The Innocents (2 page)

For years, in his head, he had been establishing a relationship with Rachel’s younger cousin—close, vaguely paternal, faintly flirtatious, but always within the bounds of what was appropriate among old friends. She would confide in him about her antics, and he would be fond and exasperated and offer her sage, avuncular advice. When he and Rachel married, she would treat their home like her own and would turn to them for refuge, would stay with them (visits during which she might sometimes be glimpsed in her underwear—though in Adam’s defense, this was not usually the focal point of the daydream). They would help her turn around her troubled life. In the pub with Jasper and the boys, he discussed her New York life in a confident, possessive manner. Ellie’s seedy glamour, such a contrast to her conventional cousin, nonetheless gave Rachel a certain edge. No one else had so notorious or so alluring a relative. The girls had been close in childhood and in the solitude of his own thoughts, Adam had appropriated this closeness. He was a friend and confidant. Now, he was forced to confront the reality that she was almost a perfect stranger.

The private image he’d constructed was now superimposed, ill-fitting, onto the girl who stood before him. Her eyes were the same extraordinary green, bright and clear and fixed on him with an expression of idle curiosity, but beneath the thick lashes were rings of gray and plum and lavender, as if she’d slept many nights in old makeup or perhaps simply never slept. Around her, the exposed heads of the community’s departing women were sleek and blow-dried, neat as a pin in order to stand before God’s judgment and each other’s, but Ellie’s hair was in a loose ponytail of overbleached straw blond, and looked unbrushed. Her heavy, pouting lips were chapped. Beneath the gaping collar of her jacket, her gaunt frame seemed as flat-chested as a little boy’s, and when she turned away for a moment, tugging her hair out from under her scarf, her profile revealed a deep shadow beneath a cheekbone that protruded like sharp flint. He hid his surprise and looked instead at the cigarette, hoping to convey to her that lighting it on Yom Kippur—while still in the grounds of the synagogue—would be flagrantly, extravagantly offensive. He did not want Rachel’s parents to be embarrassed further.

“Where again?” he asked. Despite his inventions, he had not expected her to remember him.

“I met you here once, a long time ago. Jaffa brought me with her to pick up Rachel from Israel Tour. I was desperate to come, I’d missed her so much. I was playing on the climbing frame when the buses got in. Just there.” She nodded toward the other end of the car park and his eyes followed hers to the smooth, empty tarmac where years ago had stood a curved rack of low monkey bars and a shallow plastic slide. “I worshiped her and I was just insanely jealous that summer. I just thought—Anyway. You and Rachel got off the coach together, you were carrying her bag. I remember, it was the first time I’d noticed a boy doing that. And then she brought you over and introduced you to Jaffa and Lawrence. So I met you.”

“You were very little then.”

“Ten.”

“Good memory.”

She shrugged. “You all seemed happy. That’s rare enough to make an impression.”

At that moment Rachel’s parents appeared behind her and he lost the chance to reply, though Ellie’s comment had bothered him. He knew a lot of happy people here. He remembered the day that Ellie described as clearly as she did, not for the stern blond ten-year-old who’d shaken his hand with the formality of a politician but for Rachel—he had first met her on that youth group trip to Israel, and as their coach of sunburned teenagers had drawn into the car park he had asked her to be his girlfriend. And he knew it seemed anachronistic, or simply unfashionable, but from the moment she’d smiled back, bashful and willing, he’d known that they would get married. She’d had such certainty, such a placid conviction in the essential goodness of the world and what it promised her. To Adam, raised by a mother who prepared with steely determination for the worst to happen immediately if not sooner, Rachel’s unwavering, no-nonsense optimism had been an elixir. He hadn’t known that he was allowed to expect a calm, happy life until Rachel had shown him that she anticipated nothing else. Her belief was such that there seemed no doubt she would have it; whoever shared that life with her would share that calm and happiness.

