The Chimney Sweeper's Boy (47 page)

“What became of your mother?”

“She died of cancer in the spring of 1973. She was ill for a long time, was in and out of the hospital; she had a mastectomy and a hysterectomy. The cancer went to her lungs. It was an awful death. If John—Gerald—if he'd known, perhaps he might have … But there it is—he didn't. Why did you want to know if I'd read
A White Webfoot
?”

She wished now that she had brought a copy with her. She had taken it for granted that such a self-confessed fan of Gerald Candless would have the paperback in the house. It was half-past six. If it had been earlier, they could have gone out and bought a copy. In the bookshops in the shopping center above the Hoe, they would be bound to have
A White Webfoot.
Still, it was too late now.

“It's about two boys growing up in the fens,” she said. “They have some sort of sexual encounter at school; it's rather glossed over, no details. They grow up—one becomes a practicing and promiscuous homosexual and a happy one; the other is haunted by his … his orientation.”

“Ah,” said Stefan. “I begin to see. Why is it called that?”

“
A White Webfoot
? It's a quotation from something, a poem—I can't remember what. Mark, who's one of the protagonists, has a recurring memory of web-footed creatures walking in a marsh. And he has a dream of being in a stone passage with one end sealed off, and when he turns around,
the entrance has also been blocked. I suppose it's a trap dream, an expression of a need to escape while knowing there's no escape. Mark is married; he has a sympathetic wife and two sons. He sees Dennis and observes him, follows him, but they never meet. When Dennis is murdered by his lover and the lover kills himself, Mark blames himself for both their deaths. He feels sure that if he had told Dennis the truth years before, that he loved him and wanted to live with him, none of it would have happened. The rest of the novel is about guilt and self-realization.”

Stefan was silent for a moment. “And you think this is based on fact?”

“All his books were. He said so. But facts changed, were filtered,
processed.
The places were changed and the names, of course, and the relationships of one character to another. You can never quite tell what is fact and what is imagination, but you can always be sure the emotions were real. He had felt them or someone he knew had.” Sarah got up, went over to the bookcase, and brought her eyes close to the row of her father's paperbacks, the line of black moths, chimney sweeper's boys. She turned around quickly to look once more at this man who was her uncle. “I think my father wrote the letter the police found.”

“The letter?”

“Among Breech's letters was one from a man who signed himself J. It was read in court.”

“None of us went to the trial. While it was on, we wouldn't have newspapers in the house, for my mother's sake. Then Givner died and that was an end of it.”

“The letter seemed to be saying J wanted some sort of reconciliation. It's not very explicit, but it does seem to suggest that J wanted to come back to his family after an absence of eight years and could do so only by talking to Desmond. Does that mean anything to you?”

“No, it doesn't. I wish it did.”

“He says in the letter he'll phone Desmond after about a week. The letter was dated a week before the murder. Perhaps he did phone. Perhaps a date had been set for a meeting. But then Givner killed Desmond.”

“I wonder what he wanted to talk about.”

“Perhaps he wanted to tell someone why he had left, where he'd been, why he'd changed his name. Perhaps he wanted to prepare the way via one
family member for returning to the family. But he does say that he and Desmond had somehow done each other a great wrong.”

“Are we ever going to know what that was, Sarah?”

“I don't know. Somehow I feel we aren't.”

She thought, but didn't say aloud, If he had met Desmond and talked to him, would he have reverted to being John Ryan, gone home again to Goodwin Road, been reunited with his family? Terrible questions reared up. Would he ever have written another book? Or if he had, would he have written the books he had written?

Would he have met her mother and married her? Would she, Sarah, ever have been born?

On the doorstep, saying good-bye, Stefan wished her a Happy Christmas.

In her headlights, the
FOR SALE
sign gleamed whitely. No one bought houses in the midwinter, though; there was time yet. It would be a long time before a sale happened. Before the house was no longer there, she thought, for that was how it would feel when it was gone from them and owned by others, as if it had disappeared. As if a mighty spring tide had come and swept it away, drawn it off the cliff into the depths of the sea. Like another Lyonesse or Dunwich, it would lie down there, intact but unreachable, inaccessible to anyone.

