The Chimney Sweeper's Boy

by Barbara Vine

  Joan closed her eyes and slipped into a reverie. When she was young, people told you not to dwell on painful things, to forget them, put them behind you. Unpleasantness must be buried, or at least hidden from public view. So she had never talked to Frank about Gerald’s death or even allowed herself to think about it. She had shut it off when it arose in her mind unbidden. But it had always lain there, asleep yet menacing, and now she had awakened it, or the pictures and the girl who wasn’t called Candless had. And Joan understood with relief that it was better for her and somehow better for Gerald now that she could confront it and remember.

  When he was dead, they let her see him. For hours and hours before that, twenty-four hours, she hadn’t been allowed in his sickroom. Dr. Nuttall came and went and came and there was talk of a nurse. But her mother had been a nurse and wanted no other. Outside his room, unseen, Joan sat on the top stair of the steep flight. It was dark there; it was always dark until they lit the gas. She listened to the murmur of the doctor’s voice and the higher-pitched sound of her mother talking, and then Gerald’s cries—“My head hurts, my head hurts.” When he shouted with the pain, she put her hands over her ears, but when he began to scream, she ran downstairs and hid in the hall cupboard among the brooms. The long silence that followed was broken by the old lady coming, though she talked in whispers. She came to lay out the body, though Joan didn’t know that then. Dr. Nuttall came back and then Joan’s father took her into the room where her mother was and the doctor was and where Gerald lay, his closed eyes looking up to the ceiling, his face white as a wax candle. They told her she could kiss him, but she wouldn’t; she shook her head wordlessly. Later, when she was grown and had children of her own, she thought they shouldn’t have asked her to kiss a dead boy.

  It was evening, night perhaps; it must have been. They hadn’t drawn the bedroom curtains. The sky over Ipswich now was a bronzy red color, but then it had been a deep dark blue with stars. Gerald was going to lie there till the morning while her mother sat at his bedside. Joan couldn’t remember the night or what her father did, no matter how hard she tried. But she remembered the morning and her mother there in the kitchen, getting breakfast for the man of the house, as she always did, as she would have if she herself were dying.

  The undertakers were to come and take Gerald away. Had someone told her that? Surely not. She must later have known it was what would have happened. But no, for when there had come that knock at the front door, her mother had said it must be the undertakers; she had said the undertaker’s name, though Joan had forgotten what it was. Just as she had forgotten the chimney sweep’s name. The knock at the door, and her mother had said it was the undertakers, then recalled they weren’t coming till nine and it was only eight. She had sat down heavily, the teapot in her hand, looked at Joan’s father with such black despair, such hopeless grief, and said, “It’s the sweep. I can’t be doing with the sweep today, not today.”

  Joan had never seen the slightest sign of demonstrative affection between her parents, not a kiss, not a touch. But now her father went awkwardly to her mother, took the teapot from her, and laid an arm around her shoulders. He stood there with his arm around her, his hand patting her shoulder, and said to Joan, “Go and open the door, there’s a good girl, and tell him he can’t come today. You tell him why. You tell him about your brother and to come back another day.”

  She had gone and had gotten the door open, but her father must have thought better of it, for he came himself and talked to the sweep while Joan stood by and heard for the first time the word meningitis, a word that was to have a special dreadful meaning for her forevermore, worse than the worst expletive or curse, a significance of evil and pain and loss.

  The sweep must already have cleaned one chimney by that time, for his face was blackened and his clothes were sooty—they looked as if soaked in soot—but his brushes were clean, the tools of his trade, somehow shaken and wiped free of chimney dirt after every use. He had left his bicycle resting up against their fence. Thieves didn’t steal bicycles in those days, the way they did later on. She could only see its handlebars, but somehow she knew now, because she had seen it before or seen it afterward, that along a metal sheet fixed to the crossbar was painted in black letters on white, or white letters on black, his name, with his initials and his trade.

