Ceremonies of Innocence Read online

  She put down the carefully gathered sheets of paper and moved across to the window to look down into the street. A man had fallen, lying twisted, over a road drill, the sort used to break up tarmac. His companion, an old man, shirtless, sweat marks running down from his armpits and a seamed face topped with a grizzled crop of curly iron-grey hair, was standing, swaying, swearing loudly and automatically.

  Funny, I hadn’t realized that was a road drill, thought Angela, turning away. Death in the morning, death in the afternoon, death at sea. Death by electrocution, by drowning. ‘Toby’s right – I’m right.’ She looked again, carefully, at the pieces of paper. ‘You can’t follow me,’ someone had written.

  She shifted on the straggly grass. It was fairly thin and muddy underneath. Hugh’s voice, emphatic, cultivated and curiously inflected to cope with the stammer, was playing counterpoint to her thoughts. She had not heard what he had been saying, but the tone was anecdotal; about Toby, she guessed.

  ‘We never heard. Not his mother, not me. The boat was made of concrete you know. Toby and those boys and that old man. I married Billy fairly soon afterwards.’ She sighed, a long juddering relieving sigh, and she and Hugh both fell silent in the damp grass under the apple tree.

  ‘Hungry?’ Sandra, the blonde, naked in Clem’s arms and in his bed, nodded. Her cool efficiency had melted in the heat of Clem’s appetite, fuelled by those sexy paintings. Clem, who often stayed overnight in town, kept a small flat above the gallery. He used it on numerous occasions. Very often Kattie stayed there with him.

  ‘OK. Let’s go out and eat.’ He uncoiled his bear-like arms from the girl’s slim shoulder and started to push his huge body out of bed.

  Sandra protested. ‘Why don’t we stay in to eat? I can make us an omelette and a salad; there’s some wine isn’t there? Let’s stay here.’

  Clem, who was thinking of sizzling chops and juicy steaks, sighed. One appetite satisfied and another one raging. He wanted to be out and moving. He looked at his watch. Pity he’d told Kattie he would not be home tonight. He wondered what was for dinner at Puttnam.

  ‘We’ll have to ask the Potters and old Brigadier Smythe – oh and Robert of course. I suppose in a way it used to belong to him. Robert’s our vicar and the church that we rescued my organ from used to be part of his parish.’ Kattie turned happily to Angela, making plans for the ‘Christening’ in just over two weeks’ time.

  Hugh, Kattie, Angela, Dorelia and, for once, Fergus, were all sitting at dinner together. Somehow the discussion about the format and the programme for the grand entrance of the organ into the community had been put off. Kattie, who loved to have all ‘her’ people gathered around, especially if they were eating food she had prepared, decided that tonight would be as good a time as any for working out what sort of a show they would put on. Of course that largely depended on Hugh, but at this precise moment between the first and second courses, he and Dorelia, heads together, were sniggering at some private story.

  They were, as usual, eating in the kitchen, using only one half of the large wooden table. Fergus was at the top next to Dorelia, who sat with her back to the darkened window. Hugh sat next to her. Opposite Dorelia and Hugh were the two other women, Angela next to Fergus and Kattie sitting across from Hugh and nearest to the stove.

  They’d eaten tuna fish and onions mixed with flageolet beans which Kattie had had the forethought to prepare that morning. Hugh and Dorelia shovelled their food down as if nothing else in the world mattered, but they satisfied their greed with an elegance which Angela felt went with the stylishness of their long thin fingers. Fergus, sniffing more loudly and more frequently than usual, pushed his beans around the plate, talking at Angela about farming. He told her several unpleasant anecdotes about the castration of pigs, grinning wolfishly when, inevitably, she winced.

  ‘Little beast,’ thought Kattie, wondering why she allowed Fergus to stay. Normally her flotsam was rewarding, in that under the protection of her roof talents were nurtured and Kattie could glow with the satisfaction of other people’s achievements. Fergus was singularly unrewarding. And, she realized, the little brute was telling Angela all these painful things about pigs because he knew that there was a leg of pork crisping in the oven.

