Ceremonies of Innocence Read online

  She was amused at Dorelia’s conversation. She’d heard other people who thought her particular talent should be regarded purely as a marketable proposition to be channelled in a cash-finding direction, but the puppy-like directness of Dorelia’s chat was appealing.

  ‘Why did you walk out of the gates when you arrived this evening?’ she asked the girl.

  ‘Oh, were you watching? Well I thought I’d hit one of those chickens when I came in. They were all scratching round by the gate and there was a sort of flurry when I started to turn the car in. I had – in fact I hit two of them. One was dead and the other was sort of twitching so I pulled its neck. There was that old tinker man – oh you wouldn’t know him but he’s an old bloke who spends all day walking around the lanes with his dog, he’s not really a tinker I don’t think. Anyway he was walking past, so I gave the chickens to him. He was ever so grateful.’ She flicked Angela’s folder shut and stared at her with unblinking bland brown eyes.

  It was after dinner. They were all, with the exception of Fergus (in temporary disgrace for the practical joke he had played on Hugh, substituting a folder full of torn scraps of music manuscript paper for the almost completed score which was due to be handed over to the commissioners that week), gathered in the downstairs drawing room. This was a happy jumble of elegance and comfort in strong contrast to the stark grace of the upstairs ballroom. Deep, just slightly sagging armchairs, sofas, some modern and some of an earlier period, bookcases, lots of paintings on the walls, a large fireplace. They had eaten a meal of generous proportions in the kitchen, which was dominated by an enormous built-in dresser, full of miraculous china (and a cat, remembered Angela, was that real, or china, too?). Angela had ravenously spooned up her fish chowder (she’d forgotten that Kattie was almost vegetarian – would they eat no meat at all?), eaten cheese and salad and fruit and drunk several glasses of wine. That must explain why she was so sleepy now.

  They had talked of the meanness of grant bodies towards the arts; of the splendour of the costume design for the production of Falstaff at the Royal Opera. Hugh had told some scurrilous tales about the sex lives of operatic leading ladies he had known and, rather drunk and light-headed with relief (though not at all ashamed of the scene he had made) at getting his score back unscathed, had held forth at great length on the vagaries of the Mexican character.

  He was recalling no doubt the traumas he had enjoyed and suffered with his glorious and overbearing wife, thirty years younger than he at least and the cause now of his removal to Kattie’s house. They had laughed at his aristocratic dismissal of her tantrums. ‘Poor sweet,’ he hiccuped and cooed, but Angela had felt the pain of rejection tearing away when he recounted (with a calculating eye on his audience) the flinging out ceremony – the banishment of Hugh with one suitcase early one Sunday morning watched by his young child (the baby was fast asleep upstairs) and a bemused au pair whose name he could not recall.

  His eyes were blank but his mouth opened to laugh. Angela thought, if I blocked my ears and looked at him, would I know if he was howling with laughter or howling in pain?

  ‘It was bloody absurd,’ Hugh stuttered, excited by the wine and the attention. ‘A Sunday morning – a SUNDAY morning – I walked past the church and there were the faithful assembled, all walking down the path to meet me. What else could I do but wave? Poor sweet.’ He relapsed into gloom.

  Everyone seemed too bemused to ask him why. Why had she chucked him out (his own house)? Why had he not hit her, argued, laughed, yelled, kicked her out with a suitcase? Or perhaps, thought Angela, still fighting sleep, perhaps they’d heard it all before.

  Billy, blurred at the edges by wine and by the shutting down, one by one, of his emotional responses, stumbled towards his hot bedroom. He aimed a kick at the large landscape which leant against the hallway wall, but missed, which was just as well, as the still-wet paint would have tipped his suppressed mood into raging anger.

  Undressing carefully as always, blocking out the moment when he removed his tin leg, folding his trousers (how he had always hated the way Angela left her clothes lying on a chair or on the floor) and hanging them up, neatly creased, he brushed his thinning hair with a careful circular motion of the soft-bristled tortoiseshell-backed brush. He pulled on his pyjamas, grunting as he did every night at the point when he eased himself between the sheets. Switching off the light he tried to close off the unease and discontent which hovered on the edge of his consciousness like the soft fluttering of the powdery moths beating gently against the closed shutters, insistent on a way in.

