The Chimney Sweeper's Boy

by Barbara Vine

  “He’d be at least a hundred if he was alive.”

  “Right, but can we find his descendants? Can’t we look him up in Crockford?”

  “That’s not doctors,” said Jason, “that’s vicars. I’ll find out what it is for doctors and I’ll find him.”

  She was beginning to wonder. Perhaps her father’s origins would never be found. A letter had come from Robert Postle, asking her how she was getting on and suggesting they should meet and discuss her progress, but she hadn’t answered it. She didn’t know what to say. After a tutorial the previous week, one of her students asked if she was “anything to do with” Gerald Candless, and she had said, yes, she was his daughter. But even as she had said it, she had this uneasy feeling about his name, her name, their claim to it. Would she ever feel right about her father, not just his name and his deception, but her father, if she couldn’t find who he was? Would she feel content then?

  She had begun rereading his books. If everything he wrote had its origins in historical fact, how much filtering, adapting, altering, twisting, distorting, flattering, debasing, glamorizing, and mutilating of that fact took place before it found its way onto paper? How could you tell? It might be that the ambitious artist daughter from the large Liverpool family in A Paper Landscape was a substitute or replacement for the ambitious writer son from a large Ipswich family, family size and the spur of fame being clues. Or that he had had a father or stepfather or uncle who was a religious fanatic, like Jacob Manley in Eye in the Eclipse.

  But he might not have been writing about himself here, only about someone he knew. Was he one of the children uprooted from his home on the death of his father? Was he the man who married for the sole purpose of becoming a father? You might as well say he was the man who killed his lover in A White Webfoot. Or even imagined himself the dead man.

  It was a beautiful book to look at, this one. Jacket designs, she thought, had taken such a turn for the better in the eighties, and this one with its painting of a silvery blue marsh landscape and white wading birds under a sky of clouds as delicate as feathers, the colors muted, the finish matte, was one of the finest examples. But the moth at the foot of the spine, incongruously black, made a sharp contrast to those watery shades. She wondered what had happened to the original—why hadn’t he possessed it, as he had possessed the original designs for Hamadryad and Phantom Listeners?

  She would ask Robert Postle, get in touch with him by the end of the week, say something to delay a meeting, make some excuse but not tell the truth. She wasn’t going to reveal her father’s secret to Postle, not, at least, until she had found out what that secret was. And if she had to abandon the attempt … Nevertheless, she would phone him. Something brought into her mind at that point the phone call made by a man called Sam something or other and that she had promised to get her mother to call him back. Still, it very likely wasn’t important, and he would have called back if it was. She couldn’t remember the number he had given her, anyway.

  It might be better to write to Robert Postle, and perhaps go to Ipswich at the weekend. Not down to Devon. Adam Foley had revealed, while seeming not to be giving direct information, that he went to his family’s weekend cottage only on particular Saturdays. Apparently, they had an arrangement, a rota, from which no family member might deviate. There would be no point in her going down to Devon.

  The woman might be younger than she, although surely not much younger, more beautiful, better educated, more clever, wittier, more charming. There was nothing Ursula could do about any of that, but she would make herself look as good as possible. She dressed with care, in a pale green coat over a matching dress, made by Cardin, rather stiff, structured and with a lot of topstitching. Her mother would have asked where on earth she was going, got up like that, would have commented on her painted nails, her jade earrings, but she took care not to let her mother see her go. So far as her mother knew, she had gone out in a dirndl skirt and cotton blouse.

  In the train, she felt overdressed, more as if it was a wedding she was going to; she fancied that people were staring at her, but by then it was too late. If she had gone back to change, she knew she would never have set out again. It was three in the afternoon and she had eaten nothing all day, fearing that if she ate, she might be sick. She felt sick even without having eaten.

