The Chimney Sweeper's Boy

by Barbara Vine

  She had an attachment to put on the phone receiver and, of course, she had her deaf aid. With the deaf aid in place and with her sharp eyes on a person’s lips, she could hear anything; she could hear words uttered in a normal voice, but the thing on the phone didn’t really help her at all. She had described the noise that came out of the phone, the way it sounded to her, as like what a big dog’s barking would be if it was in the bottom of a well. The audiologist had laughed and said, very well put, but she hadn’t been able to do anything about improving the phone. Joan kept the phone in case she ever had to dial 999 for an ambulance, but she never used it. That was why the young lady whose dad had passed away was coming to the house and not phoning.

  Saturday was the day, in the afternoon. Maureen had come around the day before and said this Miss Candless had phoned again and asked if Saturday afternoon at about three would be all right, and Maureen had said she was sure it would be, and she had come over to pass on the message. Then they had gone to Martlesham and Joan had bought chocolate-chip biscuits and Kunzle cakes (which had come back into the shops after an absence of forty years) for Miss Candless’s tea. Luckily, Frank had left her comfortably off and she had always been thrifty, so she didn’t have to worry about spending a little extra for special occasions.

  While she busied herself dusting and vacuuming the already-immaculate bungalow, Joan speculated as to who the young lady could be. It was unthinkable that anyone called Candless and hailing from Ipswich shouldn’t be one of their family. Miss Candless was trying to trace her father’s roots, and Maureen had said this man’s Christian name and something else about him but had turned her face away at that moment to catch sight of someone out of the window and Joan hadn’t been able to read her lips. She put the vacuum cleaner away and laid on the newly dusted coffee table in the living room all the photograph albums she possessed, four of them.

  There must have been a point, perhaps about the time of the Great War or perhaps a bit later, when photographs stopped being brown and fawn and became black and white. It would be precisely known, that date—people would know it, but Joan didn’t. She rather liked the brown and thought it a shame it was gone forever. Then there was another point when black and white gave place to color. Of her albums, one held the brown photographs, two the black and white, and the latest one the colored. The young lady would want to see them and see if she could pick out her dad among the numerous cousins and cousins’ sons.

  Joan couldn’t resist opening the first album of black-and-white photographs, the one that held her wedding pictures. She had been living in Sudbury and wanted to get married at the church of St. Gregory and St. Peter, so pretty down there by the Stour in May, with the water meadows all green and the white daisies blooming. But her mother wanted her home in Ipswich for the wedding, and she had thought she owed that to her mother. Frank had been so handsome then, the handsomest man she had ever seen. Joan felt very much like picking up the album and pressing her lips to Frank’s photographed face, but she resisted; she didn’t want to be silly.

  Their first home had been in Sudbury, just two rooms in a white brick house on Melford Road, where Frank’s uncle had his greengrocery business. She’d worked in the shop herself until Peter was born, and after that, it wasn’t long before Frank was called up. They had been hard, those war years, with two babies at home and a husband in the western desert. But afterward, Frank had gone into business on his own in Ipswich, and if they had never been really prosperous, they’d done well enough and been happy. You could see that from the photo of Frank outside the shop, holding a giant marrow.

  She closed the album once more and turned her mind to Miss Candless’s tea. Would she prefer Darjeeling or Earl Grey? You couldn’t have milk with Earl Grey and she hadn’t a lemon in the house, so Indian it would have to be. Did “about three” mean before three or after? Joan was a stickler for punctuality herself and would never have made an appointment for “about” anything, but she understood about Miss Candless driving here from London and perhaps getting held up in traffic jams. “About three” could mean ten past. Nevertheless, she was at the window watching by two minutes to three.

  It was twenty past before the car came. Joan was nearly distraught, pacing into the dining room and back to the window, putting on the kettle and taking it off again, wondering if she’d gotten the day wrong. She even looked at the newspaper to check that it really was Saturday, and she would have phoned the J.G.’s, in case Maureen hadn’t actually said Saturday, only she had her deafness problem with the phone. Then the car came and Joan ducked in case the young lady saw her watching.

