The Chimney Sweeper's Boy

by Barbara Vine

  So it had been he whom Dickie Parfitt saw. Twenty-eight years ago, but yesterday all the same. She would never know why he went there and now she no longer cared. A black floater swam across her vision, the beginning of pain following it. She would have a full-blown migraine by nightfall.

  They were all in the pub but Adam. Rosie admired Sarah’s nails and said she’d thought of having hers done with a pattern, designer nails, or whatever it was called, but really she was too old. Rosie, Sarah happened to know, was thirty-three. A discussion ensued as to what they should do, where they should go.

  “Why can’t we just stay here?” said Sarah, looking at the clock.

  “It’s so boring here. And the club is boring.”

  Someone Alexander knew was having a party. A thirtieth birthday. He had been invited, so they wouldn’t be crashing it. What, five of them? Rosie said. That “five” made Sarah uncomfortable, because she suddenly thought they must wonder why she always came alone, that she never brought a man, that she apparently had no man.

  “We’ll have another drink here,” said Vicky, “and then we’ll go to this new restaurant that’s called the Trawl or something and have fish and chips and then we’ll go to the club. How about that?”

  Sarah said as casually as she could, “But will Adam find us?”

  “He’s not coming, you’ll be glad to hear. He hasn’t come down from London.”

  She was dazed and stilled, as if a gray net had been thrown over her. He wasn’t coming. He hadn’t come down from London. Those two sentences repeated themselves in her head. The whole evening stretched ahead of her as some rare childhood evenings had for her and Hope, notably when Auntie Helen was visiting or her grandparents, gray panoramas of boring grown-up talk, until her father had come and rescued them. He couldn’t rescue her now. No one could. She looked at her ridiculous fingernails, down at her knees in skintight black velvet jeans. They made it quite difficult to walk, something she had felt as sexy before but now knew was absurd.

  She drank her second drink, went with the others to the restaurant, aware that her quietness must be remarked on but finding nothing to say. The reason for his absence was no longer a mystery. It was deliberate, of course, the ultimate rudeness, the titillating, exciting rudeness. Now she would never know when he would come back, had no way of knowing, since other contact was forbidden in their unwritten laws. He was challenging her, or was he seeing how far he could go, if he could draw her down here week after week on the off chance? She shook; she couldn’t eat. Nausea came up in her throat.

  “I won’t go to the club with you,” she said. “I’d better go home. I’m not feeling well.”

  It was the first Sunday down here since her father had died that she hadn’t woken up bludgeoned by a hangover, hadn’t had to drive back to Lundy View House with a throbbing head and shaking hands. She got up early and dialed Stefan’s number. His answering machine was on and she left a message on it. If he wasn’t busy this afternoon, could she come and hear the rest of it?

  Perhaps now was the time to tell her mother. Or would it be better to wait until she had heard what else Stefan had to say? I shall be here again next Saturday, after all, she said to herself. And then she realized what she had said and was as quick to deny it. Adam mustn’t be allowed to rule her. She wouldn’t return until the fourth Saturday in the month, until after Christmas.

  “Did Dad ever go out on a Saturday night?” she asked abruptly.

  “Possibly.” Ursula seemed indifferent. “Occasionally. To take a manuscript to Rosemary perhaps. Why?”

  “I think he went to church. I think he went—at the end, he went back to the church.”

  Ursula’s sudden bark of laughter shocked Sarah. Contrition followed: Her mother said she was sorry, and then added, “If you and Hope want to come here for Christmas, I’ll do my best to see we have the nicest time we can.” She hesitated. “Fabian, of course, and there’s a friend I’d like to ask, and we could invite—”

  “Oh, no. No, I couldn’t. And I’m sure Hope couldn’t. It would be terrible—can’t you see it would be terrible?”

  “Perhaps. If you say so.”

  “You’ll be all right, won’t you? You can have your friend and … well, anyone else you’d like to ask.”

