Ceremonies of Innocence

by Annie Bullen

  That night she thought not of her long and stumbling journey home, nor of the terror she had felt in chilling dabs during her slow climb up the winding and crumbling stair, but of the young couple, the ‘two jewels’, sitting close together, pushed up against each other, touching and stroking as they ate. They spoke less and nuzzled in closer as the meal went on, food and warmth inducing a slow drowsiness. Each gave covert looks, sideways peeps, at Dorelia, who sat cross-legged and straight-backed, beginning to fear an atmosphere she did not understand. The only concession to her announcement that now she must leave was the casual offer of a torch, which she accepted because of her fear of falling down the dark stairway. As she left the room she felt that her presence there had made as fleeting an impression as the whisper of a draught through the thick walls, or the faint scratching of a mouse hiding in the rafters.

  When she awoke after a deep, dreamless sleep, the whole scene had become fragmented, dissolved into a fairy story that she never recounted.

  The journey to the dark tower did however force Dorelia to focus more clearly on her own attitude to her relation to other people. She thought she would never want to take part in life as others seemed to; neither did she want to opt out, like so many of her contemporaries, who lost themselves, if only temporarily, in some narrow creed: imitation of love, religion or limited self-gratification. She wanted to dip her finger in, taste it all, just once, but not be touched. She wanted to watch, but not to comment, to translate what she saw into her own private language, to create a life within herself that was so rich and interesting that she had no need to worry about things that happened on the outside. Despite her self-imposed detachment, she became popular at the Swiss school with both her teachers and her fellow pupils, moving with ease from group to group, moving away with grace if there was any sign of involvement or commitment. She was happy to wait for things to happen, riding with them if she chose, dropping out if necessary. Ambition seemed to her to be a pointless quality, and destiny had a pattern that had become familiar.

  Dorelia watched with interest, but no curiosity, Angela’s empty-handed return from the village shop. The baby lay in a soft straw basket on the kitchen floor beside her and she had been amusing herself by pulling strange faces at it, occasionally leaning forwards from the chair in which she lounged, prodding at the round little body with a long white finger.

  Angela walked in slowly. She seemed tired and old, smiling only briefly and with distraction at the girl and the child before she walked across to the sink to draw herself a glass of water.

  ‘Where’s the stuff? Those nappies are stinking upstairs.’ Dorelia leaned back, stretching her leg out stiffly in front of her, turning her foot this way and that to admire her new green espadrilles.

  ‘Oh! The shopping! I forgot it. I did buy it all, but I put it down somewhere. I must have left it in the village. How stupid! Dorelia, I’m so sorry, I put it down, the bucket – it’s rather heavy – and I forgot to pick it up again. Whatever was I thinking of?’

  Angela knew very well what was on her mind, but had no idea what she was going to do about it. The woman in the shop might have been anyone, but so many ghosts had been raised by that ten-second encounter that she could not think clearly, work out what she should do next. There had to be action, she knew, but what form it should take was something she could not even begin to consider.

  ‘You mean you just put it down and left it?’

  ‘I’m afraid I did. In that little lay-by place by the shop. How stupid of me.’

  ‘Look, I’ll go and find it. You mind little thingy here.’ Dorelia blew a vague kiss at the baby, at Angela, and whirled out of the door, a bluebell haze, gone in a blur.

  There was a wide-armed wooden chair in a corner of the room next to the laden dresser. The sunlight, dust-moted, streamed through the pattern made by the tendrils and leaves of plants struggling to achieve light as they pressed against the blurred panes. The path of mottled light ended in a brilliant pool on the seat of the chair. Angela wearily and automatically sat so that the dappled sunshine shivered on her lap and on her hands clasped loosely in it. She closed her eyes and sat very still, feeling one stray spot of sun playing on her cheek, which became warm and flushed.

  She knew that there was a path she should have taken, years before, which she had deliberately and wilfully ignored. By turning her back coldly on her talent and making it a lesser thing than it was, by filling the emptiness made by Toby’s leaving with small things that should not have mattered, she had destroyed what she should have tended until its horror had turned to a bright light to be recognized, as a marker, a guide. Now she had to go back to face it. She unclasped her hands and held on to the arms of the chair. She was tired. It was hard to concentrate, to cast her mind back to that exact point where, from lack of strength, from fear and from loneliness, she had walked away from her own life.

