The Innocents (25 page)

The Purim story’s heroine was Esther, new bride of the Persian King Ahasuerus. Shortly after their marriage, the king’s adviser Haman decided to murder all the Jews of the region, and Ahasuerus agreed to the genocide. It was only when Esther threw herself on her husband’s mercy and confessed that she herself was Jewish that he revoked his consent, and sentenced Haman to death.

As a bride herself only six months earlier, Rachel had been cast to play Queen Esther in the English performance of the Purim
shpiel
at synagogue. Adam had not seen her on stage since she played Lady Bracknell in the upper-sixth production of
The Importance of Being Earnest
(she’d been the best actress in the production by far but had been refused the coveted role of Gwendolen because the director had complained that her inescapably large chest would make her look more matronly than the scrawny teenage girl playing her mother. She had cried about it and had begun the first of her many preliminary investigations into breast reduction surgery—not for the last time Adam and Jaffa had talked her out of it). He was intrigued by the idea of his new wife taking center stage. She had been an excellent Lady Bracknell, but he’d always thought that her own natural sweetness would have made her an ideal Cecily.

Greeting the arriving guests at the young adults’ Purim party was the freckled junior rabbi Josh Cordova, dressed as a milkmaid with a bosom large enough to rival Rachel’s, blond woolen Heidi plaits concealing his curly ginger hair, and a black and white stuffed cow under his arm that he introduced as Moo-ses. Tanya Pearl’s younger sister, Hayley, stood beside him, dressed as Mata Hari as far as Adam could tell, decked in bells and anklets and displaying a rather startling amount of fake-tanned midriff. Unlike Tanya, she was rail-thin and had been wearing a full face of makeup, complete with false eyelashes and equally voluminous hair, every day since she was twelve. She worked at a respite center for disabled children and taught in the synagogue Sunday school, and if discipline was required for these roles, then Hayley Pearl was the ideal candidate. She had put her face on every morning, even when they camped in the desert on Israel Tour.

“Rachie!” Hayley embraced her, wrists and feet jangling as she moved. “Come with me, we’ve got a five-minute rehearsal in the kitchens and then you’re on. Did you really bring it? Is that it? Ah, we had a spare one from the fancy dress box just in case you didn’t want to wear it again!” She reached for the garment bag that Adam carried but Rachel shook her head.

“It’s been dry-cleaned and packed so I couldn’t, but I’ve got a white dress and a crown for the costume instead.”

Adam squeezed Rachel’s hand before passing her the hanger. There was no need for Hayley Pearl to know that the wedding dress had remained at home because now, only six months after the wedding, it no longer fit. Rachel’s wholehearted return to carbohydrates had had its inevitable consequences. The discovery had been made that morning; the tears had ended only recently.

Hayley pouted. “But you looked so gorge in it, what a shame! Ah, well. You’ll look gorge in anything. Come in with me. I’ve got my whole class here to see you, they’re going to be so excited. And it’s Natalie Joseph’s seventh birthday today so don’t forget to give her a cuddle.” She drew Rachel away from Adam and they disappeared together through the back doors of the synagogue. Adam remained outside with the milkmaid. His own costume—a hat and magnifying glass to be Sherlock Holmes—was already feeling rather halfhearted.

The little plastic gemstone tiara that she wore to be queen was comical, but Rachel on stage was not—she was captivating. Rachel’s Queen Esther was sweet and solemn. Her innocence and gentleness lent a grace to her quiet courage as she risked her life before her all-powerful husband, a grave expression in her wide, dark eyes as she pleaded. It was all there in Rachel’s lovely face—a young girl unused to confrontation who, in defense of her family and her people, had found steel within. As she prepared to come before the king unbidden—a crime punishable by death if it displeased him—it was all Adam could do not to walk on stage and enfold Rachel in his arms. She looked so frightened, and yet so determined. She had mesmerized the room.

The performance ended, and Adam joined the rest of the audience in a standing ovation for the players. Rachel was glowing with pleasure, taking her bow between Haman (Jasper Cohen) and King Ahasuerus (Anthony Rosenbaum). Adam had not been able to take his eyes off his wife throughout the performance and he saw that the rest of the congregation felt the same—the whoops and whistles of approval were all for Rachel.

“Isn’t she gorge?” Hayley Pearl whispered to him during the standing ovation. Her bells and bracelets jangled as she clapped. “Every man in the room right now is mad about your wife.”

Adam swelled with pride. “I know,” he said, immodestly.

