The Chimney Sweeper's Boy (28 page)

The Wrightsons had come, and on that Saturday afternoon, Sally and Colin and Gerald had gone out with the children, leaving her at home alone. Why had she been alone? On account, perhaps, of a migraine. About that time, the migraines had started, though the one she had had that afternoon must have gotten better very fast or never have been that bad, because she wasn't too ill to do what Colin wanted when he came back unexpectedly.

To make an essential phone call to London, he said. Well, he had said it to Sally and Gerald. He didn't repeat it to her. He said a lot of other things that she would have been ashamed to say to anyone, that she would have been ashamed to say even then: that he couldn't get her out of his mind, that he wasn't made of stone, that he had only one reason for coming to Lundy View House. He sat on the sofa beside her, saying all these things, and after a while she got up and went into the guest room with him.

It was awful, electric, unexpectedly what she had longed for. With anyone, it appeared. Until she looked at his face, the texture and color of blackberry mousse and glistening with sweat.

“Go easy,” he kept saying. “Go easy.”

But she couldn't go easy—it had been so long.

“Hey, you're quite a girl,” he puffed. “Go easy now. If you do that, I can't hold out. For God's sake …”

Probably he liked smiling, passive women. At any rate, he hadn't come back for more. She thought, madly, that she'd have killed him if he had, taken the kitchen knife with her and stuck it into his big belly.

She considered telling Gerald—just to see what he would say, what he would do. Instead, she asked him what it was
she
had done. It made her angry in later years to remember that she had put it that way Not “What's the matter with you?” or “Why don't you want me anymore?” But “What have
I
done?” When the women's movement really got under way and she was reading about it and even excited by these new ideas, she understood she had been brought up like that, that her mother was like that and her sister, Helen, for they, too, had been conditioned to think that when things went wrong, the woman must be to blame.

He said, “Nothing.”

Just like that, a bald nothing.

“We aren't having a real married life,” she said, because she couldn't bring herself to use such expressions as “making love,” or worse. “We don't share a room. Why don't we? That's why I asked what I'd done. Maybe I'd better say, where have I gone wrong?”

Then he told her. And she wished she hadn't asked.

“You were simply the wrong person. That's not as harsh as it sounds, because there is no right person and never can be.”

She almost whispered it. “Was there ever?”

“No.”

“Gerald, what do you want of me?”

“Nothing,” he said again.

She had grown up a lot. She wasn't nearly so afraid of him. “That's not good enough. I need more than that. I've a right to a better answer than that.”

He sighed. She remembered—oddly then for her—a line from Shakespeare: “The heart is sorely charged.” He sounded as if his heart were sorely charged.

“When we got married, I thought it would work. I thought I could manage.”
He didn't mention the children. This was fourteen years before
Hand to Mouth.
“It isn't my fault and it isn't yours.”

“Why can't you tell me why?”

“I can. Up to a point.” His sorely charged heart turned his face gray. “Long before I met you, I did something. Just a chance, rather daring something. Not wicked, not vicious. It destroyed my whole life. Later on, I tried to mend it, but it was too late. I'm sorry, but it makes me sick to talk of it. One day, maybe, I'll write it down. When I'm old. Perhaps.”

“And that keeps you … away from me?”

He ignored that. “We dislike those we've injured. I know I've injured you—so there it is. If it's any consolation to you, I've been celibate. Entirely celibate.”

She believed him. It wasn't a consolation. It just made her detective activities seem foolish. Her brother, Ian, had recently gotten his divorce, just in time to marry Judy and ensure the legitimacy of the child she was expecting. It had shown Ursula's family that divorce was possible without the world ending, that remarriage could happen. At the same time, Roger Pallinter's wife had left him.

“Are you asking me to stay?” she said, and it took a lot of courage to say it.

“No,” he said. “No, I'm not asking you. I'm not even expecting it.”

She waited for him to add that he would like it, though, that it was what he wanted. Instead, he added, “This is straight talking, so I may as well say I'm indifferent as to whether you stay or not. That's as you please. You have never shown a great deal of interest in the children, and they, of course, would stay with their father.”

She was so shocked that she couldn't speak. It was easily the most brutal thing anyone had ever said to her. She seldom cried, but that night she cried bitterly. Next day, a Sunday, the first reviews of
Orisons
had appeared in the papers. They were the best he had ever had. The critics spoke of his compassion, his warm humanity, and of his ability to re-create on the page the magic that can exist between a man and a woman.

He had driven into Gaunton and bought all the papers. That was the only time he was really happy, when he got good notices, and they had never been as good as this. He pushed the papers across the table to her, read bits out of
other reviews while she was reading, laughed with delight, once actually brought his hands together in a resounding clap of triumph. She was sure he had forgotten everything they had said the night before, or thought it of no particular account.

Now they wanted her to step into his shoes, so to speak, and publicize his new one. Walking across Russell Square toward the tube station, she thought of the things that woman Elaine Kirkman had said, the possibility of her going on the radio, on
Kaleidoscope
to talk about his writing, of a television program called
Bookworm
, of being interviewed by the
Guardian
and the
Times.
She hadn't been able to bring herself to tell Elaine Kirkman or Robert Postle that the last book of Gerald's she had read or even looked at had been published twelve years before.

