The Chimney Sweeper's Boy (40 page)

“It's still based on me,” Ursula said.

“Nonsense.”

“Why did you do it?” She corrected herself. “Why are you doing it?”

“It is you who are doing it, Ursula. Still, it's a recognized phenomenon. People wish to identify themselves with characters in fiction, still more to find characters they can allege are based on themselves. I don't know why, but it's probably vanity. Vanity and a desire to be the center of attention.”

She asked him not to publish it. He laughed and told her she was imagining things. But he did change Una's name to Imogen, Ursula and Una strictly being the only two English Christian names for women beginning with a
U.
He also made Imogen childless and her studies in social sciences rather than fine arts.

Ursula had typed six chapters but broke off in the middle of the seventh. She told him she would do no more. She would never type another line for him, and she waited for him to ask how, then, she justified her existence as sharer in his income. But he never did. That wasn't his way; that was the last thing he cared about.

No one else could have read his handwriting, so he went into Barnstaple and bought himself a typewriter. As a journalist all those years before, he had been a two-finger typist and he managed. The result wasn't fit for his agent's eyes or Robert Postle's, and Rosemary, who typed for a living, was found to take on Ursula's job.

Hand to Mouth
was published in the autumn of 1984. The reviews were disappointing. Ursula waited for some friend or acquaintance or even gossip columnist to point out the similarities of character and way of life between Imogen and herself. But no one did.

“I've read
Hand to Mouth
,” Sam said, “and I wouldn't have said Imogen was a portrait of you. She's not in the least like you.”

“Her life was like mine was then. You didn't know me then. She used my turns of phrase. She dressed as I dressed.”

“There's a story about Somerset Maugham and Hugh Walpole,” he said. “Maugham based a character directly on Walpole. The self-opinionated critic Alroy Kear was Walpole to the teeth, barely a feature or a character trait altered. When
Cakes and Ale
was already in print, at proof stage,
Maugham gave him a proof, and as Walpole sat down to read it that same night, he recognized himself in every cruel detail. There was nothing to be done except sue, but he didn't sue. It was said to have ruined his life; he was never the same again, never got his confidence back. And he had thought Maugham his friend.”

“Well, I'd thought Gerald was my husband. I never really spoke to him much after that. That was the end.”

They were at the top of the Pincian Hill because Sam said it was the best place to watch the sun set over the city. The dome of St. Peter's seemed to melt into the growing dusk as the Angelus began to ring. As the sky changed from red to violet, they began to walk down, pausing to look through the bars of the gate at the ancient garden.

“Hold my hand,” Sam said as they descended.

“I think I'm too old to hold hands.”

“Hold my hand. Please.”

So she held his hand and he told her how this was the only section of the Aurelian Wall that Belisarius had failed to repair, for the Romans told him St. Peter himself would defend it against all assault. A young man and a girl were walking ahead of them, also hand in hand, and when the man turned around to look back over his shoulder, his dark good looks reminded her of Fabian Lerner. He was very much like him, almost his double, or his double as Fabian had been twelve years before.

Hope had brought him home to Lundy View House. It was December and their term at Cambridge, where they had met two months before, had just ended. Publication day of
Hand to Mouth
had also been Hope's eighteenth birthday. Fabian had turned eighteen the previous June.

She could remember so clearly their arrival, the sound of Hope's key in the door just when Gerald's nerves were starting to get the better of him and he had begun to pace. She was half an hour late, or half an hour late in his view, for she had certainly not given any arrival time. The key in the lock and then her voice calling, “Daddy!”

That was when Hope had begun wearing those hats and the one she had on was her first black velvet cartwheel. She threw it onto the sofa and rushed into her father's arms. Ursula said hello to Fabian, shook hands, waited for the greetings to be over.

Hope said belatedly, “This is Fabian.”

Gerald looked at the boy then. But he quickly disguised, veiled, obscured, the indefinable flash that leapt in his eyes. She saw it later, when, thinking himself unobserved or perhaps that observers would fail to interpret, he allowed his gaze to rest on Fabian for a long moment—of what, Ursula hardly knew. Briefly, his whole face changed; his eyes darkened, and his flesh seemed to swell. He passed his tongue across his lips. And then, swiftly, he collected himself. He sat up straight. He smiled.

She squeezed Sam's hand, looked up into his face.

“Ten thousand lire for them.”

“I was thinking of my daughter Hope's boyfriend. That boy looks like him.”

“I don't like you to think of boys,” Sam said. “I want you to think of me.”

Sarah had lain in bed in the dark, unable to sleep. The black misery she had felt when her father died descended once more, but this time it wasn't definable; she didn't know why she was plunged into such deep unhappiness. It had nothing to do with Jason Thague, who was a fool, who misunderstood everything, but who hadn't, of course, tried to rape her. Perhaps it was the same old misery from the same source, because her father was dead and wouldn't come back and be there.

If he had been alive, she would have gone to him and thrown herself into his arms, talked to him and been comforted. There was one man in the world she thought could comfort her, hold her and kiss her and tell her all was well, but even as she thought it, she saw the folly of that. His might be the first name to come to mind, but it should have been the last. Her relationship with Adam Foley depended on mutual rudeness and antagonism, with no place in it for tenderness.

