The Chimney Sweeper's Boy (17 page)

A
FAMOUS ACTRESS, WHO HAD ALSO BEEN AN ACQUAINTANCE
of Gerald Candless, recited the second half of Tennyson's “Ulysses.” A rather less famous actor, but one who had occasionally stayed at Lundy View House, read Herbert's “Jordan.” Ursula, in the front pew, with a daughter on either side of her, the younger in a huge black hat and weeping copiously, thought “Jordan” inappropriate for an aggressive atheist like Gerald, of whom it couldn't have been said that while he had his God, he envied no man's nightingale or spring.

Ursula didn't know, and had indeed never heard of, the soprano who sang a Hugo Wolf song. These were Hope's choices, and she suspected Hope had chosen what she would like at her own memorial service, if she had been able to contemplate having one. Roger Pallinter, thin in old age, arthritic and on two sticks, recited one of his own poems. It was a surprise to Ursula that he had written any. Colin Wrightson, looking just as old and doddery, gave an address. Eulogy, thought Ursula. She also thought how very odd it was to listen to and look at a man who had once been one's lover and feel nothing for him but impatience and a faint distaste.

She would have liked to hold poor Hope's hand but could scarcely imagine what the reaction might be if she attempted to take it. Robert Postle, sitting behind her, had one of those noisy, spluttery colds that spray infection into a three-foot-long radius of atmosphere around their subject. She felt a spot of damp on the back of her neck and shuddered. While Wrightson
droned on, his wife, on the other side of the church, put on her glasses and read the black-edged sheet Hope had had printed with the songs and poems on it and
GERALD CANDLESS
1926–1997 in times roman at the top. Perhaps she was as taken aback as Ursula herself had been at the Latin epitaph:
Vixit, scripsit, mortuus est.

“He lived, he wrote, he died,” Tessa Postle whispered throatily to her.

It made her shudder. She was going home on the 3:50, a train that would get her to Exeter by 7:00
P.M.
From there, she would take another, reaching Barnstaple by some time just before nine. Both girls had asked her to stay the night, which amazed and touched her, though Hope's invitation had been grudging. Her sister, Helen, had asked her to stay, and perhaps she would have done if the prospect of getting from Carshalton to Paddington in the morning hadn't been so dire. Now it was all over and the organist was playing a voluntary, which Adela Churchouse was humming and to which she seemed to be executing a little dance in the aisle. London's literati drifted out into the courtyard, into Piccadilly.

Ursula was kissed by people she couldn't remember ever having seen before. Robert Postle, mopping his face with tissues from a box held by Tessa, said that they must meet; they must talk; there was the new book.… When would she come up again? When would she have lunch with him? “You don't need me,” she said. A small crowd surrounded her by this time, but no one was shocked; no one was even surprised. It was her grief, her loss, the soul-rocking sorrow any woman would feel at the loss of such a man as Gerald Candless. To her surprise, Sarah came up to her, touched her arm, rescued her. She had a taxi waiting; she and Hope would accompany her to Paddington.

A red-letter day indeed, thought Ursula, who could hardly believe it. Once more, but this time in the taxi, they sat on either side of her, and she was moved by their presence, as nothing connected with Gerald could have moved her. He was gone, but she was still there; she was their surviving parent—Was that it? Was that what accounted for it? Something happened that hadn't happened for years and years. The tears came into her eyes, and not tears that stopped there, were blinked back, and quelled, but real gushing, pouring tears that spilled over and flooded down her face.

“Oh, Ma,” said Sarah, “I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry.”

Ursula hadn't felt so happy for ages. She hadn't felt happy at all for years, but now she did, because Sarah and Hope were being nice to her, were actually both of them kissing her good-bye. She couldn't remember Hope kissing her since she was a tiny girl. They were a threesome hugging, a great loving embrace; then the girls went, and happy Ursula, making sure they were gone, bought herself a poached salmon and watercress sandwich and a bottle of fresh orange juice in the sandwich shop for eating and drinking on the train, in the first-class compartment.

