The Chimney Sweeper's Boy (48 page)

She said, surprised that she had a voice, “Have you got a date, Adam?”

“What?”

She repeated it, “I asked you if you'd got a date.” He shook his head. It was a movement that implied the impossibility of understanding her, the total mystery of her thought processes. The others had become tense. To her astonishment, she felt Rosie reach for her hand under the table and squeeze it. Adam did the entirely unexpected. He felt in one of the pockets of his voluminous greatcoat and pulled out a book, a paperback, which he threw onto the table. A glass fell over and red wine trickled between the plates, dripped onto the floor. Vicky started mopping it up with a handful of paper napkins.

The book was one of her father's,
Phantom Listeners.

It was dog-eared, the cover with its design of huddled ghosts alarmed by the dawn, curled at the corners and bruised. The wine had splashed its spine, leaving blood-colored drops on the black moth. Sarah put her hand up to her mouth, as if warding off a blow.

“I picked it up off a stall in the flea market,” he said, “for thirty pee. If any of you want to read it, you're welcome. If you can get through it. I couldn't.” He slowly turned his head and let his eyes travel from her face, where a blush was mounting, down her body. “You, of course, will already have had that dubious experience.”

She was stunned, had nothing to say, felt the tightening pressure of Rosie's unwanted, unneeded hand.

“The renowned novelist was something of a pompous old git, wouldn't you say? Something of a pretentious nerd? I suppose there's a kind of distinction in writing nineteen books, each one more boring than the last.”

Alexander said, “Adam.”

Simultaneously, Vicky said, “Look, this is embarrassing. Didn't you know Gerald Candless was Sarah's dad?”

“There wouldn't be much point in saying it if he wasn't, would there? She doesn't look much like him, though. He had a face like a lizard with whiskers. It's a wise child that knows its own father, isn't it?”

“Of course he was my father, you bastard,” Sarah said.

“Charming. Thank you. I hardly suppose it's anything you're proud of. I'd keep quiet about it if I were you.”

“Adam! Stop it.” Rosie was on her feet. “We can't do this anymore. We can't have you here with us like this. It's awful; it's unbelievable.…”

“What, because I tell a woman what she knows already, that the darling of the literary establishment was a clapped-out hack who wrote shit? Who called it art and had the cunning to get others to do the same?”

Sarah wrenched her hand free from Rosie's. She got up, pulled her father's sheepskin around her, and, hardly knowing why, picked up the paperback from the table. Holding it in her two hands, she made for the side door to the car park. Vicky's voice called out, “Sarah, wait …” She didn't turn her head.

Pain spread across her shoulders and up into her head, settling on the top
of her skull like a too-tight hat. It had been hot in there and she was shivering. The night was damp and dark, a black mist hanging above the cars, leaving water on their surfaces in clustered glittering pustules. She unlocked the car and sat in the driver's seat. Her breath misted up the glass, enclosing her in opaque walls.

She knew it would be no more than five minutes before he opened the passenger door and got in beside her. He would be there in five minutes. It was, in fact, three minutes. The interior light came on and she saw her face in the rearview mirror, ravaged, aged, the mouth blue, as from hypothermia.

He got into the car, closed the door, put his hand on her knee. The light went out and deep darkness came. He took her hand and touched the palm with his tongue.

As if she was very tired, as if she was ill, she said in a weary voice, “It's no use.” She took her hand away and pushed his hand away. “I can't. Not tonight. Not ever.”

“What do you mean?”

“You know.”

“I do not.”

“The things you said.”

She could see his face only as a vague blur, but she caught the gleam of an eye.

“That was a game,” he said. “You know that. That was the game we play. You like it; I like it. It turns us on.”

“No.”

“You liked it before. It's happened before.” He was urgent. He was panicking. “For God's sake. I didn't mean any of it. I love his writing. I loved that book. You must know I didn't mean those things.”

She tried to be calm, articulate, partly succeeded. “You said them. I don't suppose you did mean them. But that doesn't matter. They were said and they can't be unsaid. I would never forget them. I will never forget. I can't help it.”

“I'm sorry,” he said. “I apologize. I'm deeply, truly sorry.” He sounded it. He sounded how she would have hated him to sound at the beginning of it, humble, penitent, afraid. “Please let me unsay them. Come back all I said, can't we say that?”

“I would if I could.” What's done cannot be undone, she thought.

“Then say it. You can.”

“I can't. It was the one place you shouldn't have stabbed, that's all.”

“Sarah, I don't understand you.”

“I'm going home now. Good-bye.”

He began to protest. She got out of the car, went around the front, opened the passenger door, and stood there, waiting. It took him a moment, but he got out. She didn't look at him, though he was quite clearly visible out here in the lamplight. Back in the car, she started the engine, pressed the switch to demist the windows. By the time she had driven out into the street, he was gone; he was nowhere.

Her head hurt behind her eyes. She needed some relief for pain, but she didn't know what. Rain began when she was halfway home. The rhythmic swish of the wipers passing to and fro, to and fro, signified a dreadful meaninglessness. She carried the book into the house. It was only a few yards, but she and the book were soaked. She hadn't cried for years, but she cried when the front door was closed. She dropped onto the floor in the hall, weeping in the dark, her father's book, a wet, soggy pulp, pressed against her face.

