The Innocents: A Novel

By Margery Sharp

Margery Sharp’s most poignant novel, set during World War II and filled with her trademark wit and warmth, tells the story of the powerful bond forged between a British spinster and the unusual little girl left in her care

As the threat of war looms, Cecilia and Rab Guthrie leave their young daughter, Antoinette, with a spinster friend in East Anglia, England, so they can enjoy a holiday on the continent. Three-year-old Antoinette doesn’t speak, is inordinately clumsy, and must always be spoken to in quiet tones or else she becomes frightened. Then the outbreak of World War II forces Antoinette’s parents to return to America without their daughter.
 
As the years pass, a relationship grows between the unmarried, childless woman and her innocent charge. Slowly Antoinette begins to change, becoming less frightened and delighting in objects and words, as does her foster mother. But when the war is over, Cecilia comes to collect her daughter—and take her away from the only person who has every really understood her.
 
An insightful, unsentimental novel about the challenges of raising a mentally challenged child in 1940s England, The Innocents sweeps readers along to its shocking conclusion.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Media
• Release date: Apr 12, 2016
• ISBN: 9781504034319

Margery Sharp

Margery Sharp is renowned for her sparkling wit and insight into human nature, both of which are liberally displayed in her critically acclaimed social comedies of class and manners. Born in Yorkshire, England, Sharp wrote pieces for Punch magazine after attending college and art school. In 1930, she published her first novel, Rhododendron Pie, and in 1938, married Maj. Geoffrey Castle. Sharp wrote twenty-six novels, three of which—Britannia Mews, Cluny Brown, and The Nutmeg Tree—were made into feature films, and fourteen children’s books, including The Rescuers, which was adapted into two Disney animated films.

Book preview

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.

Lady A. I thought acted very well too, suddenly offered at half-past five the tribute she’d been there to receive on the dot of three, also now somewhat bedraggled. That is, she accepted it. So Mabel went home forgiven, and Rab back to Leys Farm under the spell of beauty matched by kindness.

3

It was of necessity a whirlwind courtship, since he was far too important and hard-worked to be able to extend his fortnight’s visit by more than a week; but luckily he’d seen Cecilia at the FêTe the very day after arriving, and a village is almost as good as a cruise ship for throwing people together; one can’t walk to the Post Office to buy a stamp without an encounter at every step; moreover Cecilia had the advantage—also enjoyed, I have noticed, by librarians and girls at cash-desks—of being always, so to speak, there. Of course if she’d kept a stationer’s rather than a dress shop Rab’s amorous path would have been even smoother: there was absolutely nothing he could buy from a ladies’ dress shop; but he could still rely on its closing and liberating her from one till two, when if she happened to lunch out instead of upstairs, and if Rab happened to pass by as she emerged, what more natural than that they should pick up a sandwich together at the Copper Kettle?—And this apart from coffee breaks at eleven, during one of which I recall Lady A. rapping like an infuriated woodpecker for a turned-up hem. Before the first week ended Cecilia’s coffee break and lunch hour had practically merged, and during the second Rab was regularly driving her out to dinner besides at one of the nice country inns in which our district happily abounds. (The Mariners’ Arms for lobster, the Crown and Sceptre for duck.) Our own guest-house, Woolmers, has quite a reputation for home-made pâté and fresh vegetables, but was of course too near at hand to be driven to, and the car Rab hired in London was a Daimler.

I cannot say the village awaited the issue with bated breath, because there never seemed any doubt about it; unsurprised, no one blamed Cecilia in the least for getting married by special license even before she wore an engagement ring.

What chiefly surprised myself was the rapidity with which she was able to sell her shop. It was quite some time before I learned through our local estate agent that she’d been negotiating for several months with her successor Miss Wilson, who henceforward provided us with a very nice line in raincoats.

So in 1933 Rab Guthrie took Cecilia back to New York with him, where she became, one heard tell, quite a leader of fashion; also bore him the daughter she now on that cool but not cold, showery but not rainy, autumn-scented April day some twelve years later came back to collect.

4

Obviously I must explain how it happened that for the last five of those years Cecilia’s daughter Antoinette was living under my roof.

Cecilia had returned once before, but literally by accident: in the June of ’39 Tam Guthrie fell off a tractor

Reviews for The Innocents

[starbox_2 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Very compulsive reading, narrated by an elderly village spinster, and set in the 1940s. She recalls local lovely Cecilia and her marriage to an American. On a trip back to Europe with their 3 year old daughter, the narrator agrees to mind her for a month...then the War breaks out and somehow little Antoinette remains in her care for the next five years.The child is severely retarded, barely speaking and behaving in erratic and inexplicable ways, and yet a great bond develops, the predictable, calm lifestyle suiting Antoinette. And then her glamorous socialite mother returns to reclaim her...Wonderful writing; although the narrator's words are cautious, we feel we understand her personality completely.