  Remembering what that name had been was another thing altogether. She tried and tried, but failed. Yet she could still hear her father saying, “Meningitis, meningitis” and the sweep saying he was sorry and that he’d come back another day, next week, whenever they said. And she could remember another caller that day: the sweep’s wife.

  It was in the afternoon. They had taken Gerald’s body away by then, hours before. Auntie Dorothy came and brought Doreen with her, but not the boys. Young as she was, Joan knew that though men went to funerals, death itself was somehow for women and girls to concern themselves with, not for men, just as birth was and marriage was. Doreen was only two, but she was a more appropriate person to be there than Ken or Don. Neighbors had been coming to the door all day to pay their respects and offer their sympathy, and her mother thought it was another of them when someone knocked after Auntie Dorothy had been there half an hour.

  Auntie Dorothy went to the door and came back with the tall lady. She must have said her name, or perhaps she only said whose wife she was, for that was what Joan remembered. Her husband had come home after his work and told her and she had come to say she was sorry; she wanted to express her sympathy for Mrs. Candless’s great loss.

  Joan’s mother or Auntie Dorothy, one of them, had offered her a cup of tea. Joan remembered that clearly and she remembered the lady talking to Doreen and Doreen immediately taking to her the way little children do to people who show an interest in them. But she had refused the tea and said why—and now her reason came back to Joan in a flash of illumination. She had said she couldn’t stay, that she must go at once, because she had brought her children with her, or some of her children, and left them outside. It wouldn’t have been fitting to bring them in, it wouldn’t have been suitable.

  Any impression she might once have had of those children was almost entirely lost, though she had gone to the door with the lady, had been sent to see her out. She had opened the door herself and had glimpsed those children—three of them, was it, or four?—standing outside the gate where that morning their father’s bicycle had leaned. Boys or girls? How was it possible not to remember a fact like that?

  Then Joan, opening her eyes and returning to the album, recalled that she had from that time forward felt a liking for the chimney sweep and his wife, a kind of mild gratitude for their kindness, and that this had led to something or other. She had done something or arranged something because of that liking, but what?

  The recovering of memory tired as well as gratified her, and these evenings she went early to bed. But on the following day, after she had had her tea, she was back with the photographs, to her marriage and the war and the children. And she was carried away by them, by herself with Frank on their honeymoon, Frank in his army uniform, Peter, her firstborn, in his pram. There was a photographer who hung about outside the clinic and took pictures of the babies when their mothers wheeled them out and down the steps. He must still have been there two years later, for here was just the same sort of photo of Anthony.

  Quite forgotten until now was the studio portrait of the whole family taken a year after Frank was discharged: herself sitting down and holding the baby, Patricia, a little boy on either side of her, their father standing behind. She was more enthralled by their young faces and by the clothes that still seemed to her desirable and elegant than she could have been by any television program. It was days now since she had even turned the telly on. But even as she was transported into the past and immersed in the emotions of the past, she was aware that this was not the way to find what she was looking for. Clues to it didn’t, couldn’t, lie in the early years of her marriage or in the family she and Frank h
ad created.

  She was afraid then that those clues, if clues there were, must have lain somewhere in the sparse and few photographs taken in the years before Gerald’s death. But she had been through them and found little or nothing to help her. It was the chimney sweep, after all, that Jason was interested in, and the purpose of this search of hers had been to find something that would trigger the memory of his name. Again she closed her eyes; again she rested her head back and transported herself back to that day, the day after Gerald’s death, to the sight of the sweep on the doorstep, the handlebars of his bicycle showing around the end of the hedge, his dirty face and clean brushes. To his tall wife with her kind face and her sweet way with Doreen. Mrs. something, they must have called her, her mother and Auntie Dorothy. Will you have a cup of tea, Mrs. something? Good-bye, Mrs. something.

