The Innocents by Margery Sharp Read Free Book Online

mine.
    She had in fact almost stopped being sick at all. It was only when frightened that she threw up, and there was little now to alarm—I always careful to speak to her in a low, slow voice, and Mrs. Brewer having learned to do the same. I still kept a supply of paper napkins handy, in my shopping-bag and under cushions and so on, but came to need them less and less, as Antoinette slowly but surely developed from a small animal into a small child.
    She not only learned to eat food without spilling it, and hold an egg without dropping it; given even a cup and saucer to carry, she became quite sure-handed. She was also accepting to be cleaner. Most children enjoy splashing in a bath: Antoinette, as though the accumulated smells of toad and turd and old Mrs. Bragg afforded her a sort of physical cushioning against a world still strange, and possibly inimical, at first needed to be put into a bath by (my own) superior force. But after some months she accepted to be bathed because it was something that happened to her every day. Anything that happened every day became in time familiar, and therefore acceptable, to Antoinette; and that she was no longer so smelly I must admit came as a relief, I having a rather sensitive nose.
    Mrs. Brewer too appreciated the change. “Clean as a Christian!” declared Mrs. Brewer approvingly—which brings me to the matter of religion, with which as a Vicar’s daughter I may have been expected to show more concern already. Mrs. Gibson undoubtedly thought me lax, and more than once promised that Antoinette, in toddlers’ Sunday School, would never be asked questions. I refused the kind offer nonetheless, my child being so inapt to sit still anywhere indoors for more than five minutes. However I taught her the Lord’s Prayer—that is, repeated it to her every night after she was in bed, and regularly to my own “Amen” Antoinette chimed in with “Vermin.”
    Obviously the syllables are much alike. “Amen,” said I; “Vermin,” said Antoinette; but I sometimes feared only from affectionateness.
    3
    The day before she left for London Doctor Alice came and almost humorously ran her stethoscope over me. Between deep breaths—
    â€œAnd Antoinette?” said I, looking her in the eye.
    â€œJust the usual treatment,” said Doctor Alice blandly.
    At which moment—as almost precisely a year earlier—in came Antoinette. Only now she didn’t so much wander as stump. She joined us, that is, quite purposefully, and to Doctor Alice’s pleasant “Hello” answered with an equally pleasant “Tureen.” I confess I hoped she might have added “vermin”—but even tureen was such an advance on being sick, I was glad Doctor Alice heard it.
    â€œShe is, isn’t she, making progress?” I asked.
    â€œYes,” said Doctor Alice.
    It was from a bottle of grocer’s sherry that I poured her a stirrup-cup. I have never ceased to regret, however foolishly, not opening the last of my father’s Pedro Domecq.

5
    1
    We were now medically under the overextended aegis of an elderly doctor who had retired to Walberswick to devote himself to fishing, and whose return to practice was no light contribution on his part to the war effort. Fortunately we are a very healthy community, with a good chemist and a fund of homely experience in the way of feeding colds and starving fevers. In fact I never saw the old boy but once, at the funeral of one of his patients who happened to be my cousin. Antoinette had measles when all the other children did, and kept in bed for a fortnight, like all the other children, like all the other children recovered.
    Physically at least there was no doubt of her thriving. She outgrew her cot within a couple of years. (The Women’s Institute offered a replacement, but Antoinette was so attached to her cot, the sight of its being dismantled was too distressing, so I simply