The Chimney Sweeper's Boy

by Barbara Vine

  He was a widower, his wife having died four years before, and their three children were all married and had children of their own. His son also lived in Plymouth, one of his daughters in Cornwall, the other in York. He was a teacher, just sixty, he had turned sixty in September, and he hoped to be able to work until retirement age, five years hence. The book she planned to write interested him, as he had himself written two books, one on walks on Dartmoor and the other purporting to be the journal of a parson who had spent his summer holidays fossil-hunting on the Dorset coast. If Mrs. Candless would like to name a day for her visit, perhaps she would leave a message on his answering machine, as he was at work during the day.

  Sarah thought that he, too, was wary of this meeting, rather shy, nervous of confronting her, and determined not to speak to her until he could also see her, but she might have been reading too much into what was perhaps a routine instruction he gave everyone. Whatever the reason was, this initial remoteness suited her, too. She picked up the phone at eleven in the morning, when she knew he would be at school, and told him she would like to visit on Friday in the late afternoon.

  Adam Foley would be at the family cottage in Barnstaple on the Saturday.

  * * *

  The tall finger of stone on the hill, the Wellington monument, meant she was coming into Devon. She relaxed a little. It had seemed a longer drive than usual.

  No word had come from Jason Thague. She hadn’t expected anything, but his silence made her angry just the same. He could have acknowledged the check. He could have written. It wouldn’t have hurt him to have apologized to her a bit more formally. But what could you expect from someone with his background and antecedents? Her father had been a snob and had made her one, and she knew it, but the knowledge didn’t change her.

  She remembered Joan Thague with a shudder. At least the woman hadn’t turned out to be her aunt, and that was something to be thankful for. And now an uncle, who might be just as bad, awaited her, no more than twenty miles away. She had just driven along the coast road and through Dawlish and it was already getting dark. December, her thirty-second birthday next week, a couple of weeks to go before the shortest day, then Christmas. The first birthday without her father and, unthinkable, the first dreadful Christmas. She wouldn’t go home for it, that was for sure, and Hope wouldn’t. Would Adam?

  It was just after five when she approached Plymouth. All the lights were on and Sainsbury’s supermarket with its roof of sails gleamed like a fleet of white ships. Up to the right for Mutley. She drew the car into the curb where there were no yellow lines, parked, switched off the ignition, and looked at her face in the rearview mirror. This was something she never did, repowdering her face and relipsticking her mouth like an old woman, like her grandmother Wick used to, but she did it now. And she ran her fingers through her hair and tossed it and ran a wet finger under each eye in case there were mascara smudges.

  For an old schoolteacher. She must be mad. If they took a sample of her DNA and his and compared them, they would be able to see a close relationship. As close as to her father, she thought, or was that wrong? And those children of his who had children of their own, they were her cousins. She might have seen that woman in the street in Fowey or Truro and never known. The one who lived in York—Sarah had done some of her postgraduate work at York University and could have passed her every day, met her eyes, even noticed some vague, unlikely resemblance.

  His house was part of a Victorian terrace. It was all late Victorian up here, biggish houses or small, three up, two down, a bathroom, a kitchen, and a scullery. Sarah had had a school friend who lived near here and her grandmother had called it a scullery, the dark hole of a minikitchen with a copper in it. All the rows of houses had gardens behind and alleys running between them, parallel to the streets and linking them as the streets did, flagstone passages with high stone walls. Something struck a chord in her mind. Where had she read recently about a stone passage, a tunnel in someone’s dream? It would come back to her.

  The houses themselves were dark gray granite, solid as the rock itself dug out of Dartmoor. She went up the path and rang the bell. Immediately, a light came on in the little porch. She expelled her breath heavily. It was ridiculous to be so nervous. She tried to relax, drop her shoulders, loosen her tense hands. The door was opened and she saw what she hadn’t anticipated, what she had forgotten she might see, something that had never crossed her mind.

  It might have been Gerald Candless standing there.

