The Innocents (14 page)

Once Ellie had left the party Adam no longer felt like staying. Lisa London joined them on the balcony, perching on the wall next to him and whispering, “Hello, you big gorgeous thing,” in a voice at once seductive and unthreateningly free from intention.

The customary conversations were resumed. Tanya asked Lisa about Manchester; Jasper asked Lisa about her hospital’s supply of “hot nurses.” Tanya asked Jasper why he was such a pig; Jasper replied that it was what she loved him for. “That, and for my enormous … personality,” he finished, swinging back on his chair, legs splayed so that anyone who had missed the subtlety of his joke might be helped along by the illustration. His jeans strained over large, womanly thighs. It was business as usual. Adam felt tired, and strangely lonely among these people he had known for so long. Ellie had taken with her the fresh air that he had been sucking deep into his lungs. What remained was a fug of claustrophobia, of the perennially predictable. He was waiting for a break during which to make his exit when a man emerged through the doors, looked around in search of someone and then retreated. Adam was cheered.

“Nick!” he shouted, and the man returned.

“Adam! I didn’t see you lurking in the shadows out there. How are you?”

Nick Hall stepped out to join them. He was a tall, lean man with strong features and subtly lopsided eyebrows that gave him a permanent expression of ironic disbelief. At university, where he and Adam had met, he had generally been considered attractive. But more and more these days he had a look of narrowed and appraising cynicism in his blue eyes, and didn’t seem to have adapted his wardrobe since his student days. He had come to this particular party in a T-shirt once white and now stained a dingy beige, and a pair of ripped corduroys of an indistinct mushroom gray. These hung from a carelessly malnourished frame, a body whose chief physical exertion was lifting a wineglass, or a fag. Nick considered exercise to be for morons or Americans, preferring instead to fester thoughtfully and smokily in his office, his living room, or his local. All this was manifest at a glance. Adam saw that Lisa, who assessed all new men she met with unabashed interest, had judged and found him wanting.

“Nick, this is Lisa, who is Dan’s sister; Tanya, who is Rachel’s flatmate; and Jasper, who just is. This is Nick. We were at university together.”

“Nice to meet you,” Jasper said, and rising from his chair, he stepped back over the threshold that Nick had just crossed. Jasper’s awkwardness with strangers surprised Adam afresh every time he witnessed it. That a vast ocean stretched beyond Jasper’s little tide pool was especially evident when someone tall and affable washed in from elsewhere. Nick was effortlessly and somehow charmingly rude, and slightly shambling, where Jasper, hunting for his own self-defining hallmark, was forced to settle for being an ostentatiously ethnic self-parody. Jasper was neurotic, hyperactive, driven to unconvincing self-aggrandizement, where Nick would have more effectively wielded witty self-deprecation. This schtick worked only with old friends. “I’m going to go in to get another drink,” Jasper said, to explain his departure. “Anyone want anything?”

“I’ll come, I’m cold.” Tanya followed him. Lisa, who had assumed Ellie’s position beneath the small beam of the heater, jumped to her feet.

“I’m so sorry, babe, you should have said! Come stand here.” She stepped aside to cede her place under the orange glow but Tanya shook her head.

“It’s fine honestly. I want to get a glass of water in any case. Do you want to come? I wouldn’t mind finding something to eat, too. Willa made strudel, there’s loads in the kitchen.”

Before answering, Lisa looked at Nick in a swift, final evaluation. He had some attractions but was altogether too gaunt and grubby for her taste. She followed Tanya.

And so they had all disappeared almost as soon as Nick arrived and for Jasper, parties would continue to be what they had always been—opportunities to spend time with exactly the same people he spent time with everywhere else. Jasper was safe in the knowledge that the companions with whom he had sat tonight on a cold balcony in South End Green were precisely the same as those with whom he had sat in someone’s family’s kitchen fifteen years before. An iPod provided the sound track instead of a CD player; the place belonged to his friends and not the parents of his friends. Instead of a six-pack of Strongbow between twenty they had Dan’s spiced cider, made with cinnamon sticks and slices of fresh red apple. He was allowed to stay past midnight (though Tanya did not often let him take advantage of this freedom). But these discrepancies were merely superficial. Disaster averted—at core, all had successfully remained the same as ever.

