The Chimney Sweeper's Boy (23 page)

“Or, rather, Jason Thague's failure to find him,” said Sarah.

“Right. What steps did he take?”

“Some pal of his is Canadian. He got his father in Toronto to search through all the phone directories in the country. The man's retired; he's nothing else to do. Apparently, he loved it, made him feel useful.”

“I wish this Thague didn't have to be involved,” Hope said fretfully, taking off her large black hat and throwing it onto the backseat. “I hate the idea of strangers knowing about Daddy. You could have done all that—what he
did, I mean. You've probably got a Canadian student, and you wouldn't have to tell her who Ken Applestone might be.”

“No, I couldn't, Hope. I'm too busy. Term's started. I might as well say you could have done it.”

“It's your book, though, isn't it? Have you thought what you're going to do if it turns out Daddy did something dreadful? Poor Daddy, I know he wouldn't have meant to, but he could unintentionally have done something against the law. Imagine the tabloids getting hold of it. What are you going to do then?”

“I don't know,” Sarah said, and she was silent for a while. Then she said, as the lights of Bristol began to appear below them, “The pal's father couldn't find Ken Applestone.”

“You told me. But he found a John Applestone, didn't he?”

“He found a number. In Winnipeg. There wasn't any answer and no answering machine.”

They stopped at a service station and bought two pork pies, two packets of tandoori-flavored chips, and two cans of Coke. Then Hope took over the driving.

“I don't know why you don't have an automatic car,” she said. “This manual shift is
prelapsarian.
We should have brought mine. I did tell you, but you wouldn't listen.”

“Eat your pie,” said Sarah.

All conversation ceased while they ate. Outside Tiverton, Hope said, “You think Daddy was the son of someone connected with the Candlesses in Ipswich, don't you? Someone who was possibly in the house when the little boy died or was told about the little boy dying and told his own son, who was the same sort of age as Daddy?”

“Something like that. I don't think he was a complete stranger.”

“It could be a tradesman, a caller at the house. The grocer making a delivery, the milkman—that's an idea; why not the milkman? The postman, the baker, the knife grinder, a washerwoman.”

“Hopie,” said Sarah, “it wasn't Victorian England. It was the thirties.”

Hope signaled left, pulled into a lay-by, and parked. She turned to her sister and said, “The doctor.”

“You mean the doctor who would have come to the house to attend the little boy?”

“Exactly.”

“There must have been one,” Sarah said thoughtfully. “They weren't rich, but they weren't really poor, either. Would the child have been taken to a hospital in those days? Yes, maybe. But a doctor … Joan Thague would remember, surely.”

“Ask the grandson.”

“You can imagine the doctor going home and saying to his wife and children that he'd lost a patient, a little boy, that he'd died of meningitis.… The boy the same age as the dead boy. It would have made a great impression on him.”

“Oh, yes, it would. Poor Daddy.”

“Child mortality was quite low by that time; the doctor would seldom have had a child patient die. The doctor's own son would never have forgotten it. It might even have haunted him throughout his childhood. You can imagine him thinking, If that could happen to that boy, why not to me? He would have remembered the name—Gerald Candless. And then when the time came nineteen years later … You're quite brilliant sometimes, Hope.”

It was after ten when they reached Lundy View House. Pauline, in a red afternoon dress with pearls, looked at Hope and said brightly, “Your hat is exactly the same shape as a coal scuttle we once had at home.”

In the manner of a reclusive judge, the kind she sometimes had to listen to, Hope said, “What's a coal scuttle?”

Ursula might have said truthfully that they had never had coal fires either in Hampstead or in this house while the girls were growing up. But she said nothing. Sarah was already pouring a large whiskey for herself, and Hope had gone into the other room to answer the phone. The two of them, while loving Pauline when she was in her teens and they were little children, had later come to regard her with a kind of contemptuous tolerance. It was exactly the same feeling as she had for them. They thought she had never lived and she thought they had never grown up.

“Wrong number,” said Hope, coming back and getting herself a whiskey. “A peculiar man with a very secretive manner.”

Sarah wondered if it might have been Adam Foley. Next morning, she got
up first. She usually did. She found her mother in the garden, deadheading the dahlias. Ursula asked her if she wanted another installment of life with Father—that was the phrase she used, trying to sound casual and cheerful at the same time—but Sarah said no, thanks, not this time, not this weekend, for there was something else she wanted to discuss. Then, to Ursula's extreme astonishment, Sarah kissed her cheek. She stood there with one hand up to her cheek and the other clutching the pruning shears for some moments before she felt the wind and realized she was getting chilled to the bone, out there without a coat.

The girls had been much nicer to her lately; they had been nicer, in fact, than they had ever been. It all dated from when she had cried in the taxi after the memorial service. Now she couldn't remember why she had cried, only that it wasn't because Gerald was dead. The girls thought it was, though, and perhaps that was why their attitude toward her had changed.

The phone was ringing as Sarah came into the kitchen. She glanced at the clock and saw it was just after 9:30, which she thought ridiculously early to phone anyone, so she lifted the receiver grudgingly. A man's voice said that he was Sam Fleming and asked if he could speak to Ursula.

Just at that moment, Pauline walked in and said that if she could take a car, any car, Ursula's or Sarah's, she'd like to go shopping in Gaunton. Yes, of course she could, Sarah said, covering up the mouthpiece, then uncovering it, looking out of the window to where her mother should be but wasn't.