  She would not now, she knew, return to live with Billy. Growing sleepy, she weakly tried to grasp at the fraying links that she supposed bound her to him, but even the marriage tie seemed a tenuous thing, depending for its existence only on her memory of the occasion itself; if she forgot that – and in her yawning, nodding state the forgetting seemed easy – what was left of it? Why had she done it? Why had she not known that it was necessary for her to mourn Toby’s disappearance properly, so that what was left of love and fear and sorrow was turned, by the rhythm of time and proper knowledge, into a layer of Angela that could not be stripped away? Why had she allowed herself to ignore the proper processes, to panic, a soft-bellied creature with a half-formed shell, looking for security that did not exist?

  Once upon a time there should have been a way forward. She could see that now. That holding on, working and waiting, carrying on with the pattern of life whose establishment was disrupted when she met Toby. She screwed up her heavy-lidded eyes, trying to remember the particular quality of the despair she must have felt as the slow slipping away of the days, weeks and months dribbled the knowledge of his loss into her consciousness. But all she could remember was the smell of spilt varnish and the black spiky night-words: ‘You can’t follow me.’

  Now this. Was this too some sort of a message that she was too dim to understand, too slow or timid to follow up? Why the hell was the way never made clear, why was there no one to show her what to do?

  ‘Angela! Are you asleep? Hey, wake up! Are you all right?’

  Kattie, looming warm and large, blotting out the sunlight, stood in front of her. She blinked herself awake.

  ‘All right?’ repeated Kattie.

  ‘Yes, of course.’ Angela wondered if she should ask Kattie for advice, confide in her, just mention the woman’s name. Kattie, who was friendly with everyone in the area, must recognize that name, know where she lived. But Kattie too had something on her mind, and the moment came and went.

  ‘I’ve been thinking. About Fergus. He’s just turned up again and I don’t know what to do about him. I feel, well, I feel I’ve lost control, if you know what I mean.’

  ‘I don’t think I do.’

  ‘Well he feels like a stranger in the house now. Not one of us. Not part of the family. Look – would you talk to him? Have a chat – it shouldn’t be difficult. Just find out what he means to do.’ Kattie’s automatic smile was tempered by the pleading in her bright eyes.

  ‘You mean you don’t want him here any longer?’

  ‘Oh. Oh I don’t know. It’s Dorelia, you see. Since she came home everything seems to have changed. Everything’s crackling like some sort of horrid electricity. Hugh’s not working any more. Fergus doesn’t seem harmless. I can’t feel SORRY for him. He’s offensive. I mean, I find him offensive.’

  ‘That is a confession.’ Angela pulled herself upright. ‘You mean because he smells and because he sniffs in that irritating way all the time – or because he’s not grateful any more? You can’t seriously think that Dorelia would be susceptible to him. She’ll find it a huge joke if he makes any sort of advance
.’

  Kattie blushed. ‘Oh that. Yes I know. Sometimes I think she’s not all there when it comes to treating life seriously like other people do. No, I’m not too worried about the effect of Fergus on Dorelia. I think perhaps it’s the other way around. She seems to have knocked things out of joint. And now there’s all this other business with Anna – what on earth are we going to do about the baby? It’s a dear little thing but Hugh’s hardly a capable father. In fact I’m not quite sure if he realizes that it’s his child. Oh hell!’

  Angela started to laugh.

  ‘What’s funny?’

  ‘Oh, everything. Me, getting on for middle age still trying to sort my life out. Hugh, totally helpless. Fergus. And you, taking us all on. A trio of derelicts. Yes, I’ll talk to Fergus. Of course I will. And the baby business will sort itself out. Anna’s surely not going to abandon her child for good. Oh, and by the way is there a Mrs Pelham living in the village, Marjorie Pelham, do you know?’

