The Innocents (6 page)

The music room evoked the same awestruck reaction from Rachel as the fireplace. The ceiling was lower here and the lemon walls, glowing in the light of Louis XVI candle sconces, managed to evoke both grandeur and coziness. The only electric bulbs in the room cast small, neat spotlights on the music stands; the flames of a hundred tapers were left to do the rest. The musicians sat poised, glancing at the Brahms on the pages before them and overseen, in turn, by the oil-painted eyes of Rupert Sabah’s ancestors, framed and sightless behind them.

Ellie arrived at the beginning of the fourth movement, and the mounting agitation of the violin stirred the audience into even greater disapproval of her lateness. The doors were not at the back of the room but at the side and her slipping in was visible to absolutely everyone, except perhaps the far back corner. Tonight she had had the decency to cover herself up at least, but her tight jeans and brown leather jacket, aged and cracking at the elbows, made her even more incongruous amid this sea of sequins and velvet than her usual overexposure would have done. She had witnessed Rachel’s own anxiety about what to wear this evening, Adam thought in irritation, so the dress code could not have escaped her attention. Sitting between his fiancée and his mother, he heard them inhale in shamed stereo. Ellie looked at no one, merely took the empty seat on the end of the second row and leaned forward slightly to listen. When the music and applause ended she slipped from her chair and crossed the room to the window, and as the audience gathered their coats he watched as she unlatched the French doors and let herself out into the garden. He turned to see Rachel and his mother disappearing into the hallway together deep in conversation and so stayed where he was between the rows of plush chairs, observing Ellie through the departing throng.

Open, the doors framed her, a cigarette between her lips, one hand shaking a gold lighter to encourage its disobedient flame. She stood in a circle of warm yellow light that spilled into the courtyard from the music room, but an icy November wind blew in around her, and her hair whipped forward. A gust of disapproval blew through the chamber with the cold air, and the candle flames guttered. Adam smiled in empathy at those murmuring their objections and crossed to greet her, and to tell her to close the doors.

“Having a fag?” he asked, needlessly.

“To Americans a fag is something else.”

“Aren’t you an American?”

“Unclear. Americans would say I’m English.” She hugged her jacket closed and shivered.

Behind her rolled the Sabahs’ garden in which lights were hidden beneath rows of heavy yews, the lawn disappearing like a vast parkland into blackness. To the right, the courtyard was lined with topiaried orange trees in pots, and closed except for a small passage that led round to the front of the house. Between these embodiments of opulent tradition and of nature mastered and manicured stood Ellie, belonging to neither.

“Well, you’re definitely not English.”

She raised an eyebrow. “So we have a dilemma.”

“We do.”

“So.” She accepted the blazer that Adam had removed and handed to her. “What did I miss?”

“You mean, apart from the first, second, and third movements? Not much. Rupert Sabah thanking us all for coming. A couple of rounds of tequila shots. The piñata. Chinese karaoke.”

“Ah, Ziva will be devastated she missed it. She does a great ‘Bohemian Rhapsody.’”

Adam laughed. Moss had darkened the seams between the broad York flagstones; Ellie began to follow one of these cracks with deliberation, walking heel to toe like a tightrope walker. After a few steps she turned and began to retrace the same slow, careful steps.

“You know,” she reflected, “I really think Ziva’s my favorite person on the planet. I hadn’t even known how much I’d missed her till I came back. Everything else is worth it just to spend some time with my grandmother again.”

“What sort of everything else?”

“Oh, you know. Family stuff. Reacclimatizing.” She stopped pacing and pushed her hair back from her eyes. “So how go the wedding plans?”

“No date yet. Rachel wants next August, but I’m pushing for sooner. And smaller.”

“Keen to lock things down.”

“Yes, that’s a spectacularly unromantic way of putting it, but yes.”

“What’s the difference if it’s a few months more? Oh”—she laughed suddenly, exhaling smoke—“God, it’s not—I mean, no wonder. You’ve certainly waited long enough for the wedding night.”

Adam laughed with her but then stopped short when he realized, horrified, that she was serious. “What?” he asked. “
What?
”

“What what?”

