The Innocents

by Francesca Segal

  And everyone was happy. Ziva was happy, watching a union two generations on from her own, a future that had once been unimaginable. Lawrence and Jaffa were happy, seeing the happiness of their beloved little girl—now undeniably a woman. Tanya Pearl (soon to be Cohen) was happy because Jasper had surprised nobody by proposing in July, and going to weddings is a favorite pastime among the newly engaged. Olivia was happy because the quotations she had selected for her brother’s Order of Service—a Stoppard line from The Real Thing on love, another on a wedding from the Song of Songs—had been much admired.

  And Adam, watching Rachel process up the aisle between her parents (Jewish mothers would never be left out of such a moment—why should the father get all the naches?), living the moment that he had imagined so many times before, Adam was happy. Why would he be anything else? Walking toward him was the most perfect girl in North West London. She had always been lovely, but in the last few months Rachel had become absolutely radiant. Much to the consternation of her seamstress she had lost weight and her features had sharper lines, her full Cupid’s bow more prominent now in a slightly streamlined face. She looked more refined, less childlike. Her skin was luminous and clear, and her eyes shone. Today, in her wedding dress, she was incandescent.

  At a Jewish wedding, a groom’s first sight of his bride is not this public entrance as she walks toward him. It is a private moment earlier during the Bedeken ceremony, in which all the men—the fathers, the rabbi, and the groom’s closest friends—dance him toward his waiting bride, for him to lower the veil over her face. It was the first of innumerable moments when Adam had ached for Jacob to be there, but Lawrence and Uncle Raymond had led the dancing and singing and clapping and foot stamping, and thus they had swept him toward the room in which Rachel waited with Michelle, Jaffa, Ziva, Aunt Judith, Olivia and the bridesmaids.

  Everything else had fallen away. Here was Rachel, his childhood sweetheart, his childhood, his future. All he’d wanted growing up was there in her eyes. Tears had brimmed and settled as she saw him approaching, perfect diamonds on her lower lashes as he stood before her to recite a blessing from Genesis, given to Rebecca by her family before her marriage to Isaac: “Achotenu: at hayi le alfei revavah.” Our sister, be thou the mother of thousands of ten thousands. All his life he had felt self-conscious reading Hebrew prayers aloud—on that day he had meant every word he spoke, and had spoken them with pride. My darling girl, be thou the mother of my children.

  No one else had been there. They were in a room filled with family chanting wedding songs and snapping photographs but he had seen only Rachel, their eyes locked together as he blessed her. He had not known if he was laughing or crying—she was surely doing both—but as he’d bent over her to lower her veil, Rachel so tiny and fragile now in the meringue peaks of duchess satin that stood in thick folds around her, he had whispered the only thought that filled his head: “God, my dad would have loved you,” and the diamonds on her lashes had slipped, first one and then the other, down her cheeks. She had nodded fiercely at him, smiling through her tears. “I know. We’ll make him proud,” and he could say nothing before Lawrence and Uncle Raymond and Jasper and the other men began a new song behind him, their rhythmic stamping grew louder and louder, and he was surrounded once more by the scrum who escorted him to the chuppah for the wedding to begin.

  There had been a brief time some months ago when he had not been sure that he would get here. The great machine set in motion by their engagement had frightened him; he had feared that he might be crushed beneath it, his voice drowned out by its volume. Around that time an e-mail had circulated—one of those entitled “so YOU THINK YOU’RE HAVING A BAD DAY???” and describing a man who had been scuba diving off the coast of Southern California, minding his own business, and in a freak accident had been swept up by a water-spraying helicopter used for fighting forest fires as it dipped its scoop into the ocean. Tiny and helpless, Adam imagined the man clinging to the lip of the bucket, peering over the edge as the ocean got farther and farther away beneath him. And the flying machine that had snatched him up in its beak like a giant hunting pelican would never hear his screaming in the din of its propellers. Adam pictured him as minuscule, no bigger than a lead soldier, and for that little scuba diver there was no escape—just the bobbing and sloshing until the inevitability of his expulsion over an inferno. The machine, lumbering blind and deaf, had him in its jaws.

  The e-mail had popped up on Adam’s phone when he’d been in the middle of a meeting, a stupid and unconvincing urban legend, but the image had haunted him for days. How fast had it happened? Would there have been time, had he known, to jump out of the scoop? Or would his first realization have come when he was already thousands of feet in the air? What had he felt? Disbelief. Panic. Claustrophobia. Terror. And perhaps, if he was very lucky, a final few seconds of pure calm as the unalterable truth of his fate dawned. There had been a time when these questions had consumed Adam in his idle moments, sneaking into whatever space he left unoccupied. He had taken up jogging again and would play over the possibilities as he ran, circling each time round the same factors: sizes of water-collecting buckets, speeds of helicopters, speeds of swimming in flippers, heights from which a man could fall and live—into water and on land. He’d worried at these things and worried that he worried. And then gradually, he had forgotten the e-mail.

