The Chimney Sweeper's Boy (9 page)

Now, though, she thought she had better. She borrowed two more—there were only three more—and sat up late reading them. The effect on her was much the same as
The Centre of Attraction
's had been. They left her uncomfortable, dissatisfied, and something else as well this time. Was it possible that she was passing her life foolishly, even wasting her life? Was it even possible that this fiction was
reality
? It felt like it. It convinced her of a kind
of truth more than the thrillers and the romances did. His books made her feel that she was outside somewhere, looking in at real people doing real things. What kind of a man could make a reader feel like that?

She and her parents and one of the Purley branch librarians had intended to take Colin Wrightson out to dinner after the event. A small French restaurant had been chosen and Herbert and Betty Wick had been there the previous week to try it out. Now their guest at L'Ecu Rouge would be Gerald Candless. Ursula had given careful thought to what she should wear. Not one of the taffeta dresses—that would be overdoing it—and a suit would look as if she meant to travel somewhere. She finally settled for a powder blue pleated skirt with a powder blue sweater worn over a blue-and-white-striped silk blouse. Heavy makeup was fashionable, but she had seldom worn as much as some girls, largely because her father made jocular remarks if she did, asking her if she had been at the raspberry jam again or kissing a fire engine.

There was a photograph of Gerald Candless on the flap of the back jacket. The face was half-turned and in partial shadow, the curly dark hair low over his forehead, but from what she could see of him, she thought he looked arrogant, clever, opinionated, frightening, and as if he had to shave a lot. She wouldn't be able to talk to a man who looked like that, still less to a man who had written those things, because everything she said would sound silly. She would speak as little as possible and he would hardly notice she was there.

He was late. Not very late, no more than five minutes after the scheduled time for the start of his talk, but the librarian and the committee ladies were going mad. Ursula sat in the middle of the front row of seats, where they had told her she must sit, her hands folded in her lap, her legs crossed at the ankles. She was wearing navy blue suede pumps. Calm, resigned, unmoving as she waited, she had begun to hope—wickedly, for what about the librarian and her mother and the committee?—that he wouldn't come at all.

Then he came. He had come by car and gotten lost. She had expected him to be wearing a suit, but he sauntered up to the platform in an old pepper-colored sports jacket, a Fair Isle pullover, and ginger corduroy pants. His hair was long, and long hair for men hadn't yet come into style, but his was as long as a woman's, a thick bush of wiry dark curls.

She recognized her Mr. Rochester. Not Charlotte Brontë's hero, but Orson Welles in the film. His face wasn't as full as Welles's and his mouth wasn't budlike—it was wide and curving—but he was her Mr. Rochester, and it terrified her. Another girl, another
sort
of girl, might have set out from that moment to get him, to attract him, fascinate him, tempt him. Ursula wouldn't have known how to begin. Besides, she was frightened. She would never dare speak a word to him.

He talked. About how he wrote and what impelled him to write and what he wanted to write one day. She didn't take much of it in. Because it was the theme of one of his novels, he talked about Freud's seduction theory and raised a gasp from his audience. But later on, she could remember hardly anything of what he had said. Afterward, at question time, the Purley librarian passed a note to her on which she had written that Ursula should ask a question. Ursula turned around and shook her head vehemently. She would rather die. One woman asked him if he wrote by hand or used a typewriter, and another woman—the audience was mostly women—asked him what advice he would give aspiring writers.

“Don't,” he said.

More gasps and some laughter, but Ursula could tell they hadn't liked that laconic answer. She looked up at him, expecting him to say more, and found that he was looking at her. His eyes met hers and something very strange happened. He winked. It was a tiny wink, more of a tic really. She knew she must have been mistaken, but still she blushed, a deep fiery blush that made her want to bury her face in her cold hands, but she couldn't, not there. I will never dare say a word to him, she thought as the heat subsided from her cheeks. I wish I didn't have to go to dinner. I wish I could go home and go to bed with a nice book,
The Constant Nymph
or
Frenchman's Creek.

In the restaurant, she was seated as far from him as it is possible to be when six people are sitting at a round table. But she was still opposite him. He drank a lot; he didn't eat much. The librarian looked dismayed when he asked if they could have another bottle of the red, but her father made reassuring faces, and Ursula knew that meant he would pay for it.

Her mother and the librarian persisted in talking to him about his work, though they should have been able to see, as she could, that he disliked
discussing it. The less she said—and she uttered only essentials concerned with what she was going to eat and to pass the water, please—the more he began to pay attention to her. Mostly, at first, with smiles and requests as to what he could pass her, but then, when he had dismissed a particularly fatuous question (Ursula thought) about where he got his ideas, he asked her quite abruptly, turning his back on the librarian, where she came from and what she did.

Ursula would have been glad if the ceiling had fallen in at that moment, engulfing them all, or if the proprietor had come in to say there was a bomb in the building and they must evacuate it in five minutes. Only there were no bombs in those days and nothing to make the ceiling fall. She had decided desperately that it didn't matter what he thought of her, because she would never see him again, so she said very quietly that she lived in Purley with her parents and worked in her father's office.

“And you're engaged to be married.”

She shook her head, the blush returning.

“I'm sorry. I thought you must be.”

She didn't ask why he thought that. Her father supplied an answer.

“Too pretty to be unattached, eh?”

Gerald Candless said coolly, “Something like that.”

