The Chimney Sweeper's Boy Read online

  The sarcastic reply came: “Of course. I haven’t even changed the names.” Then he said, “It’s a novel, the start of a novel, or the end—I don’t know which. But he is not he and she is not she and they are not they. Right? I don’t want it left here. You were coming, I’d met you in wherever it was …”

  “Hay-on-Wye.”

  “Right. You were coming, and it came to me that you’d do. Who else is there down here?”

  “I wonder you didn’t put it in a safe-deposit box somewhere.”

  “Oh, you wonder that, do you? If you don’t want to take it and look after it for me, just say. I’ll give it to Miss Batty, or I’ll burn it. Come to think of it, burning might be best.”

  “For God’s sake, don’t burn it,” said Titus. “I’ll take it. How do I get it back to you? And when do I?”

  Gerald picked up the pages and held them in his hands. Underneath them, on the desk, was a padded bag already addressed to Gerald Candless, Lundy View House, Gaunton, North Devon, and stamped with £1.50 postage.

  “Do you … Do you want me to … Do you mind if I read it?”

  A gale of laughter greeted that, a strong, vigorous bellow, incompatible with those tremulous hands. “You’ll have a job. I’m the world’s lousiest typist. Here, you can put it in this.”

  “This” was a cheap-looking plastic briefcase, the kind of thing that, containing the requisite brochures and agenda, is given to delegates at a conference. Titus Romney wouldn’t have been seen dead with it normally. But he had only a short distance to carry it to the hotel. They found Julia in the drawing room, carrying on a stilted conversation with Gerald’s wife. Titus had already forgotten her name, but he didn’t have to remember it, because they were going. It was 3:30 and they were leaving. The daughters had disappeared.

  “I’ll walk with you to the hotel,” Gerald said. “I’m supposed to walk a bit every day. A few yards.”

  Julia gushed, the way she did when she had had a horrid time. “Goodbye. Thank you so much. It’s been lovely. A lovely lunch.”

  “Enjoy the rest of your stay,” Gerald’s wife said.

  They set off across the garden, Titus carrying the briefcase, at which Julia cast curious glances. The garden extended to about ten yards from the cliff edge, where there was a gate to the cliff path. From this path, all the beach could be seen, and the car park, full of cars and trailers. The beach was crowded and there were a lot of people in the sea. Somewhere Julia had read this described as the finest beach on the English coast, the longest, seven miles of it, with the best sand. The safest beach, for the tide went out half a mile and flowed in gently over the flat, scarcely sloping sand, a shallow, limpid sea. It was blue as a jewel, calm, waveless.

  “You must love living here,” Julia said politely.

  He didn’t answer. Titus asked him if he didn’t like walking. The way he talked about it implied he didn’t like it.

  “I don’t like any physical exercise. Only cranks like walking. That’s why a sensible man invented the car.”

  A gate in the path bore a sign: THE DUNES HOTEL. STRICTLY PRIVATE. HOTEL GUESTS ONLY. Gerald opened it, then stood aside to let Julia pass through. The hotel, Edwardian red brick with white facings, multigabled, stood up above them, its striped awnings unfurled across the terrace. People sat at tables having tea. Children splashed about in a swimming pool that was barely concealed by privet hedges.

  “Your children enjoying themselves?”

  “We haven’t any children,” said Julia.

  “Really? Why not?”

  “I don’t know.” She was very taken aback. That should be a question people didn’t ask. “I … I don’t necessarily want any.”

  Another gate to pass through and they were on the turf of the big lawn.

  “You don’t want any children?” Gerald said. “How unnatural. You must change your mind. Not afraid to have a baby, are you? Some women are. Children are the crown of existence. Children are the source of all happiness. The great reward. Believe me. I know. Here we are, then, back among the throng.”

  Julia was so angry, she was nearly rude to him. She looked at her husband, but he refused to meet her eyes. She turned to Gerald Candless, resolved on silently shaking hands with him, turning her back on him, and marching quickly up to her room. Her hand went out reluctantly. He failed to take it, though this omission wasn’t rudeness. He was staring up at the hotel, at the terrace, with an expression of astonishment and, more than that, amazement. His eyes were fixed and so unblinking that she followed his gaze.