Adam was genuinely delighted to see Nick and had forgotten that they might meet at Willa’s party. As teenagers Nick and Willa had been at Bryanston together and it was Adam who had reintroduced them years after they had lost touch. In the meantime Willa had fallen in love with Dan London and had converted to Judaism, a decision confusing to her girlfriends as Dan himself was so clearly unobservant. But the traditions, if not the beliefs, were important to the Londons, and they had decided to raise a Jewish family—if nothing else the conversion classes, taken at a cozy Reform synagogue (and therefore gentler and far more inclusive than anywhere Orthodox), were an excellent primer for life with a Jewish man, with all the attendant relatives, quirks, and customs. The Londons now threw Shabbat dinners for friends and spent their Sabbath afternoons like most Jews, in fervent and near-religious contemplation at White Hart Lane. Willa was as happy and exemplary a convert as Adam had ever seen, and their marriage equally inspiring. She had fallen in love with Dan and everything about him—the Londons were a warm and chaotic family, and she had become one of them wholeheartedly. With Sarah London as her mother-in-law, she would return from every holiday for the rest of her life to find her flat clean, her ironing done, and a pint of milk, a moussaka and a crème brûlée in her fridge. There were certainly worse fates.

Nick, by contrast, believed in only two things—atheism and the Labour Party. He had grown up in the country. His mother was lapsed Church of England; his father was Jewish and had been, for many years, the only Jew Nick had ever met. He had never ceased to find Adam’s North West London Judaism amusing, with its
bar mitzvahs
and weddings and festivals and endless series of family meals and obligations. Nick had never experienced anything like it. In his own Fens village he’d been known, only half in jest, as Jew-Boy.

“So how goes life in the ghetto?” he asked Adam now.

“All good. The usual. How’s everything with you?”

Nick stretched out and crossed his ankles revealing odd socks beneath the frayed corduroy. “All right. I’m working like a bitch at the moment, which hasn’t done much for my Sisyphean extracurricular writing attempts. Still trying to push this bastard novel up the mountain.”

“But it’s brilliant that you’re doing it,” said Adam with enthusiasm. “You’re going for it; it’s shaming for the rest of us who just sit around in offices like monkeys.”

“Yeah, well, it won’t be brilliant if the damn thing rolls back and flattens me. And Emily’s great, but writing with a kid”—here he shook his head—“we don’t get five seconds’ peace.”

“How old is she now?”

“Nineteen months.”

“Bloody hell. I can’t believe it’s been that long since she was born.”

“Ah, well. Time flies. No doubt in the meantime you’ve been busy being a moral pillar of the
shtetl
whilst I’ve been battling the conflicting tugs of literary glory, dissipation and parenthood.”

This
shtetl
jibe had its origins in an old argument between them. Nick’s position was that religion was the root of all evil, Adam’s that fundamentalism of any sort was not to be confused with the faiths it subverted and that organized religion provided morality and community, and encouraged precisely the tolerance that Nick believed it lacked. It was hard to object to the Judeo-Christian attachment to the Decalogue when its suggestion not to murder, steal or tell porkies seemed to be incontrovertibly sensible. Adam thought Nick was a hypocrite to criticize moral guides when his überleft-wing politics equally abhorred the more libertarian suggestion that people would do good if left to themselves. But this evening he was not in the mood for a debate, and Nick was welcome company. He lived with his girlfriend, Marianne, and their little daughter, Emily, in a flat in Stepney Green, hours away from his parents in Cambridgeshire, and nearly four hundred miles away from Marianne’s mother in County Cork. Nick wrote for
The Independent
; Marianne had worked on the
Sunday Times
until Emily arrived and it transpired that she earned less than the childminder they required for her to go back to work. She now freelanced from home and wrote fiction, perennially unpublished. They had chosen their own paths. Their mothers did not have one another on speed dial. They were free.

“How’s Marianne doing?”

“Very well. Going a bit stir-crazy at home with the baby, but very well. Emily’s sleeping better now so she’s getting a bit more writing done. But not much. We’re both too knackered.”

“I’m impressed you’re doing it at all.”

“Brutal. It’s brutal. Hold off a while, that’s my advice. Worth it, but brutal. Still, weekends are all right. Marianne gets Friday nights out, and I get Saturdays.”

“So you don’t go out together?”

Nick looked at him, head cocked. “What do you want us to do with Emily? Order her a pizza and leave her to it?”

“Babysitter?”