  Never once had she considered that the woman might not be in. She had assumed she didn’t go out to work, because Dickie Parfitt had seen Gerald enter the house in the late morning. But that might be wrong; there might be no one in. She began thinking like this in the Central line train after she had changed at Tottenham Court Road. If there was no one in, would she be disappointed, or would she be relieved?

  She had worked out her route from Gerald’s London road plan. Fairlop Road, Hainault Road, Leigh Road. She had written these names down because she couldn’t squeeze the heavy map book into her small bronze-colored handbag. Her bronze-colored stiletto-heeled shoes were not the most comfortable for walking in and she had about half a mile to go. The district reminded her of the hinterland of Streatham, of Crystal Palace, yet there was some indefinable stamp of north-of-the-river London on it. It was gray and Victorian, with patches of fifties architecture filling in where bombs had fallen during the war, and green with privet hedges. But as Leyton was reached, the neighborhood rapidly became run-down. Here, near the Midland railway arches, it was poor and mean, and it had always been so; you could see that the low red-brown houses had been frugally built when these streets came into being eighty years before.

  Of all the journeys she had ever made, this was the one from which she most often thought of turning back. First, of getting out of the train at Camden Town because her clothes were too grand, then of crossing the bridge at Leytonstone and getting into the first train that came, then in Fairlop Road, in Leigh Road. But always she had gone on, pressed on, with the half-formed prevision that if she gave up, she would hate herself tonight, tomorrow, even more than she did now. And that, she couldn’t bear. She already approached losing that sense of herself as a person worthy to be liked and admired; she was already developing what now, nearly thirty years later, was called “a low self-image,” but which then was known as an inferiority complex. Once, though proud and flattered that Gerald Candless had wanted her, she would not have thought so poorly of herself as to assume that any other woman in his life must be better-looking and nicer and cleverer than she.

  Goodwin Road was a double row of little red-brown houses, linked together into terraces. A train went by over the bridge as she turned into the street and its noisy passage shook the ground like an earthquake. The sunshine, which was strong, seemed full of hot dust. She stood on the corner for a little while, trying to calculate where the house with the number Dickie Parfitt had given her might be. There was shadow on one side of the street, unbroken sunshine on the other. It was her longest hesitation but her final one. She walked on and up to the gate in the wall that separated the mean little patch of a front garden from the pavement.

  The front door and the window frames were painted green. Net curtains hung across the windows halfway up from the central bar. There was no doorbell, only a knocker that was all in one with the mailbox and made of a cheap chrome. Another train went by and the street felt the rattle of it, but more remotely. She lifted the knocker and let it fall, lifted it and let it fall again. Her throat had closed and her chest felt tight.

  Footsteps sounded inside, as if from far away. Yet that could hardly be in this small house where the passage would stretch for no more than ten feet. She thought these things as she stood, listening. The sun had gone in and she was immediately cold. A feeling came upon her that some terrible thing was approaching the door, some monster that trailed and lumbered. She fancied she heard a choking sound from in there, a throatiness, and in that moment she knew she had been wrong, but not in what way or in what respect.

  A bolt was slid back and something lifted and allowed to fall, a chain perhaps. Then the door was slow
ly opened. Not a monster, not a slouching grotesque, and not a pretty young girl, either, but a tall, gaunt old woman, the woman of the photograph, who stood before her with the door pulled wide, not an inch or two, but as far as it would go, her expression patient, gentle, and tragically calm.

  Ursula met Mrs. Eady again in the novel Gerald published thirteen years later. That was Purple of Cassius, which she typed before the last one she ever typed for him. Mrs. Eady was in it as Chloe Rule, the protagonist’s aunt, who brought him up when his parents were killed by a flying bomb. Deciphering his spidery zigzag handwriting, penetrating the web of deletions and corrections, Ursula brought Chloe Rule to light and recognized her for who she was.

  Here she was in his pages and soon, more clearly and positively, on her pages, the living woman as real as the real Mrs. Eady had been, standing in that passage in the wide doorway. His description was accurate, down to the curiously luminous gray eyes and the big hands with a wedding ring on each of the third fingers.

