The Chimney Sweeper's Boy (45 page)

The court seemed to regard this letter simply as further evidence of Desmond Ryan's propensities and no great weight was attached to it. The prosecution's next witness was the man who had found the body the following morning, and who described the wreckage of the room, the smashed furniture, a rug dyed almost entirely red, and the blood splashes on the walls. After that, the court adjourned until the following Monday.

Sarah looked in vain through the following Tuesday's newspaper for the progress of the trial. Instead, in the next issue, she found a paragraph to the effect that George Peter Givner had committed suicide in his cell. During the Sunday night, he had removed his shirt and his underclothes, torn them into strips, plaited them into a rope, and hanged himself.

*  *  *

The file on Gerald Candless, alias John Ryan, now had the thickness of a telephone directory. Sarah added her newspaper photocopies to it and sat down to read the rest of
A White Webfoot.
She had abandoned it a month before because it seemed to have so little relevance to her father's situation, and she had had the more recent
Less Is More
to study. Opening the earlier novel again, halfway through, she felt frightened by disturbing pictures, the white walker, half beast, half bird, and its webbed prints in the snow, and she was aware of real but ridiculous fear, the shiver of the child reading a ghost story in an empty house. Then she came to the dream, the man in the tunnel who finds the exit ahead blocked and who, on turning around, is confronted by a stone wall where the entrance had been.

It got dark so early at this time of the year. After a while, when she reached the chapter in which the murder happens, she put more lights on. She went to fetch herself a bottle of wine and drank the first glass straight down.

She could see what the critics had meant when they called the novel a thriller. In none of his other books had her father so graphically described violent death. Here was the battle between George Givner and Desmond Ryan—Harry Merchant and Dennis Conlon in the book—one man armed with an object that might have been designed as a weapon, the other defenseless but for the cable, a lamp cord, the author put into his hand. Gerald Candless, with characteristic Candless imagery, compared the two to Roman gladiators, the man with the sword and the man with the net.

Sarah flinched from it as she had never before recoiled from her father's work. When the blood was described, flying like red birds smashing into glass walls, she had to look away from the page. The damage to Desmond-Dennis's beauty dismayed her, the long, painful, passionate dwelling on his ruined face, the bloody cavern in his skull, his broken hands. She skipped paragraphs after that, then came to the discovery of the body and at last to Givner-Merchant's piteous self-inflicted death, the lonely suicide, the long, cold hours that passed before the dead man was found.

No mention of letters, Mark the boyhood friend not mentioned for two chapters, then described only as reading an account of all this in newspapers. Just as she herself had done. The thriller element of the novel soon disappeared. There was no more suspense, no mystery, only a long
examination of Mark's guilt and conscience, as he blames himself for Dennis's death.

Sarah had been refilling her glass as she read, and by the time she reached the last chapter, she was fuddled with wine, the print starting to dance. She had learned nothing new, only that her father must have been made to suffer painfully from his brother's death. She fell asleep in the chair and the book fell to the floor.

By the time Ursula was prepared to work and qualified to work, there were no jobs. It was the late eighties. And Gerald, if not exactly ill, had a heart condition, which meant he needed to care for himself and be cared for. She learned to cook the right sort of food for him; she encouraged him to take a walk around the garden, on the level ground, every day. If he had been able to climb the cliff, he could have joined her in her beach walks, but climbing the cliff would probably have killed him.

Not a word to the girls. He was insistent about that.

“They love me,” he said. “I am blessed in that two beautiful, brilliant women love me. What have I done to deserve that? Am I to reward them by making them unhappy?”

Ursula thought that he had done plenty to deserve it. Gotten up in the night to tend them, hugged and kissed them, told them stories, given them everything they wanted, spent large sums of money on them, bought them their homes, but she didn't say so. He drove himself to the hospital for regular checkups, dropping off chapters of
The Mezzanine Smile
at Rosemary's. Ursula wasn't allowed to drive him; he didn't think women made good drivers, Sarah and Hope necessarily being the exceptions.

An angioplasty was proposed. It was a method for unblocking an artery by inflating a kind of balloon device that had been passed into it by means of a catheter. Gerald liked the idea because the process could be carried out without surgery. It failed. The artery was impenetrable.

Ursula drove him home and he said nothing about her driving. He was deeply depressed. For most of his life, he had enjoyed robust good health and now his strength had been taken away, like Samson's. For most of his working life his books had been received first with enthusiasm, later with rapture. But the critics had disliked
Half an Hour in the Street
, sneered at
A White Webfoot
, and damned
The Mezzanine Smile
with faint praise. Worse, they had given it short paragraphs at the foot of pages.

Back at home, he did no work. The strong medication he had been put on had a side effect of bringing him dreadful dreams. He said only they were dreadful, not what their content was. She wondered if he still had that recurring dream in which he was in the stone tunnel and first one end, then the other, was blocked, but she didn't ask.

She felt nothing for him. No pity, no interest, of course no love. One good thing was that, mysteriously, she never felt him to be an encumbrance or a nuisance. He was her fate. She looked after him with great care, keeping him warm, comfortable, and suitably fed, as she might an aging once-loved pet animal. While in her company, he was dull, spiritless. He had done that himself. By a long process of attrition and occasional bouts of violence, he had worn away her love and even her liking for him, had silenced her, made her wary of speaking to him, and the result was that he had nothing to say to her. Symptoms of illness were occasionally discussed, the weather, the state of the tides.

Of those writer friends of his, Roger Pallinter was dead, Jonathan Arthur's wife had died and he had married again and gone to live in France, and Adela Churchouse was too mad to go out alone. Frederic Cyprian was reported as being in an advanced state of Alzheimer's; Beattie Paris had written his autobiography and died the day it was published. Only the Wrightsons still came. Gerald saw few people but his faithful daughters. They came every weekend, and Robert Postle occasionally came, talked publishing gossip to Gerald, and walked with her on the beach.