  Unless the pointer to the name lay somewhere in the past, before Gerald died, or even in the future, after he was dead. The sweep must have come every April to sweep the chimney before spring-cleaning, but Joan could recall no previous visit. Perhaps she had been at school when he came. And afterward?

  It wasn’t much more than two years later that she went away to Sudbury. The sweep must have come in those two years, but she couldn’t remember his visits, only the emptiness of the house without Gerald and the loneliness. Perhaps the chimneys hadn’t been swept again, for her mother lost interest in the house and the cooking and her husband and her daughter and for a long time retreated inside herself, into that place where perhaps her dead child still lived. Because of this, her father was always out, at his men’s club. And Joan went to live twenty-two miles away, a distance that would be nothing now but was considerable then, the other end of the county.

  Four years passed before she came back, and that was for her wedding in 1938. She opened the last album, the one she hadn’t looked at because she looked at it so often. Those photographers always began with a picture of the church, and St. Stephen’s was pretty enough, if not on par with the one she had wanted in Sudbury. Then came the shot of herself on her father’s arm, walking up the path to the door. She was holding up her white taffeta train with one hand and clutching her bouquet with the other. Her father looked happy enough, and in the later pictures, her mother looked happy. They were back to normal; they were over it. They had recovered, or recovered as much as they ever would.

  What was she looking for? She had half-forgotten. The photographer’s series that she had looked at so often before passed gently before her eyes, the wedding, the bridesmaids, the group on the steps, the departure for the reception. The month of May and a glorious day. Happy is the bride that the sun shines on.…

  Happiness, yes, but surely she had wanted luck, as well? Joan felt a constriction in her throat. What had she done for luck? Worn something old, yes, something new, something borrowed, and something blue.… She was nearly there; she sensed it. She turned to the last photograph in the album.

  It hadn’t been taken by the professional, but by Frank’s best man. Joan couldn’t remember his name now, but he hadn’t been a very good photographer. Why had they stuck this picture in with the good ones? Because Frank had wanted it, because Frank for some reason had liked it. Usually, when she looked at her wedding album, she stopped before this page or else allowed her eyes to flicker swiftly over it.

  Now they rested on it. And she saw herself and Frank arm in arm and the man who stood smiling at the front of the little crowd with his brushes in his hand and, behind him, leaning against a tree trunk, his bicycle, with his name clearly written in white on black on the metal sheet triangle attached to the crossbar.

  J. W. RYAN, CHIMNEY SWEEP.

  Ursula’s lover was named Edward Akenham and, in a way, he was the only lover she had ever had, for Colin Wrightson didn’t count, and though some husbands can also be lovers, Gerald had not been one of them. Edward was a painter with a cottage in Clovelly, but in order to live, he taught art history at an evening course in Ilfracombe.

  From the first, she had known the kind of man Edward was. She had no illusions, perhaps because she had had so many about Gerald and all had been rudely smashed. Chronically poor, permanently unsuccessful, splendid to look at, if a little worn, Edward made a point of having an affair with one of his art history students each term. Occasionally, such a relationship lasted two terms, and Ursula was one of the two-term women.

  He was honest. He told his girlfriends he had no money to spend on them, that he had never been married and didn’t wish to be. On the other hand, he was free. He had a place to take them, a cottage of exquisitely picturesque appearance, with the advantage of being next door to a pub. And he would make love to them nicely, with care, perhaps with passion. For a while, he would give them his devotion. What love he had to give, and within limits, he would give them. He was an honest man.

  For nearly a year, he made Ursula feel desired, beautiful, sexy, and needed. In all that time, she never had a migraine. And Edward paid her a compliment very close to what Gerald had said to her on their honeymoon.

  “You are the kind of woman most men dream of making love to.”

  But June came and the end of the art history course for that year. Edward went off to Spain to stay with an equally impoverished friend, first saying an unequivocal good-bye to her, coupled with another compliment, of a sort. “It” was among the best he’d ever had. She minded, as she had known she would, because she was more than a little in love. But that, she had also known to be inevitable, for how could you live the life she lived and not fall in love with the first kind, clever, handsome man who paid attention to you?