Rachel was as proud of herself as Adam was of her, and in the car her excitement was infectious. She sat, clutching the
hamantaschen
that Rabbi Cordova had insisted they take home, a bag of fifty from the caterer. The rest of the leftover food was going to a homeless shelter in Camden—Rabbi Cordova would deliver it to the same place he took the spare
challot
every Friday on his way home. But he had been desperate to show his appreciation for the star actress of the night and had only pastries with which to reward her. Refusing had not been an option.

Rachel shifted the bag on her knees. “Shall we take these to Ziva? It’s only nine and we could just drop them off if she’s going to bed.”

“That’s a lovely idea, Pumpkin.” They were about to turn in to England’s Lane; Adam continued down Haverstock Hill instead.

“And we’ll still be home for you to watch
Match of the Day
.”

They stopped at a junction and he turned to look at her, her eyes bright in the tawny streetlight, pleased by her own suggestion. In Rachel’s early childhood Ziva had been a source of painful embarrassment, Rachel had once confessed to Adam. At her first primary school play, Amy Thomas had seen Rachel’s grandmother swaddling fairy cakes in napkins and putting the bundles into her handbag. It was not theft of which she stood accused—Laura Young’s mother had been manning the refreshments table and at the end of the night had been giving them away. But everyone else’s parents had taken one and peeled off the paper case and handed it on to a child, or had simply refused the offer of pink-iced cupcakes unevenly studded with silver balls. Even class six, whose chubby fingers had decorated them earlier that day in Home Ec, knew that they were not good enough to justify wrapping them in shredding tissues to take home. The next day Amy Thomas had suggested that Rachel’s grandmother probably didn’t want to pay for her own cupcakes because Jews didn’t like to spend money, and this had been Rachel’s first gentle brush with bigotry. She knew this only in hindsight—at the time it seemed to say less about the worldview to which a precocious Amy Thomas had been exposed at her parents’ dinner table and more about Ziva herself, who was now a source of humiliation and was perhaps also mad. Rachel had nursed these fears alone until the school carol concert when, forced to explain why she did not want her snack-filching grandmother to come and hear her solo in “Silent Night,” Jaffa and Lawrence had told her about the Holocaust.

“
Kinderlach?
” Ziva squinted at them from the doorway. “
Vos is dis?
”

Adam held the plastic bag aloft in his fist like a giant funfair goldfish. “
Hamantaschen
, Ziva.”

“Wonderful. Come in!
Ach
, this is a lovely surprise. Come in. We have just been having crumpets.”

“Oh, do you have people here, Granny?” Rachel had stepped across the threshold and begun to follow her grandmother across the hall but stopped. “We don’t want to disturb you.”

Ziva continued toward the sitting room. She had momentum; pausing to reply would make the walk more difficult. She addressed Rachel over her shoulder. “First of all, Rachele, with nobody in the world could I be disturbed if my visitor was you. And secondly, I am now alone in any case. Come. Sit. Bring plates.”

“
Hamantaschen
with your crumpets?” Adam asked, moving an ebony-handled toasting fork from where it lay on the coffee table and returning it to a brass stand by the mantelpiece. Although it was already March, a fire burned high in the grate and the butter dish, also on the coffee table between three grease-slicked plates, was now a pond of buttercup-bright oil.

“Thank you, Adam, but I have crumpeted already quite enough. But please make tea.
Ach
, ten minutes earlier and you would also have seen Ellie.”

Adam had been trying to make the toasting fork stand upright in its place beside the poker and a pair of brass fire tongs; he tightened his grip on it to prevent it clattering to the ground.

“Ellie’s here?” he and Rachel said together.

“Why didn’t she tell me she was in London?” Rachel continued, sounding hurt.

“She is here only for tonight, and then she has I think a lunch with the Balmain directors and
Tatler
, and is going straight back to Paris in the afternoon.”

“But she’s here this evening.”

“Yes, and I know that she would be very sad to miss you. She wished to have more time to see the family, this I know. But it got late, and now she has gone to the pub with her friend Melissa who is also staying with me here. She is a model also, one of those peculiar-looking ones. Very heavy features, and the big thick brows. Androgynous a little, but also attractive. I have been feeling very diminutive, especially now with you also Adam, looming over me.”

Rachel, who had shot up to five foot two in primary school but had since got no further, did not smile. “Ellie shouldn’t bring her friends to stay with you, Granny, you’ll get tired.”

“And what is it precisely for which you think I should be conserving my energy? Nonsense. I like to have life in the house. Melissa is very charming, and she speaks excellent French.”

