The Innocents (18 page)

“Pedalos?” he asked. “I think the Wilsons are going down; they’ve reserved four of them so you two could take one.”

Rodney and Charlotte Wilson were old friends of the Gilberts’. Rodney had been at school with Lawrence and was now his squash partner; their elder daughter, Lucy Wilson, was Rachel’s age and had also been in her class at school. Leonora Wilson was much younger and had been at school with none of the Gilberts but had been in the same Sunday school class as Tanya Pearl’s sister Hayley. Charlotte Wilson’s cousin, who had become religious and upset the family, had studied in Jerusalem ten years ago with Jaffa’s cousin, who had also become religious and upset her own family. Rodney Wilson was an orthopedic surgeon and had once helped Adam’s mother with her back. Numerous other tangential connections united them.

“Great,” Adam answered before Rachel could opt to remain supine. “It’ll be perfect for your tan, Pumpkin, we’ll stay in one spot and just go round in circles so you can get all angles covered.”

Rachel pulled a face at him without opening her eyes. Lawrence laughed and continued along the row to issue invitations to other friends.

The last time that Adam had captained a paddle boat he had been in Hyde Park, desultory swans drifting past as he and Rachel explored the motionless expanse of the boating lake beneath a lead gray sky. The long-ago date had been a success, however. Boats were romantic even if the weather did not hold and the swans, close up, were raggedly dirty and bad-tempered and just slightly menacing. It was all rather different on the Red Sea. They pedaled away from the pontoon, powering slowly through clear turquoise water toward the red hills of Jordan. On the shore behind them tall palm trees threw perfect fluted shadows on the sand.

“I’ve found a dress, I think.”

“Cool. What’s it like?”

“Well, obviously you’re the last person I can say what it’s like to when you’re not meant to know anything. But it’s gorgeous. Yael and I were looking at Vera Wang online yesterday and there’s one that I really think is it. And Tanya knows someone who used this brilliant seamstress in Belsize Park who can copy anything, so I’m going to try it on in Selfridges, and if it works then she can make something similar. And it’s perfect because that way I can change it a bit too.”

“How long does it take to make a dress?”

“She thinks about six weeks, depending on how busy she is. But six weeks probably, until the first fitting.”

“So in theory it could be ready by the middle of February.”

“Yes, if I find the right fabric for her, too. She’s given me the names of a few places to go.”

“Hmm. How are you ever going to choose a color?”

“Yes, ha-ha, Ads, I know, all wedding dresses look the same to you but I actually do have to choose a shade.”

“What about red for Arsenal?”

Rachel ignored this, as she did so many of his jokes. Her selective hearing became particularly selective when she deemed his frivolity to be in poor taste as it saved her the bother of getting annoyed. “At first I thought maybe oyster.”

“Not kosher.”

“Or ivory maybe, or something in the middle, like cream. But I think I’m going to go for white-white. I do tan quite dark.” This with some pride. “And once I’ve chosen that she can start.”

“So then please, Pumpkin, will you consider changing the date of the wedding? I really don’t want it to be in August, that’s still almost a year away—”

“Eight months.”

“Eight months, but still, it’s ridiculous. I know how important it is to you to get married in the perfect wedding dress and you deserve it, absolutely. But you’ve found the dress, which you’ve always said is the hardest part, so now I really don’t see why it can’t be late February.” As he spoke he felt lighter—after all, there was no need to have worried; when put like this it was all so simple.

“Just think about it. All our family and the friends who really matter to us will make sure they’re free whenever, and I want it to be
meaningful
”—he spoke this with emphasis, a shield held up preemptively against accusations of callousness—“and I don’t want to wait. And now we really don’t have to. And all the rest of it, I’m happy for you to have anything you want, really, any way you want, but can we just at least talk about making it at the end of next month? Last weekend in February, say. Eight weeks is more than enough time to plan …” He trailed off, realizing that Rachel had been sitting still and his own pedaling, rhythmic and synchronized with his emphatic speech, was powering them in circles. They slowed and began to drift.