  Younger, of course. He was Gerald as he had been when Sarah herself was twenty-one, his hair nearer to black than gray, his thick, curly hair. This man was lighter, thinner, even a little taller. The massive impression her father had made—the bearlike figure, heavy shoulders, big head—that was absent. But his features, the wide, curved mouth, the big hooky nose, the broad forehead, all framed by that bushy hair … For a moment, she had a dazed feeling of faintness; the little hall seemed to spin. She clenched her hands, swallowed, then said too brightly, “It’s good of you to see me.”

  The voice was a little like her father’s. “You look as if you’ve seen a ghost.”

  “Yes,” she said. “You’re like him.”

  He took her into what probably had once been a seldom-used parlor but was now part of a room extending from the front of the house to the back. He had lit a coal fire and the place looked comfortable, somewhat untidy, lived in by someone busy and interested. She turned to look at him again, noting that he even dressed like her father, the same baggy cords, check shirt, Fair Isle pullover.

  “Why didn’t he come himself?”

  She remembered then that she hadn’t told him. Would it be a shock? Hardly, after forty-six years. “My father’s dead.”

  “Ah,” he said.

  “He died last July.”

  “Yes. Well. I’m sorry. For you, I mean. How old was he?”

  “Seventy-one.”

  “I shouldn’t have to ask. He was eleven years older than I am.”

  “It was a shock.”

  He nodded. “Come in. Sit down.”

  She sat on a sofa that had a stack of books on one arm, the Guardian and a left-wing periodical on one of the seat cushions. “What do I call you?” she asked.

  “Not Mr. Ryan. Not Uncle. God forbid.” He smiled. “My friends call me Stefan. My wife was Polish, you see, and that was her name for me.”

  Constructing her image of him, a compound of Joan Thague and Frederic Cyprian, she had half-expected to be asked to call him Uncle Steve. “I am Sarah. But you know that. And it’s not Mrs. Candless.”

  She hesitated, looked around the room. The wall facing her was lined with bookshelves, but she turned her eyes quickly away from it, from trying to detect one of her father’s books from the color of a spine or that tiny black moth logo. This man would know; somehow she understood that. The name would not bewilder him as it had those others.

  “I’m Sarah Candless,” she said, “and my father, your brother, was Gerald Candless.”

  “The same name as the writer. Is that why he picked it?”

  “He was the writer.”

  He drew in his breath, said, “My goodness,” then added, “the novelist? You mean the novelist Gerald Candless?”

  “Yes.”

  “Gerald Candless was my brother?”

  “Yes.”

  He got up, walked across to the window, then turned back to face her. “How amazing.”

  “I know.”

  “I’ve read most of his books. I’ve got most of them—well, in paperback. Oh—wait a minute; this is really extraordinary—my daughter wrote her M.A. thesis on his work.”

  “He would have been very pleased if he’d known.”

  “How did it—I mean, how did John Ryan get to be Gerald Candless?”

  “I’m hoping you can tell me that,” she said, and then she told him all about her father, everything she knew.

  “It’s your turn now.”

  He nodded. “I’m go
ing to give you a drink and get myself one. We’ll go out to eat, if that’s all right with you. But I’ll start the … the family history first.”

  He was outside a long time, much longer than it took to open a bottle of wine and put glasses on a tray. She read an article in his New Statesman, had a look at his books. The fire needed making up. She had never made up a fire in her life and that suddenly seemed odd, given the fact her grandfather had been a chimney sweep. There were logs on the hearth and she picked one up gingerly and then another and put them on the dying embers. He came back as the fire began to crackle and flame.

  “Sorry to have been so long. I found I needed to be alone for ten minutes and I thought you’d understand.”

  “I did.”

  “I was thinking about him,” he said, “and about what I could tell you. Let me give you a drink.”

  He turned off the overhead light, left on the two table lamps. They sat in a dimmer, golden, less revealing light. At first, she didn’t look at him while he spoke—he looked too much like her father.

