The Chimney Sweeper's Boy

by Barbara Vine

She felt a stinging behind the eyes as if she was going to cry and was surprised to hear her own voice so steady. “Was that my father?”

  “I’d think so, wouldn’t you? He was three weeks older than Gerald Candless.”

  She talked to maintain that steadiness. “The death of the little boy his own age would have stayed with him always. You can imagine that, his father coming home and saying what had happened, that the Candlesses had lost their only son, and Mrs. Ryan going over to the house with her children, her own little boys—oh God, she was my grandmother.” This time, her voice broke—she couldn’t help it—but she managed to cough the tears away, dip her head, fists to forehead.

  “Hey, come on,” he said. “This won’t do,” and he went over to her, sat down beside her, and put an arm around her shoulders.

  If anything could have banished emotion, it was this. She exerted herself not to shake him off, not to scream at him to get out. Almost worse than the arm and the greasiness was the handkerchief proffered to her, a gray crumpled object smelling of dirty pockets and dried nasal mucus.

  She jumped up. “I’m fine now. Thanks. Let me get you another drink. Some ice.”

  He nodded happily. She couldn’t help noticing his glass was heavily marked with sticky fingerprints and salivary ellipses. “Please go on,” she said. “I’ll be all right now.”

  “They were Irish Catholics. Nan remembers her mother telling her that. There were five other children. James Robert and Desmond William were the next.” He was reading from notes he had made. “They were probably the ones left outside the gate along with”—he looked warily at her—“your dad, because Margaret wasn’t born till August 1933 and the other two, Mary and Stephen, not till 1935 and 1937, respectively.”

  “Then Stephen can’t have been much more than a baby when the father died.”

  Jason referred to his notes. “Ryan, the sweep, died in April 1939, when Stephen was—let me see—nineteen months old. Your dad would have been just thirteen. And sometime after that but before the start of the war, I think—I don’t know, mind—the family moved to London. Mrs. Ryan, with John, James, Desmond, Margaret, Mary, and Stephen, moved to somewhere in London to the home of a relative.”

  “What does ‘relative’ mean?”

  “It doesn’t mean brother,” said Jason. “O’Drida is a very uncommon name. I’ve looked in a few phone books for various areas and not been able to find one. I found Anne Elizabeth O’Drida in the records as born in Hackney in 1897 and a sister Catherine Mary O’Drida born in 1899 but no brothers.”

  “And your grandmother can’t be more specific?”

  “I’ve tried ‘uncle’ on her and ‘brother-in-law,’ but it doesn’t ring any bells. I reckon she’s told me everything she knows.” He grinned at her. “If I persist, she may tell me more than she knows.”

  “Is Hackney significant?”

  “Maybe. But there’s no O’Drida in Hackney in the phone book. And why would there be? It’s a hundred years ago we’re talking about.”

  “So what happens next?”

  Instead of answering, he said, “Your dad wasn’t a Catholic?”

  She shook her head, then remembered something. It was still there, in the dictionary, between dynamicity and Earl Marshal. She held out the palm cross to Jason. “He never went out on a Sunday morning. I’d know; I was almost always there.”

  “But maybe he went out on a Saturday night. Lots of Catholic churches have Mass on Saturday evening.”

  “What a lot you know,” she mocked him, suddenly angry.

  Jason looked at his watch. “I guess I’d better go home.”

  He said it with a kind of drawn-out reluctance, a shrug, and a heavy sigh. He looked at her as if waiting for her to suggest an alternative. Perhaps he thought she would put him up in a hotel?

  “Have a last drink,” she said, and on an impulse, while filling his glass, she added, “I’ll give you your taxi fare to Liverpool Street.”

  “Thanks. I’ve missed the ten o’clock, but there’s a last train at eleven.”

  “You have a lecture in the morning?”

  “I don’t exactly go to classes anymore.” His eyes avoided hers. “I thought you might have realized. I … well, I dropped out. That is, I never went back after the Easter break.”

  “I see.” She didn’t quite. “So your grant—what are you living on?”

  “You,” he said. “You’ve been a godsend.” He looked at her then. “In more ways than one.”

