by Barbara Vine
Her mother and the librarian persisted in talking to him about his work, though they should have been able to see, as she could, that he disliked discussing it. The less she said—and she uttered only essentials concerned with what she was going to eat and to pass the water, please—the more he began to pay attention to her. Mostly, at first, with smiles and requests as to what he could pass her, but then, when he had dismissed a particularly fatuous question (Ursula thought) about where he got his ideas, he asked her quite abruptly, turning his back on the librarian, where she came from and what she did.
Ursula would have been glad if the ceiling had fallen in at that moment, engulfing them all, or if the proprietor had come in to say there was a bomb in the building and they must evacuate it in five minutes. Only there were no bombs in those days and nothing to make the ceiling fall. She had decided desperately that it didn’t matter what he thought of her, because she would never see him again, so she said very quietly that she lived in Purley with her parents and worked in her father’s office.
“And you’re engaged to be married.”
She shook her head, the blush returning.
“I’m sorry. I thought you must be.”
She didn’t ask why he thought that. Her father supplied an answer.
“Too pretty to be unattached, eh?”
Gerald Candless said coolly, “Something like that.”
But then she thought he looked at her almost tenderly. It was hindsight that told her he was weighing her up, considering; she hadn’t thought it back then. She doubted if she had ever seen that tender look on his face again. Because there was no need for it once he had decided not to spare her? The slaughterer strokes the calf only while he fattens it. There is no honey for the bear once captured.
Normally a good sleeper, she hardly slept that night. She kept thinking of her father saying she was pretty. It made her squirm. In her narrow bed with the rose-sprigged white curtains draped from a gold coronet, she wriggled with embarrassment. The room seemed silly now, the white carpet, the Cicely Mary Barker pictures, the looped net curtains. Perhaps he would put her in one of his books, a silly girl, a contrast to the intrepid heroine.
Next day, he phoned. He had phoned her mother first and asked if it would be all right to speak to Ursula, and her mother had passed on the number of Wick and Co.
“I told your mother I wanted to thank you for last night.”
“It wasn’t me,” she whispered, almost voiceless. “It was them.”
“Oh, no, it was you.”
She had nothing to say. Her heart beat heavily.
“I’d like to … return the compliment. Isn’t that what people say?”
She said truthfully, “I don’t know.” She knew nothing.
“I’d like you to have dinner with me.”
Modern English is peculiar, though not unique, in that it has one form for both the singular and the plural of the second person. French or German would have been quite clear. The obsolete thou would have been clear. But this was 1962.
“Did you give my mother a date?” she asked. “I’m sure my parents would be free most evenings, and of course I am.”
He laughed. “I meant you. You alone. You and me.”
“Oh.”
“Will you have dinner with me, Ursula?”
“I don’t know,” she said. She was almost stammering. “I mean, yes, of course. Of course I will. Thank you.”
“Good. When would you like it to be? You say.”
All her evenings were free or else occupied by events, by movable feasts, that could without trouble be changed. “Friday,” she said. “Saturday. I don’t mind.”
“Your name means ‘little bear’—did you know that?”
She hadn’t then. She uttered a small, tremulous “No.”
“I will call for you at your parents’ house in my car at seven on Saturday evening, Ursula.”
She didn’t know what to say. Perhaps to thank him? Before she could say anything, he had rung off.
Honey for the Little Bear.
6
Our children when young are a part of ourselves, but when they grow up, they are just other people.
—A PAPER LANDSCAPE
ONLY ONE CANDLESS WAS TO BE FOUND. Sarah examined the Ipswich telephone directory in her local public library. J. G. Candless, in Christchurch Street. She noted down the address and the phone number. She was growing excited about her book, much more excited than she had expected to be. She had already written bits of it, although she had an idea that it ought not to be done this way, piecemeal, odd stories about her father and memories that she particularly liked jotted down, but methodically, research first, then time set aside for the serious writing. Now was the time to start the research. That was why she had been to the library and found a relative. A possible relative, she corrected herself. She was too much of an academic to make assumptions.
