The Chimney Sweeper's Boy (18 page)

“I don't see why having your lover die would be all that terrible,” said Hope.

“Thanks very much.”

“I don't mean that, Fab. You know I don't. But why would it make you change your identity? A murderer for a father's more likely.”

“I'm remembering something from long ago,” Sarah said. “I once heard that funny old woman Adela Churchouse saying something to Dad about that. Oh, not about having a murderer for a father—I don't believe that—but about his accent. She said, ‘You know, Gerald, sometimes when you get animated, the way you were just then, I can hear Silly Suffolk in your voice.' And Dad said there was nothing more likely, because he'd lived in Ipswich till he was ten.”

If she had thought of that conversation at all since Joan Thague's revelations, it was to assume that everything he had said was a lie, just as she had assumed all references he had made to his origins were untrue. But suppose it hadn't been a lie? Suppose that, though not the Gerald Candless born to George and Kathleen Candless in Waterloo Road, he also had come from Ipswich and lived there long enough as a child to acquire an ineradicable accent?

The palm cross lay on the table, where Fabian had put it down on top of a copy of the
Spectator.
There was something about it that Sarah very much disliked and which she found deeply disconcerting. She didn't want to think
about it too much, didn't want to confront its implications, yet to throw it away, to put it out with the rubbish to be collected by Camden waste disposal in the morning, seemed an extreme step, and one she might regret.

After Hope and Fabian had gone, she took out of the bookcase her copy of the
Shorter Oxford Dictionary
, put the palm inside it between
dynamicity
and
Earl Marshal
, and replaced the dictionary on the shelf.

M
R. AND
M
RS.
J
OHN
G
EORGE
C
ANDLESS, PUT IN POSSESSION
of the facts, looked upon the whole thing with suspicion. J.G. passed through three phases of doubt: disbelief at first, then speculation, finally extreme wariness. “Have nothing more to do with it, keep away, ignore the girl's letter, or send back a sharp negative response.”

But Maureen said, “Suppose she puts it in the paper or this book she's writing? Better be there and find out what she's up to.”

“All right,” said J.G., “and tell her I shall be consulting my solicitor if you like.”

Neither of them had ever previously heard of Auntie Joan having a little brother who died. A little brother called Gerald Candless. Why should they? Auntie Joan wasn't really John George's auntie, but something like his first cousin once removed, and it had all happened so long ago.

“It's upset Auntie Joan a lot,” Maureen had said. “I've never seen her tearful before. And now this girl's written and wants to see her again.”

“There's bound to be some ulterior motive. She could be after Auntie Joan's money.”

“She hasn't got any money, J.G.”

“You never want to say that about anyone. The ones you say that about are the ones who are rolling in it.”

So because Joan didn't feel like writing and didn't know what to say, Maureen phoned Sarah Candless and was careful to be offhand. She could
come if she liked, but Mr. and Mrs. J. G. Candless would appreciate it if Sarah remembered Joan was an old lady and shouldn't be upset. She, Maureen, would make a point of being there just to keep an eye on things.

That made Sarah feel as if they suspected her of planning to steal the silver. She hardly knew what she was going to ask Joan Thague. If she asked about friends and neighbors at the time of the little boy's death, would that upset Joan? Would any reference to that time upset her? Suppose she asked for a photograph of the child? But how would that help? She remembered the fat photograph albums laid out, ready for scrutiny, but which had never been scrutinized. Did they take group photographs in those days? Of some university class or team, yes, but of the pupils at an Ipswich primary school?

She drove to Ipswich on the appointed day but lost her way and found herself in the center of the town. The place was full of churches and streets named for churches, so that once again she thought of the palm cross. She would have liked to imagine her father as a child in this town, walking with his mother and holding her hand, but it was impossible because so much must have changed, because the little shops of that time had been replaced by precincts and malls. But he had lived here—she was sure of that; she hung on to that, remembering the trace of a Suffolk accent Adela Churchouse and Fabian had detected.

When she eventually found her way to Rushmere St. Andrew, the front door of the bungalow was opened to her by Maureen Candless. She introduced herself brusquely as Mrs. Candless. She was a big woman, fat and heavy, somehow frightening in her charmlessness. Her face in repose was sullen and in animation a conflict of big jarring features—thick lips, overlarge teeth, a pointed nose with a tip that twitched independently of the rest of it.

“She can't tell you anything,” she said. “I expect you'll have had a wasted journey.”

This time, Sarah sensed, there was going to be no tea, no cakes on a plate with a paper doily. Joan Thague sat very upright and on the edge of an armchair made for the adoption of a more relaxed attitude. She looked uncomfortable and she was. She had been uncomfortable since Sarah's previous visit, having suffered repeated bad dreams for the first time in many years. And in the daytime, while apparently occupied with something quite removed from her family and the past, she had heard, as if a real child were in the
house and a real child somewhere in pain, a thin, weary voice crying, “My head hurts, my head hurts.” She'd been cooking a meal for her grandson Jason, standing at the stove, frying chips, when the child called her and she heard it, for she wasn't deaf to
that
voice.

None of this, of course, had been told to J.G. and his wife. They were given no details, only the bare facts. Joan was surprised they didn't know them already, and offended, too, hurt, rather, that J.G.'s mother had never said a word to him about Gerald and Gerald's death, had forgotten him or ignored him, as if he had never existed. Maureen was kind, especially in the matter of taking her to the Martlesham Tesco, but she didn't want Maureen there. She didn't want Sarah Candless, either. Or anyone.

