The Innocents

EARLY BIRD BOOKS

FRESH EBOOK DEALS, DELIVERED DAILY

BE THE FIRST TO KNOW—

NEW DEALS HATCH EVERY DAY!

Praise for the Writing of Margery Sharp

“A highly gifted woman … a wonderful entertainer.” —
The New Yorker

“One of the most gifted writers of comedy in the civilized world today.” —
Chicago Daily News

“[Sharp's] dialogue is brilliant, uncannily true. Her taste is excellent; she is an excellent storyteller.” —Elizabeth Bowen

Britannia Mews

“As an artistic achievement … first-class, as entertainment … tops.” —
The Boston Globe

The Eye of Love

“A double-plotted … masterpiece.” —John Bayley,
Guardian Books of the Year

Martha, Eric, and George

“Amusing, enjoyable, Miss Sharp is a born storyteller.” —
The Times
(London)

The Gypsy in the Parlour

“Unforgettable … There is humor, mystery, good narrative.” —
Library Journal

The Nutmeg Tree

“A sheer delight.” —New York Herald Tribune

Something Light

“Margery Sharp has done it again! Witty, clever, delightful, entertaining.” —
The Denver Post

The Innocents

A Novel

Margery Sharp

PART ONE

1

1

My father was a connoisseur of wine; but times and incomes change and we with them, and now I am a connoisseur of weather. Thus I remember distinctly the day of Cecilia's return as being cool (for mid-April), but not cold; showery rather than rainy, also with a peculiar tang in the air (which I have noticed as late as May) that seems to presage not summer but autumn. Oddly enough, the day she died some five months later, in October, had a rather springlike feeling—though this of course may have been subconscious on my part.

How fortunate the connoisseur of weather who is born English! When I say the intervening summer was unusually fine I do not by any means describe such a succession of monotonously cloudy days as they have to put up with in Kenya, for instance, or in India—before the equally predictable and monotonous Rains. In England, and particularly in East Anglia, a single afternoon may embrace several meteorological extremes, especially if there is an Outdoor Fête. The sensation of voile clinging damply to the skin is almost a birthright!

Not that Cecilia ever wore voile. We all knew, as in a village everyone knows everything, that her late parents couldn't have left her much beyond the small house in the High Street, but she had turned the downstairs part into a very nice dress shop and no doubt got trade prices: at all Outdoor Fêtes Cecilia in her tailored silk suits was so conspicuously elegant, on one occasion a child presented her with the bouquet destined for its titled Patroness. Cecilia made a great joke of it—as she said, how could she possibly abash the innocent by refusing, or even passing on, the booty? So it was Cecilia, not Lady A., who strolled through the afternoon badged by a dozen pink carnations!

I personally have never cared for carnations of any colour. They are too much of a florist's flower. Outdoors they always look either disheveled, or (if individually sticked) stiff.

What I should have perhaps mentioned about Cecilia at once was that she was a beauty. Her colouring was pure East Anglian, and our young girls are unsurpassable for abundant russet hair and glowing, peaches-and-cream complexions; only they tend to put on weight quite enormously, particularly below the waist, till they soon look like our neighbouring Norfolk's dumplings. Cecilia at twenty-seven had legs long and slim as a heron's; she was tall for a woman altogether, and height matched her wonderfully clear-cut features; it seemed right that so lovely a head should be carried high. I have never seen a more beautiful woman, and like everyone else sometimes felt surprise that she wasn't married. However it was by her own choice; half the bachelors of the neighbourhood had proposed to Cecilia in their time, but whether gentleman-farmer, or curate, or solicitor, or once the County Surveyor and once a Bank Manager, she turned them all down, and again in their time they married someone else. Of course she had a right to be difficult!—and if some ungenerous tongue occasionally remarked that she wasn't getting any younger, one had only to look at her to see the implication not only unkind but absurd. As I never beheld a more beautiful girl, so, I repeat, I have never beheld a more beautiful woman—and nor apparently had Rab (or Robert) Guthrie.

2

How far more appreciative and careful of family ties are the Scots, and particularly the American-Scots, than we British! I myself have a brother with a parish in Cornwall whom I visit no more often than he does me; Robert Guthrie crossed the Atlantic to see a mere cousin—our own Tam (or Thomas) of Leys Farm, who'd flighted no farther than Suffolk, where indeed he so Scottishly prospered, his wife if he'd had one would have been opening Fêtes right and left. But like his transatlantic cousin he was still a bachelor, and took Rab along just to help spend the necessary fiver. If they split it at two-pounds-ten apiece, how shall I, who bought no more than a lavender-bag, blame them? In any event, it was then, on the occasion I have described, that Robert Guthrie set eyes on Cecilia strolling about with her stolen badge of honour, and was completely bowled over.

