Ceremonies of Innocence Read online

  ‘Little monkey!’, said the doctor fondly, all the way back home in the car. ‘Little monkey.’

  Now Clem, too, had obviously discovered early on that it was useless to argue with Kattie (whose ideas, it must be said, had improved a great deal over the years, generally bearing much more pleasant fruit). He was used to the invasion of his home by odd clusters of people and he had come to accept with tolerably good grace Kattie’s preoccupation with the tender nurturing of the frail talents they bore. There were, after all, compensations for being married to a partner whose mind was not always probingly focused on her husband’s activities. So, when approached on the subject of the organ, he murmured assent, as he knew he had to. And thus it was that during lunch they made plans to organize a ‘Service’, to celebrate the safe arrival of the elaborate little organ in their home for which Hugh, as a sort of composer-in-residence, would be asked to write (for an agreed fee) a special piece of music to mark the occasion.

  ‘I say,’ Hugh stammered at the barman. ‘Would you be awfully kind and cash a cheque for me? – I seem to have run out of change.’ He patted at his pockets vaguely, smiling in a disarming if distracted fashion. Dorelia, embarrassed, went to sit down. Awful, she thought, to be taken out for a drink and then to have to worry if he could pay for it. What a funny old thing Hugh was, really. A bit like a giant stick insect – but so intense. It had crossed her newly sophisticated mind in a not very serious way that perhaps her mother had been having an affair with him. But looking at him now this seemed unlikely.

  The barman, used by now to Hugh’s constant lack of ready cash, accepted the cheque – only a small one – added up the cost of two packets of Benson and Hedges, a half of cider (for Dorelia) and a Guinness, and pushed a handful of change back across the bar. Hugh dithered over the purchase of some nuts and crisps. He was soon to discover that he and Dorelia, matched physically, also had in common an insatiable appetite for a constant supply of small and savoury snacks. Dorelia, ripping open the bag of crisps and relieved now that the cash situation had been settled without fuss, was telling Hugh of her ambition (transitory) to become a journalist.

  ‘I’ve already been accepted by several magazines in London to go and work for them,’ she said. ‘Writing bits and pieces and talking to people, helping to organize photo sessions – that sort of thing. But Mummy thinks I should do it properly and go on a course and get trained and pass exams. So I’m waiting, really, until the course starts in the autumn. It’s bound to be boring,’ she added gloomily.

  ‘And what are you going to do until then?’ asked Hugh, who had worked his way through a packet of peanuts and was dipping his long fingers into the crisps.

  ‘Oh, I expect I’ll just hang around home for a bit – it’s nice here in the summertime,’ said Dorelia dreamily.

  ‘You mean you’ll stay in this house, here, with the rest of us?’ Hugh was growing excited.

  ‘Oh yes – of course. Mummy always keeps my room free. I mean, you’re in the ballroom and that awful smelly Fergus seems to be in the cupboard place by the back stairs. I can’t think why Mummy asked him to stay. We all know that she goes in for this lame duck bit, but don’t you think she’s taking it a little far with Fergus? What’s he doing, anyway?’

  Hugh winced a little at the lame duck jibe, but he decided not to be offended. He understood that she had not meant to embarrass him. There was about her a quality not only of total innocence but also of aristocratic grandeur, the assumption of an absolute right to exist in her own way, occupying her own space.

  ‘Don’t you think, Hugh, that the worst thing in the world – the VERY worst thing – must be Fergus’ underclothes?’ she was saying.

  Fergus sat loosely on the side of his unmade bed, yawning and sniffing, waiting for his electric kettle to boil. He slipped a hand inside his grubby T-shirt and scratched at his armpit, sniffing at his fingers as he withdrew them. The same sour smell lingered on his hand, a compound of unwashed bedclothes and socks and his own peculiar odour, which oozed from him probably as a result of the various substances he was prone to ingest when he got the chance.

  The kettle began to bubble and steam and, as the tiny window set high in the wall dividing the little box room from the passageway began to mist over, Fergus picked up the first letter from a moderate sized pile at his feet, and began to steam it open. Because his room was so close to the front door he was the first to commandeer the post each morning, and the trusting household now turned to him each day for their letters.

