The Innocents (7 page)

All of them had been on holiday together in Israel when Jackie died, Ziva and Jaffa and Lawrence and Boaz and Jackie, all attending a wedding at which Rachel was a bridesmaid and eight-year-old Ellie was the flower girl. They had been to the party, where the cake had not been as delicate as Jackie’s but everyone had agreed that the girls had been enchanting, and it had happened early the following morning. Rachel had been babysitting, sunbathing by the side of the King David swimming pool while Ellie practiced endless handstands and somersaults in the shallow end. And three streets away had been a bomb, on a belt, on a bus, and Jackie on a sun-soaked pedestrian crossing just behind it. Ellie had squealed delightedly at the sudden deep waves that had rippled across the glittering surface of the water; a moment later the sirens had begun.

In the years that followed it became clear that Boaz had not survived the attack. After a death it is understood that one must go on living for the children; after certain deaths, certain horrors, it is simply too much to ask. The family took care of Ellie as much as Boaz would allow them and could do no more, for he did not make it easy. Most of the time he was near catatonic, animated only when he considered that someone else was being too overtly maternal toward his daughter, when he would snarl with territorial rage like an animal. But most of the time he was simply passive. He seemed bewildered by the little girl, as if he couldn’t quite remember who she was, or why she was beside him. Father and daughter were isolated, set apart from the world by the fascinating violence of their loss.

Ellie in those years was solemn and pliant. She made it easy for Boaz to neglect her. At Jackie’s stone-setting eleven months after her death, Rachel had sobbed against Lawrence’s chest until, during a moment between prayers, she looked up to see Ellie holding Jaffa’s hand, mute and blank-eyed, and had been shamed into composure. The little knuckles on Ellie’s hand were white, clutching Jaffa with all her strength. But her face had shown nothing beneath the glittering tracks of silent tears. Not once did she look toward the new gray marble headstone. When she stayed with the Gilberts, they would find her awake at all hours reading comics, watching a low-murmuring television, or studying the recipes in one of Jaffa’s baking books with intense concentration. After the stone-setting Rachel never saw her cry.

Boaz stayed until an old friend from Israel offered him a job in New York. It was a position with a small software company, nothing he understood or was excited by. But it was Jackie’s city, and father and daughter all but disappeared into its maw. Ziva was heartbroken. They all did as much as they could, flying to New York every holiday, as Ellie’s father would not bring her back to see them, nor allow her to visit without him. But when Ellie turned sixteen, Boaz once again shouldered his rucksack. He couldn’t care about his child, Ziva saw, because he was no longer capable of caring about anything at all.

Ellie had stayed in New York alone. She had refused to return to London, and there was nothing they could do. During those years Ziva and Jaffa had been beside themselves about the girl and twice Ziva had gone to visit, only for Ellie to disappear. “We will lose her forever if we chase her,” Ziva had said eventually, “and I hope that she will come to us when she is ready.”

Ellie was an odd contradiction: With a modest allowance from her guilty father (who, to his small credit, always worked wherever he was in the world, even if it was hauling crabs in Thailand) combined with her far larger modeling income, she had finished high school and college and finally had begun graduate school at Columbia, all without support or advice, though both would have been forthcoming if only she had allowed the family to see her. In parallel, she had kept up the more conventional curriculum of drugs and drink and self-destruction that one expects of the abandoned, troubled teenager, cries for help that she would then refuse to accept. That she had now agreed to Ziva’s offer of, if not help, then at least somewhere to stay for a while after the Columbia film debacle was seen by the family as proof that she was coming round. Healing, maybe. Jaffa would be the first to say that her brother had been weak and flighty, even before his heart had imploded. He was last heard of selling rose oil to tourists on Varanasi’s Assi Ghat and had been silent now for years. But if no good could come for him there might yet be hope for the girl. Whatever life had dealt her, she was still only twenty-two. They wanted to rally round her, if she would let them.