But she was excited. Enough to want to devote hours and hours to it. When a man named Adam Foley, whom she had met in the Barnstaple pub, phoned and asked her out, she said no, because she had to start on the research for the book. The sound of his voice excited her, but, perversely, she said no to him and said it absently. After that, his voice also turned cold and he was barely polite when he said good-bye. She had shrugged, had no regrets. She had to phone this man called J. G. Candless in Ipswich. On her way home, she bought a town map of Ipswich in a bookshop. She meant to be thorough about this. Anyway, she was bound to have to go there. She might even go this week.
Sarah’s flat was on the top floor of a Victorian house, a big attic with skylights, and to get to it you had to climb forty-eight stairs. Sarah didn’t mind this and usually ran up them, or ran up thirty of them. Her own front door was painted deep purple. The rooms were large, if few, a living room converted from three attics for the servants’ use, a slightly smaller bedroom, a kitchen, purple like the door, and a bathroom. From the big new windows (put in and paid for by darling Dad), you could see all the way across to Primrose Hill, a green hill and green trees and rows of gray-and-brown houses and white-and-yellow towers fingering the blue sky. At night, it was black and yellow and glittery.
Sarah had a look in the mirror, checking on whether she liked her new hair color, done in St. John’s Wood that morning. Perhaps it was rather too red. On the other hand, it made her look less like her mother. Like most people—not like Hope, though—she was dissatisfied with the way she looked and would have preferred to resemble some dark beauty such as Stella Tennant or Demi Moore. Small neat features looked prissy. Her mouth was too rosebudlike, her nose too short and straight, her eyes too gray. She was seriously considering going in for brown contacts.
Because she thought her small neat features dull and prissy, a milkmaid’s looks, Sarah sought to dress herself with contrasting wildness and drama. So she always wore high heels, sometimes thick high heels attached to clumping shoes or boots, and a lot of black, with fringes and red beads. Her hair was her crowning glory, so she never covered it with a hat as Hope did, though sometimes she wore a large tortoiseshell clip, whose teeth held up a spike of hair at right angles to the rest.
Sarah opened windows and kicked off her boots. She poured herself a big glass of chardonnay. The bottle had been standing in the sun and was at a temperature she liked. She hated ice. She opened the map and spread it out on the table. Districts of Ipswich had some very strange names. Gainsborough and Halifax and—could it be?—California. How could a grid of streets in an East Anglian town be called California? Perhaps her father had actually come from there.
She referred to his birth certificate. No. He had been born in Waterloo Road, which was in an area that didn’t seem to have any specific name. Sarah had a large new loose-leaf notebook and this she opened and wrote on the first page, as if with the aim of making it part of a genealogical table: “George John Candless, b. 1890; m. Kathleen Mitchell, b. 1893.” She drew a vertical line underneath and at the tip of it wrote, “Gerald Francis C
andless, b. 1926.”
Christchurch Street, where the only Candless lived, was not far from the center of the town and near a large park. She looked again at his initials, J.G. John George? No assumptions, she reminded herself, and took a swig of her wine. Her father had had no siblings, so he couldn’t be her first cousin. The son therefore (probably) of a brother of George John’s. Would that make him a second cousin or a first cousin once removed? That was something she would have to check on.
When they were teenagers, she and Hope, their grandmother Wick had tried to interest them in their ancestry. On her visits to Lundy View House, she brought with her ancient albums of sepia photographs and rather less ancient ones of black-and-white photographs, and her granddaughters were supposed to look at them and ask who this was and that was. And absorb and remember names of great-grandparents and, to a lesser extent, great-aunts and great-uncles. But they had been inclined to regard this as a dreadful bore and—since they were already hardworking and ambitious—of no possible use to them in their future lives and careers.
