The Chimney Sweeper's Boy

by Barbara Vine

  Somehow, he knew he mustn’t hesitate too long. Two old men sitting on the second level were gazing at him with hope; he could tell it was that. They were hoping he would come over, pass near them. It was a new world he had entered, something he had no idea existed. Quite slowly, with a deliberate tread, beginning to enjoy this, he walked toward the old men and, starting to mount the steps, passed between them. Each step was at least two feet six and the old men couldn’t climb them, couldn’t ascend beyond the second level. He felt their eyes following him, deriving a sensuous pleasure and a bitter pang from the sight of his movements as he climbed into the thick white fog.

  There was no stopping him now. The steam was like burning cotton wool. He spread one of his towels and lay down on the fourth level. Would someone come to him? He didn’t know whether he wanted this or not. In a way, he felt he had done enough, learned enough. He lay on his back, with one leg stretched out onto the step below, the other bent, his right arm behind his head, his left resting lightly across his body. The other towel covered him decorously—temptingly? He closed his eyes. In the heat and the dense white fog, with his eyes shut, he thought how wonderful it would be were someone to approach, to be there looking at him. To touch him.

  All the time he lay there, he sensed that he was watched. Not just by the old men on the lower levels. He doubted if they could even see him. The young and the beautiful watched him, just making out his shape and his youth through the veiling, titillating whiteness. A net, a gauze, an all-enveloping disguise.

  After about half an hour, he got up and descended the steps. Perhaps because he had made up his mind that nothing would happen, nothing would happen this time, he was surprised and a little shocked when one of the old men reached out a hand as he passed and touched his leg. He bent down and pushed the hand away. He showered again, dropped his towels into the bin, dressed, and left.

  Once outside in the air, he felt cold, though it was a mild night and getting on for midsummer. He also felt tired, exhausted as much by the assimilating of new experience as from the heat. Next time, things would happen. If there was a next time.

  Robert had been absorbed by Titus Romney’s manuscript and hadn’t noticed the time. Now, at the end of chapter six, he saw that it was midnight. The rest must wait for tomorrow and he would finish it the night before he was due to go away.

  On his way up to bed, the strange ideas that his reading had aroused all returned to him for review. If he hadn’t been sent this by Titus Romney’s agent on behalf of Romney, he would have guessed it to have been written by the late Gerald Candless. He wouldn’t have put it among Gerald’s best work; he wouldn’t even have put it among Gerald’s finished work. He would have placed it, because much of it read like a synopsis, as a first draft or even an experiment.

  As far as he knew, Titus Romney and Gerald Candless hadn’t known each other. They might have met at some publisher’s party or a book festival, but that was all. So was Romney, consciously or unconsciously, aping Gerald’s work? Had he perhaps read A White Webfoot and been powerfully influenced by that book?

  Robert got into bed beside his sleeping wife but lay awake a long time, thinking about the two novelists and remembering suddenly that Titus Romney had said in an interview in the Radio Times that his problem was not the writing but finding something to write about.

  7

  The impression he made on the editor was a good one. He could tell. He wouldn’t have been surprised if he was offered the job there and then, but this didn’t happen. It was the usual “We’ll let you know,” and in a way, John was relieved. What would he have said if told to start in two weeks’ time?

  After all, he had accepted the other job. His aim was to get to Fleet Street, that or become a novelist, a real full-time novelist, and he thought he could attain either or both as well from a weekly on the outskirts of London as from a provincial daily. But still he wasn’t sure. He kept thinking of his family.

  This reminded him that his sister Mary’s birthday was in just over a week’s time. Monday, July the second. She would be sixteen. He had already gotten her a box of chocolates, having saved up his coupons. Chocolate was still rationed, even though the war had been over for six years, and a box of Black Magic was a rare treat. But she ought to have something else, as well. With seven pounds a week coming in, he wasn’t poor and could have gotten her a sweater or a dress length, but Mary wasn’t interested in clothes. On his way to the station and the London train, he went into a bookshop and bought her a book of poetry called Young Pegasus.

