the same practice. For reasons the family never discussed they had not been able to have children; their devotion to Adam and Olivia was therefore redoubled. I have, you need. So take. It was the way with all the families among whom Adam had grown up. When he and Rachel had a baby they would have to fight off Jaffa’s offers of assistance, he imagined, so effusive would be her outpourings of love; she would be desperate to squeeze soft cheeks and parade, alight with worshipful triumph, through the streets of Temple Fortune. There was no life event—marriage, birth, parenthood, or loss—through which one need ever walk alone. Twenty-five people were always poised to help. The other side of interference was support.

  The following Monday at work was particularly grim, and the ritual of beginning a new week seemed merely to emphasize how very similar this week was to the ones that preceded it. On Monday nights Adam usually played five-a-side football with the boys, but tonight most people were away. Lawrence was in Israel, the office was quiet, and Adam had little pressing work with which to divert himself. He was meant to be finishing a pro bono review of a charter for a new homeless shelter. Instead he sat morosely at his desk, staring at the BBC Sport webpage and brooding. It would end in a late night, to compensate.

  Since the party he could not stop thinking. It had served his purpose until now to reject all evidence of alternatives, and to uphold the simpler belief that it was required to marry a Jewish girl whose mother had for years bumped into one’s own mother in Waitrose and who was therefore known and parentally endorsed. Michelle had been alone for a long time and there was nothing about that state that he envied, for in the Noah’s ark of Temple Fortune it was best to go two by two. Since Jacob’s death, he had grown up believing in dark, looming uncertainties, and fearing them. It wasn’t obligatory conformity; simply a question of joining the majority, a subscription to desirable traditions that allowed one to remain supported and cushioned in the bosom of North West London. And he had subscribed wholesale, firm in the belief that his childhood friends had done the same. All were happily settled in conventional relationships, married, engaged, or well on the way. Jasper was with Tanya. Josh Cordova was married to Natalie. Noah Cordova (Rabbi Josh’s first cousin and son of Simon Cordova, Rachel’s dentist) was engaged to Lucy Wilson, whom he’d met on Israel Tour like Rachel and Adam, although Noah and Lucy had started going out only two years afterward. Even Gideon Press, who was gay and therefore was awarded nominal points for unconventionality at the outset, had been in the same relationship since he was twenty, cohabiting contentedly with a man called Simon Levy, who was from Glasgow and who played golf every Saturday with Gideon’s mother.

  Adam had always assumed that to pursue independence was to sacrifice security. But thinking, really thinking, about Dan and others, he could see that it simply wasn’t true. Dan London had gone up to Cambridge with his virginity and a Tottenham duvet cover and come down with a blond-haired, green-eyed girlfriend called Willa Hope-Christopher and the world had gone on turning. Gideon had brought home a nice Jewish boy. The community was liberal and elastic, far more than he’d allowed himself to admit. It was he who had been rigid. It was his own insecurity that had constrained him. If only he’d known, Adam reflected with a throb of indistinct regret, he would have stridden forth without fear—but then he had already walked so very far following the old rules.

  He composed an e-mail to Ellie.

  If you’re really trying to make London your home then we should go out and drink to it. Are you around this week? We could even have something that doesn’t come in a teacup. Adam x

  Send.

  The sense of having taken action restored his humor and imbued him with enough energy to answer, belatedly, a long e-mail from Rachel that detailed every particular of the Gilbert family’s holiday thus far. She was a bit rusty playing tennis but it was coming back and she’d won the night before; their rooms had been noisy but they’d moved two floors up and now they were perfect; the sun was shining and she missed him. It was so nice to have a break from the stress of school and marking homework. The food was amazing as usual. Did he remember those ice cream sandwiches they’d had by the pool? They had them again this year except with caramel swirled in the vanilla.

  His resurgence of energy and the unfounded sense of optimism turned out to be just a flash, however. When days later he had received no answer to his offer of a drink he slumped back into melancholy. All the communications, the loving messages, and voluble effusions that poured from Rachel by phone, text and e-mail, were drowned out by the single deafening silence of her cousin.

