The Chimney Sweeper's Boy (37 page)

The dedication, as so many dedications had been in the past, was to her and her sister. “For my daughters, Sarah and Hope.” Tears prickled Sarah's
eyes once more. She remembered his asking the two of them for their permission.

“As is proper,” he had said, and then added, “may I have the honor of dedicating the new one to you?”

A Messenger of the Gods
, she remembered, had been dedicated to Colin Wrightson, another one—was it
Hand to Mouth
?—to Robert Postle, and
Time Too Swift
“In memory of my mother,” while the early books had no dedications. It occurred to her then to wonder why not a single book had been dedicated to his wife, to Ursula. And why hadn't she noticed that “In memory of my mother” before? He hadn't been remembering Kathleen Candless, but Anne Ryan.

Did that mean Anne Ryan had died around the time of
Time Too Swift
? Or had died when he began to write it? Sarah went to her collection of her father's works, found that novel, and saw that its publication date was 1975. She had been nine or ten at the time, but of course she had no clear memory of the book's being published. Come to that, though she had read it, as she had read all his works, she couldn't recall anything about it. She must read it again, as she must reread all his books before writing her own.

Perhaps Anne Ryan had died in 1973 or 1974. If he knew of her death, it must be because, to some extent, he kept up with his true family. From a distance, he had made himself aware of what happened to the members of that family. Had he also known some of his O'Drida connections? Ryan and O'Drida—her father had been, in anyone's estimation, an Irishman. And was that why, when choosing a university for himself, he had picked Trinity?

Sarah wrote a note to Jason Thague, asking him if he could trace the record of Anne Ryan's death in the early seventies and to find if there were O'Dridas in the Dublin telephone directory.

When Sarah's letter came, Jason was in his room in the tall white brick house in Ipswich, reading
A White Webfoot
in the paperback edition she had sent him. Both letter and book smelled of Sarah, of a musky and faintly bitter French perfume. The cover of the book also reminded him of her, though he would have had difficulty in saying why, as the design on it was an impressionistic painting, streaks and veils of white mist half-covering a
pallid blue sky and a blurred white sun, while Sarah invariably dressed in black.

Jason could have done without all these long descriptions of fenlands and wildfowl sanctuaries on the Suffolk coast. It began to get better when the story moved to London and sex raised its more attractive head. One of the young men the novel was about apparently lived by prostitution and enjoyed it and had entered into the whole gay life with verve and gusto. Dennis had a steady boyfriend who kept him and a great many others he picked up, mostly in public conveniences in parts of London unknown to Jason. And he had his old school friend, Mark, a man who refused to admit his own sexual orientation and who underwent all sorts of treatment aimed at turning him into a lover of women.

The idea of homosexuality as a disease was common at the time. Some saw it as a moral sickness to be resisted by greater self-control, others as a curable mental disorder. Jason looked back a couple of chapters and found that the date when the action was supposed to be taking place was 1960. While Mark entered treatment, first by being given massive doses of estrogen and later by aversion therapy in a mental hospital, Dennis, who regularly had secret encounters with a string of young “rough trade” boyfriends, was moving into an apartment paid for by his lover. The guilty feelings of one man and the carefree brashness of the other were starkly contrasted.

Mark became a voluntary patient in a psychiatric ward in South London. There electrodes were attached to his body and shocks administered each time a picture of homosexual erotica was shown on a screen. The treatment had no effect but to make him deeply miserable and to contemplate taking his own life. Jason was very taken aback by all this, wondered if such things could really have gone on in his own parents' lifetime. How had Gerald Candless known about it anyway?

Earlier, when they were boys, there had been some kind of encounter between Mark and Dennis, though the details of this were never spelled out. Mark, fresh from his failed treatment, met Dennis again by chance, discovered the kind of life he was leading, and became obsessed with the idea of a confrontation between them, an explanation. Was Dennis to blame for his fate or he for Dennis's? He knew he must either thrash this matter out or kill Dennis, for while he lived, there could be no peace for him.

Jason gave up for the time being, saw to his surprise that he had been reading for three hours. Two evenings before, he had gotten out of the cab just around the corner from Sarah's place and, ignoring the expostulations of the driver, taken the tube to Liverpool Street station, thus keeping for himself most of the twenty pounds. Just enough now remained to buy half a bottle of gin or some food. He went downstairs and around to the corner shop, where he thought of Sarah, rejected the gin, and bought a pint of milk, a pizza, a bumper packet of minitortillas, and a pound of cheddar cheese.

T
HE LAST TIME
P
AULINE EVER CAME TO STAY DURING
G
ERALD
's lifetime was in the long, hot summer of 1976. Gerald was writing
Half an Hour in the Street
, the least successful and certainly the least acclaimed of all his books. Perhaps he was affected by the heat or just didn't apply himself. They spent most of the time on the beach, not the great stretch of sand that spanned the seven miles to Franaton Burrows—it was too crowded there—but in the little cove around the north headland, where there was no one but themselves. It was so quiet there and so isolated that quite often the tide came in, went out again, and returned once more over virgin sand no foot had trodden in the meantime.

Pauline was seventeen and had a boyfriend. He was the only boyfriend she had ever had and later on she would marry him. Brian was his name. Sarah wanted to know about him and got Pauline to talk about him all the time, which wasn't hard to do. Hope wasn't interested. She was still at the sand-castle stage. Gerald built the most beautiful sand castles on the beach, fortresses with moats and crenellated walls and keeps and towers. When Hope was younger, all she had wanted to do was knock them down, but Gerald hadn't minded; he had only laughed.