She imagined phoning him. It made her shudder. If you were really close to someone, you ought to be able to phone him at any hour of the night and unburden your soul, but there had never been anyone like that in her life except her father. No contemporary, no lover. Violence and abuse aroused her, and she didn't know why. They were the antithesis of what she had had from her father. But she didn't want to think about that; it bit too hard at the bone. She would think about Adam, sex with Adam, which she did more or less rewardingly, and at last she fell asleep.

That had been nearly two weeks ago, and in those two weeks she had done the things Jason might have done but which she could no longer ask him to do. She sent him a check—the final check, she thought it would be—without a covering letter, then set about finding Stephen Ryan herself. It wasn't difficult, because he was in the Plymouth phone book, the street where he lived recognizable as in that district of the city called Mutley. She didn't know Plymouth well, but she knew that much.

Phoning J. G. Candless had been one thing; this would be quite another. She had been naive then; she had believed she knew exactly who Gerald Candless was. Besides, this Stephen was her uncle. She couldn't just pick up the phone, dial his number, say who she was, and tell him he was her uncle. Instead, she wrote. It took her a long time, that letter, and when she had finally finished it, she balled it up, threw it away, and wrote simply: “Dear Mr. Ryan, I believe I am your niece, your lost brother John's daughter. I am writing a book about him. May I come and see you?”

It was only after she had posted it that she realized she hadn't said her father was dead.

I
NSTEAD OF A PHONE CALL, A LETTER CAME ADDRESSED TO
M
RS.
S. Candless. “Dear Mrs. Candless …” it began. It puzzled her for a moment and then she understood he must suppose her to have been called Ryan and that Candless was her married name. He wrote that he would be happy to see her; he was generally at home in the evenings from five onward. Although she hadn't asked for it, he gave information about himself.

He was a widower, his wife having died four years before, and their three children were all married and had children of their own. His son also lived in Plymouth, one of his daughters in Cornwall, the other in York. He was a teacher, just sixty, he had turned sixty in September, and he hoped to be able to work until retirement age, five years hence. The book she planned to write interested him, as he had himself written two books, one on walks on Dartmoor and the other purporting to be the journal of a parson who had spent his summer holidays fossil-hunting on the Dorset coast. If Mrs. Candless would like to name a day for her visit, perhaps she would leave a message on his answering machine, as he was at work during the day.

Sarah thought that he, too, was wary of this meeting, rather shy, nervous of confronting her, and determined not to speak to her until he could also see her, but she might have been reading too much into what was perhaps a routine instruction he gave everyone. Whatever the reason was, this initial remoteness suited her, too. She picked up the phone at eleven in the morning, when she knew he would be at school, and told him she would like to visit on Friday in the late afternoon.

Adam Foley would be at the family cottage in Barnstaple on the Saturday.

*  *  *

The tall finger of stone on the hill, the Wellington monument, meant she was coming into Devon. She relaxed a little. It had seemed a longer drive than usual.

No word had come from Jason Thague. She hadn't expected anything, but his silence made her angry just the same. He could have acknowledged the check. He could have written. It wouldn't have hurt him to have apologized to her a bit more formally. But what could you expect from someone with his background and antecedents? Her father had been a snob and had made her one, and she knew it, but the knowledge didn't change her.

She remembered Joan Thague with a shudder. At least the woman hadn't turned out to be her aunt, and that was something to be thankful for. And now an uncle, who might be just as bad, awaited her, no more than twenty miles away. She had just driven along the coast road and through Dawlish and it was already getting dark. December, her thirty-second birthday next week, a couple of weeks to go before the shortest day, then Christmas. The first birthday without her father and, unthinkable, the first dreadful Christmas. She wouldn't go home for it, that was for sure, and Hope wouldn't. Would Adam?

It was just after five when she approached Plymouth. All the lights were on and Sainsbury's supermarket with its roof of sails gleamed like a fleet of white ships. Up to the right for Mutley. She drew the car into the curb where there were no yellow lines, parked, switched off the ignition, and looked at her face in the rearview mirror. This was something she never did, repowdering her face and relipsticking her mouth like an old woman, like her grandmother Wick used to, but she did it now. And she ran her fingers through her hair and tossed it and ran a wet finger under each eye in case there were mascara smudges.

For an old schoolteacher. She must be mad. If they took a sample of her DNA and his and compared them, they would be able to see a close relationship. As close as to her father, she thought, or was that wrong? And those children of his who had children of their own, they were her cousins. She might have seen that woman in the street in Fowey or Truro and never known. The one who lived in York—Sarah had done some of her postgraduate work at York University and could have passed her every day, met her eyes, even noticed some vague, unlikely resemblance.

His house was part of a Victorian terrace. It was all late Victorian up here, biggish houses or small, three up, two down, a bathroom, a kitchen, and a scullery. Sarah had had a school friend who lived near here and her grandmother had called it a scullery, the dark hole of a minikitchen with a copper in it. All the rows of houses had gardens behind and alleys running between them, parallel to the streets and linking them as the streets did, flagstone passages with high stone walls. Something struck a chord in her mind. Where had she read recently about a stone passage, a tunnel in someone's dream? It would come back to her.

The houses themselves were dark gray granite, solid as the rock itself dug out of Dartmoor. She went up the path and rang the bell. Immediately, a light came on in the little porch. She expelled her breath heavily. It was ridiculous to be so nervous. She tried to relax, drop her shoulders, loosen her tense hands. The door was opened and she saw what she hadn't anticipated, what she had forgotten she might see, something that had never crossed her mind.