Barbara Vine - The Chimney Sweeper's Boy

The girl stood up, too. “Mrs. Thague, I’m very sorry if I’ve upset you. I didn’t mean to.”

“Go away. Please go away.”

“I don’t know what I’ve done. Believe me. I don’t know what I’ve done wrong. What have I said?”

“Let me see that.”

Joan put out her hand for the certificate. It was passed to her without reluctance. The girl’s face was puzzled, her lips parted. She didn’t look cruel or spiteful. Joan’s heart was beating hard. She had to sit down again, because it was Gerald’s birth certificate; his name was on it, and her mother’s and father’s names, and the address of the house in Waterloo Road where she had been born and later Gerald had been born, and the date was the date of Gerald’s birthday in 1926, when she was seven years old.

She said, “Where did you get this?”

“Mrs. Thague, please don’t be angry with me. I don’t mean to offend you. I don’t know what I’ve done. This was my father’s birth certificate. My mother had it; she kept it with all our birth certificates.”

“It can’t be your father’s,” said Joan.

“I’m sorry. I don’t want to have to argue with you, but it is. It was. His name was Gerald Candless and that was his birthday, and he was seventy-one last May, which was two months before he died.”

Joan knew what she had to do. She had to look in the tin. It was years since she had opened the tin and looked into it, not since she had lifted the lid and laid Frank’s death certificate on the top of the papers. That would be the first thing she would see, but it couldn’t be helped. Unless she proved to this white-faced, red-lipped girl with her false mourning and her dyed red hair—no one in their family had ever had naturally red hair—that Gerald was dead and had been dead for a lifetime, she knew she wouldn’t rest, but would reproach herself throughout the night and next day and on and on. For not defending him against this girl, these people, these thieves of his life and his death.

“Wait here,” she said.

The tin was in the dining room. Though a dining room was for eating in and also for keeping the cruet in and a bottle of sherry and a half a bottle of brandy for medicinal purposes, it was also suitable as the repository of documents. Bedrooms were not fitting places for the concealment of such things, and the sitting room too frivolous. But the absence of soft and comfortable chairs in the dining room, the austerity of the seldom-used mahogany table, the only partially carpeted floor, and the room’s perpetual dimness due to a northern aspect all contributed to its appropriateness. The top drawer of the sideboard contained the best cutlery, the one below it Kathleen Candless’s damask tablecloths and napkins, and the lowest the tin.

It was orange and black and had once contained biscuits, the products of Carr’s of Carlisle. Joan kept her documents in a tin because her mother had done so, on the grounds that the metal would keep paper from yellowing. In this, at any rate, it had been ineffective, for Frank’s death certificate had already become the same deep ocher color as those of George and Kathleen Candless, dead within a year of each other, which lay beneath it. What she sought would be at the very bottom.

First, her children’s birth certificates, then her marriage certificate and Frank’s father’s death certificate. What had happened to his mother’s, she didn’t know. Perhaps one of her sisters-in-law had it. The two documents at the bottom of the tin were out of order, the record of birth above the record of death. Joan lifted out the top one, looked at the other lying there, and spoke his name involuntarily.

“Gerald.”

She mustn’t cry. Not in front of that girl. There was already the mark of a water splash on the faded brownish paper, where someone’s tear had fallen years ago, decades ago. Her mother’s? Joan heard his voice crying, “My head hurts; my head hurts.” The tear had fallen onto the end of the long word written in the space under “Cause of death”— meningitis. She had never heard the word before, not until he died of it. It still sounded ugly and menacing to her, a crawling monster, crocodilelike, a thing to see in nightmares. She turned the paper over, blank side up, to hide the word. She read the birth certificate, identical to the one the girl had, and then she took both back into the living room.

Miss Candless had drunk all her water, the whole glassful. Joan no longer felt angry, only tired and very sad. She laid the papers on the table and said quietly, “He was my brother.”

8

There are no such things as good lovers and bad lovers. There are only the lovers you want and the lovers you don’t want.

—A WHITE WEBFOOT

MOSTLY, IT WAS SHE WHO HAD ANSWERED THE PHONE. A daughter’s voice at the other end would ask for Dad, sometimes didn’t even ask, but took it for granted Ursula would expect nothing more than to say hello and “I’ll fetch your father.” In the unlikely event of Gerald’s being out—taking manuscript pages to Rosemary, walking for the prescribed hated twenty minutes on the clifftop—Sarah’s or Hope’s disappointment sounded almost comically in a dying fall of tone. They had to talk to her. Where was Dad? There was nothing wrong with Dad, was there? When was Dad coming back?

All was changed now. Inevitably. They had to talk to her every time. The calls came less often. Hope seldom phoned at all. Sarah phoned, Ursula thought, because she was more inclined to guilt feelings, to a sense of duty. And she phoned for information. But Ursula quite liked it, to pick up the receiver and say hello and hear a daughter who wanted to talk to her, needed to talk to her.

“How are you, Ma?”

After that came the requests. Would she like to write it down? Talk into a tape recorder? Just answer questions on the phone? Ursula thought about it and doctored her thoughts for daughterly consumption. Writing it down was all right if she was careful, a strict and controlled censor. She had talked about that first meeting with Gerald and subsequent meetings and Little Bear and even the Mr. Rochester exchange, and she had written some of it down and sent it to Sarah, the story about the engagement ring, among other anecdotes. But now dangerous ground was approached. Her words would find their way into Sarah’s book. Women probably existed who were willing to talk to a daughter about their sex lives with that daughter’s father, but she wasn’t one of them. Would Sarah ask?

But Sarah didn’t ask anything. Ursula had been expecting a call for three days. No call came, and Ursula began to worry. It was ridiculous, because a week might easily pass by without a call from either daughter, but Sarah had promised. Sarah had said, “I’ll phone in a couple of days. I’ll have gotten a lot of Dad’s family background by then and I’ll be ready to hear about when you were first married.”

On the fourth day, in the evening, Ursula called her. It was because she was alone that she was prey to absurd fancies. It frightened her to think there might be no answer, or only Sarah’s recorded voice. If that happened, she would be worse off than before. But Sarah picked up the phone after two rings.

She sounded cool and distant. “Is there something wrong?”

“With me, no,” Ursula said. “I thought you’d want to talk about your father. For the book.”

“I will, I suppose, but not now.”

“I’m sorry. Have I interrupted something?”

“No.”

“You said you were tracing Dad’s family.”