Ceremonies of Innocence Read online

  The pale walls of his gallery were covered just now with the work of one man. Powerful figurative pieces, amazingly sensual. Figures, mainly women, standing, sitting Indian style, the modesty of their downcast eyes and carefully posed hands and feet emphasizing the ripe curves of breasts, thighs and calves. A few people wandered in and out of the gallery, whispering as they strolled from painting to painting. The sibilant rustle that broke the silence emphasized the thick voluptuous atmosphere engendered by the warmth, the luxury of the room, the slowly moving people, the paintings themselves.

  Clem, punched in the gut by the sexiness of it all, looked sideways at the woman who ran the gallery for him on a day by day basis. Sandra listened, nodding and smiling efficiently. She had unconsciously (or perhaps there was some measure of intent, thought Clem greedily) assumed a pose like that of one of the bare-breasted women in a large canvas on the wall in front of them. Small neat feet crossed at the ankle, one knuckled hand snuggling into her slim waist and the other hand open-palmed towards Clem as he spoke. She even managed to look almond-eyed he thought, melting inside. Aware that he was beginning to sound pompous, he broke off his speech about Krane’s work and bared his teeth in a grin.

  ‘Lunch today, I think.’ He felt very hungry. Sandra nodded.

  ‘The point as I see it is this.’ Hugh, bestowing his most charming smile on Angela, paused to light another cigarette. ‘We DO need some sort of security. These constant ghastly worries about money and contracts and being used absolutely by the sharp dealers you meet all the time are something we should not have to cope with. It is quite honestly bullshit, pardon me, to say that adversity sharpens perception. I’m firmly of the opinion that the artist needs a measure of security to be able to work. That maxim about strife and turmoil producing great art isn’t for the everyday level of work. I mean I’m not saying that music or painting or books of great feeling don’t come out of terrible conflict – of course they do – look at Guernica and Goya’s work – but actually to sit down and produce a body of work needs periods of security. I would never have completed this score if Kattie, bless her, hadn’t dragged me away from my own menage and insisted I get on with it.’

  Hugh and Angela were sitting in the straggly grass under an enormous apple tree. Half-formed globes of fruit and a fretty pattern of leaves dappled the strong sunlight. Kattie and Dorelia had driven off after lunch to shop in the nearby city, while Angela, reluctant yet to start work, had asked Hugh to show her round the neighbourhood.

  Each was looking for an interlude. Hugh, beset as ever by worries about the future, was musing on the charmingly delivered order to write a christening piece for the newly acquired organ. He conceded to himself that it was, without any doubt, a justification for putting off for at least three weeks a decision about trying to return home, sorting out his matrimonial difficulties and facing financial reality.

  Angela, although still cocooned by the warmth of her reception at Puttnam House and the relief of making the transition from resentful wife to (fairly) independent woman, knew that she would have to face reality soon. But, like Hugh, she let the warmth of this afternoon, the pleasure in the little plans for the future of the household and the interest in the novelty of her surroundings fend off the decision ahead.

  They had waved at Dorelia and Kattie, as they bumped away round the curve of the drive in the terrible old Mini Traveller that always stood, keys in ignition, outside the front steps of the house. Then, ambling and chatting, Hugh had guided Angela on a tour of exploration around the house and grounds and the outbuildings. Stables were filled with a jumble of farm machinery some of which had been there for years while some, belonging to the farm down the road, was in good working order and in regular use. Everything was neglected, but not derelict. The old clock tower above the stable block had crumbling brickwork, badly in need of repointing, but the clock itself still told perfect time. Weeds showed in the pathways, but roses and viburnum, hydrangeas, hollyhocks, dense clumps of phlox, tall spikes of metallic blue delphiniums and great heads of giant allium dominated the weeds in the borders. There was no perfect lawn, but the grass, rough cut once a week by a lad from the village, was kept to a presentable length.

