by Barbara Vine
“Are you asking me to stay?” she said, and it took a lot of courage to say it.
“No,” he said. “No, I’m not asking you. I’m not even expecting it.”
She waited for him to add that he would like it, though, that it was what he wanted. Instead, he added, “This is straight talking, so I may as well say I’m indifferent as to whether you stay or not. That’s as you please. You have never shown a great deal of interest in the children, and they, of course, would stay with their father.”
She was so shocked that she couldn’t speak. It was easily the most brutal thing anyone had ever said to her. She seldom cried, but that night she cried bitterly. Next day, a Sunday, the first reviews of Orisons had appeared in the papers. They were the best he had ever had. The critics spoke of his compassion, his warm humanity, and of his ability to re-create on the page the magic that can exist between a man and a woman.
He had driven into Gaunton and bought all the papers. That was the only time he was really happy, when he got good notices, and they had never been as good as this. He pushed the papers across the table to her, read bits out of other reviews while she was reading, laughed with delight, once actually brought his hands together in a resounding clap of triumph. She was sure he had forgotten everything they had said the night before, or thought it of no particular account.
Now they wanted her to step into his shoes, so to speak, and publicize his new one. Walking across Russell Square toward the tube station, she thought of the things that woman Elaine Kirkman had said, the possibility of her going on the radio, on Kaleidoscope to talk about his writing, of a television program called Bookworm, of being interviewed by the Guardian and the Times. She hadn’t been able to bring herself to tell Elaine Kirkman or Robert Postle that the last book of Gerald’s she had read or even looked at had been published twelve years before.
And now there was this business of his not being who he said he was. It had been clear that neither Robert nor Elaine knew anything about that. They couldn’t, therefore, know how profoundly it had affected her, making the house and everything in it that was his horrible to her. Impulsively, she had decided she must sell it and move, and she hadn’t changed her mind after letting the sun set on her panic. The sun had set and risen again and she was more than ever resolved on getting out.
When she got home, she would return to clearing out all those papers, continue the task she had begun and flinched from. The house should be made tidy and sterile, cleaned of him, and then she would put it on the market. She was thinking like this when she looked up and saw Sam Fleming walking toward her.
Her immediate instinct was a childish one, her reflex to the sight of him something she hadn’t had since she was a child. She wanted to hide. Not be seen. Or pretend not to see him, slip past, eyes down. But he had seen her. He put out both hands.
“Ursula!”
She knew she had gone red. “Hello.”
“Let me guess. You’ve been to your husband’s publishers.”
It wasn’t so very clever of him. Where else would she have been but to Carlyon-Brent, unless it was to the British Museum? “I’m in rather a hurry,” she said. “I’ve a train to catch.”
“What time’s your train?”
She told him, wishing immediately that she’d lied and made it half an hour sooner.
“Then you’ve plenty of time,” he said. “Time to come and have a cup of tea with me.”
Sitting opposite him in the café near the tube station, she thought she might as well say it. What had she to lose? In that moment, stirring her tea, she thought suddenly that she had nothing left to lose, for she had already lost everything.
“Why do you want to be here with me?” she said, and she looked him straight in the eye. “If you’d wanted it, you’d have phoned me. This chance meeting—are you just being polite? You don’t have to be polite with me.”
“I did phone you,” he said. “I phoned you twice. The first time, I was told I had a wrong number, which I didn’t really believe, and the second time, I left a message and my phone number.”
“Oh. I see.” One of those weekends, it would have been, when the girls were home or one of them was home. “My daughters, I expect. I didn’t get the message.”
“I’d hoped to make you understand that I didn’t want to know you because of your husband’s books. Getting my hands on some first editions. That’s laughable. I wanted to know you—I want to know you—because I like you. I find you attractive. I think we’d get on together.”
“That’s frank,” she said.
“I still feel like that. I feel like it more. I see it as a tremendous piece of luck, a very happy coincidence, meeting you like this.”