Rachel gazed ahead of her for a moment, then pushed her sunglasses up into her hair. “Ads, what’s going on?”

“What do you mean? Nothing’s going on. I just want us to take back a little control of this wedding, that’s all. It’s about what we want, not anyone else. I think people forget that sometimes and—”

She interrupted him. “And I really, really don’t understand this big rush all of a sudden. I mean, it was sweet before when you were all impatient and saying that you wanted me to be your wife and everything, but I’ve been thinking about it and Ads, we’ve been together
thirteen years
now. Why is it such an emergency all of a sudden? Are you actually sure you want to marry me?”

Adam stiffened. “Don’t be silly, Pumpkin, of course I want to marry you.”

“Don’t tell me I’m being silly, I’m not. I’m not an idiot. You’ve been acting differently ever since we got engaged, and it feels like maybe you’re having doubts.”

“I’m not having doubts!” he said, quickly.

“Well, something’s going on. And if your heart is somewhere else”—at this point Adam’s heart felt as if it were somewhere else entirely, contracted with fear and lodged in the region of his throat—“then it’s not right not to tell me. If you’re still thinking about Kate then…”

“Kate?” He could not keep the surprise from his voice. Kate Henderson! He had barely thought of her at all in the last years, and when he did it was mostly because Rachel herself had a habit of bringing her up in the middle of arguments. In Adam’s mind, Kate was filed away somewhere in the catalog of sexual memories through which he occasionally rifled, cross-referenced with mild domination and dirty talk and appearing only during moments when his imagination required such supplements. But she did not feature elsewhere. He’d been fond of her; he had even loved her once, maybe. But he had never pined for her, even back then. Kate!

“Yes. I’m not stupid, I saw how you were with her, I met her, remember? And you said it was nothing but I’ve always known it wasn’t. You loved her. And you broke up with her because she wasn’t Jewish and I know that your dad had always wanted you to marry a Jewish girl and you felt guilty, and that must have been very hard because you can’t feel okay about rebelling against someone who isn’t there. And I know you think, Oh, Rachel’s so conventional and she doesn’t understand anything or whatever, but I understand
love
because I know the way I love you, and if you want to be with someone then I know that religion shouldn’t get in the way. And nor should what your family would say, or anything you feel toward me that is a”—she was almost in tears now but he watched her steel herself to continue and her bravery moved him more than anything in her words—“a responsibility. I don’t want you to marry me because you feel like you have to. We have a choice here, you’re not stuck. And I don’t know if you’ve been in touch with her or…”

Adam finally found his voice. This conversation was preposterous and it was preposterous to have it in a pedalo, separated in their molded plastic bucket chairs and unable even to face one another properly. He could not let it continue.

“Stop, Rachel! I mean—stop. I don’t even think about Kate from one year to the next! This is crazy. And you’re”—he paused and then continued—“it’s so wide off the mark, it’s madness. I want to marry you. No one else. Why would I be begging you to move the wedding forward if I was thinking of anyone but you? Let’s take this stupid boat thing back now. Don’t you see that doesn’t make any sense?”

She shook her head. “No, I don’t think it makes no sense, it makes sense to me. Yes, let’s go back.” They began to pedal slowly in unison. “Sometimes if someone’s worried about something they want to just do it and get it over with so they don’t have to keep questioning their decision. If you’re really sure that you want to be with me forever then why does it matter when we get married?”

This was a more apposite observation than even she realized, he thought. He was grasping for certainty. The sooner they married the sooner his vacillating and torment would end, and on that point both his reason and his instinct had been in harmony. She had cornered him. Although he often felt that he was the one to back down in arguments, during which Rachel would contradict herself frequently and wallow in the irrational, he was not used to conceding logical points to her. To concede was usually to indulge. But there was nothing he could say in answer to her question except “You’re right, of course it doesn’t matter. I don’t care if it’s ten years, Pumpkin. I don’t care if it’s another thirteen. I could not be more certain—I want to be with you forever.”

“Are you sure?”

“Of course.”

“Are you sure you’re sure?”