  You never wanted to answer the door too quickly. People got the wrong idea about you if you did that. They thought you must be lonely or anxious. So when the bell rang, Joan counted to twenty and then slowly walked to the front door. She opened it in a casual manner.

  The young lady stepped in, held out her hand, and said, “I’m Sarah Candless. How do you do? It’s very good of you to see me.”

  She was a good-looking girl, with red hair and dark red painted lips. Her skin was thick and smooth like white suede. Joan had seldom seen anyone in such deep mourning, black suit, black blouse, black stockings and shoes, black macintosh draped around her shoulders. All for the dead father, of course. This made her view Sarah Candless with approval, and she ushered her into the living room, having first hung up the shiny black mac.

  Getting down to business wasn’t Joan’s way. Small talk must come first, exchanges on the weather and the state of the road from London. Joan said it was cooler today than it had been; it was autumnal and one could soon expect the nights to draw in. Sarah Candless said that she supposed so. Yes, she had come on the M25 and the A12 and there were still roadworks on the approach to Colchester.

  “I expect you’d like a cup of tea.”

  She never drank tea. She said that very firmly and it took Joan aback. Joan had never previously met anyone who didn’t drink tea. At a loss, recalling a small jar of decaffeinated instant coffee brought by her grandson and deposited at the back of the kitchen cabinet, she asked what it was Miss Candless did drink.

  “I don’t want anything. Really.”

  “But you’ve come all the way from London,” said Joan.

  “It’s quite all right. I don’t want anything.”

  “After all those hours in a car?”

  “Well, if you have any water …”

  Joan couldn’t imagine what she meant. Of course she had water. All her life, at her parents’ home and after she was married, they had always been on the main water line. It did occur to her, while she was running the tap to get it really cold, that water was available from other sources; she had seen it in the supermarket at Martlesham, but she couldn’t believe any sane person would actually pay good money for a bottle of water. No, Miss Candless must simply have been speaking politely.

  She took the glass in on a tray, and the Kunzle cakes and biscuits, as well. She’d have her own tea later. Miss Candless refused the cakes. Joan had guessed she would as soon as she saw her. Girls like her all suffered from an epidemic called anorexia nervosa; she had read about it in the paper.

  “Perhaps we can talk about my father.”

  Joan thought it a bit abrupt. The folder Miss Candless took out of her black briefcase looked very official, as did the briefcase itself, rather as if she had come from the gas company about going on the three-star contract, instead of paying a social call. But Joan nodded and sat very upright, looking expectant, her hands folded in her lap.

  “I’ve brought a copy of his birth certificate.” She held it up. “His name was Gerald Francis Candless.”

  Joan looked at her. She had taken her eyes off her for a moment, and perhaps she had misheard. A chill had run through her at the sound of what she had heard, or thought she had heard. Now she stared hard at Miss Candless’s glossy, full dark red lips, which were parted a little, showing teeth as white and shiny as the china plate on which the biscuits lay. />
  “I am sorry,” she said. “Would you say the name again, please?”

  “Gerald Francis Candless.”

  The red mouth formed that name, the teeth just clipping the lower lip at the pronunciation of the two r’s. There could be no mistake. Sarah Candless said, “Have you never heard of him? He was a famous writer. A famous literary writer.”

  It meant nothing. It was nonsense. Joan said tonelessly, “There’s no one in the family by that name.”

  “Mrs. Thague, let me tell you a bit more. My father was born in 1926. On May the tenth. His parents were George and Kathleen Candless. It’s all here in the birth certificate. If you would just—”

  Nothing like this had ever happened to Joan before. She was frightened, without knowing exactly what of. But she interrupted the girl with an explosive “No!”

  “No?”

  Joan clenched her hands. “No, no. I said, no!”

  “What’s the matter? What have I said?”

