The Chimney Sweeper's Boy

by Barbara Vine

  It wasn’t Adela. She watched him and listened to him. She had taken to being present in the girls’ bedroom while he told them their bedtime story, hoping to pick up some clue. If Sarah and Hope didn’t want her there, they didn’t say, only bade her keep quiet and not make a disturbance by moving about the room, picking up toys.

  The stories he told them were serials. She couldn’t remember now, twenty-eight years later, which ones he had told them that spring when Sarah was three and a half and Hope was nearly two, only that though Hope was really too young to understand, she seemed to follow it. That story quarter hour was the only time boisterous Hope was silent. What happened in those stories had disappeared almost entirely from Ursula’s mind. She could just about remember that one involved an old man who sent messages by carrier pigeon to a little girl at the other end of the country and the other concerned a child who was sent up chimneys by a harsh master. This last owed a lot to Charles Kingsley’s The Water Babies, not to mention Blake’s verses in Songs of Innocence, but she hadn’t read those then.

  There was nothing in the stories about a “someone else.” How could there be? How had she ever imagined there could be?

  Gerald gave her plenty of money. They had a joint account, and he never questioned what she spent. If he noticed what she spent, he didn’t say, but she didn’t think he was much interested in money. He wanted, he had sometimes said, a nice house to live in, a good house in a beautiful place. That was all he wanted to do with money. Foreign travel held no attractions for him. He disliked the theater and loathed opera. He bought books, but most of the books he wanted were gifts. One publisher had given him the Encyclopedia Britannica, and another one gave him the complete unabridged Oxford Dictionary. Their car was a Morris station wagon, because that was more convenient for transporting children and their paraphernalia. Clothes were to keep him warm and keep him decent, and the watch he wore he had had for twenty years.

  But she could have what money she wanted and do as she pleased with it. What she pleased to spend money on in the April of that year was a private detective.

  Until the night he had died, she had never been in there. Sometimes she had thought it strange to have a room in one’s house, a house one had lived in for twenty-seven years, that one never entered, whose shape one hardly knew, whose furniture one couldn’t have described. Like a Bluebeard’s chamber, which might contain nothing or might be full of bloody evidence. The difference was that she hadn’t been curious. Once only, coming into the garden from the cliff path, she had walked across to that part of the house where his bedroom was and looked up at its windows, becoming aware for the first time—or else she had forgotten—that it was a corner room with one window facing north and the other west.

  Daphne kept it clean. Daphne had changed his bed linen. A single woman, living with her sister, another single woman, and their mother, who had been widowed for fifty years, Daphne had never once commented on the fact that Gerald and Ursula slept in separate rooms. Perhaps it didn’t strike her as remarkable. Perhaps she had no experience of how most married couples lived. She cleaned the room, sang “Dashing Away with the Smoothing Iron,” changed the sheets, referred to it as “Mr. Candless’s room,” for though Ursula had become Ursula to her long ago, he had never become Gerald.

  She suspected old Mrs. Batty of adhering to the Victorian principle of keeping out the night air, or, come to that, any air, for Daphne never opened windows, and she closed them if she found them open. Ursula opened all the casements in the room and leaned out of the one that faced west. The dark gray sea, an unrolled bolt of wrinkled silk, lay immobile, scarcely seeming to lap the pale, flat sand. It was misty, but the mist hung thin and distant, obscuring only the island and the far point.

  Blinds at the windows. A bed with a quilt on it and a blue-and-white-striped cover on the quilt, two pillows in white cases, several hundred paperback books in a plain bookcase, a chest of drawers, an upright chair. The built-in cupboard she thought she remembered from coming in here nearly three decades before, but every bedroom had such a cupboard, so perhaps she didn’t remember.

  The two pictures, one facing the northerly window, the other opposite it, affected her unpleasantly. She had come a long way from that wide-eyed and optimistic girlhood when she would have said, had anyone asked her, that one should have pretty pictures on bedroom walls, if not puppies and kittens, certainly sunlit landscapes and Monet water lilies. But still she wondered at the taste and the mental processes of her late husband, who could have Piranesi’s Imaginary Prisons on one wall and a painting of a lighthouse, a wild sea, and a sky of tumbling clouds on the other.