  By that time, she had grown a long way away from Gerald, almost as far as she was ever to be, but they still met at mealtimes, still made small talk across the table about the girls or the weather or something that needed doing to the house, and that evening, the first evening after her discovery, she had been many times on the point of asking him, of saying, “I recognize her. Who was she? Why did you go there? Oh, yes, I know you went there. Whom did you go to see and why did you? Why did you? Why did you go there and see Mrs. Eady and then, as if something was over or something resolved, uproot yourself and leave London forever?”

  His silence silenced her. That evening at the table, she remembered, he had sat opposite her, reading a book, without speaking at all. She even remembered what the book was: The Paston Letters, in a new edition some publisher had sent him. He wouldn’t have told her if she had asked—she was sure of that—and the next day, she went back to his scrawled and crisscrossed pages to meet in them a man not in the least like Gerald, a young, sweet-natured man named Paul.

  Paul was sent by his friend to the friend’s aunt, Chloe Rule, who kept a lodging house, and there he had his digs for years to come, becoming like a son to Chloe and watching her decline. It was a tribute to Gerald’s powers, Ursula thought, and she had thought it reluctantly, that he could draw this woman as comparatively young, as no more than forty when Paul meets her, yet she, Ursula, the knowing reader, could recognize in the character the old woman she had met and met only once. For Mrs. Eady had been old, had been deep into her seventies. Chloe Rule’s black hair had turned white, her strong face had fallen, and the cancer that was soon to kill her had devoured the plumpness that Paul observed the first time he saw her. But she was the same woman, and Ursula thought with a shiver that she was someone Gerald had loved.

  Not Leyton, but Hounslow; not a little red-brown terraced house, but a tall gray one; not six children, but just two; not the murdered son, the lost sons, the daughter consecrated to religion, but one son and one daughter, unimportant, distant characters, not figuring much in the narrative. Were those other children the family that appeared in A Paper Landscape, in A Messenger of the Gods? Perhaps. You could find out his whole life from his novels, yet not find it out at all, find out nothing.

  The more she had known of these things, the less she had known him. That day, when she came home from Goodwin Road, it was to be weighed down with guilt. For she had misjudged him, falsely accused him. There was no one who could have entered that house but a woman from the next street, who had been given a key to the house to come in and keep an eye on things while Mrs. Eady was in the hospital having her operation. The woman had a station wagon and a husband, a tall, dark man, who might well one day have gone to the house in his wife’s place.

  Ursula understood that Dickie Parfitt had gotten it wrong. She had never had a high opinion of his intelligence. Guilty and ashamed of herself, she sat down and wrote to the detective agency, ridding herself of its services and asking for its account. It was not until some time afterward that she understood her discovery really changed nothing. It didn’t negate Gerald’s visits to Goodwin Road; it provided no answer as to why he rejected her.

  The following day, he returned from Devon and asked her a question. He was kind, almost jovial, somewhat paternalistic, faintly teasing, the way he had been in the days when he called her Little Bear. How would she feel about moving?

  “Leave London,” he said. “Go and live in the country. Or at the seaside.”

  “Don’t you have to live in London?” she said.

  “Why? I don’t exactly work in an office.”

  “Is that where you’ve been?” she said. “Have you been looking at houses?”

  Once she would never have—dared was too strong a word—never have quite brought herself to ask him anything so baldly. She was no longer afraid of him, no longer in awe.

  “Is that where you’ve been when you were doing research?”

  “In Devon, yes,” he said. “North Devon. The most beautiful beach in England. A house on the cliff and a view of Lundy Island.” He looked at her; his eyes flicked over her. “Should I have told you before? Are you going to be unreasonable?”

  She said, like a woman twice her age, not like the Wicks’ spoiled daughter, “I am never unreasonable.”

