The Chimney Sweeper's Boy

by Barbara Vine

  In that case, what had he expected a biographer to do about his banished childhood and youth? Not inquire perhaps. Assume, gloss over, pass on. Strange, then, that he had kept no sort of diary. Not entirely believing her mother, Sarah had searched for a diary, found only notebooks whose contents referred to the plots, themes, and characters of his novels.

  All Saturday afternoon, she had worked in the study, but in the evening she had gone to the pub in Barnstaple and then on to a drinking club with a bunch of friends. Strangely enough, because there was no prearrangement, Adam Foley turned up among them once again. He was one of Alexander’s friends, or an ex-boyfriend of Rosie’s sister—Sarah wasn’t sure which. His family had a weekend cottage in a village not far away.

  Nothing was said about the phone call, coldly received and coldly terminated, but she thought he resented what had happened. It must be so. He spoke to everyone but her. He must remember her “No, thanks, can’t, I’m busy.” Too bad. She wouldn’t talk to him, either. It was a shame he was so deeply, disturbingly attractive. His hair was black and his skin had a dark bloom. He was thin. She liked thinness and that peculiar grace with which he moved, very casual, laid-back, insouciant. But she had brushed him off.

  After a time, she was aware, uncomfortably at first, then with mounting excitement, of his eyes on her. Not on her face, not meeting her eyes, but on her body. That wasn’t what having a roving eye meant, but his eyes roved. While they were still in the pub, he went to fetch a round of drinks, then came back with glasses for everyone but her.

  “What’s poor Sarah done?” Rosie said.

  He looked at her face then. “I didn’t see you there.”

  It was uttered in an indifferent tone and as if she were too insignificant to be noticed. He must be paranoid if a woman’s refusal to go out with him made him so rude. She could be rude, too. It would give her pleasure.

  “Staring at an empty chair, were you?”

  She got up, went to the bar, and bought her own drink. The place was so crowded, she had to push past him to get back to her seat. As she did so, his arm touched her thigh, pressed against her thigh. For some reason, she didn’t walk out. She stayed and they went on to the club. It was in a cellar under a greengrocer’s and called, of course, Greens. He pushed ahead of her; he let the door swing into her face. There was dancing on a little floor the size of someone’s bathroom and he danced with Vicky and with Rosie. He danced with them and looked at her.

  She was mesmerized by him. She began to feel a little sick. Of course, she had drunk too much. It must have been after one when they all left. Rosie asked him if he wanted a lift. He cocked a thumb in Sarah’s direction and said in exactly the tone he might use about a taxi driver, “She’s taking me.”

  And she did take him. Or he took her. He took the keys from her in silence, found her car, opened the passenger door for her, and drove a couple of miles. She was very drunk, but not too drunk to be aware that he had parked the car on the grass verge and gotten out. He came around to her side, pulled her out, put her in the back, and made love to her on the backseat.

  Somehow or other, he and she had gone back to the cottage together and Sarah had stayed the night. With Adam, in Adam’s bed, though members of his family were occupying the other bedrooms. And it had been exciting, like being a teenager again, creeping up the stairs, carrying her shoes, making no sound because Adam’s aunt or grandmother or someone was sleeping on the other side of the bedroom wall. They had scarcely spoken. Early in the morning, the moment the old woman had gone off to Holy Communion, she had gotten up and driven home with a monstrous hangover.

  Her mother had made no comment on Sarah’s arriving back at ten in the morning, just asked if she’d had a nice evening. Sarah drank a lot of fizzy water and a fair amount of black coffee and took herself back into the study, where she expected to find nothing and where she made the only real discovery of the weekend.

  It was in the last drawer she examined, lying on top of the sheets in an open pack of typing paper. She didn’t know what it was and didn’t know then that she had made a discovery, only that she was holding in her hand something peculiar that she couldn’t identify and which seemed to have no place in a novelist’s workroom. Not, that is, a novelist who was also an atheist. But she thought that later. After the memorial service, in fact, back in her own flat, where she showed her find to Hope and Fabian.