“Not such a coincidence,” she said. “I expect your business is around here, isn’t it? You walk across the square every day at this time. And one day, I was bound to walk across it, too.” She felt a flicker then of that powerful desire that had afflicted her—oh, yes, it was an affliction—in the hotel that summer evening. His face, the sound of his voice, his enthusiasm, his eagerness to please her, so different from what she had been used to. “I must go and catch my train,” she said.
“I’ll come with you. I’ll put you into your train. Isn’t that what they used to say?”
She told him it wasn’t necessary. She had only to go one stop to King’s Cross and change to the Circle. He thanked her for telling him but said he was familiar with the configuration of the London underground and that he was going with her.
The train stopped in the tunnel between King’s Cross and Euston Square and sat there for ten minutes. She had asked him how Molly was, and he was talking about Molly and the children and telling her how he thought Molly might marry again, when Ursula realized she had missed the intercity train. It wouldn’t now be possible to get to Paddington in time, and the next train was very late, too late to get a connection to Barnstaple. The tube train started with a shudder, but it was too late. She thought of asking Sarah or Hope if she could stay the night. One of them would say it just wasn’t convenient, sorry, Ma, and the other would say yes, all right, but in a forlorn voice, and she thought she couldn’t bear that.
The tears came into her eyes. He was looking at her, aghast. I know what this is, she thought. This is the start of some sort of breakdown. That is what will happen to me next. I shall break down, and that really means go mad, so to pieces.
“What is it?” he said.
“I’ve missed my train!”
“I know. Let’s get out at the next stop.” It was Baker Street, and on the escalator, he said, “We’ll find you a hotel for the night. Then I shall take you out to dinner and you can tell me why you’re so unhappy, because I don’t believe it’s missing your train or losing your husband.”
“No,” she said in a small voice. “No, it’s not.”
She thought he said that he would like to make her happy, but she couldn’t be sure, because it was noisy in the tube station and he might have said something quite different.
16
When you think someone is listening to you he is probably only considering what to say next.
—A MAN OF THESSALY
JASON THAGUE HAD FOUND ROBERT NUTTALL’S WIDOW, Anne, living in the Cotswolds. Her husband had been a dentist in Oxford and they had retired to Chipping Campden.
“That makes me wonder about dentists,” Sarah said. “I mean the Candlesses’ dentist. They’d have had one.”
“I don’t think so. Most people didn’t have dentists in the thirties, not a dentist you go to for regular checkups. You went to a dentist to have a tooth out when you had a toothache. Anyway, I asked my nan, and she said her father had had all his teeth out and false ones for a twenty-first birthday present.”
“I don’t believe it!”
“That’s what I said. My nan’s got dentures now, has had all my lifetime. She never went near a dentist till she was seventeen and living in Sudbury, and that was, like I said, to have a tooth out.�
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What would her father have thought of Jason’s pitted face and his voice and his accent? She said coldly, “So we’ve reached a dead end.”
“Don’t say that. There’s still the knife grinder and the chair mender. Is my check in the post?”
Sarah had been fourteen when Hamadryad was short-listed for the Booker Prize, old enough to have some understanding of what that meant and young enough to be bitterly hurt and convinced of injustice when it didn’t win. She had read the novel and believed that the young girl, Delphine, the protagonist, was herself. She asked her father and he said, “There’s something of you in Delphine and something of Hope.”
She had asked which “somethings,” and he said, their beauty and their intelligence. What about the rest of her, then? What about Delphine’s shyness, her goodness, her reclusiveness? No one, even then, could have pretended she and Hope were shy or retiring or even particularly good.
“That was someone I knew long ago,” he said. “No, not a girlfriend.” He had hesitated. “A relative.”
She remembered that now. She was thinking of Hamadryad because Frederic Cyprian had still been her father’s editor when it was published. After that, and before the next book, he had retired. Some said his retirement was directly due to Hamadryad’s failure to win. At the dinner, when the winning novel was announced, he had done something authors had been known to do but not publishers. He had gotten up from the table and walked out.