“You can’t seriously think that.”

“Don’t shout. People are looking at you and I know how much you all hate that here. Think what? That you’re getting impatient, or that your love is still pure?”

“The second one. For God’s sake.” He was freezing now, although he still stood shielded in the doorway, and he wanted his jacket back. He had come outside because he’d pitied her the disapproval of the room, but she had managed within seconds to make him furious. “Are you insane? It’s not the bloody eighteenth century, I’m not some sort of mad, retrogressive
frummer
…”

“Sorry. What do I know?”

“Something about something, surely. I mean, what tipped you off? My
peyot?
The clank of Rachel’s chastity belt?”

“You’re mixing metaphors like crazy, or religions at least. I’m sorry, really. It’s just that everything here is so”—she paused—“traditional. And so much of it surprises me, and I still don’t really know anything about how things work, or at least I don’t remember. I was surprised that you and Rach don’t live together after dating so long, but when I asked her about it last weekend, it was like I’d suggested, I don’t know, a threesome or something. And so I had to guess why. And there was that time when you chucked her and went off
‘wiz dat shiksa’
”—this affected Middle Eastern accent was presumably her impression of Jaffa’s outrage, and he felt a sharp discomfort at the thought of the Gilbert family discussing his behavior—“and back then I thought that it might have been about sex.”

“I didn’t chuck her! I just needed some spa—That’s actually none of your business. And it’s not that, thank you.” Once more he turned to leave her, hot with annoyance and aware that she had pushed him into sounding priggish and defensive, while she remained unmoved by his temper. He was stopped by his mother, who had returned to pick up Rachel’s pashmina for her and came over to demand that he do something about the temperature.

“Adam, close those now, please. It’s really far too cold, and all the candles are going to blow out.”

Michelle wore a navy silk scarf around her throat, pinned into its perfect whorl with a small gold scarab. She fingered this as she spoke, minutely adjusting its already precise arrangement. “And you should take Rachel home soon, her shoes are hurting her.” She smiled briefly and unconvincingly into the garden toward Ellie and then returned to her beloved daughter-in-law elect, with whom she had been gossiping before the satisfying glow of the immense fireplace. Adam reached up to bolt the left-hand door, leaving the right one open for Ellie.

“Thank you.” She put out her cigarette and came in holding the stub between her fingers, and then stepped back out into the garden. “I’m going to go, actually. I’ll go out this way so I don’t disturb everyone.” She pointed at the path that led around from the courtyard to the driveway, and then disappeared down it into the shadows. An usher standing nearby looked quizzically at Adam, who shrugged in answer. Sure, close the doors. Leave her out there, I don’t care. And then he remembered—

“You’ve got my jacket!”

From the darkness she called back, “I’m in all tomorrow night, you can pick it up then.”

6

When her children were teenagers, Ziva Schneider took a position at the Israeli embassy in London and the family moved from Tel Aviv to Temple Fortune. The job was the only possible inducement for her to leave the country that had rescued her. Fresh, vibrant, healthy Israel had healed the body that Bergen-Belsen had almost destroyed and had woven muscle around fragile bone, had cured her malnutrition with kibbutz ideology and sweet oranges. In the British internment camp in Haifa, she had married the second Yosef, Yosef Schneider; the bridegroom a twenty-two-year-old widower, the bride a twenty-four-year-old widow. Both their families had been murdered in Belsen and they had married because they had not died. But that was not enough, in the end, to sustain the union. Like many of the marriages formed in the aftermath of the Holocaust it ended almost immediately, two human beings drawn together by the immensity of their renewed, impassioned life forces and pulled just as quickly apart by the immensity of their trauma. Ziva did not mind very much. The second Yosef had given her the children, Jaffa and Boaz—that was what life force was, after all, and the second Yosef himself was of very little consequence. The love of her life had been the first Yosef, and would now be Israel. Israel meant freedom from persecution. Israel meant Never Again. Israel had nourished her heart, breathed sunshine and hope and comradeship and youthful, optimistic socialism into her soul. She would leave its threatened borders only to represent it, with staunch pride, elsewhere. Rupert Sabah had helped them to find the house.