  ‘It was all very, well, peculiar, you know. I didn’t realize until at least halfway through the evening that they were all well, you know, GAY.’ Dorelia, appetite satisfied (unlike her father, who was sitting moodily in his London flat, staring at a pale scrap of omelette and listening to the small talk of the bright Sandra, skipping around barelegged clad only in one of his enormous jerseys), was swapping stories in a low voice with the entranced Hugh.

  ‘This boy took me there. I didn’t know him very well but he seemed good fun and he said the party would be a real laugh. So we arrived – late – with our little bouteilles, at this rather posh-looking house. Cheyne Walk, I think – can’t really remember. Well, we were let in by someone who looked like a butler would you believe, very snotty and all that and then we walked slowly down this long pink corridor – pink carpet, pink walls, pink lamps. There was a door at the end and we had to go through this, downstairs – very shallow steps with a curving rail and there was a room, like an enormous hallway, at the bottom of the stairs. And, do you know it was full of men wearing tight jumpsuits.’

  Hugh looked slightly startled and Angela, half hearing the conversation, raised an eyebrow. Kattie was by this time busy at the stove, producing meat, baked potatoes, mixing dressing for the salad.

  ‘I say, what on earth did you do? Were you the only girl there?’ Hugh, who remembered enjoying himself at several such gatherings in the past, wondered how on earth a young girl got herself mixed up in such company.

  ‘Oh, yes. But we didn’t stay too long.’ Dorelia finished the anecdote tamely, tailing it off, and quickly changed the subject. Hugh, enraptured by her angel face and taut, boyish body, accepted her conversational tyranny.

  Angela watched Kattie cutting the meat (vegetarian as Kattie was she couldn’t bear not to see her household eat what they most enjoyed), handing potatoes, urging everyone to help themselves to gravy, salad, dressing, and suddenly she became panicky. Between Fergus and his odd smell and bizarre mischief-making conversation and the strange murmurs from across the table, she felt trapped. How could she justify her place at this table, in this house, in this country?

  Hugh’s face, shadowed as he turned to look at Dorelia, who was intent on heaping salad onto her piled-up plate, was vulnerable and lost. Line on line of folded flesh, the boniness of the structure emphasized the sad collapse of the façade. He didn’t belong anywhere either. Who the hell slept on a crooked bed in the middle of a vast empty ballroom with a creaking floor? Or in a cupboard under the stairs for that matter. She must escape and start to think for herself. She unclenched her hands (‘How plump and wrinkled my fingers are,’ she thought. ‘Look how the flesh is growing around my rings’) and turned to Kattie, who was raising her glass as a toast to them all and starting to ask them about plans for the organ recital.

  Billy grunted, scratched the inside of his thigh (his good leg) and blew his nose on the sheet. Although it was almost midday, the thought of getting out of bed weighed heavily on him. But he did need to pee, so he made the effort, swinging his whole leg onto the parquet floor and dragging the rest of him after it. Picking up the stick which was kept by the side of the bed for occasions such as this, he went hopping off to the bathroom. The floor once kept bright and clean by the efforts of Madame Houbon and Angela was now streaky and grimy with a layer of dust, and scrape marks mapped Billy’s progress from bed to lavatory to kitchen. Billy had lied to Angela in the grumpy defensive letter, but as she had not received it, thanks to Fergus, perhaps it did not matter. He was not staying in a hotel but was holed up in his own house.

  Madame, it is true, was no longer turning up daily to cook and to wash for him. This was because he had been so insufferably rude that she had gathered up her overall and th
oughtfully shovelled the remaining coffee in her bag (after all Madame Cruickshank no longer paid for her mid-morning break) before carefully and precisely telling Monsieur Cruickshank that never in thirty-four years of married ups and downs had Monsieur Houbon addressed her in words even approaching those used over breakfast. And if this was the way the English men chose to address their women she was not surprised that ‘la pauvre Madame’ had seen fit to come to her senses at last.

