The Innocents (4 page)

“Sweet that you go with her.” She closed her eyes.

“Are you all right?” She looked very pale; he crouched down to face her.

She nodded. She opened her eyes and he stood up again hurriedly, feeling awkward.

“Just tired. I’m not a very accomplished sleeper.”

“Always or recently?”

She shrugged. “Not sure. Just kind of a thing of mine. I can’t remember the last time I slept a whole night, or easily. Sometimes it feels like never, but I suppose that’s not possible.”

“No. But the feeling of never must be horrible. Exhausting. Or isolating.” He stopped. He wasn’t quite sure what else to say.

“Both exhausting and isolating, in fact. Exactly.”

“So now do you not sleep at all?” he asked, curious. “What do you do all night?”

“Interesting question. What would you do?”

“I can’t imagine,” he said, and then immediately wondered why he’d said the very opposite of what he’d been thinking.

“Can’t you? How very unimaginative you must be.” Her tone had changed; he sensed that he’d disappointed her.

“Come in and see Rachel. Your grandmother has ordered Indian, it should be here soon.”

“I’ll come in a second, I need to get Rocky’s eyedrops.”

She stood up with the tiny animal tucked under her arm like a handbag. Looming above him on the stairs she no longer looked vulnerable and had become again the remote model he’d seen across the synagogue—too much exposed skin and clever, knowing eyes. Her sweater had slipped down over her shoulder, and he was acutely aware that her bare legs were at the level of his gaze, peach-soft flesh seamed lightly with long muscle. For one brief moment he felt an urge, vivid and intense, to reach out and slide a hand between her thighs.

He stepped back and turned away embarrassed, and suddenly infuriated. He had thought himself immune to what was, after all, only a cheap casing concealing an even cheaper mechanism, and was troubled to find that he was not. He did not respect her, he told himself, and that ought to render her unattractive.

But however easily he might dismiss Ellie in the abstract, it was different now that she was nearby. His body had responded to the sight of hers, and what he thought of her ceased to matter because he had ceased, in her presence, to think. He had never before experienced anything quite like it. It felt pathetic to watch her walk up the stairs. Compromising.

She turned. “Wait, Adam, I want us to talk. Will you come back soon?”

“Of course,” he said, wondering if he meant it. He could hear Ziva calling to them and he opened the door to the sitting room, longing for the reassurance of Rachel’s hand in his.

3

“Is it really true that Rachel’s cousin was actually in a porn film? Adam, it’s mortifying.”

Adam was driving his mother, Michelle, home from an early dinner at a sushi restaurant in Chalk Farm. “It was art house,” he corrected her. “Don’t think about it, everyone will forget it soon, I’m sure.” Michelle had met him with the news that two more boys from the Jewish Free School had been beaten up on their way home—one had a fractured cheekbone, the other was still in hospital but would make a full recovery. Over supper they had discussed other recent hate crimes and the rabbi’s wife’s prolapsed uterus, and Adam had been drawn into another lengthy analysis of why his sister, Olivia, might still be unmarried. Why, Michelle had interrogated, as if Adam might be personally responsible for his sister’s perpetual spinsterhood, had she not yet settled down? Why did she feel no urgency? Why, his mother had demanded as he looked down uncomfortably at his salmon roe, why did Olivia not feel the pressing diminution of her reproductive capacity? Adam welcomed this return to lighter topics, but he did not feel like discussing Ellie Schneider with his mother. Or anyone.

“Well, I don’t know what the difference is. It must have been obscene to get her in such trouble.”

“She is in trouble,” said Adam, changing the radio station before his mother could object to the loud U2 that had started with the engine. “She’s troubled.”

“Of course I know she’s troubled; it’s terrible what she went through and such a little girl. I’m not sure there’s any recovering from that, you know.” Michelle shook her head. “Her mother was a lovely woman. Very beautiful and very, very funny. She was famously funny. It was all so awful. But Ellie can’t be allowed to throw her life away because of it. I mean, goodness. What’s being done for her?”

“I don’t know. She’s come home, which is a good sign. There’s been this older man around for years. Rachel never knew much about him but thinks he’s married, but she’s pretty sure it’s over now. So I guess things are improving.”

“Yes, Jaffa seemed reasonably positive about this visit. I hadn’t heard about the married man. Goodness me, that really is appalling.”

“Hang on,” Adam said, feeling a sudden irritation. “She’s not married. If she’s sleeping with a married man then surely he’s the one at fault. He’s the one with a wife.”

“Oh, but Adam, I’m sure she’s terribly promiscuous that girl, and she looks predatory, don’t you think?”

“Promiscuous doesn’t mean the same thing as predatory.”

“Well, it doesn’t mean anything good.”

“Surely Ellie can sleep with whomever she likes; she doesn’t owe anything to anyone. It’s not our business.”

He did not normally expend energy contradicting his quietly formidable mother, but this had come out before he could stop himself, and with unexpected vehemence. Michelle was looking at him in surprise. Adam remained dimly aware of the hypocrisy lurking in the corner he defended—Rachel’s innocence, and that blank sexual canvas on which he alone had daubed, was a tremendous part of her appeal. Had she half of the sexual history he’d imagined for her cousin, he wouldn’t have even glanced in her direction. Still, he found himself going on. “I mean, aren’t women nowadays meant to be emancipated? If she wants to shag around—”

“Adam!”

