The Chimney Sweeper's Boy (24 page)

“The woman who lives next door to Mother got Bell's palsy walking in a wind like this,” she said at the foot of the cliff path.

“Why don't you go back, Pauline?”

“Her face never righted itself. It's permanently pulled down on the left side.”

Ursula said nothing. At the next sharp gust, Pauline said she would go back, adding with a laugh that it seemed a shame to walk all that way down only to have to go up again. Ursula turned once to watch her climb the path, and when Pauline looked in her direction, she waved, not wishing to seem unkind. The beach was deserted. At the hotel, the shutters were closed on the upper windows and in its grounds the wind tore yellow leaves from the maple trees and the false acacias.

So Gerald was not Gerald and she might not, strictly speaking, even be called Candless. In that moment, she decided to revert from henceforward to her maiden name. Down there on the beach, in the sharp salty wind, she decided. She would be Ursula Wick and would immediately set about putting everything in that name. If he could change his, she could change hers, hers that wasn't hers and never had been.

What dreadful thing had he done? What offense or, more likely, crime had he committed that made him take a new identity? She told herself, angrily and aloud to the wind, that she could have believed anything of him. He was capable of anything. She wished now that she had never forgiven him, never overlooked so much for the sake of—what? She no longer knew.

In giving her the entire use of his money all those years, in leaving her the house and everything he possessed apart from Sarah's and Hope's legacies, in making her his literary executor, he was compensating for—what? For more than neglect and near ostracism, for more than contempt and the theft of her children. He was making up to her for the dreadful thing he had done and on account of which he had taken on the identity of someone's dead child.

She sat down on the turf in the lee of the dunes and wrapped her arms around her knees. The sea was half a mile away, a line of silver, a line of white foam, and between her and the tide edge, the lone and level sands stretched, bleak, pale, empty. “My name is Ozymandias, king of kings.” The hand that mocked them, she thought, and the heart that fed. She would move; she would sell the house now, no matter what the girls said. “I don't want to know what he did,” she said aloud. “I don't any longer ask why.”

Once she had. Twenty-eight years ago, she still had wanted very much to know. She was young and she thought she knew. Yet the proof of it was a great shock. It is one thing to suspect your husband of infidelity, another to have his infidelity confirmed. This was how Jean must have felt when Ian confessed. Ursula knew Gerald would never confess to anything. If Dickie Parfitt had merely seen him go to a house, be let into a house, and spend time there, she would have thought very little of it, but Gerald had had a
key.
He had a key to a house in a street in Leyton and let himself into it with his own key, as a husband might. As an accredited lover might.

She had looked at Dickie Parfitt's photographs. The one of the old woman was clear enough, but she was just an old woman in a felt hat and a buttoned-up coat. The man in the other photograph might have been Gerald, but it was out of focus and no face could be seen. Perhaps he owned the house. What did she know? He might have lived there himself once, kept it when he moved to Hampstead, now allowed this woman to live there.

Ursula thought she would go to the house and see the woman who lived there, speak to her, find out the truth. But the idea was at first a dream, a fantasy; she would be terrified to do that. And then she asked herself if she really would be afraid. What was there to be afraid of?

Her mother had taken to coming over while Pauline was with them. She had regularly paid a monthly visit to have tea with the children and to
admire Gerald's “way” with them, but that August she came at least once a week. Ostensibly, this was to be with Pauline, the granddaughter she seldom saw because Pauline lived in Manchester, but her true purpose was to discuss her son's broken marriage.

In the world of Herbert and Betty Wick, divorce was so rare as to be practically nonexistent. To Betty, it had been something that happened in the lives of Hollywood film stars, and even there, she believed—or, at any rate, said—it was engaged in solely for its publicity value. Marriage was an absolute, as rock-solid and in a way as physical as birth and death. Love, compatibility, preference scarcely came into it.

