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Praise for the Writing of Margery Sharp
“A highly gifted woman … a wonderful entertainer.” —The New Yorker
“One of the most gifted writers of comedy in the civilized world today.” —Chicago Daily News
“[Sharp’s] dialogue is brilliant, uncannily true. Her taste is excellent; she is an excellent storyteller.” —Elizabeth Bowen
Britannia Mews
“As an artistic achievement … first-class, as entertainment … tops.” —The Boston Globe
The Eye of Love
“A double-plotted … masterpiece.” —John Bayley, Guardian Books of the Year
Martha, Eric, and George
“Amusing, enjoyable, Miss Sharp is a born storyteller.” —The Times (London)
The Gypsy in the Parlour
“Unforgettable … There is humor, mystery, good narrative.” —Library Journal
The Nutmeg Tree
“A sheer delight.” —New York Herald Tribune
Something Light
“Margery Sharp has done it again! Witty, clever, delightful, entertaining.” —The Denver Post
The Innocents
A Novel
Margery Sharp
PART ONE
1
1
My father was a connoisseur of wine; but times and incomes change and we with them, and now I am a connoisseur of weather. Thus I remember distinctly the day of Cecilia’s return as being cool (for mid-April), but not cold; showery rather than rainy, also with a peculiar tang in the air (which I have noticed as late as May) that seems to presage not summer but autumn. Oddly enough, the day she died some five months later, in October, had a rather springlike feeling—though this of course may have been subconscious on my part.
How fortunate the connoisseur of weather who is born English! When I say the intervening summer was unusually fine I do not by any means describe such a succession of monotonously cloudy days as they have to put up with in Kenya, for instance, or in India—before the equally predictable and monotonous Rains. In England, and particularly in East Anglia, a single afternoon may embrace several meteorological extremes, especially if there is an Outdoor Fête. The sensation of voile clinging damply to the skin is almost a birthright!
Not that Cecilia ever wore voile. We all knew, as in a village everyone knows everything, that her late parents couldn’t have left her much beyond the small house in the High Street, but she had turned the downstairs part into a very nice dress shop and no doubt got trade prices: at all Outdoor Fêtes Cecilia in her tailored silk suits was so conspicuously elegant, on one occasion a child presented her with the bouquet destined for its titled Patroness. Cecilia made a great joke of it—as she said, how could she possibly abash the innocent by refusing, or even passing on, the booty? So it was Cecilia, not Lady A., who strolled through the afternoon badged by a dozen pink carnations!
I personally have never cared for carnations of any colour. They are too much of a florist’s flower. Outdoors they always look either disheveled, or (if individually sticked) stiff.
What I should have perhaps mentioned about Cecilia at once was that she was a beauty. Her colouring was pure East Anglian, and our young girls are unsurpassable for abundant russet hair and glowing, peaches-and-cream complexions; only they tend to put on weight quite enormously, particularly below the waist, till they soon look like our neighbouring Norfolk’s dumplings. Cecilia at twenty-seven had legs long and slim as a heron’s; she was tall for a woman altogether, and height matched her wonderfully clear-cut features; it seemed right that so lovely a head should be carried high. I have never seen a more beautiful woman, and like everyone else sometimes felt surprise that she wasn’t married. However it was by her own choice; half the bachelors of the neighbourhood had proposed to Cecilia in their time, but whether gentleman-farmer, or curate, or solicitor, or once the County Surveyor and once a Bank Manager, she turned them all down, and again in their time they married someone else. Of course she had a right to be difficult!—and if some ungenerous tongue occasionally remarked that she wasn’t getting any younger, one had only to look at her to see the implication not only unkind but absurd. As I never beheld a more beautiful girl, so, I repeat, I have never beheld a more beautiful woman—and nor apparently had Rab (or Robert) Guthrie.
