The Chimney Sweeper's Boy (44 page)

He had never said a word to the girls. Nor had she. And they had never known, as evinced by Sarah's surprise that her mother hadn't read
A White Webfoot.
Gerald went on tour to the United States for
A Man of Thessaly
, but she stayed at home. He told anyone who cared to know that his publishers weren't prepared to pay her airfare.

The angina began the following year. He had never walked much and now he walked even less, for any climb left him fighting for breath. While at the hospital for tests, actually during a cardiogram, he had a heart attack. Not much of a one, but alarming.

Once again, nothing was said to the girls. The woman who no longer cared about him bore the brunt of his health problems, while the women who loved him were left in ignorance. As far as they knew, their father might live for twenty years.

The year of
Phantom Listeners
was the year he got the OBE. She went to the palace with him and sat in the audience next to Robert Postle. Afterward, he told Robert that the queen had asked him how many books he had written and whether he was working on one now. They had lunch in Charlotte Street and Robert asked what he had said to the queen about writing another book, as he, Gerald's publisher, would very much like to know.

“I may give up writing,” Gerald had said. “I may retire.”

“Writers don't retire. Not at sixty.”

“Some should when they're thirty,” said Gerald.

Robert hadn't taken the threat seriously. And that was wise of him, because Gerald had begun work on
A White Webfoot
the following week. Ursula hadn't known its title and hadn't cared to find out, but the girls knew
and talked about it. There was no escaping involvement with his work in that house.

He bought Sarah's flat when she had her first job in London, and Hope's a year later. South Kensington or Bayswater was what he would have liked for them, but they had to settle for Kentish Town and Crouch End, the best he could afford. Not that they had been anything but rapturous, touchingly grateful; they realized their own luck, aware of their friends' mortgages. The new book progressed slowly. She wondered if he was ill, if he lay on the sofa in the study, racked with angina pain, instead of writing. Something was making the process very slow for him, as if the pages he produced were not the result of a melding of invention and imagination, but of a hand-to-hand battle with a demon that must be daily wrestled to the floor. And when he finally appeared, to sit reading in the living room or come for his meal, he looked gaunt and ghost-ridden, his eyes staring, black shadows under them like inky fingerprints.

For a few weeks, they had reached a point where they ceased altogether to speak to each other. Total silence between people who share a home might have been possible on his side; it wasn't on hers. Gradually, they began once more to exchange remarks about their children, the weather, the condition of the sea and his health.

One evening when she was coming out of a racking migraine, she looked at him and thought he seemed worse than she was. “You are very ill,” she said.

“It's in the mind,” he said, “only in the mind,” and then he laughed, presumably at that “only.”

“If I were you, I'd make an appointment with the doctor.”

“And if I were you,” he said, “I'd want me to die. The sooner the better.”

It took him two and a half years to complete his new novel. Within a few months of its reaching Robert Postle, a rough of a proposed jacket design arrived. The white, gold-shot mist—rather, the dazzling whiteness barely broken by streaks of saffron and blue—reminded Ursula of an Impressionist painting, a Monet without a motif. Gerald hated it. His feelings about it, violently expressed, came near to generating a real conversation between them. He sent it back to Mellie Pearson, the artist, with demands for change, but
even the final version, with birds and a sun and a pale waterside, was always to be a cause of deep dislike that almost amounted to phobia. The original in a pastel gray frame, presented to him at the novel's launch party, he afterward returned to the artist.

The critics called
A White Webfoot
a thriller. One newspaper had its crime-fiction critic review it. Another described it as “a murder story dressed up in Dostoyevskian pretensions.” Gerald Candless, said the
Evening Standard
, no longer able to dredge up plots out of his own imagination, had based his new novel on the Ryan case, a notorious and sordid murder that was of interest today solely because of its place in the history of the campaign for homosexual-law reform.

Gerald had had very little experience with bad reviews. Even
Half an Hour in the Street
had met with nothing like this. He didn't want his daughters to see the newspapers, but he was powerless, in Hope's case, to prevent it. Sarah, as it happened, was out of the country. Hope, of course, flew to her father's defense and would have written impassioned letters to several newspapers if Gerald hadn't gently persuaded her that this would do more harm than good.

His last book, the last, that is, before the one that would be posthumously published, he wrote in four months. No one could have called
The Mezzanine Smile
a thriller (Gerald said) and no one did. Reviewers wrote four hundred words about it rather than the established eight hundred and it passed quietly into number twenty on some newspaper's best-seller list. Ursula, in tune with her resolve of nine years before, didn't read it.

“And I still don't know what it's about,” she said to Sam, taking the book down from the shelf and handing it to him.

“A man who works on a provincial newspaper but who gets up at five to write plays and a woman who loses her chance of marriage because she stays at home to look after her old parents.”

“You can take them to London with you. I must stay here for Sarah at the weekend and then I'll come up and maybe …”

“You won't go back?”

“I shall have to tell the girls, Sam. I don't think they'll mind. They're not very interested in what I do. Shall we go for a walk on the beach?”

*  *  *

The sea was a dull slate blue, its color the reflection of dark clouds with gaps of clear sky between them. Mussel shells, ground into powder by the tides, made chevron streaks on the pale, flat sand, and the razor shells lay everywhere, some split and splintered, others perfect open blades. The air was clear and cold, the sun a pool of yellow light between bulges of cloud low on the horizon.