During this exchange Adam had remained facing the fireplace. He was not sure what he felt now, only that the idea of her proximity was disturbing and when Ziva had said that they had missed her by moments, his disappointment vied with an equally powerful relief. His cheeks felt hot. He stepped back from the fire.

“Adam, you know Prebend Street from here, yes?”

He turned around, forcing a smile. “Yes.”

“Ellie and Melissa are in a pub, I believe; it is called I think the Duchess of Kent. It is cream and red brick, there is nothing else near it. It is not a very exciting one, Ellie said, but glamour I suppose they have in Paris, and this one she is able to take the dog inside. Her phone is I believe charging upstairs. Would you mind very much to go and fetch them, just for a little? Rachele is upset, but Ellie I promise you will also be upset not to see her cousin now that you are both here. She has been asking me all about you this evening, and how you were. I showed her photographs from the wedding.” She patted Rachel’s hand and Rachel smiled, tentatively reassured. Ziva would not flatter her unless this was true. “It was just so short this time, and she was a little
meshugah
to get everything done. It is only very close. Would you mind?”

Adam shook his head.

The Duchess of Kent was full, the windows blurred with condensation. It was impossible to see anything through them but smudges of moving color, and so Adam steeled himself and pushed open the door. He was hit by a fug of heat and humidity. Above the threshold a heater whirred and blew and he stood in its hot gusts feeling faintly dizzy and scanning the room. Whether he hoped to see her or hoped she was elsewhere he had no idea—only that he was hoping something, fervently.

Ellie was standing at the bar. Despite the dense crowd, it seemed as if every group he looked at was oriented toward her. Melissa was beside her, precisely as Ziva had described—angular and heavy-jawed, wearing a slash of red lipstick and hair gelled into a black teddy boy quiff. Ellie was conspicuous everywhere, but together with Melissa the effect was exponentially exaggerated. Every man in the room had found an excuse to face in their direction.

Ellie had changed since last he’d seen her. She was leaning on the bar, Rocky at her feet. He could see her profile and the long curve of her body, one foot resting on the brass rail as if she were a cowgirl leaning casually on a fence. Even from across the room it was obvious that she had lost some of her haunted look—her skin was clearer and her face and arms were tanned caramel dark, as if she’d just returned from the tropics. She wore a black tank top and loose gray jeans that hung so low they showed a band of tanned skin and the violin curve of her hip bone. He imagined reaching for her, his hand on the small of her back where he could see the neat beads of her spine as she leaned forward. His palms were sweating and he remained where he was, wiped them on his jeans and told himself, without sympathy, to get a bloody grip.

She was laughing—the bartender was firing something from a soda nozzle into two glasses in front of them and was chuckling with her. As Adam watched, Melissa leaned a hand on Ellie’s shoulder and whispered something in her ear, at which Ellie threw her head back and laughed harder, her eyes briefly closed. Her leather jacket was slung over a barstool between them and when her hand went to its pocket, he thought, “She’s reaching for her lighter and her cigarette case. She’ll go outside to smoke,” and the intimacy of predicting her most trivial movements sent a thrill through him. He stayed rooted where he was. It seemed impossible that one glimpse of her could petrify him into a dumb silence in a doorway, and that it could still happen after so long—yet her proximity had electrified him, recalling the light touch of her fingers in his palm. He stared at her, willing her to turn. If she looks at me, he told himself, it means something. It was a stupid, infantile conviction—the same kind of bargain he’d made with himself as a child. If the first train is for Charing Cross and not the Bank branch, then it means that Arsenal will win today. If I can fit four Hobnobs in my mouth then it means I’ll make the First Eleven. If the rain stops before we get to the hospice then it means they’re wrong about Dad. He knew that such bargains did not pay. Still, when Ellie didn’t lift her face toward him he made no move toward her. She had taken out her lighter and cigarette case, just as he’d known she would, but instead of moving to the door where he waited she had simply placed them on the polished bar and continued talking to Melissa. A group of people were leaving; Adam stepped aside to let them pass and when the last girl left, wrapping her scarf high around her ears and squealing at the cold night, he followed her outside and kept walking. Ellie hadn’t seen him. He had had a fortunate escape, he thought, breathing in cold air that burned and cleared his lungs. Seeing her could only harm him now—he had stupid, unilateral fantasies that could never bear any relation to reality and apparently those feelings were still lurking just beneath the surface, however much he’d silenced them until now. But it would be fine. He was married. If anything, it had been a test and he had passed it because he’d extricated himself before anything unsettled him beyond an initial jolt of memory. She looked well; she didn’t need him. Once and for all he would get over it—in the meantime he would tell Ziva and Rachel that Ellie was nowhere to be seen.