  The stables ran at right angles to the house, so that the long low block topped by the square clock tower and the house itself made two sides of a square at the front. A line of once pleached lime trees which thickened into a grove at the back of the house, and an old brick wall which contained the entrance gateway, completed the square.

  Hugh and Angela, having poked around in the muddle of the stables, walked to the front of the house again, across the circular patch of grass which grew at the centre of the round sweep of the driveway, and onto a narrow path which ran in front of the lime trees, leading to the rear of the house. Here they had briefly explored the ‘wood’, which consisted of a few more limes, rhododendrons and azaleas and some holly bushes, with a couple of rather more impressive oak trees. Now they were sitting down, contemplating their surroundings and chatting idly. A businesslike vegetable patch in the far corner of the rear garden was the only indication of any sense of purpose in the scene. But Angela appreciated the generosity of the plants that, however haphazardly nurtured, grew happily in the ill defined beds. Giant cardoons (‘So good for the flower arrangements in the cathedral,’ Kitty had said casually), huge clumps of gunnera with its curious rhubarb-like leaves and forbidding stem, sea cabbage, tall clusters of lovage and bronze feathery fennel. Several prolific clematis rampaged across the wall which enclosed the garden on two sides, while large old-fashioned apple trees were dotted at random in the rest of the space.

  Absorbed in her own widening consciousness, Angela had not, up until now, felt too much curiosity about the other members of Kattie’s household. Now she began to see a link with her own position and that of Hugh – two refugees from domestic strife. She also wanted, for the first time in many years, to talk about Toby.

  ‘Hugh,’ she said, leaning forward and patting him on the knee. ‘You knew Toby Pelham, didn’t you? I remember him talking about you rather a lot, although I don’t think you and I ever met in those days.’

  ‘Good Lord! You knew Toby! Hang on a minute, Angela. I say – you’re not – I mean you weren’t THE Angela – the one he was …’ Hugh was lost, reticent in finding the right word.

  ‘The one he was going to marry? Yes, I was.’ Angela gazed at Hugh and smiled. ‘Toby was, I think, the most important thing that ever happened to me and I took a long time to accept … to accept it all. You were at university with him, weren’t you? I met him some time after that.’

  ‘Oh Lord, yes! Toby and I had some splendid times.’ Vivid images flickered through Hugh’s mind, and then he felt himself collapse inwardly. ‘Oh God, whatever happened?’ he thought. ‘Even being evil was so exciting then – now it’s all so dreary.’

  Introspection came to Hugh only rarely when he was with others. Alone he found it an increasingly natural state. He knew all about Toby’s tragic death but he had never heard of the circumstances leading up to it; he had listened to Toby talking of Angela, but this had been after their university days, at a time when their lives (his and Toby’s) were diverging along paths so different that they rarely met. He looked carefully at Angela, seeking in this stocky, no longer young woman (what was her age? – early forties, he supposed) the bright girl that Toby, a special person if there ever was one, had loved and had wanted to live with.

  Angela for her part felt a wave of emotion so intense that she had to hang on to physical reality by clenching her hands. The sweetness of the sorrow was pure sentiment, but the memory of the sideways grip on life that Toby had taught her and the knowledge that she had guiltily lost that and couldn’t reach out now to scoop it back was overwhelming. Hugh must have known that too.

  She had to speak. Hugh was opening and shutting his mouth and making well-bred preparing-to-talk noises.

  ‘We were going to be married in the May,’ she said. �
�I was at the Slade then, doing pretty well. I met Toby when he came to talk to us – read us some poetry. One of those after class classes.’

  ‘But he was an engineer.’

  ‘Oh, that as well.’ Angela did not really notice the interruption. Hugh must have known that Toby could not be classified. ‘An engineer.’ ‘A poet.’ ‘An explorer.’

  ‘He came to read some of his poetry, and we talked and we went out to eat and we came back to my room and he stayed the night. We decided then to marry.’

  She looked triumphantly at Hugh. He laughed and lit another cigarette. His brown-rimmed spectacles had slid to the end of his nose and his eyes were young.

