The Chimney Sweeper's Boy

by Barbara Vine

  She felt a light touch on her shoulder and looked up, realizing then that she was being offered a glass of water.

  “Thank you. I’m sorry.”

  “Sit quietly,” the woman said. “You’ll be better presently. I am Mrs. Eady.”

  She was perhaps in her mid-seventies, dressed in a dark sweater and skirt covered by an apron, the kind of sleeveless crossover overall, tied at the waist, that Ursula remembered her own grandmother wearing, not as protection against dirt or food stains but as part of a daily uniform. The skin on her face was red and shiny, but with an unhealthy, inflamed look, and her hands were red, too, large and spread and gnarled. A plain gold ring was on the third finger of her left hand and another encircled the third finger of her right. Her white hair was as brilliant as congealed ice.

  Standing there, for she still stood, waiting to take the glass from Ursula’s hand, she appeared to be a tall woman, almost six feet, somewhat bandy-legged, her strong, solid legs planted far apart, as if they had once supported an overweight body. It was gaunt now, the big bones prominent.

  She said patiently, “There, that’s better. You’ve some color come back into your face.”

  Ursula handed her the glass, thanked her again. She sensed that Mrs. Eady would never ask her why she had come, what she was doing there, would simply accept it. “Mrs. Eady,” she said, “I am Ursula Candless. I am Mrs. Gerald Candless. Gerald Candless is my husband.”

  Of course she expected a flicker of something to cross that calm and steady face: the eyes infinitesimally to move, the lips to tighten, or the white head to bow a little. There was nothing. Then Mrs. Eady set the glass down on the table runner, a runner that held along its length a photograph in a silver frame, another in a tortoiseshell frame, a single rose in a green-speckled vase, and sat down in the chair opposite Ursula.

  “I think I have really come to see your daughter,” Ursula said. “I don’t know her name. Your daughter, who lives here with you.”

  “I have two daughters,” Mrs. Eady said, and she hesitated a little. But she went on, “They don’t live with me. One of my sons lives nearby, but not with me. One of my daughters is married and lives in York and the other”—again the hesitation—“the other is a religious.”

  “I’m sorry? A what?”

  “A sister. A nun.”

  Ursula bit her lip. Those words had the least expected effect of making her want to laugh. They were not the sort of thing people said. But the amusement, if that was what it was, died as quickly as it arose. She said, “Then someone else, some young woman, lives here with you. You have a”—she sought for the appropriate word—“a tenant, a boarder.”

  “No.”

  “Mrs. Eady, my husband was seen coming here, letting himself in with a key. Oh, I am sorry—it’s embarrassing for me, too; it’s shameful, I know. I am sorry. Perhaps I’m wrong. I hope I’m wrong—”

  “I’m not embarrassed.” She said it very quietly and easily, as if she had passed beyond embarrassment, had entered a world where social solecism is a trivial thing. “Would you tell me what you want of me, Mrs.”—she recollected—“Mrs. Candless?”

  “I don’t know. I shouldn’t have come.”

  “When was your husband seen coming here?”

  “It was a few days ago, about a week ago. On a Tuesday morning.”

  “And he let himself in with a key?”

  Ursula thought afterward that she must have imagined the points of light that for a moment appeared in the other woman’s eyes, for Mrs. Eady said somberly, “I wasn’t here, Mrs. Candless. I was in the hospital. I’ve been very ill.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” Ursula said.

  “I am very ill now—but we needn’t go into it. While I was away, my son may have come in, but not till the evening, after his work. My neighbor down the street had a key to the house. To feed my cat and water my plants. I believe her husband comes in as often as she does.”

  “What does he look like?”

  “He’s a tall man, dark-haired, about forty-five. Is that where the mistake has been made?”

  Ursula nodded. “I think so. I don’t know.” She looked at the nearer of the photographs, of a thin, very handsome boy in jeans standing by a motorcycle. “Is that him? Is that your son?”

