The Chimney Sweeper's Boy (14 page)

The typescript she produced pleased him. Doing this for him would become her work, the job she had vaguely thought she ought to have. She was proud of herself.

That was something to tell Sarah. When she got over what was so evidently troubling her. When she phoned again with a spate of enthusiastic questions.

The mist had lifted, but its rising would be temporary. In half an hour, the pale blue sky and hazy white sun would once more be covered, the lone and level sands stretch bleakly under the dense canopy, the sky be gone as well as the view of the hotel and even the flat expanse of gently lapping sea. And the white cottony floss would press against Gerald's study windows.…

Meanwhile, it was almost bright down there, and with the lifting of the mist, the people had begun to return, as they always did, with the inevitability of birds appearing when dawn breaks. In the distance, she saw the Fleming family, up against the dunes, with a windbreak behind them, though there was no wind. James and Edith were digging in the sand, Sam Fleming and his daughter-in-law sitting in deck chairs. She had done her two baby-sitting
stints and on the second occasion had handed over the stamps she had collected to be given to James. There had been no more demand for her services and she hadn't expected to see them again. She knew they were going home at the end of the week.

Now she thought there was no point in making them acknowledge her, and she would have passed fifty yards from them without turning her head, but she heard Sam's voice call, “Mrs. Candless!”

She turned and went up the beach. Something strange, unexpected, and unwelcome happened to her. Gerald had for a long time kept a photograph of Samuel Beckett in his study, pinned to the wall, as he occasionally did keep photographs of writers he admired. Ursula thought Sam Fleming, with his lantern jaw and piercing eyes and full, mobile mouth, looked a lot like Beckett. She didn't know if Beckett had also been tall and very thin, but she suspected so. The sudden powerful attraction he exerted over her, that she had been quite unaware of at their previous meetings, seemed to hit her between the eyes. It was enough to stop her in her tracks, cause her to take a deep breath. Then she went on.

They spoke to her, said things about the mist, the clearing of the mist. Molly said to her son, calling him from his sand-castle building, “What do you say to Mrs. Candless, James?”

“Thank you very much for the stamps,” said the child.

“I'm glad you were pleased.”

Sam Fleming was looking hard at her. Ursula thought there might be something in the idea that if you were very powerfully attracted to someone, that made you attractive to them, that there was some chemical or telepathic exchange. Then she told herself that should Sam Fleming be attracted to a woman, it wouldn't be to someone of his own age, a skinny woman of fifty-seven in jeans and a sweatshirt, with cropped graying hair, but a bright and nubile thirty-five-year-old. It wasn't the first time she'd been attracted to a man other than Gerald, nor would it be the first time that nothing had come of it.

She said, “I'm afraid the mist is coming back. It always does when the sky looks like that.”

“Then we shall pack up and go in for our tea.”

She said good-bye to them. It was unlikely she would see them again, so
she wished them a good journey home. Her legs felt a little weak. Her body was given over to a yearning. It was exactly the same feeling she had had thirty-five years ago, when she had first known Gerald, and she marveled that such a sensation could repeat itself so faithfully after so long. When the woman who experienced it was utterly changed. When it had been so rudely mocked that first time and so roughly repudiated.

The mist rolled in and cloaked her. It hid them, so that even if she had looked back, they would have been concealed from her. And she was glad of it, glad of the isolation in which to recover. Then, as she approached the path and the steps, she heard someone running after her.

She turned around then and waited.

Sarah had gone early to St. Catherine's House. She expected to get it done with and to have the day to assemble her notes and draw her conclusions before going to Hope's for supper.

People were already queuing outside the Public Search Room. Even getting inside took time. And once the doors were opened and she had begun on her task, she found things more complicated than she had expected. Forms had to be filled in, as well as one ledger after another scrutinized.

These were heavy and there were a great many of them. Eventually, in the ledger for the summer of 1918, she found the marriage of George Candless to Kathleen Mary Mitchell. Now she had to move on to births. It was a tiring business. Luckily, she had a rough idea where to look, and she found the birth of Joan Kathleen Candless without trouble in June 1919. That of Gerald Candless was easy to find. May 10, 1926, and here it was.

The Candlesses had possibly had more children in between. Now Sarah wished she had asked Joan Thague. She hadn't been able to bring herself to do that, because Mrs. Thague had been so distraught. Bewildered and distressed and
deaf.
Tearful enough and upset enough for Sarah to have wondered about the facts, incoherently outlined, of a little brother dead in April 1932, a month before his sixth birthday. But within the next half hour, she came upon the registration of the child's death: “Gerald Francis Candless, age five. Cause of death: heart failure; contributory cause, meningitis.”

So it was true. She hadn't really been in doubt, but reading it here in this official way was different from hearing it uttered by Joan Thague and
different even from seeing the words on the little boy's aged yellow death certificate. She didn't relish telling Hope.

“You're not saying Daddy told lies!”

Hope stared at her sister like an enemy.

“All right, but what other explanation is there? It was really quite pathetic, this poor old woman, and the little brother dying. I don't think I'm easily embarrassed, but I was then.”

“There must have been two Gerald Candlesses,” said Hope.

“What, two boys named Gerald Francis Candless, both born in the same town on the tenth of May, 1926, and both with parents named Kathleen and George?”

Hope looked on the verge of tears. “But why would Daddy do that? You mean he was someone else, don't you? Someone else entirely? But why would he do that?” She was a lawyer, and she quickly saw why someone would do that. “Because he'd done something criminal? Because he was wanted for that? Oh, I won't believe it. Not Daddy. I can't believe that.”