  Anger came, an unfamiliar emotion. It was a long time since Joan had done what she called “standing up to” someone, but she was going to do it now. She was not going to be mocked. Somehow, for some unknown reason, this girl had come here, to her house, to get a rise out of her, to hurt her, too, and she wouldn’t stand for it.

  “You know what you’ve said. You know who George and Kathleen Candless were; they were my parents. And you know who was born on May the tenth, 1926.” Joan was almost gasping with the effort of being rude to someone. Her hands had begun to shake. But she managed to stand up. “Now, I think you’d better go.”

  The girl stood up, too. “Mrs. Thague, I’m very sorry if I’ve upset you. I didn’t mean to.”

  “Go away. Please go away.”

  “I don’t know what I’ve done. Believe me. I don’t know what I’ve done wrong. What have I said?”

  “Let me see that.”

  Joan put out her hand for the certificate. It was passed to her without reluctance. The girl’s face was puzzled, her lips parted. She didn’t look cruel or spiteful. Joan’s heart was beating hard. She had to sit down again, because it was Gerald’s birth certificate; his name was on it, and her mother’s and father’s names, and the address of the house in Waterloo Road where she had been born and later Gerald had been born, and the date was the date of Gerald’s birthday in 1926, when she was seven years old.

  She said, “Where did you get this?”

  “Mrs. Thague, please don’t be angry with me. I don’t mean to offend you. I don’t know what I’ve done. This was my father’s birth certificate. My mother had it; she kept it with all our birth certificates.”

  “It can’t be your father’s,” said Joan.

  “I’m sorry. I don’t want to have to argue with you, but it is. It was. His name was Gerald Candless and that was his birthday, and he was seventy-one last May, which was two months before he died.”

  Joan knew what she had to do. She had to look in the tin. It was years since she had opened the tin and looked into it, not since she had lifted the lid and laid Frank’s death certificate on the top of the papers. That would be the first thing she would see, but it couldn’t be helped. Unless she proved to this white-faced, red-lipped girl with her false mourning and her dyed red hair—no one in their family had ever had naturally red hair—that Gerald was dead and had been dead for a lifetime, she knew she wouldn’t rest, but would reproach herself throughout the night and next day and on and on. For not defending him against this girl, these people, these thieves of his life and his death.

  “Wait here,” she said.

  The tin was in the dining room. Though a dining room was for eating in and also for keeping the cruet in and a bottle of sherry and a half a bottle of brandy for medicinal purposes, it was also suitable as the repository of documents. Bedrooms were not fitting places for the concealment of such things, and the sitting room too frivolous. But the absence of soft and comfortable chairs in the dining room, the austerity of the seldom-used mahogany table, the only partially carpeted floor, and the room’s perpetual dimness due to a northern aspect all contributed to its appropriateness. The top drawer of the sideboard contained the best cutlery, the one below it Kathleen Candless’s damask tablecloths and napkins, and the lowest the tin.

  It was orange and black and had once contained biscuits, the products of Carr’s of Carlisle. Joan kept her documents in a tin because her mother had done so, on the grounds that the metal would keep paper from yellowing. In this, at any rate, it had been ineffective, for Frank’s death certificate had already become the same deep ocher color as those of George and Kathleen Candless, dead within a year of each other, which lay beneath it. What she sought would be at the very bottom.

  First, her children’s birth certificates, then her marriage certificate and Frank’s father’s death certificate. What had happened to his mother’s, she didn’t know. Perhaps one of her sisters-in-law had it. The two documents at the bottom of the tin were out of order, the record of birth above the record of death. Joan lifted out the top one, looked at the other lying there, and spoke his name involuntarily.

  “Gerald.”

  She mustn’t cry. Not in front of that girl. There was already the mark of a water splash on the faded brownish paper, where someone’s tear had fallen years ago, decades ago. Her mother’s? Joan heard his voice crying, “My head hurts; my head hurts.” The tear had fallen onto the end of the long word written in the space under “Cause of death”—meningitis. She had never heard the word before, not until he died of it. It still sounded ugly and menacing to her, a crawling monster, crocodilelike, a thing to see in nightmares. She turned the paper over, blank side up, to hide the word. She read the birth certificate, identical to the one the girl had, and then she took both back into the living room.

