Ceremonies of Innocence Read online

  CEREMONIES OF INNOCENCE

  Annie Bullen

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Fergus Slack was sweating against the effort of trying, with three other people, to shift a small and rather beautiful church organ.

  Now they were resting, Fergus smoking, in the weedy front driveway of Puttnam House, up whose dilapidated steps they were planning to introduce the lonely instrument.

  Kattie and Clem Augier were both giggling.

  ‘We’ll never get it inside, Clem.’ Kattie, her face pink, wispy tendrils of brown hair clinging to its dampness, began to sound serious. ‘It’s spent all its life in a consecrated place and now we are forcing it up our steps – like a convent girl being pushed into a house of ill repute.’

  ‘Our house has no reputation – ill or otherwise.’ Clem straightened up, ready to start pushing and shoving again.

  ‘Oh – DO be careful,’ stammered Hugh, hiccuping and gulping as he generally did when he spoke. Fergus rolled his eyes. ‘Look Clem, I really do feel that we shouldn’t sort of heave this ourselves. It’s rather precious and should be treated as such.’ Hugh’s brow was creased in distress.

  ‘Well it’s been rotting away for the last ten years,’ said Kattie briskly, ‘and there’s a good chance that it would have been demolished along with the church if we hadn’t taken pity on it and given it sanctuary. But you are right – I do feel that we’re going to have to call on some more muscle to get it inside and upstairs.’

  ‘Oh shit,’ whined Fergus sucking at the thumb which he had just pinched between the side of the organ and a stone pillar.

  A grey and maroon Ford Granada swung smartly between the wide gateposts into the driveway, hesitated at the curve of the overgrown gravel sweep round the circular lawn and then made a right-hand turn, pulling up with a flourish parallel to the precariously balanced organ.

  Clem, Hugh, Fergus and Kattie had just bent their backs once more to the task of heaving the organ, its blue and gold painted pipes shining forlornly in the late afternoon sun; they turned to watch the car sliding smoothly alongside.

  Fergus, sweating and unaccountably nervous, put his quarter of the instrument’s considerable weight down awkwardly, so that the base scraped against the edge of the lower steps and the massive piece tilted back, to rest with a loud crack on the plump stone pillar at the front of the porch. He swore again.

  Angela stepped out of her taxi to face a gathering whose attention and concern was equally divided between her arrival and the fate of the handsome, collapsed piece of furniture.

  ‘Darling Angela, you’re looking so brown, I really can’t believe you’re here at last, look let me get you another one of those, no really, oh I’m SO glad you’re here, we’ve got so much to talk about,’ said Kattie.

  ‘Not yet,’ thought Angela, taking a gulp of her gin. ‘Not yet.’ She smiled at Kattie and then she laughed.

  ‘What’s the matter? Are you happy to be back?’

  ‘No – it’s not that, although I am. It’s you. You’re just as I always think of you only more so.’ Angela’s gesture swept in all of Kattie’s plump generosity, standing there, bottle of gin in one hand, wine in the other, topping up glasses, swooping, chatting, smiling.

  ‘Oh I’m all right! But what about you? You look – well – tired.’ Angela nodded, but said nothing.

  Kattie found herself nervous at her friend’s preoccupied air, nervous about the reasons behind Angela’s sudden decision to return at last to England after nearly twenty years living in France. Let her find her level with us before we start talking, she thought, as she poured more gin, more tonic, more wine. She stood close to Angela as she tipped the bottle, brushing against her arm. She felt the other woman stiffen.

  ‘How tense she is,’ thought Kattie in a sad cold rush. The act of touching, touching and holding, was as natural to Kattie as breathing. As a poet will hear only his own voice as he fits words together, so Kattie could imbue others with the same warmth and sensual perception that she used instinctively. She was blessed with a will that was persistent in its generosity and a warmth that melted resistance to that will. She smiled again gently at Angela, thinking, I always forget how tidy she is, compact, like a folded-away person. Angela, freckled of face and with threads of grey in her once auburn hair, felt faded and sandy, energy drained by time and travel.