  The time was 8.15 on the morning after Dorelia and Hugh had made their stroll to the pub. On their return Kattie had very prettily propositioned Hugh for his services in writing a short piece for her new organ. Kattie, overflowing with generosity herself, could not be denied anything when she asked in her charming, wheedling way, and Hugh, an incipient sense of obligation supplementing relief at hints of payment, had readily agreed.

  He noted that the lusty little instrument was now ‘my organ’. Kattie’s possessions were legion: they ranged from ‘her’ people to ‘her’ bits and pieces of china (only slightly cracked), which she picked up in junk shops and jumble sales, odd pieces of pottery, sickly plants, rag rugs, strange paintings and collages which sat quite happily next to the ever-changing arrangement of paintings from Clem’s gallery. Kattie possessed with the same enthusiasm that she gave.

  Fergus, just at this moment peeling open the flap of a letter addressed to Kattie’s husband, was often puzzled by her easy acceptance of him into this household whose routines and observances he skirted. Fergus and Kattie had met whilst she was prison visiting and he was in the remand wing charged, for the second time, with a drugs offence. He’d been sent down for two and a half years for that one, to Dartmoor. That was tough and Fergus had vowed that he was not going through that particular ordeal again, although at the same time he had no intention of changing his habits. On his release the previous week, remembering Kattie and her implicit promise of sanctuary, he had simply turned up on her doorstep, despite the fact that he owned land and homes of his own: a farm (which was managed and lived in by a tenant); a large bungalow and several idle acres of land. The latest in a long line of ever-changing girlfriends (Dorelia’s assumptions about the unhealthy state of his underwear were spot on), who had found herself the unchallenged mistress of the bungalow and land when Fergus went down, had shrewdly and cautiously stayed put, and was still in possession.

  Fergus was, or had been, a wealthy young man. He himself did not know what his material possessions amounted to now, partly because he could not become organized and responsible enough to quantify them and partly because he had never had any conception of the value of what he was worth beyond the easy satisfaction of his immediate needs. It may also be said that Hugh had no idea that Fergus had anything more solid in his background than a sorry string of convictions, or by now the two would have formed a relationship of benefit to at least one of them.

  Fergus, an adopted child, had been left an estate worth at least a quarter of a million pounds: a small farm, land, buildings, all unencumbered. This totally unexpected windfall happened when Fergus was in his early twenties and his adoptive mother died. At the time he was doing his stretch in Dartmoor, and he underwent an emotional change which meant that, for the first time in his reprehensible life, he began at least to think about cause and effect, action and consequence.

  They’d cut his long hair off in the nick, shuddering routinely and dousing him with a thick, evil-smelling fluid to delouse him. Before then he’d been living rough, in squats, although his mother had pleaded with him on more than one occasion to take up his old room at the farm bungalow. But, although after his father’s death a sentimental type of conspiracy had engulfed the pair of them (he’d visit her every day at tea-time, rolling his own brand of pain-killing cigarettes for her to help ease the acute discomfort of the early cancer which later carried her away), Fergus was unyielding.

  Later, in his prison cell, he often though
t about the first time he’d called in to see her stuffing down pills with her tea.

  ‘They do help – they stop the worry. With your father gone and this lonely place,’ she’d started to say, little, lined, grey-haired, leaning forward anxiously on the red-speckled Formica of the kitchen table. Fergus, in his own grimy world, refused to speak of his father. He had hated him. They had different names for a start. Herbert Giddings his dad had been called. Not a bad name, thought Fergus, who had to keep his own unpromising surname even after he had been adopted. Fergus Slack. What sort of chance, he had often whined in moments of all-engulfing self-pity to prison warders, to the old Bill, to probation officers, what sort of chance was that to keep you on the straight and narrow. His old man had been a real bastard. Fergus knew that he had only been adopted because the old lady had made such a fuss about not having a family. And that was before there was any money on the horizon. Once the old man and the old lady had been left the farm and all the land, there had been more pressure on them to become a model family, complete with child.