  12

  Adam Oscillated between despair and relief before finally settling into the less exhausting equilibrium of a moderate, resigned depression. For almost a week each vibration of his BlackBerry had caused an equally strong vibration in his heart, and nervous anticipation would shiver through him until he saw that the e-mail was merely a smutty joke forwarded by Jasper (“WHAT’S THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN MARSHALL BRUCE AND SANTA CLAUS? SANTA ONLY HAS THREE ‘HO’S’—HO, HO, HO”); an article urging the awakening of his political consciousness from his office mate, Matthew Findlay, sitting only four feet away from him (“Iran’s Ticking Bomb: President Ahmadinejad boasted of the installation of 60,000 ‘third-generation’ centrifuges for the enrichment of uranium. Time is running out—world leaders must act now to prevent nuclear terrorism”); or a daily update from Rachel (“Weather here still gorgeous and Yael coming down from Tel Aviv to visit tonite. She’s bringing her baby, yay! I switched bikinis from the white one to the pink one because yesterday I fell asleep and now I’ve got tan lines—nooooo! I need u here to rub in my sun cream :). Down to factor 4 now, kisses from your pumpkin”). This roller coaster of anticipation and disappointment had continued for days. It
was after he had given up hoping for a reply that the reply eventually came.

  He was in the Roebuck on Pond Street watching Chelsea play Fulham. It had been a gloriously bad December for Chelsea, and today Fulham had scored in the first five minutes. When his phone began buzzing he did not even think to reach for it. Much heated discussion with Jasper and Gideon followed (Arsenal’s title challenge was no longer a joke, Adam had claimed—the quest for the Premier League became ever closer each time Chelsea faltered. Gideon maintained it was still a joke). It was an hour later that Adam thought to check his messages. An e-mail had arrived from Ellie Schneider. Its subject was “Escape.”

  Sorry for radio silence. I just needed a break and some breathing space from everything. Georgina and Rupert went to their place in Oxfordshire at the beginning of December and they’ve invited me to stay a couple of times as they’re not back in London till January. They are so awesome—and appear to be the only people who don’t pay any attention to the crap said about me or if they do, it only seems to make them want to be kinder to me. I suspect Georgina thinks it’s painfully middle-class to care about someone else’s private life (and Ziva thinks they both secretly love a little bad behavior to liven things up—it’s true, Rupert seems positively gleeful about taking in a “black sheep,” as he’s started calling me). I feel very lucky to know them. They’re so generous.

  I wasn’t going to leave the city but the day after I saw you at that party I just had to go. So I’ve been out here since then just thinking and getting some air. It’s so, so peaceful and beautiful—nothing like a bit of bucolic winter splendor to put our choking urban lives into perspective. In a quiet way, the English countryside is at its most awesome when it’s stripped and naked like this, I think anyway. White sky, bare, black trees—it’s all so clear out here. Wouldn’t it be nice if everything else was black and white?

  Anyway, I’m becoming quite the country girl, going for long, bracing walks, and Rocky is loving the space out here. He’s fallen for Rupert’s pointer but she’s not showing much interest. I wish I could tell him that love just screws things up. He should go back to being the Casanova he used to be in the Washington Square dog park; he got a lot of pedigree ass back then. I guess he’s lonely these days. Well, he can join the line.

  I take it you know that Marshall and his wife are officially reconciling? If it works out, good for them—and I’m sure Lawrence is right that the best place for me while they’re figuring it out is anywhere but Manhattan but God, it’s nice to be away from London for a bit, too. So I’m going to stay here for a couple of weeks. Begin the new year with a bit of tranquillity for once. Fresh starts or whatever. Maybe I’ll even sleep. So when you’re out partying think of me in Oxfordshire, repotting orchids and listening to The Archers with Georgina … Ellie

  There was a great deal in this e-mail. More, much more, than the words themselves. Adam was perched on a rickety upholstered stool and surrounded on all sides by looming beer-warmed men in sweaty polyester club T-shirts—under these conditions, discerning the significance of the communication was too great a challenge for his concentration. He excused himself from the table and pushed his way toward the front door so that he could focus.

  Outside the pub the winter sky declared that night had fallen, though his watch told him there were several more daytime hours to go. London’s hours of light were weak and few in December; his BlackBerry glowed brightly in the darkness like a beacon. He looked at her message again.

  It was not clear what had happened on Dan and Willa’s balcony, that strange and trivial drunken conversation, thickened with subtext, interrupted by Jasper and Tanya and then left, like all the somethings and nothings that had ever passed between them, unresolved. This message was nuanced too, in a way that he did not fully understand. And that final sentence—her joke about him at a party imagining the incongruity of her days in Oxfordshire—he felt stung by it. How could she not know by now that all he ever did with an acute and all-consuming energy was think of her wherever he was, wherever she was, all the time? Had she ever, as he had now more than once, lain alone in midnight silence and imagined her hands were his hands, eyes closed to the solitude of reality in favor of another secret, deeper place where they were touching? Whispering? Fucking? He had been so close to her in these moments it was appalling to believe she didn’t know it. “When you’re out partying, think of me” was so trivializing, it was an insult. In these last weeks, to think was to think of her.

