The Chimney Sweeper's Boy (7 page)

That might be no bad thing, he thought, a freshness of approach, a mind uncluttered by the magnificences of recent daddy biographies.

“All right, you don't read,” he said as his fish and her veal came, “but would you write?”

She was staring at the carafe like a pet cat in front of an empty plate. He tapped it and said to the waiter that they'd better have another one of those.

“Would you write a memoir of your father?”

“Me?” said Hope.

No, the wine waiter, he thought. That chap with the glasses at the next table. “Your relationship with him, how it was when you were a small child, what it was like being his daughter. Oh, and his origins, his background, his family, what he came out of. The stories he told you, the games he played with you.” To his horror, tears welled up in those eyes that were Gerald's eyes. She must be half-blinded, he thought. “Hope, my dear, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to upset you.”

A couple of tears escaped and trickled down. She dabbed at them with a handkerchief. So it was true—she really did use handkerchiefs. She crumpled it up in her hand before he could see if there was an
H
on it or not. Facilitating her recovery with a big slice of veal, she said with her mouth full, “I couldn't write anything. I haven't any imagination.”

This would be facts, not imagination. Well,
some
imagination, some emotion, surely. But he knew it was hopeless. The waiter refilled her glass. She swigged it as if parched, and Robert was incongruously reminded of that episode in
King Solomon's Mines
when Sir Henry Curtis and Captain Good crawl across the last lap of the desert sands to suck up muddy water out of an oasis pool.

She surprised him by asking, “Is this something Carlyon-Brent want to commission?” But after all, she was a lawyer.

He said cautiously, “I don't know about commission. If it was done the way we hope it would be, we'd want to publish it.”

“Not if I did it, you wouldn't,” she said. “I'll have the zabaglione—no, I won't. I'll have the tiramisù and some Strega, no coffee, and then I must fly; I've got a very full afternoon. Why don't you ask my sister?”

“It did occur to me, but she's always so busy.”

“Thanks very much,” said Hope. “I'm a lady of leisure, I suppose. I'll ask her if you like; it'll probably appeal to her.” He wondered how she kept so thin, how she did her work. Both Gerald's girls drank so much. Hope must have consumed over a liter of wine. “She doesn't get as upset about Daddy as I do,” she said.

Robert watched her go, straight as a reed and as unsteady. He thought of bereaved children's memoirs and of titles.
Mommie Dearest
at one end of
the quality scale and
When Did You Last See Your Father?
at the other. Classics like
A Voyage Round My Father.
Then there was that Germaine Greer book he had admired, with all the detective work in it. That brought him to the letter to the
Times
about Gerald never having worked for the
Walthamstow Herald.
Probably nonsense, but on the other hand, he, Robert, had never really believed Gerald had been at Trinity. Not that he would ever have said a word, to Gerald or anyone else, but he had had a feeling about it, a sense of something not being quite right.

He paid the bill and, a taxi-hater, he began to walk back to Bloomsbury.

S
ARAH TOLD
U
RSULA THAT SHE SHOULD HAVE HAD HER
hair cut years ago, but better late than never. Looking over her shoulder into the mirror, she said that she could see what people meant when they remarked on her likeness to her mother, something she didn't mind admitting now Ursula looked so much more attractive. It was the first time she had been in the house since the funeral, and she trod warily, casting uneasy glances.

Hope cried, but not for long, and she had the grace to say she knew she was stupid and that her father would have hated it.

“That was the only thing about you Dad didn't like,” said Sarah, “the way you're always crying.”

“I'm not always crying. I don't cry when I'm happy.”

It would have been too much to expect them not to go out on Saturday evenings, and Ursula didn't expect it. Hope went to a party in Ilfracombe and another one in Westward Ho! and Sarah went drinking in Barnstaple. The Saturday they both came and both went out by six, Ursula was baby-sitting anyway. She had to be at the hotel and inside room 214 by seven sharp. It was a suite really, consisting of the parents' bedroom, the children's bedroom, and a bathroom in between. The windows had no sea view but gave on to the formal gardens at the front and the Ilfracombe to Franaton Road.

The parents were a Mr. Hester and a Ms. Thompson. Ursula didn't know if they were married or just living together. This was the third time she had sat for them since they had arrived ten days before, but they never said much to her, being anxious to escape downstairs to the bar and dinner and the postdinner country-and-western evening in the Lundy Lounge. The children were always in bed when she got there, with the television on in their room. There was a girl of six and a boy of four.

The first time she came, she offered to read to them, a suggestion greeted by Ms. Thompson with an incredulous stare. They had the telly. They had a stock of children's videos from the hotel's boundless store. And, of course, there was another telly in the main bedroom. Ursula sometimes wondered how many television sets there were in the Dunes. Hundreds. It was a daunting thought.

She had brought a book with her, but before settling down to read it, she went into the children's bedroom to say hello. The little girl smiled, but the boy gave her an indifferent stare. On the dazzling screen, Power Rangers struck attitudes and flashed swords. The little boy clutched a small yellow model of a Power Ranger in his left hand. The second time she came, tiptoeing in to check on the children, Ursula had eased the little figure out of the sleeping boy's grasp lest it dig into his soft cheek in the night. But he awoke screaming, fumbling and groping for it, so she was obliged to restore it to him.

