The Chimney Sweeper's Boy (22 page)

She postponed the search, put the clothes into a plastic bag and the bag into the broom cupboard, where there was no chance of the girls finding it.

Pauline immediately wanted to know why she couldn't have Sarah's room, where she had slept before, and seemed none too pleased when told both her cousins were coming.

“I didn't know you had a spare room up here,” she said, no doubt recalling all those occasions on which she had either slept downstairs in the little room Ursula later took for her study or had shared with Sarah or Hope.

Ursula smiled but said nothing. It shocked her a little to realize, now, after all this time, that Pauline must always have believed Gerald and she shared a room, even shared a bed. Pauline stood inside and looked about her, approving, it was evident, of the view and
Evening Light
, but not especially of anything else.

“Those books will take a lot of dusting, Ursula.”

She spoke the name with emphasis, preceding it with a small pause, no doubt to show that she had remembered the caution not to say “Auntie.” Then she looked at her aunt, looked at her as if she hadn't seen her for a long
time, as if they hadn't met outside Barnstaple station, traveled home side by side, and entered the house together.

“You've had your hair cut!”

“Nearly three months ago,” said Ursula.

In the evening, after supper, Pauline reverted to her previous visit and to Ursula's proposal with regard to baby-sitting at the hotel. Ursula had forgotten whether she had told Pauline only that Gerald had stopped her babysitting or that she intended to do some baby-sitting now he was dead, and she realized too late that Pauline had known nothing about this activity of hers until she herself mentioned it.

“You actually did it!”

Pauline's tone couldn't have sounded more shocked and repelled, Ursula thought, than if she had confided her experiences as a prostitute in Ilfracombe town center.

“I've thought a lot about it,” Pauline said. “Brian often says I would have made a good psychologist. You weren't close to your own children really, were you? I suppose baby-sitting was a kind of compensating for that. What do you think?”

Ursula thought it surprisingly near the bone. They went to bed soon after that. Remarks of that kind, made late in the evening, were particularly unwelcome because they kept her from sleeping. She hadn't been back to the Dunes since the encounter with Sam Fleming, and she knew she would never go back. In spite of everything, in spite of her positive rejection of Sam, she had expected him to phone her. She had thought he would phone, if only to repeat his apology and explanation, but he hadn't. Though his grandchildren wouldn't be there, though they might never be there again, she would have gone back to baby-sit for others if he had phoned. It was an irrational, even absurd, way of going on, but it was the way her mind worked in this matter. And now the season was over, the hotel half-closed, to be shut up altogether for three months after the Christmas influx.

Ursula knew very well how a penetrating comment on the incongruities of one's behavior, a remark that brings home an unacceptable truth, arouses dislike for the one who utters it. She was filled at that moment with dislike for her niece, an antipathy that of course would pass but which she was
aware of having sometimes felt on previous occasions. Pauline had seldom been as perspicacious as that, usually only liable to make personal remarks about people's appearance or habits, but even these, Ursula now recalled, had had a way of drilling into one's soft and sensitive parts. Ridiculous, because she had been a child then, and one should make abundant allowance for what a child says. According to Gerald, anyway.

Pauline had first come to stay with them in that fateful year, 1969. Ursula called it fateful because that was their last year in Hampstead, the year of her brother's separation from his wife, of
A Messenger of the Gods
, hailed by his publishers as the breakthrough for Gerald Candless from good to great fiction, the year of the private detective. Pauline came to stay because it was August, her school was on holiday, and Helen had to go into the hospital for a hysterectomy. Jeremy could stay with his paternal grandmother, whose favorite he was.

That year, Pauline was ten. She was coming up to the age when girls love looking after, playing with, and taking out small children. And she was a big, tall girl who looked at least two years older than her age, who perhaps felt older in some ways. Her mother was making her into a woman too early, letting her wear an unnecessary bra, cut off her plaits, and have her ears pierced. Helen believed that girls couldn't begin being feminine too soon.

