by Barbara Vine
“I’ve missed it,” he said. “It went at eleven. Can you—I mean, could I kip down here?”
He had shocked her as much as if he had started taking his clothes off. Her instinct was to say a violent no. No, no, of course you can’t. Go to a hotel; I’ll pay. She got up and took the glasses to the kitchen, stood thinking, but thinking of nothing much except how she hated the idea. Then she walked back into the room and said, “Yes, yes, of course you can.” She made herself smile and even managed to pat his shoulder. “Of course you can stay—what else?”
If only she had two bathrooms. Suppose he used her toothbrush? But no one would do that. She said good night and to please turn off the lights, rushed into the bathroom, then rushed out again and into her bedroom, clutching her toothbrush.
It was better when her door was shut and much better when he put the lights out. She could pretend she was alone as usual. She got into bed. It was quite silent in the flat, with no sound but the occasional distant hum of traffic. The proof of Less Is More was on the bedside cabinet and she began to read her father’s last book.
Perhaps more than anything else could have done, the plot of this novel distracted her mind from the unwanted guest in the next room. Gerald Candless plunged directly into this narrative of a man who abruptly leaves his family without explanation for his departure, takes on a new identity and profession, and makes for himself a new life. In a series of flashbacks, he had his protagonist recall that former happy existence, the closely united family, the loving parents.
Overcome by his memories, Philip knows he must at least once return to the family home and experience its atmosphere, absorb what he is sure it still has but what he has lost. All these years, he has retained a key. He watches from the opposite side of the street, in a surge of emotion and pain sees his mother go out, and, once she is out of sight, lets himself into the house.
Sarah had reached this point when she fell asleep. It was more a dozing off, and she jerked herself awake again, turned the page, read another paragraph and then another. But she knew that if you are tired, it matters very little how interested you may be in something or how intensely you want to go on with it, sleep will get you. She had learned that in her student days. In a way, she was relieved, for if she could feel like this, the presence of Jason Thague in the flat couldn’t be seriously incommoding her, and that was her last thought when, having dropped the proof on the floor and turned off the lamp, she fell asleep.
At first, she thought it was a dream that woke her. Something heavy and alive lying beside her, an arm around her waist, a mouth against her cheek. She came back to consciousness, felt real skin, a real hand.… She sat up, screamed, “Get off me!”
She shoved him with all her strength, though strength wasn’t needed, he was so thin and light. She jumped up, kicked him, stood on the mattress kicking him, leaped off, pulling the quilt around her, cocooning herself in it.
“Get out of here, you fucking rapist,” she yelled at him. “Get out of my flat. Get out.”
One of them put the light on. It must have been Jason. He sat on the bed, blinking.
“Get out. Now.”
“I wouldn’t rape you, Sarah,” he said. “I wouldn’t know how to rape anyone.”
“Just go,” she said. “Please just get dressed and go.”
“I thought you liked me. You said you loved me. On the phone you said it, but I knew it was a joke. I’m not a fool. But I did think you liked me, and when you said I could stay, I thought you might—well, maybe not do much the first time, but something.…” To her horror, he began to cry. He put his head in his hands and sobbed.
“Oh God,” she said. “Oh God.”
“I’m so lonely, Sarah. And I’m hungry. When I played the Game and got it right I thought I’d proved myself to you. I’m so bloody lonely and I’m starving to death.”
“You don’t expect me to feed you, do you? Just get out. Get out now.”
22
“Those who marry to escape something,” Oliver remarked, “usually find themselves in something worse.”
—HAND TO MOUTH
DRIVING HER UP TO OXFORD, GERALD TOLD SARAH the story about Cardinal Newman, whose father’s decision as to the university he should attend depended on which way the coachman chanced to bring the carriage around that fateful morning. If the horses had faced eastward, it would have been Cambridge, but, in fact, they faced westward, so it was to Oxford that Newman went.