  Miss Candless had drunk all her water, the whole glassful. Joan no longer felt angry, only tired and very sad. She laid the papers on the table and said quietly, “He was my brother.”

  8

  There are no such things as good lovers and bad lovers. There are only the lovers you want and the lovers you don’t want.

  —A WHITE WEBFOOT

  MOSTLY, IT WAS SHE WHO HAD ANSWERED THE PHONE. A daughter’s voice at the other end would ask for Dad, sometimes didn’t even ask, but took it for granted Ursula would expect nothing more than to say hello and “I’ll fetch your father.” In the unlikely event of Gerald’s being out—taking manuscript pages to Rosemary, walking for the prescribed hated twenty minutes on the clifftop—Sarah’s or Hope’s disappointment sounded almost comically in a dying fall of tone. They had to talk to her. Where was Dad? There was nothing wrong with Dad, was there? When was Dad coming back?

  All was changed now. Inevitably. They had to talk to her every time. The calls came less often. Hope seldom phoned at all. Sarah phoned, Ursula thought, because she was more inclined to guilt feelings, to a sense of duty. And she phoned for information. But Ursula quite liked it, to pick up the receiver and say hello and hear a daughter who wanted to talk to her, needed to talk to her.

  “How are you, Ma?”

  After that came the requests. Would she like to write it down? Talk into a tape recorder? Just answer questions on the phone? Ursula thought about it and doctored her thoughts for daughterly consumption. Writing it down was all right if she was careful, a strict and controlled censor. She had talked about that first meeting with Gerald and subsequent meetings and Little Bear and even the Mr. Rochester exchange, and she had written some of it down and sent it to Sarah, the story about the engagement ring, among other anecdotes. But now dangerous ground was approached. Her words would find their way into Sarah’s book. Women probably existed who were willing to talk to a daughter about their sex lives with that daughter’s father, but she wasn’t one of them. Would Sarah ask?

  But Sarah didn’t ask anything. Ursula had been expecting a call for three days. No call came, and Ursula began to worry. It was ridiculous, because a week might easily pass by without a call
from either daughter, but Sarah had promised. Sarah had said, “I’ll phone in a couple of days. I’ll have gotten a lot of Dad’s family background by then and I’ll be ready to hear about when you were first married.”

  On the fourth day, in the evening, Ursula called her. It was because she was alone that she was prey to absurd fancies. It frightened her to think there might be no answer, or only Sarah’s recorded voice. If that happened, she would be worse off than before. But Sarah picked up the phone after two rings.

  She sounded cool and distant. “Is there something wrong?”

  “With me, no,” Ursula said. “I thought you’d want to talk about your father. For the book.”

  “I will, I suppose, but not now.”

  “I’m sorry. Have I interrupted something?”

  “No.”

  “You said you were tracing Dad’s family.”

  “Yes.”

  “Was that successful, Sarah?”

  There was a pause, a silence; then Sarah’s voice came in a rush, impulsive and strangely high-pitched. “I’ve been wondering, Ma, if you—I mean, if you’ve any idea why Dad …”

  “Idea of what?”

  “Nothing,” said Sarah.

  “Shall I write to you, then?” In the absence of any reply to this, Ursula said, “Is there anything you want to ask me?”

  “No. No, nothing. I’ll call you in a day or two.”

  She sounded just like Ursula’s mother had when some forbidden subject had been raised—cagey, slightly embarrassed, almost dismissive. In Betty Wick’s case, the subject had usually been sex, and for a moment Ursula wondered, as she replaced the receiver, if Sarah’s awkwardness could have been from the same cause, shyness in anticipation of what her mother might have to say about her married life. But no, it must be something else, something she couldn’t guess at, for both daughters seemed to her free from even mild inhibition. If Sarah wanted to know, she would come out with it, and if she was afraid of hearing, she would say that, too.