Barbara Vine - The Chimney Sweeper's Boy

There was no indignation, no disbelief. He was clearly delighted. He looked at the pages in wonderment, told her she was clever. She thought he might jump up and put his arms around her, kiss her out of gratitude, and he did pick up her hand and bring it to his lips. She had to be content with that. It was a more affectionate gesture than she had received for weeks.

“Would you like me to type the whole book for you?” she asked him.

“What do you think?” he said, smiling.

The novel was Eye in the Eclipse , the story of Jacob Manley, a religious fanatic, who, in a gesture of self-sacrifice and for the sake of propriety, marries a widow with five children. He supports the family, encourages his stepchildren to work hard at school and better themselves, but he is unable to give them love. Ursula thought she had never enjoyed a book so much as this novel, set in East London in the forties and fifties. None of those books she had devoured before she was married had interested her half so much, and she understood that this was partly because he had written it and as she read she could hear his voice. She read each chapter before she began to type, relishing the characters and the dialogue, but looking for him in vain. Nothing in the book seemed to bear any relation to what he had told her of his early life.

The typescript she produced pleased him. Doing this for him would become her work, the job she had vaguely thought she ought to have. She was proud of herself.

That was something to tell Sarah. When she got over what was so evidently troubling her. When she phoned again with a spate of enthusiastic questions.

The mist had lifted, but its rising would be temporary. In half an hour, the pale blue sky and hazy white sun would once more be covered, the lone and level sands stretch bleakly under the dense canopy, the sky be gone as well as the view of the hotel and even the flat expanse of gently lapping sea. And the white cottony floss would press against Gerald’s study windows.…

Meanwhile, it was almost bright down there, and with the lifting of the mist, the people had begun to return, as they always did, with the inevitability of birds appearing when dawn breaks. In the distance, she saw the Fleming family, up against the dunes, with a windbreak behind them, though there was no wind. James and Edith were digging in the sand, Sam Fleming and his daughter-in-law sitting in deck chairs. She had done her two baby-sitting stints and on the second occasion had handed over the stamps she had collected to be given to James. There had been no more demand for her services and she hadn’t expected to see them again. She knew they were going home at the end of the week.

Now she thought there was no point in making them acknowledge her, and she would have passed fifty yards from them without turning her head, but she heard Sam’s voice call, “Mrs. Candless!”

She turned and went up the beach. Something strange, unexpected, and unwelcome happened to her. Gerald had for a long time kept a photograph of Samuel Beckett in his study, pinned to the wall, as he occasionally did keep photographs of writers he admired. Ursula thought Sam Fleming, with his lantern jaw and piercing eyes and full, mobile mouth, looked a lot like Beckett. She didn’t know if Beckett had also been tall and very thin, but she suspected so. The sudden powerful attraction he exerted over her, that she had been quite unaware of at their previous meetings, seemed to hit her between the eyes. It was enough to stop her in her tracks, cause her to take a deep breath. Then she went on.

They spoke to her, said things about the mist, the clearing of the mist. Molly said to her son, calling him from his sand-castle building, “What do you say to Mrs. Candless, James?”

“Thank you very much for the stamps,” said the child.

“I’m glad you were pleased.”

Sam Fleming was looking hard at her. Ursula thought there might be something in the idea that if you were very powerfully attracted to someone, that made you attractive to them, that there was some chemical or telepathic exchange. Then she told herself that should Sam Fleming be attracted to a woman, it wouldn’t be to someone of his own age, a skinny woman of fifty-seven in jeans and a sweatshirt, with cropped graying hair, but a bright and nubile thirty-five-year-old. It wasn’t the first time she’d been attracted to a man other than Gerald, nor would it be the first time that nothing had come of it.

She said, “I’m afraid the mist is coming back. It always does when the sky looks like that.”

“Then we shall pack up and go in for our tea.”

She said good-bye to them. It was unlikely she would see them again, so she wished them a good journey home. Her legs felt a little weak. Her body was given over to a yearning. It was exactly the same feeling she had had thirty-five years ago, when she had first known Gerald, and she marveled that such a sensation could repeat itself so faithfully after so long. When the woman who experienced it was utterly changed. When it had been so rudely mocked that first time and so roughly repudiated.

The mist rolled in and cloaked her. It hid them, so that even if she had looked back, they would have been concealed from her. And she was glad of it, glad of the isolation in which to recover. Then, as she approached the path and the steps, she heard someone running after her.

She turned around then and waited.

Sarah had gone early to St. Catherine’s House. She expected to get it done with and to have the day to assemble her notes and draw her conclusions before going to Hope’s for supper.

People were already queuing outside the Public Search Room. Even getting inside took time. And once the doors were opened and she had begun on her task, she found things more complicated than she had expected. Forms had to be filled in, as well as one ledger after another scrutinized.

These were heavy and there were a great many of them. Eventually, in the ledger for the summer of 1918, she found the marriage of George Candless to Kathleen Mary Mitchell. Now she had to move on to births. It was a tiring business. Luckily, she had a rough idea where to look, and she found the birth of Joan Kathleen Candless without trouble in June 1919. That of Gerald Candless was easy to find. May 10, 1926, and here it was.

The Candlesses had possibly had more children in between. Now Sarah wished she had asked Joan Thague. She hadn’t been able to bring herself to do that, because Mrs. Thague had been so distraught. Bewildered and distressed and deaf. Tearful enough and upset enough for Sarah to have wondered about the facts, incoherently outlined, of a little brother dead in April 1932, a month before his sixth birthday. But within the next half hour, she came upon the registration of the child’s death: “Gerald Francis Candless, age five. Cause of death: heart failure; contributory cause, meningitis.”

So it was true. She hadn’t really been in doubt, but reading it here in this official way was different from hearing it uttered by Joan Thague and different even from seeing the words on the little boy’s aged yellow death certificate. She didn’t relish telling Hope.

“You’re not saying Daddy told lies!”

Hope stared at her sister like an enemy.

“All right, but what other explanation is there? It was really quite pathetic, this poor old woman, and the little brother dying. I don’t think I’m easily embarrassed, but I was then.”

“There must have been two Gerald Candlesses,” said Hope.

“What, two boys named Gerald Francis Candless, both born in the same town on the tenth of May, 1926, and both with parents named Kathleen and George?”

Hope looked on the verge of tears. “But why would Daddy do that? You mean he was someone else, don’t you? Someone else entirely? But why would he do that?” She was a lawyer, and she quickly saw why someone would do that. “Because he’d done something criminal? Because he was wanted for that? Oh, I won’t believe it. Not Daddy. I can’t believe that.”