  Nothing to see, no one to look at, nothing to cause this rigid, fixed stare. It was the elderly people who congregated there on the terrace, she had noticed from the previous afternoon, those who didn’t swim or walk far or venture down the cliff, knowing they would have to climb up again. The old ones sat there under the umbrellas and the blue-and-white-striped awning, golden-wedding couples, grandparents, the sedate, the inactive.

  “Have you seen someone you know?” Titus asked.

  It was as if he were in a dream, as if he were a sleepwalker arrested in his blind progress and lost, his orientation gone. Titus’s question broke the spell or the dream and he passed a hand across his high wrinkled forehead, pushing the fingers through that bush of hair.

  “I was mistaken,” he said; then the hand came down, and farewells were made. He was smiling the way he did, with his red wolfish mouth and not his eyes. His eyes not at all.

  They didn’t watch him go back. They didn’t look back or wave. As she crossed the terrace to enter the hotel by way of the open glass doors into the lounge and bar, Julia paused briefly to take in the people who sat at the terrace tables, those grandparents. Old people smoked so much. They all sat with cigarettes, overflowing ashtrays, pots of tea and cups of tea, pastries on cake stands, packs of cards, but no sun lotion or sunglasses. They never went into the sun. A woman was making up her face in the mirror of a powder compact, drawing crimson lips onto an old pursed mouth.

  There was no one to interest him, no one who could so have caught his rapt gaze. More affectation, she thought, more games to impress us, and she followed Titus into the cool shadowy interior.

  Sarah and Hope were going out. Hope had already made her plans, a barbecue on some beach farther up the coast. Almost before the guests were out of earshot, Sarah was on the phone, arranging to meet the usual crowd in a Barnstaple pub. Not even the prospect of their father’s company would keep them in on a Saturday night. To go out with those old companions, school friends and friends’ friends, was an obligation, almost a duty.

  “ ‘Make my bed and light the light,’ ” said Miss Batty in the kitchen. “ ‘I’ll arrive late tonight, blackbird, bye-bye.’ There’s a lot of truth in those old songs.”

  She picked up Titus Romney’s glass off the tray and drank the port he had left. It was something she usually did when they entertained. Once she had gotten into such a state drinking the dregs from fifteen champagne glasses that Ursula had had to drive her home. But what on earth had they had champagne for? Ursula couldn’t remember. Miss Batty—whom Ursula long ago had begun calling Daphne, just as Miss Batty called her Ursula—drained a drop of brandy and began emptying the dishwasher of its first load.

  “ ‘Bye-bye, blackbird,’ ” she said.

  Ursula never ceased to be amazed by the scope of Daphne Batty’s knowledge of sixty years of popular music. If Gerald liked her for her name, Ursula’s appreciation derived from this unceasing flow of esoterica. She went back into the living room. Gerald was standing by the open windows but facing the inside of the room. Since he had come back from the hotel, he had spoken not a word, and that look he sometimes had of being far away had taken control of his face. Only this time, he was even more distant, almost as if he had stepped across some dividing stream into different territory. He looked at her blankly. She could have sworn that for a moment he didn’t know who she was.

  Saturday nights when the girls were out, he worried himself sick.
He thought she wasn’t aware of his anxiety, but of course she was. While his daughters were in London, as they mostly were, they were no doubt out night after night till all hours, and it never occurred to him to worry. Ursula was sure he scarcely thought about it, still less woke up in the small hours to wonder if Hope was back safe in her bed in Crouch End or Sarah in hers in Kentish Town. But here, when they were out, he no longer even bothered to go to bed. He sat up in the dark in the study, waiting for the sound of a car, then one key in the door, then the second car, the other key.

