The Chimney Sweeper's Boy (43 page)

She had probably drunk almost a liter of wine, for Stefan had certainly not drunk more than the contents of the small carafe. And then there had been the brandy. Jason Thague's words came back to her and she thought, But if I don't drink, how will I get through my days? How could I have gotten through this evening? Oh, I want my father, I want him. I never drank so much while my father was alive.

It seemed an interminable journey. Once or twice, she thought of parking the car under a hedge, of lying down to sleep on the backseat with her coat and the car blanket over her. She would be afraid in this wild, deserted place. It was strange, because she never was afraid of the dark or who might be out and about in the dark or of being attacked. What she had learned this evening had made her vulnerable. A skin had been pulled off her and the tender places exposed. She drove on, glad when, as occasionally happened, she saw the lights of another car, the lights of the empty towns as she passed through them.

Lundy View House was in darkness when she reached it, the sea a shining
pan of ink, a glittering expanse between invisible headlands. A tiny segment of moon showed between bluish swollen clouds. She let herself in and went straight upstairs in the dark, in the familiar place, her father's house, where no light was needed to find her way.

Ursula came up to her and kissed her. It was an unprecedented act in the morning, and though she knew she should have been more trusting, she was suspicious. A favorite phrase of her father's, quoting from
The Taming of the Shrew
, came to mind: “I wonder what it bodes.”

“I am thinking of selling the house,” her mother said when breakfast was coming to an end.

“This house?” Sarah knew that was stupid, as though her mother possessed several houses.

“I don't want to live here alone. It's too big for me, for one thing.”

“And for the other things?”

Ursula didn't answer. “I don't think it means much to you without your father.”

“What about Hope? It means a lot to her.”

“Hope has been here only a couple times since your father's funeral.”

Sarah, who had considered telling her mother all the things she had found out, now changed her mind. If the house was sold how could she go into Barnstaple and meet Adam Foley? Ursula didn't read her thoughts, but it seemed as if she did.

“I know children always think of their parents' house as their home. Even after years away. But I don't want to be condemned to living alone on the edge of a cliff above the Bristol Channel for the rest of my life.”

Just because you and Hope might occasionally want to come here, Ursula had been going to add, and use it as a hotel, for Sarah's fourteen-hour-long Saturday-night absences hadn't escaped her notice, but she didn't say it. The habit of conciliation and gentleness took a long time dying, would probably live on in its present moribund state.

“Where will you go?”

Ursula wasn't lying. She really wasn't quite sure yet. “I don't know.”

“Have you put it on the market?”

“Not yet. I wanted to tell you first. And I want to say, while you're here,
will you have a look around and see if there's anything you want? Furniture or ornaments, of course, and anything of your father's. There's a big box of his reviews in the study.”

Black velvet from head to foot. She varnished her fingernails midnight blue and when her face was done, painted far more thickly and elaborately than it ever was in London, she unscrewed the top from the silver-flecked midnight-blue lipstick and sat there holding it in her hand. You will be thirty-two next week, she said to herself. Thirty-two was young, but not young enough. She had a swift nightmare vision of horror, undefined, shapeless, a gnarled hand in it, a grinning face, and she put the lipstick away and found a red one instead.

Hope had a long black cloak in her room. Sarah put it on, took it off. Batwoman. She saw her mother looking at her fingernails but knew she wouldn't say anything; she never did.

“I thought I'd wear Dad's sheepskin. It's so cold. Is it in his room?”

“I'll get it for you.”

The coat that had been a jacket on him was almost full-length on her, dark gray, the sheep's wool lining curly gray, like his hair. She snuggled into it, closed her eyes, and felt as if her father were hugging her. In the hall, Ursula was on the phone, talking animatedly. Sarah just raised her hand, mouthed that she didn't know when she'd be back.

After Sarah had gone and she had finished talking to Sam, Ursula went back to the kitchen and once more opened the broom cupboard. She had completely forgotten about the bag of Gerald's clothes in there until Sarah had asked about the sheepskin coat. Sarah had better keep that coat. The rest of the clothes, she would put in her car boot now.