  “No, you’re not, are you? I suppose that’s something to be thankful for. Come on, Ursula, Little Bear, Constellation, be nice, be pleased.” She had stared at him in astonishment and he had reddened. She had never seen that before, a blush on his face. “Come on,” he said, “you come with me to Gaunton next week. We’ll all go, and we’ll go over the house. Won’t you like that?”

  She thought she might. She was flattered that he had asked. It would have been much more like him to have bought a house and then moved her into it. He disappeared one day before they left for Devon, but she didn’t ask where he went; she didn’t even care. Dickie Parfitt had been paid, had been a touch aggrieved, but had departed without a struggle. Then the tunnel dream came. It might even have been the night before they went to Devon, the very small hours of that day. And she went to him and comforted him and got into his bed.

  Going over Lundy View House that first time with Gerald and the girls and the estate agent had made her feel like an ordinary, normal wife and mother. Like the beloved wife of a suburban man, the mother of loving children, whose husband has been given a promotion and can now afford their dream house. It was a fine sunny day at the end of August. On the previous occasion that he had been to the house, it had been fine and sunny. The couple who owned the house, who were reluctantly moving to a smaller place near their daughter in the Midlands, showed them the large airy bedrooms, all with views of the green wooded countryside and three overlooking the sea.

  The garden then was full of the kind of flowers that last in bloom for months, hydrangea and helichrysum and statice, though Ursula didn’t know their names then. They looked fresh and beautiful from a distance, a little worn close to. The lawn was yellowing in the heat, but the sea was blue as sea can ever be and the air so clear that you could pick out individual trees on the island and the striations on its cliffs.

  Gerald said, out of earshot of the owners, “I could work in this room.”

  It was on the ground floor, protruding from the main body of the house like a small wing. Bookshelves already lined two of its walls. She could see him calculating where more should go. He had Hope in his arms, had carried her up and down the stairs, whispered to her which should be her room and which Sarah’s.

  Ursula’s resentment at his high-handedness, his choosing a place, if not quite a house, without consulting her, was fading. The house itself helped dispel it. Besides, she had come to expect so little from him that she was flattered he had eventually asked for her approval. And she was even more astonished when, that evening in the Barnstaple hotel where they were staying the night, where they had been given a double room, he asked her if they should make an offer on the house.

&nb
sp; “Shall we buy it?”

  “Yes, let’s.” Her reply was spontaneous, eager. “I love it.”

  “My girls will have seaside every day,” he said.

  Three weeks later, she thought she might be pregnant. She didn’t know whether she hoped it or feared it. Both, possibly. Another child for him to take away from her? Or a child for her to fight for and keep. In the end, she wasn’t pregnant, so it didn’t matter. And there wouldn’t be any more chances; he had made that clear by locking his bedroom door in Holly Mount, so that Sarah, coming in as usual in the morning, had to rattle the doorknob and shout, “Daddy, Daddy, let me in!”

  The Hampstead house was sold and they moved in December, the day after Sarah’s fourth birthday. It was raining and the steely gray sea looked as if punctured all over by a million shining needles. Gerald’s books filled twelve tea chests and he set about getting them up on the shelves as soon as they arrived. Next day, the fog came. The house, the garden, the dunes were swathed in it, muffled by it, and the sea was invisible. He reacted violently, saying he would never have bought the house if he’d known.

  She had no idea what he meant. To her, it was just low clouds, a white wetness that left dew on the leaves and water drops on the windows. A neighbor, to whom she had already talked, told her the sea mists seldom lasted more than a day, and Ursula repeated this to Gerald. He said nothing, just retreated into his study, pulled the curtains, and put the lights on.

  She was in the next room, the room Pauline was later to sleep in, getting it ready, making up the bed for the guest he had invited for the weekend, Robert Postle’s predecessor at Carlyon-Brent, Frederic Cyprian, the editor who had “discovered” Gerald, who had been the first to read The Centre of Attraction. She would have preferred Gerald to have waited a week or two, but she had learned and was still learning that what Gerald wanted he got.