  ‘Of course. I do remember Toby very well. But he had to do the trip first?’

  ‘Oh yes. It was all planned you see. I wanted to go with them. At least I said I did but – well – I didn’t go. I met him in March, he left for the South Atlantic in September and you know the rest.’

  ‘No I don’t. Not really. You see Toby and I did some pretty strange things together. Experimenting, that sort of thing. He always knew the way he wanted to go. He knew what he could spare and what he could not. That was when we were students.’ Hugh gulped and felt his stutter becoming worse as he tried to tell the truth which had suddenly become vitally important. He looked again at Angela, noting that she had a slight cast in one eye and that the set of her jaw was strong and dogged.

  ‘Toby tried to define life. The rest of us felt as intently about art, politics, sex – just as any young people do. But he always wanted to know the workings of things. If he took a drug or read a book or tried out some odd sexual experiment it was done with calculation rather than passion. He wanted to push his mind and body, he wanted to understand himself. But he must have told you.’ Angela nodded. ‘You didn’t mind?’

  ‘Why should I? He’d made those “experiments” as you call them by the time we’d met. He was still – what did you say – “defining” things, but they did not threaten me. At least I never felt that they did. Perhaps that was because we were only together for such a short time. Six months.’ Angela shivered. She had travelled down to Southampton with Toby’s mother to wave the men goodbye. Five of them in what looked like a horribly frail craft, setting sail for a desolate island in the uncharted waste of the South Atlantic. An island whose existence was known but which had never been mapped. An island said to be accessible for only three months of the year and then the access depended heavily on the vagaries of the unpredictable weather. An island that had no definition in human terms until Toby and his crew arrived to turn its mountain, its bays and its rocks into marks on pieces of paper.

  No one knew if they ever made it. Angela had visited Toby’s mother as the weeks passed and there was no news, but the two women found themselves unable to communicate.

  That, more than anything, grieved the girl who knew that mother and son had been close to the point of often experiencing almost telepathic communication and understanding. As time stretched into meaningless weeks Angela’s life was a straight grey line, unrelieved by small joys, unmarked by event. Should she celebrate Christmas knowing that Toby, his three young friends and the old man, the experienced explorer for whom this trip was to be a glorious postscript, were safely bivouacked in the frozen wastes of the island? Or should she drink to drown the certain knowledge that their grave was a cold and secret one? Toby’s mother, always pleasant, brisk and matter-of-fact with Angela, refused to accept that her son was not going to sail back home.

  May, their wedding date, came and went. Angela carried on her studies in a dreary mechanical way, despising herself as she felt that Toby’s stoic mother despised her for her lack of joy in her own life and her lack of acceptance of life around her.

  One night – her twenty-first birthday – she went back to her flat in Kensington. All her friends lived nearby. They’d celebrated her birthday in a desultory sort of way and she was slightly drunk, enough to feel that her senses were heightened and she was thinking sharply, but not enough to slump into bed for pointless sleep. She decided to do what perhaps Toby would have done. To define her pain, in words. The walls of her flat were obscured by the backs of paintings, leaning inwards, one upon the other, defining it in oil paint. She switched on a reading lamp, drew a block of sketching paper (she had no writing pad) towards her, picked up a fine-nibbed pen and put down his name. Toby. Toby Pelham.

  She stroked her pen and then rubbed her finger across a small scratch in the leather top of her desk. She remembered with great clarity and with great satisfaction the individual quality of Toby’s features. As if she were gazing at him at close quarters, in bed after making love, she saw him. The sharpness of the end of his nose, the smooth blue-tinged feel of his face, the precision with which his moustache was clipped. She felt his hands. Long fingers, effete, tilting up at the last joint with smooth rounded nails. An artist’s, musician’s hands, those of a thinker, not a man of action. But he was undoubtedly a man of action, a contradiction. Put together those features and she was lost, the face meaningless. But not the figure, the attitude.