And Sarah hardly knew how to begin. The two women were looking at her as if she were a social worker come to accuse them of mistreating a child. Joan Thague cleared her throat, brought her hands together, and looked down at her wedding ring. For the first time, Sarah was conscious of the smell in the house, a laboratory's attempt at re-creating the scent of daffodils and hyacinths. She thought she ought to preface her inquiries with some kind of apology for her father, and on the way here, she had rehearsed this, but it had turned into an apology for herself, for caring about a man who had manifestly been so false and so deceitful, and she couldn't bring herself to make it. Instead she said, “I feel that my father must have known your family. As a child, he must have lived somewhere near. He lived here till he was ten. And he had a Suffolk accent.”

“Well, that's something no one in this family ever had,” Maureen Candless said in a huffy tone and broad Ipswich.

“He had a trace of it,” Sarah said. “That's been something for me to hold on to.” She looked from one implacable face to the other, from Joan's wary eyes to the twitch at the end of Maureen's nose. “I'm sure you can understand.” Why do we say we're sure when we mean we have the gravest doubts? “I wondered if you had a neighbor with a boy of your brother's age, Mrs. Thague. Or friends of the family. Or if he had school friends.”

Joan Thague looked at her cousin's wife. For reassurance? Comfort?
Permission?
No, not that last. Joan Thague was, in the current phrase, her own woman. She said, “When you get old, you remember your childhood better than what happened yesterday. Did you know that?”

Sarah nodded.

“Gerald hadn't been at school long. The elementary school, that is. They didn't call them primary schools then. He was the only little boy in our street who went to that school. There weren't any other little boys. I know that, because Mother said it was a shame there was no one for him to play with.”

“He had no one to play with?”

“He had me,” said Joan Thague.

“Yes, but no one his own age?”

“We had these cousins, my mother's sister's children. Two boys and a girl. Donald and Kenneth and Doreen.” Joan had been thinking about it, racking her brain. “They used to come. My auntie brought them to tea once a week. She fetched the boys from school and brought them to tea and Gerald played with Don and Ken. Doreen was only little, too young for school. We had a special tea when they came. Mother made a sponge with chocolate butter icing.”

It was a middle-class picture, not what Sarah had expected. She enunciated carefully, conscious that Joan needed to read her lips. “Your mother was a nurse. Did she go out nursing? I mean, did she go to people's houses? I thought there might have been someone she nursed who had a boy or a boy she nursed.”

“My father would never have allowed my mother to work.” Mrs. Thague was more than indignant. A flush burned across her face. “He was a master printer. It would have looked as if he couldn't support his family.”

So why was she listed as a nurse on that birth certificate? Out of a struggling attempt, doomed to instant failure, on Kathleen Candless's part to assert herself as a person, not merely an appendage? This, at any rate, was how Sarah saw it. Not anxious to look into Mrs. Thague's face but knowing she must if the woman was to understand her, she asked about Don and Ken, the cousins, their ages, their fate.

“You can't expect her to know that,” said Maureen Candless.

Because Maureen hadn't been looking in her direction, Joan hadn't heard. The flush fading, the outrage subsiding, she said, “They were both younger than me and older than Gerald. Don would have been ten and Ken seven when—when my brother died. He was killed in the war, Don, I mean, in the desert at El Alamein.”

To Sarah's astonishment, she eased her chair a little toward her, edging its legs across the carpet. She peered into Sarah's face. It was as if her outrage over what she took as suggestions her family might not have been comfortably off had cleared some obstruction in her head. Some inhibition had been broken down by a surge of anger. She leaned forward, her relative's wife forgotten.

“They weren't Candlesses. My mother was a Mitchell; she and her sister were Kathleen and Dorothy Mitchell and my auntie Dorothy was a Mrs. Applestone. So they were all Applestones, Don and Ken and Doreen. Not Candlesses. You understand that, don't you?”

“I don't believe my father was a Candless, Mrs. Thague. I'm sure he wasn't. I think he just took the name.”

“That puts a different complexion on things,” said Maureen, catching on at last. Her tone was lighter, relief mixed in it. She began slowly shaking her head, as if such iniquity as Sarah's father's had been was undreamed of in her philosophy.

“My cousin Ken,” Joan Thague said, “Ken Applestone. I don't know what became of him. I left home, you see. When I was fifteen. The fact was, I couldn't stand being home after Gerald was gone. I couldn't bear it.” She cast a glance at Maureen, perhaps to check the effect such a small display of feeling might have had on her. “I went into lodgings in Sudbury and worked in the silk mill. Then I met my husband and I got married—I came home to Ipswich to get married—and we lived there, over the shop on Melford Road, and he went into the army, and what with one thing and another, I lost touch with the family. With the Applestones, I mean, not with my family. I always wrote regular to my mother and she to me. That's how I heard about Don, through my mother.”

“But no one mentioned Ken?”

“I know he was in the air force, went in when he was eighteen, in 'forty-three.” She had looked down into her lap as she sometimes did when she was speaking, as opposed to the stare into the speaker's face she gave when listening, but now she looked up. “My mother died in 'fifty-one, but she'd have told me if Ken'd died in the war. I think he was alive and living—now, where did he live?—when she died, but after that—I saw Auntie Dorothy at Mother's funeral and I don't reckon I ever saw her again.”

“Where did he live, Mrs. Thague?”

“Let me think. In Essex, I think it was. Chelmsford. Yes, it was Chelmsford, but that was forty-six years ago, and that's a long time in anyone's reckoning.”