Sarah had met him a few times in the seventies when he came with or without his wife to stay at Lundy View House. He was old then and his wife was older, and she had since died. Sarah had known, since moving into this flat, that he and she lived very near each other. For some reason, now forgotten, she had once looked him up in the phone book. It must have been simple curiosity, since she had never intended to phone him or visit him.
Now she had. If he was still alive, and Robert Postle had indicated he thought so, he was still there, around the corner, two hundred yards away. She walked down and looked at the house. Victorian, red brick, a steep flight of steps up to the front door. It looked empty, closed up. She hesitated only for a moment, then walked up the steps and rang the bell.
No one came. She rang again. The door was opened by a woman some ten years older than herself, but very different from herself. She looked worn and harassed and irritable and she was dressed in a dark purple shell suit.
“Yes?” she said.
“My name is Sarah Candless. Gerald Candless was my father. I wonder if I might see Mr. Cyprian?”
“Well …”
“He was my father’s editor at Carlyon-Brent.”
“I know that, Miss Candless.”
The woman looked at her doubtfully. Sarah thought she recognized her from years ago as Frederic Cyprian’s daughter. Jane? Jean? Or perhaps it was just that she saw something of him in this strained, intense face.
“I met your father,” she said. “When I was young.”
“That can’t have been very long ago,” the woman said dryly. “Won’t you come in? I am Jane Cyprian. My father is very old and not well. More than that, but you’ll see, you’ll see.” She added, “He may be quite lucid. He sometimes is.”
Sarah felt the apprehensiveness that is almost fear and that comes at the threat of being confronted by someone whose control has slipped or been fragmented. She followed Jane Cyprian down the passage. It wasn’t dark or in any way sinister, unless a profusion of pictures, ornaments, and clutter is sinister.
Outside the closed door, Jane Cyprian turned to Sarah and said, “I wish you’d phoned first.”
“I was passing. I live very near.”
A shrug, a glance of impatience, and the door was opened. The room on the other side of it held nothing to surprise a visitor of a hundred years before. It was perfectly but not self-consciously Victorian, even to the braided pelmet along the mantelpiece and the row of framed sepia photographs above it. The old man sat in front of the cold grate in an antimacassared armchair. In the years since she had last seen him, time had bleached and shriveled and drained him, had dried him up, like a fallen leaf.
“Dad,” Jane Cyprian said, “there’s someone to see you.”
He turned his head, reached for the handles of the two sticks that rested against the arms of his chair, thought better of it, and extended one wavering hand.
“Ursula!”
Sarah shook her head. Jane Cyprian said, “That’s not your name, is it?”
“My mother.”
“Ah. He makes these mistakes. This is Miss Candless, Dad.”
“Ursula,” he said again.
Sarah made herself walk over to him and extend her hand. He looked at it as if it were some unfamiliar object, the likes of which he had perhaps never seen before, attached to her sleeve. His voice was thin and high, as if the vocal cords had shortened.
“That husband of yours never comes to see me anymore.”
About to say Gerald Candless was dead, Sarah caught Jane Cyprian’s eye and her faint shake of the head. She said nothing, feeling helpless. “I wanted to ask him about a sort of logo thing on the covers of my father’s books.”
“You can try.”
But she couldn’t. The old man with his papery face and his uncomprehending eyes brought home to her her own shortcomings. She hadn’t been aware of them before, of this failure in herself to approach, to find any rapport with, the old, the unsound in mind, those who were different. An image of Joan Thague came into her head.
“I must go,” she said. “I shouldn’t have come.”
“Perhaps not.”
The woman despised her. Her contempt was palpable, and Sarah, turning to go, drew herself up indignantly. The old man’s voice came eagerly, lucid now, “I’ll take you up on that invitation when the weather’s better. In the spring. I’ll come down and see you and your little boys.”