Ziva’s daughter, Jaffa, had slipped into North West London and Lawrence’s waiting arms with such ease that it was as though she had cabled ahead to arrange it. But Ziva’s beloved son, Boaz, was different. He had caused her trouble in Tel Aviv too, disappearing from school to go surfing at Hilton Beach with the Americans who rode glamorous longboards instead of the wide, cumbersome
hasakes
that the Israeli lifeguards had, or spending her week’s shopping money on cigarette filters as an ingenious way to fix some damage to his surfboard. Boaz was bright, his teachers would write to Ziva, irritated, one of the brightest in the class, but he was also willful and capricious and applied his considerable intelligence only to making excuses, or to surfing. And before they’d even moved there, Boaz had decided that there was nothing for him in London. One day, when he was older, he wanted to learn about balsa wood and fiberglass and polyester and polystyrene, and then he wanted to go back to Israel and make boards. But in the meantime he would not do A levels in England no matter what his mother said—he wanted to travel the world, to explore different countries, and to surf. He came to London, as commanded, but soon afterward shouldered a rucksack and disappeared.

Ziva found it hard to be angry with him, though he drove her wild with frustration—he was beautiful for one thing, green-eyed and dimpled, and had such confidence, such easy manners that anyone on whom he turned the warmth of his attention found themselves in total agreement with him, even if later they weren’t entirely sure what it was they had agreed to. When he was there before her, charming and feckless, she felt indulgent. He was able and amiable and would, she felt certain, make something of himself one day. But when he was out of sight, no longer reassuring her with his sweet, empty promises, she was left to admit her disappointment and found his wanderlust inexplicable. What was out there that was so marvelous anyway? Hurt and destruction and echoes of genocides, whether tragically tiny or vast and incomprehensible, were everywhere once you had learned to recognize their reverberations. You’re in such a rush, she would ask him, to see the world? What you will see is that people are petty and cruel and can commit epic atrocities in their pettiness. You will see only that it is the same beneath all skin colors, the same in the heat of the tropics as it is below clear, frigid skies. Wherever there is more than one kind of man. Stay in London. Study. Study fiberglass, if you must. But study. Study something.

And then, from New York, Ziva got a postcard, a grainy photograph of a beryl green Statue of Liberty against a clear cornflower sky that had been divided into dotted segments and labeled in black ink with facts: 12
PERSONS CAN STAND IN TORCH
and
LENGTH OF NOSE
4
FT,
6
IN.
On the back, Boaz wrote to his mother that he’d met a girl named Jackie, who had given up a place at Brandeis University and agreed to drive across the country with him. The real surprise was that she was so suitable—Jackie was a young and spirited beauty who had grown up playing in the Manhattan back room of her father’s kosher bakery. They had married and would come home to live in London, he wrote again from Eureka, California, and the greatest shock of all was that they did. Boaz decided he would study engineering and Jackie, who had promised her father she would go back to college, instead made wedding cakes—elaborate sculptures in ivory buttercream and painted fondant, and in each of her designs there was always a wreath of sugar ivy at the base. Like art, Jaffa would say, on the rare occasions she discussed her sister-in-law. Curling, edible leaves so fine-veined and delicate that they were translucent. In Rachel’s early memories, Uncle Boaz was a source of sweets and rude jokes and family tension; he was loving and irresponsible, and after family Shabbat dinners—when he remembered to come—he would play on the floor with Rachel to avoid sitting at the table with the adults. Jackie, she remembered, had changed him—he still brought forbidden sherbet Dip Dabs and candy watches for his niece, but he wore a tie to dinner, and afterward he sat with the grown-ups. If he was expected somewhere, he would arrive there, and he would arrive there on time. He went to college as he was supposed to, and though it was a long way from the dream of designing surfboards still he persevered, encouraged and supported by his wife. When Rachel was six, Boaz and Jackie had baby Ellie—a grandchild so beautiful that Ziva instantly forgave her son his years of idleness. Ellie was achievement enough. Boaz got an apprenticeship with a company in Hertfordshire that made innovative fiberglass sliding doors.