He’d loved her since that glorious month of freedom in Israel. The boys had pierced their ears, kneeling on blankets for Arab jewelry traders to shoot ill-advised gold studs through their lobes; Rachel and her friends had sat cross-legged on adjacent rugs while Ethiopian girls worked slim braids into their hair, the plaits then wrapped in bright cotton so that one or two worms of green and red stuck out stiffly from each ponytail. Their teenage rebellions that summer had been innocent and conventional and brief—the earrings had been removed at Heathrow; there had only ever been kissing and maybe, for a precocious couple, one hand in a bra. And Adam and Rachel had done neither of those things but instead had begun tentatively, in the final few days, to sit together on the bus. They were all happy then—Ellie was right. But they were happy now, too.

“Good, good, you found each other.”

Rachel’s father, Lawrence, clapped Adam amiably on the back and then, overcome by emotion at the thought of the engagement as he had been intermittently all week, gripped him by the shoulders and held him at arm’s length for a loving appraisal. He then enfolded him in a bear hug. Adam and Lawrence were the same height—six foot two—but Adam was broad-shouldered while Lawrence was thin and always slightly stooping, as if to avoid intimidating anyone with this impressively un-Jewish height. Yet still his bear hugs felt enveloping. The warmth of Lawrence’s presence alone was enveloping. Proud to be tall, particularly among Ashkenazi men who tended to halt at around five nine, Adam had nonetheless been content to stop growing where he did. It would have felt wrong to stand taller than Lawrence.

Jaffa, small and wide where her husband was tall and slim, was frowning at Ellie’s cigarette. “Ellie, you can wait for that, no? Show respect.” She had removed the green hat to expose short hair home-dyed a deep wine purple, streaked with lighter aubergine shades where it had begun to fade with washing. It was a color much favored, for reasons Adam had never fathomed, by Israeli women of a certain age.

Ziva Schneider joined them in time to hear this remonstrance. “You think,” she asked her daughter, “that God finds it more respectful if she smokes on Kol Nidre around the corner?”

Jaffa pursed her lips in irritated silence, as her mother knew full well that it was not God’s judgment that concerned her. She wanted to stand exultant in the car park as the crowds flooded from the synagogue, graciously accepting congratulations on the triumph of her daughter’s engagement to Adam. She wanted to soak up
naches
like a sponge. Such a large assembly would not come together again until Rosh Hashanah the following year—this Yom Kippur she wanted to fire her news at huge clusters of rival mothers. She adored Adam, God only knew, but there had been other engagements recently, newer couples walking down the aisle; the names of girls younger than her daughter featured on the announcements pages of
The Jewish Chronicle
. There had been some concern that Adam would leave it “too long.” But now it had happened, and Rachel would not yet be thirty at the wedding if they planned it quickly. Today of all days, Jaffa Gilbert did not want to concern herself with her niece’s rebellion. She turned her considerable back to both Ziva and Ellie and caught Adam’s face between plump hands.

“Ah, Adam, Adam. Rachel says she’ll be just a little while,
bubele
, she is talking to Brooke Goodman about something. You are breaking the fast with us tomorrow, yes?”

Adam nodded, his face still between Jaffa’s palms through the first few motions. An assortment of rings—heavy silver and bright molded plastic—scratched gently against his cheeks.

“I’ll wait for Rachel, please go ahead.”

“I am going nowhere, I have a cab,” said Ziva, sitting down neatly on a low brick wall. “I am an old lady, I will not walk back and no injunction says I must. I am eighty-eight. I am infirm.
Pikuach nefesh
. This morning I already call Addison Lee, and Ellie will come with me.”

“Infirm?
Eze meshugas? At lo chola, Ima!
”

“
Sha shtil
,” said Ziva, waving away Jaffa dismissively. At that moment a black Volkswagen drew up at the curb and Ziva hopped lightly to her feet, disappearing into it before Jaffa could intervene. Ellie folded herself into the front seat and the car departed. Adam watched her go with curiosity.