  Kattie and Clem, Angela and Fergus were drinking together in an upstairs room at Kattie and Clem’s home. Now divided by a wall covered with original drawings and paintings, all collected over the decades by Clem, his father and grandfather, the high-ceilinged and many-windowed apartment had once been a small ballroom.

  The floor, of worn, thin oak boards, was bare of covering and the only furniture apart from the rescued organ (Angela’s taxi driver, beguiled by Kattie, had provided the extra muscle), which stood magnificently at one end, was a grand piano and an unmade divan bed, swamped with an assortment of old quilts, fur rugs and a black and white cat.

  Fergus, his face shiny with sweat or grease and smelling, as he often did, of kennels or stables, a sharp animal smell, slid into the space between Kattie and Angela and began to talk, attracting Angela’s attention with a nervous giggle.

  ‘This has come for you. This is you, right, isn’t it? Angela Cruickshank, yeah?’ – he placed a stubby, dirty finger over the name on the envelope. Angela’s heart sank as she recognized the jabbing black strokes of Billy’s writing on one of her creamy envelopes. She pushed the letter, unopened, into the pocket of her skirt. Fergus giggled again, sucking noisily at his teeth.

  Kattie, anxious for Angela if not to like Fergus, at least to try to understand him, thought for the millionth time, poor Fergus, how ugly he is, how unsympathetic. Fergus, happily unaware, grinned again, now to himself, picked at the edge of his nose and sniffed loudly. He wished he had some dope.

  Angela was not even considering Fergus but was experiencing a growing anger at Billy’s ability to sap her energy and initiative, even at a distance of several hundred miles. She thought of her status as his wife, her duties to him and his responsibilities to her. Of her refusal to accept any longer her own accumulation of resentment against having continuously to acknowledge that the rites and solidity of marriage must take precedence over her own perception of the world. Angela, Billy’s wife, was not the person standing here, making sense of a house filled with people and of the beginning of a lonely fear.

  Each time Angela had laid down her paintbrush, screwing a paint-encrusted cap back onto a tube, the realities of life with Billy had made mockery of any other form of expression she wanted to use. Billy had always sensed her uncertainty and, not unnaturally, had taken advantage of it. How many times had he straddled the floor behind her as she worked? He never said anything, but she could always sense the expression on his face and she knew that his hands were clasped loosely behind his back, fingers tapping contemptuously together. It had been her weakness, she thought, that she had been the one to speak first, to wipe the paint from her brushes and hands with a scrap of oily rag, to go with him, pushing the easel away from her, turning it as she did, so that her painting hung apologetically, shielding itself from the onlooker.

  I made him into a tyrant because I was weak, she thought. For years she had accepted Billy’s demands; now she could not tell what force was welling up inside her to destroy an order that she had understood for so long.

  She looked across at Kattie, who seemed to be explaining something to Fergus while Clem stood tolerantly by. In the past few weeks Kattie had loomed larger and larger in her mind as a haven, her only refuge. Kattie with her soft face and generous body and beautiful sense of what was right. Lucky Clem, to have Kattie, she thought, and luck
y me to have both of them to fly to.

  After nineteen years of sometimes tolerable married life, Angela was coming home to England, moving away from her husband for a length of time which she was unable to specify. She preferred not to think of her move as ‘leaving’ Billy, because at forty-two she felt she should be past dramatic gestures. But the shift had become inevitable: as she saw it now, she had been working towards this, for the past three years at least. She had listened, morning after morning, in the heat of the South to Billy’s grumbles: the proud laziness of the French, the dust, the smelly, oily food, the flies, the filth of the sluggish seashore, the arid air which made his catarrh worse. None of these points had seemed to Angela to matter very much, but she had catalogued her own small list of what was missing. Gossiping with Kattie, the flat taste of English tap water, the day in autumn when everyone put away their cotton dresses and appeared in woollen shirts and jumpers. And that day in early January when the year ‘turned’ and buds and birds made their hopeful, untimely appearance in the mistaken belief that the toil of winter was over.