  He dreamed that night. But he dreamed every night now, falling asleep to the rhythm of a fantasy and sliding from visions of beautiful young men to dreams of them, so he hardly knew where one ended and the other began. All were either in the dangerous darkness of the spoiled forest or in various versions of the baths. Their naked bodies were spread on ziggurat levels or temple steps or they walked, proudly and sensuously, down the inclines of pyramids, and they were veiled in a mist that deepened and thinned, moved, lifted momentarily, swung back in a descended cumulus cloud.

  Sometimes the mist closed in so completely as to blind his waking or dreaming eyes. He would be suspended, sightless, in a blank whiteout that was not only opaque but stifling, too. A woolpack, a cloud bank. And then, when he thought he must lose consciousness and cease to breathe, the vapor thinned and lifted, disclosing once more beauty and youth, clearer now than before, no longer merely display and promenade, but embracing, enfolded, and, in the later dreams, passionately conjoined.

  He knew somehow that he would be an involved participant in these fantasies and dreams only when he had himself, in reality, done everything they did. And he was ready for that now, aware that the time had come. All ideas that maybe he wasn’t really homosexual, that there was a way out, some avenue that could be taken where you learned to be a lover of women, all those ideas were gone. He felt committed. He had set his foot on this path, not that one, and he couldn’t go back. As soon as the chance came, he was returning to the baths.

  The difficulty was when. It sounded like one of his old excuses, born of fear and self-doubt, but it wasn’t. They were busy on the paper and he didn’t have the time. It didn’t occur to him that leaving as he planned to leave, about to give in his notice, he could neglect his job, not bother. He pursued the stories he was doing with his old zeal. Tuesday was when he could have gone to Mile End, but every fourth Tuesday the housing committee met and he had to be there. No one else had his fast shorthand.

  He went home to tea on Wednesday evening, just dropped in really, because he had a school play to cover. He wouldn’t have bothered to be there except that a once-famous actress and friend of the headmistress was coming down to attend the performance. Desmond was at home, too, had come back from work to change before going on somewhere. He was tremendously well dressed, in a light gray suit and jaunty trilby hat. They walked as far as the bus stop together and, leaving him, Desmond winked and said he had a date. John saw him get into a taxi.

  On Thursday, he thought the time had come and he could make it that evening. It was either now or waiting till next Tuesday, because the women’s days were out and he couldn’t go on Saturday. He had promised to take Mary and Stephen to the zoo. The paper went to press on Thursdays and it was a busy day because all the reporters took a hand—it wasn’t a union shop—and journalists handled the lead, putting headings into the dummy, and photographic blocks, too. One of John’s jobs was to set up the weekly chess problem.

  He was doing this when the chief sub came over to him and asked if he could go out to Woodford at seven and cover a political meeting. The man who usually did Woodford was off sick. Sylvia Pankhurst would be speaking. John said he thought Sylvia Pankhurst was dead, but the chief sub said no, that was her mother, and he was afraid there was no question about it—John would have to do it.

  Why didn’t he say, “Do it yourself; I’m leaving”? He could have. He should have. He was going to write his letter of resi
gnation tomorrow, anyway. Instead, he shrugged, said yes, okay.

  A refusal would have saved his life, but how was he to know that?

  The letter from the Devon daily paper, offering him the job and with a much higher salary than the weekly one, came on Friday morning. He had almost definitely decided not to take it, but to take the other one. He wrote his resignation and posted his letter on Saturday morning, on his way to his mothers to pick up the children.

  His mother put her arms around him and kissed him, which naturally didn’t happen each time he went home. She said he looked tired, a bit strained—was anything worrying him? It was then that he nearly told her about his change of job, but he didn’t because he hadn’t quite decided which one he was going to take.