“Eze meshugas?”
Jaffa asked again, this time to herself, pouting and drawing her face farther back into her chins. She made no further comment, but the force with which she crossed her arms over her immense, velvet-clad breasts was sufficiently expressive. The engagement cast their family into the spotlight this Yom Kippur—absolute propriety was required beneath its glare. A look of anxiety crossed Lawrence’s mild face as they departed, Jaffa muttering an outraged monologue in rapid Hebrew to her partially comprehending but entirely supportive husband. Lawrence was a straightforward man. He lived, exclusively and devotedly, for his wife and daughter. He would be happy again only when Jaffa’s equilibrium was restored.

Adam sat down on the wall that Ziva and Ellie had just vacated, nodding greetings to the many familiar faces among the congregation. Mostly, these were the occupants of the crowded outer stratum of his world, people with whom his life had intersected at an earlier stage and who now resurfaced often enough for him to know a little of their lives, though he did nothing to seek out either the information or the subjects of it. Such was the way in Jewish North West London—no one ever disappeared. Instead his contemporaries circled in its gravity, returning from college to rent houses in Hendon, or buy first flats in West Hampstead, held in orbit by the hot sun of the community. And during brief periods away—a year seconded to a law firm in Shanghai, for example, or a residency at an Edinburgh hospital—their parents were still in place and in contact, so that everyone’s coordinates remained logged. It had only been at university that he had understood just how unusual it was that he could list the whereabouts of all of his nursery school classmates. He could say if they were married or fat or employed by the civil service. He knew, for the most part, their sexual histories. Unless from a very small village, his fellow students found it incomprehensible. Even in a small village, in fact, when people leave there is little expectation of return.

But tonight, on the eve of Yom Kippur, everyone was here—Hayley Pearl, who was Jasper’s girlfriend’s sister; Dan Kirsch, who had been in Adam and Jasper’s scout pack and had twice been on tennis camp with Rachel; Ari Rosenbaum, whose brother had married a girl who’d gone out with Dan Kirsch. Adam smiled at each of them as they passed, but his eyes always returned to the steps of the synagogue, waiting to catch sight of his future wife.

2

“She must.”

“What, do it on purpose?”

“Yes, of course. You can’t go to
shul
with your tits hanging out and not realize.”

“Adam, that’s my cousin! And please don’t use that word.” Rachel swatted at his forearm and then immediately patted it, somewhat anxiously, as if to undo the simulated violence of her rebuke. It made her unhappy to disapprove of him. “Maybe in New York people are just less conservative at synagogue.”

“It’s New York, Pumpkin, it’s not the moon. How different can it be?”

“Well then, I don’t know. Everything about her’s different from me.”

“That’s true,” Adam said. “Thank goodness.”

They were parking outside Ziva’s house in Islington; as he turned to reverse into a space, he squeezed her shoulder fondly. She was right, of course. Absolutely everything about her was different from her younger cousin. Ellie seemed restless and too worldly. Rachel liked what she knew and was content for everything to remain precisely as it was, though it would be unfair to say she was ignorant. That there were worlds and lives beyond theirs had not escaped her, but she was certain enough of her own place to be resolutely incurious about the knowledge that those worlds might offer. At sixteen, Adam had been able to see in her eyes the home she would make for him at fifty. Rachel knew who she was.

Their exteriors were equally at odds. Rachel was polished and pink with health, her dark hair sleek, her nails neat and Chanel-varnished. Ellie had looked slightly worn, he’d thought outside the synagogue, though she was only twenty-two; he’d noted the bitten nails and the angry red skin around them, had seen the shadows beneath her eyes. It had been months since Ellie had officially been expelled from the creative writing program at Columbia University—if she had sleepless nights, it wasn’t because she was studying.

An evening rain had begun, light and silent, insistent enough to pixelate the world through the windscreen until it blurred. Adam jumped out to open Rachel’s door, holding his jacket aloft to shield her hair from the drizzle. Since the engagement, he had found himself taking a particular pride in these small gestures of gallantry. She looked different to him now, no longer simply his girlfriend but the woman to whom he had promised his future. He felt the weight of his responsibilities toward her, long unspoken, now confirmed. A twenty-eight-year-old matriarch to future generations of Newmans.