“Yes, I’m sure.” To his own surprise he heard his voice breaking and felt the odd sensation that, for reasons he could not articulate, he might cry.

“Ads!” Rachel reached across the molded fiberglass gulf between them and stroked his cheek. They were approaching the little bobbing pontoon from which they had set out; the pedalo man was semaphoring that they should come in on the left side and behind him stood Lawrence and Jaffa, waving at them and squinting into the sunshine. As they drew nearer Adam could see Lawrence reach for the camera around his neck and aim it at their little craft.

“Ads, don’t be upset, I love you, I’m sorry. I know you don’t want to be with Kate.”

“I want to marry
you
,” he said, with feeling.

“I know.”

Together they turned to look up at a beaming Lawrence who extended his camera toward them, capturing for posterity the moment at which they arrived together, back onto dry land.

15

“Friday night dinner” is one of the most evocative phrases in the vocabulary of any Jew—up there in significance with “my son the doctor” and “my daughter’s wedding.” In the Newman household Friday night dinners had been, like everything else, divided into the epochs of Before Jacob and After Jacob, both defined by distinct but equally fixed practices. In the early years of Adam’s life, his father would collect him and Olivia from school on Friday and they would go home via Carmelli’s to buy the
challah
for the blessing of the bread, unless they had made dough the night before and were baking it themselves. To buy
challah
so late on a Friday is controversial. Most of North London’s housewives had already queued for theirs well before midday—by three thirty there is always a moderate risk that they’ll have sold out (one is meant to have two
challot
on the table beneath a decorated cover to represent the double portion of manna that God bestowed on the Sabbath, a clever suggestion on the Lord’s part that ensures there will always be enough left over for French toast the following morning). By the afternoon the bakeries are either feverishly crowded or stripped bare.

But Adam and Olivia both loved to go to Carmelli Bakery with their father, to breathe in the warm steam of fresh bagels and admire the glass displays of cakes and biscuits, the loaves of
challah
and black rye heaped on blond wooden shelves behind the West Indian shop assistants, all of whom now spoke Yiddish by osmosis. If Adam was lucky, these outings also offered the opportunity to ruin his dinner with something that he and Olivia had nagged Jacob to buy them. Olivia favored the apricot-glazed Danish pastries, shiny as glass; Adam’s most coveted treats had been the broad, dry gingerbread men with piped white faces, their clothing implied by a series of miniature Smarties. Adam had passed many walks home to Temple Fortune trailing behind father and sister, absorbed in rendering his gingerbread man’s howls of protest during a slow and violent consumption. Sometimes the captive biscuit was a Nazi, at other times merely a nonspecific villain whom Adam’s cunning had defeated. At the door, crumbs were brushed off chins. Ruining one’s dinner was a sin punishable by swift but potent guilt inducement. Michelle did not work a long day at the office and then slave to cook their meals for her own health, you know.

After Jacob, the visits to the bakery had ended, and instead the remaining Newmans had begun to go to synagogue every Friday—religiously, as it were. Through the modern wizardry of delayed-timer ovens and Slovakian au pairs, Michelle had managed to parboil potatoes, roast a chicken, pâté its liver and the livers of many of its cousins, steam vegetables, and bake amaretto-soaked peaches, all while she accompanied her offspring to
shul
and remained with them therein, praying for them to stay anchored and supported at the bosom of a community. Adam fought temptation each week. His friends from Sunday school were inevitably sitting together in the back row or were outside gloriously unsupervised in the dark playground, but as the eight-year-old man of the family, he knew what his father would expect of him. And so he remained standing beside his mother throughout the service, braced for the two inevitable danger moments—the
misheberach
, the prayer to heal the sick, and the Kaddish, the mourners’ prayer. During these—the first a sweet, lilting melody, the second chanted in mysterious and haunting Aramaic—it was always his worst fear that his mother might cry. She had never done so but each week he felt her stiffen beside him and watched as her left thumb crept to stroke her wedding band under the partial cover of a closed fist. He would not leave her side, though he longed to escape. Olivia was spared such temptation by having no friends she wished to join.