The Innocents (2 page)

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.

Which seemed perfectly acceptable to Antoinette, who after a second tentative nibble appeared to recognize something tougher than green-stuff, yet not inimical, and philosophically squatted down on my shoes.

“She's so shy, if there's a stranger she simply won't utter,” explained Cecilia. “But you're certainly favoured!”

—I shall never forget how lovely she looked at that moment, bending forward from where she sat, her eyes on her little daughter, one hand stretched out, as if in an arrested caress, toward the smooth, lint-coloured head. In the six years since she left us Cecilia had grown even slenderer, but without the least angularity. There was a wonderful grace about her even more attractive than her beauties of hair and skin and feature—though these too seemed to me enhanced, as if by special cherishing. I could easily imagine her becoming a leader of fashion and a pride to her husband in New York! But even while Antoinette was still trying to undo my shoelaces (she didn't succeed), Cecilia's expression of maternal affection altered to an equally maternal expression of irritation—though directed rather towards her husband.

“When we left, she was quite rosy!” harked back Cecilia. “Now she's white as an egg! Didn't I tell you, darling, we should have left her with Miss Swanson?—Swedish,” she added, in a hasty parenthesis to myself, “with absolutely every qualification!”

“Maybe I was wrong,” said Rab quietly.

“You certainly were!” snapped Cecilia. “And there's still Paris and Rome and Salzburg ahead!”

It is always embarrassing to witness a tiff between husband and wife; I so to speak absented myself by lifting Antoinette up and letting her bite my thumb more conveniently from my lap. I only hoped Cecilia might not feel jealous, at such trust in as she said a stranger; but not at all. On the contrary—

“Actually I've suddenly had the most brilliant idea!” declared Cecilia, turning from her husband to myself with a lightened brow. “If we could only leave Tony with you, just for the month, and pick her up on the way home, I'm sure it would be far, far better for her!”

Extraordinarily enough I paused only a moment before agreeing: to look enquiringly at Rab. He for his part gave me as searching a look back; then with equal consideration contemplated my sitting-room, and the windows open to the garden, and the garden beyond. I suppose it all presented a picture of modest comfort and respectability, also of course he'd met me before.

“It might be a good idea at that,” said he.

So it was arranged, after singularly little more discussion (I having lost my heart to Antoinette already), that while the Guthries toured Europe their daughter should be left in my care, and her parents brought her to deposit with me next morning, together with her clothes in a suitcase and a traveling-bag of toys.

The interim parting was remarkably painless.—I had taken the precaution of borrowing a basketful of tabby kittens with which to distract and console an infant in tears: Antoinette was obviously taken by them, she purred back like a kitten herself, but had not been crying. Cecilia quite rightly behaved as casually as possible; she and I equally, I think, reprobated Rab's too prolonged, too serious embracement of his small daughter before he finally released her and followed Cecilia out to the car.

Antoinette appeared to forget them instantaneously. Of course she had the kits to divert her, and then a glass of milk and bread-and-honey, before being tucked up for a nap in the cot I'd borrowed from the Women's Institute and had set up beside my bed. She seemed so cozy and content (and tired out, poor infant), I in fact gave her her boiled egg for supper there too; but still through the night lay with one ear alert in case she woke crying and needing comfort.

It was I who didn't sleep; not Antoinette.

When in the morning I got her up, and told her who Mrs. Brewer was, and showed her where the garden she could play in was, Antoinette accepted all in the same peaceable silence. I knew she wasn't mute—though now I came to consider it, I'd never heard her speak a word—because of her murmurings to the cats; but during those very first days of our life together it became clear to me that Cecilia's daughter was what in earlier times would have been called an innocent.

2

1

I have spoken of her, describing our first encounter, as a baby. Antoinette was in fact three. At three, she should have been able to untie my shoelaces quite easily. She should have not only uttered, but prattled. At three, Antoinette had still no more vocabulary than—a baby.

She was also as physically clumsy as a baby. If I had visualized her carrying bowl of eggs, basket of oranges, with serious, safe care, I soon discovered my error. Anything Antoinette was given to carry she dropped. It was as though her powers of concentration had an unusually limited span. She spilled even a cup of milk before she drank from it, and a spoonful of porridge before it reached her mouth—which of course made for a certain messiness that I had to discipline myself to accept without snapping, since one of the first things I learned about Antoinette was that she needed to be spoken to always very quietly, not to frighten her. It was specially important not to frighten her, not only for her own sake but because when frightened she was sick. I do not mean ailed: threw up. So I kept a supply of paper napkins always handy.

Other things that frightened her were strangers, blancmange, and dark glasses (especially if put on and off) but nothing so much as a voice raised in anger. I myself share the same distaste, though not of course to the extent of hiding under my bed; but on the rare occasions when Mrs. Brewer and her daughter-in-law “had words” in the kitchen, it was refuged under her cot that I discovered the suddenly missing Antoinette. Fortunately such incidents were rare, not only in my own quiet household but in the village generally, of which the motto, in the unlikely event of its ever attaining a coat of arms, might well be
De gustibus non est disputandum
—Anglicé, I don't blame you. Thus when two couples openly exchanged spouses without benefit of the Divorce Court, no one blamed them, no more than old Mrs. Bragg, supporting fifteen cats on her pension, was blamed for regularly each Sunday stealing all milk bottles left outside doors on her way home from Early Communion. Of old Mr. Pyke at Hollanders, so heavy-handed with a strap, woe betide any urchin caught scrumping in his orchard, it was remembered in excuse how he'd been thrashed as a boy, after his mother died, by a father even heavier-handed still. (What myself was to be excused for remains to be seen.) Then there was Major Cochran, ex—Royal Artillery, D.S.O. and bar, a positive menace each Armistice Day. Like every other, our village was only too willing to commemorate it, as a nice turnout for Old Comrades and the Boy Scouts and the St. John's Ambulance Brigade; owing to trouble with his dentures the Major's perennial recitation of
They shall not grow old
often held the band up marking time for as much as ten minutes; but no one blamed him …