  “I can have my friend,” said Ursula.

  After lunch, she tried Stefan again, and again the machine was on. Had he said he was going away? Had he said something about visiting his son? She couldn’t remember. She left another message that she would like to see him the following Friday. That way, she would have to come down; she would be here on Saturday.…

  Afterward, she hardly knew what had made her phone Hope. She never phoned Hope from Devon. Even before she made the call, she knew she wouldn’t tell Hope their mother meant to sell the house. She’d be afraid to do that over the phone, afraid of Hope’s explosion, her wail of wrath and misery. But now she had Hope on the line, she had to say something to her.

  “I’m bringing some stuff of Dad’s back. D’you know why he didn’t keep any reviews of A White Webfoot?”

  “He didn’t like them. The critics said he’d written a thriller. You won’t remember. You know you were away.”

  “You told me it was based on the Highbury murder.”

  “That’s what they said, the Ryan murder case.”

  “The what?”

  “The murder of Desmond Ryan. I don’t know if it was. That’s what they said.”

  That evening, when she got back from Devon, she went straight to Hope. Fabian wasn’t there and for once her sister was alone.

  “It was years before we were born,” Hope said. “One of the critics said 1960, I think.”

  “He was Dad’s brother,” Sarah said. “One of his younger brothers,” and she told her sister about Stefan and the Ryan family. Hope listened, not interrupting. The color came up into her face, burned her cheeks, then faded away as fast as it had come.

  “You’re saying that after all those years, Daddy based a novel on his brother’s murder?”

  “It looks like it.”

  “But if that’s true, Daddy had left his home and all of them behind for almost ten years before Desmond was murdered.”

  “He’d still have known about it, wouldn’t he? If it was in the papers. D’you know the circumstances?”

  “I don’t know anything about it,” Hope said. “I’ve read A White Webfoot—of course I have, and so have you. But that won’t be a faithful reporting of the case; it’ll be the way Daddy always did it. The filtering process, the changing to disguise it and make a better story. I don’t really understand why you want to know. You’re going to write about Daddy, aren’t you, not his family?”

  “He is his family. I can’t leave them out.”

  “I would. You know who he was now, his real name, and that he took the new one in 1951—isn’t that enough?”

  “I don’t know why he did,” Sarah said.

  “Well, it wasn’t because his brother got himself beaten to death or whatever nine years later, that’s for sure. Ma phoned me this afternoon—did I tell you? No? She says she’s going to sell the house. I wasn’t surprised; I thought she would.”

  “Don’t you mind?”

  “It’s funny,” said Hope, “but I’ve been thinking about it a lot. I mean, before she told me. I even thought that maybe you and I could raise the money, get huge mortgages or something, and buy it from her, and then I thought, What’s the point? I couldn’t bear to be there. I can’t bear the place. I can’t bear to be in the rooms. Not without Daddy.” She looked at her sister, with tears streaming down her face. “I loved him too much, you know. I loved him too much for my own good.”

  The FOR SALE sign was discreet, white with austere black Gothic lettering. But passersby stopped to look at it. There weren’t many on foot at this time of year, but even cars stopped. The estate agent had asked what Ursula would think of advertising the house as the former home of Gerald Candless. “Anything that s
ells it,” she had said recklessly.

  The study was empty of his papers now. The books remained. It looked, she thought, like the room in a writer’s house that has been preserved as a museum, the rows of reference works, the shelf of his own books facing the desk, the typewriter uncovered. She had laid a sheet of A4 paper beside it and a fountain pen across the paper, then taken them away again. Stupid game playing—what was the point?

  Sarah had taken the first edition of Hand to Mouth. She was glad to see it no more, the black moth on its yellow spine, the woman on the front cover that the artist had given black hair and a full red mouth but in whose face she could always see her own. The rest of them, the four that Hope didn’t want, she intended to hand over to Sam. A Man of Thessaly was the next one Gerald had written and the patient typist in Ilfracombe deciphered. She remembered, with distaste for her own pettiness, the quiet pleasure she had taken in witnessing his struggles with the unwieldy mass of paper, scrawled all over as by a planchette needle gone wildly out of control. Once a week, he had grabbed handfuls of it, stuffed them into giant brown envelopes, and driven off to Ilfracombe.