  Angela also felt blurred at the edges but her dissolution came about by sheer relief. To be responsible for the first time in many years for herself and to herself, not to have to listen (however subconsciously) for Billy, gauging his mood, reading the way he thumped his glass down on the table or rustled the pages of the newspaper, this was the relief. The sense of fear that comes with freedom had not come to her yet and she slept as easily as she had done just the night before in a stuffy French hotel bedroom.

  Hugh on the other hand did not sleep easily. Insecure, a warped genius with a head full of crazy tunes, unloved just now in the sexual sense but noticed with interest and hostility balanced in just about equal measure from many quarters, he chain-smoked as he worried about his lack of money. Stubbing out his fiftieth cigarette that day in the marble-faced grate of the elegant fireplace, he felt just a twinge of guilt as he thought of the fiver he had nicked from Kattie’s bag earlier on. Oh God, he must be careful not to set these blasted bedclothes on fire. He curled his fingers round his two packs of cigarettes and his heavy gold lighter (should he sell that quietly or make a production of the fact that he was forced to do so?), scooping them and his thin-rimmed spectacles along the floor to the side of his bed. He was defenceless, undressing in the middle of the enormous bare room, floor uncarpeted and ceiling-height windows uncurtained, small single divan askew on sloping boards, adrift just as he was in vast empty space.

  Fergus, potentially the loneliest of these three stray people, felt perfectly happy. In his smelly cubby hole by the kitchen, he peeled off jeans that were stiff with dirt and carefully removed his thick spectacles. Like Hugh he placed them on the floor by the side of his bed. Unlike Hugh he was the possessor of a small bedside table, thoughtfully provided by Kattie; but there was no space left on it because of the piled-up clutter of plates, cups, knives, glasses, gnawed meat bones, bits of uneaten bread crust and rotting fruit cores and skins. So his spectacles, without which his eyes weakly strayed, guarded the patch of floor by his noisome shoes. Fergus, oblivious now to everything but the delicious memory of Hugh’s reaction when he thought his manuscript destroyed, clambered into bed, still wearing his underpants, giggled softly to himself and drifted towards sleep.

  Kattie and Clem were not accustomed to bedtime trauma in their well-balanced lives. They each read a little before they slept, Kattie lost in an indulgent Irish novel and Clem revelling in the pubescent eroticism of a new book, lavishly illustrated, on the work of Balthus. They curled up together, lucky Clem, blessed Kattie, perfectly easy with each other’s generous bodies.

  ‘I think I must have forgotten that Angela was arriving today.’ Clem took off the spectacles he had only recently started wearing for reading and laid down his book.

  ‘Well, I had no idea either. Honestly darling. Poor Angela swears she wrote giving times and all that, but the letter must have gone astray. As far as I knew it was going to be some time next week. Not that it matters. Lovely that Dorelia’s arrived too – it’s so good to have all our friends and family together like this.’ Kattie tucked her paperback under the pillow and turned in towards Clem.

  ‘Mmmmmm,’ he frowned to himself, still wondering over Angela’s quiet arrival. ‘Has she left Billy for good, do you know? What did she say?’ He put an arm under Kattie’s shoulders and pulled her close. She responded as she had done every night of their married lives by laying her head on his shoulder and tucking her f
ist in the warm hollow under his arm.

  ‘Don’t know. Honest. She hasn’t said, and I couldn’t very well put the poor girl through an inquisition tonight, could I?’

  ‘Well, you’ll sort her out, darling. You always do. You sort us all out.’ He nuzzled close to her. ‘Come and sort me out Kattie, Kattie. Like this darling.’

  Billy noted, with a degree of displeasure that had become as necessary to his well-being as the two litres of wine that he consumed daily, that Madame Houbon, the farmer’s wife who came in every day to tidy up, was late again.

