The Innocents Read Free Page B

Fortunately such incidents were rare, not only in my own quiet household but in the village generally, of which the motto, in the unlikely event of its ever attaining a coat of arms, might well be De gustibus non est disputandum —Anglicé, I don’t blame you. Thus when two couples openly exchanged spouses without benefit of the Divorce Court, no one blamed them, no more than old Mrs. Bragg, supporting fifteen cats on her pension, was blamed for regularly each Sunday stealing all milk bottles left outside doors on her way home from Early Communion. Of old Mr. Pyke at Hollanders, so heavy-handed with a strap, woe betide any urchin caught scrumping in his orchard, it was remembered in excuse how he’d been thrashed as a boy, after his mother died, by a father even heavier-handed still. (What myself was to be excused for remains to be seen.) Then there was Major Cochran, ex—Royal Artillery, D.S.O. and bar, a positive menace each Armistice Day. Like every other, our village was only too willing to commemorate it, as a nice turnout for Old Comrades and the Boy Scouts and the St. John’s Ambulance Brigade; owing to trouble with his dentures the Major’s perennial recitation of They shall not grow old often held the band up marking time for as much as ten minutes; but no one blamed him …
    So certainly no one in the village blamed Antoinette for being an innocent.
    2
    Spoken to always quietly and slowly, Antoinette understood perfectly. All that was needed was patience. She liked hearing poetry, if it had a strong rhythm, as in the Lays of Ancient Rome . I also introduced her—a rather abrupt declension, I fear!—to such easy nursery rhymes as “ Pussy-cat, pussy-cat, where have you been ?”—still substituting for the rather awkward monosyllable “queen” an easier disyllable: “ I’ve been up to London to buy a tureen .” Antoinette knew what a tureen was, because it was what I served our soup from. She also appeared to like the word for itself, for its soothing, crooning sound. (“Tureen, tureen!” I once heard her cajole a hedgehog.) Obviously she made no connection between sound and content; another word she liked was “vermin,” overheard during an argument with my gardener on the subject of mole-traps. And indeed, for sound, what word is prettier—the soft opening v that begins also violets, and velvet, and voluptuousness, then the tender dying fall that concludes? “Vermin” became in fact Antoinette’s term of affection, applied alike to a cat, a dead toad, or myself.
    I cannot describe what an affectionate little creature she was. If I say “creature” as I might say “animal,” I too was accepting her innocence. Though childless, indeed unmarried, I have had ample opportunity (as in a village who has not?) to observe children from infancy onwards, and as a consequence believe firmly in the doctrine of original sin. The merest babe is covetous; a toddler no sooner finds its feet than employs them to trample its neighbour’s mud-pie landmark; even the more sophisticated vices, such as exclusiveness, or cold-shouldering, bud early. (The exchange, “Can I play with you?” “No, you can’t!” already adumbrating a Golf Club Committee faced by Jew or tradesman.) Antoinette cold-shouldered nobody—that is, who wasn’t a stranger; and nothing in nature was alien to her.
    The butcher’s boy, for example, so glaringly cross-eyed he couldn’t get a girl to go to the pictures with him, had in Antoinette almost an admirer. She seemed to find his squint an interesting variation from the usual—which when I remembered her dislike of dark glasses (also a facial variant), at first surprised me. But Kevin’s squint came by nature; or possibly Antoinette thought he squinted deliberately, to amuse? In any case she never showed the least repulsion, unlike the girls who