Ceremonies of Innocence Read online

Billy had encountered very little opposition to anything in his life until his prolonged stay in hospital. Then he had to accept people he would rather have avoided and do things he did not want to. But he suffered silently then, tucking what he felt were wrongs and injustices into the back of his mind, to fester away without too much immediate visible effect.

  Learning to use the artificial limb took well over a year. During that time Billy rejected his studies, and in doing so rejected any sort of responsibility for his own future. His parents, alarmed by their only son’s refusal to look at anything in terms of the years ahead, fretted until they made themselves ill over what was to become of Billy. Eventually his father, fearing that his son’s life had become a sentence, confirmed and settled, and remembering an old dream of his own to make green things grow, applied for and obtained planning permission to develop a market garden on part of the land that went with the family home.

  Billy grew wallflowers and lettuces without too much protest and with very little interest. Perhaps because he did not care too much about the business (unlike his father who, in his retirement, suddenly discovered a renewed interest and became like one bereaved if the young plants were hit by the ravages of frost or the depredations of insects), the whole set-up thrived. In those sparse years just after the war, they began to make money.

  Billy was indifferent to the fate of the market garden. But, perversely, the plants flourished, and the buyers returned as the rich Lincolnshire soil yielded a good harvest year after year. Every spring and summer the crops of wallflowers and lettuces increased. His father built greenhouses for tomatoes and cucumbers, whose casual abundance began to be taken for granted.

  But it was a friendless existence. Billy, who had moved into a separate wing of his parents’ home, sometimes went for several days without speaking to anyone. He worked mechanically and for the most part efficiently, but without any real commitment. As he reached his mid-twenties and then his thirties, he would have been unable to name any real friends, to recall any conversation that did not involve business – the ordering of fertilizers, haggling over prices, arranging transport for the markets. The crops grew fatter each year but each year Billy’s spirit dried up a little more until he peered grudgingly at life from the inside out to a world which rejected him. Instead of seeing the village, the town, the country itself spread out ready to receive him, he shrank from any outside contact, resenting anything that interfered with his self-imposed routine. He grew more intolerant and turned his back on any outside call on his time. His parents, rebuffed time after time, grew wary of him, limiting their intercourse to brief chats about the weather and the business. They never spoke of his leg.

  His sexual needs became purely physical. As the tender stump at the end of his amputated leg toughened and hardened, so his spirit rejected any weakness and any soft and exposed emotion was cauterized. So he satisfied himself mechanically, or on occasion used one of his workers, a young mentally handicapped girl who met his needs with eager incomprehension. The act for Billy was one of simple brutal possession.

  Angela was an unconfident nurse and Billy a resentful patient.

  With the cunning that he had gradually learnt since the day of his accident, the foxy knowledge that becomes the manipulative power of the deformed, he exerted moral pressure on the young nurse who awkwardly saw to his basic physical needs each day. Chamberpots and bottles, trays and thermometers became instruments of blackmail as Billy made up his mind to escape from the market garden. For that he needed an excuse, a partner.

  By this time Angela had become so diminished in her own eyes that she was able to acknowledge humbly that she had been a mere dust particle caught up in Toby’s comet-like dash through life. She was ready to be manipulated.

  The wedding was to be in June and Angela bought a powder-blue suit. In the event she wore black to mark the death of Billy’s parents, whom she had scarcely known, but who died within three days of each other, struck down by a virulent influenza just three weeks before the marriage. Without them, the bride and groom were alone apart from a witness provided by the Registrar. Three months later Billy and Angela stumbled together out of the disastrous election count and sold the smallholding ready to flee abroad.

  That was where Angela, taken without protest into a different sort of reality, put her life into stasis, turning once more to drawing and painting as her only way of assuring herself that she existed outside the artificial life that she and Billy had created for themselves.

  ‘Hugh?’ said Dorelia, drifting loose-limbed like some great downy bird, into his ballroom. ‘What exactly is cunnilingus?’

  Hugh, who had been sitting on his unmade bed, a plaid rug wrapped round his lower limbs (he found the early mornings chilly, even in summer), moodily leafing through his manuscript, gulped and told her.