  Relieving himself, Billy snorted derisively. Poor Angela, my arse, he thought. Silly cow goes off, leaving me to fend for myself. He wondered if that bit about the stove packing up would bring her back. Although he had written that business about staying in a hotel, he had no intention of doing anything of the sort. The electric stove had blown a fuse (or something like that) but Billy contented himself with making tea and coffee and heating up tins of soup on an old gas ring which was a leftover from the pre-cooker days.

  Angela had left for England just one week ago. The skirmish with Madame and the demise of the stove had happened two days after her departure. Since then Billy had given up any pretence of research or of writing. He lay for longer and longer spells in bed in the mornings, ignored the gathering dirt and dust in the house and did not notice how the plants, large pots of pink geraniums and exotic datura, were drooping and dying. La Grandmère had ceased to tick, but Billy, who relied on his pocket watch for the time, had not yet noticed.

  He hopped and thumped to the kitchen. The water heater thingy had gone kaput at the same time as the stove. Billy had at first made do by washing in warm water which he had boiled on the gas ring. But for the past couple of days he had not bothered.

  Feeling thirsty after all the wine he had gone to bed on the night before, he hunted around for a clean cup or mug, but without success. The small sink was fully of dirty cups and bowls which overflowed onto the draining board. It did not occur to him to heat water to wash them. Instead he heaved himself into the living room where a cupboard full of ‘best’ china, the sort that came out on the rare occasions when he and Angela had entertained, was kept. He selected one of Angela’s favourite pieces, a deep Limoges chocolate cup, and took it back into the kitchen to sprinkle some instant coffee powder in the bottom. The fresh stuff seemed to have been used up days before. He set a pan of water to heat on the gas ring and, when it was almost boiling, slopped some into the cup. The milk had soured days ago and now he found he had used up all the emergency supplies of dried powder. Instead he poured a generous slug of brandy into his coffee, grimacing as he sucked in the fiery mixture.

  There were several things he should do. One was to attend to his artificial limb, which he had not bothered to wear for a couple of days. This meant that there would be discomfort involved when he put it on again. With a great effort of will and another slug of brandy, which by now had so diluted the coffee that the mixture was neat spirit, he got up to find his electric razor. But as he plugged it in to the specially adapted socket in the bathroom, two things happened. The first and most disconcerting was a bright blue flash and a spark followed by a nasty acrid smell as he switched the razor on, and the second was a rap at the door which he recognized as that of the postman, who always did this, despite the fact that all the mail was left in a green box just by the gate.

  Billy felt the conspiracy against him: his personal comfort, indeed the fabric of his whole life was threatened. He stared with disbelief at the razor before switching off and pulling out the plug. Then a thought struck him and he leaned over and tried the bathroom light. Nothing happened when he pulled the cord. That was the whole bloody lot gone, then. He cursed Angela aloud – ‘Bloody woman, stupid fucking bitch’ – and sat down heavily on the lavatory, his mind a turmoil of anger, self-pity and indecision.

  He had always been quick to anger but the last time the level of uncontrollable rage had welled up inside him like this had been in the period just before he and Angela had moved to Les Meaunes.

  When he had stood on that platform, utterly confident that, at last, his own assessment of his capabilities was recognized, the right level found, his leg not in this instance a handicap, he had been proud and whole. Angela, his bride of three months, so supportive in the short campaign, was standing just down there, on the left, ready to spring up to join him in his victory. He smiled down at her auburn curls. Her head was bent forward and he could not see the bright blue of her eyes. Funny how he had often thought she would be more striking-looking with green eyes. For just one moment he was on top, fulfilling everything his father had predicted and his mother had hoped for him. He only wished they could have been here now to join in this moment of family joy. His victory.

  He was still smiling broadly when the Returning Officer read out the results.

  ‘Cruickshank, William Arthur Wisdom, Conservative, 26,541.’ Billy’s smile became a fixed grimace, still, glued to his face as the man read on.

  ‘Davies, Stanley Hubert, Labour, 26,864.’