  He had never said a word to the girls. Nor had she. And they had never known, as evinced by Sarah’s surprise that her mother hadn’t read A White Webfoot. Gerald went on tour to the United States for A Man of Thessaly, but she stayed at home. He told anyone who cared to know that his publishers weren’t prepared to pay her airfare.

  The angina began the following year. He had never walked much and now he walked even less, for any climb left him fighting for breath. While at the hospital for tests, actually during a cardiogram, he had a heart attack. Not much of a one, but alarming.

  Once again, nothing was said to the girls. The woman who no longer cared about him bore the brunt of his health problems, while the women who loved him were left in ignorance. As far as they knew, their father might live for twenty years.

  The year of Phantom Listeners was the year he got the OBE. She went to the palace with him and sat in the audience next to Robert Postle. Afterward, he told Robert that the queen had asked him how many books he had written and whether he was working on one now. They had lunch in Charlotte Street and Robert asked what he had said to the queen about writing another book, as he, Gerald’s publisher, would very much like to know.

  “I may give up writing,” Gerald had said. “I may retire.”

  “Writers don’t retire. Not at sixty.”

  “Some should when they’re thirty,” said Gerald.

  Robert hadn’t taken the threat seriously. And that was wise of him, because Gerald had begun work on A White Webfoot the following week. Ursula hadn’t known its title and hadn’t cared to find out, but the girls knew and talked about it. There was no escaping involvement with his work in that house.

  He bought Sarah’s flat when she had her first job in London, and Hope’s a year later. South Kensington or Bayswater was what he would have liked for them, but they had to settle for Kentish Town and Crouch End, the best he could afford. Not that they had been anything but rapturous, touchingly grateful; they realized their own luck, aware of their friends’ mortgages. The new book progressed slowly. She wondered if he was ill, if he lay on the sofa in the study, racked with angina pain, instead of writing. Something was making the process very slow for him, as if the pages he produced were not the result of a melding of invention and imagination, but of a hand-to-hand battle with a demon that must be daily wrestled to the floor. And when he finally appeared, to sit reading in the living room or come for his meal, he looked gaunt and ghost-ridden, his eyes staring, black shadows under them like inky fingerprints.

  For a few weeks, they had reached a point where they ceased altogether to speak to each other. Total silence between people who share a home might have been possible on his side; it wasn’t on hers. Gradually, they began once more to exchange remarks about their children, the weather, the condition of the sea and his health.

  One evening when she was coming out of a racking migraine, she looked at him and thought he seemed worse than she was. “You are very ill,” she said.

  “It’s in the mind,” he said, “only in the mind,” and then he laughed, presumably at that “only.”

  “If I were you, I’d make an appointment with the doctor.”

  “And if I were you,” he said, “I’d want me to die. The sooner the better.”

  It took him two and a half years to complete his new novel. Within a few months of its reaching Robert Postle, a rough of a proposed jacket design arrived. The white, gold-shot mist—rather, the dazzling whiteness barely broken by streaks of saffron and blue—reminded Ursula of an Impressionist painting, a Monet without a motif. Gerald hated it. His feelings about it, violently expressed, came near to generating a real conversation between them. He sent it back to Mellie Pearson, the artist, with demands for change, but even the final version, with birds and a sun and a pale waterside, was always to be a cause of deep dislike that almost amounted to phobia. The original in a pastel gray frame, presented to him at the novel’s launch party, he afterward returned to the artist.