  She hadn’t shared a bedroom with him for nearly thirty years, never in this house, but she knew. She was still fascinated by him. As one could be, she sometimes thought, by a deformity or a mutilation. He compelled her horrified gaze, her continual speculation. There was no actual way she could know if he was in his bedroom or not, no indication by gleam of light or hint of sound. The floorboards were all carpeted and the doors fitted trimly into their architraves. His bedroom was at the other end of the house from hers. But she knew when he wasn’t in bed during the night, just as she knew when the girls weren’t. One of the cars coming usually woke her. She was a light sleeper. And she, too, would be relieved that first Sarah was home, then Hope. Or the other way around, as the case might be. It wouldn’t be before midnight, and probably long after.

  His daughters mustn’t know he sat up for them. He sat in his study in the dark so that they couldn’t find out. They mustn’t know he worried about them; they mustn’t know he had a bad heart or that on Wednesday that bad heart was to undergo repairs. He wanted them as carefree as they had been when children, believing their father immortal. She thought for a moment of how it might be for them if he were to die on the operating table, of the abyss that would open before them, and then she put the light out and went to sleep.

  She didn’t hear the first car come in, but she heard the faint squeak Hope’s door made when it was opened more than forty-five degrees. Sarah’s car came in noisily and too fast, which probably meant she had drunk too much. Ursula wondered if the newspapers would know whose daughter she was and make something of it when the police caught her one of these nights for driving over the speed limit. The car door banged and the front door shut with almost a slam. Sarah made up for it by creeping up the stairs.

  Gerald was almost as quiet. But he was big and heavy and he lumbered when he walked. If the girls heard him, they would think he had gotten up to go to the bathroom. She lay there listening but heard nothing more, and perhaps she slept. Afterward, she wasn’t sure, certain only of the silence and peace and that when she put the light on, it had been just after 1:30. The tide was high at 1:50, she had noticed. Not that it made much difference these summer nights when the sea was calm and there was no wind. People said how lovely it must be to hear the sound of the sea at night, but she never heard it. The house might be on the clifftop, but it was still too far away from that creeping shallow sea.

  He had had a shock in the afternoon. Realizing this woke her out of a doze. Or something woke her. Perhaps she had dreamed of him, as she sometimes did. She remembered his stillness, his stare. He had walked back to the hotel with those people and something had happened. He had seen something or someone, or something upsetting had been said to him. Shocks shouldn’t happen to him, she thought vaguely, and she sat up and put on the lamp. Four. She must have slept. Dawn was coming, a thin gray light making a shimmer around the curtains.

  It was then that she heard him. Or he had made that sound before and that was what had awakened her. Her nightdress was a thin thing with narrow shoulder straps. She put on a dressing gown, screwed her long hair up into a knot, and stabbed it with two hairpins.

  She had never been in his bedroom. Not in this house. She didn’t even know what it was like inside. Daphne Batty cleaned it and changed his sheets, humming pop or rock or country while she did so. Ursula said, “Gerald?”

  A gasp for breath. That was what it sounded like. She opened the door. The curtains were drawn back and she could see a pale moon in a pale sky. It was quite light. He was sitting up in the single bed, crimson-faced, his skin sprinkled with sweat.

  She spoke his name again. “Gerald?”

  He struggled to speak. At once, she knew he was having a seizure, and she looked around for the remedy he had, the nitroglycerin. It might be anywhere. There was nothing on the bedside table. As she went toward the bed, he suddenly threw back his head and bellowed out a roar. It was an animal noise a goaded bull might make, and it seemed to come up through his chest and throat from the very center of his stricken heart. The echoes of it died away and he punched at his chest with his fists, then threw out his arms as his face swelled and grew deep purple.

  She went to take his hands, to forget everything and hold him. As she had done once before, as she had done the night he dreamed his trapped-in-a-tunnel dream. But he fought against her. He punched again, this time at her, his eyes bulging as if his eyeballs would burst from their sockets, punching like a maddened child.

  Aghast, she stepped back. He drew a long breath, a sound like water gurgling down a drain, liquid and rich and bubbling. The color seeped out of his face, red wine drained out of a smoky glass. She saw it grow pale and slacken, the muscles slip. As the death rattle burst out of him, a clattering salvo of final sound, he fell back into the bed and out of life.

