The Innocents (26 page)

21

The months that followed were distinguished only for being unremarkable. Summer edged reluctantly into London; broad saucers of Queen Anne’s lace balanced on tall stems across the Heath Extension, and buttercups splashed the parks with sunny yolk yellow. Optimistic barbecues were planned, rained off, and planned again. Adam was given directorship over two new trainees, which tripled his workload because giving them assignments and explaining them took far longer than doing it himself. Michelle bought a neat Burberry mackintosh for the upcoming autumn. Tanya and Jasper got married. The football season began.

Adam had been in a meeting with Lawrence and Jonathan Pearl, one of the other GGP founding partners, when he noticed three missed calls from Rachel. The fourth time she rang he had excused himself and stepped outside to answer. “Hi, Pumpkin, what’s up? Are you okay?”

“I’m good. How are you? How’s work?” He could hear noises behind her, voices and beeping, and the line was crackling.

“Work’s good but really busy, Pumpkin. Do you need anything?”

“Oh—yes. I’m just in M & S, and I just wanted to catch you before I left. Do you feel like salmon tonight? Or I could do a leg of lamb if you wanted? It’s still early enough if I got a small one, or did it in bits maybe. But I’m in the queue now though, and I went for the salmon because you loved that one we had the other night at Café Japan so I thought I’d try to copy it for you. I looked for ages on the Internet and I found a recipe that seems like it’s right.” She sounded jubilant. “Yes please, double bags. Sorry, Ads. But I can easily do lamb and freeze the fish. What do you think?”

Rachel did not, Adam imagined, want to know what he thought. What he thought was that they had had too many of these conversations during the thirteen months of their marriage and that what slender novelty they’d had was fast waning. Rachel had never been a striving career woman and for many years had been candid with him about her aspiration, one day, to give up teaching and be a housewife. But he could not have envisaged that she would become one quite so soon after their wedding, nor that she would apply herself to the role with such all-consuming energy. Rachel had always been generous and considerate but as the only daughter of devoted parents, she had never been a low-maintenance girlfriend. Adam had done it all willingly. But now, confusingly, she required constant tending to in her incessant tending to others. Shortly after Purim, when she had told him that she couldn’t endure another minute teaching in the Portakabins at the back of the playground under a headmaster whom she was convinced was having a nervous breakdown (“Honestly, Ads, the whole maths department is like a loo on a building site, it’s horrible and the kids get so depressed out there they can’t even listen”), he had not objected to her giving up work. It was a few years and a baby earlier than he’d expected but if they were prudent, he’d estimated, he could keep them both on what he earned already. If she could have stuck it out until he’d made partner at GGP it would have been better, but it wasn’t the end of the world. If it made her happy, he would go along with it.

He had imagined having to be a little more careful with his spending, and for a while having to be a lot more careful with their holidays. What he had not imagined was this—that in giving up work Rachel had given up a great deal of what made her days differ from his; had given up a great deal of what broadened her life beyond the bands of it, morning and evening and weekends, in which he and she cohabited and related. What he had not understood was the tremendous vault of free time that Rachel had unlocked, and how much of it would be dedicated to activities concerning him. And this commitment to him had realigned her priorities still further away from his own. He was touched that she wanted to do it for him, touched every time he came home and saw that she had laid the table in advance and had folded white calla lilies horizontally into glass bowls of water like a lobby centerpiece and that she had made a pudding every day—real puddings like tarte tatin and trifle and crème caramel, so that he was already beginning to worry about his waistline—but within weeks it had begun to feel faintly oppressive. Despite discouragements, Rachel had always called and texted him during the day but now the communication was almost hourly—did he think she should take back the cafetière that the Wilsons had given them to John Lewis and exchange it for a smaller one? It was still in the box from the wedding but of course she didn’t have the receipt. Did he think Michelle would like a copy of the lovely new Philippa Gregory? She had popped into Waterstone’s for it and there was a three-for-two on but there were only two books she wanted. What were those papers he’d left on the kitchen table? Did he need them? Could he sort them out when he got home?

“Salmon’s brilliant, Pumpkin. I’ve really got to go though, I’m in a meeting.”

“Okay.” Rachel was unperturbed. “Say hi to Dad and tell him if the salmon works I’ll make it for them next week. Love you.”

“Love you, too.” Adam slipped his phone back into his jacket and returned, sheepish, to his meeting. This time, fortunately, no one questioned his absence—Lawrence was on the phone asking Kristine to reserve a conference room and Jonathan was standing over Lawrence’s desk reading something on his screen. He was Tanya’s uncle—still, he was the most remote and formal of the senior partners and the one Adam worked hardest to impress. Adam resumed his seat and kept his head down, reading an article on his BlackBerry until they addressed him again.

The following Saturday Adam had packed his sister into the car to keep him company as he ran errands. She was in London for the weekend, preparing for imminent noughth week and the annual descent of stumbling, giggling drunken freshers. Michelle had greeted her daughter’s return to London as she often did, presenting her with a pair of optimistically purchased jeans or a small, encouraging pile of makeup—a mascara usually, and a lipstick. One day, she hoped, her daughter would give up the strange clothes and would accept these gifts. After all, why not demonstrate that women could be both intelligent and feminine, both intellectually voracious and visually pleasing? Why not dress normally? Why not have a good haircut? Why not get a nice boyfriend?

Olivia was unmoved by these exhortations. The jeans were bemusedly accepted and then forgotten in an upstairs bathroom whenever she went back to Oxford; on this occasion she’d been unable to hide her distaste for a particularly slinky, particularly expensive pair, and Michelle was currently at Selfridges returning them. Olivia had agreed to run errands with Adam because it seemed preferable to running such errands with Michelle.