A foolish fantasy. Her mother had gone to bed, though her bedroom light was still on. Sarah thought that there must be people of her age, perhaps most people, who under these circumstances would have opened that bedroom door, put a head out, said something cheerful, pleasant, inquiring, or gone up to the woman reading in bed and kissed her. She half-wanted to do some of that, but she couldn't. She stood for a moment outside the door, hesitating, in a dilemma about something so trivial, so absurd, then finally called out, “Good night!” and ran into her own room.

Psychologists said that it is best if a child models itself on the parent of the same sex. She and Hope had modeled themselves on the parent of the other sex and couldn't undo it now, wouldn't want to undo it now. How unhappy he must have been, her poor father, she thought as she lay in bed. While he was alive, she had never thought of his happiness or unhappiness, only of him as her father and sometimes, often, of her luck in having this
father, so clever, so talented, so successful, so generally admired, so good to her and Hope, so generous and so loving.

But he carried with him always some terrible thing. Oh, why didn't he tell me? Once we were grown-up, Hope and I, why didn't he tell us? We would have comforted him; we would have made it better, because we loved him so much.

There was nothing to do the next day. If only she had thought of that, anticipated it, she wouldn't have come down until this afternoon, would have stayed in a hotel in Plymouth. It was too cold to go out unless going out was essential, as it would be in the evening. Her father's study was stripped and emptied. It was painful to be in there. She thought of a line he had quoted somewhere: “The flesh, alas, is sad and I have read all the books.” It was true about the books, but her flesh wouldn't be sad tonight, no matter how cold it was, and how much she reflected and wondered and mourned.

The rapport she and Hope had seemed to establish with their mother a few months back had faded. She hadn't kissed her and thought she never would again. Whatever burden her father had carried through life, her mother should have helped lighten it. Sarah was sure she hadn't. She had left him to bear it unhappily alone while pursuing, like the woman in
Hand to Mouth
, her own selfish and petty interests.

Overnight, her heart had hardened against Ursula and it was with wonder and some self-disgust that she looked back on her journey of the evening before across the moor, when she had speculated on the single state of Stefan and her mother and had considered the possibility of bringing them together. The deceased husband's brother. Once, and not so long ago, historically speaking, marriage between them would have been against the law, would have counted in some bizarre way as incest.

She had nothing to say to Ursula and said nothing. In the afternoon, a rather wonderful thing happened. Vicky phoned. She sounded embarrassed and rather nervous. Adam Foley was down for the weekend and wanted to join them in the pub, but she had wondered how Sarah would feel—he was for some reason so antagonistic to her, could be so rude—and if it would spoil Sarah's evening, she, Vicky (her voice strengthening and growing indignant), was quite prepared to call him back and tell him no.

“I'll be fine,” Sarah said, and she grew tense with excitement. “I don't mind, you know. I hope I'm tougher than that.”

The outrageous dressing was becoming a habit. She no longer had so many doubts. This time, she painted her mouth blue as well as her fingernails. She plundered Hope's wardrobe for black stockings, not tights, a skintight miniskirt that would show those stocking tops if she bent over. The shoes, with four-inch heels, were her own. She couldn't imagine why she had bought them but was glad now that she had. It would be better if her hair were extravagantly long or shorn to her shapely skull, but that couldn't be helped now.

It was still only half-past six. She sat in her bedroom, reading the one book of her father's his house now held, the copy she had brought with her,
Purple of Cassius.
His family was in there—she knew that now—not only Chloe Rule, who was his mother, but Peter, who must be Stefan as a child and perhaps James as an adult, Catherine, who was an amalgam of Margaret and Mary, and the strict God-fearing neighbor, who was another version of Jacob Manley, another face of Joseph.

It wasn't possible to concentrate on what she was reading. Sexual desire drives out everything else, she thought, takes over, fills the body and expels the mind, turns the blood into some steamy substance, changes the heartbeat, sets the skin on fire.

