The Innocents (17 page)

“Keep your voice down, your parents are just behind you.”

She shrugged and stumbled slightly, steadying herself on his arm. “So? We’re getting married. We’re allowed to do it. We have to practice making babies! They
want
us to be doing it now, we have to practice making their grandchildren. Let’s
go
.”

Adam turned to Anthony, who was laughing. “I’m going to take her back, I think.”

“Good luck with all the baby making.” Anthony clapped him on the back and raised his bottle of Goldstar.

“Thank yooou!” Rachel interjected and began to drag Adam up the beach toward the hotel.

The whole Gilbert family had been touched by his coming. Lawrence’s delight had been the greatest of all when a confused (and back then, sober) Rachel had seen Adam sitting on a barstool, his holdall still at his feet. Lawrence’s expression alone had been enough to make the trip worthwhile—he had looked quite misty-eyed. To Lawrence, there was only ever one thing that was important, and that thing was family. For his own family Lawrence would cross not only oceans but continents, stratospheres—galaxies if necessary. What he would not do for Jaffa and Rachel could not be done. He had known that Adam had turned the holiday down in order to man his, Lawrence’s, own office. He had understood that this drive to work hard was a drive to provide for a future with a new wife. Still, he had been disappointed that the young couple were to start the year apart. Success was important for the security it provided, Lawrence knew that, and if it protected his girls then Lawrence would work until he fell. But nothing was more important than being together. Adam had realized it, acted, and Lawrence was tremendously proud.

Adam’s appearance reaffirmed a secret plan that Lawrence had long been hatching. Once they were officially related, he would find a way to fly Michelle out to Eilat with them each Christmas without embarrassing her, and Olivia too, though it was an imaginative stretch to picture Adam’s sister on a beach. But she would appreciate the Neolithic excavations at Nahal Ashrun, he thought, and if she came he would take her to them.

Until now he had been holding back, not wanting the Newmans to feel so keenly the imbalance between the sides—Michelle and Olivia teetering high on a seesaw that was weighted heavily on the other arm by all the Gilberts and Schneiders, heaped and jostling on top of one another. It was an improbably large family in which relatives kept appearing like clowns tumbling out of a Mini, and Adam had been lovingly enveloped by the flock. But there was room for Michelle and Olivia too, and now that Adam had demonstrated his commitment to Rachel’s every happiness, Lawrence was determined to bring them into the fold. The evening had been a magical one. For his part, Adam was equally pleased with his decision. It had worked out better than he’d even imagined, although the family’s elation had done little to assuage his guilt. If recently their praise seemed sometimes to evoke a mild claustrophobia, now he pushed this aside with deliberation.

“Do you want to say good night to your parents before we go up?”

“Oh.” Rachel stopped and pushed her lip out in an exaggerated sulk. “Do we have to?”

“No, we can just go to bed. I thought you might want to.”

They had reached the decking that led through the restaurant back into the hotel and Rachel spun round, a mischievous smile on her face. “I want to see you! You’re here now, I still can’t believe you’re actually here. Oh—let’s go back down to the beach, let’s go and have sex on the beach!” This was so loud that he feared she’d been overheard by the patrons around them—among them several members of their synagogue, a young cousin of her father’s squash partner or a neighbor no doubt—but no one appeared to react. He had never seen Rachel so uninhibited, and her behavior had been out of character from the start of the evening. He was uneasy about this unfamiliar, daring Rachel, sensing a nervous hysteria simmering beneath her new, bold exterior. He felt a dull throb of shame and anxiety, and for a moment he wondered if she had suspected something and was competing to outsex her cousin. Still, it was not an offer he was willing to turn down. He followed her back through the bar, circumnavigating a constellation of yellow plastic beach chairs that contained Lawrence, Jaffa, and assorted Schneider cousins. They walked together into the darkness that fell on either side of the hotel, padding across the hard, wet sand near the water’s edge. At one point Rachel stopped and, leaning on Adam’s forearm, pulled off her knickers, tripping as she stepped free of them, and flung them into the air toward the sea with an accompanying shriek. They fell anticlimactically, six inches in front of her, where they lay sopped and wavering gently in the shallow water like pink cotton seaweed. Adam and Rachel carried on walking.

