The Chimney Sweeper's Boy (39 page)

Sarah said thoughtfully, “This was the next brother to my dad, my uncle James?”

“Was. He's dead, according to Liam. The sisters are alive, Liam thinks, Margaret and Mary. He says there was something odd about Mary, but he doesn't know what, or can't remember. It's the youngest one, Stephen, I mean when I say your uncle.”

“And he's still alive?”

“He was sixty this year. Born in 1937 and nineteen months old when his father, the chimney sweep, died. All Liam could tell me about him was that he was a schoolteacher in Plymouth.”

“In
Plymouth.
But then he and Dad … Look, Dad, all of us, we lived in the same county; Plymouth's only about seventy miles away. And Dad worked in Plymouth at one time.”

“Maybe. So what? I don't know any more than I've told you. I haven't gotten around to looking Stephen up in a phone book. I could go to Dublin if you want, but it'll cost you, and I don't think I'll get any more from Liam. Stephen is the next step.”

“How about Margaret and Mary?”

“Liam didn't even know their names, only that there were two sisters and one of them had done something peculiar or different or whatever. He knew James and Desmond were dead and he thought John was, too. Oh, and he said the mother, his half sister—”

“My grandmother.”

“Your grandmother, right. He said he thought she'd married again.”

“Where in London was it the student nurse came to when she visited James?”

“Liam can't remember. The girl herself—well, she's fifty-five now—she married a Canadian and went to live in Nova Scotia.”

Sarah sat in silence for a moment. She was thinking of her father's visits to Plymouth, notably a time when she was a child that he had been there to give a talk and sign copies of a newly published novel in a bookshop. If Stephen had gone there, would he have recognized his brother? Plymouth
was a big city with a large population. How many people would have attended her father's talk? A hundred, if he was lucky.

All this put a strain on her, seemed to take hold of her emotions and wring them out. “I'm going to open another bottle of wine.”

“Not for me,” he said, and then, astounding her, he added, “You drink too much.”

“I beg your pardon? That's rich, coming from you.”

“I know I drank your gin, but it's only when I'm with you I actually ever get a drink. But you don't just drink when you're with me, do you? Well, obviously you don't. You drink like this all the time, and you shouldn't—it's bad for you. You're beautiful and you'll spoil your beauty.”

The only part of that she really heard—the earlier sentences passed over her—was the last. So that was how he saw her? She was surprised. But she didn't open the wine. “I was forgetting—you have to get the last train.”

“I've missed it,” he said. “It went at eleven. Can you—I mean, could I kip down here?”

He had shocked her as much as if he had started taking his clothes off. Her instinct was to say a violent no. No, no, of course you can't. Go to a hotel; I'll pay. She got up and took the glasses to the kitchen, stood thinking, but thinking of nothing much except how she hated the idea. Then she walked back into the room and said, “Yes, yes, of course you can.” She made herself smile and even managed to pat his shoulder. “Of course you can stay—what else?”

If only she had two bathrooms. Suppose he used her toothbrush? But no one would do that. She said good night and to please turn off the lights, rushed into the bathroom, then rushed out again and into her bedroom, clutching her toothbrush.

It was better when her door was shut and much better when he put the lights out. She could pretend she was alone as usual. She got into bed. It was quite silent in the flat, with no sound but the occasional distant hum of traffic. The proof of
Less Is More
was on the bedside cabinet and she began to read her father's last book.

Perhaps more than anything else could have done, the plot of this novel distracted her mind from the unwanted guest in the next room. Gerald Candless plunged directly into this narrative of a man who abruptly leaves his
family without explanation for his departure, takes on a new identity and profession, and makes for himself a new life. In a series of flashbacks, he had his protagonist recall that former happy existence, the closely united family, the loving parents.

Overcome by his memories, Philip knows he must at least once return to the family home and experience its atmosphere, absorb what he is sure it still has but what he has lost. All these years, he has retained a key. He watches from the opposite side of the street, in a surge of emotion and pain sees his mother go out, and, once she is out of sight, lets himself into the house.

Sarah had reached this point when she fell asleep. It was more a dozing off, and she jerked herself awake again, turned the page, read another paragraph and then another. But she knew that if you are tired, it matters very little how interested you may be in something or how intensely you want to go on with it, sleep will get you. She had learned that in her student days. In a way, she was relieved, for if she could feel like this, the presence of Jason Thague in the flat couldn't be seriously incommoding her, and that was her last thought when, having dropped the proof on the floor and turned off the lamp, she fell asleep.

At first, she thought it was a dream that woke her. Something heavy and alive lying beside her, an arm around her waist, a mouth against her cheek. She came back to consciousness, felt real skin, a real hand.… She sat up, screamed, “Get off me!”

She shoved him with all her strength, though strength wasn't needed, he was so thin and light. She jumped up, kicked him, stood on the mattress kicking him, leaped off, pulling the quilt around her, cocooning herself in it.

“Get out of here, you fucking rapist,” she yelled at him. “Get out of my flat. Get out.”

One of them put the light on. It must have been Jason. He sat on the bed, blinking.

“Get out. Now.”

“I wouldn't rape you, Sarah,” he said. “I wouldn't know how to rape anyone.”

“Just go,” she said. “Please just get dressed and go.”