Outside, in the cluttered hall, Jane Cyprian said, “Alzheimer’s, as you probably gathered.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Yes, well, you should have phoned.”
Walking down the street, trying not to think of that woman and what her life must be like, Sarah found herself trembling. But a hateful woman. There was no need for such rudeness. I’ll go and see Hope, she thought. I should have gone to her before. She’s as likely to know about the moth as anyone. A taxi came and she got into it. Calling on Hope without phoning first would be almost unprecedented, and halfway there, she remembered her sister had said she would be staying with Fabian. Sarah gave the taxi driver Fabian’s address at Shadwell Basin. It was a long way and there were cheaper ways of getting there. Am I really going because I want someone to talk to? Is it because, since Adam, I’ve felt more alone?
Fabian had two cousins from the country staying with him, accommodated in sleeping bags in the living room. Hope opened the front door, crowing with delight at the sight of her sister, which touched and slightly puzzled Sarah, until Hope said, whispering out in the hall, “We’re in the middle of playing the Game.”
“What, with the cousins?”
“Your arrival will demoralize them further. And then they’ll go out. They’re going to the pub, but we won’t. I’ve got plenty of booze.”
They were a brother and sister in their late twenties. Hope held Fabian’s kitchen scissors by their blades, passed them to the brother, saying, “I pass the scissors crossed.”
The brother took them gingerly, opened them, and passed them to Sarah. “I receive the scissors crossed and pass them uncrossed.”
Hope crowed, “No, you don’t. That’s wrong.”
Sarah turned the scissors over, took them by the handles, closed them, and passed them to the sister. “I receive the scissors uncrossed and pass them crossed.”
Fabian’s female cousin opened the scissors, turned them over twice, closed them, and said, “I receive them uncrossed and pass them crossed” as she passed them to Hope. “Is that right?”
“Yes, but do you know why?”<
br />
“Because they’re closed?”
“Wrong.”
“It’s the words you use, isn’t it?”
Hope and Fabian laughed unkindly. The cousin then said it must depend on which way up the scissors were and her brother thought it was which way around they were. Neither guessed, though they played the Game for half an hour, Hope and Fabian enjoying themselves hugely and Sarah starting to cheer up. Fabian’s male cousin thought he ought to have an explanation, but Fabian wasn’t having any of that. The answer might get out and he and Hope would be deprived of this perennial source of amusement.
“Anyone coming down to the pub?”
Hope said a decisive “No, thanks,” and as soon as the door closed behind them, she went to open a bottle. Not wine this time, but Strega.
“I shall get pissed,” said Sarah.
“Good idea. You look as if you need it. Fabby’s been doing some researches into the Highbury murder for you, if you’re still interested. You know, the case they said A White Webfoot was based on.”
“Fab has?”
“He’s good at that sort of thing.”
“Has it got anything remotely to do with Dad, Fab? I mean, first of all, do you think A White Webfoot really was based on it? And then, could it shed any light on Dad’s past?”
Fabian rotated his glass, watching the pale yellow liqueur roll back and forth. He sipped it meditatively. “I’ve never read it.” His tone made it plain he didn’t intend to, either. “You’ll have to judge. I’ve written it all down.” He passed her a dozen sheets of paper in a green cardboard folder.
She said doubtfully, “It looks very businesslike.”
“That’s probably all it is.”
“I’ve been wondering about the black moth. Does it have any significance. Why a black moth? Do you know, Hopie?”
“I’ve never thought about it.”
“For a couple of women who had such an amazing relationship with their father, you seem to have been singularly uninterested in him. While he was alive, that is.” Fabian grinned in response to Hope’s mutinous look. “His ancestry, for instance. Women are supposed to be keen on that kind of thing. His childhood. And wouldn’t the first thing you’d have asked when that moth thing appeared on his books—after all, you were in your teens; you weren’t infants—wouldn’t the first thing have been, ‘Why the butterfly, Daddy?’ ”