For a while, she stood by the window in the main bedroom, watching the cars full of holidaymakers pass by. The evening was warm and sunny, but it had rained all afternoon and the hedgerows glittered with water drops. The grass was very green, the garden-center annuals in the flower beds bright as paint. She asked herself, not for the first time, why she was doing this, minding other people's children for a pittance, and she didn't really know the answer. It got her out of the house in the evenings—that was true. It removed her from those things that reminded her of him, so much of it everywhere, cluttering the place, his books, his manuscripts, his galley proofs and proof copies, his papers.

And to get out in the evenings, where else could she have gone? Perhaps to see the neighbors, all of whom had invited her, and who would have talked of him, questioned her, and required answers. There were cinemas
still, a few, but she was wary of going to them alone. Obviously not to the pub or a bar. Baby-sitting gave her quiet evenings in neutral surroundings. She surveyed the room critically. There was nothing here to remind anyone of anything, unless some people's memories could be stirred by wall-to-wall beige carpet, chintz-covered armchairs, a pink-and-beige-checked bedspread, and two pictures, both abstracts in pink, blue, and gold.

No books, no papers, not even a magazine. She tried to read her own book. That was all right; that was her choice, Trollope's
Is He Popenjoy?
And she wanted to read it, but tonight, even the basic powers of concentration called for had deserted her. Would it be a melodramatic gesture to clear the house of everything that had been Gerald's? She had to think of the girls and their feelings. And then what was she to do with all that stuff? Only that morning, she had received a letter from an American university asking almost reverentially to be the guardian of his manuscripts.

“Not Daddy's manuscripts!” Hope had said, as if Ursula had proposed to desecrate his grave. “Oh, you can't. You mustn't.”

“At least make them pay for them,” said Sarah. “Though in my experience, that would be like trying to get blood out of a stone.”

The university's keeper of collections boasted that they had the world's finest accumulation of manuscripts by contemporary writers. Already they possessed three of Gerald Candless's, three treasured manuscripts with the author's corrections, and it was the keeper's dream to acquire more. Ursula realized that she couldn't keep on cutting foreign stamps off envelopes and throwing the contents away. Some would have to be read and answered. So she had crept—a Trollopian word for women's gait, but true and appropriate here—into Gerald's study and opened the cupboard where his manuscripts were kept.

But first, she had paused just inside the door and looked almost fearfully about the room. It reeked of him. He was powerfully and dreadfully present still, a personality left behind when the body had been removed, a fetch, an earthbound spirit. What was that word he had once used in those scrawled, slowly to be deciphered pages she had carefully typed? She had had to look it up, first in
Chambers
, which didn't have it, then in the
Shorter Oxford
, which did. Psychopomp. The messenger who escorts to the underworld the souls of the dead. Standing there in his study, she felt that the psychopomp
hadn't yet come for him, had been deterred, perhaps, by his restless energy, his hard, dark gaze, the ambience of him that remained oppressively sexual even in age, even in celibacy.

Ursula shivered. He used to say that novelists who wrote that were writing rubbish, because no one had ever shivered at some shock or unpleasant discovery. But she had and would, she thought, all the time she was in here. It was a place from which to remove certain essential artifacts, those manuscripts, some notebooks, all the first editions, and then lock the door and throw away the key. She imagined locking the door and then having a builder in to take away the door frame and then plaster over the door and paper over the plaster so that the study behind became a secret room, sealed up and perhaps one day forgotten. She could also imagine what the girls would say to that.

In a sense, one's children never grow up. Their parents' home is always their home, to keep as a sentimental sanctuary in the heart, to return to at will, their first refuge, no matter what homes of their own they may have. Sarah and Hope would consider it their primary business to tell her how to manage and arrange and decide the future of Lundy View House. The study to them was a sanctum, a place Hope could easily turn into a shrine.

Eventually, she had opened that cupboard door and looked inside. But there were more manuscripts than she remembered, Gerald's own handwritten originals as well as copies of her copies, and there were attempts at novels that had never been finished, some of which contained only a chapter or two. He had tended to that—to start something and grow tired of it or be unable to make it work. And then he had been angry and bad-tempered until a better idea came. She hadn't reproached him, not then, but still he had said to her, “It is my life. Can't you understand that? All the life I have or ever will have. All the life I might have had has gone into it.”

She didn't know what he meant. Hadn't he had success and adulation, money enough, herself and his daughters, this house?

“I pour out my life into it,” he said. “I do it to save my life. And when it fails, it's death. I die. And then I have to be resurrected. But how many times can you die before the last time? Can you tell me that?”

“It” was always how he referred to his writing. The primal, the sole “it.”

In there, in among the manuscripts that had become published books,
would be a dozen of those “deaths.” She had turned her gaze on his desk then and noticed something. The page proofs that he had been correcting the day he died still lay there to the left of the typewriter, but the pile of manuscript on the right-hand side was gone. Hope knew nothing about it—she said she couldn't bear to go in there—and Sarah didn't seem to know what Ursula was talking about. Daphne Batty, usually so reasonable, would nevertheless have taken any inquiry as an accusation of stealing, as if she could have found a use for a hundred sheets of indecipherable typescript.

Ursula, in the hotel bedroom, put the manuscript out of her mind and read the first chapter of her Trollope. She had read it before, but she didn't mind. At nine, she went softly into the children's room. They were fast asleep, the Power Ranger in the little boy's hand held up against his mouth. Ursula turned off the television set and went back into the main bedroom to pass the time in reading and pondering until Mr. Hester and Ms. Thompson returned at 10:30.