2
How far more appreciative and careful of family ties are the Scots, and particularly the American-Scots, than we British! I myself have a brother with a parish in Cornwall whom I visit no more often than he does me; Robert Guthrie crossed the Atlantic to see a mere cousin—our own Tam (or Thomas) of Leys Farm, who’d flighted no farther than Suffolk, where indeed he so Scottishly prospered, his wife if he’d had one would have been opening Fêtes right and left. But like his transatlantic cousin he was still a bachelor, and took Rab along just to help spend the necessary fiver. If they split it at two-pounds-ten apiece, how shall I, who bought no more than a lavender-bag, blame them? In any event, it was then, on the occasion I have described, that Robert Guthrie set eyes on Cecilia strolling about with her stolen badge of honour, and was completely bowled over.
The most I can say for his physical appearance is that he had very direct (though small) grey eyes and a good stuggy build. He was more than a few inches shorter than Cecilia, and more than a few years older; he was actually fifty. He was also one of the highest-salaried men in America, owing to some breakthrough he’d made in the field of industrial chemistry.—Here I rely on later information from our own, local Guthrie, who sometimes added it had been just a toss-up whether he himself, at Edinburgh, took Veterinary/Agriculture rather than Science. There is always a natural rivalry between cousins. Was it my favourite novelist Henry James who pronounced that in Boston it could amount to internecine warfare? He referred of course to the Boston in America, not our own Boston in Lincolnshire; East Anglia, after so much banging to-and-fro with the Danes, has settled into a generally rather tolerant community. Even the Dutch who came to teach us to drain, and then some of them to settle, were so tolerated and absorbed, the next biggest farm after Leys is still called Hollanders.
I happened myself to witness the moment of Cecilia’s and Rab’s first encounter. I had arrived late, from motives of economy, and Cecilia was still telling me the tale of her bouquet when the two Guthries (equally late, though let us hope not for the same reason), hove in view. Tam and I are old acquaintances; naturally he introduced his cousin at once, then to Cecilia beside me. For some reason Tam had never much liked Cecilia—otherwise the carnations might have been hers by right!—but as for Rab, he had plainly but to look to love.
I had twice in my life witnessed such a coup de foudre before: once at a bus stop in Saxmundham, when a young girl of very moderate attractiveness, and a youth definitely oafish, after eying each other for five minutes got on the bus with hands already entwined; the other at our local fish-and-chip shop (whose kind proprietress Mrs. Cook lets me take a fillet of plaice home wet), as a lorry driver set eyes on young Ellen behind the counter. Paying my ninepence, I felt a sudden positive charge of amorous electricity in the air—Cupid’s arrow, so to speak, ricocheting off my own lean bosom—and though Ellen tossed her head and looked lofty, I had to tell her twice what the right change from half-a-crown was.
They are now married, with five or six children.—“Those lorry drivers, there’s no holding them!” Mrs. Cook once observed to me; though from what other experience I cannot guess. Her husband Arthur was on a trawler.
Of course Robert Guthrie was a different kettle of fish altogether, but I recognized the same sudden electricity in the air—in fa
ct, the coup de foudre. (Men far less than women, I think, consciously look for love; it takes them by surprise, like a tile blown off a roof.) Equally of course Cecilia neither curled her fingers in his nor bridled and tossed her head, and Rab merely offered us refreshments in the marquee.
One always expects to be robbed at Fêtes—my lavender-bag at a shilling was flat as an April peasecod—but the half-crown teas in the marquee I can only describe as bare-faced. By this time even the rock cakes were gone. However one was able to sit down.—A few minutes after we did so, up sidled a little girl sniffling.
“If you’re lost,” said I—I hope kindly, but even the tea was cold—“go and wait by the entrance till you’re found.”
Children are always getting lost at FêTes, just as their elders are robbed; but this particular child’s predicament turned out to be less usual and more sophisticated.
“I gave the flowers wrong,” she stated dismally. “Mum’s bin on at me ever since.”
Her mother being Lady A.’s housekeeper, I could well believe it. Why I hadn’t recognized Mabel sooner was due to her unusual finery of starched muslin and pink sash. I commonly saw her in darned jerseys.
