The Innocents

by Margery Sharp

  The Cockers gave little dinner-parties for her, based on rare lobsters or else soles. For men, besides Sir David, they could always invite the U.S. Air Force Colonel, who with typical American generosity often contributed (and left behind unemptied) a bottle of Scotch. (Only delicacy, I feel sure, prevented his providing solids; he’d taken the pains to find out that seafood was off-ration.) Naturally Cecilia had a great success with him; besides her beauty and charm, wasn’t she by marriage a compatriot? Soon the American Colonel was driving her to The Mariners’ Arms and the Crown and Sceptre just as Rab Guthrie had done. But he was a married man with a wallet full of photographs of his wife and family.

  As the weather warmed the American swimming pool too became very pleasant to Cecilia. I have said that on Saturday afternoons it attracted all the small fry of the village; Cecilia had carte blanche to patronize it whenever she liked, and take anyone she liked with her. The Colonel absolutely insisted that she take an escort—(how charmingly precise American grammatical usage!)—warning her of nine feet at the deep end. Actually Cecilia’s delight, especially with anyone watching, was to run down over the shingle-ridge into the estuary itself where she could swim looking more like a mermaid. She often urged me to bring Antoinette, to learn to swim too—of course in the pool; but I always managed some excuse. I could give even myself no real reason; what matter that I myself couldn’t swim, the child’s mother swimming so well? (Though I always felt more showily than strongly; Cecilia’s butterfly-stroke was a marvel to behold, but only for about twenty yards.) Moreover now that her riding lessons were suspended, didn’t she need some other wholesome exercise, and in company with her peers? My instinct was still to keep Antoinette—the little land-animal, the little mole or hedgehog—away from water; and in any case Cecilia never patronized the pool on Saturdays.

  During the week, other escort lacking, she took the Admiral on guard duty. He once confided to me that the sight of Cecilia breasting the estuary was the most poetical damn’ thing he’d ever seen in his life. There is no doubt that she spread a very great deal of pleasure—and not amongst new admirers only; old ones too came in for their share, as witness Major Cochran and Henry Pyke, each with his own sentimental tale to relate.

  In one way these were curiously alike, for both centered not so much on Cecilia herself as on the memories she’d aroused. Henry Pyke Cecilia reminded of his mother. I was surprised. According to Mrs. Brewer, with a memory even longer than my own, poor young Mrs. Pyke had been a bit of a weakling: pretty as a picture, but with no more guts to her than a drawn hen. Thus my impression was of some helpless pre-Raphaelite beauty—even though it wasn’t till she’d died that the thrashings (that left our own Henry Pyke a tongue-tied lameter), really began. “So long as she lived, ’twas never the strap,” admitted Mrs. Brewer—but for once I thought slightly blaming someone, if only for having died young.

  “But why should he have been thrashed at all?” I remember asking. “Was he so wild?”

  “No; but puny,” said Mrs. Brewer.

  The East Anglian is a hard coast. Under all surface tolerance runs a hard streak; almost our only folk-hero is Peter Grimes. Old Henry Pyke, East-Anglian born and bred, had survived to grow in turn as hard-handed as his father; but he hadn’t been so thrashed until his gentle mother died, and upon reflection I saw Cecilia’s beauty and grace simply fitting into the shape of a boyish icon …

  Major Cochran, ex-R.A., D.S.O. and bar, was reminded of a first love in India, for his Colonel’s daughter, he no more than a subaltern with nothing but his pay. It seemed Cecilia had just the same stunning carriage and air of being more than common clay. “I dare say it wasn’t more than once or twice I even partnered her in the mixed doubles,” confided Major Cochran, “but I think she knew how I felt about her. Then of course she married a chap in the Hussars …”