  She nodded indifferently and turned to drift out again. Hugh was infuriated.

  ‘Dorelia – why on earth should you ask me that?’

  ‘Oh, nothing really Hugh. Just something someone said to me the other day. Why are people so sordid? Boring, isn’t it? All anyone ever thinks about is bonking and all that.’ And she was gone.

  ‘Bonking?’ But there was no one to hear the squeak in Hugh’s voice. His mouth was dry and all inclination to work had vanished. Dorelia with her worldly knowledge and her (apparently) total detachment from that knowledge undermined his ability to concentrate. He had to restrain himself, he noted gloomily, from getting up and following her, dog-like, out of the room.

  ‘Hugh!’ Angela, flushed and bright-eyed, poked her head round the door.

  ‘Hugh – there’s a woman to see you. She’s downstairs. With a baby. I think she said she’s your wife.’

  Hugh’s groan sounded like a large piece of rock tearing itself out of a mountain. He buried his head in his hands and was crouched in this dramatically cowed position when the door was flung wide and Anna, clutching their younger child, made herself the centre of the scene. Angela, swept aside in the swirl of entrance, beat a hasty retreat. She left, noting the sympathy between the drama of Anna’s entrance and the ballroom itself –the vastness of the room settled comfortably around the vivid woman whose energy seemed enough to fill it.

  What Angela did not see was the diminishing of Hugh.

  ‘Why, Hugh, are you wearing that extraordinary cloak on your legs?’ shouted Anna, her voice like the fine spray of shattering glass. Hugh knew that this was not a question, merely the first part of the process of pulling him apart that was necessary to Anna for her own self-esteem. He said nothing. She gathered herself after the statement and looked at him with the same relish he imagined would be smeared across the face of one who examines entrails.

  ‘Why are you still here?’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Working.’

  ‘Pah! Why have you not communicated with me since you left? On a Sunday morning.’

  ‘Since you threw me out, you mean.’ Hugh was alarmed to hear his voice grow high and indignant. He cleared his throat and dared to look up at her. Anna’s eyes narrowed, dangerously, he thought. She moved forward slowly with velvety footsteps. Hugh flinched.

  ‘Since you left me.’ She spat each word out with careful deliberation and thrust forward the wrapped-up bundle that was Juanita something. (Hugh never could remember the interminable forenames of his children.) She swung the baby under his nose. He blinked, but she carried on remorselessly.

  ‘… left me, penniless and with two babies to care for and only that halfwit from the village to help. You men. I wish I knew what you did want. You expect us to be paragons, perfect. To cook and to clean for you, to be the mothers of your children and to be mistresses and lovers. And however we do this, however much we give and give and carry on giving, what happens? I will tell you what happens! You leave us, desert us and expect us to wait patiently at home until you deign to come back. That is just what I am not going to do. Oh, I tell you …’

/>   Hugh tried to think of something useful to say. He knew perfectly well that Anna in full flood was like one of those rapid-fire automatic weapons which are only silent once the ammunition runs out.

  ‘Oh do be careful with the baby, Anna,’ he said. He was genuinely alarmed that little Juanita was about to slip out of his wife’s distracted grasp. ‘What do you want, anyway?’

  ‘Ah – what do I want? What do I want, he says! What should a wife and mother want for her children? Only clothes for their backs, food for their bellies and a roof over their heads. It is your duty, Hugh, to provide for us. That is why I have come.’

  ‘You have a roof over your heads. And I don’t have any money. That’s why you threw me out,’ he reminded her gently.

  Anna said nothing. She retreated just one step. The baby, a tight white bundle crowned with a frilly bonnet which gave it a curious pig-like appearance, was undisturbed. Anna shifted Juanita under her arm and drew herself up to look at Hugh.