  At once, she knew she shouldn’t have asked. She hardly knew why she had asked, for it wasn’t Gerald who had come to this house, and it wasn’t this skinny boy, but the neighbor. If light had come into Mrs. Eady’s face, it was now overshadowed by pain, the lips compressed as if to keep in a cry. It took her a little while to speak.

  “That was my son. I had four sons, Mrs. Candless. That was Desmond. He was … killed. My son who lives here is James, and Stephen is a teacher on the other side of London.”

  “Killed?” Ursula faltered. She said it because she didn’t know what else to say in the face of this naked acceptance of grief.

  Mrs. Eady stood up. “For a long time, I kept his photograph in a drawer, but then … It’s the worst thing in the world to lose a child, an unnatural thing. Yet even that passes.” Ursula’s anxious, almost hungry look must have forced the words from her. She said, “It can’t interest you. It’s not connected with why you came,” and then she added, “Desmond was killed; he was murdered.” She clenched her hands. “Beaten to death, yes.” She added with courteous formality but in a strained voice, “I mustn’t keep you any longer.”

  “Oh, no, no, I must go.”

  A painful flush had spread across that gaunt face. Mrs. Eady regretted having said so much, and it showed. Now she was making a polite effort. “Once, a long time ago, I knew some people in Ipswich named Candless.”

  “I expect they would be his family. He came from there. Good-bye.”

  When the house was left behind, she ran. She liked the rhythm of it, the freedom of running, and in Hainault Road, she did an unprecedented thing: She took off her shoes and ran on the warm pavement in her stocking feet. A few people looked at her. She ran on, full of hatred for Dickie Parfitt, who had nearly wrecked her life.

  Instead of telling Sam Fleming this story at breakfast the next morning, she talked about her daughters and how she believed that, now Gerald was dead, she might manage to get on better with them. And she recounted the incident of the embraces in the taxi and of Hope holding her hand.

  “Why didn’t you take a stand when they were young?” he asked. “How could he make them love him and not you, unless you let him?”

  “I tried, but I didn’t try hard enough. And he had that advantage over most fathers—he was always there. Short of physically pulling them away from him, there wasn’t much I could do. If I’d ever been alone with them … but I never was. He married in order to have children; that is the plain truth of it. And when he got them, he was going to extract every ounce of love and pleasure and … well, richness out of it.”

  “And you were expendable?”

  “I was expendable, but I couldn’t be spent, so to speak. I think he’d have liked me to go and leave the children, only I wouldn’t go. Perhaps I stayed because he wanted me to go.”

  She said she would like to visit the British Museum. He looked incredulous when she said she had never been there, but he took her, and he took her out to lunch. She wouldn’t have said another word about Gerald if he hadn’t asked. Asked and pressed her and shown an interest that wasn’t feigned.

  “He hadn’t anything else, you see. He only had the children.”

  “He had his work,” Sam said.

  “Yes. He had his work. I don’t know which was more important to him, his writing or his children. About equal, I expect. I thought he had other women; for a long time I was sure of it, and then, quite a bit later, I thought there might be … men. But I don’t think so now. He said he had no sex life, and I believe that. I think he was always perfectly faithful to me—for what that’s worth.”

  “Often not as much as many people think.”

  She had never before talked like this to an
yone, but now she was telling it all, or much of it, to Sam Fleming, knowing by some instinct she must recently have developed that it would be quite safe with him. He listened, but he said very little. Sometimes he smiled or raised his eyebrows. He made no final comment. She thought she had never known a man, in conversation with herself, look less bored.

  He took her to Paddington in a taxi. He talked about their next meeting as if it was something previously firmly decided on. There would be a next meeting. The question was only of when and where.

  “Come back up here. You say your daughter’s going down for the weekend. Get a lift with her and come back on Sunday night.”

  “I wonder if I could,” Ursula said. “Why not? I don’t suppose she could exactly say no.”

  “That’s the spirit,” said Sam.