And now there was this business of his not being who he said he was. It had been clear that neither Robert nor Elaine knew anything about that. They couldn't, therefore, know how profoundly it had affected her, making the house and everything in it that was his horrible to her. Impulsively, she had decided she must sell it and move, and she hadn't changed her mind after letting the sun set on her panic. The sun had set and risen again and she was more than ever resolved on getting out.

When she got home, she would return to clearing out all those papers, continue the task she had begun and flinched from. The house should be made tidy and sterile, cleaned of him, and then she would put it on the market. She was thinking like this when she looked up and saw Sam Fleming walking toward her.

Her immediate instinct was a childish one, her reflex to the sight of him something she hadn't had since she was a child. She wanted to hide. Not be seen. Or pretend not to see him, slip past, eyes down. But he had seen her. He put out both hands.

“Ursula!”

She knew she had gone red. “Hello.”

“Let me guess. You've been to your husband's publishers.”

It wasn't so very clever of him. Where else would she have been but to Carlyon-Brent, unless it was to the British Museum? “I'm in rather a hurry,” she said. “I've a train to catch.”

“What time's your train?”

She told him, wishing immediately that she'd lied and made it half an hour sooner.

“Then you've plenty of time,” he said. “Time to come and have a cup of tea with me.”

Sitting opposite him in the café near the tube station, she thought she might as well say it. What had she to lose? In that moment, stirring her tea, she thought suddenly that she had nothing left to lose, for she had already lost everything.

“Why do you want to be here with me?” she said, and she looked him straight in the eye. “If you'd wanted it, you'd have phoned me. This chance meeting—are you just being polite? You don't have to be polite with me.”

“I did phone you,” he said. “I phoned you twice. The first time, I was told I had a wrong number, which I didn't really believe, and the second time, I left a message and my phone number.”

“Oh. I see.” One of those weekends, it would have been, when the girls were home or one of them was home. “My daughters, I expect. I didn't get the message.”

“I'd hoped to make you understand that I didn't want to know you because of your husband's books. Getting my hands on some first editions. That's laughable. I wanted to know you—I want to know you—because I like you. I find you attractive. I think we'd get on together.”

“That's frank,” she said.

“I still feel like that. I feel like it more. I see it as a tremendous piece of luck, a very happy coincidence, meeting you like this.”

“Not such a coincidence,” she said. “I expect your business is around here, isn't it? You walk across the square every day at this time. And one day, I was bound to walk across it, too.” She felt a flicker then of that powerful desire that had afflicted her—oh, yes, it was an affliction—in the hotel that summer evening. His face, the sound of his voice, his enthusiasm, his eagerness to please her, so different from what she had been used to. “I must go and catch my train,” she said.

“I'll come with you. I'll put you into your train. Isn't that what they used to say?”

She told him it wasn't necessary. She had only to go one stop to King's Cross and change to the Circle. He thanked her for telling him but said he was familiar with the configuration of the London underground and that he was going with her.

The train stopped in the tunnel between King's Cross and Euston Square and sat there for ten minutes. She had asked him how Molly was, and he was talking about Molly and the children and telling her how he thought Molly might marry again, when Ursula realized she had missed the intercity train. It wouldn't now be possible to get to Paddington in time, and the next train was very late, too late to get a connection to Barnstaple. The tube train started with a shudder, but it was too late. She thought of asking Sarah or Hope if she could stay the night. One of them would say it just wasn't convenient, sorry, Ma, and the other would say yes, all right, but in a forlorn voice, and she thought she couldn't bear that.

The tears came into her eyes. He was looking at her, aghast. I know what this is, she thought. This is the start of some sort of breakdown. That is what will happen to me next. I shall break down, and that really means go mad, so to pieces.

“What is it?” he said.

“I've missed my train!”

“I know. Let's get out at the next stop.” It was Baker Street, and on the escalator, he said, “We'll find you a hotel for the night. Then I shall take you out to dinner and you can tell me why you're so unhappy, because I don't believe it's missing your train or losing your husband.”

“No,” she said in a small voice. “No, it's not.”

She thought he said that he would like to make her happy, but she couldn't be sure, because it was noisy in the tube station and he might have said something quite different.

J
ASON
T
HAGUE HAD FOUND
R
OBERT
N
UTTALL'S WIDOW
, Anne, living in the Cotswolds. Her husband had been a dentist in Oxford and they had retired to Chipping Campden.

“That makes me wonder about dentists,” Sarah said. “I mean the Candlesses' dentist. They'd have had one.”

“I don't think so. Most people didn't have dentists in the thirties, not a dentist you go to for regular checkups. You went to a dentist to have a tooth out when you had a toothache. Anyway, I asked my nan, and she said her father had had all his teeth out and false ones for a twenty-first birthday present.”

“I don't believe it!”

“That's what I said. My nan's got dentures now, has had all my lifetime. She never went near a dentist till she was seventeen and living in Sudbury, and that was, like I said, to have a tooth out.”

What would her father have thought of Jason's pitted face and his voice and his accent? She said coldly, “So we've reached a dead end.”

“Don't say that. There's still the knife grinder and the chair mender. Is my check in the post?”

Sarah had been fourteen when
Hamadryad
was short-listed for the Booker Prize, old enough to have some understanding of what that meant and young enough to be bitterly hurt and convinced of injustice when it didn't win. She had read the novel and believed that the young girl, Delphine, the protagonist,
was herself. She asked her father and he said, “There's something of you in Delphine and something of Hope.”