  That Cecilia should at one and the same time have reminded Henry Pyke of his mother and the Major of his Colonel’s daughter—types of womanhood apparently as opposed as possible—didn’t surprise me. In my considered opinion most men are fools sentimentally. But I wondered that neither had attempted to marry her before she married Rab Guthrie. They were neither of them in the category of Bank Managers or County Surveyors or even the average gentleman-farmer: Henry Pyke after all his thrashings inherited more than substantially, and Major Cochran too came into money—so much that had an uncle died sooner he might have challenged the chap in the Hussars. Yet neither, to my knowledge, ever proposed to Cecilia. Possibly they’d felt themselves, even so many years ago, too old for her, I meditated; and Mrs. Brewer (the topic somehow arising as we made my bed) agreed, though in cruder terms. Old fools they might have been the pair of them, said Mrs. Brewer, but still with a bottom of sense left …

  I dare say it was the same bottom of sense that preserved them from singeing their wings and hearts afresh. Neither, for instance, went much out of his way to meet Cecilia in the High Street. But if an encounter chanced, what pleasure illumined each leathery old phiz! Also Major Cochran went into Ipswich to have his dentures seen to, and Henry Pyke let Scouts camp in his orchard.

  Neither in any case was capable of doing guard duty at the swimming pool, nor could Paul Amory in his wheelchair attempt the mile and a half of shingly approach; but another returning young husband, Group Captain Pennon, was soon on the roster, and both he and his wife Janice swam very well.

  How flattering it is, to the old, to be liked by the young! Even though they may have no more experience of life than a chicken in its shell, their liking still, however irrationally, flatters. When Janice told me I reminded her of Jane Austen I knew the comparison with that elegant moralist simply absurd, and put it down to a hangover from having read Eng. lit. at some provincial university; but was still flattered!

  Her husband too had a slight provincial accent. (East Anglians never consider their own accent provincial. It is simply East Anglian.) I felt a great admiration for Peter Pennon, returned from what heroic battling in the skies to settle contentedly amongst us as a vet. In fact I once expressed it to him. He grinned and turned the conversation, but I think wasn’t displeased, and no more was Janice. In short the Pennons and I liked each other, and became friends.

  3

  Cecilia in fact spread more pleasure than she was aware of. I have described the pretty purse brought for her daughter all the way across the Atlantic; after Antoinette took it out into the garden, it disappeared. For days I hunted about, at first expecting to find it simply dropped somewhere. (That I then looked under the artichokes was probably foolish; the cache scraped there by Antoinette was for treasures—an empty black-and-amber snail shell, an unusually striated pebble.) I also kept an eye open about the house, still without result. Then some time later Mrs. Brewer reported that squinty Kevin had got a girl to go to the movies with him at last, he having given her a lovely embroidered bag on a gilt chain. It was certainly a prettier present than a bullock’s eye!

  I was very grateful to Cecilia for her discretion in not asking what became of the toy, since I could not believe she had entirely forgotten it. I thought she behaved extremely well; and more than ever looked forward, as a sort of return favour, to showing her Antoinette on pony-back. Afterwards, of course, I could only wish Honoria had stayed in London.

  10

  1

  But back Honoria came, greatly smartened up with lipstick and a new tweed coat, full of the shows she’d seen and the old chums she’d met, yet still quite glad, she whinnied, to be back with us old stick-in-the-muds. She found the ponies in good condition, though the saddlery was a bit of a mess, and on the first Tuesday after her return off we all set again, she and I and Antoinette and the three Cocker children, and now Cecilia of course accompanying.

  To begin with all went quite splendidly. Just as I’d hoped, she was obviously pleased to see how well her daughter sat, and how readily and intelligently she exchanged a “hello” with the young Cockers, who on their part showed Antoinette a new regard
for having such a beautiful mother. Everyone we passed looked at Cecilia admiringly. One or two faces even appeared at windows. As a rule our passage to the heath was simply a matter of getting there as fast as possible without trotting, and certainly attracted no attention, but with Cecilia accompanying it became quite a little procession!

  The heath once gained, off the whole juvenile string first trotted, then cantered—Antoinette cantering with the best, and for once perfectly indistinguishable from any other child of her years. Naturally Cecilia couldn’t realize what a triumph this represented, but there was no doubt of her pleasure; for once she looked even proud of her daughter.—Then suddenly Pepper stumbled, and Antoinette lost her stirrup and went headfirst into a gorse bush.