  It was then that she remembered his clothes. He had been dead for three months, but it had never occurred to her to do anything about his clothes. She had forgotten their existence. She opened the cupboard and looked at them, the baggy trousers, shapeless jackets, two aged tweed suits, a heavy dark gray sheepskin coat. They smelled musty, of old wool. When someone died, you used to take their clothes to a rummage sale. Now you gave them to a charity shop.

  She began taking them out of the cupboard. She laid them on the bed. When the cupboard was empty, she dusted the inside of it and closed the doors. She took the pictures downstairs, thinking them unsuitable for a guest bedroom, and read printed on the back of the lighthouse painting “Korsö fyr by August Strindberg.” She was trained as an art historian, but she hadn’t known Strindberg had painted anything. She carried the paintings—the reproductions—downstairs and laid them against one of the walls of the study, replacing them with a still life from her own room and Evening Light, an innocuous and rather charming picture by Robert Duncan of a girl in white and geese in a rose bed, a picture that someone had given Hope when she was twelve.

  The clothes were heavy and she had to make three trips. First to the kitchen. Later, she would put them in the boot of the car, then drop them off at Oxfam when next she went to the shops. Before you disposed of clothes, you had to go through the pockets. The idea brought her a wry amusement, because this was exactly the situation where the wife or widow finds the letter that reveals an unsuspected love passage. The mistress’s assignation note from years before. Ursula smiled at the thought, because she knew she would find no letter, or anything else of that kind.

  She postponed the search, put the clothes into a plastic bag and the bag into the broom cupboard, where there was no chance of the girls finding it.

  Pauline immediately wanted to know why she couldn’t have Sarah’s room, where she had slept before, and seemed none too pleased when told both her cousins were coming.

  “I didn’t know you had a spare room up here,” she said, no doubt recalling all those occasions on which she had either slept downstairs in the little room Ursula later took for her study or had shared with Sarah or Hope.

  Ursula smiled but said nothing. It shocked her a little to realize, now, after all this time, that Pauline must always have believed Gerald and she shared a room, even shared a bed. Pauline stood inside and looked about her, approving, it was evident, of the view and Evening Light, but not especially of anything else.

  “Those books will take a lot of dusting, Ursula.”

  She spoke the name with emphasis, preceding it with a small pause, no doubt to show that she had remembered the caution not to say “Auntie.” Then she looked at her aunt, looked at her as if she hadn’t seen her for a long time, as if they hadn’t met outside Barnstaple station, traveled home side by side, and entered the house together.

  “You’ve had your hair cut!”

  “Nearly three months ago,” said Ursula.

  In the evening, after supper, Pauline reverted to her previous visit and to Ursula’s proposal with regard to baby-sitting at the hotel. Ursula had forgotten whether she had told Pauline only that Gerald had stopped her babysitting or that she intended to do some baby-sitting now he was dead, and she realized too late that Pauline had known nothing about this activity of hers until she herself mentioned it.
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  “You actually did it!”

  Pauline’s tone couldn’t have sounded more shocked and repelled, Ursula thought, than if she had confided her experiences as a prostitute in Ilfracombe town center.

  “I’ve thought a lot about it,” Pauline said. “Brian often says I would have made a good psychologist. You weren’t close to your own children really, were you? I suppose baby-sitting was a kind of compensating for that. What do you think?”

  Ursula thought it surprisingly near the bone. They went to bed soon after that. Remarks of that kind, made late in the evening, were particularly unwelcome because they kept her from sleeping. She hadn’t been back to the Dunes since the encounter with Sam Fleming, and she knew she would never go back. In spite of everything, in spite of her positive rejection of Sam, she had expected him to phone her. She had thought he would phone, if only to repeat his apology and explanation, but he hadn’t. Though his grandchildren wouldn’t be there, though they might never be there again, she would have gone back to baby-sit for others if he had phoned. It was an irrational, even absurd, way of going on, but it was the way her mind worked in this matter. And now the season was over, the hotel half-closed, to be shut up altogether for three months after the Christmas influx.