“She says to get ’em back,” continued Mabel, “an’ have another go.”
The hint, or plea, was obviously directed at Cecilia; only she and I had any idea what the child was talking about, and beyond the open side of the marquee could indeed glimpse Lady A. still on duty chatting to a stallholder. Only where was the bouquet? Discarded under our tea-table. I stooped and fished it up and replaced it in Cecilia’s hands, who I must say appreciated the whole situation with great swiftness.
“So you want my flowers back to give to someone else?” she asked gently. “Then you shall have them!”—and Mabel got not only the carnations but a kiss as well. It must have seemed like a kiss from a Fairy Godmother, the child’s eyes so widened; but she couldn’t have looked more bewitched than Rab Guthrie.
Lady A. I thought acted very well too, suddenly offered at half-past five the tribute she’d been there to receive on the dot of three, also now somewhat bedraggled. That is, she accepted it. So Mabel went home forgiven, and Rab back to Leys Farm under the spell of beauty matched by kindness.
3
It was of necessity a whirlwind courtship, since he was far too important and hard-worked to be able to extend his fortnight’s visit by more than a week; but luckily he’d seen Cecilia at the FêTe the very day after arriving, and a village is almost as good as a cruise ship for throwing people together; one can’t walk to the Post Office to buy a stamp without an encounter at every step; moreover Cecilia had the advantage—also enjoyed, I have noticed, by librarians and girls at cash-desks—of being always, so to speak, there. Of course if she’d kept a stationer’s rather than a dress shop Rab’s amorous path would have been even smoother: there was absolutely nothing he could buy from a ladies’ dress shop; but he could still rely on its closing and liberating her from one till two, when if she happened to lunch out instead of upstairs, and if Rab happened to pass by as she emerged, what more natural than that they should pick up a sandwich together at the Copper Kettle?—And this apart from coffee breaks at eleven, during one of which I recall Lady A. rapping like an infuriated woodpecker for a turned-up hem. Before the first week ended Cecilia’s coffee break and lunch hour had practically merged, and during the second Rab was regularly driving her out to dinner besides at one of the nice country inns in which our district happily abounds. (The Mariners’ Arms for lobster, the Crown and Sceptre for duck.) Our own guest-house, Woolmers, has quite a reputation for home-made pâté and fresh vegetables, but was of course too near at hand to be driven to, and the car Rab hired in London was a Daimler.
I cannot say the village awaited the issue with bated breath, because there never seemed any doubt about it; unsurprised, no one blamed Cecilia in the least for getting married by special license even before she wore an engagement ring.
What chiefly surprised myself was the rapidity with which she was able to sell her shop. It was quite some time before I learned through our local estate agent that she’d been negotiating for several months with her successor Miss Wilson, who henceforward provided us with a very nice line in raincoats.
So in 1933 Rab Guthrie took Cecilia back to New York with him, where she became, one heard tell, quite a leader of fashion; also bore him the daughter she now on that cool but not cold, showery but not rainy, autumn-scented April day some twelve years later came back to collect.
4
Obviously I must explain how it happened that for the last five of those years Cecilia’s daughter Antoinette was living under my roof.
Cecilia had returned once before, but literally by accident: in the June of ’39 Tam Guthrie fell off a tractor and broke his ribs. What to a younger man would have been no more than a painful mishap resulted for Tam in complications leading first to pneumonia and eventually to his death. (After sixty a fall of any sort is to be avoided, which is why I put away my bicycle—or rather gave it away, to the Scouts, who I fear had to dispose of it as scrap iron.) There was nothing surprising about Tam’s end, nor, essentially, about the way he left his property: all to be sold and merged in a trust fund to provide bursaries at his old university. What surprised us was that Rab came to the funeral. I have remarked earlier on the strength of Scottish-American family feeling, and of course he was a wealthy man: however, it then turned out that he and Cecilia were Europe-bound in any case, on a quite extended tour; their original plan (before Tam fell off the tractor) had been to disembark at Cherbourg. Now instead (Tam’s obsequies fitting in so handily), they left ship at Southampton and put up for a couple of nights at Woolmers instead of the Crillon.