  The critics called A White Webfoot a thriller. One newspaper had its crime-fiction critic review it. Another described it as “a murder story dressed up in Dostoyevskian pretensions.” Gerald Candless, said the Evening Standard, no longer able to dredge up plots out of his own imagination, had based his new novel on the Ryan case, a notorious and sordid murder that was of interest today solely because of its place in the history of the campaign for homosexual-law reform.

  Gerald had had very little experience with bad reviews. Even Half an Hour in the Street had met with nothing like this. He didn’t want his daughters to see the newspapers, but he was powerless, in Hope’s case, to prevent it. Sarah, as it happened, was out of the country. Hope, of course, flew to her father’s defense and would have written impassioned letters to several newspapers if Gerald hadn’t gently persuaded her that this would do more harm than good.

  His last book, the last, that is, before the one that would be posthumously published, he wrote in four months. No one could have called The Mezzanine Smile a thriller (Gerald said) and no one did. Reviewers wrote four hundred words about it rather than the established eight hundred and it passed quietly into number twenty on some newspaper’s best-seller list. Ursula, in tune with her resolve of nine years before, didn’t read it.

  “And I still don’t know what it’s about,” she said to Sam, taking the book down from the shelf and handing it to him.

  “A man who works on a provincial newspaper but who gets up at five to write plays and a woman who loses her chance of marriage because she stays at home to look after her old parents.”

  “You can take them to London with you. I must stay here for Sarah at the weekend and then I’ll come up and maybe …”

  “You won’t go back?”

  “I shall have to tell the girls, Sam. I don’t think they’ll mind. They’re not very interested in what I do. Shall we go for a walk on the beach?”

  * * *

  The sea was a dull slate blue, its color the reflection of dark clouds with gaps of clear sky between them. Mussel shells, ground into powder by the tides, made chevron streaks on the pale, flat sand, and the razor shells lay everywhere, some split and splintered, others perfect open blades. The air was clear and cold, the sun a pool of yellow light between bulges of cloud low on the horizon.

  “Have you ever noticed,” she said, “how sunsets aren’t red? The sky never goes red until after the sun has gone down.”

  “Your late husband pointed that out in one of his books.”

  “Did he? You know his work better than I do. But I’m not surprised; he pointed everything out. Somewhere he said that people never shiver from fear or emotion, only from the cold, though writers are always saying they do.”

  “Hold my hand,” he said.

  They walked along the water’s edge, where the sand was firmest, hard as setting mortar. Gerald had never written about
this sea that for twenty-seven years had been under his windows. He had enjoyed it only on the finest days. She thought, as the trickling tide crept close to her shoes, as she stepped aside and he jumped aside, laughing, I will do my best never to think about Gerald again; I will try to shut off my past.

  At the gap in the dunes, they turned back. The hotel, which had been dark for long weeks, now had lights in many of its windows and, as they watched, more came on. They were going to eat their Christmas dinner up there. It is where we met, she thought, turning her face to him, smiling. He bent over and kissed her.

  She wanted to ask him something. She remembered what he had said soon after they met, how he wanted to be in love, and she knew that if she asked him, she would get an honest answer. Why am I so greedy for punishment? Haven’t I had enough? She asked herself those questions but asked him nothing, and they watched the sun go down and the red color gradually seep across the sky.

  25

  The judge praised William for punching Mark in the face. He said that this seventeen-year-old set an example to all men who were approached by another man for sex. Mark’s nose was broken and he lost a tooth. In a facetious tone, the judge described the damage as “cosmetically disfiguring.”

  —A WHITE WEBFOOT

  WITHOUT ANY GROUNDS FOR HOPE, SHE HAD HALF-EXPECTED A LETTER from Jason to be waiting for her when she got back, an apology, a request for more work. There was nothing, and on an impulse, she sent him a check for the amount she had been paying him weekly when he was still her researcher. He was loathsome and clumsy, but his cry of hunger sometimes still echoed in her head. She considered a covering letter, something to the effect of hoping he was all right, but she couldn’t find suitable words, and in the end, she put the check by itself into the envelope.