“I don't know where she is,” she said. “Can I get her to call you back?”

This Fleming man said yes and gave her a number, which Sarah tried to memorize, as there was no paper at hand. Pauline left and Hope walked in. They looked at each other and nodded, Sarah cocking a thumb toward the garden. Sarah said she was going to make French toast and asked if Hope wanted some, and while she was making it, Ursula appeared.

Ursula washed her hands at the sink. She started to feel nervous because both girls stared at her in silence and in a ponderous way. With her hair pulled back and screwed into a knot and wearing an old denim jacket and gray trousers, Hope looked a lot like Gerald sitting there. If Ursula had screwed up her eyes, it would have been Gerald she saw, Gerald about to say something cruel and devastating.

But what she and Sarah said, finally, wasn't exactly unpleasant, only unbelievable. Ursula found herself shaking her head.

“You didn't know anything about it?” said Hope.

“You told me he'd changed his name, but this …” What kind of a woman was it who could live with a man for thirty-four years and not know who he was? “Are you absolutely sure?”

“Afraid so.”

And then, suddenly, Ursula found she could believe it. She could believe it all too easily. It accounted for so much. For the family life in his books and the unfamiliar people, the naval themes and the recurrent theme of poverty. The long procession of loving, self-denying mothers. The world of children, siblings big and small. In that kitchen, for a moment, she didn't see her daughters, both of them strangely solicitous, anxiously eyeing her. She saw the church where she and Gerald were married, the dearth of his relations, heard his incongruous laughter when she dropped the ring, and she saw Mrs. Eady, her gaunt, wasted body, her tragic face, and she recoiled from it. She got up and stepped back, holding her hands in front of her, pushing something away.

“Ma, are you all right?”

She felt very cold then, and she sat down heavily. Hope, who had never in her life done such a thing, reached across the table and took Ursula's hand in hers.

U
RSULA WENT FOR HER WALK AS USUAL
, taking her niece with her, though it was blowing a gale and the sea was a leaping mass of what Pauline called “white horses.” When it was calm, she compared it to a millpond, or had done so until Gerald asked her if she had ever seen a millpond. While they were out, Sarah phoned Jason Thague and told him about Hope's doctor theory. He said he would be going to his grandmother's for supper and that he would ask her.

“Thanks for the check,” he said.

“I've had this letter,” she said. “May I read it to you?”

“Go ahead.”

“It's from the widow of the former editor of the
Western Morning News.
Someone passed on my inquiry to her. She must be very old—the writing's a bit shaky. She says, ‘Dear Miss Candless …' and then there's a lot of explanation, and then she says, ‘I probably remember your father because he became famous later on. My late husband engaged him as a general reporter after interviewing him sometime in the summer of 1951 or 1952, early fifties anyway.' The writing's pretty illegible here but—wait, yes—‘My
husband told me that on the day he started work, the new reporter asked to speak to him in private. He said he was writing a book, which he hoped to publish under another name. If my husband had no objection, he wished to call himself by this name from that time forward. I cannot remember what his name was, if indeed I was ever told it, but he wanted to change it to Gerald Candless.' ”

“She can't remember what it was? That's great. That's all we need.”

“She says she wouldn't remember any of this if the reporter hadn't become famous later on. Her husband told her about it at the time because he thought it strange. She goes on: ‘But he didn't object to it. He said what he called himself was the young man's business. I never knew the young man as anyone but Gerald Candless. You probably know all this, but if not, I thought it might be of interest. Yours sincerely, Diana Birchfield.' ”

“But his first book wasn't published for another four years,” Jason said. “Not till 1955.”

She was surprised and gratified that he knew. “No, but maybe he'd already started writing it. Besides, we think that stuff about the pseudonym was just an excuse, don't we? He wanted to change his name for some other reason; he'd probably already changed it.”

She said good-bye to Jason as Hope came into the room and then she showed Hope the letter. She had no secrets from her sister, or not many, but she didn't tell her she would be meeting Adam Foley that evening in the pub. It was a strange business, this carrying-on (as she called it to herself) with Adam Foley; she had experienced nothing like it before. Whether he had set it up or she had was hard to say. Both of them, probably, unanimously, coin-cidentally, but without words.

Words were minimal between them. Strange for two highly educated, highly literate people. Once they were alone together, they spoke only about each other's appearance and what they wanted to do to each other. In the morning, either she got up and left first or he did, again without words, the other left sleeping. They both lived in London, both in Kentish Town, yet they never met there. He never phoned her, nor she him. She knew he would be in the pub with the others that night because Rosie had told her so. Rosie had asked her if she minded.

Hope was going to a school reunion. Six of them, while in the sixth form, had made a plan to do this every four years on the third Saturday in October. Hope couldn't remember why October or why the third Saturday or even why every four years, but she was going. Drinks, then dinner, then more drinks. Sarah had agreed to drive her to Barnstaple and she was going to take a taxi home.

The surface of the sand was ribbed by the action of a rough sea, the rippling and corrugating of a choppy receding tide. In the shallow wells lay white razor shells, upturned, their hollows full of saltwater. Buffeted by the wind, Ursula pressed on, determined to reach Franaton Burrows before turning back. Pauline had given up after a hundred yards.