by Barbara Vine
She had forgotten the Romneys were coming. He hadn’t. But such visitors were no trouble. She always cooked a roast for him and the girls, and it would only mean a larger joint of meat. He sat with the proofs of Less Is More on his knees and the Encyclopedia Britannica on the table beside him, a man with a bad heart, a man who, given what he was and the mind he had, must dwell sometimes on the journey his blood made throughout his body, squeezing its way through constricted passageways, on each rotation still reaching its destination, escaping again, once more penetrating the infinitesimally narrower passages.
Until the thick-walled tunnel closed at both ends.
“Do you think pity is akin to love?” she said to Sam when he was back with her at Lundy View House. “It’s what they say.”
“It’s what they used to say,” he corrected her. “All those eighteenth-century heroines pitying their lovers. That was just a way of saying they loved them but not using a word that betrayed their own weakness.”
“You mean, if you pity someone, that means you’re stronger? I think I was stronger than Gerald in his last days. I did pity him, and that’s what it was, pity; it wasn’t love.”
“What was it he was writing? This Less Is More?”
“No, it can’t have been,” she said. “He’d already gotten the proofs of that by the middle of June. He was correcting them when he died. I don’t know what it was. I looked for it after he was dead and I looked some more when I was sorting out all those manuscripts.” His puzzled look made her smile. “You’ll want to know how I could tell it wasn’t there. His typing. It was so bad. There wasn’t a messy manuscript among them; they’d all been typed by Rosemary or me.”
He had destroyed it himself, she decided. Whatever it was, autobiography, new novel, amalgam of both, he had gotten rid of it. With no means of burning anything that size in summer, he could simply have dumped it in his wastepaper basket for Daphne to empty.
“I’m glad I felt something for him at the end,” she said. “It wasn’t love; it was just a little warmth, a little pity.”
“Did you hope he wouldn’t die?” Sam asked.
“I didn’t think that far.” She was suddenly visited with courage, the nerve to ask him. It was all this talk of love and pity. And he was looking at her with such tenderness, from which all sentimentality, it seemed to her, was absent. “Sam,” she said, “you said to me when we first met that you wanted to be in love. Do you remember?”
He nodded.
“So I’m asking you … well, I’m asking if it’s happened. With me, I mean.”
She held her breath. She needed to because of his hesitation. If he hesitated, wasn’t it all up with her? Wasn’t this an indication that everything was at an end?
“I’m not in love,” he said at last. “And you’re not, are you?”
“I don’t know,” she said very quietly.
“I think I’m too old. Or I’ve had it before and can’t have it again. Something like that. It was absurd to expect it. I do love you; I do want you to live with me. I want to live with you, I think spend the rest of our lives together. Is that good enough?”
“Yes,” she said.
26
It is easier to excise letters cut in stone than to unsay what has been said.
—A PAPER LANDSCAPE
“YOU HAVEN’T READ A White Webfoot?”
“No,” Stefan said, “I don’t know why. When was it published?”
“Nineteen ninety-two.”
“Ah, then I do know. That was the year my wife was so ill. I didn’t read much. I certainly didn’t read reviews, so I wouldn’t have known about it. And when the paperback came out—would that have been the following year?”
Sarah had checked that morning, before leaving for Plymouth. “Hardback publication was in October 1992, paperback in October 1993.”
“That was the month she died.” He was silent, then smiled at her. “You said he lived at Gaunton, didn’t you?”
“A house on the cliff, yes.”
“My sister Margaret went to stay at Gaunton in the summer with her daughter and her husband. At the Dunes Hotel. Is that anywhere near?”
“Next door,” she said. “A hundred yards away.”
“It was July. They might have seen each other and not have known.”
“Or have known,” said Sarah. “You wouldn’t know exactly when, would you?”
“I know they left the hotel on July the sixth, because they all came to see me here before going home.”