  Sitting at the shaded writing pad, her drooping head cast an enormous shadow on the wall behind. Trying to reconstitute Toby, his physical qualities, required an effort of will that she did not possess. Suddenly desolate, she knew that she could not capture him by writing him down any more than she was able to trap him by paint on canvas. Or was it her own pain she could not define? For the millionth wearying time Angela pictured Toby and his companions, the young men, the old explorer, washed up on some ghastly ice-covered rock, bodies reduced to slow skeletons by relentless frosts and winds and rains. It was the not knowing, she told herself, that she could not bear. The waiting until waiting became something past all sense. Toby’s mother, serene in her own waiting, could not give her any clue about her own convictions. Her strength, Angela felt, came from some secret knowledge, a bond across wastes of frozen seas and of time, with her extraordinary son.

  Angela’s head drooped further until her forehead grazed the pad with Toby’s name on it. ‘Girl in a Garret’ by the light of an oil lamp.

  Except that it wasn’t oil. She lived in an electric age. She was to have been married. Now she never would. She used to know how to treat each day, how to lick it into shape, painting her pictures, moving forward to engulf pain or joy or sorrow. Now that was gone. Life was a daily test that had to be reconsidered now, not something that you met head-on and enjoyed. She was tired.

  The lamp was still on, throwing strange shadows up against the wall, the curtains were drawn and Angela, not knowing or caring to know the time, went to bed.

  When she woke she did so with a sense of panic. Her heart thumped, making the left side of her body, her shoulder and rib cage feel vulnerable, frail. She pressed her right hand there, underneath her breast, to feel the frightening judder of the muscle.

  An uneasy humming sound filled the air. It came from outside her windows with their still-drawn curtains. The grey shadows on the walls and ceiling and the streak of light splashing on her dressing table told her that night had passed. She could smell something. An odd fume-laden smell, cloying and sweet. She sniffed, trying to adjust outside the thrumming noise which came and went in intermittent bursts. At last she identified the smell as the varnish which she sometimes used for her work. The noise drilled its way into her head until it seemed to fill even her mouth. But the pictures in her brain were of her lamplit vigil at her desk the night before in the room next door. She pushed her feet into slippers, pulled on her wrap and shuffled from her bedroom into the all-purpose living room/studio.

  Here the noise was much louder, pulsing regularly. For a minute she panicked, wondering if it was coming from inside her own head. Her own introspective misery had now taken the noise and the smell as a focus point.

  Angela soon identified the source of the sickly waft of varnish. A jar of the sticky stuff had fallen over (‘How the hell could I have knocked that last night with enough force
to break the bottle?’ she wondered) and was now hardening rapidly down the side of the old dresser where she kept her tubes and jars and bottles. A pool of varnish was congealing on the paint-stained carpet. Angela stood and watched the thickening drips slowly plopping into the gelatinous pool. None of the other bottles or tubes was disturbed. She shook her head and turned to look out of the window to discover the source of the noise. As she did so her glance fell on the thick block of drawing paper which had been propped up in front of her as she sat and thought last night. Several sheets had been torn away from the block, and these were scattered onto the table as if someone had been working quickly, tearing each sheet off to get down what he had to say on the next.

  She knew that she had written nothing. Nothing apart from the name. Toby. Toby Pelham. Toby Pelham went to sea, he’ll come back and marry me. The senseless rhyme jiggled in and out of her mind as she leant forward to gather up the scattered sheets and saw that each was covered with words.

  Spidery runes; night messages. His hand or mine? Whose hand or mine, she snapped back at herself, alert now, gathering up the sheets, shuffling them into size order because that was the only order she could make out. Four words assembled themselves in front of her as she sorted the sheets out. Those four leapt out from every page. My words or his, my thoughts or his, she whispered aloud. She tried to place the words – sorrow, relief, regret, trying to get away from self and into rational thought.

  Suddenly, from outside, there was a sharp bang, a loud scream and, in the shocked silence that followed – a silence made by the sudden cessation of the thrumming noise – a loud string of oaths started to be recited.