  She went into the kitchen and found her purse, came back with two ten-pound notes, a good deal more than his taxi would cost—but what the hell.

  He took the notes gratefully. “Nan doesn’t know. I reckon she’d stop feeding me if she did—just when I need it most. And giving me baths. I ought to make myself wash in cold water, but I guess I don’t have the willpower, as Nan would say. My parents don’t know. They think I’m still trying to cope with psychology. But something’ll happen, I reckon. Something usually does.”

  She thought with distaste that anyone these days can keep himself clean. Heat water in a kettle, have a stand-up wash, go to the launderette. If she told him so, he would only tell her she’d never experienced it. Which would be true.

  “Look, I thought I’d keep on at the O’Drida angle,” he said. “I’ll keep at it.”

  She saw him to the door, then, on second thought, went down with him to the street and waited until a taxi came. From the window, he waved to her with enthusiasm. She returned upstairs, shivered at the stuffiness in the flat, and began opening windows. Absurdly perhaps, but with a real distaste, she didn’t want to touch that glass, but at last she did, having first put on a rubber glove. Even so, she picked it up gingerly between thumb and forefinger and carried it out to the kitchen at arm’s length, the way one might remove a dead spider.

  A bound proof of Less Is More arrived the next day from Robert Postle. The cover design, as Carlyon-Brent pointed out on the back, was not that which would appear on a finished copy. An empty city street by night, a photograph, not a drawing—it looked more like somewhere on the continent than London. The back cover of the proof also bore quotations from highly laudatory reviews of the author’s previous works and commendations from Malcolm Bradbury and A. N. Wilson.

  At the foot were a few lines informing the reader that publication would be on January 29, 1998, the price £16.99 in hardback, its size 5½ by 8¼ inches and its length 256 pages, all this followed by the ISBN number. A short biography inside told Sarah a few things she now knew to be false about her father, such as his status as an only child and his education at Trinity, and something painfully true, that he had died in July 1997.

  The dedication, as so many dedications had been in the past, was to her and her sister. “For my daughters, Sarah and Hope.” Tears prickled Sarah’s eyes once more. She remembered his asking the two of them for their permission.

  “As is proper,” he had said, and then added, “may I have the honor of dedicating the new one to you?”

  A Messenger of the Gods, she remembered, had been dedicated to Colin Wrightson, another one—was it Hand to Mouth?—to Robert Postle, and Time Too Swift “In memory of my mother,” while the early books had no dedications. It occurred to her then to wonder why not a single book had been dedicated to his wife, to Ursula. And why hadn’t she noticed that “In memory of my mother” before? He hadn’t been remembering Kathleen Candless, but Anne Ryan.

  Did that mean Anne Ryan had died around the time of Time Too Swift? Or had died when he began to write it? Sarah went to her collection of her father’s works, found that novel, and saw that its publication date was 1975. She had been nine or ten at the time, but of course she had no clear memory of the book’s being published. Come to that, though she had read it, as she had read all his works, she couldn’t recall anything about it. She must read it again, as she must reread all his books before writing her own.

  Perhaps Anne Ryan had died in 1973 or 1974. If he knew of her death,
it must be because, to some extent, he kept up with his true family. From a distance, he had made himself aware of what happened to the members of that family. Had he also known some of his O’Drida connections? Ryan and O’Drida—her father had been, in anyone’s estimation, an Irishman. And was that why, when choosing a university for himself, he had picked Trinity?

  Sarah wrote a note to Jason Thague, asking him if he could trace the record of Anne Ryan’s death in the early seventies and to find if there were O’Dridas in the Dublin telephone directory.

  When Sarah’s letter came, Jason was in his room in the tall white brick house in Ipswich, reading A White Webfoot in the paperback edition she had sent him. Both letter and book smelled of Sarah, of a musky and faintly bitter French perfume. The cover of the book also reminded him of her, though he would have had difficulty in saying why, as the design on it was an impressionistic painting, streaks and veils of white mist half-covering a pallid blue sky and a blurred white sun, while Sarah invariably dressed in black.