“On whose trust fund?” Nick demanded, somewhat bitterly. “Even kids now expect ten quid an hour, we can’t afford it. I just saw Josh Cordova inside. Do you know where his kid is this evening? At his parents’ house—where she is every Saturday night. Every single one, and she
stays
. They drop her off at six and pick her up at lunchtime every Sunday. Every bloody week! I couldn’t believe it—and he said it was his mother’s idea! My parents were happy to get me off their hands years ago; they’re not about to start slaving over my own kids now. Every time she’s in her cups, my mother threatens to make me pay back my school fees with interest. She worked it out once and claims they could have had a yacht instead. Can you believe Cordova’s parents take the kid every week?”

“Yes,” said Adam, simply. There was nothing remarkable in Josh Cordova’s arrangement. In North West London, grandchildren were considered the source of life’s highest pleasure; more, Adam sometimes suspected, even than the children who begat them. He knew without ever having considered it that if his own mother lived where Nick’s parents did, two hours away from Adam’s children, she would still offer to drive down to look after them so that Rachel could go back to work; she would offer to take them home with her for a night; if none of those things were possible she would offer to pay—nay, insist upon paying—for the babysitter. Aunt Judith and Uncle Raymond would not be far behind. Michelle’s older sister Judith was a rounder, softer version of Michelle, wild-haired and mostly unkempt. She worked as a GP in Stanmore and was married to full-bellied, cinnamon-bearded Uncle Raymond, who was a GP at the same practice. For reasons the family never discussed they had not been able to have children; their devotion to Adam and Olivia was therefore redoubled. I have, you need. So take. It was the way with all the families among whom Adam had grown up. When he and Rachel had a baby they would have to fight off Jaffa’s offers of assistance, he imagined, so effusive would be her outpourings of love; she would be desperate to squeeze soft cheeks and parade, alight with worshipful triumph, through the streets of Temple Fortune. There was no life event—marriage, birth, parenthood, or loss—through which one need ever walk alone. Twenty-five people were always poised to help. The other side of interference was support.

The following Monday at work was particularly grim, and the ritual of beginning a new week seemed merely to emphasize how very similar this week was to the ones that preceded it. On Monday nights Adam usually played five-a-side football with the boys, but tonight most people were away. Lawrence was in Israel, the office was quiet, and Adam had little pressing work with which to divert himself. He was meant to be finishing a pro bono review of a charter for a new homeless shelter. Instead he sat morosely at his desk, staring at the BBC Sport webpage and brooding. It would end in a late night, to compensate.

Since the party he could not stop thinking. It had served his purpose until now to reject all evidence of alternatives, and to uphold the simpler belief that it was required to marry a Jewish girl whose mother had for years bumped into one’s own mother in Waitrose and who was therefore known and parentally endorsed. Michelle had been alone for a long time and there was nothing about that state that he envied, for in the Noah’s ark of Temple Fortune it was best to go two by two. Since Jacob’s death, he had grown up believing in dark, looming uncertainties, and fearing them. It wasn’t obligatory conformity; simply a question of joining the majority, a subscription to desirable traditions that allowed one to remain supported and cushioned in the bosom of North West London. And he had subscribed wholesale, firm in the belief that his childhood friends had done the same. All were happily settled in conventional relationships, married, engaged, or well on the way. Jasper was with Tanya. Josh Cordova was married to Natalie. Noah Cordova (Rabbi Josh’s first cousin and son of Simon Cordova, Rachel’s dentist) was engaged to Lucy Wilson, whom he’d met on Israel Tour like Rachel and Adam, although Noah and Lucy had started going out only two years afterward. Even Gideon Press, who was gay and therefore was awarded nominal points for unconventionality at the outset, had been in the same relationship since he was twenty, cohabiting contentedly with a man called Simon Levy, who was from Glasgow and who played golf every Saturday with Gideon’s mother.

Adam had always assumed that to pursue independence was to sacrifice security. But thinking, really thinking, about Dan and others, he could see that it simply wasn’t true. Dan London had gone up to Cambridge with his virginity and a Tottenham duvet cover and come down with a blond-haired, green-eyed girlfriend called Willa Hope-Christopher and the world had gone on turning. Gideon had brought home a nice Jewish boy. The community was liberal and elastic, far more than he’d allowed himself to admit. It was he who had been rigid. It was his own insecurity that had constrained him. If only he’d known, Adam reflected with a throb of indistinct regret, he would have stridden forth without fear—but then he had already walked so very far following the old rules.