“That need not necessarily be the reason,” said Sarah. “Something awful might have happened to him that he wanted to put behind him. The thing is, when did he do it? Obviously not when he was six. I mean, we don't even know if whoever he was was the same age as the little boy who died. Or came from the same place. Or was even English, come to that. He may have done it when he was eighteen, or five years later, but not ten years later, because that was when his first book was published, and he was Gerald Candless then.”

“You've really thought about this, haven't you?” said Hope, not altogether pleasantly.

“Yes, of course I have. I haven't liked it, Hope. But if I'm going to write this book …”

“I wish to God you weren't going to write the bloody book! I wish we'd never had to know. I don't want to know this. I hate knowing this.”

“Hopie,” said Sarah, “if I hadn't found it, someone else would. Someone else writing his biography. There are bound to be biographers. Isn't it better it should be me than some stranger?”

Fabian, who had been cooking, stuck his head around the corner. “Ready in five minutes,” he said, and then he said, “
The Day of the Jackal.
”

“The what?”

“In
The Day of the Jackal
, by Frederick Forsyth, there's a man who wants to change his identity to get a passport. So he goes to graveyards and searches till he finds a tombstone of a very young child of the same sex and who would now be approximately the same age as himself. And then when he's got the name and all the rest of it, he finds that child in the records and applies for a birth certificate in that name and thence for a passport.”

“But the person would be dead,” Hope objected.

“Nobody's going to know that, are they? The passport people aren't going to check. Maybe that's what your dad did. He couldn't have read the book, because it was published years afterward, but maybe he had the same idea.”

“No, he didn't,” Sarah said. “The Gerald Candless who died didn't have a tombstone. I asked. Oh, not because of what you're saying, but I suppose I just—well, I didn't actually believe her at first. It seemed so bizarre, so
awful
—it still does. I said to her, ‘Where was he buried?' and she said—Oh, she was crying; it was dreadful—that they'd put a wooden cross on the grave, but when she went back to Ipswich and looked for it twenty years afterward, it was gone; there was no clue as to where it had been.”

Sarah ate Fabian's pasta, but Hope didn't feel much like eating. She drank a lot of the wine Sarah had brought, gazing broodingly at her sister. Fabian, who had known him quite well, thought of the man who was dead and tried to fit him into this role of a villain or fugitive but couldn't. Gerald Candless had been so decisive, so authoritative, so in control.

“What about Ursula?” he said.

“What about her?” Hope poured herself the last of the wine. “She won't know. I hope someone's going to open another bottle.”

Fabian, because he had cooked and served the meal, sat tight, declining to make a move. “You can't assume that just because it happened before they were married she doesn't know anything.”

“I nearly asked her,” said Sarah. “I phoned her last night and I nearly asked her; it was on the tip of my tongue.”

“What, like that, straight out?”

“No, not exactly. Of course not. I was going to say something about did she know if Dad had ever thought of changing his name.”

“I like ‘thought,' ” said Fabian.

Hope rounded on him. “Well, I don't. I hate it. I hate all this.”

She went outside, banging doors, looking for more wine. Sarah said, “That pasta was delicious. You're a good cook, Fabby.”

“Someone has to do it,” said Fabian, grinning.

“I don't know what to do now. I just don't know what on earth to do. I can't write a memoir about someone when I don't know who he was. D'you know, I feel quite sick when I have to say that. I feel sort of hollow. Because it's us, too, isn't it? If he was someone else, who are we? What's our real name?”

“Candless,” said Fabian firmly. “Think of all the people there are whose fathers had foreign names. Polish names, for instance—they've almost always been changed to something pronounceable. They know who they are. They're the name their fathers changed to.”

Hope came back with a bottle and a corkscrew. She dumped it on the table. “I haven't the strength to open it. I feel as weak as water.”

“I'll do it,” said Sarah.

“I think you ought to give up this memoir. I was thinking about it while I was out in the kitchen. Daddy wouldn't want you to find this stuff out; we know that. Otherwise, he wouldn't have changed his name in the first place. So you ought to stop. Ring up Postle and say it upsets you too much. Leave it where it is and maybe—well, maybe in time we could forget.”

“Could you forget, Hope?”

Hope didn't answer. She snatched the glass of wine Sarah had poured for her.

“I've done something else,” Sarah said almost shamefacedly. “Some checking up. Dad never went to Trinity. Or if he did, he went as whoever he was before he became Gerald Candless. And did you see that letter to the
Times
? The stamp-magazine man, Droridge? I didn't believe it when I first read it, but it's true. Dad never worked for the
Walthamstow Herald.
”

“So what? It's just a backstreet rag. He worked for the
Western Morning News.
”

Sarah nodded. “Maybe he did. Probably he did. I've written to them, asking if they've a record of his employment there. It's a long time, forty-five years. As far as I can see now, Dad doesn't seem to have done anything or been anywhere before he was twenty-five.”

Fabian said thoughtfully, “But doesn't that mean he'd done everything?”

“What?”

“It means he'd done too much.”

I
T WAS EXACTLY WHAT
G
ERALD HAD SAID TO HER ALL THOSE YEARS AGO
, the precise words: “I'd like you to have dinner with me.”

If he had put it differently—“Will you have dinner with me?” or “Will you dine with me?”—she might have responded differently. She might have said an unqualified yes. But the words shocked her. His voice wasn't unlike Gerald's, though his appearance was very unlike, but there in the mist, she briefly experienced a dreadful and eerie carrying back. In the intervening years, men had said many things to her, but none had asked her to have a meal with him in those words. She was sure her shock must show on her face, even in the white gloom.