Ursula hadn't seen a great deal of her since the incident of the engagement ring, when the small Pauline had brought the ring to her on the stem of a flower, and would hardly have known her. Gerald had no recollection of her at all. He put his foot down at once when Pauline wanted to take Sarah and Hope out. That was not to be; that was never to be. The danger, of course, involved the roads and the Hampstead traffic. No one thought about child molesters and rapists in those days. But he seemed pleased to have someone in the house to entertain the children, the possibility of their mother's doing this having been dismissed by him long before.

If Pauline hadn't been there, would he have taken the unprecedented step of being absent from home for a whole day and a night and half the next day? Would he have done this not once, but twice, if this eager, bossy, patient, and managing child hadn't been in the house to supervise the happiness of his daughters?

The private detective had been on Gerald's tail for a few months by then. He was expensive, and he had found out practically nothing. Ursula, who had expected some dashing gumshoe, a Philip Marlowe, asked herself what she was doing when she walked up the uncarpeted wooden staircase to the rooms over a theatrical costumers on the Soho fringes and found two middle-aged portly men in an office full of cigarette smoke and a bent white-haired secretary, at least old enough to be their mother. Later on, Ursula discovered this secretary
was
the mother of one of them.

Dickie Parfitt was polite, urbane, and knowing. Indeed, he was too knowing, for he assumed from the first that this was what he called “divorce work.” Most of what he and Mr. Cullen did was in connection with divorces. Ursula had to explain that she wished to know only where her husband went, that there was no thought of ending her marriage. But afterward, as she walked back to the Tottenham Court Road underground station and the Northern line, she considered what Mr. Parfitt had said. He had put ideas into her head.

His first report reached her a week later. Gerald was referred to as “the subject.” Better than Mr. X, Ursula supposed. Dickie Parfitt had followed him while he was out with Sarah and Hope and pursued him all over Hampstead while (like Shelley) he had made paper boats and sailed them on the Vale of Health pond, visited the geese and peacocks in Golders Hill Park, and bought ice creams in the Finchley Road. Another time, he went to Canfield Gardens in West Hampstead and was inside a house with the children for four hours. Mr. Parfitt was pleased with his find, but Ursula knew Gerald had only gone to the home of a university teacher and poet he knew named Beattie Paris, who, with his girlfriend, Maggie, had two daughters of similar age to Sarah and Hope.

That was before Pauline came. Pauline thought it amusing to see Gerald wheeling Hope about in a stroller, and she said so.

“My father says that's a job for a woman,” she said.

Gerald laughed. He didn't seem to mind. He treated most of Pauline's gnomic utterances as if she were the soul of wit. When she saw him sitting with Sarah on one knee and Hope on the other, an arm around each, she again quoted a parent.

“My mother says you can overstimulate children.”

“Oh, can you now?” said Gerald, laughing. “And what happens to them when you do that? Do they break things or have fits? What do they do?”

Pauline said she didn't know, but she stared at him and his daughters with envy. A little later on, she went and stood by Gerald's chair. She leaned against the wing of the chair, then shifted herself to lean against his shoulder. Gerald was telling the girls his story about the chimney sweeper's boy. Installment fifteen or something like that, it must have been by that time. Pauline stood there listening.

The chair was big and Gerald was big. There was plenty of room. Gerald looked up into Pauline's wistful face.

“Come and be overstimulated,” he said.

He hoisted Hope up onto the arm of the chair so that her cheek was close enough to his cheek to brush it, and he made room for Pauline on his knee. His arm went around both of them. Pauline perched there awkwardly at first, but eventually she relaxed. Ursula watched them. Probably few men today, in the nineties, that decade of lost innocence, would do what Gerald had done and take a tall, precocious ten-year-old girl onto their knee. Probably Gerald himself wouldn't. But no one thought anything of it then. Except Ursula, and what she wondered was how it had happened that children all preferred Gerald to her, how it was that she was apparently no good with children, that even her own only suffered her, sometimes let her kiss and hold them, but wouldn't, she believed, have missed her had she been gone.