  * * *

  Their father had not only not believed in God but had been aggressively anti-God. (Their mother’s attitude toward religion they had never inquired about nor thought important.) He had brought them up godlessly, though without the ostentation of requesting they not attend school assembly. Religious ritual, he opined, would have no effect on them, and he had been right. Neither of them had ever read a line of the Bible, nor did they recognize quotations from it. They had been in church only to attend their cousin Pauline’s wedding and their father’s funeral.

  Hope, therefore, had no more idea of what the thing found in the paper drawer was than her sister had. It seemed to be made of some fibrous vegetable substance, leaf or stem perhaps. A strip of this had been folded double, to which, two-thirds of the way up, a crosspiece, also folded double, was attached with a neat binding to conceal the join.

  “It’s a palm cross,” said Fabian.

  “A what?”

  “There’s atheism and there’s ignorance,” he said, “and you two are just plain ignorant. You don’t have to believe in God to know something about religion. I mean a smidgen. If I asked you what is: a, a pyx; b, a creed; and c, Pentecost, you wouldn’t have a clue, would you?”

  “I know what a creed is,” said Hope impatiently. “Anyway, never mind that. What’s this thing? What’s a palm cross?”

  “It’s palm leaf or reed or even a branch from a fir tree made into the shape of a cross and given to people who attend matins or Mass, I expect, on Palm Sunday, which is the Sunday before Easter.”

  “I thought you were Jewish,” said Sarah.

  “I don’t think you can be right, Fab,” said Hope, “because Daddy would never have had anything like that in the house. Daddy hated religion. He said he didn’t agree with anything Marx said except about religion being the opium of the people. And he used to mock religion, I mean make jokes about it. Jonathan Arthur was staying once and he was talking about Resurrection—he’s religious—and Daddy upset him frightfully by saying that what went up must come down.”

  “I can’t help that. It’s a palm cross, known as a palm. Ask anyone if you don’t believe me. Ask that fellow Postle, the one with the streaming nose; he’s a Catholic.”

  “If I ask him, he’ll want to know how the book’s coming on,” said Sarah, “and it isn’t coming on. I don’t know what to do next.”

  Fabian said, “Your dad had a London accent. I’m a latter-day Professor Higgins, I am; I know about accents. His was London, and I’d say with a faint undertone somewhere of East Anglia. So he’s a Londoner, living alone, working on this newspaper, and something terrible happens. Discount something criminal; your dad wouldn’t have done that, or so you say, so it’s something that happened to him. Wife or lover died? Children died? Made some momentous discovery about his family—his real family, I mean? Some hereditary disease, murderer for a father—how about that?”

  “I don’t see why having your lover die would be all that terrible,” said Hope.

  “Thanks very much.”

  “I don’t mean that, Fab. You know I don’t. But why would it make you change your identity? A murderer for a father’s more likely.”

  “I’m remembering something from long ago,” Sarah said. “I once heard that funny old woman Adela Churchouse saying something to Dad about that. Oh, not about having a murderer for a father—I don’t believe that—but about his accent. She said, ‘You know, Gerald, sometimes when you get animated, the way you were just then, I can hear Silly Suffolk in your voice.’ And Dad said there was nothing more likely, because he’d lived i
n Ipswich till he was ten.”

  If she had thought of that conversation at all since Joan Thague’s revelations, it was to assume that everything he had said was a lie, just as she had assumed all references he had made to his origins were untrue. But suppose it hadn’t been a lie? Suppose that, though not the Gerald Candless born to George and Kathleen Candless in Waterloo Road, he also had come from Ipswich and lived there long enough as a child to acquire an ineradicable accent?

  The palm cross lay on the table, where Fabian had put it down on top of a copy of the Spectator. There was something about it that Sarah very much disliked and which she found deeply disconcerting. She didn’t want to think about it too much, didn’t want to confront its implications, yet to throw it away, to put it out with the rubbish to be collected by Camden waste disposal in the morning, seemed an extreme step, and one she might regret.

