Barbara Vine - The Chimney Sweeper's Boy

“She can’t tell you anything,” she said. “I expect you’ll have had a wasted journey.”

This time, Sarah sensed, there was going to be no tea, no cakes on a plate with a paper doily. Joan Thague sat very upright and on the edge of an armchair made for the adoption of a more relaxed attitude. She looked uncomfortable and she was. She had been uncomfortable since Sarah’s previous visit, having suffered repeated bad dreams for the first time in many years. And in the daytime, while apparently occupied with something quite removed from her family and the past, she had heard, as if a real child were in the house and a real child somewhere in pain, a thin, weary voice crying, “My head hurts, my head hurts.” She’d been cooking a meal for her grandson Jason, standing at the stove, frying chips, when the child called her and she heard it, for she wasn’t deaf to that voice.

None of this, of course, had been told to J.G. and his wife. They were given no details, only the bare facts. Joan was surprised they didn’t know them already, and offended, too, hurt, rather, that J.G.’s mother had never said a word to him about Gerald and Gerald’s death, had forgotten him or ignored him, as if he had never existed. Maureen was kind, especially in the matter of taking her to the Martlesham Tesco, but she didn’t want Maureen there. She didn’t want Sarah Candless, either. Or anyone.

And Sarah hardly knew how to begin. The two women were looking at her as if she were a social worker come to accuse them of mistreating a child. Joan Thague cleared her throat, brought her hands together, and looked down at her wedding ring. For the first time, Sarah was conscious of the smell in the house, a laboratory’s attempt at re-creating the scent of daffodils and hyacinths. She thought she ought to preface her inquiries with some kind of apology for her father, and on the way here, she had rehearsed this, but it had turned into an apology for herself, for caring about a man who had manifestly been so false and so deceitful, and she couldn’t bring herself to make it. Instead she said, “I feel that my father must have known your family. As a child, he must have lived somewhere near. He lived here till he was ten. And he had a Suffolk accent.”

“Well, that’s something no one in this family ever had,” Maureen Candless said in a huffy tone and broad Ipswich.

“He had a trace of it,” Sarah said. “That’s been something for me to hold on to.” She looked from one implacable face to the other, from Joan’s wary eyes to the twitch at the end of Maureen’s nose. “I’m sure you can understand.” Why do we say we’re sure when we mean we have the gravest doubts? “I wondered if you had a neighbor with a boy of your brother’s age, Mrs. Thague. Or friends of the family. Or if he had school friends.”

Joan Thague looked at her cousin’s wife. For reassurance? Comfort? Permission? No, not that last. Joan Thague was, in the current phrase, her own woman. She said, “When you get old, you remember your childhood better than what happened yesterday. Did you know that?”

Sarah nodded.

“Gerald hadn’t been at school long. The elementary school, that is. They didn’t call them primary schools then. He was the only little boy in our street who went to that school. There weren’t any other little boys. I know that, because Mother said it was a shame there was no one for him to play with.”

“He had no one to play with?”

“He had me,” said Joan Thague.

“Yes, but no one his own age?”

“We had these cousins, my mother’s sister’s children. Two boys and a girl. Donald and Kenneth and Doreen.” Joan had been thinking about it, racking her brain. “They used to come. My auntie brought them to tea once a week. She fetched the boys from school and brought them to tea and Gerald played with Don and Ken. Doreen was only little, too young for school. We had a special tea when they came. Mother made a sponge with chocolate butter icing.”

It was a middle-class picture, not what Sarah had expected. She enunciated carefully, conscious that Joan needed to read her lips. “Your mother was a nurse. Did she go out nursing? I mean, did she go to people’s houses? I thought there might have been someone she nursed who had a boy or a boy she nursed.”

“My father would never have allowed my mother to work.” Mrs. Thague was more than indignant. A flush burned across her face. “He was a master printer. It would have looked as if he couldn’t support his family.”

So why was she listed as a nurse on that birth certificate? Out of a struggling attempt, doomed to instant failure, on Kathleen Candless’s part to assert herself as a person, not merely an appendage? This, at any rate, was how Sarah saw it. Not anxious to look into Mrs. Thague’s face but knowing she must if the woman was to understand her, she asked about Don and Ken, the cousins, their ages, their fate.

“You can’t expect her to know that,” said Maureen Candless.

Because Maureen hadn’t been looking in her direction, Joan hadn’t heard. The flush fading, the outrage subsiding, she said, “They were both younger than me and older than Gerald. Don would have been ten and Ken seven when—when my brother died. He was killed in the war, Don, I mean, in the desert at El Alamein.”

To Sarah’s astonishment, she eased her chair a little toward her, edging its legs across the carpet. She peered into Sarah’s face. It was as if her outrage over what she took as suggestions her family might not have been comfortably off had cleared some obstruction in her head. Some inhibition had been broken down by a surge of anger. She leaned forward, her relative’s wife forgotten.

“They weren’t Candlesses. My mother was a Mitchell; she and her sister were Kathleen and Dorothy Mitchell and my auntie Dorothy was a Mrs. Applestone. So they were all Applestones, Don and Ken and Doreen. Not Candlesses. You understand that, don’t you?”

“I don’t believe my father was a Candless, Mrs. Thague. I’m sure he wasn’t. I think he just took the name.”

“That puts a different complexion on things,” said Maureen, catching on at last. Her tone was lighter, relief mixed in it. She began slowly shaking her head, as if such iniquity as Sarah’s father’s had been was undreamed of in her philosophy.

“My cousin Ken,” Joan Thague said, “Ken Applestone. I don’t know what became of him. I left home, you see. When I was fifteen. The fact was, I couldn’t stand being home after Gerald was gone. I couldn’t bear it.” She cast a glance at Maureen, perhaps to check the effect such a small display of feeling might have had on her. “I went into lodgings in Sudbury and worked in the silk mill. Then I met my husband and I got married—I came home to Ipswich to get married—and we lived there, over the shop on Melford Road, and he went into the army, and what with one thing and another, I lost touch with the family. With the Applestones, I mean, not with my family. I always wrote regular to my mother and she to me. That’s how I heard about Don, through my mother.”

“But no one mentioned Ken?”

“I know he was in the air force, went in when he was eighteen, in ’forty-three.” She had looked down into her lap as she sometimes did when she was speaking, as opposed to the stare into the speaker’s face she gave when listening, but now she looked up. “My mother died in ’fifty-one, but she’d have told me if Ken’d died in the war. I think he was alive and living—now, where did he live?—when she died, but after that—I saw Auntie Dorothy at Mother’s funeral and I don’t reckon I ever saw her again.”

“Where did he live, Mrs. Thague?”

“Let me think. In Essex, I think it was. Chelmsford. Yes, it was Chelmsford, but that was forty-six years ago, and that’s a long time in anyone’s reckoning.”