He had had a shock. She remembered the look on his face, the dazed look. The sleepwalking look. Before he went across to the hotel with those Romneys, he had been his normal self, and when he came back, the shock was there. A sight had stunned him. He had seen his sister and recognized her after forty-six years. She hadn’t known him, though. She would have come back with him if she had. The shock had gone to his heart. Had broken his heart?
“Tell me about your brother Desmond,” she said.
“All right. Would you like a cup of tea?”
“I don’t want anything,” she said.
Her father looked at her out of Stefan’s eyes. Their voices, that at first she had thought alike, really weren’t at all similar. Her father’s had been very deep, rich, with that underlying faint burr. Stefan, of course, had left Suffolk when he was only a little over two, when he must barely have been able to speak, and his voice was educated London. He watched her, looked away, then turned to her again as if making calculations.
“Desmond,” she said gently.
“Well, Desmond,” he said, “I think you know he was murdered.”
“Yes.”
“When John disappeared,” Stefan went on, “Desmond was twenty and living at home, as all the rest of us were. That is, James and his wife and baby, Margaret and Mary and I, and, of course, Mother and Joseph. Desmond and I shared a room. We Ryans were a very good-looking lot, tall, dark, regular features—not me, I was the ugly one—but Desmond was the best of us. People used to say all the girls would be after him, and maybe they were, but it wouldn’t have been of much interest to him.”
“He was gay.”
“Yes.” Stefan looked at her inquiringly. “You’ve been reading about the trial?”
She nodded.
“I didn’t know, of course. Not then. None of us did. It’s impossible to imagine what Joseph’s reaction to such a thing would have been. You, at your age, probably don’t realize how the general public felt about homosexuals in the fifties. And I, at mine, just have a sort of muddled recollection of horror at the very idea. This was many years ago, before the act that made homosexual relations between consenting adults over twenty-one legal, and feelings were as strong as they had been at the time of the Oscar Wilde case.”
“I didn’t know. But I’ve read some newspaper accounts since then.”
“Then you’ll know judges and magistrates were describing homosexuality as the worst evil known to man, as a hideous crime, and, above all, as a deliberate, calculated viciousness. The most liberal, the really enlightened, took the view that it could be cured, that it was a kind of madness or sickness. Right on during the sixties, men were being put into mental hospitals and given aversion therapy to ‘cure’ their disease.”
“There’s a lot about that in A White Webfoot.”
“Is there now? I knew nothing about homosexuality until my brother Desmond came up in court in 1955. He was found guilty of an act of gross indecency in a public lavatory and sent to prison for six months.”
Sarah wanted to ask what gross indecency was but as quickly decided not to. Instead, she said very tentatively, for she was bewildered, “You don’t mean with a child, with a minor?”
“He was twenty-four and the other man, so far as I remember, was over thirty. It was a crime in those days, Sarah, with anyone of any age. Fortunately—I think I can fairly say fortunately for him—Joseph was dead before it happened. He had died the previous year. National newspapers were quite reticen
t about cases of this sort, but local papers weren’t, and it was all in the Walthamstow Independent, which my brother John had worked for. All there for my mother to read.”
“What did he do for a living? Desmond, I mean.”
“He had had various jobs. He’d been a messenger and worked in a shop behind the counter. A gentlemen’s outfitters. He’d been a barman, and at the time of his arrest he was working as a receptionist in rather a dubious sort of hotel in Paddington. But he always had money, far more money than he could have earned by the sort of work he did. We never noticed or we never made the connection. We were innocent.
“After he came out of prison, he didn’t come back to live with us. He got a flat of his own. It was in Highbury and he was set up in it by the man who killed him. There was no question of my mother not wanting to see Desmond; she wasn’t like that. None of us would have rejected him, but he just didn’t come back. And I don’t think he ever again had a regular job. He’d call in sometimes to see her and he’d bring her presents. He was always well dressed. And he was always happy.”
“Happy?”