  There had been a brief time when he had not known, but six months on, he barely thought of it. He found it easy to dismiss at a distance. Ellie Schneider had merely been a repository for emotions running high—he could see that now. He had not spoken to her since that February night in Casa Blue and now, in the bright sunshine of high summer, there were no dark corners for shadows, merely a faint embarrassment that he’d said what he’d said. But it was surprisingly easy not to think about her. She had gone to Paris on a job and had not come back, even for the wedding; instead she had sent them a KitchenAid mixer complete with the ravioli-making attachment that Rachel coveted—one of the more expensive items on their wedding list. Ellie was to be the new face of Balmain leather and was shooting an entire season’s campaign for them, living in Le Marais in an apartment owned by a friend of Theo’s. Another man jumping to the rescue. Lawrence had surprised them all by his great enthusiasm for the move—Adam had expected disapproval that she was once again to be on her own in the world. But Paris was a good place for her to be, Lawrence maintained.

  For a while after the scandal broke, the New York papers had been filled with images of Ellie and Marshall Bruce just as they’d feared, ones Adam recognized from Lawrence’s file in the office and others that had come out once the story emerged. It had seemed only a matter of time before the financial arrangement between them became public and Ellie’s tattered reputation was completely destroyed, and yet somehow it hadn’t happened and all had gone oddly quiet. Almost immediately afterward, Marshall Bruce and his wife had made their reconciliation official and were once again appearing at New York functions together, hands clasped and smiles wide and rigid. Lawrence had confirmed with the solicitors in writing that there was to be no divorce case and that Ellie’s testimony was no longer required; a more complex telephone conversation had left him with the distinct impression that it would be better for Ellie if she steered clear of Manhattan and the newly reinstated Mrs. Bruce.

  “The wife had them dig up all sorts of stuff when they were building a case, and her lawyer more or less implied that Ellie would be better off keeping her distance for a while. It’s virtually blackmail but she’s on such thin ice with all this and it would do us no good to be litigious. At least no one knows he was paying her, thank God. The Balmain contract has another two years on it and by then she’ll be safe again,” Lawrence had said, and Adam had thought to himself, By then, so will I.

  Remembering his own private histrionics made him cringe a little. But he had needed it, whatever it was. It had jolted him into seeing that he wanted more from life. There was a world outside NW11, and with
every month that passed he had become more and more convinced that—once the all-consuming wedding mania was no longer occupying Rachel’s every waking moment—they could discover that world together. Once they were married and life was their own again they could travel, they could go to new places and meet new people, and live. Why shouldn’t she become worldlier? Why shouldn’t they both? They could grow together, and he could teach her as he learned. Once the wedding was over.

  19

  “I bought Us Weekly. And I was going to buy the National Enquirer but then I figured Tanya can get it in London now so there’s no point.”

  Rachel was kneeling up, talking to him over the back of her seat. As a surprise Lawrence had upgraded them to first class and so they were separated into individual pods replete with everything except easy communication with one another. Rachel had twice come over to sit on his footrest but now, six hours into the flight, she had resorted to peering over the top of her seat.

  “Haven’t you read them all already?”

  “New ones came out today; the old ones are in my suitcase too, just in case she wants them. And I got People, Star, and In Touch. She was so excited that we’re bringing them all back.”

  “Poor Jasper, you’ve probably ruined his sex life. Tanya’s going to be in bed with a heap of crap Brad Pitt magazines for weeks.”

  “Ads,” said Rachel, as if she were explaining what he ought already to know, “Brad Pitt has gone off, he looks vile these days, and anyway Jasper probably reads all the tabloids too, you know, you always steal mine, I’ve seen you. I was just about to offer you Grazia, but I won’t now.” She stuck her tongue out at him and flumped back down in her seat, disappearing.

  Adam laughed. It was true that Rachel’s magazines had been intermittently instructive over the years—apart from observing Rachel herself, he had derived the best part of his understanding of women from their pages. He went round to where Rachel was curled in her pod, smiling behind her magazine, and kissed her.

  “Pumpkin, I love your magazines, they’ve taught me all sorts of important things. I know that Marshall Bruce’s wife has had breast implants, for example.”

  “And that she might have been sleeping with her assistant.”

  “And that she might have been sleeping with her assistant. They’re very informative. But personally”—he leaned forward and nuzzled his face against her cheek and she giggled loudly and then clapped a hand over her mouth—“I think we’ve made far better use of our honeymoon so far.”

  They had spent ten days in Maui. Ten days of traditional honeymoon pursuits—of sunset beaches and cocktails of chilled Hawaiian rum and fresh fruit; of surfing lessons and whale watching and infinity pools and private dinners on the balcony of their suite. Rachel had sunbathed and had, two days before the end, arrived at a shade that she considered to be suitably enviable. Adam had discovered audiobooks (the Wilsons had given them an online subscription as part of their wedding gift) and had gone for evening runs along the beach listening, contented, to Ian McEwan.