  “I was a baby when my father died,” he began. “He had tuberculosis, a form of tuberculosis. Lung damage from the soot, I suppose, though apparently the doctors wouldn’t admit it. It’s hard to imagine what it must have been like for my mother. She had six children, the eldest thirteen. She was a Catholic; we were brought up Catholics. Your father was an altar boy. It’s a wonder really that she didn’t have more children. We lived in a rented house, more a cottage. She went out cleaning; that was our only income. Of course, I know all this from her and from what my brothers told me.

  “She used to say to the children, as a joke I suppose, when they were being trying, that she’d had enough, that she was going to put her hat on and go and throw herself in the Orwell. That’s the river there. Well, after my father died, she said she really thought of doing it, that it was a punishment for making such a wicked threat. She was very religious, my poor mum was. Of course she didn’t do it; she had six children to think of.”

  “Can you remember the Candlesses?” Sarah asked.

  “I’m not sure I understand you.”

  “There was a family in Ipswich named Candless. My grandfather”—she smiled as she said it—“swept their chimneys. You don’t remember?”

  He shook his head. “That’s where he took the name from?”

  “Their son died. He was the same age as my father.”

  That made him pause for thought. “Yes. I see.”

  “Tell me, Stefan”—she managed to say the name, and it didn’t seem absurd—“tell me, how did you all get to London?”

  “My mother’s cousin offered her a home. She hadn’t been very close to him, I gather. He was closer to her sister—”

  “That would be Catherine O’Drida?”

  He laughed. “You’ve found that out. My aunt Catherine told him about her sister’s … plight. He wrote to her and offered her a share in his house, her and all her children. Out of pure Christian charity and kindness of heart, I think. He was a good man, if a bit stern and remote. Conscious of his virtue, I could say, though of course I wasn’t aware of that for years and years.

  “His name was Joseph. We little ones called him Uncle Joseph. He was a widower and childless. I’m inclined to think I shouldn’t have said that about his conscious virtue—still, too late now, I’ve said it. If it hadn’t been for him, John would have left school at fourteen, probably would never have attended a school in London at all, and I and my sisters would have been denied our education. Really, he saved us all.”

  “That must have been just before the Second World War started.”

  “A few weeks before, yes. Leyton isn’t exactly inner London, but it suffered a good deal of bombing. My three brothers and my elder sister were all evacuees—that is, they were evacuated to the country with their schools. Mary and I and Mother and Uncle Joseph, we stayed where we were. There wasn’t any choice about it; we had nowhere else to go.”

  She had picked up on one name. “Leyton?”

  “In East London. E-ten. That was where our house was, in Goodwin Road, Leyton.”

  Her expression must have told him what she wouldn’t say. He said quickly, “You’re thinking it was hardly ‘our’ house. It was, though. Uncle Joseph and my mother got married. Later on, years later, after he was dead, my sister Margaret told me they got married because in those days it wasn’t considered the right thing for a man and a woman to live under the same roof without being married. People would have talked.”

  “Victorian,” said Sarah.

  “Yes, well, it was only with the war that things began to change much. I don’t know if my mother loved him or he her; he wasn’t very lovable, though he was good.”

  “He was a cousin, but he wasn’t a Ryan or an O’Drida, was he?”

  “His name was Joseph Eady. My mother was Anne Elizabeth Eady.”

  They went out to eat at an Italian restaurant two streets away. Stefan said to the proprietor, “We’ll have a carafe of your house white. We’ve something to celebrate.”

  Sarah, catching sight of her own face in the mirror behind Stefan’s head, thought again that she looked like her mother. It was Hope who was like Stefan, and suddenly she understood how much like. Some reconstructing process in her mind put long dark curls on him and makeup and—of course—a big black hat. That made her laugh. He put up one of Hope’s black circumflex eyebrows.

  “I was thinking how much like you my sister is.”

  “So there are more of you?”