  After Hope and Fabian had gone, she took out of the bookcase her copy of the Shorter Oxford Dictionary, put the palm inside it between dynamicity and Earl Marshal, and replaced the dictionary on the shelf.

  11

  Times change and views do an about-face. Oliver’s grandfather would have been ashamed if his wife had gone out to work, but Oliver was embarrassed because his wife stayed at home.

  —HAND TO MOUTH

  MR. AND MRS. JOHN GEORGE CANDLESS, PUT IN POSSESSION of the facts, looked upon the whole thing with suspicion. J.G. passed through three phases of doubt: disbelief at first, then speculation, finally extreme wariness. “Have nothing more to do with it, keep away, ignore the girl’s letter, or send back a sharp negative response.”

  But Maureen said, “Suppose she puts it in the paper or this book she’s writing? Better be there and find out what she’s up to.”

  “All right,” said J.G., “and tell her I shall be consulting my solicitor if you like.”

  Neither of them had ever previously heard of Auntie Joan having a little brother who died. A little brother called Gerald Candless. Why should they? Auntie Joan wasn’t really John George’s auntie, but something like his first cousin once removed, and it had all happened so long ago.

  “It’s upset Auntie Joan a lot,” Maureen had said. “I’ve never seen her tearful before. And now this girl’s written and wants to see her again.”

  “There’s bound to be some ulterior motive. She could be after Auntie Joan’s money.”

  “She hasn’t got any money, J.G.”

  “You never want to say that about anyone. The ones you say that about are the ones who are rolling in it.”

  So because Joan didn’t feel like writing and didn’t know what to say, Maureen phoned Sarah Candless and was careful to be offhand. She could come if she liked, but Mr. and Mrs. J. G. Candless would appreciate it if Sarah remembered Joan was an old lady and shouldn’t be upset. She, Maureen, would make a point of being there just to keep an eye on things.

  That made Sarah feel as if they suspected her of planning to steal the silver. She hardly knew what she was going to ask Joan Thague. If she asked about friends and neighbors at the time of the little boy’s death, would that upset Joan? Would any reference to that time upset her? Suppose she asked for a photograph of the child? But how would that help? She remembered the fat photograph albums laid out, ready for scrutiny, but which had never been scrutinized. Did they take group photographs in those days? Of some university class or team, yes, but of the pupils at an Ipswich primary school?

  She drove to Ipswich on the appointed day but lost her way and found herself in the center of the town. The place was full of churches and streets named for churches, so that once again she thought of the palm cross. She would have liked to imagine her father as a child in this town, walking with his mother and holding her hand, but it was impossible because so much must have changed, because the little shops of that time had been replaced by precincts and malls. But he had lived here—she was sure of that; she hung on to that, remembering the trace of a Suffolk accent Adela Churchouse and Fabian had detected.

  When she eventually found her way to Rushmere St. Andrew, the front door of the bungalow was opened to her by Maureen Candless. She introduced herself brusquely as Mrs. Candless. She was a big woman, fat and heavy, somehow frightening in her charmlessness. Her face in repose was sullen and in animation a conflict of big jarring features—thick lips, overlarge teeth, a pointed nose with a tip that twitched independently of the rest of it.

  “She can’t tell you anything,” she said. “I expect you’ll have had a wasted journey.”

  This time, Sarah sensed, there was going to be no tea, no cakes on a plate with a paper doily. Joan Thague sat very upright and on the edge of an armchair made for the adoption of a more relaxed attitude. She looked uncomfortable and she was. She had been uncomfortable since Sarah’s previous visit, having suffered repeated bad dreams for the first time in many years. And in the daytime, while apparently occupied with something quite removed from her family and the past, she had heard, as if a real child were in the house and a real child somewhere in pain, a thin, weary voice crying, “My head hurts, my head hurts.” She’d been cooking a meal for her grandson Jason, standing at the stove, frying chips, when the child called her and she heard it, for she wasn’t deaf to that voice.