They had been stumbling together for a while, Rachel’s hand groping unsteadily at the waistband of his trousers, before they reached anywhere with privacy. The sand had widened and low dunes had appeared, standing between the empty beach and what looked like the dark staff quarters of a big hotel. She seemed to have sobered a little and her gleeful laughter had subsided to awkward, intermittent giggles. Before the sand dunes he picked her up, and she squealed as he carried her into the black shadows of the palm trees. There was hope then, he reflected, for adventure with this girl whom he loved so tenderly. Maybe she’d guessed nothing. Maybe it was the long, long-awaited engagement ring—glittering even in the deep blue desert night—that held magic for her that might yet free her like a djinn. Perhaps it really was enough to make her feel safe, liberated under its protection to be someone bigger, someone braver. And why shouldn’t she change? Here was the evidence. This was a new Rachel for him—more adventurous, less careful, and now on her back on the cool sand, pulling him on top of her with urgency and parting her legs beneath his weight, and driven by needs that he hadn’t seen in her since they were teenagers. He pushed aside her fumbling hands to undo his buttons himself.

But when she kissed him, the taste made him shiver. The piña coladas on her breath and the traces of sun cream still on her skin filled his nostrils with the sweet scent of coconut, and took him suddenly and painfully elsewhere. And as he knelt over her in the darkness, it wasn’t Rachel’s gasps he heard.

Israeli hotel breakfasts have their origins on the kibbutz, where breakfast comes at the middle of the working day—if you’ve risen with the sun to pick fruit or tend chickens, by 8:00
A.M.
it’s time for a substantial meal. At center stage are the least exciting elements—rectangular catering trays steam-heated and steaming with scrambled eggs, oily roasted tomatoes, pancakes (both potato and blueberry), the customary glass bowls of slippery pink grapefruit segments and slickly purple-brown prunes sodden with syrup ubiquitous in hotel dining rooms. Beside the yoghurts, cheeses and smoked fish are cut vegetables, tart young purple olives, small, dry Middle Eastern cucumbers, fresh chopped tomatoes, sugar-sweet and drowned in salted lemon juice. And beyond these the firm cheesecakes, iced lemon cakes, poppy seed coffee cakes, brownies, Hungarian sponge cakes with walnut icing and bowls of whipped sour cream. In no other country had Adam ever seen chocolate mousse served for breakfast (piped into champagne glasses, a black chocolate musical note perched proudly on each swirled peak). Glistening neon-red carrot jam; bowls of shredded halva, chocolate-covered almonds, candied orange peel, glossy, flaking baklava. It is all there in an emulation of the exhausted farmworkers’ reward, laid on for holidaymakers who will exert themselves only in the harvesting of souvenirs, and the picking of lunch from the pool menu.

The Gilberts breakfasted at one end of a table for twenty. As Jaffa’s cousins had set off late the night before, in typically intrepid fashion, to drive the six hours back to Tel Aviv, their numbers were depleted to a more modest sixteen. Brunch on New Year’s Day was extended until eleven, and so they had all assembled at 10:00
A.M.,
a jaunty and cheerful crew. Not for this family the traditional morning cocktail of Alka-Seltzer and regret; Rachel’s was the only hangover at the table—quite possibly the only hangover in the dining room. She sat white-faced behind her sunglasses and nursed the orange juice that Adam brought her.

“I feel wobbly,” she whispered sadly.

“That’s okay, Pumpkin, you’ll feel better soon.” Next to the orange juice he set down a
café barad
, a slush of coffee, sugar, cream and crushed ice that swirled beneath the revolving blades of a self-service granita machine. She sipped some feebly from a teaspoon.