  Ursula knew very well how a penetrating comment on the incongruities of one’s behavior, a remark that brings home an unacceptable truth, arouses dislike for the one who utters it. She was filled at that moment with dislike for her niece, an antipathy that of course would pass but which she was aware of having sometimes felt on previous occasions. Pauline had seldom been as perspicacious as that, usually only liable to make personal remarks about people’s appearance or habits, but even these, Ursula now recalled, had had a way of drilling into one’s soft and sensitive parts. Ridiculous, because she had been a child then, and one should make abundant allowance for what a child says. According to Gerald, anyway.

  Pauline had first come to stay with them in that fateful year, 1969. Ursula called it fateful because that was their last year in Hampstead, the year of her brother’s separation from his wife, of A Messenger of the Gods, hailed by his publishers as the breakthrough for Gerald Candless from good to great fiction, the year of the private detective. Pauline came to stay because it was August, her school was on holiday, and Helen had to go into the hospital for a hysterectomy. Jeremy could stay with his paternal grandmother, whose favorite he was.

  That year, Pauline was ten. She was coming up to the age when girls love looking after, playing with, and taking out small children. And she was a big, tall girl who looked at least two years older than her age, who perhaps felt older in some ways. Her mother was making her into a woman too early, letting her wear an unnecessary bra, cut off her plaits, and have her ears pierced. Helen believed that girls couldn’t begin being feminine too soon.

  Ursula hadn’t seen a great deal of her since the incident of the engagement ring, when the small Pauline had brought the ring to her on the stem of a flower, and would hardly have known her. Gerald had no recollection of her at all. He put his foot down at once when Pauline wanted to take Sarah and Hope out. That was not to be; that was never to be. The danger, of course, involved the roads and the Hampstead traffic. No one thought about child molesters and rapists in those days. But he seemed pleased to have someone in the house to entertain the children, the possibility of their mother’s doing this having been dismissed by him long before.

  If Pauline hadn’t been there, would he have taken the unprecedented step of being absent from home for a whole day and a night and half the next day? Would he have done this not once, but twice, if this eager, bossy, patient, and managing child hadn’t been in the house to supervise the happiness of his daughters?

  The private detective had been on Gerald’s tail for a few months by then. He was expensive, and he had found out practically nothing. Ursula, who had expected some dashing gumshoe, a Philip Marlowe, asked herself what she was doing when she walked up the uncarpeted wooden staircase to the rooms over a theatrical costumers on the Soho fringes and found two middle-aged portly men in an office full of cigarette smoke and a bent white-haired secretary, at least old enough to be their mother. Later on, Ursula discovered this secretary was the mother of one of them.

  Dickie Parfitt was polite, urbane, and knowing. Indeed, he was too knowing, for he assumed from the first that this was what he called “divorce work.” Most of what he and Mr. Cullen did was in connection with divorces. Ursula had to explain that she wished to know only where her husband went, that there was no thought of ending her marriage. But afterward, as she walked back to the Tottenham Court Road underground station and the Northern line, she considered what Mr. Parfitt had said. He had put ideas into her head.

  His first report reached her a week later. Gerald was referred to as “the subject.” Better than Mr. X, Ursula supposed. Dickie Parfitt had followed him while he was out with Sarah and Hope and pursued him all over Hampstead while (like Shelley) he had made paper boats and sailed them on the Vale of Health pond, visited the geese and peacocks in Golders Hill Park, and bought ice creams in the Finchley Road. Another time, he went to Canfield Gardens in West Hampstead and was inside a house with the children for four hours. Mr. Parfitt was pleased with his find, but Ursula knew Gerald had only gone to the home of a university teacher and poet he knew named Beattie Paris, who, with his girlfriend, Maggie, had two daughters of similar age to Sarah and Hope.

  That was before Pauline came. Pauline thought it amusing to see Gerald wheeling Hope about in a stroller, and she said so.

