The Innocents Read Free Page A

could only leave Tony with you, just for the month, and pick her up on the way home, I’m sure it would be far, far better for her!”
    Extraordinarily enough I paused only a moment before agreeing: to look enquiringly at Rab. He for his part gave me as searching a look back; then with equal consideration contemplated my sitting-room, and the windows open to the garden, and the garden beyond. I suppose it all presented a picture of modest comfort and respectability, also of course he’d met me before.
    â€œIt might be a good idea at that,” said he.
    So it was arranged, after singularly little more discussion (I having lost my heart to Antoinette already), that while the Guthries toured Europe their daughter should be left in my care, and her parents brought her to deposit with me next morning, together with her clothes in a suitcase and a traveling-bag of toys.
    The interim parting was remarkably painless.—I had taken the precaution of borrowing a basketful of tabby kittens with which to distract and console an infant in tears: Antoinette was obviously taken by them, she purred back like a kitten herself, but had not been crying. Cecilia quite rightly behaved as casually as possible; she and I equally, I think, reprobated Rab’s too prolonged, too serious embracement of his small daughter before he finally released her and followed Cecilia out to the car.
    Antoinette appeared to forget them instantaneously. Of course she had the kits to divert her, and then a glass of milk and bread-and-honey, before being tucked up for a nap in the cot I’d borrowed from the Women’s Institute and had set up beside my bed. She seemed so cozy and content (and tired out, poor infant), I in fact gave her her boiled egg for supper there too; but still through the night lay with one ear alert in case she woke crying and needing comfort.
    It was I who didn’t sleep; not Antoinette.
    When in the morning I got her up, and told her who Mrs. Brewer was, and showed her where the garden she could play in was, Antoinette accepted all in the same peaceable silence. I knew she wasn’t mute—though now I came to consider it, I’d never heard her speak a word—because of her murmurings to the cats; but during those very first days of our life together it became clear to me that Cecilia’s daughter was what in earlier times would have been called an innocent.

2
    1
    I have spoken of her, describing our first encounter, as a baby. Antoinette was in fact three. At three, she should have been able to untie my shoelaces quite easily. She should have not only uttered, but prattled. At three, Antoinette had still no more vocabulary than—a baby.
    She was also as physically clumsy as a baby. If I had visualized her carrying bowl of eggs, basket of oranges, with serious, safe care, I soon discovered my error. Anything Antoinette was given to carry she dropped. It was as though her powers of concentration had an unusually limited span. She spilled even a cup of milk before she drank from it, and a spoonful of porridge before it reached her mouth—which of course made for a certain messiness that I had to discipline myself to accept without snapping, since one of the first things I learned about Antoinette was that she needed to be spoken to always very quietly, not to frighten her. It was specially important not to frighten her, not only for her own sake but because when frightened she was sick. I do not mean ailed: threw up. So I kept a supply of paper napkins always handy.
    Other things that frightened her were strangers, blancmange, and dark glasses (especially if put on and off) but nothing so much as a voice raised in anger. I myself share the same distaste, though not of course to the extent of hiding under my bed; but on the rare occasions when Mrs. Brewer and her daughter-in-law “had words” in the kitchen, it was refuged under her cot that I discovered the suddenly missing Antoinette.