The Chimney Sweeper's Boy (36 page)

There was some dancing and a female impersonator—Rosie swore it was a woman impersonating a man impersonating a woman—came on and told transvestite jokes. Sarah was casting caution aside and drinking one of the club's champagne cocktails when Adam Foley came down the steps and walked up to their table. It was a cold night and he was wearing a greatcoat that reached almost to his feet.

He said, to Sarah's consternation, “I've come to apologize.”

There was an expectant and somewhat excited silence.

“I'm sorry. I apologize. I bitterly regret my behavior. Will you forgive me?” He didn't wait for her to speak. “That's all right, then. Scene over. Fight unnecessary. Now can I sit down and have a drink?”

No one said anything. Adam Foley took a glass and helped himself from the red wine on the table. Sarah, who had long abandoned her evening as a waste of time, now felt herself beginning to tremble. His presence—he had sat down next to her—made her feel almost faint. The silence was broken by Alexander's asking if anyone wanted to eat. Either at the Scarlet Angel or a curry house somewhere.

This led to a discussion of food and eating places. Adam Foley turned his back on Sarah. She had been sitting next to one of the cuboid Art Deco pillars that held up, or appeared to hold up, the black-and-gilt ceiling, and by moving as he had, still inside his voluminous big-shouldered coat, he managed to force her back into an alcove and exclude her from the company.

Her position was made worse by his sliding his chair back so that it pressed against her knees. She was actually squashed against the wall, in a certain amount of pain. For a while, she didn't know what to do. And no one else—from what she could see of them—seemed to have noticed. That she had no idea what particular game he was playing this evening added to her excitement, but all that would be lost if she was actually made ridiculous. If she was squeezed out of her corner onto the floor or forced to call for help. If he crushed her so that she was physically injured.

Then he stood up. The coat swept against her face, a thick muffling mass of tweed. She let out a cry and pushed at him. He stepped aside, looked at her, and said, “Good God, how long have you been there?”

As if he had been totally unaware of her. As if she were insignificant, not a woman, not a human being, of no account. He had spoken to her as if she were someone's small dog trapped behind a sofa. And for an instant, she doubted. It was as if all that had been between them and all they had done had never been done. But only for an instant. Still, she couldn't answer him; he had deprived her of her powers of repartee.

They were going off to eat somewhere. Or some of them were. She heard him say, and her heart seemed to revolve, return to its place with a bump, “Curry it is, then.”

At the foot of the stairs, he stepped back to let Rosie and Vicky pass ahead of him and then walked on up, leaving her to follow. Her throat was dry and blocked at the same time. On the back of his coat, at about waist level, her mouth had left a dark red blurred imprint. She asked herself then what she had never before asked: why she liked this, why it excited her so much, and why did the doubt add to her excitement. If she had been drunk, she was no longer, but she still walked slowly, dragging herself up the stairs.

The street door swung back. She had to put up her hands to keep it from striking her in the face and she heard the doorman or bouncer or whatever he was mutter something like “That's a right bastard.”

Out in the street, they were gone, all of them. She imagined him telling them she'd said to say good-bye for her, that she'd gone home. Bitterly, she thought that by now they must be used to her leaving early and chagrined perhaps that for once he wasn't. The car park was dark, almost empty of cars, a great pool of oil lying in the middle of the asphalt. She skirted around it, looked for her car, then saw a single point of red light.

It was his cigarette. He was sitting on the rear fender, and when she came up, shaking and speechless, he took the cigarette from his mouth and with thumb and forefinger put it into hers with a lingering touch.

At nearly thirty-two, which was young for this to happen, Sarah saw in herself signs of developing eccentricity. Of her curious relationship with Adam Foley, she preferred not to think, for thinking would, if not spoil it, interfere with its remote and emotionless nature. But that decision in itself was an eccentricity, as the relationship was. Another was her growing dislike of admitting anyone else into her home. She had asked her mother to stay, both immediately after her father died and more recently, but her relief at her invitation's being refused was disproportionate. After each refusal, she had come home and luxuriated in her solitude, drinking too much and falling asleep fully clothed on the hearth rug.

