The Innocents (21 page)

Anoushka turned blinking, green-glittered eyes to Adam, regarding him like a curiosity with which she could entertain herself in Ellie’s brief absence. Jade spangles had fallen on her cheeks, which looked acceptable, and also on her nose, which did not. She addressed him. “Ellie says you’re her lawyer. Are you going to be able to get her back into Columbia? What are you doing about Marshall Bruce? Is it true that the wife has threatened her if she goes back to New York? Surely she can’t do that?”

“I can’t really talk about it,” said Adam, surprised that that wasn’t self-evident.

She shrugged. “Okay. She’d tell me all of it anyway. She’d tell anyone anything. She’s a crazy one, that girl.”

Theo shook his head in what looked like a combination of awe and disapproval. “She is definitely crazy. What was she doing with that terrible Marshall Bruce?”

Chris laughed. “Do you mean actually, technically—
what
was she doing? You’d have to ask her yourself, Theodore. Get some pointers.”

Anoushka sighed, heavily. “She doesn’t value herself. It’s a question of self-respect I think, or self-esteem, and she’s just not able to separate her value as a woman—as a person actually—from her value as a sexual commodity.”

There followed much earnest analysis. Chris believed that the tragedy of her mother’s death had not only deprived her of a female role model but taught her a destructive fatalism. Theo sniffed. “That father, Boaz. I called him Bobo the Clown. I saw him in New York; he was just never there for this splendiferously wonderful daughter even when she needed him, and she was always coming alone on jobs even when all the other girls still had their mothers tagging along and quite rightly, too. Now she doesn’t even know where he is, I don’t think.” Anoushka believed that all this was true and was further compounded by a lack of self-worth derived both from a double parental loss and from teetering on the brink of flawlessness—there was a theory, she explained, that very beautiful, very intelligent women suffered because absolute perfection felt tantalizingly attainable for them, just beyond reach of their beautiful, capable fingers, whereas for normal mortals it was abstract, impossible, and therefore not worth worrying about.

It was several minutes before Adam identified what was bothering him about this conversation. The surprising element was the utter lack of surprise—he had heard these discussions about Ellie, held in these terms and this tone, many times before. What he had not expected was to hear them from these people.

Chris had just finished saying that Ellie had cheapened herself irreparably with some of her editorial campaigns even before he’d known about Marshall Bruce, and was pointing to the image on his own T-shirt by way of illustration, when Adam finally entered the conversation.

“Isn’t it a bit off to wear it then, if you think it cheapens her?” he asked, surprised by what he took to be such clear hypocrisy on the part of someone who moments ago had claimed liberality above all other virtues. Chris’s disapproval bothered him much more than Jaffa’s, or his mother’s, or Rachel’s. More than that of anyone in North London, whose clucks and tutting he could dismiss. “After what you said before about the diminishing importance of marriage I thought you’d be the first person to speak out against adherence to empty convention.” In her own circles at least, Adam had imagined that Ellie would not be judged for her actions.

Chris looked at him with a strange expression. “I hardly consider a sense of self-worth to be empty convention.”

“She has self-worth, but she’s choosing to discard conventional expectations. She’s brave. Just before, you sounded like you were advocating for us all to break free of cultural and social expectations.”

“Again—bravery”—here Chris raised his left hand, cupped as if holding in it the virtue he discussed—“and stupidity.” He raised his right hand in the same way, and then separated the two hands to illustrate the difference between them, the distance between them. “I like Ellie, she’s a great girl, but I can’t agree with you that she has an adequate sense of her own value and as a result of that lack she’s made some absolutely moronic decisions. Destructive, stupid, generally unwise. Just because I don’t believe two people need a legal contract or a discriminatory tax advantage to join their lives together doesn’t mean I applaud the girl for rogering a married man for money. That’s not at odds with, as you say, objecting to an adherence to empty convention.
Empty
convention, yes. Of course I object. But there’s a place for meaningful, constructive social convention and principles. I’m not actually an anarchist, whatever misleading impression I might have given you.”

He was laughing a little as he said this, but it was clear that he was affronted. Adam in turn felt foolish. That something was condemned by North West London’s gossiping mothers did not, he realized, automatically make it brave. They weren’t wrong about everything—their censure was not, in fact, an endorsement. But why had that never occurred to him before?

17

It was not turning into the evening that Adam had expected. Shortly after Ellie disappeared she sent Theo a text message to say that she would be gone for longer than she’d thought—she had remembered that she had to speak to someone in New York before they went into the theater and it was getting late. Adam found himself sharing a platter of garlicky, paprika-dappled hummus and oily stuffed vine leaves with Anoushka and Chris, while Theo pursed his lips and nibbled unenthusiastically on a stiff triangle of pita bread. Around them the bar had slowly filled with big-haired boys in women’s jeans and short-haired girls in Ray-Bans and even here, in the heart of the laid-back hipster East End, there was a charge of Valentine’s Day madness in the air. Everyone in Casa Blue was too hip, too cool, too ironical and countercultural to care about greeting card holidays and yet—gazes were roaming; eyes were meeting. If you were out tonight, you were probably looking for some action.

Adam stayed on, sampling meze and listening to Theo tell an unflattering story about Marshall Bruce’s soon-to-be ex-wife (Anoushka, who had met her once on a photo shoot in Cape Cod, said that tale was untrue and that Mrs. Bruce was charming). He wondered whether Ellie was outside on the phone to Marshall. At half past eleven Theo produced a comically oversize pocket watch and rapped it impatiently, like the White Rabbit.

“Tell Madam we had to go, the guest list shuts at midnight. She’ll be back soon, I’m sure, but we can’t wait any longer.”