  So little Fergus from Heaven knows where (‘Your real mother was a god-damned whore,’ old Herbert would often mutter at the small child who invaded his space) had been adopted, papers signed, all official, but the old man, the old bastard who gave him his money, refused to give him his name. The old man had croaked it as he walked in his fields one day. He’d started off his working life as a farmhand, clearing out tons of pig shit from the sheds, and he’d ended up because of the lonely bequest of the first owner of the farm in possession of the lot – the pig farm, the arable holding, the bungalow and hundreds of smelly sheds. ‘Good riddance,’ muttered Fergus at the funeral, before he disappeared into the sordid local underworld.

  Little Fergus had been sent first of all to a boys’ private day school at a nearby cathedral city, where the boy had proved so intractable that he was packed off to a first-rate public school in Somerset. But the civilizing process which consisted of freezing and uncomfortable early morning runs, savage beatings by frustrated prefects and the torment of sarcasm from unsympathetic masters, was wasted on Fergus. His expertise lay in other directions. He learnt that primary survival lay in playing people off against each other with the low cunning that his adoptive father had insisted was the sign of the bad blood of his unknown parentage.

  At school he often acted as a go-between, dropping hints, ferreting out secrets, practising minor blackmail, sometimes for friendship but more often for cash. The ‘business’ relationships that developed then became more serious than he realized at the time – they became the basis for the whole of his adult life.

  Again in his prison cell he would brood over the dealings he had at school and what they had led to. He hated pushers of the hard stuff: heroin, coke. Awful people. He had used cocaine himself now and then, but nothing regular, and he loathed the assumption of the bully boys that they were the big league men, the big-time boys. He knew them all, though, the women, the pushers, the addicts.

  A life of dealing and dodging, lying and scoring, organizing and distributing. But when the hard pushers moved onto his patch, onto an area he knew and serviced faithfully, he knew that he and his teams would have to fight for survival. No matter how good his stuff was – and he reckoned it was often the best around – the kids would want to try something new, to experiment with the hard stuff. When he complained indignantly to his team of distributors, ‘That stuff kills people,’ his indignation was genuine.

  It was that boarding school they’d sent him to that had started young Fergus down the long path to the place of murky dealings and colourful characters, dangerous circumstances and long peaceful interludes when all life demanded was a joint and a few drinks. Twilight intervals, nightmares and two prison sentences had, ostensibly, stopped the dealings, but nothing could detach Fergus from his love for the shady, the finger-along-the-side-of-the-nose deal and the favour-for-favour philosophy from suppliers who extracted exactly as they dealt.

  The thrill was always the same as that the young Fergus, the ugly schoolboy, had felt when he discovered exactly what was tucked away in Anthony Dalgetty’s suitcase, which he just happened to come across on the second day of term at the start of his second year. Dalgetty was the most lusted-after boy in the school but, with what a spurned prefect had scornfully referred to as his ‘healthy colonial upbringing’, he successfully ignored or avoided all approaches. He was helped in all this by Fergus, with whom an ill-matched friendship had somehow developed.

  Fergus had the normal sexual instinct of youth but his other strong instinct – that of self preservation – prevailed. He controlled his basic lusts and set about making himself useful, a friend of the bosom to the talented young hero of the fifth form. And he was rewarded. Young Tony Dalgetty was healthily oblivious to sexual overtures but he did have one vice. On his family farm, in the fertile highlands of Kenya, many of the houseboys cultivated their own crops, unhindered. And Tony had learnt, very early on, the pleasures of smoking that crop. The first time he brought cannabis – leaves and thick lumps of resin – over to England in his hand luggage it simply never occurred to him that the consequences of his smuggling could have been immense. Homesick and bewildered at first, some caution born of the general air of misery and suspicion that was natural at the start of a new school year, with its trail of miserable new boys, told young Dalgetty to hide his booty, squirrel-like, behind a loose piece of skirting board in his cubicle.

