The Chimney Sweeper's Boy Read Free Page A

umbrellas and the blue-and-white-striped awning, golden-wedding couples, grandparents, the sedate, the inactive.
    â€œHave you seen someone you know?” Titus asked.
    It was as if he were in a dream, as if he were a sleepwalker arrested in his blind progress and lost, his orientation gone. Titus’s question broke the spell or the dream and he passed a hand across his high wrinkled forehead, pushing the fingers through that bush of hair.
    â€œI was mistaken,” he said; then the hand came down, and farewells were made. He was smiling the way he did, with his red wolfish mouth and not his eyes. His eyes not at all.
    They didn’t watch him go back. They didn’t look back or wave. As she crossed the terrace to enter the hotel by way of the open glass doors into the lounge and bar, Julia paused briefly to take in the people who sat at the terrace tables, those grandparents. Old people smoked so much. They all sat with cigarettes, overflowing ashtrays, pots of tea and cups of tea, pastries on cake stands, packs of cards, but no sun lotion or sunglasses. They never went into the sun. A woman was making up her face in the mirror of a powder compact, drawing crimson lips onto an old pursed mouth.
    There was no one to interest him, no one who could so have caught his rapt gaze. More affectation, she thought, more games to impress us, and she followed Titus into the cool shadowy interior.
    Sarah and Hope were going out. Hope had already made her plans, a barbecue on some beach farther up the coast. Almost before the guests were out of earshot, Sarah was on the phone, arranging to meet the usual crowd in a Barnstaple pub. Not even the prospect of their father’s company would keep them in on a Saturday night. To go out with those old companions, school friends and friends’ friends, was an obligation, almost a duty.
    â€œÂ â€˜Make my bed and light the light,’ ” said Miss Batty in the kitchen. “ ‘I’ll arrive late tonight, blackbird, bye-bye.’ There’s a lot of truth in those old songs.”
    She picked up Titus Romney’s glass off the tray and drank the port he had left. It was something she usually did when they entertained. Once she had gotten into such a state drinking the dregs from fifteen champagne glassesthat Ursula had had to drive her home. But what on earth had they had champagne for? Ursula couldn’t remember. Miss Batty—whom Ursula long ago had begun calling Daphne, just as Miss Batty called her Ursula—drained a drop of brandy and began emptying the dishwasher of its first load.
    â€œÂ â€˜Bye-bye, blackbird,’ ” she said.
    Ursula never ceased to be amazed by the scope of Daphne Batty’s knowledge of sixty years of popular music. If Gerald liked her for her name, Ursula’s appreciation derived from this unceasing flow of esoterica. She went back into the living room. Gerald was standing by the open windows but facing the inside of the room. Since he had come back from the hotel, he had spoken not a word, and that look he sometimes had of being far away had taken control of his face. Only this time, he was even more distant, almost as if he had stepped across some dividing stream into different territory. He looked at her blankly. She could have sworn that for a moment he didn’t know who she was.
    Saturday nights when the girls were out, he worried himself sick. He thought she wasn’t aware of his anxiety, but of course she was. While his daughters were in London, as they mostly were, they were no doubt out night after night till all hours, and it never occurred to him to worry. Ursula was sure he scarcely thought about it, still less woke up in the small hours to wonder if Hope was back safe in her bed in Crouch End or Sarah in hers in Kentish Town. But here, when they were out, he no longer even bothered to go to bed. He sat up in the dark in the study, waiting for the sound of a car, then one key