The Chimney Sweeper's Boy

by Barbara Vine

  The place was very warm and quite crowded for the time of day. Jason was already there, sitting at a table by the window, without even a drink in front of him. He looked gaunt and pale. She hadn’t previously noticed how thin he was, but she saw now that he was a thin, almost-emaciated man. The incongruous thought came to her that if he had a girlfriend, she would find it very uncomfortable to sit on his knees.

  “Let’s have a drink,” she said, and when the waitress came over, she said, “We’ll have a bottle of the Chilean Semillon.”

  “Not unless you’ll drink it all yourself,” he said. “I’m going to have a beer.” He directed his next request to Sarah. “And please may I have the pizza casalinga and chips and some bread first, bread and butter?”

  “Pizza casalinga and a side order of french fries?” said the girl, looking from one to the other of them. “Ciabatta or focaccia?”

  “Not for me,” said Sarah. “I don’t want anything at this hour. I’d better just have a glass of wine, a large glass.”

  He looked at her. “You can take the cost of the pizza off my next check if you like.”

  “For God’s sake. You said yourself it was cheap.” She opened and shut her hands impatiently. “Now, what have you got to tell me?”

  “You’re going to like it. It’s the first real step along the way to knowing who your father was.” He took a small notebook from his jacket pocket. “You know how we thought of all those people who might have come to the house, regular callers who’d know about the little boy’s death?”

  “Of course I do. The butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker. The milkman. The doctor. The dentist who never was. But I thought you were researching moths.”

  His beer came and her wine. She drank greedily. Waiting until she had set her glass down, he said, “I was. I have. This is about the moth. It’s the moth that gives the clue to your father’s father’s occupation, or that’s what I think. See what you think. There are two moths, right? Both black.” Jason referred to his notes. “The big one, Odezia atrata, is blacker, and one of the books about them says of the little one, Epichnopterix plumella, I quote: ‘It is not quite true to nature, however, that he should be less densely black than his master, since the latter would ordinarily see to it that his fag did an abundant share of the work, and the boy-nature of the latter would consider even a modified cleanliness as somewhat of a weakness.’ ”

  “Should I know what you’re talking about? When was that written?”

  “In 1903.”

  “What fag? What master?”

  “These moths don’t just have Latin names; they have common names, too. Odezia atrata is commonly known as ‘the chimney sweeper,’ and Epichnopterix plumella as ‘the chimney sweeper’s boy.’ How about that?”

  She had never appreciated what “tucking in” meant until she saw Jason eating his mammoth pizza. He passed her the basket of chips, but she shook her head. Another glass of wine was more necessary. Wine to blur despair and wine to settle excitement.

  “You’re saying, aren’t you, that Dad’s father, my grandfather, was a chimney sweep? That somewhere he’d come across this moth and been amused by its name, by the appropriateness of its name for someone who actually was the sweep’s boy, the sweep’s son.”

  “Right.”

  “You’re brilliant, Jason, you really are. I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

  He had demolished half the pizza. He looked up at her and grinned. When he smiled, you could see the outlines of his skull under the stretched pocked skin. “Is there anything you can remember to … well, back it up, if you know what I mean?”

  “There is something. My father used to tell my sister and me this story. The hero—well, the boy in it—used to go up chimneys. The story was about his adventures. When I was older, I thought it came from Kingsley’s book The Water Babies, and I’m sure it did in part, but I think some of it was based on fact.”

  “Your dad wouldn’t have gone up chimneys, not in the 1930s he wouldn’t.”

  “His father would have. His father did. Or stuck his brushes up chimneys, or whatever they did. And he was his boy. The black moth was a secret joke.”

  “One he didn’t share with you.”

  Sarah disliked being reminded of that. The picture she formed of her father discovering this insect, its Latin name and then its common name, his amusement, perhaps a wry amusement, his decision to have it on his books as an emblem, esoteric, intensely personal, utterly private—all this was displeasing to her. Silently, to herself, she admitted she was jealous. Jealous of an insect?