“You might think there wasn’t much for a homosexual man to be happy about in the fifties, but he was. Gay wasn’t in any way a misnomer for him. In fact, gay in its older sense really described him; gaiety expressed him. He was nice and sweet and lovable. I don’t think he was in the least bit ashamed of the kind of life he led. You might say, why should he have been? The answer to that is that everyone was always telling gay men they should be ashamed, that they were sick, that they were vicious, that they’d either chosen their way of life or else they were mentally disturbed.”
Sarah considered. “Did he talk to you about it?”
“You have to understand that we didn’t meet much. I went away to university in ’fifty-five, the year he went to prison, and I wasn’t home much after that, except for the holidays. But he did talk to me on a couple of occasions. That’s how I know he wasn’t ashamed. I’m sure people would have said then that in telling me these things he was trying to corrupt me—the powers that be were very big on corruption in those days—but of course he wasn’t. He wouldn’t have wanted me to follow his way of life—why should he? He was he and I was I and we were different. I think he recognized, even then, that some are born gay and some straight, just as some have blue eyes and some brown. He never went into physical detail, anyway, only told me about love affairs he’d had. And he talked about clubs he went to and baths.”
“You mean steam baths, Turkish baths?”
“He was very big on that. I think he enjoyed showing off his body. He liked the old men who went there looking at him. He never mentioned Givner to me—not by name, that is. It was quite simple and straightforward, you know. Givner loved him, provided him with that flat, spent money on him, and he was unfaithful to Givner. What else did the man expect? He must have been living in a dream world. You’ve read about the trial, you said?”
Sarah nodded. “Givner hanged himself in his cell while on remand.”
“Yes. It was a terrible thing for my mother. The loss of Desmond, the trial. Everyone knew, of course. The neighbors knew.”
“If Desmond had been a respectable heterosexual with a wife and children, she’d have gotten sympathy, but because he was gay and things had come out about his way of life, it was quite different?”
“That’s right. By that time, James and Jackie had two children and had moved into a house a couple of streets away. Mary was serving her novitiate. Margaret and I were both teaching nearby and both living at home. But it was John my mother wanted. I’ve told you how we tried to find him. We advertised for him, but we didn’t get any response. And Mother said we never would; she knew she’d never see him again.”
“And eventually you came down here?”
“I didn’t think I’d actually get the job. It was a good school, a better school than I could have hoped for in London. And I loved the place, not so much Plymouth as the countryside around it. So I left and Margaret stayed. She stayed because someone had to. She was a prime example of the single woman who sacrifices herself for a parent.”
“The Mezzanine Smile,” said Sarah.
“Well, yes, maybe. Yet Mother didn’t want it; she didn’t expect it. Margaret was engaged, and she kept the man she was engaged to waiting for seven years. Then Mother insisted, said to go and get married, to leave her, and in the end, Margaret did.”
“What became of your mother?”
“She died of cancer in the spring of 1973. She was ill for a long time, was in and out of the hospital; she had a mastectomy and a hysterectomy. The cancer went to her lungs. It was an awful death. If John—Gerald—if he’d known, perhaps he might have … But there it is—he didn’t. Why did you want to know if I’d read A White Webfoot?”
She wished now that she had brought a copy with her. She had taken it for granted that such a self-confessed fan of Gerald Candless would have the paperback in the house. It was half-past six. If it had been earlier, they could have gone out and bought a copy. In the bookshops in the shopping center above the Hoe, they would be bound to have A White Webfoot. Still, it was too late now.
“It’s about two boys growing up in the fens,” she said. “They have some sort of sexual encounter at school; it’s rather glossed over, no details. They grow up—one becomes a practicing and promiscuous homosexual and a happy one; the other is haunted by his … his orientation.”
“Ah,” said Stefan. “I begin to see. Why is it called that?”
