Twenty-One Stories by Graham Greene

Author:Graham Greene
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2001-07-05T04:00:00+00:00

THE INNOCENT

IT was a mistake to take Lola there. I knew it the moment we alighted from the train at the small country station. On an autumn evening one remembers more of childhood than at any other time of year, and her bright veneered face, the small bag which hardly pretended to contain our things for the night, simply didn’t go with the old grain warehouses across the small canal, the few lights up the hill, the posters of an ancient film. But she said, ‘Let’s go into the country,’ and Bishop’s Hendron was, of course, the first name which came into my head. Nobody would know me there now, and it hadn’t occurred to me that it would be I who remembered.

Even the old porter touched a chord. I said, ‘There’ll be a four-wheeler at the entrance,’ and there was, though at first I didn’t notice it, seeing the two taxis and thinking, ‘The old place is coming on.’ It was very dark, and the thin autumn mist, the smell of wet leaves and canal water were deeply familiar.

Lola said, ‘But why did you choose this place? It’s grim.’ It was no use explaining to her why it wasn’t grim to me, that that sand heap by the canal had always been there (when I was three I remember thinking it was what other people meant by the seaside). I took the bag (I’ve said it was light; it was simply a forged passport of respectability) and said we’d walk. We came up over the little humpbacked bridge and passed the alms-houses. When I was five I saw a middle-aged man run into one to commit suicide; he carried a knife and all the neighbours pursued him up the stairs. She said, ‘I never thought the country was like this.’ They were ugly alms-houses, little grey stone boxes, but I knew them as I knew nothing else. It was like listening to music, all that walk.

But I had to say something to Lola. It wasn’t her fault that she didn’t belong here. We passed the school, the church, and came round into the old wide High Street and the sense of the first twelve years of life. If I hadn’t come, I shouldn’t have known that sense would be so strong, because those years hadn’t been particularly happy or particularly miserable; they had been ordinary years, but now with the smell of wood fires, of the cold striking up from the dark damp paving stones, I thought I knew what it was that held me. It was the smell of innocence.

I said to Lola, ‘It’s a good inn, and there’ll be nothing here, you’ll see, to keep us up. We’ll have dinner and drinks and go to bed.’ But the worst of it was that I couldn’t help wishing that I were alone. I hadn’t been back all these years; I hadn’t realized how well I remembered the place. Things I’d quite forgotten, like that sand heap, were coming back with an effect of pathos and nostalgia.

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