Such last-minute decisions had for a long time not been feasible, Gerald said, though there had, of course, never been any doubt that his daughters would have the pick of any seats of learning available. Ursula, sitting in the front for form’s sake while Sarah and Hope were in the back, thought it unfortunate for a girl of seventeen and a girl of nearly sixteen to be exposed constantly to this kind of flattery, but it would be useless to say so. It was probably too late, anyway, and the damage, if damage there was, was done.
She was working hard for her own degree from the Open University. Gerald and the girls knew about it and Sarah and Hope had at first shown some curiosity. What did she want it for? Was she going to get a job? Why art history? Gerald, on the other hand, appeared entirely uninterested. He seldom watched television, making an exception only when the adaptations of Hamadryad and later of A Paper Landscape were broadcast on BBC2, and when Ursula took over the downstairs spare room for herself and moved the set in there, he said merely, but in a tone that was more gratified than disapproving, “That will mean we can’t have anyone to stay.”
On the return journey to Devon, though Gerald and Hope talked exhaustively about academic matters concerning her future and the glowing A levels she would get, with occasional reference to Sarah’s prospects, Pauline’s dismal abandonment of education, and Robert Postle’s double first, no comment at all was made on her, Ursula’s, art history endeavors. Still, nothing was said about Gerald’s own academic achievements at Trinity, either. And Ursula didn’t mind. She would rather have nothing said than the casual contempt that was the probable alternative.
Gerald had been occupied in writing a script based on one of his earlier novels for a feature film. Ursula had no typing to do for him and was left free to get on with her own work. But in the early spring of the following year, he began writing a new novel. Sometimes he found his title before he had written more than a few pages, and it was so in this case. He called it Hand to Mouth.
Since Sarah’s departure, things had been rather better between them. Hope, too, was much occupied with school, seemed always to be out pursuing after-school activities, and their rapprochement, if it could be so called, might have been due to their being much alone together. Ursula supposed it was because she was his only companion that he was obliged to talk to her, but whatever it was, there was no longer any evidence of the dislike he had once more or less expressed for her.
On one occasion, very early in the morning, when she was watching a filmed lecture on the Italian Renaissance, he came into the room and sat down beside her on the settee. At the film’s close, he asked her questions, seeming genuinely interested. Another time, he asked her about the class she had attended in Ilfracombe. She expected mockery and jibes, but none came, nor did a suggestion that she had only chosen art history as her discipline because Edward Akenham taught it.
Trying to account for his approaches to her—conversation at mealtimes, signs of consideration, even an inquiry after her health—she wondered if it might be his age, if he was settling down, resigning himself to her and his fate. In May of that year, he would be fifty-eight. Inevitably, he would soon be alone with her, both his children departed.
* * *
Gerald handed her the first chapter of Hand to Mouth one wet day in March. It was raining too hard for her to go for her beach walk and so she settled down at once at the typewriter. It wasn’t until she was given the next two chapters that she began to see what was being done to her. She still remembered thirteen years later, with almost the same p
hysical sensation, her increasing sickness, her actual nausea, as she deciphered this narrative of a man choosing a young naive girl from a suburb to be the mother of the children he so much wanted.
By the time the novel began, she had become a silly woman in early middle age. Her name was Una. She was married to a distinguished musician with a full and productive life, and because she had no talents herself and no inclination for good works, she spent her time in acquiring an education. The early chapters were about the turn academe had taken in the late seventies and early eighties, about cranky degree subjects, low standards in polytechnics, evening classes in obscure crafts and Oriental martial arts, education by mail and education by television.
Flashback chapters told of Una’s youth in Golders Green. The only daughter of the prosperous owner of a department store and his wife, she grew up ignorant, spoiled, and sheltered. It was at the only concert she had ever attended that she met her future husband, a composer on the lookout for a healthy, undemanding bride.