“Have you ever noticed,” she said, “how sunsets aren't red? The sky never goes red until after the sun has gone down.”

“Your late husband pointed that out in one of his books.”

“Did he? You know his work better than I do. But I'm not surprised; he pointed everything out. Somewhere he said that people never shiver from fear or emotion, only from the cold, though writers are always saying they do.”

“Hold my hand,” he said.

They walked along the water's edge, where the sand was firmest, hard as setting mortar. Gerald had never written about this sea that for twenty-seven years had been under his windows. He had enjoyed it only on the finest days. She thought, as the trickling tide crept close to her shoes, as she stepped aside and he jumped aside, laughing, I will do my best never to think about Gerald again; I will try to shut off my past.

At the gap in the dunes, they turned back. The hotel, which had been dark for long weeks, now had lights in many of its windows and, as they watched, more came on. They were going to eat their Christmas dinner up there. It is where we met, she thought, turning her face to him, smiling. He bent over and kissed her.

She wanted to ask him something. She remembered what he had said soon after they met, how he wanted to be in love, and she knew that if she asked him, she would get an honest answer. Why am I so greedy for punishment? Haven't I had enough? She asked herself those questions but asked him nothing, and they watched the sun go down and the red color gradually seep across the sky.

W
ITHOUT ANY GROUNDS FOR HOPE, SHE HAD HALF-EXPECTED A LETTER
from Jason to be waiting for her when she got back, an apology, a request for more work. There was nothing, and on an impulse, she sent him a check for the amount she had been paying him weekly when he was still her researcher. He was loathsome and clumsy, but his cry of hunger sometimes still echoed in her head. She considered a covering letter, something to the effect of hoping he was all right, but she couldn't find suitable words, and in the end, she put the check by itself into the envelope.

In his absence, she had to do it herself. She went to the British Newspaper Library in Colindale. Hope had given her the approximate dates. It was a slow business, finding the appropriate newspapers, waiting for them to be brought to her, and it made researches at St. Catherine's House seem simple. But at last, when she had been there more than two hours, she found what she was looking for.

The death of Desmond Ryan had taken place in the autumn of 1959. In October. The
Evening News
was the first newspaper to carry a report of it. A body had been discovered that morning by a friend who had a key to a flat in Highbury Crescent. It was identified as that of Desmond William Ryan, twenty-eight, of that address. Police were treating the case as a murder.

The following day's papers all carried similar accounts. All were brief, cagey, somehow veiled. It didn't take a particularly suspicious mind to detect a contrived cover-up. The local weekly, the
Walthamstow Independent
, was less reticent. On the following Friday, when it came out, it carried a much fuller story and a long article about what it described as a “perverts' ring” and a “network of corruption.” Its tone was one of almost incredulous moral outrage. The word
homosexual
was never used, nor was
gay.
Perhaps
gay
hadn't come into use then, Sarah thought vaguely. The piece told of large-scale investigations by the police and the uncovering of a “web of vice” unparalleled in British history.

“Perverts” and “inverts” got in touch with one another through elaborate codes in film and pornographic magazines. Accounts followed of recent prosecutions, the imprisonment of a clergyman for what the chairman of a quarter sessions had called “one of the most terrible offenses in the world.” Public conveniences were a notorious meeting place for these “sick men,” and there they even indulged their disgusting and degraded practices. Such behavior was common across the metropolis, though it seemed to have begun in Soho, and to have spread its “abominable tentacles” outward, through Finsbury, Islington, and Highbury, Lisson Grove, Kilburn, and the respectable northern suburbs.

Sarah couldn't see where Desmond Ryan came into all this until she reached the proceedings at the central criminal court, the accounts of the trial of George Peter Givner for his murder. Here, in the national newspapers, the process was again heavily veiled under prudery and euphemism, but she could make out Givner's role and Desmond's. Givner had been his lover, had rented the Highbury Crescent flat for him and occasionally lived with him there. On the evening in question, according to the police, Givner had arrived at the flat, let himself in with his key, and found Desmond Ryan there with another man. There had been a violent quarrel, during which the other man fled and which culminated in Givner first striking Ryan with a table lamp, then using an eighteen-inch-high marble statuette of a male nude to beat him to death. Much was made in the report of this bronze figurine of Apollo.

The next day, the witness, the other man in the flat, James Henry Breech, a private soldier, gave evidence of Givner's arrival, his verbal abuse of Ryan,
and the quarrel. He had not witnessed the murder, but he had seen Givner pick up the statuette and strike Ryan with it. Then he had fled, run down the stairs and out into the street. He denied a sexual relationship with Ryan, describing the two of them as “close friends,” but the police found letters from him to Ryan in the flat, misspelled, punctuation-free effusions of love combined with offers of payment for favors.

Among these letters was one other, a literate piece of work, written in a spidery, sloping hand and signed only with the letter
J.
It was dated one week before, but there was no address on it and no clue as to the sender. This letter was read in court just as Breech's letters were and the newspaper gave them all in full, the soldier's, Sarah suspected, for the pleasure of offering its readers examples not so much of the man's depravity as of his brutish ignorance. J's letter was quite another matter.