by Barbara Vine
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.
12
Jacob Manley was not a forbearing man, yet when someone died, he always said of him that he had gone to his reward, never to his punishment.
—EYE IN THE ECLIPSE
THIRTY YEARS HAD PASSED SINCE URSULA 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.
For infidelity was undreamed of among the Wicks and their connections. The sexual revolution that began in the sixties hadn’t touched them, even supposing they knew that it was taking place. But it had touched Ian Wick, or something had, and led him into adultery. This was the news Jean brought to Ursula and adultery was her word. Ian had fallen in love with a young cashier at the bank, had spent nights with her, been away for weekends with her, and now wanted to marry her.
Ursula, of course, had no answers. And Jean’s story of Ian’s withdrawal from sex struck painful chords in her own recent experience. Jean came out with it all, no holds barred—Ian’s refusal to share a bed with her, his unexplained absences, his apparent contentment, as if he had some other distant source of happiness. As he had, as he had. And as Ursula listened, helpless to console, she could think only of these parallels. When Jean had gone home (determined to take a taxi all the way to Sydenham at Ian’s expense), she wondered she hadn’t seen it before.
Gerald didn’t want her because he had someone else. “Someone else” was Jean’s expression until, her story progressing, she began using a name, and Ursula, with her newfound habit of questioning the words and expressions she used, found it absurd, almost comical, as if this combination of words could only properly apply to an illicit paramour. “Another woman” was almost as silly. Yet a woman there must be, a girl, a lover, a mistress, out there, a “someone else” intervening in her marriage. All the conditions of Ian’s defection fit Gerald, except that of frequent absence.
When he was away from the house, Sarah and Hope were almost always with him. He had never, so far as she knew, taken them on visits to his publishers, but he seldom went to his publishers. Would he take her children to visit his mistress?
A Paper Landscape was published in 1968, and he had already begun writing his next novel. In that year, he also became deputy literary editor of a Sunday newspaper. The position brought books for review every week, and Ursula had plenty to read. She read so much fiction that she suggested to Gerald—jokingly, of course, but attempting to talk to him of things he knew about and liked—that they ought to make her a judge in the newly instituted Booker Prize.
“The other judges might have something to say about that,” he said.
She hadn’t understood. She hadn’t wanted to. “Because I’m your wife, you mean?”
“Because you’re hardly competent, are you?”
Another time, when he saw her reading a novel, his review of which had appeared in the paper the previous Sunday, he asked her if she really understood what she was reading.
“I think so,” she said, tense already, expecting the insult.
He looked her up and down, the way he had recently acquired, the way a designer might view a model newly dressed in his latest creation. But he had no longer any interest in her appearance. He looked for something else, though she didn’t know what.
“Should I,” she tried, “should I try reading your critique?”
His face went dark with anger. “Critique,” he said. “Are you French? Are you trying to impress me? It is a notice. A notice or a review. Can you remember that?”
Before he began his new novel, he had a title for it. When he had written two chapters, he asked her if she would type it for him. No taking it for granted this time, and she wondered why not. Was he for some reason placating her?
She had no room of her own in the house in Holly Mount. The house was really too small for them and he, of course, had the room intended as a dining room as his study. She was sitting in the living room, reading, and the children were asleep. He had given them their tea and bathed them and put them to bed. Often she had thought of asserting herself here, but to take these offices upon herself would have meant physically tearing the little girls from him.
Her heart quailed at the thought; she recoiled from it. He fed them, bathed them, told them their bedtime story, and began writing at 7:30. Just before ten, he walked in with his hands full of sheets of paper, paper whose edges weren’t even aligned, but clutched in a bundle, held it out to her and asked her to “do what you have so kindly done before.” She could hardly believe her ears.
“It’s to be called A Messenger of the Gods,” he said. “Would you get it into some sort of order for me, Ursula? Decode my scrawl?”
For the first time for months, he had used her Christian name. She stared at him, unsmiling, but put out her hand for the paper. There was an eagerness in his face that made him look younger, an enthusiasm. And she understood. He was pleased; he was happy. He had his title, and he had completed two chapters with which he was satisfied. This was his life; this was everything, this and his children. He told her because he had to tell someone. No doubt, he would prefer to tell that woman, the “someone else,” his mistress, but she wasn’t there.
“I’ll start on it tomorrow,” she said.
As the chapters came to her, she looked in the text, the story, for evidence of adultery. Already, at that tim
e, she had heard him say—or, rather, seen him say, for she had read it in a magazine interview—that everything that happened to him went into his fiction. She found nothing. And then she realized something. He never wrote about marital infidelity. He seldom wrote about marriage, except peripherally, and although she had no means of knowing it then, this rule or inhibition was to prevail. He was never to write much about marriage or married life until the fateful Hand to Mouth in 1984, and even in that novel, though there was unhappiness and strife and incompatibility, though sex was important and sexual acts occurring, there was no unfaithfulness.
But then, when those chapters came to her in the early spring of 1969, this was still far in the future. This time, she encountered Annie Raleigh, shivered and trembled at his descriptions of her desires, looked in vain for adultery. But its absence might only mean that he was deferring the use of this particular experience, this perhaps new experience, until a later date, a later book. She typed his novel, she watched him, and she thought it coincidence that while she was tormented by sexual hunger, he had happened to write about a woman with a similar need.
She nevertheless repelled the advances of a young poet he invited to dinner and who followed her out to the kitchen while Gerald and Colin Wrightson and Beattie Paris discussed who would be candidates for the Booker. She kissed the poet back but stopped there and told him no, no, she wouldn’t go out for a drink with him, see him again, no, no, definitely not. That night, though she had never before done such a thing nor knew how it was done, she masturbated. Otherwise, she would never have slept.
She watched him. She listened. It was the beginning of that fascination with him that was to replace love. She thought about him constantly. If the girls were taken to see “a lady,” wouldn’t they betray him? She even asked Sarah, though she hated herself for asking.
“Daddy takes us to see Miss Churchouse, silly,” said Sarah.
Not Adela, who everyone said preferred women. Not Adela, who had threatened to chain herself to the Home Office railings over homosexual law reform. Jealous as she was, and made unreasonable by jealousy, as she knew, she still couldn’t believe Gerald would sleep with that scatty fifty-year-old, she of the diaphanous garments and bead strings, who took out her “partial” in other people’s bathrooms and left it grinning on the basin.