[lydiahd · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

If I were asked to name a perfect novel, it might well be The Innocents. The writing is silky-smooth. The plot is simple, but engrossing, dealing with the fate of a mentally retarded child with a five-word vocabulary. Trust me, you'll care. The ending is surprising. Read it.

[leavesandpages · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

An elderly spinster and a young, mentally retarded girl are thrown together by circumstance, and their complicated but loving relationship of years is suddenly threatened by the return of the child's oblivious and selfish mother.Another most unusual novel by master writer Sharp, and one of my personal favourites of her many excellent works.

[beyondedenrock · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I have loved many of Margery Sharp’s books for many different reasons and, though I could argue with myself for a long time over the question, I think that if I had to pick just one favourite, one book to take with me to a desert island, it would be ‘The Innocents’.I read it twice and each time I didn’t write about it, because I wasn’t sure that I could find the words to do it justice. And now I’ve read it for a third time, and I know that I must start to write.It’s a later work, it’s a quieter and simpler work than many of her others, and it speaks so profoundly.The story is told by a middle-aged – almost elderly spinster living in a quiet country village. She had lived there all her life, first as the only child of the vicarage, and then as a lady of independent means. She was content with her life and with her position in village society; not at the forefront but always with a role to play.Margery Sharp drew her character so well, and all of the characters who had parts to play in the story she has to tell. She had the ability to draw a real, living, breathing person with just a few lines, and in this case an account of a particular village fete. I can’t explain them nearly so well and so I shan’t even try. You need to read this book, and somebody needs to reissue it, please.What she didn’t do was tell me her narrator’s name, and so I must continue to refer to her as ‘she’.She recalled a visit from friends in the summer of 1939. A younger friend, who had been the belle of the village, had a whirlwind romance with an older Scottish businessman and they had settled in the USA. They had come home for business reasons, with their infant daughter in tow, and they had plans to tour continental Europe before they travelled back across the Atlantic. They realised that it had been a mistake to bring a young child without her nanny, and they wondered if could leave her, safe in the care of their older friend, while they holidayed.She was pleased to say yes, she was quite taken with the child, and arrangements were quickly put into place.She had already recognised what the parents had left unsaid: the child – Antoinette – Toni – had learning difficulties, or, in her own preferred terminology, she was ‘an innocent.’This was when the story really struck a chord with me; because I had a brother who was ‘an innocent’. And that is why it means a great deal for me to say that everything rang true, that it was emotionally honest without ever being sentimental, and that ….It made me think of many of the lovely people I met who were involved in my brother’s care, and it made me think of my mother and wish that I had discovered that book when my mother would have still been able to read it.Now, back to the story.Toni was blessed with a guardian who took such good care of her. She borrowed a basket of tabby kittens in case a distraction was needed when the parents left; it wasn’t, but Toni loved them anyway. She borrowed a cot from the WI and she took great care to understand what made her charge happy. What she loved was to spend her days wandering in the garden, to come into the house to eat when she was hungry, and to sleep securely in her cot at night. And so that was what happened.A lovely understanding grew between the two. Toni had only a small number of words, and she used them to express herself rather than applying their conventional meaning; but of course true understanding doesn’t need words.This arrangement lasted for much longer than had been originally planned. Because Britain declared war on Germany before that holiday was over, and an anxious employer arranged flights back to the USA, post haste. There was no time to collect Toni, and so she stayed just where she was until the war was over.Her guardian learned, as more arrangements were put in place, that Toni’s father understood her condition and its implications, that he was anxious to do whatever was best for her; and that her mother did not, that she thought that counselling and speech therapy would transform Toni into the model daughter to follow her into society.Toni’s father died just before the end of the war, and her mother arrived to take her home. She didn’t understand her child; she could not – or maybe would not – Margery Sharp is far to clever a writer to let me decide which, but she made me care so much.The way that the story played out then was heart-rending. The guardian persuaded the mother to stay a while, to help the child’s transition; she wished to do more but she knew she could not; The child was unhappy, she tried to cling to the secure world she knew and loved, but it was clear that at some level she knew that she could; and the mother’s presence, living in a world where she no longer really belonged, sent ripples through the village community.The conclusion is dramatic, and it could be interpreted in more than one way. I can’t quite decide; but I can tell you that thinking about it brings a lump to my throat.Margery Sharp was such a perceptive writer; she understood all of her characters so well, and she knew that there were no heroes and no villains, just fallible human beings, some wiser than others.Even though I knew this story it held me, it had my heart rising and falling, from the first page to the last.I can’t do it justice, but I can say that it really is a gem.