“I thought you liked me. You said you loved me. On the phone you said it,
but I knew it was a joke. I'm not a fool. But I did think you liked me, and when you said I could stay, I thought you might—well, maybe not do much the first time, but something.…” To her horror, he began to cry. He put his head in his hands and sobbed.

“Oh God,” she said. “Oh God.”

“I'm so lonely, Sarah. And I'm hungry. When I played the Game and got it right I thought I'd proved myself to you. I'm so bloody lonely and I'm starving to death.”

“You don't expect me to feed you, do you? Just get out. Get out
now.
”

D
RIVING HER UP TO
O
XFORD
, G
ERALD TOLD
S
ARAH
the story about Cardinal Newman, whose father's decision as to the university he should attend depended on which way the coachman chanced to bring the carriage around that fateful morning. If the horses had faced eastward, it would have been Cambridge, but, in fact, they faced westward, so it was to Oxford that Newman went.

Such last-minute decisions had for a long time not been feasible, Gerald said, though there had, of course, never been any doubt that his daughters would have the pick of any seats of learning available. Ursula, sitting in the front for form's sake while Sarah and Hope were in the back, thought it unfortunate for a girl of seventeen and a girl of nearly sixteen to be exposed constantly to this kind of flattery, but it would be useless to say so. It was probably too late, anyway, and the damage, if damage there was, was done.

She was working hard for her own degree from the Open University. Gerald and the girls knew about it and Sarah and Hope had at first shown some curiosity. What did she want it for? Was she going to get a job? Why art history? Gerald, on the other hand, appeared entirely uninterested. He seldom watched television, making an exception only when the adaptations of
Hamadryad
and later of
A Paper Landscape
were broadcast on BBC2, and when Ursula took over the downstairs spare room for herself and moved the set in there, he said merely, but in a tone that was more gratified than disapproving, “That will mean we can't have anyone to stay.”

On the return journey to Devon, though Gerald and Hope talked exhaustively about academic matters concerning her future and the glowing A levels she would get, with occasional reference to Sarah's prospects, Pauline's dismal abandonment of education, and Robert Postle's double first, no comment at all was made on her, Ursula's, art history endeavors. Still, nothing was said about Gerald's own academic achievements at Trinity, either. And Ursula didn't mind. She would rather have nothing said than the casual contempt that was the probable alternative.

Gerald had been occupied in writing a script based on one of his earlier novels for a feature film. Ursula had no typing to do for him and was left free to get on with her own work. But in the early spring of the following year, he began writing a new novel. Sometimes he found his title before he had written more than a few pages, and it was so in this case. He called it
Hand to Mouth.

Since Sarah's departure, things had been rather better between them. Hope, too, was much occupied with school, seemed always to be out pursuing after-school activities, and their rapprochement, if it could be so called, might have been due to their being much alone together. Ursula supposed it was because she was his only companion that he was obliged to talk to her, but whatever it was, there was no longer any evidence of the dislike he had once more or less expressed for her.

On one occasion, very early in the morning, when she was watching a filmed lecture on the Italian Renaissance, he came into the room and sat down beside her on the settee. At the film's close, he asked her questions, seeming genuinely interested. Another time, he asked her about the class she had attended in Ilfracombe. She expected mockery and jibes, but none came, nor did a suggestion that she had only chosen art history as her discipline because Edward Akenham taught it.

Trying to account for his approaches to her—conversation at mealtimes, signs of consideration, even an inquiry after her health—she wondered if it might be his age, if he was settling down, resigning himself to her and his fate. In May of that year, he would be fifty-eight. Inevitably, he would soon be alone with her, both his children departed.

*  *  *

Gerald handed her the first chapter of
Hand to Mouth
one wet day in March. It was raining too hard for her to go for her beach walk and so she settled down at once at the typewriter. It wasn't until she was given the next two chapters that she began to see what was being done to her. She still remembered thirteen years later, with almost the same physical sensation, her increasing sickness, her actual nausea, as she deciphered this narrative of a man choosing a young naive girl from a suburb to be the mother of the children he so much wanted.

By the time the novel began, she had become a silly woman in early middle age. Her name was Una. She was married to a distinguished musician with a full and productive life, and because she had no talents herself and no inclination for good works, she spent her time in acquiring an education. The early chapters were about the turn academe had taken in the late seventies and early eighties, about cranky degree subjects, low standards in polytechnics, evening classes in obscure crafts and Oriental martial arts, education by mail and education by television.

Flashback chapters told of Una's youth in Golders Green. The only daughter of the prosperous owner of a department store and his wife, she grew up ignorant, spoiled, and sheltered. It was at the only concert she had ever attended that she met her future husband, a composer on the lookout for a healthy, undemanding bride.

Two sons were born to them. They lived in North London, in Highgate. Una was never able to hold her own in the conversations her husband had with his intellectual friends and she turned out not to be as good a cook and housekeeper as he had hoped for and a less than adequate mother. At the same time, her pretensions grew, and when the family moved to Somerset, Una began investigating the possibilities of further education in order to keep up with her husband.

When she got to this point, Ursula walked into the study and asked for an explanation.

“You can do the explaining,” he said. “I don't understand what this is about.”

She told him and he denied it. Una had dark hair, she was forty-six to Ursula's forty-four, she lived in Somerset, her husband was a composer younger than she, and she had sons, not daughters.