  Hugh, who could not but be melted by beauty and moved to agonies of emotion by it, forgot the danger of Anna’s temper as he gaped at her. Anger had brought a glow to her dark complexion and as he watched, open-mouthed, she slowly pushed back the heavy fall of her black hair with red-tipped fingers. Brilliance was Anna’s by-word. She was by nature and design a woman who turned heads and drew eyes. She dressed to match her temperament in bright colours. Today she was wearing trousers in a silky material with a dramatic sea-green and pink design, bright pink canvas espadrilles and a shocking pink T-shirt. Overstated jewellery – a huge lump of silver round her neck, enormous rings on her fingers, combs, bows in her hair – could not swamp her. Just as Hugh realized that the glitter in her dark eyes, which had had a mesmeric effect on him, signalled danger, she moved forward and kicked the divan. Hugh yelped and instinctively drew up his legs so that he was isolated, a sailor afloat on a life raft. The pink espadrille shot out again and pushed hard at the divan, which began to slide across the floorboards. Hugh was not sure if she was trying to kick him and hurt him or if she was merely venting pent up rage on the bed. Then he was sliding crazily across the ballroom floor.

  ‘Anna! Stop it. Stop being so bloody stupid,’ he shouted. But she was unstoppable. The small bed swivelling on castors on the polished boards moved easily. Anna was actively pushing at it now, forcing it down the length of the room.

  It moved in a dizzying, crab-like way, Hugh clinging on grimly, fingers scrabbling at rugs, blankets, trying to keep his head out of the way of the kicks. Afterwards he could not be sure what it was that she shouted as she advanced, baby still tucked under her left arm, but he did remember, the split second before the careering bed crashed into the newly installed organ, looking up to see Dorelia, a gleam of flaming gold in a bluebell dress, standing very still at the far end of the room.

  ‘What do you want?’ he screamed this time, but the question plummeted, killed as the bed, and Hugh, came to a shocking standstill, the divan to slew around as it bounced off the organ and thudded into the wall. Hugh cracked his head against the very edge of the organ, toppled off and lay unconscious on the floor.

  Anna was not in the least bit horrified at the abrupt conclusion of her fit of passion. (Had she not laid her brother out, similarly unconscious, when they engaged in a squabble over a decision that had to be made over part of the family business, a chain of canning plants, back home in Mexico? She had used a heavy glass ashtray that time and had obtained the decision she wanted by the simple fact that Ferdinand was in no fit state to argue with her for at least two days, by which time the plant had been sold to a rival group of canners.) She was however concerned that Juanita, disturbed, understandably perhaps, by the sudden silence, chose this moment to begin to yell lustily.

  Anna, brought up in a household where there were always servants to deal with the irritating bits of life, to mop up the messes and spills, looked around for someone to hand Juanita to, now that the baby’s part in the drama was over. Even in her stylish poverty with Hugh there had always been an au pair girl or village woman standing just inside the kitchen door. It was not in Anna’s nature to be indecisive. Turning with angry grace she saw Dorelia, standing tall and still at the other end of the room. As Anna marched past, setting up a musical jingling of silver jewellery, she handed the baby to the girl, who accepted the yelling child without saying a word.

  It seemed later to Hugh that Dorelia, the silent watcher, must be filled with a wisdom that understood the clash between his crazy genius and Anna’s misdirected passion. As he slowly came round he saw her walking towards him. But it was as if she were concealed behind a glass screen, a gauze curtain. She walked; he saw her dance, he saw a stern virginal figure. Perhaps it was his concussion, but Dorelia became a vision, a tall bright blue flame. It was to Dorelia that he turned with a sense of relief, bruised and dazed as he was after the whirlwind of Anna.

  But Dorelia had taken the silent part through instinct rather than by judgement. She accepted the baby, and it was inevitable that she should do so in innocence. In the peace that followed Anna’s departure, she weighed up the warmth of the baby in her arms and then strode towards Hugh, laying the now silent child on the bed which had come to rest by the wall next to the organ.

  She squatted on the floor and stroked his head until he opened his eyes properly. He blinked several times, trying to correct his blurred vision. His spectacles had been jolted off his nose in the collision.

  Dorelia sat down, cradling his head in her lap, wishing that someone, her mother, would come to help. But Kattie was standing at the front door, with Angela, trying to fathom Anna’s behaviour. It had not yet occurred to either of them that, although she had arrived carrying her baby, a justification for her anger, her departure was empty-handed.