  It had been the most relaxed that either of them had been for as long as he could remember—certainly since their engagement. Rachel had spun and twittered for the first few days, disoriented without a wedding as the epicenter of her near future. But the pleasure of the postmortem and of being, finally, just the two of them, had aided her recovery. By the end of the first week she was almost convincing when she said brightly, “I’m so glad it’s all over and we get to get on with normal life!” She had repeated this assertion a lot since they’d arrived, but that had been the first time that she hadn’t sounded crestfallen. Calling her Mrs. Newman helped cheer her, Adam discovered. It had evolved, yesterday, into the more aspirational Mrs. Pumpkin-Newman, which had made her giggle, and this morning he had tried out Mrs. P, which she had liked less, as she said it made her sound old. But all in all, she was perkier. She asked questions when he talked to her about what he was listening to. Mealtimes were glorious because she would finally share desserts with him again and had stopped shooing away every breadbasket as if it were a malarial mosquito. And she had gone down on him three times in the last five days, which was something of a record. Married life in Hawaii was no bad thing, Adam had discovered.

  “Where is Newark? We always flew to JFK,” Rachel asked, moving her handbag so that he could sit down on the footrest in front of her.

  “New Jersey. Noo Joisey.”

  “Why are we flying to Noo Joisey?”

  “It’s just as close, half an hour in a cab, and then we’ll be in your shopping Mecca. I’m glad I’m well rested.”

  “I’m so excited!” Rachel clapped her hands. “It’s so nice to finally be going with you; I can show you all my favorite places and stuff. Every single time we would always go to the Second Avenue Deli and have the most enormous sandwiches I’ve ever seen, and pickled green tomatoes. But I haven’t been back since it moved.”

  “I have a date with one of those sandwiches. Turkey and pastrami on rye with Russian dressing. Your dad gave me instructions. Shall we go later today?”

  “Ads, you don’t know what you’re saying, you’ll be sick if you eat a whole one.”

  He stood up and stretched before walking back to his own seat. “You don’t have to start worrying about what I eat just yet,” he said, moving aside the seat belt to sit down. “We’ve only been married ten days.”

  The honeymoon was over. They had another full day together in New York but the tranquil Maui spell had evaporated the moment they joined a queue of a hundred angry, time-pressed New Yorkers waiting for cabs in jungle-thick humidity. The city was smoggy and boiling and a warm rain fell intermittently but did not break the heaviness of the air. Rachel’s energies were devoted to doing battle with her hair in the humidity and to buying a series of items, both for herself and on commissions for other people, from a list so long and so randomly assorted that it felt as if they were on a particularly tedious scavenger hunt. Adam did not see that they needed to chase around a sweltering SoHo looking for organic sun cream for his mother, nor could he imagine that Michelle had really insisted they find it. But Rachel was tremendously excited to be in New York and a great part of that excitement, he could see, came from the opportunity it offered for beneficence. She could bring back coveted moisturizers and eye creams and lip balms and tank tops and CDs and cupcakes and iPad accessories for the poor people back home, the underprivileged who did not have the chance to shop the Big Apple as she did. Bringing gifts for others made Rachel feel cosmopolitan and she approached the task with gravity and a minute attention to detail, as if she were scouring the rain forest for rare, healing berries. Along the way she would say things like “I’m sure they stock Kate Somerville products at Henri Bendel,” and all Adam could extract from these explanations was that strange people, Kate Someone and Henry Something, were making him spend the last days of his holiday loitering in department store cosmetics halls. He had suggested that they briefly separate so that he could at least retreat into the air-conditioned paradise of MoMA for an hour or two—when they’d booked the tickets he’d had a vision of himself in New York, standing in contemplation before Jasper Johns’s American flag; coming face to face with Warhol’s Marilyn screen prints and understanding for the first time the subversive brilliance that a postcard, a T-shirt, a mouse mat reproduction could never convey. He’d even have been happy to sit round the corner and have a cold beer while she shopped—but Rachel had looked wounded. “We’re on our honeymoon, Ads!” she’d exclaimed. To leave her side for a moment would not, it was clear, be correct honeymoon protocol.

  But finally, on the penultimate day, they were following Adam’s wishes and meeting an old friend for brunch. Zach Sabah was the son of one of Rupert Sabah’s first cousins and had been at the same prep school as Adam, Dan London and Gideon Press, after which Zach was promptly whisked off to Eton. Then, because his mother was American, he had disappeared to Princeton and had never returned. He turned up in London every now and again b
ut hadn’t visited for over four years—precisely the length of his employment at a New York hedge fund. His parents had retired to Israel, where his mother had instantly been moved to come out of retirement and had opened a nursery school. Lisa London would be jealous they were seeing him, Rachel confided happily, because she’d always fancied Zach, and these days he was almost never in NW11.