Sarah told herself that she had come to terms with her father's behavior, his assumption, for some reason or other, of a new identity. At least she was used to it. She could accept it. The difficulty was that her discovery had stopped her in her tracks; she was stuck as badly as if she had writer's block. Her father could have told her, though he never had, that if the first few chapters a writer has written are lifeless or have gaps in them, it will be very hard to proceed with any enthusiasm until that earlier part has been satisfactorily repaired. And if these repairs can't be carried out, the whole work may have to be abandoned.

She couldn't mend her chapter without the wherewithal for filling gaps. A great reluctance to go on had taken hold of her. How could she write about a man who seemed to have been born at the age of twenty-five? A man who had taken his first job at that age? The
Western Morning News
had replied to her letter. They had a record of Gerald Candless working for them in Plymouth as a general reporter from the summer of 1951 until late in 1957. She had even read a piece written by him on the Suez crisis of 1956 and soldiers leaving for Egypt on a boat out of Plymouth. But no records seemed to exist of his history before 1951.

The results of searching her father's study had been disappointing. He had not been a specially orderly man, but on the other hand, he hadn't been grossly untidy, either. There was no filing system, but neither were there drawers stuffed with rubbish. He had kept letters, still in their envelopes, but by no means all the letters he had received. In spite of what she had said to her mother, she read them and wondered at his choice of what to preserve, at last realizing—it was an unwelcome, even chilling, conclusion—that he had kept letters from the rich and famous, from celebrities and from
distinguished writers. Friends' letters had been discarded. It was impossible to escape the conclusion that he was looking to a posthumous future, when someone would write his biography and include those letters.

In that case, what had he expected a biographer to do about his banished childhood and youth? Not inquire perhaps. Assume, gloss over, pass on. Strange, then, that he had kept no sort of diary. Not entirely believing her mother, Sarah had searched for a diary, found only notebooks whose contents referred to the plots, themes, and characters of his novels.

All Saturday afternoon, she had worked in the study, but in the evening she had gone to the pub in Barnstaple and then on to a drinking club with a bunch of friends. Strangely enough, because there was no prearrangement, Adam Foley turned up among them once again. He was one of Alexander's friends, or an ex-boyfriend of Rosie's sister—Sarah wasn't sure which. His family had a weekend cottage in a village not far away.

Nothing was said about the phone call, coldly received and coldly terminated, but she thought he resented what had happened. It must be so. He spoke to everyone but her. He must remember her “No, thanks, can't, I'm busy.” Too bad. She wouldn't talk to him, either. It was a shame he was so deeply, disturbingly attractive. His hair was black and his skin had a dark bloom. He was thin. She liked thinness and that peculiar grace with which he moved, very casual, laid-back, insouciant. But she had brushed him off.

After a time, she was aware, uncomfortably at first, then with mounting excitement, of his eyes on her. Not on her face, not meeting her eyes, but on her body. That wasn't what having a roving eye meant, but his eyes roved. While they were still in the pub, he went to fetch a round of drinks, then came back with glasses for everyone but her.

“What's poor Sarah done?” Rosie said.

He looked at her face then. “I didn't see you there.”

It was uttered in an indifferent tone and as if she were too insignificant to be noticed. He must be paranoid if a woman's refusal to go out with him made him so rude. She could be rude, too. It would give her pleasure.

“Staring at an empty chair, were you?”

She got up, went to the bar, and bought her own drink. The place was so crowded, she had to push past him to get back to her seat. As she did so, his arm touched her thigh, pressed against her thigh. For some reason, she
didn't walk out. She stayed and they went on to the club. It was in a cellar under a greengrocer's and called, of course, Greens. He pushed ahead of her; he let the door swing into her face. There was dancing on a little floor the size of someone's bathroom and he danced with Vicky and with Rosie. He danced with them and looked at her.

She was mesmerized by him. She began to feel a little sick. Of course, she had drunk too much. It must have been after one when they all left. Rosie asked him if he wanted a lift. He cocked a thumb in Sarah's direction and said in exactly the tone he might use about a taxi driver, “She's taking me.”