  Billy smiled on through the names of the list of the hopeless candidates right down to Smith, Frederick, Legalize Euthanasia Campaign, twelve votes. He smiled at his agent, who whispered to him demanding that there must be a recount. Billy shook his head, self-esteem far lower than that of Smith, who had lost his deposit but seemed unconcerned, cheerful even. Why the hell did a healthy-looking man like that opt for euthanasia, thought Billy as he stepped clumsily off the platform, his leg now horribly uncomfortable. He grabbed Angela’s elbow and steered her out of that dreadful hall, away from the inevitable post mortem.

  It was typical of Billy that he attached no blame to himself and the way he had conducted the campaign and gave no credit to the Labour candidate, now the Member, who in that safe Tory seat had fastened keenly onto the one issue which troubled the area. Mr Davies had pledged himself to fight tooth and nail to keep fluoride out of the town’s water supply. Billy, who held no truck with such faddy fears, had refused even to discuss the issue, assuming that it was something that the Town Council could and should deal with. He blamed his agent and the selection committee for misleading him about the outcome of the vote, which he had been told would fall in the greater part to him.

  Billy and Angela had then been married for just three months. He was thirty-nine and she sixteen years younger. They fled the safe Conservative seat to Les Meaunes, she to paint, he to write.

  Angela realized very soon that she was running away from everything that she had left unresolved in England, parcelling up all her muddled thinking, personal sorrow and the terrible mistake she had made in marrying Billy. She had left this packet to be called for, like something destined to be discovered, years later, at a left luggage office, neatly bundled out of sight.

  Billy, with a brutal ability to cut out whatever was unpleasant and could not be coped with, was simply bringing down the shutters on a section of his life which he would later, even when pressed, refuse to acknowledge. With the cash his parents left him and with Angela’s own small annuity there was enough to buy the white house at Les Meaunes and to provide a perfectly adequate income, and Billy had decided to spend his days researching and writing a definitive book on the Spanish Armada.

  Angela often wondered if their relationship would have been any different if she had known Billy when he was whole, before he had lost his leg. Would he have been less inclined to waste not the slightest opportunity to exercise control of his will over hers? Would he have been more graceful in giving and accepting the tokens of friendship and affection which she regarded as a right and proper mark of a close relationship? It was clear that he regarded affection as a sign of weakness.

  They had met as patient and nurse. He was, grudgingly, occupying a hospital bed, undergoing minor surgery which resulted from a persistent infection in his leg, and she, still trying to turn Toby’s death (which she now accepted) into a spiritual experience, was using up her considerable energy on what she wanted to see as useful work. What had been written on those twilight sheets of paper seemed to indicate t
hat this was what she should do. So it was with a measure of relief that she chose to deny any sense of ‘vocation’ towards her painting.

  She left the Slade in mid-course and managed to start her training as a nurse – something which seemed worthy of the word ‘vocation’. Painting pictures could be relegated to evenings, to weekends, to become a relaxation rather than the total expression which Angela had always been fierce about in the past. Very soon she discovered that she could not paint at all.

  Billy had lost his leg when he was eighteen, and not in the war, as so many people assumed in later years. He was rarely to disillusion them. A wartime accident sounded more glamorous than the complete cock-up of a dreary routine operation to relieve a circulatory complaint. By the time he and Angela met in the half-life of thermometers, bedpans and blancmange, he had been without the use of his lower leg for over twenty years and had forgotten the terrible sense of waste and the total outrage that had infected him and his doting parents when the gangrene and the need to amputate had been revealed.

  The assumption that Billy could have lost his limb in the war would have been chronologically impossible in any case, as he reached his eighteenth birthday and the onset of the gangrene simultaneously the year after the conflict was over. A scholar of solid, if unimaginative, promise, he was all set to study history at university. What happened made that impossible, physically at first and psychologically in the whole course of the affair. Until the botched operation Billy had been the spoilt but casually charming son of a wealthy couple who hovered, a little uncertainly, between the upper professional and the lower upper classes. Before the war his mother was not quite sure how many servants she ought to run, afterwards she couldn’t work out how she should address the two women who came in to cook and clean.