The Innocents by Francesca Segal

Author:Francesca Segal [Segal, Francesca]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: General, Fiction
ISBN: 9781401341817
Publisher: Voice
Published: 2012-06-04T23:00:00+00:00

16

The route to East London was now becoming a familiar one but each time he passed the pink brick expanse of the British Library and the gray-tipped neo-Gothic spires of St. Pancras, Adam would begin to get nervous. From that point east it was Ellie’s territory.

The first half of this drive he had already done once that day, delivering an excitable Rachel to the station where she was met by an equally excitable group of her girlfriends, all in the customary hen party attire of matching pink T-shirts (in this instance emblazoned with a photograph of Lucy Wilson, the bride-to-be, taken when she was a toddler, with plump, creased arms raised toward the camera and a towel on her head like a veil). In addition they each wore bouncing, glittery deely-boppers extending from pink headbands. Rachel’s were fished out of a plastic bag by an officious Tanya Pearl (who was this weekend operating under the designation of Head Bridesmaid) and issued to her as soon as she stepped out of Adam’s car.

Clustered on the pavement beneath the sleek glass flank of the Eurostar terminal, they were a swarm of fuchsia bumblebees fizzing and buzzing around their collective heap of luggage. These were the Nice Jewish Girls who populated Adam’s world; young, modern women, many fiercely bright, several equally ambitious; strong and forthright and intellectually emancipated. Among them, Rachel was the least conflicted. The rest were contradictions, these creatures, and that they did not see it was the wonder. Lucy Wilson herself was an excellent example—with an intercalated M.D.-D.Phil. from Oxford, she now worked at University College Hospital as a clinician and researcher but her highest ambition, Adam knew, was to be Mrs. Noah Cordova. She was a strange faun like so many of the others, with the head of a consultant oncologist and the heart of a shtetl daughter. And here they all were, preparing to send off one of their number into the halcyon paradise of matrimony. It was the thirteenth of February—nine girls were on their way to the City of Love, crossing the Channel to celebrate Lucy’s love-themed Parisian hen party, marking her passage into wifehood. Emotions of all hues would be running high—tenderness, nostalgia, sisterhood and womb-twisting envy. In London, nine corresponding men had heaved a sigh of relief that, for this year at least, they were released from the pressure of arranging a Valentine’s celebration.

“Passport?” Adam had checked, leaning across the passenger seat and shouting through the open window. In return Rachel had waved it at him and blown him a kiss, nodding her deely-boppers so that they danced cheerily. The others had waved and blown him fond kisses alongside her for they were old friends of his too, and now doubly woven into his life as the girlfriends and wives of other childhood friends.

And then later for the second time, he navigated through the dark back streets of King’s Cross toward the Euston Road where he would turn east, toward who knew what. He

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