  She had read somewhere, perhaps among the pieces of advice given by an agony aunt, that if you have a love affair your husband hasn’t found out about, it is wiser and kinder not to tell him. But that, she felt, didn’t apply to husbands like Gerald, who wasn’t really a husband anymore, but someone she shared the house with, a not very congenial kind of landlord. So one Saturday morning, when her Thursday migraine was over, when Sarah was out riding and Hope was at her dancing class, she told him about Edward Akenham.

  He looked up from the Times. “What do you expect me to say?”

  It was terrible how she had learned to talk the way he did; she had learned his kind of repartee. “What you’ve just said.” It was true. “No other comment?”

  “Not so long as you don’t get yourself in the newspapers,” he said. “I refer to your association with me, of course.”

  She pondered his words: “your association with me” not “my wife.”

  “And I don’t want my children witnessing any primal scenes.”

  “There is nothing to witness. It’s over,” she had said.

  “No doubt there will be others.”

  There never had been. Until now.

  “Why did you tell him?” Sam Fleming asked her.

  “I don’t know,” she said. She had told him all of it, that and much more. “I mean, I didn’t know at the time. It wasn’t revenge or some sort of wish to hurt him; I knew it wouldn’t hurt him. Afterward, I thought about why, and I think I told him in the hope he’d throw me out. I hadn’t the strength to leave, you see, and I couldn’t bring myself to take the children away from him and go, but I think somewhere in my unconscious was the wish that he’d leave me or force me to leave. He’d do it for me.”

  “He didn’t, though.”

  “He didn’t care enough. It looks as if he must have needed me in some way, and he did, but not in the way any woman would want to be needed. And by then he was beginning to be very well known. He was giving interviews to newspapers and getting pieces about him in the Sunday supplements. It suited the persona he’d created to have an apparently stable marriage, a serene family life. And his children had to have a mother—I don’t think he ever considered the possibility that they might not have a father—even if they didn’t care much for her. She had to be there so that they had a mummy and a daddy, like the other girls at school. It’s different now, b
ut most children did live with both natural parents then.”

  “It was a few years later that he wrote Hamadryad.”

  “The young girl was a kind of amalgam of Sarah and Hope, older than they, of course, and idealized—at least the dryad girl seemed idealized to me. Perhaps he saw his daughters like that.”

  “The hamadryad,” Sam said, “dies when the tree she inhabits dies. Did he mean his daughters couldn’t exist without him, without his support?”

  “God knows what he meant. It was sometimes hard to know with him where reality stopped and symbolism began. Maybe we have to remember that a hamadryad is also a kind of snake. But I’m talking too much. I haven’t talked so much for years.”

  “You can talk as much as you like with me,” Sam said. “I like to be talked to. I’m a good listener.”

  She smiled at him. They had been together almost continuously since the Sunday night when she arrived at the hotel where she had stayed before and booked into again and where he was waiting for her in the lobby. The drive from Devon in Sarah’s car had been uneventful and their conversation of the bland small-talk kind, broken by long silences, until the western outskirts of London were reached and Sarah asked her where her friend lived.

  Ursula had often noticed that when a woman speaks to others of a friend, the assumption will always be made that that friend is female. She had wondered if things had changed among the young and if this rule no longer applied, but apparently it still persisted, for Sarah said, “If your friend lives this side of London, I can drive you to her place.”

  “It’s his place,” Ursula said.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “My friend is a man, Sarah. He lives in Bloomsbury and I am staying in a hotel. You won’t want to go so far east, so if you’ll drop me somewhere on your way, I can get a taxi.”

  “It was all rather absurd,” she said to Sam the next day, “because surely most daughters would have asked about this mysterious man, would have teased their mothers about a thing like that, made some comment. It made me realize, if I hadn’t known it already, what a thin sort of relationship we have.”