The Chimney Sweeper's Boy (20 page)

An illustrated children's encyclopedia of the time showed Sarah photographs and drawings of thirties boys.
The Wonderland of Knowledge
, in twelve volumes, had been given to Fabian Lerner's grandmother on her tenth birthday. The boys wore short flannel trousers that reached to their knees, striped blazers, and striped ties. Unlike Richmal Crompton's William Brown (of whom Hope showed a surprising knowledge), none of them wore striped caps indoors.

The Applestone boys would have looked like that. Her father would have looked like that. She imagined the boys named Don and Ken going to tea in the house in Waterloo Road, a house in which there was no central heating, refrigerator, washing machine, dishwasher, television (though possibly a radio); no carpets, only rugs on linoleum; open fires and perhaps a gas fire; draft stoppers around the window frames; and once-weekly baths. Sarah had done her research, assisted by Fabian's grandmother. She had also looked for, and failed to find, a K. Applestone in the telephone directory for the Chelmsford area.

There were no Applestones at all. Applestone turned out to be a very uncommon name, while Appletons and Applebys abounded. But Kenneth Applestone existed in the records. Paying another visit to St. Catherine's House, Sarah found him born in 1925: Kenneth George Applestone, second son of Charles and Dorothy Applestone, née Mitchell. She started looking for a record of his marriage from 1943 onward, but there was nothing. Then she looked for a death certificate. No record of that, either. Joan Thague had no photographs of the Applestone boys, so it was solely Sarah's imagination that made her see Ken as a tall, dark boy with brown eyes and curly black hair.

At this point, she understood something. It was so clear and obvious, a child would have seen it, but she hadn't until this moment. Only if Ken Applestone was not to be found could she seriously begin to think of him as her father. The harder it became to find him, the more likely he was to be her father.

That evening, she phoned all the Applestones in the London phone book. There weren't many. One of them, the last she phoned, said that her father had mentioned cousins called Donald and Kenneth and that the woman to get in touch with was another cousin, a woman named Victoria Anderson, who lived in Exeter. Sarah got this woman's phone number from directory assistance, then dialed it and encountered an answering service. She left her name and number and a brief explanation of what she wanted, and half an hour later the phone rang.

A voice said, “Ms. Sarah Candless?”

It hadn't sounded feminine, but still she said, “Victoria Anderson?”

“No, should it be? I sort of wish it was. My name's Jason Thague, and anything's better than that. I'm Joan's grandson.”

It was three days since she had been to Ipswich, but she was sure he was going to reprove her. She imagined him saying, “How dare you come here and upset my gran? She's an old lady. She's not strong. Who do you think you …”

“What can I do for you, Mr. Thague?”

“Jason, please. I don't think anyone's called me Mr. Thague before. Ever.” His wasn't a Suffolk voice; rather, the accent dubbed in the eighties “Estuary English.” “It's more a case of what can I do for you,” he said.

She hesitated. “Can you do anything for me?”

“I don't know. I hope so. My nan's told me about you and what you're doing. That was the first I'd heard of her having a little brother who died. The first my dad'd heard, come to that.” He paused, then said in a stronger tone, “The fact is, I'm permanently strapped for cash. I'm a student, if you know what that means.”

“I should,” she said. “I teach them.”

“Right. I thought—I'd
like
—to give it a go at finding your dad for you. Who he was, I mean. I think I'd be good at it. I'm in the right place, for a start. I know the place, worse luck. But I do know it. If he came from around here, I reckon I could trace him, and if there's any more to be gotten out of Joan, I'm the man to do it.”

“You would want to be paid, of course?”

“I'm doing it for the money,” he said simply.

She realized only now, late in the day, that attempting to find her father's
origins had brought her a chronic distress. She hated it, the phone calls, the visits, the search through records. The excitement was all gone. Because it was her father, whom she had loved and honored and who, she had lately constantly felt, might not be worthy of even common respect.

“All right,” she said. “Why not? Do you want some sort of contract?”

“I'd better. I'm tempted to take your word, but that wouldn't be businesslike, would it? You can send me a contract and all the info you've got about your dad.”

The next day, she packed it all up for him: photocopies of her father's birth certificate and documents from the
Walthamstow Herald
, the
Western Morning News
, Trinity College records. In her covering letter, she gave it as her opinion—and it hurt her to write it—that some unknown man, probably twenty-five years old, probably a trained journalist, probably born in Ipswich and a resident there till the age of ten, had in the summer of 1951 assumed the identity of Gerald Candless.

He might have attended a university somewhere, though not Trinity College, Dublin. He might have served in one of the armed forces during World War II. He was the right age. His hair had been black when he was young. His eyes were brown. He had no scars or what used to be called on passports “distinguishing marks.” She winced, writing these things to an unknown, brash young man with a common accent. She thought she could see him in her mind's eye, short and weedy, the puddingy Candless (the
real
Candless) face triumphing over Thague genes, spotty skin, round glasses, shaggy brown hair to his shoulders.

She wrote, “My father used to say he put everything that happened to him into his novels, these events being subject to the filtering process and subtle metamorphosis that operates with all novelists when using autobiographical detail in their work. I am sure you are aware of this.” (She wasn't; she was far from sure. She thought of her own students.) “It may still be worthwhile considering passages in his novels as possible pointers to his identity. I would direct you to
A Paper Landscape
, in which he describes life as a member of a large Irish immigrant family who he writes about very tellingly. I mean by this that the reader can easily believe in this fiction as truth.