“Where are you off to?” Adam asked, confused.

“We’ve got tickets to a gig at the Ivy Club; we’ve got to get over to Covent Garden,” Anoushka explained. From beneath the table she produced a slim patent leather handbag. “Will you hang on to Ellie’s stuff?”

“Is she definitely coming back?”

“Oh yes,” said Theo, adjusting his hat in the tarnished mirror across the bar. He snatched the small bag from Anoushka and flipped it open, reached in, and produced Ellie’s enamel cigarette case. “Her beloved coconut sweeties are in there, see? She’ll be back. So sorry to leave you here, we’re such ungracious little things. But what a pleasure to meet any friend of Miss Ellie’s. Tell her we said happy Vee Day.”

They were all standing now—Chris was even taller than Adam had imagined from his seated frame, looming over Theo who looked positively Lilliputian beside him, at eye level with the graphic photograph of Ellie that was stretched over Chris’s pectorals. Anoushka tugged at her skirt, which had bunched and ridden up over pudgy stockinged thighs. “Send her our love,” she said, and the three of them began to make their way out through the crowded bar, having left on the table a patently inadequate contribution to the bill. Adam sat down again, this time on the velvet sofa that the others had vacated. It had suddenly become the moment he’d expected, waiting for her alone, drink in hand and heart in mouth. The evening could begin again.

“What the hell did you say to them?” asked Ellie when she returned. In the short interim, other larger parties had expanded from the tables on either side of Adam and had appropriated the stools, one by one; she sat down next to him on the sofa.

“I told them they were in the way.”

“That’s right. They were.”

“They were going to a gig. Weren’t you meant to be going with them?”

Ellie wrinkled her nose as if the very suggestion were distasteful. “Nope. I loathe that atonal, experimental horseshit that Theo’s obsessed with, I have more than enough dissonance in my life without listening to it. It’s like the Emperor’s New Clothes but without the diversion of male nudity to keep me awake. Never.”

“I don’t know anything about it, to be honest.”

“Nothing to know. Pretentious Royal College graduates up on a stage gratifying themselves, and only themselves, by making a freaking racket. They always look overcome with a sort of masturbatory self-satisfaction at their own supposed creativity. Half the time they have their backs to the audience and just gaze in adoration at each other.”

A vague recollection stirred. “Didn’t your father play professional jazz saxophone?” Adam asked her.

“Whether Boaz has ever done anything professionally is up for debate. But he certainly plays a lot. At sea, on land, it’s always playtime for Boaz. Did you meet my father ever?”

“Once, a long time ago.”

What he did not say was that he had met her mother that day too—Boaz and Jackie had come to the synagogue and given a
challah
-baking lesson to Adam’s Sunday school class, a young, happy couple who had seemed so old to seven-year-old Adam, though they could not yet have been thirty. As the baker’s daughter Jackie had led the class and while she kneaded had taught them phrases in Yiddish that she said were too rude to repeat to their parents; Boaz had been her assistant, had made jokes and pulled faces, and had shaped his dough into a heart that he had presented to his giggling wife, who kissed him in front of the whole class while the boys had made vomiting noises. Adam’s
challah
had been more like a pancake, he remembered; he had been too ashamed to take it to show Jacob when they’d gone to visit him at the hospice later that day. Adam had been baking
challah
with his father for years—he should have been able to do better for him, he’d felt.

“A long time ago sounds about right. Anyway.” She sat back and closed her eyes, pulling at one of her heavy false eyelashes. Adam winced. Her eyelid flickered as she stretched it; the thick, spidery fronds began to peel away slowly. “So now you’re speaking to me again, it seems.”

“I was never not speaking to you.”

“I’m not sure that’s strictly true, but we’ll let it pass for now.” She opened her eyes and regarded him. One set of the lashes was now in her hand like a small black comb. Without it her face looked strangely distorted, her eyes vastly different sizes as if she were a Picasso portrait of herself. She set to work on the other side. “So how was Israel with the perfect family?”

“Fine. A little strained, to be honest.”

“Why strained?”

“Rachel asked me if I was in love with someone else,” he said, bluntly. This statement coincided with her detaching the second set of eyelashes and so he could not identify the source of the brief discomfort that flashed across her face. He took a deep breath. “Only she was asking about someone, this girl Kate—”

“Ah yes, her great rival from college,” Ellie said, but now that he had started to speak he would not let her divert him with mockery and he continued, tense but determined.

“Look, obviously I’ve not even thought about that girl for years. It’s bullshit.”

She nodded, almost imperceptibly, but did not look back at him. On a chain round her neck she wore a slim gold ring and was sliding it on and off each finger in turn.

“I can’t stop thinking about you,” he said, and somehow despite everything it was just so easy to say it, so simple. The rest came out in a rush. “I’ve been trying to stay away from you since Christmas and just stop—but then I saw you yesterday and it was like—I realized how impossible it is for me to stay away from you.” His own ineloquence was maddening and with it the certain knowledge that when he relived this speech later, too late, the right words would flow, simple and powerful. But he had finally reached his point and he concluded with a sudden rush of triumph, “I want to be with you. I know it’s a mess and I know—I don’t know how it could even ever happen or how you feel although I think, I hope—I, I know that you feel
something
. And I can’t marry Rachel and feel the way I feel about you. I want to be with you. If there’s even a chance it’s what you want.”

“But, Adam,” she said, and the sweetness when she spoke his name was unbearable, “that’s impossible.”

He had expected protest at this point but had thought no further. Now he prepared to convince her. Logic and romance were both on his side; you must not dream of one woman and marry another. It is noble to follow your heart. She needed him. We must be together because we must.

“Why?”

“Do you really need me to tell you that?”