  ‘What – oh yes – in that cottage by the church. Do you know her? Odd woman. Richard, the vicar, you know, is terrified of her. Do you think I’m getting things out of proportion? Because of the baby and trying to sort out this concert?’

  ‘The concert! Have we got a programme yet? How’s Hugh’s piece coming along?’

  Angela did not hear Kattie’s reply. Toby’s mother, here, in the village. As a coincidence the fact was remarkable; as a link in the chain of circumstances she could feel that it was inevitable, just as it was now inevitable that Angela should make her presence known. Whether she was to be accepted or rejected was something she could not foresee, nor could she understand what the significance of the encounter might be.

  It was at this point that Dorelia returned, telling lies about the hedgehog (although she had indeed seen one, flattened, on the road outside the post office), and Angela escaped upstairs to her room. Her tooth was hurting again and she realized that her tongue was sore and rough at the side from prodding at it. That must be dealt with. There was much to be thought about now, sorted out. She must find work, a home, a dentist. She should start to paint again, make that a signal that life was beginning again. First of all she should unpack. Her belongings were half in and half out of her suitcases; she was still in transit, but now she made the decision to deal with things, one by one.

  She moved slowly around the room, straightening, unpacking, stowing, putting things in order. She smiled as she realized that Kattie, indulging her own romantic vision of a painter’s needs, had chosen a room in which she thought Angela could work. Big windows, the light falling into a large recess with plenty of room for all her paraphernalia. She stood with her back to the window, and she thought, tomorrow I shall find a dentist and then I shall call on Toby’s mother.

  ‘So you found me, eh?’

  ‘Well, not really found you. I mean, I wasn’t looking. But as soon as I realized who you were, of course I had to come.’

  ‘Of course you did. Of course!’

  Angela was not sure if Marjorie Pelham was behaving seriously. She looked across at the other woman, trying to detect sarcasm or bitterness, but found neither in the face or carriage of Toby’s mother.

  ‘You married after all did you? Went to live abroad, I believe. Yes? Mistake, was it?’

  Angela had forgotten but now recalled, along with a host of other memories, the curious clipped style of speaking that Marjorie Pelham adopted. She also remembered a helpless fear of the woman, a sense of being judged inadequate. The fear was gone, based as it had been on her worth as a prospective daughter-in-law, and in its place was a great curiosity which before she had been too anxious to explore.

  Mrs Pelham, in great physical contrast to her lost son, was a small, restless, clever-looking woman. She must be in her late sixties, early seventies, thought Angela, but her hair is hardly white. This was in marked contrast to her skin, which was deeply tanned, fretted and crazed with tiny wrinkles, like the maze of threaded lines on thick clay which has cracked as it dries out. Set deeply in that small wreck of a face were bright blue eyes. Her glossy dark red-brown hair was cut forward in a monkish fringe, the deep chestnut threaded only here and there by one or two pure white lines.

  She and Angela were confronting each other in the small front room of her cottage, which was next to the church. The street door opened straight into a small living room which had little furniture, but a great many framed photographs, placed along the window sills, on the mantelpiece and on the two small tables. They were of a young man whom Angela supposed to be Toby, and she braced herself for a closer look when the time was right.

  ‘When did you come to live here?’ Mrs Pelham had not yet asked her to sit down but, having mustered courage to knock at the door and introduce herself (although as it had turned out there was no need of this: her visit seemed to be expected), she was disinclined to make excuses and leave.

  ‘Oh, a long time ago – when it seemed appropriate. I had things to do here.’

  ‘Things to do?’

  ‘Yes. Sit down, why don’t you. Tea?’

  ‘Oh, yes. Rather. I’d love a cup.’ Angela found she was adopting a hearty manner which surprised her.

  Marjorie Pelham moved towards the door at the back of the room. She turned and looked back.

  ‘Sit down, I said. You’d better call me Marjorie.’

  Angela did not sit down. Curiosity about the photographs, the pictures of Toby, overcame any fear of the older woman’s authority. She moved to the window-sill and glanced from one frame to the other. Toby standing by an aeroplane. Toby in flying gear. Toby with a group of young men in white overalls. Angela was bemused. She peered more closely at the pictures, leaning forward; hands on the low window sill.