Two sons were born to them. They lived in North London, in Highgate. Una was never able to hold her own in the conversations her husband had with his intellectual friends and she turned out not to be as good a cook and housekeeper as he had hoped for and a less than adequate mother. At the same time, her pretensions grew, and when the family moved to Somerset, Una began investigating the possibilities of further education in order to keep up with her husband.
When she got to this point, Ursula walked into the study and asked for an explanation.
“You can do the explaining,” he said. “I don’t understand what this is about.”
She told him and he denied it. Una had dark hair, she was forty-six to Ursula’s forty-four, she lived in Somerset, her husband was a composer younger than she, and she had sons, not daughters.
“It’s still based on me,” Ursula said.
“Nonsense.”
“Why did you do it?” She corrected herself. “Why are you doing it?”
“It is you who are doing it, Ursula. Still, it’s a recognized phenomenon. People wish to identify themselves with characters in fiction, still more to find characters they can allege are based on themselves. I don’t know why, but it’s probably vanity. Vanity and a desire to be the center of attention.”
She asked him not to publish it. He laughed and told her she was imagining things. But he did change Una’s name to Imogen, Ursula and Una strictly being the only two English Christian names for women beginning with a U. He also made Imogen childless and her studies in social sciences rather than fine arts.
Ursula had typed six chapters but broke off in the middle of the seventh. She told him she would do no more. She would never type another line for him, and she waited for him to ask how, then, she justified her existence as sharer in his income. But he never did. That wasn’t his way; that was the last thing he cared about.
No one else could have read his handwriting, so he went into Barnstaple and bought himself a typewriter. As a journalist all those years before, he had been a two-finger typist and he managed. The result wasn’t fit for his agent’s eyes or Robert Postle’s, and Rosemary, who typed for a living, was found to take on Ursula’s job.
Hand to Mouth was published in the autumn of 1984. The reviews were disappointing. Ursula waited for some friend or acquaintance or even gossip columnist to point out the similarities of character and way of life between Imogen and herself. But no one did.
“I’ve read Hand to Mouth,” Sam said, “and I wouldn’t have said Imogen was a portrait of you. She’s not in the least like you.”
“Her life was like mine was then. You didn’t know me then. She used my turns of phrase. She dressed as I dressed.”
“There’s a story about Somerset Maugham and Hugh Walpole,” he said. “Maugham based a character directly on Walpole. The self-opinionated critic Alroy Kear was Walpole to the teeth, barely a feature or a character trait altered. When Cakes and Ale was already in print, at proof stage, Maugham gave him a proof, and as Walpole sat down to read it that same night, he recognized himself in every cruel detail. There was nothing to be done except sue, but he didn’t sue. It was said to have ruined his life; he was never the same again, never got his confidence back. And he had thought Maugham his friend.”
“Well, I’d thought Gerald was my husband. I never really spoke to him much after that. That was the end.”
They were at the top of the Pincian Hill because Sam said it was the best place to watch the sun set over the city. The dome of St. Peter’s seemed to melt into the growing dusk as the Angelus began to ring. As the sky changed from red to violet, they began to walk down, pausing to look through the bars of the gate at the ancient garden.
“Hold my hand,” Sam said as they descended.
“I think I’m too old to hold hands.”
“Hold my hand. Please.”
So she held his hand and he told her how this was the only section of the Aurelian Wall that Belisarius had failed to repair, for the Romans told him St. Peter himself would defend it against all assault. A young man and a girl were walking ahead of them, also hand in hand, and when the man turned around to look back over his shoulder, his dark good looks reminded her of Fabian Lerner. He was very much like him, almost his double, or his double as Fabian had been twelve years before.
Hope had brought him home to Lundy View House. It was December and their term at Cambridge, where they had met two months before, had just ended. Publication day of Hand to Mouth had also been Hope’s eighteenth birthday. Fabian had turned eighteen the previous June.