  She knew it was death. Nothing else was possible. It amazed her afterward that Sarah and Hope had slept through it all. Just as, when children, they had slept through his screaming when he dreamed of the tunnel. She phoned for an ambulance, although she knew he was dead, and then, unwillingly, fearfully, afraid of her own children, she went to wake them.

  2

  The meek may inherit the earth, but they won’t keep it long.

  —EYE IN THE ECLIPSE

  SARAH AND HOPE COMPOSED THE DEATH ANNOUNCEMENT TOGETHER. Sarah put in “beloved” because you couldn’t just have “husband of,” and both of them loved “adored.” The lines from Cory’s “Heraclitus” were Hope’s choice, remembered from school and rediscovered in Palgrave’s Golden Treasury. Sarah found them mildly embarrassing but gave in because Hope cried so much when she protested. The announcement appeared in several daily newspapers.

  Candless, Gerald Francis, age 71, on July 6 at his home in Gaunton, Devon, beloved husband of Ursula and adored father of Sarah and Hope. Funeral, Ilfracombe, July 11. No flowers. Donations to the British Heart Foundation.

  I wept when I remembered how often thou and I,

  Had tired the sun with talking and sent him down the sky.

  The next day, his obituary was in the Times.

  Gerald Francis Candless, OBE, novelist, died July 6, age 71. He was born on May 10, 1926.

  Gerald Candless was the author of eighteen novels, their publication spanning a period from 1955 to the present. He will probably be best remembered for Hamadryad, which was short-listed for the Booker Prize in 1979.

  His novels were unusual in that, though literary fiction, they were, in the middle years, at any rate, both popular with the public and highly regarded by critics. It was only from the mid-eighties onward, however, that his fiction regularly appeared on best-seller lists, a phenomenon that seemed to coincide with a cooling of enthusiasm on the part of reviewers. It was suggested that his books were “too plot-driven” and sometimes that they resembled the “sensation fiction” of a hundred years before. Nevertheless, in a list compiled by newspaper reviewers in 1995, he was named as one of the leading twenty-five novelists of the second half of the twentieth century.

  Candless was born in Ipswich, Suffolk, the only child of a printer and a nurse, George and Kathleen Candless, and grew up in that town. He was educated privately and later at Trinity College, Dublin, where he obtained a degree in classics. After university, he worked as a journalist for various weekly and provincial daily newspapers, first the Walthamstow Herald in East London and, more notably, the Western Morning News in Plymouth.

  It was while in P
lymouth that he wrote his first book, at the age of twenty-eight. Many years later, in an interview for the Daily Telegraph, he said he had followed the example of Anthony Trollope, got up at five every morning and wrote for three hours before going to work. The novel, The Centre of Attraction, was accepted by the third publisher to whom Candless sent it and was published in the autumn of 1955.

  Three more books appeared, to increasing acclaim, before Candless was able to live by his writing. It was a long time, however, before he abandoned journalism altogether, as in the early sixties, about the time of his marriage, he became a fiction reviewer for the Daily Mail, and later, for a while, its book-page editor, then deputy literary editor of the Observer.

  He was at this time living in London, in Hampstead, where his daughters were born. Later, he moved with his family to a part of the country that had been a favorite with him since Plymouth days, the north Devon coast between Bideford and Ilfracombe. There, on the outskirts of the village of Gaunton, he bought Lundy View House on the clifftop above Gaunton Dunes, where he lived and worked from 1970 until his death.

  Candless became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1976 and was awarded the OBE in the 1986 Birthday Honours. His death was from coronary thrombosis. He is survived by his widow, the former Ursula Wick, and by his daughters, Sarah and Hope.

  There were not many at the funeral. Gerald Candless had no relatives, not even a cousin or two. The girls were there, and Fabian Lerner, who was Hope’s boyfriend, as well as Ursula’s widowed sister and her married niece, Pauline.

  “When my mother was young, women never went to funerals,” said Daphne Batty, washing sherry glasses. Old Mrs. Batty was ninety-three. “They called it ‘following,’ and women didn’t follow.”

  “Why not?” said Ursula.

  “They was the weaker sex, and it could have been too much for them.”

  “Aren’t they the weaker sex any longer, then?”