“Sorry. Never mind. I’m sure she doesn’t. And in any case, I’m sure Jaffa agrees with you, if that’s any consolation.”

“I’m quite sure Jaffa’s beside herself,” said Michelle firmly, flipping down the sun visor to check her neat bob of caramel hair in its mirror. Husbands were a sensitive topic for Michelle, who had been without one for twenty years but could say with pride that she had never once touched anyone else’s.

At sixty she still had the light step and ramrod posture of a dancer, a compliment she had received so often that she now took it for granted and had almost come to believe in her own childhood history at the barre, though in reality she had none. Instead she ran many miles in the gym (though never on Hampstead Heath so as not to be seen in undignified Lycra) and ate very little.

This discipline extended to all areas. Raised by Michelle, Adam could fold hospital corners into a bedsheet like an army man and had been drilled since childhood to be ten minutes early for everything. Almost always in a uniform of freshly dry-cleaned gray cashmere tracksuit and Scotchgarded new black Uggs, Michelle appeared flawlessly, resolutely self-contained. If she were not his mother Adam would have found her terrifying. As she was, he merely found her intimidating. The noisy chaos of Rachel’s family had been foreign and wondrous to him, having known only Michelle’s emotional and domestic tidiness.

They were approaching Michelle’s house on Temple Fortune Lane but she gestured for him to keep driving. “You can drop me at the corner of Hoop Lane.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes, absolutely. It’s not yet seven. I’m going to pop in and visit your father.”

In the Newman household, the responsibility for upholding Jewish tradition had always been shouldered by Adam’s father, Jacob, who had wanted nothing more than to transmit to his children a love of Jewish culture. When he’d gone, therefore, Michelle had had no choice but to pick up the slack, furious with him for his abandonment and channeling this fury into perfect Purim costumes and elaborate
succah
decoration. The cancer might not have been his fault, but for years his dying had been awfully hard to forgive. Olivia had been twelve, Adam eight; there would be
bat
and
bar mitzvahs
looming and huge, aching family gaps to fill. But if she was going to do it, as with everything, she would do it properly. The children would not miss a festival.

Jacob had guided her so clearly, shown her by such proud example his stance on culture, on practice, on tradition, and she knew how he would want her to raise his children—as active citizens in a congregation, individuals with a sense of family, of community responsibility and firm, proud Jewish identities. But for all that, Michelle reflected, he had talked to her so little about God. It is not a contradiction to be a Jew and an atheist—on the God question, Judaism might well be the broadest church of them all. There are rabbis (admittedly a rather small minority) who do not believe in Him. You can detest organized religion and still consider yourself Jewish. There is a place for you in a synagogue if you don’t believe, if you do believe, if you’re not sure, or if you only believe during brief moments of turbulence on airplanes or in the final five minutes of a football match in which only divine intervention might save you. But Jacob had never really told her where he stood. What would he think of her talking to him now that he was gone, for example? What had he thought of heaven, or of an afterlife? She didn’t know and it was disorienting, for he had been her navigator in everything. At his grave now, it hurt most of all that she did not know whether Jacob, in whatever form his spirit might or might not currently take, would think her silly for perching at the side of Mr. and Mrs. Lefkowicz to tell him all about recent events on the synagogue charity committee. Or had he believed that it ended in death? That silence and eternal sleep came next, and she was merely confiding in the ether? So many questions she had not had time to ask him and this the most important one of all. And so she was left to keep a Jewish home, to visit the silent Hoop Lane Jewish Cemetery, and to wonder.

4

The Prospect of being alone was unappealing on a night when Adam had no desire to be reflective. There were several lines of thought that he was actively choosing to ignore, pushed into the darker cavities of his mind where he felt their menace but could not clearly see their shape. Seeing Rachel would blunt their fangs, would probably banish them completely, just as her deep, untroubled sleep beside him usually made his own release into unconsciousness seem possible. Rachel did not lie awake thinking of sudden death or other calamities. In childhood no one had told her that dying—don’t be frightened—is just like falling asleep. Ever since then there had been nights when Adam could not quite let go, even when his eyes stung and his head throbbed with exhaustion. But now he would lie beside Rachel and force himself to breathe to the rhythms of her breath. He would focus on this rise and fall, the warm curve of her back pressed tight against his chest as if he might absorb her calm through his skin.

But as he’d arrived home from dropping off his mother, Rachel had called to say that she was staying at her own flat. Jasper’s girlfriend, Tanya, was upset—Jasper had perpetrated some injustice that would be tedious or incomprehensible when it was later explained—requiring chocolate and ministrations and for Rachel to remain at home to provide them. Adam was disappointed.

He had been imagining her waiting for him as he drove home to Primrose Hill, curled up on the sofa with the television whispering in the corner, mobile wedged under her ear, magazine on her knees on top of a pile of marking, nail file in hand, and his laptop open in front of her so that she could communicate in multimedia. Mission control. At the moment she was obsessed with a scandal unfolding in New York—a well-known art dealer named Marshall Bruce was in the throes of a brutal divorce after the
New York Post
had exposed his serial infidelities. Marshall Bruce was tall and silver-haired, and had the oblong jaw and oversize, dazzling grin of an American game show host. He was at least as big a celebrity as the contemporary artists whose work he sold and was known for his signature outfit of a cream suit and a tie in textured Nantucket red, and for having married a distant cousin of the Kennedys. He was a major Democratic Party donor and had, before the scandal, supposedly nursed political ambitions of his own.