Books: The Pagan Touch

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THE INNOCENTS

by MARGERY SHARP 1 83 pages. Little, Brown. $5.95.

Innocent here is a gentle, archaic term for a retarded child. Antoinette Guthrie, aged three, is the daughter of a beautiful English woman and a wealthy American. She is confided to the care of an aging friend in East Anglia while her parents travel on the Continent. World War II interrupts the tour, and the parents must return directly to America, leaving their daughter in England for the duration. After the war, the mother, who has become a New York society figure, returns to England to reclaim her child.

Such is only the shell of this wonderful, disarmingly fluty novel, which is Margery Sharp's 27th book. Antoinette's foster mother, who tells the story, speaks what at first seems a dithering Dame Margaret Rutherford prose: "As Sir David and I had agreed, summer was wearing on, and after summer one must expect autumn." Yet she possesses a ruthlessly unsentimental, almost primeval attachment to the retarded child, whose still, strange presence dominates her life — until the mother returns with blithe hopes and confident of "cur ing" the innocent by psychotherapy.

But the child's only fascination is her foster mother's garden, with its ambience of witchery, herbs, bullock's-eyes, dead frogs, dog droppings. Sharp is too intelligent to make explicit any metaphorical claims. But her solution, as the society mother is about to take her natural child back to Manhattan's concrete canyons, is a beautifully delicate stroke of paganism.