  While Billy grumbled endlessly about the impossibility of doing any work because of the hopelessness of the libraries which were meant to be sending him books to further his research, Angela picked over the guts of the country in her painting.

  But all the while she felt that because it was easy to sit and paint – the light was good, the weather kind and the subjects all unselfconsciously to hand – her judgement was slowly oozing away. In isolation she had no yardstick. The figurative work went so well that she had moved, from year to year, simplifying line, experimenting with colour and form, pruning, intensifying, looking all the while for what she saw as the juicy core of things. Without too much confidence she sent work back to England, to Clem. Occasionally he and Kattie had made a short visit on their way to or from a holiday destination and had taken canvasses back with them.

  Once or twice she had returned to England, in the early days, to see her work hanging, and sometimes selling, in Clem’s gallery. But she was excited and upset by the sheer pleasure she felt in the company of other painters. Having the chance to look at the work of her contemporaries (although Angela never thought of herself as a ‘proper’ painter and would not have dreamed of bracketing the others in the same category as herself), to listen to them speaking of their own work and asking about hers, not to have to make excuses (as she did daily to Billy) for what she had put down, gave her too much freedom.

  At home, with Billy, she had long ago stopped mixing with the other painters who came, in season, to their small town, to use the light and the colour. Meeting them had invariably provoked a scene (sometimes before the visitors had left), and if she went out to see them in a bar or café to go and talk ‘Art’ as Billy sneeringly said, the self-pity and snide deprecation which he vented when she guiltily returned made the whole exercise futile and self-defeating.

  In a land of easy warmth, the sun bestowing beauty, it had not been too difficult to express a basic joy in the curves and shadows of the country and its people. Now she would have to seek a new subtlety.

  She sighed and Kattie, assuming she wanted more gin, topped up her glass. As she drank a lump of ice clinked against her tooth, making her wince. She prodded cautiously at the decayed bit of tooth with her tongue and thought, at least now I can get some decent dental treatment, without having to pay the earth.

  ‘How much work have you brought with you, Angela? I hope you haven’t taken up all your suitcase space with silly things like clothes!’ Clem, big and shaggy, shambled across to her.

  Kattie smiled and tried to relax. Anxious, as always, for everyone to be happy under her mantle, she was beginning to experience a sense of doubt – for her a new sensation. The cause of this testing feeling was Fergus. She tried to remember the point at which she had given Fergus an invitation to stay ‘until you’ve sorted yourself out’. It must have been on that last prison visit. He had turned up on the doorstep (or to be accurate she had found him wandering around the back of the house, snooping in windows) five, or was it six nights ago, with a back-pack bulging with what she assumed were spare clothes (although there was no evidence of that in his daily dress). Kattie’s generosity, her easy heart, attracted many friends looking for comfort, breathing space, respite. But most of ‘her’ people recognized that, in receiving, just as in giving, there are rules that must be observed. Fergus clearly was not too good at observing rules, written or otherwise.

  ‘Well of course he’s different,’ Kattie had said to Clem as they undressed together the night before. ‘If he knew how to behave properly, he wouldn’t have ended up in prison, would he?’ Now she shook her head. She had drunk just too much, as usual. Why do we do it, she thought. I must go and see to dinner. But she stayed, watching her husband and Angela talking, Clem’s courteous head inclined, his large face serious and pleasant, talking to Angela about her work and his plans for it. And she responded, with an obvious effort at first, but soon with a naturalness that Kattie watched with relief. She could not analyse how Clem’s charm worked, though she had often observed, sometimes with rancour, the effects on a series of women of its withdrawal.

  Her husband was a big man with a swoop of greying hair. All his features, his nose, his hands, his shaggy eyebrows, were well-defined, strongly drawn. He had a voice and a body to match. A charmer, a man who liked other people, especially women, very much. Kattie was aware of this but very rarely felt that she needed to be jealous. She trusted his honesty, his lack of possessiveness, although she could not help wishing, at times, that she had the talent that Clem was always looking for and that he found in someone like Angela.