Ursula looked at her mouth and her shoes, said nothing. She said nothing at the sight of her bent over at the drinks cupboard with her stocking tops showing. But when Sarah poured two inches of whiskey into a tumbler and took a swig of it, she did speak.

“Sarah, are you sure that's wise when you're going to drive to Barnstaple?”

“I can take care of myself,” said Sarah. “Don't you worry about me.”

Tyger wasn't there. Rosie had a new man, Neil, or perhaps he was just a new companion for the evening. From the moment she got there, from before she got there, Sarah was afraid Adam wouldn't come. That Rosie had said he would made no difference. Not coming after all might only be the next step in the game of tease and rudeness, disappointment and renewed expectation, the ultimate playing of hard to get.

She kept to whiskey. Her mouth left a blue imprint on the glass. After half
an hour, she went to the ladies' room and, looking at herself in the mirror, thought she looked like someone who has been too long in a cold swimming pool, white-faced, lilac-lipped. When she got back to the table, she told herself, he would be there. She delayed, pushing her fingers through her alreadytangled hair, applying more blue lipstick. But when she got back to the table, he would be there. He wasn't. Vicky had begun talking about where they should go on to. Barnstaple was such a hopeless place. Why didn't they all move to London? If they were in London, where lucky Sarah lived and lucky Adam lived, there would be a hundred places to go to; there would be infinite choice. Someone suggested a wine bar that stayed open till midnight. Someone else came up with five fresh drinks on a tray. Alexander said, “Why not eat here?” and everyone started consulting the menu. Sarah couldn't face food.

Their plates came, the usual pub possibilities, a plowman's, fish and chips, chicken and chips, all crowded onto the too-small table with sauce bottles and a basket of chopped-up French bread. Sarah picked at the bread, poured herself more wine, then more. She began thinking of what to do if he didn't come. It was nearly ten. She hadn't spoken for an hour, apart from saying yes and no. If he didn't come, it would just be a repetition of last week. But she couldn't face the lonely drive back, the dark house, her mother there and not her father.

Perhaps there was something Adam expected her to do. Go to the cottage, ring the doorbell, be insulted by him, turned away, then meet five minutes later outside in the dark. Or perhaps he was driving her to do the dreadful thing, the humiliating thing, go home and try again the next week and the next, be driven to phone him in London. But how long could she do that? And wouldn't such compliance with his wishes defeat the object, since it was antagonism and hostility that he desired as much as she?

She looked up and saw him come in by the side door. In a single moment, a second, her fear and doubt were gone. Heat flooded her, rushed up to her head, so that the beating blood sounded in her ears like the waves of the sea. One rational thought did come, that it was strange, inexplicable, how the sight of someone, not his voice or his touch or his presence but just the distant sight of him, could bring such arousal. She was almost afraid of her own body, so nearly out of control, behaving as it should not now but only
later, in his arms, under his hands. For the first time that she could remember, she was aware of gasping involuntarily. Alexander looked at her, raised his eyebrows.

She kept herself sane enough to be thankful they must think her reaction one of trepidation at Adam's arrival. He came up and stood at the already-full table, said a general “Hi.” He didn't look at her; she knew he wouldn't. Rosie moved to the left, Vicky to the right; he pulled up a chair between them and sat down.

“This is Neil,” Rosie said.

“Hi, Neil.”

“We were talking about where to go on to.”

“You always are,” he said.

“Right. Have you got any ideas?”

“There isn't anywhere.”

“There's the club. There's that new wine bar.”

“It won't affect me, anyway,” he said. “I can't stop. I only came in for a quick drink.”

He turned upon her a cold, indifferent glance. She returned it. She was so sick with desire that she wondered if her legs would carry her. When he had drunk that drink, he would go and she would have to follow him. The licensee would call time. Suppose she couldn't get up, couldn't walk? His cold eyes met hers again. He wanted her to begin. She was to start the exchange that would grow more and more acrimonious, insulting, unbearably exciting.