  He looked at his watch, shook it in impatience and checked it against the half-sized grandfather clock which he always called a ‘grandmother’. Angela did not. She referred to it as ‘La Grandmère’, a title given, thought Billy, out of some misguided sort of affectation. The gaiety with which she would say she was going to ask the time of La Grandmère made him want to puke, he thought, as he stomped off to his study to ponder the economics, the logistics and the politics that caused the Spanish Armada to set sail. He did not consider the frailties.

  He gave a resigned snort of displeasure for the second time that morning when he unpeeled the brown paper parcel with its swathes of tape, and realized that yet again they had sent him the wrong books, not at all the ones he’d ordered to enable him to finish his research for his work on military strategy. He threw State Papers, Spanish, to the floor in disgust and consulted the checklist of books he had ordered. It was as clear as daylight – Calendar of State Papers, Spanish, the four volumes from 1558 to 1603. The translation of relevant volumes of Lefevre’s Correspondance de Philippe II was there, but where was the second volume of Duro’s work, for which he had been waiting for months?

  He looked at his watch again and thought about lunch.

  Billy had already decided that he was not going to think about Angela, rushing off home to England. A grey stain of malcontent had already crept into his day and had to be scrubbed away, purged by work, making notes, checking references, important routine; it was mitigated by the doorbell thank God, whose incongruous two notes announced the late arrival of Madame Houbon, who would make his bed, wash his pyjamas and shirts, socks and underpants and cook his lunch in the absence of his wife.

  ‘You have just no idea at all, Hugh. It wasn’t even embarrassing, because I was too frightened. The cows would not go away, and lying on that branch with no clothes on was just the most uncomfortable thing you can imagine. It was truly awful!’

  Hugh and Dorelia were strolling down the road from Puttnam House to the pub in the next village. Dorelia’s dress, the soft colour of bluebells, emphasized the creamy white of her skin and the startling coppery red tones of her long curling hair.

  Hugh could have been her father, his long narrow frame angular and bony, echoing her own tall and slender body. He was utterly enchanted by all her picturesque qualities: her easy unselfconsciousness, her loping stride, her pale face which could crumple into an expression so cross-grained that she looked like a baby pig and would have been ugly but for the fact that each feature – small nose, clear freckled skin, white teeth, fullish lips – was charming. She clutched at his arm, held his hand, stopped to dance and twirl as she spoke, chattering away, making each point by poking at him with her long white forefinger – which had a rather grubby nail. Hugh, indulgent, liked the contrast.

  Her easy chatter, her pirouetting and her puppylike friendliness were the manners of a small child, her talk the sophistication of a schoolgirl. She was telling Hugh how, just the week before, she and a photographer friend from college had ventured into a large meadow. Dorelia had agreed, she said, to model for a series of life photographs which the young man had to prepare for a ‘Figure in the Landscape’ collection for a college exhibition. He had spied a distinguished cedar in one corner of the meadow. It sported a long low-curving branch and he had envisaged Dorelia, long and curving herself, undulating along its length, her white, barely post-adolescent body and the figured roughness of the bark on the branch echoing each other’s qualities.

  Hugh, who had known Dorelia since babyhood, was not surprised to find himself growing excited at the thought of her clambering, naked, into the tree, and lying along the branch, trying to balance elegantly. With the indiscipline of the emotionally insecure, Hugh was in the habit of falling in love regularly, unsuitably and, very often, hopelessly. He groaned as he felt the familiar sensations hit him in the pit of his stomach. Stirred by an image, like a medieval painting, of the colour and texture and sensuality of the scene, he all but missed what Dorelia was telling him.

  ‘And then Hugh, oh God, it’s so funny now, looking back, but AWFUL at the time, these cows, black and white – Friesian aren’t they? – suddenly appeared over a sort of curve in the field. One minute there was nothing on the landscape except us being all arty and then these horns appeared and then the cows’ heads and then the brutes themselves BREATHING over us. Dave was sorting out lenses and things and he didn’t see them at first and I started to giggle because once the horns had appeared it was all so inevitable and they moved in on us RELENTLESSLY and I just froze on the branch because there they were right underneath me, nuzzling up … I really didn’t … Hugh… whatever is the matter. Hugh.’ Dorelia stopped in full flood, ran round to stand in front of the frozen pillar that Hugh had become and started pumping his arm up and down. ‘Hugh!’