  Fergus meanwhile was not oblivious to the disruption of the tenor of the day, but it was not in his nature to enquire openly about any matter. At about the time Angela and Kattie began to giggle helplessly as they stood on the steps of the house considering Anna’s behaviour and speculating on her treatment of poor Hugh, and while Dorelia began to grow alarmed at Hugh’s state of mind as he moaned and nuzzled into her lap, Fergus was sneaking and spying outside the ballroom door. Head cocked cautiously on one side, he sniffed and listened, trying to get hold of the scene inside.

  Hugh by now was fully conscious. That is to say he was aware of what had happened, and where he was in relation to space and time. But the tremor of fear aroused by his passionate wife was obliterated by the blissful sensation of Dorelia. There was a tingle in the pit of his stomach, a warm glow that was spreading through his whole body. He groaned aloud once or twice and then slowly, without lifting his head from the warmth of her lap, held up his arms until they met at the back of her head. Dorelia yelped as he tried to pull her towards him and, at this clear signal, Fergus stuck his head round the door.

  ‘You slimy old shit!’ Fergus screamed down the length of the room. Hugh, in a state of half-dazed ecstasy, his hands still gripping the back of Dorelia’s head, looked up blankly.

  ‘You leave her alone – get your dirty old hands off.’ Fergus, almost beside himself, bounded in fury down the long room, a picture of Dorelia loping up and down in his cage of a bedroom superimposing itself on the Dorelia he saw now confused and still looking from one man to the other.

  She stared hard at Fergus and seemed to be unaware of Hugh’s hand, now slipping from the back of her neck onto her shoulder. Fergus faltered and seemed abashed. Like a dog suddenly recognizing the look in his master’s eyes, he slowed down and started to shuffle. He sniffed loudly. But he could not altogether halt the impetus of his headlong rush into the room. Turning his head away from the fine balance presented by Hugh and Dorelia, he carried on forwards with a shuffle and, slowly swinging his arm back, looking out of the corner of his eye as he did so, hit Hugh very hard on the face.

  ‘Oh my…’ Hugh was heard to gulp as, for the second time that morning, he slid into unconsciousness.

/>   ‘Honestly, darling, I really do feel that this is all a bit much. First of all Anna screaming into the house, attacking poor Hugh and leaving her baby behind. And now this. What on earth got into Fergus I cannot imagine. Why should he punch Hugh like that? You don’t suppose he’s been taking drugs again, do you?’

  Kattie was sitting, genuinely disturbed, in her bedroom, nursing Hugh’s baby. Her normally placid face was set in slightly distracted lines and she held the child awkwardly, her motherly body tense. The large four-poster bed heaped with pillows and books and fat cushions was, as usual, not yet made. Dorelia sprawled on a carelessly crumpled embroidered spread, pointing one long leg towards the chubby carved wooden upright. Kattie was sitting right on the edge of a pretty blue velvet chair which had been designed in Victorian times for the purpose of feeding babies. She had bought it many years earlier when she was feeding hers. Now she was trying hard to re-focus on her lame ducks.

  All her generosity was fed by the response which she was used to receiving as a matter of course. It was characteristic of Kattie to give – but she took as well. Her payment was gratitude, recognition and, above all, dependency. Now Hugh, morose and self-absorbed, the crazy music in his head a harsh jangle against the hard high note of Anna’s anger and the sotto voce of Fergus’ malice, had withdrawn from her loving. Almost catatonic in his self-absorption, he sat huddled on his unmade divan, fingering the bruises on his head which Kattie had dabbed at with cold compresses and witch-hazel. He refused to acknowledge even the desperation which he could detect in Kattie’s attempts to enfold him once again. When an appeal about the welfare of the baby failed to elicit any noticeable response, Kattie withdrew, leaving Hugh, in her opinion at least, wilfully adrift once more.

  Fergus, sullen and resentful, had left the house, mouthing obscenities to himself and sucking at his knuckles, which he had grazed during his assault on Hugh. Where he had gone no one knew. Kattie, bitter at his defection, was taken aback to find herself hoping that, once out of her care, he would turn to drugs again and soon be in trouble.