A search of the pockets yielded two crumpled handkerchiefs, a five-pound note, the stub of a pencil, a receipt for petrol, and a key. The shape of one's own house keys are imprinted on the mind. Close the eyes and the outline can be seen, the silhouette. Ursula didn't recognize this key. But she knew what it was and which door it opened. It was the key to the house in Goodwin Road.

So it
had
been he whom Dickie Parfitt saw. Twenty-eight years ago, but
yesterday all the same. She would never know why he went there and now she no longer cared. A black floater swam across her vision, the beginning of pain following it. She would have a full-blown migraine by nightfall.

They were all in the pub but Adam. Rosie admired Sarah's nails and said she'd thought of having hers done with a pattern, designer nails, or whatever it was called, but really she was too old. Rosie, Sarah happened to know, was thirty-three. A discussion ensued as to what they should do, where they should go.

“Why can't we just stay here?” said Sarah, looking at the clock.

“It's so boring here. And the club is boring.”

Someone Alexander knew was having a party. A thirtieth birthday. He had been invited, so they wouldn't be crashing it. What, five of them? Rosie said. That “five” made Sarah uncomfortable, because she suddenly thought they must wonder why she always came alone, that she never brought a man, that she apparently had no man.

“We'll have another drink here,” said Vicky, “and then we'll go to this new restaurant that's called the Trawl or something and have fish and chips and then we'll go to the club. How about that?”

Sarah said as casually as she could, “But will Adam find us?”

“He's not coming, you'll be glad to hear. He hasn't come down from London.”

She was dazed and stilled, as if a gray net had been thrown over her. He wasn't coming. He hadn't come down from London. Those two sentences repeated themselves in her head. The whole evening stretched ahead of her as some rare childhood evenings had for her and Hope, notably when Auntie Helen was visiting or her grandparents, gray panoramas of boring grown-up talk, until her father had come and rescued them. He couldn't rescue her now. No one could. She looked at her ridiculous fingernails, down at her knees in skintight black velvet jeans. They made it quite difficult to walk, something she had felt as sexy before but now knew was absurd.

She drank her second drink, went with the others to the restaurant, aware that her quietness must be remarked on but finding nothing to say. The reason for his absence was no longer a mystery. It was deliberate, of course, the ultimate rudeness, the titillating, exciting rudeness. Now she would never
know when he would come back, had no way of knowing, since other contact was forbidden in their unwritten laws. He was challenging her, or was he seeing how far he could go, if he could draw her down here week after week on the off chance? She shook; she couldn't eat. Nausea came up in her throat.

“I won't go to the club with you,” she said. “I'd better go home. I'm not feeling well.”

It was the first Sunday down here since her father had died that she hadn't woken up bludgeoned by a hangover, hadn't had to drive back to Lundy View House with a throbbing head and shaking hands. She got up early and dialed Stefan's number. His answering machine was on and she left a message on it. If he wasn't busy this afternoon, could she come and hear the rest of it?

Perhaps now was the time to tell her mother. Or would it be better to wait until she had heard what else Stefan had to say? I shall be here again next Saturday, after all, she said to herself. And then she realized what she had said and was as quick to deny it. Adam mustn't be allowed to rule her. She wouldn't return until the fourth Saturday in the month, until after Christmas.

“Did Dad ever go out on a Saturday night?” she asked abruptly.

“Possibly.” Ursula seemed indifferent. “Occasionally. To take a manuscript to Rosemary perhaps. Why?”

“I think he went to church. I think he went—at the end, he went back to the church.”

Ursula's sudden bark of laughter shocked Sarah. Contrition followed: Her mother said she was sorry, and then added, “If you and Hope want to come here for Christmas, I'll do my best to see we have the nicest time we can.” She hesitated. “Fabian, of course, and there's a friend I'd like to ask, and we could invite—”

“Oh, no. No, I couldn't. And I'm sure Hope couldn't. It would be terrible—can't you see it would be terrible?”

“Perhaps. If you say so.”

“You'll be all right, won't you? You can have your friend and … well, anyone else you'd like to ask.”

“I can have my friend,” said Ursula.