  On their way to the tube station, Mary said her friend’s mother had told her she had been on elephant and camel rides down the Broad Walk of Regent’s Park and could they do that? John said, “If it’s possible,” but when they got to the zoo, they found the rides in the park no longer happened, though both children got to sit on an elephant. A tall, thin young man was feeding the lions. He had lion-colored hair and tawny eyes, was shaped like the statue of the discus thrower, and that night he came into John’s fantasy and then his dreams, wearing only a loincloth, which he dropped onto the marble as he stepped down into a shiny white pool.

  8

  It would be easy telling his mother and Joseph and the children about the North London job because it really would make very little difference to them. He could even go on living where he lived now and see them just as often. By the time Monday came, he had decided to stick to his decision and take the job on the weekly, though he still hadn’t replied to the letter from Devon. A couple of days’ delay wouldn’t matter.

  The chief sub came into his cubbyhole of an office on Monday afternoon and said he was very disappointed to have gotten John’s resignation. The editor would have something to say about it when he got back from his holiday.

  “I’ll be gone by then,” John said.

  “No, you won’t,” said the chief sub. “You’ll reconsider your decision.”

  “I wouldn’t bank on that if I were you,” John said.

  He finished the diary note he was writing and caught the bus to Chingford, where he had a cup of tea and a bun in a carman’s café and went on to the meeting of the Chingford Mount Residents’ Association. It went on much longer than he had expected, very little real business was done, and it made John wonder how much more of this backstreet parochial stuff he could stand to cover. Whereas down in Devon, on a daily … But he had decided. North London it was to be.

  It was nearly eight before he got to his mother’s and Mary’s birthday party. She had two school friends there, a nice one and a pretty one, giggly sixteen-year-olds. Mary never giggled; she was grave, quiet, sweetly affectionate. John gave her the presents and she smiled and rolled her eyes at the chocolates, but when she had unwrapped the poetry book and looked inside, she came over to him and put her arms around him and kissed him.

  That made the friends giggle. One of them looked inside Young Pegasus and made a face, asked with more giggling if John had ever read Forever Amber. John nodded. It and various other works of mild (very mild) heterosexual pornography had been among the books he had made himself read a few years back in one of many attempts to reorientate his inclinations. Now, eyeing the girl who had inquired, he thought how good-looking she was, a real beauty, a Leyton Lana Turner, old for her age, appearing at least nineteen. Her beauty left him cold. He found her utterly undesirable.

  The whole family was there, Stephen finishing his homework in the corner, Margaret seeming mature and grave in the presence of the younger girls, Desmond over by the wireless, listening to Phil Harris singing “The Darktown Poker Club.” Joseph still sat at the table, behind the remains of Marys birthday cake, looking quite genial for him. Mary was his favorite, the only one of them he referred to as his own child, instead of his stepdaughter or stepson.

  It was Desmond who suggested they play the Game. Someone was bound to; they couldn’t have had any sort of gathering without playing the Game. Desmond switched off the radio and said to the two girls, the beauty and the nice one, “This game is called I Pass the Scissors. You have to see if you can do it right.”

  “Do we have to?”

  The beauty could hardly keep her eyes off Desmond. They would have made a handsome couple, John thought dryly, only Desmond was no more likely to be drawn to her than he was. She pouted at him, yearning for a flirtation, but all Desmond did was say, “Yes, you have to. You’ll like it.”

  Margaret fetched her mother’s sewing scissors. They were steel, the metal worn to a deep gunmetal color, the handles bound in tape to keep fingers that constantly used them from getting sore. For years, their mother had made all the children’s clothes. Mary, the birthday girl, took the scissors, opened them, and handed them to her sister.

  “I pass the scissors crossed.”

  “I receive the scissors crossed and pass them uncrossed,” said Margaret, shifting her position at the table.

  “I receive the scissors uncrossed,” said the beauty, “and pass them uncrossed.”