  “Jason,” she said, “your grandmother would remember the sweep, wouldn’t she? She’d know his name, maybe a lot about him?”

  “I’ll give it a go,” he said.

  Lundy View House was empty. Never before had Sarah arrived to find it empty. It was a piece of luck she had brought her key. The central heating was off and the house was cold. She found it all rather unnerving. It had begun to rain, the wind was getting up, and a high tide pounded against the foot of the cliffs. She checked the garage, saw that her mother’s car was gone, and thought about road accidents. Then a sense of grievance overpowered mild anxiety. She had never before come home with no one to welcome her, offer her a drink, food, ask about her week. If her father had lived … Immediately, the tears threatened. She rubbed her eyes angrily and poured herself a stiff whiskey. Then she switched on the heat.

  At any rate, she could now phone Jason Thague without an audience. And Ma could pay for the call, which would be a long one. She took her whiskey and the phone and sat down in “Daddy’s chair.” But it was a little while before she dialed the Ipswich number.

  Since the discovery of the black moth’s common name, she had felt both closer to her father and further away. Closer because of the thought processes his connection with this small black emblem revealed, because, knowing him so well, she could imagine his researches, his perhaps grim amusement, and his response to those who asked why. “A private matter,” he might have said. “An in-joke shared only by myself with myself.” What would he have said if she had asked? If Hope had asked? This was what distanced her from him now, the secret he had hidden from her and hidden so successfully. She touched the arms of his chair. His own hands had worn the velvet almost bald. Her hands lay for a moment where his had lain, and then she picked up the phone.

  It rang so long, she thought no one was there to answer it. She was on the point of putting the receiver down when his voice said, “Hello?” Absurdly, she thought he should have sounded breathless, should have exerted himself to get to the phone. But his voice was calm, almost indifferent.

  “I’ve asked my nan. She remembers they had the sweep, but she can’t remember his name. It’s a bit much to expect her to remember.”

  “She remembered the doctor,” Sarah said.

  “Look, she’s a marvel, considering. I just hope you and me’ll have our marbles the way she has when we come to wrinkleland.”

  “Okay, okay, I’m not knocking your grandmother.”

  He spoke to someone in the house where he was, some fellow tenant. “Will you turn down that radio? Sorry, but I can’t hear myself speak. Sarah, she’s going to try and think. See if there’s any way she can check. If she can’t remember his name, there are a lot of things she does remember. Hang on, will you, and I’ll get my notes.”

  Sarah hung on. The radio, which no one seemed to have turned down, was providing the sort of music companies play to callers awaiting attention. She half-expected a voice to say, “Our agents are aware of your call and will attend to you soon.” The music tinkled out “Für Elise.” Jason, she thought, why was it such an awful name? Jason was a hero; he captured the Golden Fleece, gained a kingdom, and married Medea. David, who was also a hero and whose name was almost an assonance of Jason, didn’t sound ridiculous, nor did Adam.…

  He came back. “I was telling you what she remembers. For instance, that the day her brother died was April twent
ieth, a Wednesday. He was taken ill on Monday the eighteenth and died on the Wednesday. The doctor came several times, but he wasn’t taken to the hospital. He died at home.

  “On Thursday, the twenty-first, the sweep came. He was booked to come. The winter fires were over and Kathleen Candless, my great-grandmother, that is, wanted to start her spring-cleaning, which she couldn’t do till the chimneys were swept. Nan says he came to the door at eight on the Thursday morning and she was sent to tell him to come back another day. Then her dad came out and told him his son had died the day before and that he should come back the following week.”

  “If she doesn’t know his name, does she know whether he had children?”

  “She doesn’t know much about him except that he was a man who was usually black with soot and who rode a bike. He carried his brushes with him on a bike.”