After lunch, she tried Stefan again, and again the machine was on. Had he said he was going away? Had he said something about visiting his son? She couldn't remember. She left another message that she would like to see him the following Friday. That way, she would have to come down; she would be here on Saturday.…

Afterward, she hardly knew what had made her phone Hope. She never phoned Hope from Devon. Even before she made the call, she knew she wouldn't tell Hope their mother meant to sell the house. She'd be
afraid
to do that over the phone, afraid of Hope's explosion, her wail of wrath and misery. But now she had Hope on the line, she had to say something to her.

“I'm bringing some stuff of Dad's back. D'you know why he didn't keep any reviews of
A White Webfoot
?”

“He didn't like them. The critics said he'd written a thriller. You won't remember. You know you were away.”

“You told me it was based on the Highbury murder.”

“That's what they said, the Ryan murder case.”

“The
what
?”

“The murder of Desmond Ryan. I don't know if it was. That's what they said.”

That evening, when she got back from Devon, she went straight to Hope. Fabian wasn't there and for once her sister was alone.

“It was years before we were born,” Hope said. “One of the critics said 1960, I think.”

“He was Dad's brother,” Sarah said. “One of his younger brothers,” and she told her sister about Stefan and the Ryan family. Hope listened, not interrupting. The color came up into her face, burned her cheeks, then faded away as fast as it had come.

“You're saying that after all those years, Daddy based a novel on his brother's murder?”

“It looks like it.”

“But if that's true, Daddy had left his home and all of them behind for almost ten years before Desmond was murdered.”

“He'd still have known about it, wouldn't he? If it was in the papers. D'you know the circumstances?”

“I don't know anything about it,” Hope said. “I've read
A White Webfoot
—of course I have, and so have you. But that won't be a faithful reporting of the case; it'll be the way Daddy always did it. The filtering process, the changing to disguise it and make a better story. I don't really understand why you want to know. You're going to write about Daddy, aren't you, not his family?”

“He is his family. I can't leave them out.”

“
I
would. You know who he was now, his real name, and that he took the new one in 1951—isn't that enough?”

“I don't know why he did,” Sarah said.

“Well, it wasn't because his brother got himself beaten to death or whatever nine years later, that's for sure. Ma phoned me this afternoon—did I tell you? No? She says she's going to sell the house. I wasn't surprised; I thought she would.”

“Don't you mind?”

“It's funny,” said Hope, “but I've been thinking about it a lot. I mean, before she told me. I even thought that maybe you and I could raise the money, get huge mortgages or something, and buy it from her, and then I thought, What's the point? I couldn't bear to be there. I can't bear the place. I can't bear to be in the rooms. Not without Daddy.” She looked at her sister, with tears streaming down her face. “I loved him too much, you know. I loved him too much for my own good.”

The
FOR SALE
sign was discreet, white with austere black Gothic lettering. But passersby stopped to look at it. There weren't many on foot at this time of year, but even cars stopped. The estate agent had asked what Ursula would think of advertising the house as the former home of Gerald Candless. “Anything that sells it,” she had said recklessly.

The study was empty of his papers now. The books remained. It looked, she thought, like the room in a writer's house that has been preserved as a museum, the rows of reference works, the shelf of his own books facing the desk, the typewriter uncovered. She had laid a sheet of A4 paper beside it and a fountain pen across the paper, then taken them away again. Stupid game playing—what was the point?

Sarah had taken the first edition of
Hand to Mouth.
She was glad to see it
no more, the black moth on its yellow spine, the woman on the front cover that the artist had given black hair and a full red mouth but in whose face she could always see her own. The rest of them, the four that Hope didn't want, she intended to hand over to Sam.
A Man of Thessaly
was the next one Gerald had written and the patient typist in Ilfracombe deciphered. She remembered, with distaste for her own pettiness, the quiet pleasure she had taken in witnessing his struggles with the unwieldy mass of paper, scrawled all over as by a planchette needle gone wildly out of control. Once a week, he had grabbed handfuls of it, stuffed them into giant brown envelopes, and driven off to Ilfracombe.