  But not before Fergus, snooping and sneaking, hanging around outside the cubicle curtains, attracted by the lure of so much vulnerable new blood, his eyes goggling behind thick lenses, his sharp nose twitching with excitement, had spotted the haul.

  Not that he knew what it was. But, peering silently round the curtains, he noted the cache, noted the physical attraction of the tall, tanned new boy and knew that there was profit for him here.

  Now, twenty years later, crouching over a steaming kettle in his stuffy room, he was still pursuing his solitary devious schemes. He scanned the letter he had just peeled open. Something to do with the paintings in the current exhibition at one of Clem’s galleries. No good. On some days he gloated silently over pearls which arrived in the post. Letters to Clem from women whose cleverly written hints and innuendoes were unmistakable. Emotional letters to Kattie from friends with all sorts of juicy problems. Fergus stored these in his head, just in case. This one could be gummed down again – the paper was expensive, good and thick with a broad strip of gummed edge, and it went back perfectly, no wrinkling or creasing.

  Angela’s letter from Billy presented difficulties. It was enclosed in a flimsy airmail envelope, the name and address written in an angry black ink with a force that had in places torn at the paper. Fergus hesitated over the difficulty of opening it, but he wanted to know what Angela was doing here, why she had left France, how she was going to slot in with the rest of Kattie’s lame ducks, so he pulled it open, ripping the gummy paper.

  ‘The stove has gone kaput and dear madame has decided that her husband is ill and that she can’t look after me as well,’ Billy wrote. ‘So I’ve taken a room in Les Meaunes for a few days. It really is too bad. The wretched library sent the wrong books again. I can only conclude that I shall have to make a trip to the UK to sort it out.

  ‘I’ll let you know when but it should be in about three weeks time when they’ve finally condescended to mend the stove. I’ll come and stay with you at Puttnam – if it won’t be too much trouble that is.’ The letter was signed simply ‘Billy’, with no concluding phrase, no token of affection or endearment.

  Fergus chuckled to himself as he read the angry little note. There was no way he was going to put this back together again, so he smoothed it as flat as he could and tucked it away with a small heap of others in his suitcase.

  Angela and Kattie were sitting talking, basking in the sunshine that poured through the windows of the kitchen recess.

  Remains of breakfast had been shoved to one end of the large, s
cruffy table. A tabby cat which had hitherto dozed quietly inside the glassed-in shelves of the dresser which housed Kattie’s china collection yawned and stretched before manoeuvring her way out of the cupboard, tracing a delicate path between the precious pieces. Angela thought of the hard white sun-scrubbed walls of her home in the South. There were plenty of paintings on her walls, but their geometric placing echoed the arid neatness of the rooms. Here things were too comfortable, overflowing. Bits of straggly grape ivy and tradescantia and enormous leggy geraniums did their best to cut out the light from the window. A clash of carefully collected old tiles covered one wall and three clocks ticked away, one in the china cabinet and two on the dresser which sagged under its vast burden of great bowls of eggs and fruit, a set of old-fashioned weights, like metal bricks with handles, and an ancient Busy Lizzie putting out dusty growth from its rose-splattered chamberpot.

  Scattered around this part of the room (the sitting end of the kitchen as distinct from the working end which held an impressive array of old ‘farmhouse’ kitchen appliances mixing with dishwashers, freezers and a host of other gadgets) were notepads covered in hastily scribbled lists and reminders in Kattie’s round handwriting. Kattie was an indefatigable list-maker. She felt that, for her at any rate, a day was too disorganized a space to be got through without the discipline imposed by a thin line of script, the division of time, the imposition of a neat paper-ruled curb. It limited the infinite possibility of chaos. And chaos was something that Kattie felt could all too easily creep into her existence. She liked to sing and to read. She loved to talk – to anyone, but especially to people who did things she could not. To painters and writers, to people she felt she could nurture and sustain. Not being a painter or a writer or a business person (although with her persuasive, sweetly confident nature – who could resist Kattie’s full-lipped dimpled smile? – she might have become an entrepreneur of sorts), Kattie had to fulfil herself by proxy.