  “No, you don’t.…”

  At this point, Robert laid the manuscript down, got up, and walked across the room. He stood at the window with his hands on the sill and looked out into the London street, seeing nothing. When was it he had been introduced to the Game? Where it had been, he knew very well. At Lundy View House, of course, and Hope had been there, but not Sarah; Sarah was away at university. Not Ursula, either. Ursula had refused to play. He and his wife and his two older children, he thought. He remembered how appalled he had been. His wife had been embarrassed.

  Nineteen eighty-one or eighty-two. After he had become Gerald’s editor, anyway, and on their first visit. The Game, they all called it, with a capital G. Two years later, he and his wife had been forced to play it again and his wife had caught on. Presumably, Titus Romney had also been to Lundy View House and also been taught it. Robert thought it essential to find out.

  The other possibility was something he dreaded to contemplate. What with the style being so like Gerald’s and the family situation so much Gerald’s thing …

  Robert skipped the Game. There were pages and pages of it.

  “You’re not going to get it, are you?” Stephen said.

  “Tell us.”

  “Oh, no. You’ll have to try again another time.”

  John remembered he hadn’t had anything to eat. Or, rather, his mother remembered for him and brought him Spam and scrambled eggs and tea and he had a piece of Mary’s cake. The wireless was on again, someone reading a story, but Desmond couldn’t stand that and started fiddling with the knobs, looking for dance music. The girls had given Mary nail polish—she would never use it—and Evening in Paris scent—she just might use that—and she had had fifteen cards. She arranged all her cards and presents on the little table by the window. It was crowded, a squeeze, because the things that had been on the table had to go somewhere else. But everything in that house was a squeeze. It didn’t seem to matter.

  John had a quiet chat with Joseph about the post office and the way things were changing, and a word with Desmond. He was glad Desmond wasn’t going out that night, but staying home with the rest of them and maybe even going to bed when Stephen went. Of course he knew it was outrageous of him to make even silent criticisms of Desmond, which was what that was, but just the same, he couldn’t help being glad when he witnessed peace and order. Then, about to leave, he told his mother he’d be in again on Wednesday, when he thought he’d have something to tell her, some news.

  Everybody was agog for his news, but he didn’t intend to say any more at this stage. Mothers only thought about one thing when told a son had something to tell them: that he was getting married. He laughed.

  “I’m not getting married,” he said.

  He kissed the girls good night and he kissed his mother. J
oseph shook hands with him; he did that sometimes, gravely approving of him. The beauty and the other one had gone home; it was after half past ten. They all crowded into the little hall to “see him off the premises,” as Joseph put it, and then Joseph said, as he always did, “God bless you.”

  John turned back and waved. When he looked around again, they had all gone in and the door was closed. The night was chilly for July and he had to wait quite a long time for his bus.

  9

  Breaking the ice doesn’t break it forever. It freezes over again, and the freezing seals over the cracks. John learned that on Tuesday evening. The familiarity with the place was half-gone and he was going to have to start afresh. If he had come last Thursday …

  He went into the café and asked for a cup of tea. He sat by the window and watched the baths, seeing things he hadn’t noticed before, the concrete portico, the recessed columns on either side of the front entrance, a broad crack in one of the steps. The sky above was blue, with white tumbling clouds. Seven-thirty and still as bright as at noon.

  A man went up the steps, and then another. The second one was as different from the first as that friend of Mary’s had been from an ordinary schoolgirl. The second one looked like the lion man at the zoo, as tall and straight and beautiful, as young. It might even have been the lion man. The sun shone on his mane of golden hair. John was afraid and excited at one and the same time.

  A different middle-aged woman was selling tickets. He asked for the steam bath, and this time he didn’t need directions. But there was no one ahead for him to follow. He felt almost more self-conscious than he had that first time. He took off his clothes and put them in the basket, put his cigarettes and lighter into one of his shoes and his change into the other. A man came in and looked at him, gave him a pleasant, friendly smile, and John began to feel better. He fastened the wristband with the tag around his wrist, helped himself to towels, one to be worn sarong-fashion, the other draped across his head and shoulders.