Through Rachel’s reports, which were concerned and censorious in extravagantly intensifying alternations, Adam knew a great deal about the surface of Ellie’s life. But he wanted the truths beneath it. He remembered the frowning, serious little girl he had met in a synagogue car park only two years after the bombing, and the sardonic and resolutely unserious young woman who had returned from her exile, an unrepentant prodigal daughter. She had known tragedy and was coming through it, in her way, defiant and oddly admirable. It was compelling. He wanted to discover who she was, and retrieving the stolen jacket offered a good opportunity.

Ellie was no longer living with Ziva and had instead set up camp in Bethnal Green, in a flat belonging to a photographer friend who traveled a lot for work. A good friend, evidently, since he’d also left a BMW in her care.

Bethnal Green was not within Adam’s usual locus of operations. It seemed like somewhere that should be “South of the River,” that vague designation that conveyed an essence rather than a geographical truth. Several places felt South of the River when they were really north of it—Shoreditch, for example, and her naughty brother, Hoxton, places that required satellite navigation and a faint concern over the fate of one’s car during the visit. Like all places that were not contained within the bounds of either Central London or the N-prefixed postal districts, it was out of Adam’s comfort zone.

By the time he arrived, it was after ten. Jasper had kept him in the pub later than he’d planned, and then roadworks had sent him careening around the streets of Whitechapel, while the officious robot-woman who inhabited his GPS sang out instructions that were, because of the diversions, impossible to obey. The address he’d been given led him down a small dead-end street to a broad, iron-studded wooden gate that looked as if it concealed a driveway. But instead he found behind it a cobbled yard, in which had been created a makeshift urban garden—a pair of park benches surrounded by carmine, terra-cotta-footed geraniums. A small, red front door stood slightly ajar in the far corner. Beside it was an open window, and when he crossed the yard he could hear, through both door and window, a shower running.

“Hello?” he said, into these apertures.

“Hi, Adam, come in. One sec, I’m just washing this mask thing out of my hair—there’s tea bags in the fridge, and wine also. The whatever, the opener, is on top.” Her voice was distorted slightly by the falling water, echoing off tiles, but he stepped inside while she was still speaking and looked to his left, where he presumed the bathroom was. Ellie was leaning over the bath with her head under a hand shower. She smiled at him upside down.

“You’re very trusting, leaving the front door open in London. Why are the tea bags in the fridge?”

“Everything’s in the fridge. Roaches.”

“Charming. I didn’t know cockroaches took an interest in tea.”

“Well, these are British roaches.” She stood up, tossing her head back violently, and there was a squawk from somewhere in the bathroom. Rocky shot out toward Adam, objecting to the spray of water from her hair. “Hot Rock!” she said, sharply.

“Ah, I’ve never heard his full name before. Classy.” Adam bent to pick up the animal, who had leapt with some effort onto an enormous silver-gray corduroy sofa, but who leapt, yelping, straight off it again at the sight of his approaching hands. Adam sat down in his place.

The flat was a large single room in a converted stable block, the low ceiling striped with hot water pipes that had each been painted a bright primary color. One wall, along which stainless-steel industrial units had been haphazardly collected, served as the kitchen—an oven, two glass-fronted bottle refrigerators with blinking red LCD displays, and a wide freezer chest that doubled as a desk, with two large-screen computers side by side on top of it. Standard-issue bohemian sleeping arrangements were in evidence—a mattress lay on the floor in the far corner—but made up with incongruously decadent black satin sheets. This was where Rocky now cowered, shivering slightly, bulging onyx eyes fixed mistrustfully on Adam, his fur as sleek and black as the pillows onto which he was no doubt shedding.

Ellie had draped a pink towel around her neck and emerged into the room. She did not kiss Adam’s cheeks in greeting as he would expect from the girls he knew. She merely smiled at him as she passed, and crossed to the kitchen where a bottle of red wine stood open on top of the oven. She poured it into two champagne flutes and returned.

“Theo only drinks champagne. It’s these or teacups. Anyway, look. I’m sorry I pissed you off last night.”

“It’s really okay. You didn’t.”

“Well, I did, but—”

“My masculine pride will recover. I’ll drink some beer, pump some iron, go out bear trapping, the usual. Don’t worry.”

“Ah, yes. Nothing like bear trapping to make a man feel like a man again.” She tilted her head and considered him with a serious expression. “I can actually see you in fatigues.”

