The Chimney Sweeper's Boy (19 page)

Emboldened by Joan's confidential manner, Sarah asked if she might see the photograph albums that had been displayed on her first visit but which were absent now. Joan nodded and went away to fetch them. Once she was gone, Maureen got up and lumbered over to the window, stretching herself and rolling her heavy shoulders. Then she turned to Sarah and said coldly, “I wonder you aren't content to let bygones be bygones.”

“I'm sorry?”

“If it were my dad, which frankly I can't imagine, I wouldn't want to bring any more to light. You never know what you'll find when you start looking under stones, do you?”

Joan Thague brought back three albums. They were the kind of thing Sarah knew families had but that were so conspicuously absent from her own home. Looking through the shoe box of photographs her mother kept in her bedroom, she had been rather taken aback by the paucity of the collection. It was on the day she had found the palm, and she had been holding that curious religious symbol in her left hand when she sifted through the snapshots—the single photograph of her parents at their wedding, baby shots of Hope and herself—and found the one picture that was of real interest to her. This was of a young Gerald, younger than in that wedding pose, slim, dark, stunningly handsome. He was standing against a seawall somewhere and in the background was an island and a wooded escarpment.

“He gave me that when we were engaged,” her mother had said indifferently.

Sarah had identified the setting herself. It was Plymouth Hoe and that was Drake's Island, with Mount Edgcumbe Park behind. Gerald Candless, firmly entrenched in that name by then, twenty-seven or twenty-eight, working for the
Western Morning News.
Now she looked at the pages Joan Sprague turned for her. Sepia photographs and then black-and-white photographs. Joan had to explain that this postcard-size shot of a man and a woman walking along an esplanade with two children had been taken by seaside photographers, something of which Sarah had no experience, though living by the
sea for much of her childhood. But she looked closely at such a picture of George and Kathleen Candless with Joan and the small Gerald at Felixstowe and understood from this pictorial rendering what no words could entirely have told her: that these people could not have been her grandparents nor this child her father. DNA testing isn't the only answer.

George had been a little man, stunted perhaps by poverty in his youth. His wife was taller than he and broad in her striped Macclesfield silk dress, strap shoes, and small obligatory hat. Both had puddingy faces, small eyes, snub noses, he a large chin, she puffy cheeks, and what showed of their hair under their hats looked mousy fair. The little boy, Sarah perceived, could never have grown into her father. Even cosmetic surgery would not have changed that pudgy face with the close-set eyes and George Candless's chin into what she thought of and Hope had once called, half serious, half joking, all adoring, their father's noble countenance.

She turned to look at Joan Thague and cried out involuntarily, “Oh, I'm sorry, I'm sorry!” for Joan was weeping, as Ursula had wept in the taxi to Paddington station, but somehow far more wretchedly and despairingly.

Giving birth to Hope had been hard. Ursula had never heard of a woman having a normal and easy delivery the first time and a cesarean the second. But it happens and it had happened to her. There was no milk and there was no joy.

She found that she had no feeling for the new baby. Gerald chose her name and, though he consulted her, she wasn't interested. She would as soon have named the child Despair. “Call her what you like,” she said, and slept. All she wanted to do was sleep. She wasn't physically ill. Physically she recovered within a week and the scar was fast disappearing. That was in the days before they recognized or had a name for postnatal depression. Her mother came over to Hampstead and told her she had felt just the same after Helen's birth but that there was no use in moping; you had to pull yourself together and get on with things. After all, no one would do it for you.

There Betty Wick was wrong. The one who would was Gerald. But even he was hardly able to look after a baby and an infant not yet two on his own. He engaged a nanny. Ursula must have known her name at the time, though Gerald, as if he came from the upper class, always addressed her as “Nanny.”

Whatever her name had been, Ursula couldn't remember it now. She had always thought of her and spoken of her as “the woman.”