She could remember so clearly their arrival, the sound of Hope’s key in the door just when Gerald’s nerves were starting to get the better of him and he had begun to pace. She was half an hour late, or half an hour late in his view, for she had certainly not given any arrival time. The key in the lock and then her voice calling, “Daddy!”
That was when Hope had begun wearing those hats and the one she had on was her first black velvet cartwheel. She threw it onto the sofa and rushed into her father’s arms. Ursula said hello to Fabian, shook hands, waited for the greetings to be over.
Hope said belatedly, “This is Fabian.”
Gerald looked at the boy then. But he quickly disguised, veiled, obscured, the indefinable flash that leapt in his eyes. She saw it later, when, thinking himself unobserved or perhaps that observers would fail to interpret, he allowed his gaze to rest on Fabian for a long moment—of what, Ursula hardly knew. Briefly, his whole face changed; his eyes darkened, and his flesh seemed to swell. He passed his tongue across his lips. And then, swiftly, he collected himself. He sat up straight. He smiled.
She squeezed Sam’s hand, looked up into his face.
“Ten thousand lire for them.”
“I was thinking of my daughter Hope’s boyfriend. That boy looks like him.”
“I don’t like you to think of boys,” Sam said. “I want you to think of me.”
Sarah had lain in bed in the dark, unable to sleep. The black misery she had felt when her father died descended once more, but this time it wasn’t definable; she didn’t know why she was plunged into such deep unhappiness. It had nothing to do with Jason Thague, who was a fool, who misunderstood everything, but who hadn’t, of course, tried to rape her. Perhaps it was the same old misery from the same source, because her father was dead and wouldn’t come back and be there.
If he had been alive, she would have gone to him and thrown herself into his arms, talked to him and been comforted. There was one man in the world she thought could comfort her, hold her and kiss her and tell her all was well, but even as she thought it, she saw the folly of that. His might be the first name to come to mind, but it should have been the last. Her relationship with Adam Foley depended on mutual rudeness and antagonism, with no place in it for tenderness.
She imagined phoning him. It made her shudder. If you were really close to someone, you ought to be able to phone him at any hour of the night and unburden your so
ul, but there had never been anyone like that in her life except her father. No contemporary, no lover. Violence and abuse aroused her, and she didn’t know why. They were the antithesis of what she had had from her father. But she didn’t want to think about that; it bit too hard at the bone. She would think about Adam, sex with Adam, which she did more or less rewardingly, and at last she fell asleep.
That had been nearly two weeks ago, and in those two weeks she had done the things Jason might have done but which she could no longer ask him to do. She sent him a check—the final check, she thought it would be—without a covering letter, then set about finding Stephen Ryan herself. It wasn’t difficult, because he was in the Plymouth phone book, the street where he lived recognizable as in that district of the city called Mutley. She didn’t know Plymouth well, but she knew that much.
Phoning J. G. Candless had been one thing; this would be quite another. She had been naive then; she had believed she knew exactly who Gerald Candless was. Besides, this Stephen was her uncle. She couldn’t just pick up the phone, dial his number, say who she was, and tell him he was her uncle. Instead, she wrote. It took her a long time, that letter, and when she had finally finished it, she balled it up, threw it away, and wrote simply: “Dear Mr. Ryan, I believe I am your niece, your lost brother John’s daughter. I am writing a book about him. May I come and see you?”
It was only after she had posted it that she realized she hadn’t said her father was dead.
23
On the subject of relatives, Louisa Manley used to say that blood being thicker than water may be the problem. Blood clots and water does not.
—EYE IN THE ECLIPSE
INSTEAD OF A PHONE CALL, A LETTER CAME ADDRESSED TO MRS. S. Candless. “Dear Mrs. Candless …” it began. It puzzled her for a moment and then she understood he must suppose her to have been called Ryan and that Candless was her married name. He wrote that he would be happy to see her; he was generally at home in the evenings from five onward. Although she hadn’t asked for it, he gave information about himself.