“It is quite funny that you thought that, though.”

“Yes, well, no need to rub it in. I get it—you and Rach are swinging from the chandeliers every night. Lucky girl. What do I know?” She sat down beside him on the sofa. “So apropos of last night, I wanted to ask you for some advice.”

Adam accepted the overfilled glass she offered him and waited; more pressing was the curiosity to discover whether Ellie considered Rachel lucky for living this imaginary endless sexual marathon or for sharing these exploits with him. He saw no satisfactory way of asking.

“I’m glad I’ve managed to get you to myself. I want to go native. I want you to tell me what I have to do to fit in whilst I’m here.”

Adam exhaled in surprise, and droplets of Zinfandel fountained from his glass down his front. That she had wanted to talk to him about something he had already guessed; after all, she had taken his jacket on purpose. But whatever it might have been, it was not this that he had expected. Specks of red began to bleed into wider stains on the breast of his shirt, and he swore. Ellie laughed and handed him the damp towel from her shoulders.

“Surely it’s not that amusing?”

“It’s quite amusing. You couldn’t be more different from everyone here.”

“I know,” she said, taking none of the compliment he had intended nor indeed any of the offense. Instead she leaned over the back of the sofa to retrieve her leather jacket from the floor and fished out her gold lighter and a small cigarette case.

“Is that you?” he asked, looking at the image printed on the case. She extracted a joint that had round chocolate-colored spots visible on the rolling paper, clicked it shut and then handed it to him, shrugging.

“Yup. Why he thought I would want to look at myself an extra ten times a day …”

“Who?”

Whoever it was had obviously put some effort into the gift. The case was heavy gold, and the image of Ellie was perfectly reproduced in enamel. She stood at an open window, behind her an empty sky and a flat gray sea showing the isolation of a girl and her unseen photographer. It was a private snapshot, not something pulled from her portfolio.

“Oh, whatever.” She waved dismissively. The brown spots on her joint revealed themselves to be cartoon coconuts; the air was filling with the heady, cloying scents of coconut and pot.

He waited for further explanation and when none was forthcoming he asked, “What did you think of Rupert and Georgina’s recital?”

“Mmm, they seemed nice,” she said vaguely.

In North West London the Sabahs were spoken of with the abstract, awestruck reverence reserved for royalty—to have tea with Rupert was as rare and lofty as to be invited to a shooting weekend at Balmoral. Ellie’s relentlessly casual posturing was infuriating but surely, he thought, surely she must now be affecting it. It was all very well to remind him at every possible juncture that she knew the world while his was a limited and parochial sphere. But he knew enough to know that the Sabahs were impressive in any circle; ancestors of Georgina’s had come over with William the Conqueror and an intimate, candlelit concert at the home of a family so patrician was noteworthy, at the very least. He was opening his mouth to accuse Ellie when she continued, “So anyway, I’ve come back, and I think I might stay for a while. And if I’m going to be here then I want to stop putting Ziva in a position where she has to defend me all the time. Ziva’s amazing, and she deserves more from me now. I don’t know how much longer she’ll be around.”

“But surely Ziva more than anyone doesn’t care how much you conform, or don’t?”

“No I know, she doesn’t want to turn me into some perfect little North London clone”—Adam bristled on Rachel’s behalf—“but you know, my aunt’s driven by this urge to conform, even if my grandmother’s not. Jaffa feels this need to be safe and burrowed into the security of a community and she finds it genuinely traumatic when anything threatens that. That’s the legacy, you know?” She brushed a thread of tobacco from her lap. “The children of survivors are sort of ignored in terms of impact but I think that’s part of their legacy. Creating a sense of security and of routine and a very tight circle of friends after a generation when the world turned upside down. So I don’t mock it, honestly. It must feel vital to know where you’ll be ten years next Tuesday and who you’ll be there with and what you’ll all be wearing, because it’s safe, and they all grew up with evidence that the world is anything but. Obviously my grandmother’s generation, actually living through what they lived through, don’t give a shit about napkin rings. But for the kids they raised, with all their baggage, suburbia feels safe. The trivia matters precisely because it’s trivia. Being free to care about napkin rings is a luxury.”