She and Herbert had known each other since they were both fifteen, had married at twenty-one, had neither of them looked in anyone else's direction. If the question of marital discord was raised, she would say that so-and-so chose his or her partner and therefore should be content with that choice forever after. Minds that could be changed on almost any other issue—Betty sometimes said sagely that it was a woman's privilege to change her mind—must be adamant here, and the heart had no option but to remain true.

So Ian's defection had left her bewildered as well as horrified. To Ursula, she said repeatedly, “I don't understand it. I don't know what he thinks he's doing. He
chose
her, didn't he?”

If Gerald was present, he listened intently to what Betty said. He fixed her with his bright, dark eyes, frowning slightly, hanging on her words. And she was flattered by his attention and by the encouragement he gave her to utter further absurdities.

“Of course I blame her, as well. Marriage is a matter of give-and-take, and you have to work at it; you both have to work at it.”

“It takes two to tango,” said Gerald.

Betty wasn't sure about that phrase, having never heard it before. Nor had Ursula then, and for all she knew, Gerald might have invented it himself. But her mother liked the encouragement, saying, “Well, exactly.”

Betty loved Gerald. He was the only husband she had ever come across who stayed at home all day and still earned money. Ursula thought then that Gerald had listened so intently to what was said because of his own adulterous behavior. He had an interest, as they said. Later on, of course, she knew
why he had listened. He had been making mental notes and every sentence Betty uttered found its way into
Time Too Swift
five years later.

Betty said that as for the girl—Judy, who would become Ian's second wife—Herbert thought she ought to be horsewhipped.

“How about skimmity riding?” said Gerald.

Betty didn't know what that was, nor did Ursula then, the works of Hardy not being among her reading matter. In a grave but approving voice, Gerald explained how once in rural England women who misbehaved were made to mount a horse, sit facing its rump, and be driven around the town to loud music and the jeers of the populace. Betty took it seriously and said that those were the days.

She nearly didn't come the following week because Ursula told her Gerald wouldn't be there; he was going down to Devon again to do more research. Even Ursula couldn't believe he had a mistress in Devon and another one in London, so she accepted the research story and thought of the key he had to the house in Goodwin Road. She would go there while her mother was in the house, minding the children with Pauline's help. It was an arrangement to suit everyone.

But she was afraid of going. It happened to her often, at this stage of her life and later, to think of herself as she had been just a few years before, six or seven years before, and say to herself, This isn't me. I can't be doing this thing, these things. I can't have come to this. I can't have been treated like this, used like this; it can't be true. And she would look in the mirror, seeing herself as very much unchanged since the time she was twenty-three, her face still round and pretty, calm and composed, her hair still smooth, shoulder-length, sand-colored, her eyes still the same gray-blue. But perhaps the self-satisfaction that had been in them was gone.

So she said to herself, I must wake up and find myself at home in Purley, in my bed with the gauzy curtains springing from the golden crown and Cicely Mary Barker's
Airymouse, Airymouse
on the wall and the southern suburbs outside the window. Work to go to in Dad's office, books from the library, watching television with Pam, getting ready to invite Colin Wrightson to the Library Users' Association … But she awoke always in her own bed in Holly Mount, to hear the children in the summer dawns talking and laughing in Gerald's room, and once to hear him, still in the dark,
scream out a loud, terrible scream, so that she had run in to him without a thought.…

That was after she had been to Goodwin Road and seen Mrs. Eady and heard what Mrs. Eady had to say and so had no choice but to stay with Gerald. Of course, she had a choice, but it hadn't seemed like that then. It seemed as if he had done nothing, as if it was he who had to forgive her for her suspicions, while she must take him for what he was and continue to hope.

Was it the morning following her visit to the house in Leyton that he had woken screaming? It felt to her as if it was, and yet it couldn't have been, for he was away in Devon that night, house hunting, as she later knew. So it must have been a morning or two later, a dawn, rather, when the eastern sky had just begun to lighten.