But then she thought he looked at her almost tenderly. It was hindsight that told her he was weighing her up, considering; she hadn't thought it back then. She doubted if she had ever seen that tender look on his face again. Because there was no need for it once he had decided not to spare her? The slaughterer strokes the calf only while he fattens it. There is no honey for the bear once captured.

Normally a good sleeper, she hardly slept that night. She kept thinking of her father saying she was pretty. It made her squirm. In her narrow bed with the rose-sprigged white curtains draped from a gold coronet, she wriggled with embarrassment. The room seemed silly now, the white carpet, the Cicely Mary Barker pictures, the looped net curtains. Perhaps he would put her in one of his books, a silly girl, a contrast to the intrepid heroine.

Next day, he phoned. He had phoned her mother first and asked if it would be all right to speak to Ursula, and her mother had passed on the number of Wick and Co.

“I told your mother I wanted to thank you for last night.”

“It wasn't me,” she whispered, almost voiceless. “It was them.”

“Oh, no, it was you.”

She had nothing to say. Her heart beat heavily.

“I'd like to … return the compliment. Isn't that what people say?”

She said truthfully, “I don't know.” She knew nothing.

“I'd like you to have dinner with me.”

Modern English is peculiar, though not unique, in that it has one form for both the singular and the plural of the second person. French or German would have been quite clear. The obsolete
thou
would have been clear. But this was 1962.

“Did you give my mother a date?” she asked. “I'm sure my parents would be free most evenings, and of course I am.”

He laughed. “I meant you. You alone. You and me.”

“Oh.”

“Will you have dinner with me, Ursula?”

“I don't know,” she said. She was almost stammering. “I mean, yes, of course. Of course I will. Thank you.”

“Good. When would you like it to be? You say.”

All her evenings were free or else occupied by events, by movable feasts, that could without trouble be changed. “Friday,” she said. “Saturday. I don't mind.”

“Your name means ‘little bear'—did you know that?”

She hadn't then. She uttered a small, tremulous “No.”

“I will call for you at your parents' house in my car at seven on Saturday evening, Ursula.”

She didn't know what to say. Perhaps to thank him? Before she could say anything, he had rung off.

Honey for the Little Bear.

O
NLY ONE
C
ANDLESS WAS TO BE FOUND.
Sarah examined the Ipswich telephone directory in her local public library. J. G. Candless, in Christchurch Street. She noted down the address and the phone number. She was growing excited about her book, much more excited than she had expected to be. She had already written bits of it, although she had an idea that it ought not to be done this way, piecemeal, odd stories about her father and memories that she particularly liked jotted down, but methodically, research first, then time set aside for the serious writing. Now was the time to start the research. That was why she had been to the library and found a relative. A possible relative, she corrected herself. She was too much of an academic to make assumptions.

But she was excited. Enough to want to devote hours and hours to it. When a man named Adam Foley, whom she had met in the Barnstaple pub, phoned and asked her out, she said no, because she had to start on the research for the book. The sound of his voice excited her, but, perversely, she said no to him and said it absently. After that, his voice also turned cold and he was barely polite when he said good-bye. She had shrugged, had no regrets. She had to phone this man called J. G. Candless in Ipswich. On her way home, she bought a town map of Ipswich in a bookshop. She meant to be thorough about this. Anyway, she was bound to have to go there. She might even go this week.

Sarah's flat was on the top floor of a Victorian house, a big attic with skylights, and to get to it you had to climb forty-eight stairs. Sarah didn't mind
this and usually ran up them, or ran up thirty of them. Her own front door was painted deep purple. The rooms were large, if few, a living room converted from three attics for the servants' use, a slightly smaller bedroom, a kitchen, purple like the door, and a bathroom. From the big new windows (put in and paid for by darling Dad), you could see all the way across to Primrose Hill, a green hill and green trees and rows of gray-and-brown houses and white-and-yellow towers fingering the blue sky. At night, it was black and yellow and glittery.

Sarah had a look in the mirror, checking on whether she liked her new hair color, done in St. John's Wood that morning. Perhaps it was rather too red. On the other hand, it made her look less like her mother. Like most people—not like Hope, though—she was dissatisfied with the way she looked and would have preferred to resemble some dark beauty such as Stella Tennant or Demi Moore. Small neat features looked prissy. Her mouth was too rosebudlike, her nose too short and straight, her eyes too gray. She was seriously considering going in for brown contacts.

Because she thought her small neat features dull and prissy, a milkmaid's looks, Sarah sought to dress herself with contrasting wildness and drama. So she always wore high heels, sometimes thick high heels attached to clumping shoes or boots, and a lot of black, with fringes and red beads. Her hair was her crowning glory, so she never covered it with a hat as Hope did, though sometimes she wore a large tortoiseshell clip, whose teeth held up a spike of hair at right angles to the rest.

Sarah opened windows and kicked off her boots. She poured herself a big glass of chardonnay. The bottle had been standing in the sun and was at a temperature she liked. She hated ice. She opened the map and spread it out on the table. Districts of Ipswich had some very strange names. Gainsborough and Halifax and—could it be?—California. How could a grid of streets in an East Anglian town be called California? Perhaps her father had actually come from there.

She referred to his birth certificate. No. He had been born in Waterloo Road, which was in an area that didn't seem to have any specific name. Sarah had a large new loose-leaf notebook and this she opened and wrote on the first page, as if with the aim of making it part of a genealogical table: “George John Candless, b. 1890; m. Kathleen Mitchell, b. 1893.” She drew
a vertical line underneath and at the tip of it wrote, “Gerald Francis Candless, b. 1926.”