Barbara Vine - The Chimney Sweeper's Boy

“That need not necessarily be the reason,” said Sarah. “Something awful might have happened to him that he wanted to put behind him. The thing is, when did he do it? Obviously not when he was six. I mean, we don’t even know if whoever he was was the same age as the little boy who died. Or came from the same place. Or was even English, come to that. He may have done it when he was eighteen, or five years later, but not ten years later, because that was when his first book was published, and he was Gerald Candless then.”

“You’ve really thought about this, haven’t you?” said Hope, not altogether pleasantly.

“Yes, of course I have. I haven’t liked it, Hope. But if I’m going to write this book …”

“I wish to God you weren’t going to write the bloody book! I wish we’d never had to know. I don’t want to know this. I hate knowing this.”

“Hopie,” said Sarah, “if I hadn’t found it, someone else would. Someone else writing his biography. There are bound to be biographers. Isn’t it better it should be me than some stranger?”

Fabian, who had been cooking, stuck his head around the corner. “Ready in five minutes,” he said, and then he said, “ The Day of the Jackal. ”

“The what?”

“In The Day of the Jackal , by Frederick Forsyth, there’s a man who wants to change his identity to get a passport. So he goes to graveyards and searches till he finds a tombstone of a very young child of the same sex and who would now be approximately the same age as himself. And then when he’s got the name and all the rest of it, he finds that child in the records and applies for a birth certificate in that name and thence for a passport.”

“But the person would be dead,” Hope objected.

“Nobody’s going to know that, are they? The passport people aren’t going to check. Maybe that’s what your dad did. He couldn’t have read the book, because it was published years afterward, but maybe he had the same idea.”

“No, he didn’t,” Sarah said. “The Gerald Candless who died didn’t have a tombstone. I asked. Oh, not because of what you’re saying, but I suppose I just—well, I didn’t actually believe her at first. It seemed so bizarre, so awful —it still does. I said to her, ‘Where was he buried?’ and she said—Oh, she was crying; it was dreadful—that they’d put a wooden cross on the grave, but when she went back to Ipswich and looked for it twenty years afterward, it was gone; there was no clue as to where it had been.”

Sarah ate Fabian’s pasta, but Hope didn’t feel much like eating. She drank a lot of the wine Sarah had brought, gazing broodingly at her sister. Fabian, who had known him quite well, thought of the man who was dead and tried to fit him into this role of a villain or fugitive but couldn’t. Gerald Candless had been so decisive, so authoritative, so in control.

“What about Ursula?” he said.

“What about her?” Hope poured herself the last of the wine. “She won’t know. I hope someone’s going to open another bottle.”

Fabian, because he had cooked and served the meal, sat tight, declining to make a move. “You can’t assume that just because it happened before they were married she doesn’t know anything.”

“I nearly asked her,” said Sarah. “I phoned her last night and I nearly asked her; it was on the tip of my tongue.”

“What, like that, straight out?”

“No, not exactly. Of course not. I was going to say something about did she know if Dad had ever thought of changing his name.”

“I like ‘thought,’ ” said Fabian.

Hope rounded on him. “Well, I don’t. I hate it. I hate all this.”

She went outside, banging doors, looking for more wine. Sarah said, “That pasta was delicious. You’re a good cook, Fabby.”

“Someone has to do it,” said Fabian, grinning.

“I don’t know what to do now. I just don’t know what on earth to do. I can’t write a memoir about someone when I don’t know who he was. D’you know, I feel quite sick when I have to say that. I feel sort of hollow. Because it’s us, too, isn’t it? If he was someone else, who are we? What’s our real name?”

“Candless,” said Fabian firmly. “Think of all the people there are whose fathers had foreign names. Polish names, for instance—they’ve almost always been changed to something pronounceable. They know who they are. They’re the name their fathers changed to.”

Hope came back with a bottle and a corkscrew. She dumped it on the table. “I haven’t the strength to open it. I feel as weak as water.”

“I’ll do it,” said Sarah.

“I think you ought to give up this memoir. I was thinking about it while I was out in the kitchen. Daddy wouldn’t want you to find this stuff out; we know that. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have changed his name in the first place. So you ought to stop. Ring up Postle and say it upsets you too much. Leave it where it is and maybe—well, maybe in time we could forget.”

“Could you forget, Hope?”

Hope didn’t answer. She snatched the glass of wine Sarah had poured for her.

“I’ve done something else,” Sarah said almost shamefacedly. “Some checking up. Dad never went to Trinity. Or if he did, he went as whoever he was before he became Gerald Candless. And did you see that letter to the Times ? The stamp-magazine man, Droridge? I didn’t believe it when I first read it, but it’s true. Dad never worked for the Walthamstow Herald. ”

“So what? It’s just a backstreet rag. He worked for the Western Morning News. ”

Sarah nodded. “Maybe he did. Probably he did. I’ve written to them, asking if they’ve a record of his employment there. It’s a long time, forty-five years. As far as I can see now, Dad doesn’t seem to have done anything or been anywhere before he was twenty-five.”

Fabian said thoughtfully, “But doesn’t that mean he’d done everything?”

“What?”

“It means he’d done too much.”

9

Few people mind saying they have a bad memory, but no one admits to having bad taste.

—PURPLE OF CASSIUS

IT WAS EXACTLY WHAT GERALD HAD SAID TO HER ALL THOSE YEARS AGO, the precise words: “I’d like you to have dinner with me.”

If he had put it differently—“Will you have dinner with me?” or “Will you dine with me?”—she might have responded differently. She might have said an unqualified yes. But the words shocked her. His voice wasn’t unlike Gerald’s, though his appearance was very unlike, but there in the mist, she briefly experienced a dreadful and eerie carrying back. In the intervening years, men had said many things to her, but none had asked her to have a meal with him in those words. She was sure her shock must show on her face, even in the white gloom.

“I’ll walk up the path with you if I may,” he said.

She collected herself. She felt very cold. The sexual pull this man had exerted over her was for the time quite gone. She walked mechanically ahead of him. There was no room on the winding path, with its occasional steps, for two to walk side by side.

“I’m going home on Friday,” he said, “and I’d very much like it if you’d have dinner with me tomorrow night or on Thursday.”

She found herself nodding, though she didn’t mean it as acceptance.

“It doesn’t have to be at the hotel. You probably know good restaurants around here. You choose.”

Afterward, she couldn’t have accounted for her answer. She simply didn’t know why she said what she said. “I won’t have dinner with you, but I’ll come up after dinner and have a drink.”