  He got out of the taxi with her, lifted her hand and kissed it, then drove away again quite quickly. In the train, instead of reading her book, she thought of all the things she had said to him, relived what she had said and felt comfortable about it. He hadn’t been impatient and he hadn’t swamped her with sympathy. She reflected on the last thing she had said to him, before they left the restaurant where they had lunched.

  “It’s very hard to come to terms with the fact of someone simply not liking you.”

  Gerald had written that, in one of his books. She hadn’t fully realized the truth of it until she had spoken it aloud. From soon after Hope was born, she had known Gerald didn’t love her. The effect of this realization was a profound sense of loneliness and a sinking of her self-esteem. He didn’t love her; he had no desire for her. Yet somehow, for years, she clung to the statement she had made to Roger Pallinter, that she and Gerald were friends. They were companions on an equal footing. She transcribed his handwriting and typed his manuscripts. With her, he shared his income entirely. She knew precisely what he received in royalties and, indeed, it was she who corresponded with his accountant and from 1973, when value-added tax was introduced, kept the VAT book.

  In this way, she deceived herself. They might no longer share a bed, but they shared what was more important—the maintenance of a family, the running of a household, the entertaining of friends, decisions as to the children’s welfare. And then one evening, after he had been more than usually silent all day, she asked him if he had another chapter completed for her to deal with the next morning. He was reading, not a book, but some journal, the Spectator perhaps—she couldn’t remember—and he looked up, barely looked up, and, frowning, waved one hand in a dismissive gesture. Don’t bother me, it said; leave me in peace. Can’t you? Why do I have to put up with this?

  And in that moment, she knew as plainly as if she had read it on the page that he didn’t even like her. It wasn’t a positive hatred; it was worse than that: a mild dislike, composed of utter indifference combined with resentment. Don’t bother me; leave me in peace. Why can’t you just do my typing and cook my food and manage my money?

  That was when she began walking every day on the beach. A mile one way and a mile back, rain or shine, mist or clear. Out of his house, away from his children—though they were at school by this time—along the pale black-streaked sand, watching the flat sheet of lapping water or looking inland at the hummocky moon-landscape dunes. At first, on these walks, she dwelled on whether she should go or stay. Divorce, with the new law, would soon be easier, geared in women’s favor. She would get custody of the children. He would have to keep them all financially.

  It was that very day, or perhaps the day after, that he had taught Sarah and Hope the Game—I Pass the Scissors. It was more a test or an ordeal than a game. She had looked up ordeal in the dictionary and found it defined as “any severe trial or distressing or trying experience.” At first, seeing the three heads bent over a table, she supposed them to be playing cards. Then she saw the kitchen scissors going from hand to hand. They wanted her to join in, a rare event.

  But by that time, the girls had caught on, or Gerald had whispered the answer to them. Was it possible those two little girls of nine and seven had solved the Game in ten minutes? She was never to know and never to learn how herself. In the meantime, they wanted her as their stooge.

  “I pass the scissors uncrossed.”

  “No, you don’t, Mummy.”

  “You don’t see, do you, Mummy?”

  “All right. Try again. I pass the scissors crossed.”

  “Wrong again,” said Gerald. “That’s enough for today. Come along, my little lambs, we’re going on the beach.”

  Could she take his children away from him?

  He wasn’t like an ordinary father. Not only did he worship the girls, but he had done everything for them. She had been like an upper-class woman whose children are cared for by nannies. If she took them away, it would ruin his life; it might kill him. Did she care? Strangely, after everything, she found that she did, still did.

  Also, she would have to earn her own living. She would be morally bound to do so, if not actually. If I could have foreseen such feelings ten years ago, she thought, if I could have imagined at my wedding the person I’d become in this short time … She could type. She had no other skills. Even if she stayed with Gerald, she ought to do something more with her life.