  Hugh, overcome by his vision of Dorelia’s white body draped sensuously along the rough branch, warmed by the damp breath of the cows, had stopped in his tracks and was minutely relishing the misery of the familiar feeling that was engulfing him. ‘Oh Gaaard,’ he drawled helplessly. Dorelia looked at him with admiration. Then he seemed to pull himself together, so she carried on: the cows, breathing and pushing, licking at each other with enormous raspy tongues, trampling on her clothes. She giggled and snarled with laughter and she gestured and pranced, embroidering her tale. She felt the velvety breath of the cows tickle her thighs and she breathed in their cabbagey warmth.

  She looked sideways at Hugh to see the effect her story was having, but Hugh, locked helplessly into his fantasy world of colour and sensation where Dorelia floated licentiously but untouchably on a green cloud of feathery leaves, kicking her long legs in the air so that the bluebell dress rode over her white thighs, had stopped reacting to the prancing girl at his side. She slipped her arm through his to anchor him and they strode on down to the Hare and Hounds.

  ‘Why don’t we wait until this evening?’ said Angela.

  ‘Oh no! I can’t bear to wait! It’s such a charming idea and it will be so good for Hugh. I know! Let’s do some lunch outside, on the little terrace where it’s sunny, and we’ll ask him then. Don’t you think so, Clem? Darling?’ Angela recognized the look on Clem’s face as he smiled at Kattie, who was almost hugging herself in excitement at the thought of the perfection of her idea. Good-humoured resignation certainly, and the indulgent smile which acknowledged the futility of arguing with Kattie once her heart was set on something.

  Angela and Kattie’s mothers had been related in a loose sort of way. But family ties had been strong enough for the Lebruns (Kattie’s grandparents) to take in Angela’s mother as a sort of honorary daughter when her own parents, pioneering types both of them, disappeared on a forbidden trip to the Belgian Congo. Angela’s mother, fired perhaps by her missing parents’ example, had been an absent guardian for most of Angela’s childhood and she too very often found herself spending weeks of school holiday with Kattie and her five sisters in their draughty old house on Dartmoor. Kattie’s father had been a general practitioner in Okehampton, and the girls were encouraged to be upright, honest and hardy. In the event they all turned into what were generally recognized as ‘splendid sorts’ and married into the higher ranks of the Services (with the exception of the oldest girl who, with her pick of curates at the large parish church, married the right one and was now a Bishop’s wife).

  Kattie, the youngest, was the exception who held the key
to her father’s heart and who obtained concessions scorned by the others. Angela had a very clear vision of the same indulgent look on Dr Glengettie’s face, years before, as Kattie pleaded to be taken to swim in one of the peat-brown bottomless pools under the shadow of the moorland tors. Although it was one of his surgery days he packed the girls in his car early in the morning and drove along the winding roads frequented by only the tourists and the sheep and the odd back-packing soldier, to stop at a pool whose black waters reflected nothing but the cold granite of the moor.

  Angela remembered nothing so clearly as the feeling of sheer terror as they undressed, thin, shivering blue bodies, cut by the early morning wind. The waters of the pool were glassy, unmoving, holding hosts of unknown terrors. As she moved towards the freezing pool she felt her feet slip on the droppings left by sheep and she wanted to cry. Kattie undressed slowly, watched by her father, who still had that fond smile on his face.

  ‘In you go, chaps!’ he hurled at them, heartily. And, out of sheer terror, Angela tipped, falling down into the black heart of the moor. Ice cut her skin and panic engulfed her so that as soon as she bobbed to the surface she cried at the edge of the pool to be pulled out, treading black water until Dr Glengettie leaned and heaved her onto the coarse heather and grass fringe. Kattie, still dancing on the edge, pouted and looked concerned.

  ‘Is it really cold, Angie?’

  ‘Freezing!’ And Kattie, alarmed by her friend’s chattering teeth and by the icy tears drying on her face, smiled at her father and shook her head before climbing back into warm trousers and jumper.