They missed Gerald when he disappeared for those two days. “I want my daddy” was the continuous refrain. But before that happened, Dickie Parfitt had followed him to an address Ursula didn't know, a house that belonged to no one she knew. Gerald had gone out alone, telling her he was doing research for an article he intended to write. When he went out, he always told her where he was going. Or, rather, he half-told her. That is, he would say it was for the purposes of research or to see his publisher or visit a library, but he never said what kind of research or why he had to see his publisher or which work of reference he required.

“I'm going out in about an hour,” he said. “There's something I need to check.”

Dickie Parfitt, alerted by a reluctant, near-nauseous Ursula, was waiting
for him, lurking in the neighborhood of the underground station in Heath Road. He followed him into the train and changed with him on to the Central line at Tottenham Court Road. Gerald got out of the train at Leytonstone and walked westward along Fairlop Road, turned left into Hainault Road, and crossed into Leyton at Leigh Road. Ursula, reading Dickie's account, had no idea where any of these places were. She had barely heard of Leyton and Leytonstone but had a vague idea of them as dowdy eastern suburbs.

The street for which Gerald was heading was called Goodwin Road, near where the London Midland railway line passed over Leyton High Road. It sounded unattractive, even slummy, though Dickie made no comment on the charms or otherwise of the neighborhood. Gerald stopped about halfway along the street and fixed his eyes on a house on the opposite side. A van was parked near where he was standing. It was empty. He positioned himself behind the cab in such a way, according to Dickie Parfitt, as to be able to see the house he was watching through the windows on the driver's side and the passenger's side of the cab, yet not be seen himself.

It was a fine day, and standing a hundred yards off, watching Gerald Candless watching a house, wasn't an unpleasant task for Dickie, who had done much the same thing in driving rain and snowstorms. But after half an hour, he began to wonder how long “the subject” would stick it out. Until the driver of the van returned?

Then something happened. The front door of the house under observation opened and a woman came out. Dickie gave no detailed description of her, but he said she was “elderly” and pushing a shopping basket on wheels. She was not, unless Gerald Candless's secret was that he was a gerontophile, his lover, but he took a photograph of her all the same. He watched her pass along the street in the direction of Leyton Midland railway station. Once she was out of sight, Gerald began walking in the opposite direction, toward Leigh Road. He simply retraced his steps, got back into the underground, and returned home.

It occurred to Dickie that if all Gerald Candless wanted to do was watch a house, he could have done so far more easily from inside a car. This he bore in mind. Meanwhile, he had high hopes for Gerald's plan to be away for a day, a night, and half the next day. He followed Gerald into the underground once more. This time, he changed at King's Cross on to the Circle, getting
out at Paddington, where, in the main-line station, he bought a first-class return ticket for Barnstaple. Dickie, behind him in the queue, bought an economy-class ticket.

By this time, Dickie confidently expected Gerald would be joined on the train by a “young lady,” and he walked through to carriage H to check. But Gerald was alone, reading a book and eating a Mars bar. They changed at Exeter, but there was no young lady there, either, then commenced (Dickie's word) the long, slow journey to Barnstaple. And there Dickie, inevitably, lost him. For Gerald was met at the station by a man in a car, an ordinary sort of man driving a green Volvo, while Dickie waited in vain for a taxi.

The following week, when Gerald set off alone in the Morris, Dickie took a gamble and stationed himself on the corner of Goodwin Road, Leyton, to wait for him. It was as he had thought. The house could be the better observed from a car. Gerald soon arrived. He parked the car and watched. Or so Dickie supposed. He couldn't really see. But he saw and moved fast when Gerald got out of the car and approached the house, knocked at the front door, and finally let himself in with his own key.

Dickie Parfitt took a photograph, but the door had shut before he got much of a shot.

It was late on Friday evening that Sarah and Hope arrived in Sarah's car. This was unusual, for they seldom came together, but they did so this time, perhaps as a mark of solidarity, as a closing of ranks, when confronted by something as upsetting as the loss of a father's identity. Throughout the long drive, which they shared, they discussed Ken Applestone and their combined failure to find him.