She couldn't understand why it didn't wake Sarah and Hope, it was such a cry. A scream that burst from the big healthy lungs of a man in the prime of life, a howl of horror, the cry a prisoner might give who finds himself walled up in a doorless dungeon. And that was just what he had fancied he was in the dream, which had been so real, so tangible, odorous, cold, that he thought it was true, that it was really happening.

When she got to him, he was sitting up, his mouth still open, his arms raised, his hands up, quivering, beside his head. Not thinking, not remembering in that moment those slights and rejections, she had gone straight to him and put herself into his uplifted arms. For a moment, he was still, petrified, and then his hands closed around her shoulders. He hugged her to him and she clung there, gasping. She hesitated for only a little while before getting into bed with him and holding him in her arms while he told her about his dream. There, two hours later, the astonished children found them fast asleep.

Ursula got to her feet and walked back along the wrinkled sand. Up in Lundy View House, someone had put lights on in the living room, though it wasn't even dusk yet. Tonight, the clocks would be turned back. The wind had blown leaves from the clifftop gardens down onto the beach, where they lay among the shells as if they, too, had been left stranded by the sea.

We never remember other people's dreams, only our own, but she remembered that one, Gerald's dream. He told her—she hadn't known—that it was recurrent, though sometimes years passed before it came again.

He whispered it all to her, and she was touched, moved, happy. He was talking to her as people who were close did talk to each other, confiding, telling their fears and their pain. It was only later that she understood anyone would have done for him, any ear would have served, anyone's arms and anyone's warmth would have been enough for him. And there were some who would have been far more welcome than she. Dream people from good dreams that for some reason he could never find or keep or confront in reality.

He had been in a city street at night. Which city, he said, he didn't know and it didn't matter. He had entered a tunnel. Or, rather, a passage between streets of stone houses in some densely built-up ancient place. Small stone houses in back-to-back terraces that ran up hills and down hills in parallel lines. The passage was walled and the walls were of stone, damp and glistening, and it was roofed over with stone, from which drops of water fell. Only a very few drops, and they fell only occasionally, but with a soft, dull plop onto the stone floor.

It was quite a short passage, which should have come out into one of the streets, but when he rounded the bend in it, he saw that the way out ahead had been blocked by a smooth sweep of mortar. Where the opening should have been was a wall of man-made stone. He turned and retraced his steps back to where he had entered, and there, during the time he had been in the passage, someone had blocked that end also. Someone had sealed it over with stone blocks set in mortar and the mortar was hard and firm, as if it had been there for years.

He was enclosed inside a tube of stone. And he knew that whatever the passage might once have been, it was now deep in the earth, a worm-cast tomb. All around him, the stones sweated water, falling faster now, dripping softly, forming pools at his feet. He pushed at the stones; he ran to the other end and pushed at the curtain of cement that was covered with fan-shaped prints where hard hands had pressed it in—
from the inside.
Yet there was no one inside but him, and it was then that he screamed and woke screaming, holding up his hands in the attitude of the stonemason who was himself.

Sarah dropped Hope at the hotel where she was having her reunion, walked into the pub, and saw Adam Foley sitting there on his own up at the bar. He
looked at her and she looked at him, apparently without recognition, and she walked past him and went into the ladies' room. When she came back, Alexander and Vicky had arrived and Alexander said, “I can't remember if you've met Adam.”

“Once, I think,” she said, and Adam said yes, once, but a long time ago.

Rosie came then and a man she'd brought with her named Tyger. Tyger with a
y
, as he told everyone, as if they were going to write him letters. Alexander got the drinks and they all moved to a table and Rosie said she had a conundrum to put to them. Suppose someone emigrated to North America and never came back home, or only came home on a visit and then went back again—it must happen to thousands of people—what became of the five (or seven or eight) hours they had gained? Everyone had answers for this: that time didn't work like that; that time wasn't a pathway, but a room; that the gain of hours was illusory, not real. Adam contributed and she contributed, but they didn't look at each other.