  Sarah had started to say that they must find out this man’s name, that there must be ways, when Ursula walked into the room. She changed her tone to one more brisk and businesslike. “I’ve put your check in the post. I’ll phone again tomorrow or the next day.” The gentle smile on Ursula’s face made her unreasonably indignant. She said like a hectoring parent to a child, “Where have you been?”

  Ursula started to laugh. She and Gerald, united for once, had made a point of never asking the girls that question. Sarah looked peevish and her compliment sounded grudging.

  “You look wonderful. You look ten years younger.”

  “I’ve been in London to see Robert Postle. I met a friend and decided to stay on another day.”

  “Have you had something done to your face?” Sarah peered closely, decided she was close enough for a greater intimacy than interrogation afforded, and planted a kiss on her cheek. “You must have been having a great time. The house was absolutely freezing. I did phone yesterday—well, I phoned a lot of times, but you weren’t here.”

  “I’ll get us something to eat, shall I?” Ursula had been disarmed by that kiss, found her spoiled child amusing, felt at once lighthearted. She looked at herself in the mirror, at her flushed face, the brightness in her eyes, the upturned corners of her mouth, and was inspired to ask, “Can you take me back with you on Sunday? To London, I mean. I have to go back.”

  “Yes, if you want.” Sarah was staring. “Ma, I think Dad’s father was a chimney sweep. Does that mean anything to you?”

  Ursula nearly said she didn’t know and she didn’t care. But, as always, she remembered her daughters’ great love for Gerald, and how the knowledge of that love always checked her, so that she was ever prevented from derogation of him.

  “Let’s go and see what there is for supper,” she said.

  He was sitting at a table with Vicky and Paul and Tyger when Sarah came in. She had dressed herself up in total black, a minimal black skirt, fishnet stockings and knee boots, and a black sweater that was too small for her and which she had found in Hope’s room. Tyger looked her up and down and said, “Going on somewhere, are you?”

  “You have to be meeting someone, sweetheart,” said Vicky, “done up like that.”

  “I felt like it,” Sarah said, and gulped her wine rather fast. “I felt a bit wild.”

  He didn’t say a word. Alexander came in and then Rosie. They were all for going on to the club at once; they were tired of this pub. You could eat at the club and drink till forever and it was raffish and pretty. Everyone drank up and Vicky put her coat on. Sarah also put on her coat, which was a hip-length black mock marabou and also Hope’s.

  “You’ll be lucky if they let her in,” Adam said suddenly. It was the first time he had spoken. “She looks as if she’s on the game.”

  Vicky gasped. Sarah turned her eyes on him coldly. “What did you say?”

  “You heard. I grew up in this town. Some of my family lives here. I can’t afford to be seen about with whores.”

  “For God’s sake.” Alexander put out one hand, interposing it between them, as if he feared their coming to blows. “What’s with you? What have you got against Sarah? This isn’t the first time.”

  “He hasn’t anything against me,” Sarah said. “He’s a shit. He talks like that because he’s too fucking stupid to make normal conversation.”

  “And you, woman, are a university lecturer who is too ignorant to manage invective without lacing it with obscenities. No wonder education is in the state it is. Do you let your students see you dressed like that?”

  “Now, come on,” Vicky said. “For God’s sake, cool it. Are we going on to the club or aren’t we? I think you ought to apologize to Sarah, Adam.”

  “Over my dead body,” said Adam.

  He picked his jacket off the back of his chair and walked out. Sarah was almost too excited to move. Her speech was choked. The others thought she was upset, that once more his rudeness had cut her.

  “I think I’ll go, too,” she said.

  “Oh, come on. You shouldn’t let it affect you. It’s Saturday night.”

  “No, I’ll go home. I’ll see you all in a couple of weeks.”

  She ran out the back way, staggering. He was leaning against her car. She looked at him, said, “Where are we going?”

  “Caravan site. I’ve borrowed someone’s van. The cottage is full of family. But a field first. I can’t wait.”