“Why precisely are you doing this?” Olivia asked her brother as they circled Hampstead for the third time in search of a parking space.

“Because Rachel’s grandmother asked Rach to pick it up for her and it’s heavy so I said I’d do it.”

“Yes but forgive me, I barely see you and Rachel could do it during the week.”

“You sound just like Mum. Why are you both obsessed with her not working?”

“I’m not obsessed, I’m bewildered. I cannot fathom it.” She shook her head and the strange necklace of green and yellow woolen pom-poms that she wore over a purple Fair Isle sweater bounced with the movement. “Don’t misunderstand me, if she had a brood at home and was busily channeling her energies into molding the next generation of Newmans I would absolutely see her purpose. I don’t think the raising of children should only be performed in allocated slots between board meetings. But really, Adam, what on earth does she
do
all day?”

He shrugged. He had already had this exchange with his mother when Rachel first decided; since then he had come to understand the choice less and less.

“Dunno. Cooks, reads. She’s planning to redecorate the flat so that takes up a lot of time, I think. She’s helping Jaffa with some of her charity stuff.”

A parking space directly outside the frame shop rescued him. He left Olivia in the car with a copy of last week’s
Jewish Chronicle
to examine—she enjoyed expressing outrage at its contents when in London—and went in to collect Ziva’s picture.

There was no one inside, and he stood for several minutes admiring the assortment of images on display in the tiny shop, a glimpse through keyholes at living room walls across Hampstead, private family exhibits brought here for mounting, or framing, or retouching. To his left an enormous canvas of a purplish black tulip stood awaiting attention, and against the other wall were four small Indian tapestries mounted and framed in delicate gilt. A series of black-and-white photographs of the same laughing baby, her dress and the bow in her hair digitally colored in pale pink, had been arranged behind glass with whimsical asymmetry. There was nothing else in the room. Radio 4 played quietly, and Adam listened, waiting for someone to appear. Then a voice called from downstairs, “What name?”

“What? Oh, Ziva Schneider. She said Ian called to tell her it was ready.”

A man raised his head from a low spiral staircase that disappeared into a basement. “Ah, yes, the photograph. I’m Ian—hello. I’ll get it for you, it’s all paid for. One sec.” He disappeared again. Moments later he was back, carrying a large oblong swaddled in bubble wrap.

“Would you like to check it? Best if you do. She wanted a mount around the picture but I haven’t added it because the proportions really looked better without, but if you think she’ll mind …” He began to slash at the plastic wrap with a small blade, peeling it away in layers.

“I don’t really know what she asked for to be honest,” Adam said. He was anxious to get back to Olivia, to deliver Ziva’s print to her, and then to get on with his day. He had offered to take his sister to a screening at the ICA that was to be followed by a discussion of psychoanalysis and cinema, an afternoon hosted by the Institute of Psychoanalysis. It was the sort of excursion he had spent years avoiding but for once he had not dismissed his sister’s suggestions as affectedly cerebral and had instead booked the tickets himself. Rachel would not have come with him and that seemed, somehow, an important reason to go.

“She wanted the frame in brushed stainless steel and a cream mount, which I agreed with when she first brought it, but once I’d lived with it for a day or two I saw that it didn’t need a mount at all and that a gunmetal gray was far more suited. But if she disagrees just bring it back.” As he spoke Ian had been unwinding the padding from around the photograph and now he leaned it in front of the tulip canvas for Adam to inspect. Adam glanced at it without much interest, expecting to see a reproduction of a Chagall like the four others that hung in Ziva’s hallway. Instead it was a photograph of Ellie, almost life-size, bathed in gray-green shadow and chlorophyll-green light and looking more extravagantly sensual than he had ever seen her. It was a simple picture. She stood leaning against a tree trunk, her hair long and wet, her body wet and oiled. He felt a shock of pain beneath his ribs; his stomach contracted. For one strange, lurching moment he felt an urge to be sick.

“It’s got lovely balance,” Ian observed.

Adam continued to stare without speaking. He knew at once that it was the picture taken for the Pirelli calendar and he would have given all he had in that instant to track down and destroy every copy. It was far worse than imagining a Times Square billboard on display before millions. That a few thousand men should feel ownership of her or any sort of private, exclusive access to her, even to this single photograph, was nauseating.

He had known that she was in it—Jaffa had made a disapproving reference over dinner months ago. Ziva had been the only one at the table to defend the decision and had been staunch in her defense—“I have been researching it on the Internet. The photographs I have seen from the Pirelli are on occasion extremely elegant and she will insist, she has promised me, on keeping some control of the styling. The most beautiful women have posed for it in the world. Why should my Ellie not claim her place among them if she was invited?” Beside him, Rachel had wilted.

Ellie had implied that Rachel might have resented more than just her beauty. Yet it had always been so clear to him that Rachel was the enviable one, and that she might have begrudged the attention her parents had paid to a bereaved little girl was not a sympathetic portrait. But almost as soon as he’d considered the idea he’d dismissed it. Despite a natural insecurity during moments when she measured herself against her cousin, Rachel adored Ellie and had always worried about her—he could call up a decade’s memories of her affection and concern. Ellie was resentful, and he understood why. But Rachel was blameless.

And so during the Pirelli debate he had wanted to make her feel better and had disagreed with Ziva for the first time in his life, saying, “Yes but Ziva, if she wants to be taken seriously then she has to stop doing this stuff,” and beside him Rachel had sat up a little straighter and he had been glad he’d spoken. But it seemed that Ziva had taken a stand against the general disapproval—there was a space cleared above her sitting room mantelpiece for this picture that she’d asked Rachel to collect, a flag waved in public support of her favorite granddaughter.