  Behind him there was a rap on the window and he turned to see Jasper inside the pub, lifting his eyebrows and tipping an imaginary pint to his lips. Adam nodded his assent to another but then instantly shook his head. “Two minutes,” he mimed with a raised victory sign, and Jasper gave him a thumbs-up and retreated. Adam placed the flat of his palm against the pub door but took a breath before he pushed inside and returned to his friends. An idea had come to him—less an idea, in fact, than an urge. He would go home tonight; and if it still seemed possible the next day then he would act.

  As it turned out, the drive to Oxfordshire gave him less time for preparation than he’d hoped. He had envisaged hours alone with a clear road and a clear mind, composing his impassioned (yet logical, comprehensive, and persuasive) address to Ellie as the gentle curves of a winter-coated Buckinghamshire slid past soothingly. And the M40 was indeed icy and deserted so early on a Sunday morning, but it did not produce a corresponding calming of his thoughts. Instead it served to deliver him to his destination, still unprepared and increasingly apprehensive, long before he’d expected. It was not yet eleven when he turned in to the broad drive of yellow gravel that curved in a wide arc up to the Sabahs’ house.

  Built in the late 1600s, the Sabahs’ country residence was a redbrick manor house; grand, bay-windowed, and constructed with loving homage to Christopher Wren. When they inherited it in 1951 it had been in use for many years as a school and then empty just as long; Georgina had quietly restored its interior to its former, understated glories, and the result had greatly pleased the village.

  Georgina’s family had been English since 1656, when Oliver Cromwell had reversed a banishment of 366 years and officially allowed the Jews to resettle in England. Rupert’s ancestry was similar; not for the Sabahs this Yiddish; these shtetl knishes and lokshen and bagels. Not for a good few British Jews, in fact—though it might surprise their fellow countrymen. Apart from the period between their unfortunate banishment by Edward I and Cromwell’s enabling their return, there have been English Jews since Roman and Anglo-Saxon times. In 1066 William the Conqueror was busily encouraging the Jewish artisans and merchants of northern France to cross the Channel; among them an ancestor of Rupert Sabah’s. That Jews should “go back where they came from,” a suggestion so frequently proposed by those who brandish St. George’s flag and fear the dissolution of “true” English culture, is bewildering. Lawrence’s parents, for example, came from Winchester.

  Adam’s plan took him only thus far. The Sabahs were not a family on whom one popped in—invitations were issued in writing, and in advance. But the dilemma was resolved for him when he heard footsteps on gravel and saw Ellie, growing nearer and nearer in his rearview mirror. He performed an undignified scramble out of the car and was standing beside it when she reached him.

  “Stalker,” she said, but her eyes were alight with pleasure.

  “You know, mountains, Mohammed …” He shrugged, trailing off.

  “I’m glad you’re here.” She stood still before him, arms crossed over her chest and her head cocked. They faced one another like sentries, smiling.

  “Let’s walk. Have you seen the gardens?”

  Adam nodded. “Years and years ago they had a charity thing here.”

  “Let’s go down and walk along the river then; there’s a path at the side through the woods.”

  She made no mention of Rupert and Georgina; Adam did not prompt her for fear she would invite him into the house for coffee and questions and an exchange of
pleasantries with the Sabahs. She led him across the lawn that sloped down on three sides of the house toward an iron gate and he followed behind her, trying to emulate her calm.

  It was only now that he dared to look at her properly. Old jeans tucked into high green Wellingtons, several bulky layers of faded black beneath her familiar leather jacket, a long college scarf of blue and yellow wound high around her neck. For once there was color in her cheeks, her face animated by the cold. She looked tired as she often did but her face, makeup-free, seemed younger. Tucked up in stripy scarf and wellies, she could have been a schoolgirl, sixteen and tramping out to feed her ponies.

  They did not have to go far. Twenty feet beyond the gate was the river, olive green and barely moving, the bank sloping down steeply from a path of terra-cotta-colored mud. Bare ash trees spread vast dendrites above them in the sky, each trunk marking ten yards along the towpath. Adam’s thin-soled tennis shoes began to squelch quietly beneath him as they crossed toward it; the hems of his jeans grazed puddles as he walked, and the bottom inches were slowly saturating with cold brown water. Ellie strode on ahead of him toward a narrow wooden footbridge. The boards were mottled green and slick with damp moss and in the middle of this she sat, folding one long denim leg beneath her and dangling the other over the edge.

  Adam looked down at her. “How inviting.”

  “Your jeans are filthy anyway.” She nodded at his ankles, which were level with her gaze. Adam sat beside her and they both looked down into the murky waters beneath, riffling in the wind. Until this point they had been in motion, and moving with purpose. Now they had arrived somewhere, wherever it was, and an awkward, expectant silence fell between them again.