T
HICK FOG PERVADED
S
ARAH
'
S DREAM, BUT SHE WAS SOMEWHERE IN
the country, not on the beach, and there was no color. It was like a black-and-white film, or gray and dark gray. They walked toward each other, she and Adam Foley, emerging out of the fog, met, stood apart. He said, “I never said those things. That was my double saying them.” “You haven't got a double,” she said, and she felt nothing for him, no desire, no challenge. The fog had condensed and clustered on her arms and hands. She looked down and saw that her whole body glittered with waterdrops like glass from a shattered windscreen.

“He hasn't a double. There's no one like him,” her father's voice said. Then she saw her father where Adam had been. She knew it was her father, but he was young; he looked like Stefan and perhaps also like someone she had never known, someone who died horribly before she was born. “I put it behind me, or I tried,” her Stefan-Desmond-father said. “But it was always in the mist that I saw him.”

She was lonely, with no remedy. She asked herself if she wanted Adam and had to answer honestly that she didn't; she never wanted to see him again. The house would be sold and she would never go back; she would never see Rosie and Alexander and Vicky again. Or the white mist that came
in from the sea. Or the rhododendrons and the white razor shells, the black mussel-shell sand and the island lying becalmed on the flat gray water.

Did she have any friends? Masses of acquaintances, yes. Other lecturers. A sister and a sister's partner. An uncle, who had his own life, his own children. An aunt she would never meet and cousins she had no wish to know. As usual—and she acknowledged this—she left her mother till last, had almost forgotten her mother.

The file on Gerald Candless was complete. Or as complete as she could manage. She leafed through the material, newspaper photocopies, her notes, photographs she had brought from Lundy View House, synopses she had made of her father's books and her own attempts at beginning her book, Jason Thague's reports, the Candless family tree, the Ryan family tree. She knew everything about him except why. She knew of his childhood, his parents, his stepfather and his brothers and sisters, his school days, his first job and his war service, his job after the war, his moving out of his family's home, and his disappearance.

What she didn't know was why he had disappeared and why he had taken on that new identity.

Her memoir would have to be written without that knowledge. With a week to go before her new term started, she sat down at the word processor early in the morning and began. When she had produced two thousand words, she broke off and wrote a letter to Robert Postle. She told him she was sorry about the long delay, that she had had to do research, but now she had made a serious beginning and had set herself a deadline of May. The end of May, she added.

While she was writing Carlyon-Brent's address on the envelope, her mother phoned. Sarah thought she must be at Lundy View House and asked if it was snowing. Somewhere or other, she had seen snow forecast for the West Country. Ursula said no, not unless it also was in Kentish Town. They sorted it out and Sarah was more interested by the coincidence of her mother's being in Bloomsbury while she was addressing a letter to the same place than by her reason for the call.

But then it occurred to her that Ursula ought to know what she had discovered, should have information about all these new relations. To be fair, she should have advance warning of what she would read in the memoir.

“Look, if you're in London for a bit why don't you come over here tomorrow evening? I'll get Hope, too. I've got something to tell you.”

It came to her that mothers always took that to mean a forthcoming engagement or even a marriage. Something sexual, anyway. Sarah was so preoccupied with thinking she would never be sexual again that she didn't take much notice of Ursula's saying she had something to tell her, too.

“You haven't sold the house?”

“Hardly. It's only been on the market two weeks.”

Hope arrived with her head tied up in a scarf because Fabian had said her fur hat made her look like Boris Yeltsin.

“I'm sure Ma will think I'm going to announce my engagement.”

“You're not, are you?”

“Whom would I get engaged to?”

Opening the bottle of wine she had brought, Hope said that she and Fabian were thinking of getting engaged.

“You always are. You've been thinking of it for ten years.”

Hope sat down, looking closely into her glass as if into a crystal ball. “If we got engaged, it would be a sort of signal for us to move in together. And then, maybe, in a year or two, if it works out, we might get married.”

“You really believe in rushing into things, don't you?”

Ursula arrived, wearing the kind of fur hat that might not have looked good on Hope but suited Ursula. As far as Sarah could tell, she was dressed in new clothes from head to foot. Her hair had been cut once more, and cut a good deal better than they had done it in Barnstaple.

She, too, had brought a bottle of wine, but hers was champagne.

“Have you sold the house or something?” said Hope.

“I've had an offer. The agent phoned me this morning.”

“I don't know what the champagne's for.” Sarah had kissed her mother. More because, as she told herself afterward, she smelled so wonderfully of Biagiotti's Roma than for any other reason. “But can we have it in favor of your wine, Hope?”

“If you look at the bottle,” said Hope, “you'll see you've drunk all my wine already.”

Their father had been very good at opening champagne. He had always
done so without spills or explosions. Hope managed fairly well, fetching a cloth from the kitchen to mop up the table.

“I want to tell you what I found out about Dad.”

“It's not horrid, is it?” Her sister, Sarah thought, looked just as she had twenty years ago and more, when a picture anticipated in a book threatened terrors or when one of their father's stories took a turn around a frightening bend. He had always promised nothing bad, nothing to alarm, and always kept his promise. “It's not going to upset me?”

“I don't think so. I'm sure not.”

She couldn't give his guarantees. But she told them the whole of it. Hope's mobile face registered every emotion. Once she put up a hand to cover her mouth, once put her head in both hands. She made a little sound that might have been distress or might have been protest. But Ursula sat impassive. She hadn't touched her champagne. Sarah drank hers and had more, aware by then that her voice was thickening.