The woman was highly qualified, very competent, brisk, and efficient. She knew her job. She despised Ursula and made that plain, but Ursula, from a distance of thirty years, from any distance, come to that, couldn't have accused the woman of stealing her children's love. Gerald did that. When she read
Hand to Mouth
, she understood that it wasn't an accident, that it wasn't chance, but a deliberate act. He said so in the book.

Sometimes she wondered whether things would have been different if she had managed to take Betty's advice and pull herself together. If she had asserted herself. But a black depression settled over her, as if a blanket had been dropped to envelop her; she retreated into its folds and curled up and shut her eyes.

The woman didn't sleep in the house, but went home to Edgware. There would have been room for her if Gerald had slept in Ursula's bedroom, but he had moved out so as not to disturb her, he said, when one of the children woke. He had Hope's cot beside his bed. Every morning, he took Hope in to see her, but he could detect her indifference to the baby, and later, looking back, she thought she could remember his satisfied expression, his
pleasure.

She had made so many mistakes. But she hadn't thought it was a question of correctness or mistakes. It wasn't an examination. In her depression, she was so helpless. All interest in anything was lost, all desire to move, even to open her eyes. For a time, she wasn't even ashamed of how she felt; she was beyond shame, beyond love or guilt or hope. Her mother made her bathe or she would never have washed herself. She grew thin and weak.

Then the depression lifted. One day, she was in darkness, in despair; the next, she had come out of it and stood in the light. She felt better: Optimism returned and her strength came back. She was never able to account for the change. As she grew well again, able to get up and go downstairs, she tried to love Hope as she loved Sarah. But Hope cried a lot; she was a colicky baby who regurgitated a milky part-digested dribble of every feeding. Ursula's mistake, one of her mistakes and not the first, was to tell Gerald how she felt.

“
I
love her,” he said, “so it doesn't matter.”

“It's unnatural not to love one's own child. A little baby, Gerald. What's wrong with me?”

“Strange,” he said, and he looked at her as he sometimes did, like a scientist scrutinizing a specimen. “I wouldn't call you a masculine woman, yet it's men who feel like that. Many men feel like that about their own children when they're babies.”

“But not you.”

“No, not I.” (He would never have said “not me.”) “Just as well, isn't it?”

It was love she had wanted, and reassurance. She wanted someone—him—to say, “You'll soon come to love her. Hold her every day, take her cot into your room, have her with you more, cuddle her, and kiss her.” He only said she was strange. She was unnatural. What she would have liked was for them all to sit together, perhaps on the big sofa in the living room, with Sarah on her lap and Hope in his arms, but close, all touching one another, an entwined family group. And then it would get better. She would love her baby; she would be happy. If Gerald would love her, she would love them, all of them.

Out for a walk with Sarah, the little girl fell over, and when Ursula picked her up, she fought her and cried, “I want my daddy!”

Ursula plucked up her courage and asked Gerald when he was coming back to their bedroom. It took courage, and she knew that was ridiculous in a marriage, to have to rehearse for days beforehand the form of words you would use to ask your husband to come back and sleep with you. Would her mother have behaved like that? Would Helen? Would Syria Arthur? Sometimes she had the lunatic thought that marriage with Gerald needed
practice
, even that she should have been married before, that she should have been someone else's wife, to know how to manage this marriage.

The words she finally used were those words. Her tone was casual and friendly. She had wondered whether she could try a coyness, a flirtatious note, but in the end she had settled for this light, amiable inquiry: “Are you soon coming back to sleep in our bedroom?”

“I have to get up to tend Hope most nights,” he said.

“We could hear her from our room.”

He didn't answer. She thought he might just arrive one night. Even knock at the door and walk in and come over to the bed where she was, the way men in books did, though not his books. Reading the sex scenes in his books, rereading them as she found herself secretly doing, made her feel
faint and her heart beat heavily. She wondered if he had done those things he wrote about. She could never ask him; she could ask him so little.