  None of this, of course, had been told to J.G. and his wife. They were given no details, only the bare facts. Joan was surprised they didn’t know them already, and offended, too, hurt, rather, that J.G.’s mother had never said a word to him about Gerald and Gerald’s death, had forgotten him or ignored him, as if he had never existed. Maureen was kind, especially in the matter of taking her to the Martlesham Tesco, but she didn’t want Maureen there. She didn’t want Sarah Candless, either. Or anyone.

  And Sarah hardly knew how to begin. The two women were looking at her as if she were a social worker come to accuse them of mistreating a child. Joan Thague cleared her throat, brought her hands together, and looked down at her wedding ring. For the first time, Sarah was conscious of the smell in the house, a laboratory’s attempt at re-creating the scent of daffodils and hyacinths. She thought she ought to preface her inquiries with some kind of apology for her father, and on the way here, she had rehearsed this, but it had turned into an apology for herself, for caring about a man who had manifestly been so false and so deceitful, and she couldn’t bring herself to make it. Instead she said, “I feel that my father must have known your family. As a child, he must have lived somewhere near. He lived here till he was ten. And he had a Suffolk accent.”

  “Well, that’s something no one in this family ever had,” Maureen Candless said in a huffy tone and broad Ipswich.

  “He had a trace of it,” Sarah said. “That’s been something for me to hold on to.” She looked from one implacable face to the other, from Joan’s wary eyes to the twitch at the end of Maureen’s nose. “I’m sure you can understand.” Why do we say we’re sure when we mean we have the gravest doubts? “I wondered if you had a neighbor with a boy of your brother’s age, Mrs. Thague. Or friends of the family. Or if he had school friends.”

  Joan Thague looked at her cousin’s wife. For reassurance? Comfort? Permission? No, not that last. Joan Thague was, in the current phrase, her own woman. She said, “When you get old, you remember your childhood better than what happened yesterday. Did you know that?”

  Sarah nodded.

  “Gerald hadn’t been at school long. The elementary school, that is. They didn’t call them primary schools then. He was the only little boy in our street who went to that school. There weren’t any other little boys. I know that, because Mother said it was a shame there was no one for him to play with.”

  “He had no one to play with?”

  “He had me,” said Joan Thague.

  “Yes, but no one his own age?”

  “We had these cousins, my mother’s sister’s children. Two boys and a girl. Donald and Kenneth and Doreen.” Joan had been thinking about it, racking her brain. “They used to come. My auntie brought them to tea once a
week. She fetched the boys from school and brought them to tea and Gerald played with Don and Ken. Doreen was only little, too young for school. We had a special tea when they came. Mother made a sponge with chocolate butter icing.”

  It was a middle-class picture, not what Sarah had expected. She enunciated carefully, conscious that Joan needed to read her lips. “Your mother was a nurse. Did she go out nursing? I mean, did she go to people’s houses? I thought there might have been someone she nursed who had a boy or a boy she nursed.”

  “My father would never have allowed my mother to work.” Mrs. Thague was more than indignant. A flush burned across her face. “He was a master printer. It would have looked as if he couldn’t support his family.”

  So why was she listed as a nurse on that birth certificate? Out of a struggling attempt, doomed to instant failure, on Kathleen Candless’s part to assert herself as a person, not merely an appendage? This, at any rate, was how Sarah saw it. Not anxious to look into Mrs. Thague’s face but knowing she must if the woman was to understand her, she asked about Don and Ken, the cousins, their ages, their fate.

  “You can’t expect her to know that,” said Maureen Candless.

  Because Maureen hadn’t been looking in her direction, Joan hadn’t heard. The flush fading, the outrage subsiding, she said, “They were both younger than me and older than Gerald. Don would have been ten and Ken seven when—when my brother died. He was killed in the war, Don, I mean, in the desert at El Alamein.”