  “One more. Two years younger. She’s a solicitor.”

  He nodded. He seemed momentarily to have gone away into thought, and revelatory thought at that, for he smiled to himself, then looked up at her. There was something of wonder, of growing amazement, in his eyes.

  “You may not believe this—you may think it’s hindsight—but in many of your father’s books, when I read them, I used to come across familiar things, things that reminded me of my family. I never made the connection—I’m not saying that. I never for a moment thought it might be my brother writing. It was rather that I felt so much in sympathy with this author. He became pretty well my favorite author. He seemed to look at things the way I looked at them and write about the kind of people I knew. Chloe Rule, in Purple of Cassius, you know, she was so absolutely my mother, and Jacob Manley in—I can’t remember the name.…”

  “Eye in the Eclipse.”

  “That’s right. Eye in the Eclipse. He was so like Joseph, and then, of course, the first novel, The Centre of Attraction, the chap who joins the navy. I can’t remember his name.…”

  “Richard Webber.”

  “Right, Richard Webber. He did all the things my brother John—your father—did, served in Northern Ireland, went out to the Philippines, believed his life was saved by the dropping of the first atomic bombs and suffered terrible pangs of conscience afterward.”

  “That was my father?”

  “Well, wasn’t it?”

  “I don’t know. I want you to tell me. But he came to Plymouth, you know, did a signing and a reading in a bookshop. About, I don’t know, twelve, fifteen years ago.”

  “I know. I meant to go to it, but I was away on holiday with my family.”

  “Would you have recognized him?”

  Stefan shrugged. “When he … disappeared, I was fourteen. We didn’t have any photographs of him—well, maybe a couple of snapshots. Thirty years do a lot to a face, and I wouldn’t have had any reason to suspect. I daresay I might have thought he was rather like our family, but then, so might any passerby be.”

  She drank her wine, remembered that sometime tonight she would have to drive right across the county, then decided not to think of that now. Their food came. Stefan refilled her glass.

  “Were you”—she had been going to ask if he had loved her father, but she couldn’t—“fond of him?”

  Stefan was bolder, less inhibited than she perhaps, despite the difference in their generations. “I lo
ved him very much,” he said simply, and then added, “He was like my father.”

  “But you had Joseph.”

  “No. No, I didn’t. Not really. Joseph was good to us. He spent what money he had on us; he made sure we went to church, that we were properly fed and dressed and went to school, that we ‘minded our books,’ as they used to say. But I don’t think he liked children’s company; he had nothing to say to us. He did his duty.” Stefan smiled. “He was Jacob Manley.”

  “And my father did more than his duty?”

  Stefan laid down his fork. He broke a piece off a roll and picked at it, making crumbs. “He loved children. All of us. You know the eldest of a big family sometimes feels it unfair to have to do so much child-minding, resents it because the children aren’t his—they’ve been thrust upon him. John—your father—wasn’t like that. He was completely different from James, for instance. That was the brother closest to him in age. James couldn’t be bothered with Mary and me—we were babies—but John never had enough of us—well, all of us. He used to tell us stories, wonderful stories.” That spark of revelation came back into his eyes. “Yes, of course, I see now. Did he tell you stories?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “He adored us. That was what made it so strange, so terrible, that he went away from us.”

  “You’re not eating,” she said.

  “No. I’m finding this too … emotional.” He drank some wine, ate a piece of bread, then shook his head and laid his knife and fork side by side across the plate. “I’m remembering what it was like when he … went. It’s forty-six years, but all very clear when I talk about it. Painful. I’m sorry.”

  She waited, allowing him to recover himself. He drank his wine carefully, as if it had been measured out, as if it were medicine. Then he shook himself, his head, neck, shoulders, the way a cat does when it has landed from a height and readjusts its balance.

  “He wasn’t living at home, of course,” he went on. “He hadn’t been for two years, and between ’forty-three and ’forty-five he’d been away in the navy. But just the same, he was always at home—he was always there, to be with us.”