  ‘Those are not photographs of Toby, you know!’

  She jumped violently and turned, a guilty blush making her face hot, to look at Marjorie Pelham, who was standing in the kitchen doorway.

  ‘Did you think they were? Look closely. Go on. It won’t hurt you.’ Mrs Pelham moved forward to stand beside her. She picked up the biggest photograph, the centrepiece, which had a handsome silver frame. Before handing it to Angela, she wiped a careful sleeve over it.

  Angela took it, equally carefully, and held it at arm’s length to look.

  ‘That is my husband. Toby’s father.’

  ‘Oh, I thought … I’m sorry.’

  ‘He was lost, too.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I forgot.’ Angela remembered now that Toby had spoken of his father, a pilot, a wartime pilot. She tried to gather some strands of memory but could not recall anything that had been said about him. They must have spoken to each other about their parents, their family homes, but those details had gone from her mind. She peered at the picture, hoping for a clue. The young man in his flying suit laughed back, facing the camera, legs straddled squarely, hands on hips.

  The quality of the silence made her uneasy. Some remark was expected. Should she speak of the family likeness? No. She had to say something significant, something clever, something that would put her, if not in control, at least on terms of equality with the woman who stood beside her. She felt her skin prickle with embarrassment as the silence thickened, but still she could not communicate. The moment passed. Marjorie Pelham spoke.

  ‘Sugar?’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘Sugar? In your tea?’

  That evening Angela climbed again to the top of the hill leading out of the village. She carried four sharp pencils and a block of drawing paper. Very soon the discipline of putting down lines, pulling shapes together and trying to stand outside the landscape, absorbed and calmed her. The abstract part of a country was something she could deal with dispassionately. Why then could not her own part be handled with the same sense of perspective and some measured emotion, so that she could sum it up neatly and walk forward into a future based on experience and proper knowledge?

  ‘I had this friend when I was at school in Switzerland. She was very, very beaut
iful. Like the Lady of Shalott. No really. All the boys in the village were in love with her and they’d creep through the grounds at night and stand under her bedroom window and sing, very softly, like this …’ Dorelia, cradling little Juanita, started to hum and then to sing, in French. Hugh raised his head from his hands and stared at her. Fergus giggled.

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘Don’t you know? The song says that before they saw her, all that was beautiful to them were the little wild windflowers in the valleys and the bluebells in the pastures. Before they heard her voice they were entranced by the song of the nightingale. Before they saw her walking with the sunlight in her hair, the waterfall in the mountains was enough beauty for them. Now the flowers are there merely to please her and the song of the bird is a cruel reminder of each night passing without her, while the curtains of water dissolve into the stream to flow away like life passing without her. Isn’t that sad and lovely?’

  ‘Go on! You made that up. Anyway why weren’t they singing that for you?’

  ‘Because she was like an enchantress. Melissa, that was her name. She was dark, with very white skin, like milk, and huge eyes, and she left a trail of broken hearts behind her. A lot of the girls at the school were in love with her too. It was all so sad.’

  ‘Sad – why sad?’ Hugh spoke for the first time.

  ‘Because she drowned. In the lake. There was an awful fuss about it. Each week you see we would have to go to swim in this ICY lake. Brrrr… it was like being skinned with icicles. I can’t tell you! Every Friday, exactly one hour after lunch, the whole school would march down the hill to this little pier that stretched out into the lake. It was very pretty mind you. Sometimes there was a band playing on the end of the pier, just like England. Anyway the school had a sort of jetty thing that you could get to from the lake. We had to get changed in a hut place and climb down the steps onto the jetty. Can’t you just imagine it. All of us shivering, blue with cold in our awful costumes – navy blue things, they were all scratchy. The worst thing was that the locals thought it was all a huge joke. They’d all line up at the pier to watch as we got in and sometimes they’d clap us. We had to swim round the edge of the pier and back again. Goodness knows why they thought it did us any good at all, but there you are. Though Melissa actually enjoyed it, or said she did. She would dive in from the jetty and simply race around the pier and back. All the boys used to cheer when she got out.