Ideally, she understood herself to feel, she would never let anyone else in here ever again. That went for Hope and Fabian, too, she discovered to her surprise. She amused herself for a while thinking of things she could do that would make it impossible for people to be invited here. These were few, but
they included displaying hard pornography on the walls, never cleaning the place, and taking all her clothes off the moment she got in the door.

None of it was possible this evening because Jason Thague was coming. Sarah groaned at the thought of it, adding making faces in the mirror to that other bizarre but quite frequent habit of hers—talking aloud to herself. He was coming because he was in London on her business and had invited him-self as a matter of course. Why not? It could be done on the phone and it could be done by letter, but why not face-to-face, since she lived in London? He had phoned her at college just as she was off to give her Wednesday-morning tutorial—and what could she say but yes? He probably didn't notice how grudging a yes it was.

He couldn't help his acne scars or his clothes or, come to that, his accent, but he could have washed himself and washed his hair. The ancient Colin Wrightson had told her some months before in a burst of self-pity that along with arthritis and a diminution of hearing, he had lost his sense of smell. Sarah felt this wouldn't be such a bad deprivation when Jason came into her flat. Her own sense of smell was acute. It registered an earthiness about his clothes and a staleness coming from his skin and hair.

She offered him a drink and sat a long way away. He had been most of the day at St. Catherine's House, checking on the Ryan family, and had found them, had found all the children born to John William and Anne Elizabeth Ryan and followed the history of some of them. Noticing that he drank his drink rapidly and somehow furtively, as if he was afraid someone else might get to it first, she offered him another. He shook his head.

“My nan keeps brandy for medicinal purposes,” he said. “I try to faint sometimes.” She didn't smile. “It's a long time since I tasted gin. I don't want to get carried away. Can I get myself some water?”

“I'll get it.” She fetched Perrier from the fridge. “Tell me about the Ryans.”

“They were married in 1925. In Ipswich. Her name was O'Drida. The first child was John Charles, born April twentieth, 1926.”

She felt a stinging behind the eyes as if she was going to cry and was surprised to hear her own voice so steady. “Was that my father?”

“I'd think so, wouldn't you? He was three weeks older than Gerald Candless.”

She talked to maintain that steadiness. “The death of the little boy his own age would have stayed with him always. You can imagine that, his father coming home and saying what had happened, that the Candlesses had lost their only son, and Mrs. Ryan going over to the house with her children, her own little boys—oh God, she was my
grandmother.
” This time, her voice broke—she couldn't help it—but she managed to cough the tears away, dip her head, fists to forehead.

“Hey, come on,” he said. “This won't do,” and he went over to her, sat down beside her, and put an arm around her shoulders.

If anything could have banished emotion, it was this. She exerted herself not to shake him off, not to scream at him to get out. Almost worse than the arm and the greasiness was the handkerchief proffered to her, a gray crumpled object smelling of dirty pockets and dried nasal mucus.

She jumped up. “I'm fine now. Thanks. Let me get you another drink. Some ice.”

He nodded happily. She couldn't help noticing his glass was heavily marked with sticky fingerprints and salivary ellipses. “Please go on,” she said. “I'll be all right now.”

“They were Irish Catholics. Nan remembers her mother telling her that. There were five other children. James Robert and Desmond William were the next.” He was reading from notes he had made. “They were probably the ones left outside the gate along with”—he looked warily at her—“your dad, because Margaret wasn't born till August 1933 and the other two, Mary and Stephen, not till 1935 and 1937, respectively.”

“Then Stephen can't have been much more than a baby when the father died.”

Jason referred to his notes. “Ryan, the sweep, died in April 1939, when Stephen was—let me see—nineteen months old. Your dad would have been just thirteen. And sometime after that but before the start of the war, I think—I don't know, mind—the family moved to London. Mrs. Ryan, with John, James, Desmond, Margaret, Mary, and Stephen, moved to somewhere in London to the home of a relative.”