  It was the most minor of misadventures. Honoria recovered both child and pony in a matter of moments, and Antoinette was no more than scratched. But beside me I felt Cecilia stiffen. I suppose it was rather incoherently that I tried to explain that Antoinette wasn’t so much learning to ride—which indeed she was doing very well—as to mix with her peers; in any case Cecilia (all her maternal instincts aroused) listened to me no more than to Honoria. In vain did Honoria protest that Antoinette must at once remount, or the kid would lose her nerve; her loud neighings merely irritated Cecilia—as they had often done myself, but this time I felt them warranted: Antoinette flinched not in the least from Pepper (now closehauled on the leading-rein), only from her mother’s hand on her wrist …

  “What I absolutely refuse,” declared Cecilia furiously, “is to have my child’s nose broken!”

  “But if she waits till next time out—” began Honoria.

  “There won’t be a next time!” snapped Cecilia.

  She wouldn’t even allow Antoinette to ride back. We returned from the heath—that is, Cecilia and I and Antoinette returned—on foot. I was chagrined to see the young Cockers looking no longer regardful but derisive. From a canter they broke spontaneously into a show-off gallop, and Honoria for once allowed it.

  Cooling down, Cecilia assured me she didn’t blame me in the least for my well-meaning if ill-judged experiment. She just felt more and more strongly that the sooner she herself took charge of her daughter the better, and that Antoinette’s joining her at Woolmers, already too long delayed, must take place immediately.

  “In fact, tomorrow,” ordered Cecilia.

  Who was I to argue? Though Antoinette, as I have said, was barely scratched, and though the trudge home, in jodhpurs and heavy shoes, was obviously more depleting than even another tumble could have been, who was I to argue?—especially when Cecilia, warming up again, presented it as sheer luck that every bone in the child’s body hadn’t been broken, let alone the bridge of her nose. So I simply said I would have Antoinette’s cot sent round in the morning, and then bring Antoinette.

  How much of these exchanges Antoinette herself comprehended I wasn’t sure. Cecilia was speaking in a rather loud voice; from the child’s expression, or lack of it, Antoinette might have been experimentally closing her ears. That she remained mute meant nothing—wasn’t she normally mute? However Cecilia, insofar as she considered her daughter an interested party in the matter, undoubtedly took silence for consent.

  “Good-bye for now, honey!” called Cecilia, quite gaily, as we parted at my gate. “Tomorrow you’re coming to Mummy for always!”

  All the rest of the morning, as a treat, Antoinette and I played tiddlywinks with rabbit-droppings.

  She played—docilely; because I suggested it. When as an extra treat I let her have supper as well as lunch in the garden, with no more than the same docility did she follow me as I carried our trays out. However much, or little, she’d comprehended, of my conversation with Cecilia, I felt her still taking refuge in strict obedience.

  How often, under the stress of emotion, the tongue turns to banality! (Or else to unnatural elaboration; I remember once, as a girl, driving with my father and his curate, being halted by a desperate, bloodied figure standing by the wreck of an overturned car in which someone screamed like a tailored hare. “Is either of you gentlemen,” he asked, “a member of the medical profession?”) In my own case, the words were banal.

  “Tomorrow you’re going to stay with your pretty mummy!” I told Antoinette.

  It wasn’t searchingly she looked at me, this time, but—resignedly.

  “In a lovely great big house just down the hill!” I babbled on. “In your own bed, with your own mummy! Won’t that be nice?”

  Of course she didn’t answer. I didn’t expect her to. But I was sure she had indeed comprehended, and that I need babble on no more.

  So I fell silent as she. Even to repeat her favourite poetry to her, at that juncture, would have been no more than babbling. Mrs. Brewer gone, the silence of the house became absolute. As a rule Antoinette and I could be silent together so companionably, words or no words made scant difference; now, such was the constraint between us, I found myself trying to think of something to say.