For a long time after Hope's birth, she felt no sexual desire. Perhaps it would never return. There was no one to ask. She imagined asking her doctor, Helen, Syria, but she never imagined asking her mother. When she was young—that was how she put it to herself, even though she was only twenty-seven—she hadn't looked at her own motives, questioned her thought processes, fears, hopes, but now she had become introspective. She had so little to do but think.

Although she felt guilty about it, she had lost interest in CND and never went to another meeting after Hope was born. If the Americans dropped a bomb on the Russians and the Russians retaliated, nothing she could do would stop them. Three months before Hope's birth, the bill making homosexual acts between consenting adults in private legal had become law. So Gerald had been right there, too, and change had come without any efforts on her part. She bought apples and oranges without noticing where they came from and never joined another campaign.

When the woman was gone, another one came to clean the house, and Gerald was always occupied, endlessly busy. Writing, though he never wrote more than three hours a day, looking after the children, taking them for walks, playing with them, reading to them, bathing them. Already marked by those in the know as a distinguished novelist, literary but increasingly popular, he was one of the sights of Hampstead, pushing a pram up Heath Street with a baby at one end and a toddler at the other. Such an
unlikely
-looking man to be doing that, tall, growing heavy by then, with that thick, curly, longish black hair, those big sensual features—the fleshy lips, the hooked nose, the intense but ponderously lidded eyes.

Sometimes, looking at him, and she was always looking at him, she thought it an un-English face for a man born in Ipswich. More Spanish or Portuguese, owing something to Moorish genes. Or Irish. He never cared what he wore, choosing only the comfortable. If men of his age had worn denim at that period, he would have worn it. So he took the children to Hampstead Heath or to Whitestone Pond in old flannel trousers and a sports jacket with a greasy scarf knotted around his neck instead of a tie.

Alone at home, she read and thought. One day, Hope smiled at her and
put out her arms, and Ursula fell in love. One of the things she had thought would never happen had happened. Unrequited love, though, may be worse than no love at all. Hope didn't dislike her, would allow herself to be hugged, fondled, kissed, but she infinitely preferred her father. As did Sarah. And Sarah, being older, vociferous, quite articulate for someone of two and a half, expressed her feelings whenever she was put out, especially when she was reproved.

“I don't want you. I want my daddy!”

They were beautiful children, with large, long-lashed eyes and flawless flower-petal skin. Hope had long dark curls that twisted naturally, as vines do, into ringlets, Gerald's full, curved lips and high forehead. Both girls had her short, straight nose, and Sarah had her coloring, too, the freckled sandiness, the tawny hair. They would cling to Gerald, the pair of them, like kittens to a mother cat, nuzzling him, an arm thrown around his neck, a cheek pressed to a cheek. But he, with his curly mane and smiling muzzle, was a father cat.

Ursula was prey to strange suspicions. She had a dream in which Gerald figured, surrounded by children; he had been married before and had some unspecified number of children from this first marriage. The dream persisted as if it were fact, and later she brought herself to ask him, again rehearsing the question carefully, how he came to be so good with children.

“I like their company,” he said.

“Yet you didn't have any brothers or sisters.”

“I was not so fortunate,” he said, using the cold and formal tone that was becoming habitual with him when he spoke to her. He no longer called her Little Bear.

And he didn't come back to sleep with her. Everyone said that a man's sexual desires were far stronger than a woman's; even people who never expressed opinions on this subject more or less said that, even her mother. What had happened to his desire? Or did his preoccupation with his children sublimate it? She started reading books on sex and popular psychology. Her own desire had returned and now began to torment her.

She was typing
A Messenger of the Gods.
The main character, the widow Annie Raleigh, had a voracious sexual appetite, which for a long time, given the time and the society in which she lived, she wasn't able to gratify. It surprised Ursula, and distressed her, to discover how much he knew about
female desire and women's sexual needs. There was something uncanny about it, for it so closely paralleled her own feelings and situation. She asked herself why, if he understood, he didn't respond to her. It took years and two rereadings for her to understand that Annie Raleigh was herself.