They might have shown more interest if their father had encouraged them, but he at once took the same attitude as they did. Sarah could still clearly remember his words.
“It’s not as if you came of some noble lineage. Your father is first-generation working class and your mother second at best. Before that, your forebears, like most people’s, were just a rabble of servants and farm laborers and factory hands. What possible point can there be in knowing who they were and putting names to their ugly faces?”
They had been ugly, Sarah thought, dimly remembering pudding-visaged women with hair like loaves and corseted bodies and glaring men whose mouths and cheeks were invisible under drooping mustaches and oddly cut beards. Now she couldn’t even have named Ursula’s grandparents, and she thought she regretted it. For if she had shown an interest in what Betty Wick called “the distaff side,” wouldn’t her father perhaps have instructed her in the helmet side? (Sarah’s students in her women’s studies course would have been horrified to know she used such sexist expressions even to herself.) He hadn’t mentioned even an uncle or an aunt of his own, so far as she could remember. Relatives bored him, he said. You didn’t choose them; they were thrust upon you, and the best thing to do was thrust them right back again.
Hope, clever and precocious, had said, “Surely the same thing must apply to your children, Daddy.”
He had been ready for her. “Ah, but I chose my children. I married. I picked a good-looking, healthy young woman. I thought, I will have two children, two years apart, both girls, both beautiful, both intellectually brilliant. And I did. Therefore, you can’t say I didn’t choose them.”
Of course they couldn’t say it after that. Sarah poured herself some more wine and thought of her father. He had been so young to die. The death of anyone else at seventy-one she would have thought a quite reasonable and appropriate time for an old man to go. But her own father might have lived another fifteen years. She had expected that; she might have had him with her till she herself was middle-aged. She sighed, looked at her watch. It was nearly six. A good or a bad time to phone J. G. Candless?
He was probably the kind of man who worked in an office, an insurance office, she thought, or a building society, from nine till five. Possibly no more than walking distance from home, or a bus ride. He would be home by now but not eating yet surely? She dialed the number. It rang four times.
A man answered. He didn’t say hello, just repeated the number, all eleven digits of it.
“Mr. Candless?”
“Yes?”
“Mr. Candless, you don’t know me, but my name is also Candless. Sarah Candless. My late father was Gerald Candless, the novelist. I expect you have heard of him.”
There was a hesitation. “No. I can’t say I have.”
She found it incredible. The man must be illiterate. A moron. She would have to be careful not to use long or difficult words. “I am researching—I mean, I am trying to find out something about my father’s family. They came from Ipswich. You are the only Candless in the phone book, so it seems likely that you are a relation and —”
“You’d better talk to my wife. My wife knows all about that side of things.”
“But, Mr. Candless, wait a minute. It’s your relatives I’m interested in—”
It was too late. He had gone. Sarah waited, feeling a mounting irritation. He reminded her of those men who, when asked if they had read her father’s books, said no, but their wives had. Absurd. The woman who picked up the receiver sounded brisk and efficient, an altogether different prospect, in spite of the ugliest accent she had ever heard.
“This is Maureen Candless. What can I do for you?”
Sarah explained all over again.
“Yes, I see.”
“I can’t believe you haven’t heard of my father. He was very famous.”
“I’ve heard of him. I read about him dying in the papers.” She didn’t say she was sorry he was dead or express any sympathy for Sarah. “I noticed,” she said, “because he had the same name as us.”
“Mrs. Candless, did your husband have an uncle George and an aunt Kathleen? Or grandparents named George and Kathleen? They lived in Ipswich, in Waterloo Road.”
“No, he didn’t,” said Maureen Candless. “My husband’s Candless grandparents were named Albert and Mary.” Here at least was someone who had paid attention to those albums and those names. “There was a cousin George, but he went to Australia, and I never heard of a Kathleen. You ought to talk to Auntie Joan.”
“Auntie Joan?”