The most I can say for
his
physical appearance is that he had very direct (though small) grey eyes and a good stuggy build. He was more than a few inches shorter than Cecilia, and more than a few years older; he was actually fifty. He was also one of the highest-salaried men in America, owing to some breakthrough he'd made in the field of industrial chemistry.—Here I rely on later information from our own, local Guthrie, who sometimes added it had been just a toss-up whether he himself, at Edinburgh, took Veterinary/Agriculture rather than Science. There is always a natural rivalry between cousins. Was it my favourite novelist Henry James who pronounced that in Boston it could amount to internecine warfare? He referred of course to the Boston in America, not our own Boston in Lincolnshire; East Anglia, after so much banging to-and-fro with the Danes, has settled into a generally rather tolerant community. Even the Dutch who came to teach us to drain, and then some of them to settle, were so tolerated and absorbed, the next biggest farm after Leys is still called Hollanders.

I happened myself to witness the moment of Cecilia's and Rab's first encounter. I had arrived late, from motives of economy, and Cecilia was still telling me the tale of her bouquet when the two Guthries (equally late, though let us hope not for the same reason), hove in view. Tam and I are old acquaintances; naturally he introduced his cousin at once, then to Cecilia beside me. For some reason Tam had never much liked Cecilia—otherwise the carnations might have been hers by right!—but as for Rab, he had plainly but to look to love.

I had twice in my life witnessed such a
coup de foudre
before: once at a bus stop in Saxmundham, when a young girl of very moderate attractiveness, and a youth definitely oafish, after eying each other for five minutes got on the bus with hands already entwined; the other at our local fish-and-chip shop (whose kind proprietress Mrs. Cook lets me take a fillet of plaice home wet), as a lorry driver set eyes on young Ellen behind the counter. Paying my ninepence, I felt a sudden positive charge of amorous electricity in the air—Cupid's arrow, so to speak, ricocheting off my own lean bosom—and though Ellen tossed her head and looked lofty, I had to tell her twice what the right change from half-a-crown was.

They are now married, with five or six children.—“Those lorry drivers, there's no holding them!” Mrs. Cook once observed to me; though from what other experience I cannot guess. Her husband Arthur was on a trawler.

Of course Robert Guthrie was a different kettle of fish altogether, but I recognized the same sudden electricity in the air—in fact, the
coup de foudre
. (Men far less than women, I think, consciously look for love; it takes them by surprise, like a tile blown off a roof.) Equally of course Cecilia neither curled her fingers in his nor bridled and tossed her head, and Rab merely offered us refreshments in the marquee.

One always expects to be robbed at Fêtes—my lavender-bag at a shilling was flat as an April peasecod—but the half-crown teas in the marquee I can only describe as bare-faced. By this time even the rock cakes were gone. However one was able to sit down.—A few minutes after we did so, up sidled a little girl sniffling.

“If you're lost,” said I—I hope kindly, but even the tea was cold—“go and wait by the entrance till you're found.”

Children are always getting lost at FêTes, just as their elders are robbed; but this particular child's predicament turned out to be less usual and more sophisticated.

“I gave the flowers wrong,” she stated dismally. “Mum's bin on at me ever since.”

Her mother being Lady A.'s housekeeper, I could well believe it. Why I hadn't recognized Mabel sooner was due to her unusual finery of starched muslin and pink sash. I commonly saw her in darned jerseys.

“She says to get 'em back,” continued Mabel, “an' have another go.”

The hint, or plea, was obviously directed at Cecilia; only she and I had any idea what the child was talking about, and beyond the open side of the marquee could indeed glimpse Lady A. still on duty chatting to a stallholder. Only where was the bouquet? Discarded under our tea-table. I stooped and fished it up and replaced it in Cecilia's hands, who I must say appreciated the whole situation with great swiftness.

“So you want my flowers back to give to someone else?” she asked gently. “Then you shall have them!”—and Mabel got not only the carnations but a kiss as well. It must have seemed like a kiss from a Fairy Godmother, the child's eyes so widened; but she couldn't have looked more bewitched than Rab Guthrie.