  The first thing that came out of those beach walks was a decision to educate herself, and the next day she signed up for an art history evening class. She told Gerald, but she didn’t think he heard, and if he noticed she was out on Tuesday and Thursday evenings, he certainly didn’t miss her. Later, of course, she knew he had heard, had been busily making notes.

  At art history class, she met new people and made some friends. Until then their friends had been Gerald’s, but now she saw the possibility of having her own. But at the same time, she withdrew even more from her children. It seemed the natural result of their indifference to her, their overwhelming preference for their father and their tendency, Hope’s especially, to ignore her. Perhaps she should have persevered, treated these clever, bright girls as if they were handicapped children who needed constant stimulus and the knowledge of unquenchable love. But they got that from their father, and she couldn’t compete, scarcely knew how to, lacked the heart. Instead, she turned to her new friends, and to one man in particular.

  It was at about that time, a few days before Easter, that she found the newspaper cutting in Gerald’s study. He had gone to Exeter to give a lecture at the University of the Southwest. She went into the study to find the chapter he had written the day before, part of Time Too Swift, with the character spitefully based on Betty Wick. It was lying on his desk, the usual higgledy-piggledy pages of scrawled, crossed-out, margin-scribbled prose, indecipherable to all but her.

  She picked it up and in doing so lifted too much, a letter from a reader that lay underneath it, an invitation to take part in an arts festival, and under that the cutting from a newspaper, probably the Daily Telegraph, though all that appeared at the top of the row of columns was the date: Monday, April 16, 1973.

  These were deaths. He hadn’t told her that a friend of his had died. But he told her so little. Only a fraction of the death announcements was there, for the paper had been cut, not lengthwise but across, to leave only the top entries in each of the first two columns. Baker, Brandon, Bray, Burton; Daynes, Denisovic, Docker, Durrant, Eady …

  Eady, Anne Elizabeth (née O’Drida), April 12, age 76, beloved wife of the late Joseph Eady, mother of James, Stephen, Margaret, and Sister Francis of the Order of the Holy Paraclete, and grandmother of Amanda, Leo, Peter, and David. Funeral April 18 at the Church of Christ the King, Leyton, E.10. “Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his saints.”

  She read it over and over. It aroused in her a powerful, undirected, almost-hysterical rage. Without knowing what she was doing, acting on angry impulse, she began tearing the newsprint into pieces. She saw, as she cooled, that she had torn it into scraps like confetti. She swept them into her hand, then into an envelope, took the envelope to the kitchen, and
thrust it into the bottom of the waste bin.

  If he noticed the absence of the cutting, he said nothing about it.

  18

  The greatest fallacy is that good looks are an essential ingredient of sexual attraction.

  —HAND TO MOUTH

  IT MUST BE SOMETHING OUT OF THE ORDINARY FOR JASON to phone her at college. She was surprised he knew where she worked, because she couldn’t remember telling him. Perhaps he had set himself to find out things about her.

  “I’m in London,” he said. “I’ve just come from the Natural History Museum.”

  “You sound excited.”

  “You will be, too, when you hear. Can we meet? I want to tell you face-to-face.”

  She sighed. He must have heard the sound. “What time is it?”

  “Just gone four.”

  He would want to come to the flat. Then she would have to have him there again—obviously enjoying the unaccustomed luxury, the warmth, the drink. And once more have to remind him of his last train, once more pay his taxi fare all across London.

  “I’m not very far away,” she said. “Why don’t we meet somewhere for a drink? Say in an hour?”

  “Could we meet for a meal?” he said.

  “You can’t get meals at five in the afternoon.”

  “That’s all you know,” he said. “If you go to cheap places, you can get meals all round the clock.”

  She would have much preferred a pub. She liked pubs. The place he chose was hardly a restaurant in her eyes, more a café that dispensed nothing more select than hamburgers and pizza. At least it was licensed. That was the first thing she looked for, cautiously stepping inside. Bottles of wine from Chile and what supermarkets rather oddly called “the New World” were lined up behind a counter with a till on it and doughnuts in cellophane packets.