“She’s not really an aunt, more a cousin of my husband’s, his dad’s cousin really, but we call her ‘Auntie.’ Her maiden name was Candless. She’s Mrs. Thague, Mrs. Joan Thague, and she lives out at Rushmere St. Andrew, but she’s a very old lady now and she doesn’t go out much.”
Sarah couldn’t see the significance of this. She didn’t want Mrs. Thague to go out, but to stay at home and talk to her. Did she have a phone?
“She has a phone,” said Maureen Candless, “but she’s a bit deaf and she says her hearing aid doesn’t work with the phone. The best thing for you would be to go and see her.”
Sarah thanked her and said she would like to. Maureen Candless said she would tell Auntie Joan to expect a visitor wanting to talk about the family, gave Sarah an address, and, when pressed, the phone number, adding that a call wouldn’t be answered. Nevertheless, once Mrs. Candless had put the receiver back, Sarah dialed the number. As forecast, there was no reply.
By now Sarah was in a phoning mood, so she called her mother. Ursula repeated that Gerald had never talked to her about his relatives; she had no idea if he had a first or second cousin named J. G. Candless or a cousin or aunt named Mrs. Joan Thague.
“Didn’t some of these people come to your wedding?”
“There were none of your father’s relations there, only friends.”
“Well, tell me about how you and Dad first met, will you?”
“I thought I was to do that when you came down for the weekend.”
“I can’t come down. I’ve got to go and see this Thague woman. So tell me now, will you, Ma?”
Some of it, only some of it. Ursula talked for ten minutes, censoring as she went. It was after Sarah rang off that she thought about it in detail, leaning her head back, closing her eyes, remembering.
The car was an MG, a two-seater. He called for her in it at precisely seven. She was ready; she had been ready for two hours—not a particularly good idea, as she had to keep running upstairs to comb her hair again and renew her lipstick (pale pink, so that Dad wouldn’t say she’d been kissing fire engines). A run appeared in one of her stockings and she had to change them, too. Those were still the days, though they were passing, when women were supposed to look perpetually fresh and newly painted, not a hair out of place, like so many life-size Barbie dolls or Stepford Wives. Bandbox was the word. It had taken her days to decide what to wear befor
e settling on the new pink shift with pink jacket.
The whole thing made her parents uneasy. Why did this man want to take their daughter out? He was old enough to be her father—well, not quite, but she knew what they meant. Why not take them all out if he wanted to make some return for the dinner at which they had entertained him and at which he had drunk far too much?
“He isn’t courting you, is he?” said Herbert Wick.
“I’m just going to have dinner with him, Dad.”
“I do think it’s most peculiar,” said Betty. “Don’t you, Bert?”
“Writers are peculiar. Still, I suppose it’s all right. He’s a middle-aged man.”
As if that made him safe. You could leave your daughter alone with a middle-aged man, whereas a young one would be dangerous. Was it a matter of greater physical strength or stronger physical urges? She didn’t think of this at the time.
Her parents were pleasant enough to Gerald when he arrived. Her father offered him a drink. Gerald said, “Yes, please, how kind,” and accepted a large gin and tonic. No one worried about drinking and driving in 1962. He was wearing a suit, not very clean and not pressed at all, but still a suit. His tie, he said, was in his pocket; he didn’t like ties, but he would put it on when they got to the restaurant.
The restaurant was in Chelsea and quite a long way. Ursula dreaded to think how long it would take at this hour in a car. Well over an hour probably, toiling up through Streatham and Balham and Battersea, along one-way streets in heavy traffic—well, what they considered heavy then. It took Gerald about forty minutes. He talked to her all the way. He asked her questions. She had never been asked so many, never known anyone to take so much interest in her. Where had she lived as a child? Where had she been to school? Had she been good at school? Did she like working for her father? What were her interests? What did she read?
She plucked up her courage and said she had read three of his books.
“And did you like what you read?”