And she did take him. Or he took her. He took the keys from her in silence, found her car, opened the passenger door for her, and drove a couple of miles. She was very drunk, but not too drunk to be aware that he had parked the car on the grass verge and gotten out. He came around to her side, pulled her out, put her in the back, and made love to her on the backseat.

Somehow or other, he and she had gone back to the cottage together and Sarah had stayed the night. With Adam, in Adam's bed, though members of his family were occupying the other bedrooms. And it had been exciting, like being a teenager again, creeping up the stairs, carrying her shoes, making no sound because Adam's aunt or grandmother or someone was sleeping on the other side of the bedroom wall. They had scarcely spoken. Early in the morning, the moment the old woman had gone off to Holy Communion, she had gotten up and driven home with a monstrous hangover.

Her mother had made no comment on Sarah's arriving back at ten in the morning, just asked if she'd had a nice evening. Sarah drank a lot of fizzy water and a fair amount of black coffee and took herself back into the study, where she expected to find nothing and where she made the only real discovery of the weekend.

It was in the last drawer she examined, lying on top of the sheets in an open pack of typing paper. She didn't know what it was and didn't know then that she had made a discovery, only that she was holding in her hand something peculiar that she couldn't identify and which seemed to have no place in a novelist's workroom. Not, that is, a novelist who was also an atheist. But she thought that later. After the memorial service, in fact, back in her own flat, where she showed her find to Hope and Fabian.

*  *  *

Their father had not only not believed in God but had been aggressively anti-God. (Their mother's attitude toward religion they had never inquired about nor thought important.) He had brought them up godlessly, though without the ostentation of requesting they not attend school assembly. Religious ritual, he opined, would have no effect on them, and he had been right. Neither of them had ever read a line of the Bible, nor did they recognize quotations from it. They had been in church only to attend their cousin Pauline's wedding and their father's funeral.

Hope, therefore, had no more idea of what the thing found in the paper drawer was than her sister had. It seemed to be made of some fibrous vegetable substance, leaf or stem perhaps. A strip of this had been folded double, to which, two-thirds of the way up, a crosspiece, also folded double, was attached with a neat binding to conceal the join.

“It's a palm cross,” said Fabian.

“A what?”

“There's atheism and there's ignorance,” he said, “and you two are just plain ignorant. You don't have to believe in God to know something about religion. I mean a smidgen. If I asked you what is: a, a pyx; b, a creed; and c, Pentecost, you wouldn't have a clue, would you?”

“I know what a creed is,” said Hope impatiently. “Anyway, never mind that. What's this thing? What's a palm cross?”

“It's palm leaf or reed or even a branch from a fir tree made into the shape of a cross and given to people who attend matins or Mass, I expect, on Palm Sunday, which is the Sunday before Easter.”

“I thought you were Jewish,” said Sarah.

“I don't think you can be right, Fab,” said Hope, “because Daddy would never have had anything like that in the house. Daddy
hated
religion. He said he didn't agree with anything Marx said except about religion being the opium of the people. And he used to mock religion, I mean make jokes about it. Jonathan Arthur was staying once and he was talking about Resurrection—he's religious—and Daddy upset him frightfully by saying that what went up must come down.”

“I can't help that. It's a palm cross, known as a palm. Ask anyone if you
don't believe me. Ask that fellow Postle, the one with the streaming nose; he's a Catholic.”

“If I ask him, he'll want to know how the book's coming on,” said Sarah, “and it isn't coming on. I don't know what to do next.”

Fabian said, “Your dad had a London accent. I'm a latter-day Professor Higgins, I am; I know about accents. His was London, and I'd say with a faint undertone somewhere of East Anglia. So he's a Londoner, living alone, working on this newspaper, and something terrible happens. Discount something criminal; your dad wouldn't have done that, or so you say, so it's something that happened to him. Wife or lover died? Children died? Made some momentous discovery about his family—his real family, I mean? Some hereditary disease, murderer for a father—how about that?”