As Mrs. Brewer (my help, and a connoisseur of funerals) observed, they made all the difference. Without them the verger would scarcely have known whom to put in the front pew; the only other relative present was a lanky, sandy-haired young woman wearing a black armband, whom he’d put in the pew across the aisle, where she looked so solitary I took it upon myself to go and sit beside her. She appeared glad of countenance, also eager to explain her conspicuous place; she was Janet Guthrie, she told me, a second cousin; adding a moment or two later that though she honestly scarcely remembered Tam he’d put her through Veterinary College. As at a wedding before the arrival of the bride so at a funeral before the coffin is borne in there is always a little time for chat!—I was most interested, as I always am by any instance of a woman invading traditionally male territory, and in return told her who I was and where I lived, and invited her to come in and see me—an invitation I would have repeated after the service, only while I was having a word with Cecilia, she disappeared.
Cecilia, unlike Rab, was in tears. I didn’t wonder; the language of the Church of England burial service is as beautiful and emotive as any chorus-ending from Euripides. However often one hears it, and of course as one grows older one hears it increasingly often, it never loses impact. I must admit that even a chorus-ending of Euripides’ I knew only by hearsay, as glossed in the note to a poem by Robert Browning; the phrase entering my mind, however, even as I pressed Cecilia’s hand determined me to attempt to learn Greek ere too late. My father had been quite a scholar in Greek, and I still had all his books.
Though it was now July, I remember that morning as so unnaturally cold we all wore our darker, winterish garments quite gratefully. (One never puts one’s heaviest coat into winter mothballs, in East Anglia!) However the morning after—(never a dull moment, in East Anglia!)—when the Guthries paid me a visit, the french windows of my sitting-room stood open to catch a breeze.
5
They brought Antoinette with them, as they’d brought her with them from New York; which Cecilia at least already recognized to have been an error.
“Such an infant, to be toted from Paris to Rome to Salzburg!” regretted Cecilia. “She’s looking peaked already! Didn’t I tell you, darling, we should have left her behind?”
; “Yes,” said Rab.
I did not recall him as being especially taciturn, but now he was properly, Scottishly dour. I liked him though for the way he held the baby so firmly and protectively on his knee.—When I say baby, remember that Antoinette was three. Yet she still seemed just a baby—possibly because she wouldn’t say a word. She was perfectly well-grown, even sturdy. Her face was rather plain—a Dutch little face, I thought, round and unanimated, with a small mouth and her father’s small grey eyes. There was nothing of Cecilia about her except her extreme fairness—but whereas Cecilia had locks the colour of honey, Antoinette’s were just the colour of straw, and her eyebrows and lashes practically invisible. Probably most people would have considered Antoinette plain, except those who like myself have a fondness for the lint-headed, serious little creatures one sees in old Dutch paintings. I could easily picture that solemn small countenance intent above a bowl of eggs, or basket of oranges, responsible for their safe conveyance across a scrupulously clean red-tiled floor!
There were no such tiles underfoot at the moment. My sitting-room carpet is a rather nice old Aubusson, off which, before her father scooped her up, Antoinette had been trying to pick the roses. Now she wriggled down again, and towards myself; I held out a hand, and she instantly bit it—not to hurt, but as it were experimentally, as if to test (she a young rabbit) whether I were some kind of lettuce. Cecilia naturally scolded and apologized—but what are baby-teeth to the thumb of a hardened gardener?—and I felt Antoinette not at all unreasonable in objecting to apologize herself.
“Say sorry, darling!” bade Cecilia. “Tony, say sorry at once!”
But quite evidently Tony wasn’t going to. Her small pink mouth remained obstinately shut.
“You mean you’re going to let Mummy say it for you?” reproached Cecilia.
The Innocents Page 1