  “Will you drive?”

  “No,” he said. “You must drive. I want to touch you while you’re driving.”

  19

  “There’s no knowing why we remember some things and forget others,” Laurence said. “If Freud had been right, we’d block off all the bad things and our minds would be storehouses of bliss.”

  —PURPLE OF CASSIUS

  FEELINGS AND MEMORIES SHE THOUGHT FORGOTTEN WERE REVIVED BY these photographs. Apart from that quick glance at her wedding album, it was years since Joan Thague had bothered to look at these records of the past, but now she had begun. The young lady whose name couldn’t really be Candless had done that for her. She and, through her, Jason. These past few days, she had made a perusal of the albums an evening ritual.

  Jason wanted a memory, though he didn’t know which one. A name, the name of a long-dead man. She thought she had given him all her memories, but now she was no longer sure. The most unexpected things came back to her. She would sit down with the album, not on her knees, but open on the table in front of her, study a photograph, then close her eyes and let all the associations of that picture flow into her mind.

  She had begun with her grandparents and, as a result of studying this formal studio portrait of them at their golden anniversary, recalled her visits to their cottage, the two old people facing each other from armchairs on either side of the graphite range, the sight, always daunting, of their gnarled hands like tree roots in a picture book, for both were arthritic, even the smell of the place, a compound of stewed food and lavender. Looking at the photograph brought back their voices, the rich Suffolk speech, and the strange words: pytle for “meadow” and sunket for “a sick child.” Her grandmother, she remembered, had called poor Gerald sunket when she came over and saw him that Monday morning.

  Joan looked at the picture of her parents’ wedding, her mother and Auntie Dorothy, her bridesmaid, in satin hobble skirts. Her mother’s wedding dress hung for years in the wardrobe in a calico bag, to be looked at by special permission but never to be used for dressing up. When Gerald was dead, though there seemed no reason for doing such a thing, Kathleen Candless took the dress out of the wardrobe and had it dyed black. As if she could have worn a fifteen-year-old wedding gown for mourning. She never did wear the dress, and Joan had no idea what had become of it.

  Here was the beach photographer’s snapshot Miss Candless had stared at so … well, rudely, in Joan’s opinion. She had had a very good idea of what the girl was thinking—that these people looked poor and old-fashioned and ugly and their children clodhoppers. It was that as much as anything that had made her cry and had, at any rate, moved the girl to say she was sorry. Joan wasn’t going
to cry now. She looked calmly and sadly at Gerald’s round, happy face, his curls, his bright eyes, his hand in their mother’s hand as he skipped along. There was another snap of him on the next page, or rather, a snap with him in it, for the Applestone boys were there, too, all sitting on the low wall of a front garden. Was that the Applestones’ house, dark brick, with small windows, and steps up to the front door? She couldn’t remember.

  Noticing for the first time that all these photographs had been taken outdoors, she realized what she must once have known very well. In those days, an ordinary camera couldn’t cope with interior shots. There was insufficient light. A flash mechanism didn’t exist, or if it did, it wasn’t available to the likes of them. You depended on sunlight, as her father must have when he had taken this shot of her mother and herself and Gerald on a day out by the sea. The background looked like Southwold, but she couldn’t be sure. How had they gotten there? No car for them, of course; she couldn’t remember anyone her parents knew having a car. Probably they had gone in a charabanc, as coaches were called then.

  It was the last picture taken of Gerald, though eight or nine months before his death. You took photographs in the summer then, on your holidays; a camera was a luxury. She studied the little boy’s smiling face, wondering how he would have looked if he had lived and grown up. If, for instance, he had been able to come to her wedding. And then she thought, with a little inward tremor, that if Gerald had lived, she might never have met Frank, let alone married him. For it was only because the house and its surroundings had been so hateful to her without her brother that she had left home and gone to Sudbury in the first place.