  Jason could have done without all these long descriptions of fenlands and wildfowl sanctuaries on the Suffolk coast. It began to get better when the story moved to London and sex raised its more attractive head. One of the young men the novel was about apparently lived by prostitution and enjoyed it and had entered into the whole gay life with verve and gusto. Dennis had a steady boyfriend who kept him and a great many others he picked up, mostly in public conveniences in parts of London unknown to Jason. And he had his old school friend, Mark, a man who refused to admit his own sexual orientation and who underwent all sorts of treatment aimed at turning him into a lover of women.

  The idea of homosexuality as a disease was common at the time. Some saw it as a moral sickness to be resisted by greater self-control, others as a curable mental disorder. Jason looked back a couple of chapters and found that the date when the action was supposed to be taking place was 1960. While Mark entered treatment, first by being given massive doses of estrogen and later by aversion therapy in a mental hospital, Dennis, who regularly had secret encounters with a string of young “rough trade” boyfriends, was moving into an apartment paid for by his lover. The guilty feelings of one man and the carefree brashness of the other were starkly contrasted.

  Mark became a voluntary patient in a psychiatric ward in South London. There electrodes were attached to his body and shocks administered each time a picture of homosexual erotica was shown on a screen. The treatment had no effect but to make him deeply miserable and to contemplate taking his own life. Jason was very taken aback by all this, wondered if such things could really have gone on in his own parents’ lifetime. How had Gerald Candless known about it anyway?

  Earlier, when they were boys, there had been some kind of encounter between Mark and Dennis, though the details of this were never spelled out. Mark, fresh from his failed treatment, met Dennis again by chance, discovered the kind of life he was leading, and became obsessed with the idea of a confrontation between them, an explanation. Was Dennis to blame for his fate or he for Dennis’s? He knew he must either thrash this matter out or kill Dennis, for while he lived, there could be no peace for him.

  Jason gave up for the time being, saw to his surprise that he had been reading for three hours. Two evenings before, he had gotten out of the cab just around the corner from Sarah’s place and, ignoring the expostulations of the driver, taken the tube to Liverpool Street station, thus keeping for himself most of the twenty pounds. Just enough now remained to buy half a bottle of gin or some food. He went downstairs and around to the corner shop, where he thought of Sarah, rejected the gin, and bought a pint of milk, a pizza, a bumper packet of minitortillas, and a pound of cheddar cheese.

  21

  “Remember that if you tell a man you love him,” said Mrs. Rule, “you may forget it, but he never will, and he will cast it up at you for the rest of his life.”

  —PURPLE OF CASSIUS

  THE LAST TIME PAULINE EVER CAME TO STAY DURING GERALD’s lifetime was in the long, hot summer of 1976. Gerald was writing Half an Hour in the Street, the least successful and certainly the least acclaimed of all his books. Perhaps he was affected by the heat or just didn’t apply himself. They spent most of the time on the beach, not the great stretch of sand that spanned the seven miles to Franaton Burrows—it was too crowded there—but in the little cove around the north headland, where there was no one but themselves. It was so quiet there and so isolated that quite often the tide came in, went out again, and returned once more over virgin sand no foot had trodden in the meantime.

  Pauline was seventeen and had a boyfriend. He was the only boyfriend she had ever had and later on she would marry him. Brian was his name. Sarah wanted to know about him and got Pauline to talk about him all the time, which wasn’t hard to do. Hope wasn’t interested. She was still at the sand-castle stage. Gerald built the most beautiful sand castles on the beach, fortresses with moats and crenellated walls and keeps and towers. When Hope was younger, all she had wanted to do was knock them down, but Gerald hadn’t minded; he had only laughed.

  Ursula swam every day, but Pauline couldn’t swim and didn’t want to learn. She talked to Sarah about Brian and about the possibility of getting engaged to Brian and her mother saying she was too young, but it was Gerald she looked at and Gerald’s sand castles that she admired. Her future might be with Brian; it was Gerald she was in love with, however. Ursula didn’t know how Hope, aged eight, could know this, but she did know it and she sat even more frequently than usual on her father’s lap, twining her arms around his neck and casting at Pauline sly, challenging glances.