  Reassured by gin, by the knowledge that soon she would go down to the kitchen and feed her extended family, she smiled and grasped at Fergus. He smiled back, eyes moonlike and wobbly behind the thick lenses of his spectacles. He immediately launched into one of his interminable tales of how the prison warders had shown their antipathy to him when he was in Dartmoor. They kicked over his trays of food, said Fergus, sniff, and the bastards they come up behind you on the stairways and chop against the back of your legs right, so your knees give way and they dope you right up so you don’t know if it’s day or night and you pee the bed.… Kattie, full-lipped and smiling, switched off, nodding. She’d heard all this before.

  She turned to put her glass down and almost tripped over the divan. This was Hugh Hansard’s bed, and Kattie was just going to ask Fergus if he had seen the errant composer that evening, when they were interrupted by a loud whinnying noise, a cross between a whistle and a wail, coming from the passageway outside the room and growing closer.

  They all stopped talking at once and, like well-drilled actors, swung to the door just as the noise reached its zenith and Hugh, everything akimbo and obviously beside himself with some strong emotion, burst inside.

  ‘Hugh, darling, whatever is the matter!’ Kattie, genuinely concerned, finally put her glass down on the floor which was the nearest surface as she moved towards him.

  He gave a despairing look, rolled his eyes up so that the pupils disappeared under the upper lids – a trick which Angela watched in some admiration – and then folded himself up, section by section, until he was squatting, chicken-like, on the floor with his large red-knuckled hands flattened, one over the other, on the top of his head. Fergus gave a nervous giggle and backed away towards the door. Clem glanced suspiciously at him. The two women were squatting down beside Hugh. Kattie, facing him, had tucked her hands under his armpits and was talking earnestly to him, half hugging him, half squeezing.

  ‘Hugh, you must tell us what it is, what has happened. Are you hurt? Is it one of the children? Is someone … has someone … come on darling, you can tell me. What has happened?’

  ‘Oh God, God God.’ Hugh’s voice, always theatrical, rose rapidly and in a crescendo to the purely dramatic. His hands, fingers sausage-like and of an even length, now covered his eyes. He maintained his concertinaed position. Now h
e was jerking his body up and down in time to triplets of small moans.

  Angela, who was perhaps alone in hearing the sound of a motor on the weedy gravel drive outside, was also alone in observing that Fergus was no longer in the room. Hugh was now hidden by Clem and Kattie, linked around him. His moans were reduced now to a regular whinnying breath and, as he swayed, so did they. Angela, giving up on a situation in which she felt she could do nothing, moved over to the window.

  It was a car that she had heard; a small boxy brand-new Ford with that year’s registration number, swinging to a precise halt outside the steps where, only a few hours before, they had wrestled with the organ. A girl was getting out. Angela could not see her clearly because the bulk of the car obscured her from sight as she swung from the driver’s seat, but she did not seem even to cast one glance at the ill-kempt pile of the house. Very tall, with orange-red hair tumbling in curls over her shoulders, she loped off down the drive, the way she had come, and disappeared through the gateway. Angela noticed a large suitcase on the rear seat of the car.

  ‘Are these really yours? They’re awfully good!’ Dorelia was flicking through Angela’s large folder of work which Clem had insisted on seeing. It was hard to tell if she really was interested because of the rapidity with which she riffled through the drawings. She pushed a weight of red hair back over her shoulder and ran a very long white finger down the sweep of a young boy’s face. Angela admired the thin gold of a ring studded with tiny emeralds traced around her finger.

  ‘If I were a painter I know how I’d make lots of money – I’d paint empty shoes. Shoes with no feet owning them. I’d bet they’d be really fashionable and people would fight to buy them. Why don’t you start a craze like that and become rich and famous?’

  Angela was exhausted. She was talking to Kattie and Clem’s daughter Dorelia, who had arrived during the diversion with Hugh. Or rather she had started off talking to Dorelia, who was now firmly in charge of the conversation whilst Angela, bombarded by a host of sensations – unease about Hugh, cold anger at Fergus and pure, devastating tiredness – fought to keep her eyes open. She probed at her tooth again, wincing at the soreness of her tongue as it caught the jagged edge in her bottom gum.