At the head of the table, Lawrence began tapping his coffee cup with a fork to command attention, but to no avail. It would take a far greater sound than that to be heard over the symphony of shouting and laughter, the clink of spoon in bowl and fork on platter. The sound track of three hundred breakfasting Jews, hungry and unleashed in a room of unlimited carbohydrates. “Hey!” said Lawrence eventually, tapping louder. His family looked up.

“I would like to propose a toast,” he continued, lifting up his coffee. “I for one was tremendously touched that Adam took the trouble to come all the way to Israel and surprise Rach when we all know what a tyrant his boss can be”—here everyone laughed except Jaffa, who after thirty years of marriage no longer pretended to be amused by her husband’s most overused jokes—“and as it’s the first day of the new year, the year in which you’re getting married … the year in which my little girl is getting married … sorry.” He paused and swallowed several times. “Sorry. Yes, as I was saying, this is the year that the rest of your lives are beginning and I just wanted to say, well. It seems crazy to welcome you to the family, Adam, when you’ve been part of our family for such a very long time, and such a very welcome part of it. So instead I will say we love you, and
thank you
, for joining our family, and for making our Rachel so very happy. I wish the two of you many happy years together and Adam, I wish the two of us many happy years together at the Arsenal.
L’chaim
.”

Cappuccinos were raised; Adam clinked his orange juice with Jaffa’s iced tea; Rachel clinked coffee slush with her younger cousins who were drinking the same concoction through slim red straws. Jaffa, despite her eye rolling during the opening words of Lawrence’s address, was now sniffing loudly and reached with one plump hand for her husband and with the other for Rachel.

“
Ach
, my family,” she said and then released them and strained over Rachel for Adam, cupped his face between jeweled fingers and squeezed. Rachel, trapped in the middle, objected.

“I can’t breathe,
Ima
, get off, leave Adam alone.”

Jaffa sat back with the benign expression of a woman who was, despite her family’s recurrent exasperation with her, completely secure in their love. “Okay, okay. I leave him. But my new son will go and get me another
boureka
, yes? Potato, not cheese.”

14

How does anyone know when it’s right to marry? Around the pool were sun loungers in pairs, on them couples sleeping, chatting, passing drinks and sun cream and books and babies to one another in a constant exchange of thoughts and things. In the pool a broad, tattooed father with a stubbled face and wet-shaved head was throwing a gleeful toddler high in the air while his young wife swam lengths, her lean body dark and muscled and barely concealed in a white bikini. Two long black braids trailed behind her in the water. In the shallow end was a modern Orthodox couple (identifiable as such because, although they were Orthodox, they were liberal enough to swim together), he in a Hawaiian print shirt and baseball cap in addition to his baggy swimming trunks; she in a long-sleeved T-shirt that ballooned around her in the water, her hair modestly stowed beneath a rubber swimming cap. They also had a baby with them but this one was smaller, smacking the water with tiny fists as mother and father held her together and smiled encouragement. And sitting on the side of the pool was another young couple, he with carrot-shaped blond dreadlocks and she with the lower half of her hair shaved and the rest cut short as if they might have only a certain amount of hair between them, though both had an equal number of piercings. They sat on the damp concrete with their legs in the water and their arms around each other. And looking among these couples, on every left hand there glinted a gold wedding ring. Adam fought the urge to go to each man he saw branded thus and shake him and demand to be told, How did you know? Are you happy? What might you have had instead?

“I’m feeling sooo much better.” Rachel flopped down next to him, restored to life by a long nap and a swim. She pulled at the silver chopstick in her hair and arched backward to let her hair fall over the back of the chair—it was crucial to keep dry hair away from wet shoulders. In this position she remained for several moments until satisfied that the midday sun had evaporated all potentially frizz-inducing droplets from her skin. Lawrence appeared before them, careful to adjust his positioning so as not to interrupt his daughter’s access to the sunshine.