  The fine weather came to an end before the school holidays did. One morning, there was no beach to be seen and no blue sky, only the all-enveloping mist, a white fallen cloud. Gerald shut himself up in the study with the blinds down and the lights on and got back to work on his novel. After that, the mist came down every morning, sometimes staying all day, and at the end of the week, Pauline went home because school was starting the next day. But before that, the day before she left, something happened between her and Gerald, though Ursula never knew exactly what it was.

  In any other marriage, she thought, a husband who wasn’t unfaithful and didn’t want to be—she was quite sure of this; she knew this—would have told his wife when a woman made an advance to him and he rejected it. Ursula had an idea that a man would want to tell, would be proud of telling, because it would be a kind of insurance for him. Whatever he had done before or since, that time he had resisted. He had been good; he was good. And he would want to tell his wife because it would make him seem strong-minded, impervious, and therefore attractive.

  Gerald said nothing to her. Of course, it was inconceivable that he ever would talk to her about anything verging on human relations or sex or his personal feelings. But she knew Pauline and Gerald had had some sort of confrontation. Pauline’s face, which had no mark on it, no tearstain, nevertheless looked bruised. She was silent and her eyes, which had rested so constantly on Gerald, now wandered everywhere, while he seemed relaxed. It was impossible for him to be more attentive to his daughters, but perhaps he was more than usually demonstrative.

  What had Pauline done? Gone to him in the study, Ursula thought, where the blinds were down and the mist pressed against the windows outside, and in some childish, clumsy way offered herself to him? His reaction was beyond her imaginings. She hoped only that he hadn’t been too unkind. When the time came for leave-taking, he had kissed Pauline, as he always did, and Ursula, who was used to seeing her rapturous response, noticed how she seemed to shrink into herself like someone out in the cold wind and inadequately dressed for it.

  The customary thank-you note arrived (“Dear Auntie Ursula”) but the last line, which had become requisite, was missing. This time Pauline hadn’t ended her letter with a “Hope to come back next summer holidays” and an exclamation mark. As she always did, Ursula passed the letter to Gerald across the breakfast table and he read it, as he always di
d, in silence. The only comment came from Sarah.

  “Is there anything in it about Brian?”

  Both Ursula’s parents died the following year, her father in the spring, her mother at the end of the summer. Their house and their savings went to Ian and Helen and Ursula, to be divided equally. Apart from what she had got from the sale of her engagement ring, it was the first money of her own Ursula had ever had, and though it didn’t amount to a great deal, it was enough to escape on. It would buy a flat and supply the means of living for a little while. The guilt she might feel if she left Gerald and lived on his money would be assuaged. Even before she got the money, knowing she would get it and having a fair idea of what it would be, she thought about this prospect. She thought of it at her mother’s funeral, her eye on Ian and his not-so-new wife, Judy, the woman Herbert Wick had wanted to horsewhip. They had two children now and Ian had never looked so well and happy. A man must be doing well for himself if he looks happy at his mother’s funeral.

  Pauline came up to them afterward with a tall redheaded boy in tow. “This is Brian, Auntie Ursula. We’re getting engaged at Christmas.”

  She bestowed a big smile on Gerald. You see, somebody likes me; somebody wants me, desires me. Gerald didn’t say a word, but he, too, smiled. Shaking hands with the boy, he smiled his Mephistophelian dead-eyed smile.

  Walking on the beach every afternoon, Ursula thought of taking the girls out of the good schools they loved, away from this house and this seaside, away from their father. The nearest she came to going was when she broke off from typing Hamadryad and wrote him a long letter of explanation for her departure. Later, she tore up the letter and put the money she had inherited into their joint account. Instead of going, she thought of going in the future, and to that end or partly to that end, she applied herself to the Open University’s art history course.

  Hamadryad got rapturous reviews and was named by various celebrities as their book of the year. It was one of the six short-listed for the Booker Prize and Ursula went with Gerald to the Booker dinner. If he was disappointed at not winning, he didn’t show it. Frederic Cyprian had pushed back his chair with a flourish and a clatter, stood for a moment, and marched noisily out, but Gerald had only lifted his shoulders and slowly dropped them. A journalist asked him how he felt. Wasn’t it true that he had been asked to change the end but had refused?