Ursula swam every day, but Pauline couldn't swim and didn't want to learn. She talked to Sarah about Brian and about the possibility of getting engaged to Brian and her mother saying she was too young, but it was
Gerald she looked at and Gerald's sand castles that she admired. Her future might be with Brian; it was Gerald she was in love with, however. Ursula didn't know how Hope, aged eight, could know this, but she did know it and she sat even more frequently than usual on her father's lap, twining her arms around his neck and casting at Pauline sly, challenging glances.

The fine weather came to an end before the school holidays did. One morning, there was no beach to be seen and no blue sky, only the all-enveloping mist, a white fallen cloud. Gerald shut himself up in the study with the blinds down and the lights on and got back to work on his novel. After that, the mist came down every morning, sometimes staying all day, and at the end of the week, Pauline went home because school was starting the next day. But before that, the day before she left, something happened between her and Gerald, though Ursula never knew exactly what it was.

In any other marriage, she thought, a husband who wasn't unfaithful and didn't want to be—she was quite sure of this; she knew this—would have told his wife when a woman made an advance to him and he rejected it. Ursula had an idea that a man would want to tell, would be proud of telling, because it would be a kind of insurance for him. Whatever he had done before or since,
that
time he had resisted. He had been good; he
was
good. And he would want to tell his wife because it would make him seem strong-minded, impervious, and therefore attractive.

Gerald said nothing to her. Of course, it was inconceivable that he ever would talk to her about anything verging on human relations or sex or his personal feelings. But she knew Pauline and Gerald had had some sort of confrontation. Pauline's face, which had no mark on it, no tearstain, nevertheless looked bruised. She was silent and her eyes, which had rested so constantly on Gerald, now wandered everywhere, while he seemed relaxed. It was impossible for him to be more attentive to his daughters, but perhaps he was more than usually demonstrative.

What had Pauline done? Gone to him in the study, Ursula thought, where the blinds were down and the mist pressed against the windows outside, and in some childish, clumsy way offered herself to him? His reaction was beyond her imaginings. She hoped only that he hadn't been too unkind. When the time came for leave-taking, he had kissed Pauline, as he always
did, and Ursula, who was used to seeing her rapturous response, noticed how she seemed to shrink into herself like someone out in the cold wind and inadequately dressed for it.

The customary thank-you note arrived (“Dear Auntie Ursula”) but the last line, which had become requisite, was missing. This time Pauline hadn't ended her letter with a “Hope to come back next summer holidays” and an exclamation mark. As she always did, Ursula passed the letter to Gerald across the breakfast table and he read it, as he always did, in silence. The only comment came from Sarah.

“Is there anything in it about Brian?”

Both Ursula's parents died the following year, her father in the spring, her mother at the end of the summer. Their house and their savings went to Ian and Helen and Ursula, to be divided equally. Apart from what she had got from the sale of her engagement ring, it was the first money of her own Ursula had ever had, and though it didn't amount to a great deal, it was enough to escape on. It would buy a flat and supply the means of living for a little while. The guilt she might feel if she left Gerald and lived on his money would be assuaged. Even before she got the money, knowing she would get it and having a fair idea of what it would be, she thought about this prospect. She thought of it at her mother's funeral, her eye on Ian and his not-so-new wife, Judy, the woman Herbert Wick had wanted to horsewhip. They had two children now and Ian had never looked so well and happy. A man must be doing well for himself if he looks happy at his mother's funeral.

Pauline came up to them afterward with a tall redheaded boy in tow. “This is Brian, Auntie Ursula. We're getting engaged at Christmas.”

She bestowed a big smile on Gerald. You see, somebody likes me; somebody wants me, desires me. Gerald didn't say a word, but he, too, smiled. Shaking hands with the boy, he smiled his Mephistophelian dead-eyed smile.

Walking on the beach every afternoon, Ursula thought of taking the girls out of the good schools they loved, away from this house and this seaside, away from their father. The nearest she came to going was when she broke off from typing
Hamadryad
and wrote him a long letter of explanation for her departure. Later, she tore up the letter and put the money she had inherited into their joint account. Instead of going, she thought of going in the
future, and to that end or partly to that end, she applied herself to the Open University's art history course.

Hamadryad
got rapturous reviews and was named by various celebrities as their book of the year. It was one of the six short-listed for the Booker Prize and Ursula went with Gerald to the Booker dinner. If he was disappointed at not winning, he didn't show it. Frederic Cyprian had pushed back his chair with a flourish and a clatter, stood for a moment, and marched noisily out, but Gerald had only lifted his shoulders and slowly dropped them. A journalist asked him how he felt. Wasn't it true that he had been asked to change the end but had refused?

Gerald could be pompous. “Like Pontius Pilate and Strindberg,” he said, “I told them that what I have written I have written.”

“Maybe you should have done what they suggested,” said the journalist.

“And maybe you should get back to subjects you know about. Like rock and cannabis.”

There was a scene in the novel that Ursula took particular note of while she was typing it. A young girl, friend of the Sarah-Hope heroine, makes an advance to an older man, who turns her down. In the man's words and the girl's turns of phrase, she heard Gerald and Pauline. His economical wit was there and her naive platitudes. It was a cruel piece of work. Her fear was that Pauline might read it and recognize herself or someone else might recognize her in it and tell her.