  Resignation belongs properly to the middle years. I myself was I suppose forty before I resigned myself to my humdrum lot. In one’s thirties, one still hopes. But to be resigned to one’s lot as a child is terrible. I wondered whether Mr. Pyke had been resigned to his lot, under his father’s thrashings? It seemed only too possible; also to think of so unbearable, I determined to make a last bid on Cecilia’s patience, to persuade her to leave Antoinette with me even a few weeks longer; and why I failed is for a reason I still dislike to recall.

  2

  Next morning I went down to Woolmers early, and alone, on the pretext of seeing whether there was space in Cecilia’s room not only for Antoinette’s cot but also for her steamer trunk.—Of course there was space, Cecilia having the biggest single room in the guesthouse; but what was my surprise to see a second bed installed already. Not a cot, but a bed. An adult’s bed, very prettily counterpaned in pink chintz, with an extra pink cushion at the head, altogether most agreeable, but not a cot.

  If I had been thinking more clearly, I must have realized that to Cecilia (unused to any sort of makeshift), no piano-stool extension would be acceptable for a moment; naturally she’d take her own measures, and in a guest-house easily enough. But it was extremely inconsiderate that she hadn’t warned me the day before. I might well have had at least the stool with me there and then.

  “Now isn’t Tony going to be comfortable?” smiled Cecilia, looking if anything pleased at my surprise.

  It was a bad beginning. If on the one hand my resolve was strengthened by the thought of Antoinette bereft even of her familiar sleeping-place, on the other Cecilia’s complacency so irritated me I was afraid of losing my temper too soon. I was fully prepared to lose my temper if necessary—if necessary to hector Cecilia just as I’d imagined Doctor Alice hectoring her, calling upon, instead of medical authority, the tycoon or fishwife side of my nature. But first I meant to advance every viable argument—such as Antoinette’s obvious contentment, and improvement, where she was, her dislike, even fear, of every sort of change, and the ill consequences that might follow from any prematurely brought about. Sitting on the foot of the pink bed I began quietly and reasonably to advance them—until Cecilia, at my first pause, observed that it was of course twenty pounds a month.

  To do her justice, I believe she almost immediately wished the words unuttered—so swiftly did she swoop towards me, and take both my hands between her own, and protest how well she knew no money could ever, ever repay all I’d done for her darling lamb. But spoken the words had been; and I, in an uncontrollable movement of false pride (since it was to be paid for by Antoinette) went away.

  3

  Our separation now inevitable, the last thing I desired, what I desired above all to avoid, was any emotional scene. I confess I was still hurt by the extreme composure—so complete as to seem to make foolish all my apprehensions—with which Antoinette, when the moment came, accepted her transference. Her small, round, Dutch face was expressionless absolutely; merely compo
sed. She walked beside me down the hill to Woolmers for once without holding my hand; and when I left her there with Cecilia, it was only I who looked back.

  All her toys—that is all her proper, New York-originating toys—of course went with her, though some had to be quite searched for, but no dead frog, or turd, did Antoinette make any attempt to smuggle. It seemed as though she could shrug off a whole way of life (myself included) as easily as ever; as easily as five years earlier she’d shrugged off the life with her parents on the other side of the Atlantic …

  “Let me learn from babes and sucklings!” thought I; and spent the rest of the day dismantling Antoinette’s cot ready to be returned to the Women’s Institute, also collecting innumerable paper napkins from behind cushions in the sitting-room. This was not to remove all traces of my child, but simply a rational tidying up. To cut down the artichokes would have been pure sentimentality, and I am happy to say I refrained; indeed at the end of my labours I went out and stood for quite some time amongst them.

  It was a beautiful evening. We were now towards the end of May, and in early summer, in East Anglia, if the weather is fine—that is, if we are neither flooded nor frozen—even to draw breath is an uncovenanted blessing. To say that we breathe the best air in England is an understatement: we breathe the best air in the world. It comes straight to us from the North Pole, just sufficiently tempered by a ricochet off Holland: a few deep breaths on rising and one is set up for the day. In fact one is continually being set up, as well as toughened.