“A White Webfoot? It’s a quotation from something, a poem—I can’t remember what. Mark, who’s one of the protagonists, has a recurring memory of web-footed creatures walking in a marsh. And he has a dream of being in a stone passage with one end sealed off, and when he turns around, the entrance has also been blocked. I suppose it’s a trap dream, an expression of a need to escape while knowing there’s no escape. Mark is married; he has a sympathetic wife and two sons. He sees Dennis and observes him, follows him, but they never meet. When Dennis is murdered by his lover and the lover kills himself, Mark blames himself for both their deaths. He feels sure that if he had told Dennis the truth years before, that he loved him and wanted to live with him, none of it would have happened. The rest of the novel is about guilt and self-realization.”
Stefan was silent for a moment. “And you think this is based on fact?”
“All his books were. He said so. But facts changed, were filtered, processed. The places were changed and the names, of course, and the relationships of one character to another. You can never quite tell what is fact and what is imagination, but you can always be sure the emotions were real. He had felt them or someone he knew had.” Sarah got up, went over to the bookcase, and brought her eyes close to the row of her father’s paperbacks, the line of black moths, chimney sweeper’s boys. She turned around quickly to look once more at this man who was her uncle. “I think my father wrote the letter the police found.”
“The letter?”
“Among Breech’s letters was one from a man who signed himself J. It was read in court.”
“None of us went to the trial. While it was on, we wouldn’t have newspapers in the house, for my mother’s sake. Then Givner died and that was an end of it.”
“The letter seemed to be saying J wanted some sort of reconciliation. It’s not very explicit, but it does seem to suggest that J wanted to come back to his family after an absence of eight years and could do so only by talking to Desmond. Does that mean anything to you?”
“No, it doesn’t. I wish it did.”
“He says in the letter he’ll phone Desmond after about a week. The letter was dated a week before the murder. Perhaps he did phone. Perhaps a date had been set for a meeting. But then Givner killed Desmond.”
“I wonder what he wanted to talk about.”
“Perhaps he wanted to tell someone why he had left, where he’d been, why he’d changed his name. Perhaps he wanted to prepare the way via one family memb
er for returning to the family. But he does say that he and Desmond had somehow done each other a great wrong.”
“Are we ever going to know what that was, Sarah?”
“I don’t know. Somehow I feel we aren’t.”
She thought, but didn’t say aloud, If he had met Desmond and talked to him, would he have reverted to being John Ryan, gone home again to Goodwin Road, been reunited with his family? Terrible questions reared up. Would he ever have written another book? Or if he had, would he have written the books he had written?
Would he have met her mother and married her? Would she, Sarah, ever have been born?
On the doorstep, saying good-bye, Stefan wished her a Happy Christmas.
In her headlights, the FOR SALE sign gleamed whitely. No one bought houses in the midwinter, though; there was time yet. It would be a long time before a sale happened. Before the house was no longer there, she thought, for that was how it would feel when it was gone from them and owned by others, as if it had disappeared. As if a mighty spring tide had come and swept it away, drawn it off the cliff into the depths of the sea. Like another Lyonesse or Dunwich, it would lie down there, intact but unreachable, inaccessible to anyone.
A foolish fantasy. Her mother had gone to bed, though her bedroom light was still on. Sarah thought that there must be people of her age, perhaps most people, who under these circumstances would have opened that bedroom door, put a head out, said something cheerful, pleasant, inquiring, or gone up to the woman reading in bed and kissed her. She half-wanted to do some of that, but she couldn’t. She stood for a moment outside the door, hesitating, in a dilemma about something so trivial, so absurd, then finally called out, “Good night!” and ran into her own room.
Psychologists said that it is best if a child models itself on the parent of the same sex. She and Hope had modeled themselves on the parent of the other sex and couldn’t undo it now, wouldn’t want to undo it now. How unhappy he must have been, her poor father, she thought as she lay in bed. While he was alive, she had never thought of his happiness or unhappiness, only of him as her father and sometimes, often, of her luck in having this father, so clever, so talented, so successful, so generally admired, so good to her and Hope, so generous and so loving.