“What does ‘relative' mean?”

“It doesn't mean brother,” said Jason. “O'Drida is a very uncommon name. I've looked in a few phone books for various areas and not been able to find
one. I found Anne Elizabeth O'Drida in the records as born in Hackney in 1897 and a sister Catherine Mary O'Drida born in 1899 but no brothers.”

“And your grandmother can't be more specific?”

“I've tried ‘uncle' on her and ‘brother-in-law,' but it doesn't ring any bells. I reckon she's told me everything she knows.” He grinned at her. “If I persist, she may tell me more than she knows.”

“Is Hackney significant?”

“Maybe. But there's no O'Drida in Hackney in the phone book. And why would there be? It's a hundred years ago we're talking about.”

“So what happens next?”

Instead of answering, he said, “Your dad wasn't a Catholic?”

She shook her head, then remembered something. It was still there, in the dictionary, between
dynamicity
and
Earl Marshal.
She held out the palm cross to Jason. “He never went out on a Sunday morning. I'd know; I was almost always there.”

“But maybe he went out on a Saturday night. Lots of Catholic churches have Mass on Saturday evening.”

“What a lot you know,” she mocked him, suddenly angry.

Jason looked at his watch. “I guess I'd better go home.”

He said it with a kind of drawn-out reluctance, a shrug, and a heavy sigh. He looked at her as if waiting for her to suggest an alternative. Perhaps he thought she would put him up in a hotel?

“Have a last drink,” she said, and on an impulse, while filling his glass, she added, “I'll give you your taxi fare to Liverpool Street.”

“Thanks. I've missed the ten o'clock, but there's a last train at eleven.”

“You have a lecture in the morning?”

“I don't exactly go to classes anymore.” His eyes avoided hers. “I thought you might have realized. I … well, I dropped out. That is, I never went back after the Easter break.”

“I see.” She didn't quite. “So your grant—what are you living on?”

“You,” he said. “You've been a godsend.” He looked at her then. “In more ways than one.”

She went into the kitchen and found her purse, came back with two ten-pound notes, a good deal more than his taxi would cost—but what the hell.

He took the notes gratefully. “Nan doesn't know. I reckon she'd stop
feeding me if she did—just when I need it most. And giving me baths. I ought to make myself wash in cold water, but I guess I don't have the willpower, as Nan would say. My parents don't know. They think I'm still trying to cope with psychology. But something'll happen, I reckon. Something usually does.”

She thought with distaste that anyone these days can keep himself clean. Heat water in a kettle, have a stand-up wash, go to the launderette. If she told him so, he would only tell her she'd never experienced it. Which would be true.

“Look, I thought I'd keep on at the O'Drida angle,” he said. “I'll keep at it.”

She saw him to the door, then, on second thought, went down with him to the street and waited until a taxi came. From the window, he waved to her with enthusiasm. She returned upstairs, shivered at the stuffiness in the flat, and began opening windows. Absurdly perhaps, but with a real distaste, she didn't want to touch that glass, but at last she did, having first put on a rubber glove. Even so, she picked it up gingerly between thumb and forefinger and carried it out to the kitchen at arm's length, the way one might remove a dead spider.

A bound proof of
Less Is More
arrived the next day from Robert Postle. The cover design, as Carlyon-Brent pointed out on the back, was not that which would appear on a finished copy. An empty city street by night, a photograph, not a drawing—it looked more like somewhere on the continent than London. The back cover of the proof also bore quotations from highly laudatory reviews of the author's previous works and commendations from Malcolm Bradbury and A. N. Wilson.

At the foot were a few lines informing the reader that publication would be on January 29, 1998, the price £16.99 in hardback, its size 5½ by 8¼ inches and its length 256 pages, all this followed by the ISBN number. A short biography inside told Sarah a few things she now knew to be false about her father, such as his status as an only child and his education at Trinity, and something painfully true, that he had died in July 1997.