  “My father says that’s a job for a woman,” she said.

  Gerald laughed. He didn’t seem to mind. He treated most of Pauline’s gnomic utterances as if she were the soul of wit. When she saw him sitting with Sarah on one knee and Hope on the other, an arm around each, she again quoted a parent.

  “My mother says you can overstimulate children.”

  “Oh, can you now?” said Gerald, laughing. “And what happens to them when you do that? Do they break things or have fits? What do they do?”

  Pauline said she didn’t know, but she stared at him and his daughters with envy. A little later on, she went and stood by Gerald’s chair. She leaned against the wing of the chair, then shifted herself to lean against his shoulder. Gerald was telling the girls his story about the chimney sweeper’s boy. Installment fifteen or something like that, it must have been by that time. Pauline stood there listening.

  The chair was big and Gerald was big. There was plenty of room. Gerald looked up into Pauline’s wistful face.

  “Come and be overstimulated,” he said.

  He hoisted Hope up onto the arm of the chair so that her cheek was close enough to his cheek to brush it, and he made room for Pauline on his knee. His arm went around both of them. Pauline perched there awkwardly at first, but eventually she relaxed. Ursula watched them. Probably few men today, in the nineties, that decade of lost innocence, would do what Gerald had done and take a tall, precocious ten-year-old girl onto their knee. Probably Gerald himself wouldn’t. But no one thought anything of it then. Except Ursula, and what she wondered was how it had happened that children all preferred Gerald to her, how it was that she was apparently no good with children, that even her own only suffered her, sometimes let her kiss and hold them, but wouldn’t, she believed, have missed her had she been gone.

  They missed Gerald when he disappeared for those two days. “I want my daddy” was the continuous refrain. But before that happened, Dickie Parfitt had followed him to an address Ursula didn’t know, a house that belonged to no one she knew. Gerald had gone out alone, telling her he was doing research for an article he intended to write. When he went out, he always told her where he was going. Or, rather, he half-told her. That is, he would say it was for the purposes of research or to see his publisher or visit a library, but he never said what kind of research or why he had to see his publisher or which work of reference he required.

  “I’m going out i
n about an hour,” he said. “There’s something I need to check.”

  Dickie Parfitt, alerted by a reluctant, near-nauseous Ursula, was waiting for him, lurking in the neighborhood of the underground station in Heath Road. He followed him into the train and changed with him on to the Central line at Tottenham Court Road. Gerald got out of the train at Leytonstone and walked westward along Fairlop Road, turned left into Hainault Road, and crossed into Leyton at Leigh Road. Ursula, reading Dickie’s account, had no idea where any of these places were. She had barely heard of Leyton and Leytonstone but had a vague idea of them as dowdy eastern suburbs.

  The street for which Gerald was heading was called Goodwin Road, near where the London Midland railway line passed over Leyton High Road. It sounded unattractive, even slummy, though Dickie made no comment on the charms or otherwise of the neighborhood. Gerald stopped about halfway along the street and fixed his eyes on a house on the opposite side. A van was parked near where he was standing. It was empty. He positioned himself behind the cab in such a way, according to Dickie Parfitt, as to be able to see the house he was watching through the windows on the driver’s side and the passenger’s side of the cab, yet not be seen himself.

  It was a fine day, and standing a hundred yards off, watching Gerald Candless watching a house, wasn’t an unpleasant task for Dickie, who had done much the same thing in driving rain and snowstorms. But after half an hour, he began to wonder how long “the subject” would stick it out. Until the driver of the van returned?

  Then something happened. The front door of the house under observation opened and a woman came out. Dickie gave no detailed description of her, but he said she was “elderly” and pushing a shopping basket on wheels. She was not, unless Gerald Candless’s secret was that he was a gerontophile, his lover, but he took a photograph of her all the same. He watched her pass along the street in the direction of Leyton Midland railway station. Once she was out of sight, Gerald began walking in the opposite direction, toward Leigh Road. He simply retraced his steps, got back into the underground, and returned home.