Sometimes she felt she must escape, get out, but she had never in all her life been to a cinema on her own and she wasn't going to start now. She had had her fill of evening classes. Gerald hadn't been precisely rude to the neighbors (one family at the top of the cliff road, two others in houses below the hotel), but he had left them in no doubt that he was humoring them, was bored, and they were afraid of him. They wouldn't come again and they wouldn't ask her without him.

Well before the height of the season, the hotel advertised for baby-sitters. When she told Gerald she had thought of doing a baby-sitting stint once or twice a week—to get out of the house, to escape—he flew into a rage. That
was a job for peasants, for the likes of Daphne Batty. It was scarcely a step up from being a charwoman. She had never heard him use the word
peasant
before. His heavy, dark face was suffused with blood. The veins stood out on his forehead and temples like purple roots. She said if he felt like that, of course she wouldn't do it. But she wondered later what that “peasant” and “charwoman” talk had meant.

She knew very little about his parents; he never talked about them. He had told her their names, that they were dead, that his father had been a master printer and he was their only child. Now she wondered if his mother had gone out cleaning—or was she being too “psychological”? But she didn't wonder much; she didn't really care.

Then he started his next novel, the one that was to be his last,
Less Is More.
The difference in him was startling. He was happy, looked younger, regained some energy. He wrote every day, completed the manuscript in six months. When his publishers wanted him to accept the invitation to attend the literary festival at Hay-on-Wye, he agreed happily, looking forward to meeting acquaintances there and to reading aloud, something he enjoyed and did well.

The days when she might have gone with him, when he might even have asked her, were long gone. He never rang while he was away, though the girls sometimes had long telephone conversations with him. On his return, he said nothing about the festival, how it had been, whom he had met there, and, contrary to his usual practice of taking a rest, then devoting time to research, he immediately began a new book.

Or so she supposed. He didn't tell her what he was doing. And this in itself was strange, for, no matter how bad their relationship had been in the past, even after the fracas of
Hand to Mouth
, he had always announced to her his commencement of a new novel. He hadn't been able to help himself, she had often thought, he was so happy on that day, those days, that first week. His energy overflowed. If there had been anyone else there to tell, he would have, but there was only herself, so it was she he told.

“I started the new one today.”

And she had never quite been able to find it in her heart to say, “Who cares?” Or “So what?” His enthusiasm touched her, in spite of everything.

“It's going well. I've made a good start. I'm pretty pleased with it.”

Of course, as time went on, the anxieties began and the doubts, the self-torment. She could see it in his face, though he seldom expressed it. Since she had stopped typing for him, he never spoke further about what he was writing, only occasionally of the practicalities. He was running out of paper. He was going out to take his manuscript to the typist.

But this time, after his return from Hay, though she could tell he was working frenetically, he said nothing about starting a new novel. She wondered if it wasn't a novel, if it was his autobiography, though he had once said he would never write one. About the same time, he told her he had invited a man called Titus Romney and his wife for a weekend. Romney was a writer he had met at Hay.

“A fan,” he said.

“Of yours, you mean?”

“Of course I mean that. I'm not likely to be a fan of his, am I? I'd never heard of him till a month ago.”

She shrugged. Then she remembered who Romney was. Robert Postle had mentioned him. Wasn't he one of Postle's authors?

“You needn't worry—they won't stay here. They can go to the hotel. I suppose we can give them lunch? My girls can come down and have a bit of fun tormenting him.”

“How very pleasant.”

“Oh, for God's sake,” Gerald said. “He's a wimp.”

At his next checkup, the cardiologist recommended a coronary bypass. It was possible that two arteries would need to be bypassed. If Gerald didn't want that, they could put him on stronger medication and his life would be indefinitely prolonged. But it was unlikely in that case that much exertion would ever be possible for him, and there might be unpleasant side effects—bad dreams, sleeplessness. While, with the bypass …

“I'll have it,” Gerald said. No doubt he remembered the bad dreams he already had. “When can you do it?”

She had been there with him. They must have presented to this heart doctor the picture of the long-married, devoted couple. The wife much younger, anxious but practical, a capable nurse.

“I'd like to tell you,” said the surgeon, “how much I admire your books.”

Gerald hadn't known the man knew who he was. “Thanks very much,” he said.

The health insurance would pay. He could have the operation the following week. A nurse told him the healing of his leg, from which the veins would be taken, would be more troublesome than the site of the main surgery.

“I'm sure,” Gerald said. “It'll be a real breeze. I can't wait.” In the car, on the way home, he said to her, “Not a word to my girls.”

“I'm not hearing this.”

“Yes, you are. You heard.”

He worked on whatever it was he was working on. Every morning and half the afternoon. She waited for him to say he was taking the manuscript to Rosemary, but he didn't; he seldom went out, apart from taking a walk around the garden and to the cliff edge. He was typing it himself, of course, as he had typed all his work since she had refused to do it, but his typing was inadequate to pass muster. She heard from outside the study door the clatter of keys, and heard his muttered swearing when he made mistakes and had to do a line of
x
's.

It must be that he didn't want Rosemary to see it. Would he want
her
to see it? She asked herself why she cared. Until recently, she had been quite indifferent about what he did, how he was, even if he lived or died. But then, at that point, she had almost offered to type his manuscript for him, to forget the pain and humiliation and perform this service for him as if
Hand to Mouth
had never happened. She hadn't done that, but she had watched him and, to some extent, waited on him in a way she hadn't for years.