“It may be useful, too, to look at his first novel,
The Centre of Attraction.
Its early chapters are about World War II, when a young man of eighteen serves in the Royal Navy in Northern Ireland and later in the Far East. You may be a fan of my father's and have these books, but if not, I will, of course, send you copies.”

When she returned from the post office, her phone was ringing. Victoria Anderson. Anderson was her married name. She had been born Applestone, the daughter of Charles Applestone's younger brother Thomas. Donald, Kenneth, and Doreen Applestone had, therefore, been her first cousins, though all much older than she. Doreen, the baby in Joan Thague's account, had been twenty-one when she was born.

Sarah quickly realized that here she had come across one of those family fanatics, as passionate about genealogical entanglements as she had been indifferent. Victoria Anderson would have her own personally created family trees, one for the maternal side, one for the paternal. It would be an ongoing irritation to her that she had failed, say, to get back further than 1795. She would be maddened by her inability to find the Christian name of a woman married in the 1820s or that of the child born in 1834 and destined to live only two days.

She reflected on all this while Victoria Anderson detailed the forebears of Mitchells and Thagues, digressing to catalog the eight children born to her cousin Doreen in two marriages.

“And Ken Applestone?” Sarah prompted her.

“He emigrated to Canada.”

“When was that?”

“Ken? I thought it was Don Applestone you were interested in. Wasn't that what you said in your message? Well, one of us must have gotten it wrong. Don married in 'forty-one, you know. He was only nineteen, but he married and had a son called Tony before he was killed in Egypt. Tony's quite a lot older than I am, but we keep in touch.…”

“When did Ken emigrate?”

“Nineteen fifty-one.” She must have been reading all this. Probably she had it on a computer, stowed under FAM.DOC. “He went to Canada in 'fifty-one. That's the year I was born.”

“So you got all this from someone else?”

“Naturally. My mother told me about Ken emigrating, though she'd never met him. My father knew him, but my father died ten years ago. I did try to follow Ken up.”

I bet you did, Sarah thought. “How did you try?”

“I had a friend in Montreal. She went through phone books for me.” Victoria Anderson's voice dropped, becoming intense. “I didn't care to have a dead end, you see. He might have married and had children; he almost certainly did. It's quite personally upsetting to me to have gaps in my genealogical tables.”

Not as upsetting as it is to me.
Sarah said impatiently, “The fact is, then, that there's been no contact with Ken Applestone since 1951?”

“If you put it like that—well, no, I suppose there hasn't been.”

Finding herself quite unaware of how to draw up a contract for Jason Thague that would be binding, she phoned Hope for advice.

“I'll do it for you,” Hope said.

“Will you really? Thanks. I know you don't approve.”

“Maybe not, but if it's got to be done, I'd like it done properly.”

“Hopie, can you remember Dad ever saying he based a book on some actual event? I mean, I know he said everything he wrote had its source in his experience or his observation, but did he ever use a real event? Like people write novels about battles in the Crimean War or the sinking of the
Titanic.
”

“
The Centre of Attraction
's got the dropping of the atomic bombs on Japan in it. You remember what's his name—Richard—he feels guilty because the bombs probably saved his life; they stopped him from having to take part in an invasion of Japan. And then there's
A White Webfoot.
The critics said it was based on fact, although Daddy didn't.”

“I was away when that was published. I was in America. Of course I've read it.”

“The reviewers called it a thriller and said it was based on the Highbury murder case of—let's see—1960 or 1961, I think.”

“That would be too late. Ten years too late. And it hasn't anything in it about someone changing his identity, has it?”

“Nothing at all,” said Hope.

T
HIRTY YEARS HAD PASSED SINCE
U
RSULA HAD SEEN
her brother's first wife, Jean. She never thought of her, except in one connection, and had almost forgotten her. Jean had faded out of her life as in-laws do in the event of death or divorce. In this case, it had been divorce. And now she was dead.

Perhaps not too untimely a death. She had been, after all, a few years older than Ian, which would have made her over seventy. A letter coming from him had surprised Ursula, the handwriting on the envelope, which at first she didn't recognize. They spoke occasionally on the phone; they sent each other Christmas cards, his second wife, the mother of his children, writing them. He had phoned when Gerald died but hadn't come to either funeral or memorial service. But now a letter had arrived. It had to be a serious matter to warrant a letter.

Ian wrote as if he cared, though not as if he regretted. Jean had never remarried, had shared a house for years with her widowed sister. Death had come three weeks before; the funeral was long over. Ian hadn't attended it and he was sure neither Ursula nor Helen would have wanted to be there. Ursula, sitting at her kitchen table with the letter in her hand, tried to remember Jean, to see her face, to conjure up precisely her features and coloring, but that, she failed to do. She could manage only a pale blur that was somehow intense and strained, a tortured face, dark hair threaded all over with gray, hands that fluttered, then clutched each other. But she remembered with perfect clarity why Jean, who was seldom in touch with her,
whom she could say she hardly knew, came to Holly Mount that day in 1968 and poured out the anguish in her heart.

Three years later, Jean and Ian were divorced and Ian married the woman on whose account Jean had come to confide in Ursula. Why Ursula? It was never made clear why she had been chosen. Perhaps because Jean's own family and friends were too close. Or perhaps it was that Jean, like Helen and even to some extent Betty Wick, looked upon Ursula, by virtue of her marriage to a novelist (a writer, an artist, a person from a different world), her entrée to elite and sophisticated circles, her home in that most elegant and least suburban of suburbs, as a woman of the world who would know answers and remedies in unfamiliar and indeed undreamed-of situations.