Barbara Vine - The Chimney Sweeper's Boy

Emboldened by Joan’s confidential manner, Sarah asked if she might see the photograph albums that had been displayed on her first visit but which were absent now. Joan nodded and went away to fetch them. Once she was gone, Maureen got up and lumbered over to the window, stretching herself and rolling her heavy shoulders. Then she turned to Sarah and said coldly, “I wonder you aren’t content to let bygones be bygones.”

“I’m sorry?”

“If it were my dad, which frankly I can’t imagine, I wouldn’t want to bring any more to light. You never know what you’ll find when you start looking under stones, do you?”

Joan Thague brought back three albums. They were the kind of thing Sarah knew families had but that were so conspicuously absent from her own home. Looking through the shoe box of photographs her mother kept in her bedroom, she had been rather taken aback by the paucity of the collection. It was on the day she had found the palm, and she had been holding that curious religious symbol in her left hand when she sifted through the snapshots—the single photograph of her parents at their wedding, baby shots of Hope and herself—and found the one picture that was of real interest to her. This was of a young Gerald, younger than in that wedding pose, slim, dark, stunningly handsome. He was standing against a seawall somewhere and in the background was an island and a wooded escarpment.

“He gave me that when we were engaged,” her mother had said indifferently.

Sarah had identified the setting herself. It was Plymouth Hoe and that was Drake’s Island, with Mount Edgcumbe Park behind. Gerald Candless, firmly entrenched in that name by then, twenty-seven or twenty-eight, working for the Western Morning News. Now she looked at the pages Joan Sprague turned for her. Sepia photographs and then black-and-white photographs. Joan had to explain that this postcard-size shot of a man and a woman walking along an esplanade with two children had been taken by seaside photographers, something of which Sarah had no experience, though living by the sea for much of her childhood. But she looked closely at such a picture of George and Kathleen Candless with Joan and the small Gerald at Felixstowe and understood from this pictorial rendering what no words could entirely have told her: that these people could not have been her grandparents nor this child her father. DNA testing isn’t the only answer.

George had been a little man, stunted perhaps by poverty in his youth. His wife was taller than he and broad in her striped Macclesfield silk dress, strap shoes, and small obligatory hat. Both had puddingy faces, small eyes, snub noses, he a large chin, she puffy cheeks, and what showed of their hair under their hats looked mousy fair. The little boy, Sarah perceived, could never have grown into her father. Even cosmetic surgery would not have changed that pudgy face with the close-set eyes and George Candless’s chin into what she thought of and Hope had once called, half serious, half joking, all adoring, their father’s noble countenance.

She turned to look at Joan Thague and cried out involuntarily, “Oh, I’m sorry, I’m sorry!” for Joan was weeping, as Ursula had wept in the taxi to Paddington station, but somehow far more wretchedly and despairingly.

Giving birth to Hope had been hard. Ursula had never heard of a woman having a normal and easy delivery the first time and a cesarean the second. But it happens and it had happened to her. There was no milk and there was no joy.

She found that she had no feeling for the new baby. Gerald chose her name and, though he consulted her, she wasn’t interested. She would as soon have named the child Despair. “Call her what you like,” she said, and slept. All she wanted to do was sleep. She wasn’t physically ill. Physically she recovered within a week and the scar was fast disappearing. That was in the days before they recognized or had a name for postnatal depression. Her mother came over to Hampstead and told her she had felt just the same after Helen’s birth but that there was no use in moping; you had to pull yourself together and get on with things. After all, no one would do it for you.

There Betty Wick was wrong. The one who would was Gerald. But even he was hardly able to look after a baby and an infant not yet two on his own. He engaged a nanny. Ursula must have known her name at the time, though Gerald, as if he came from the upper class, always addressed her as “Nanny.”

Whatever her name had been, Ursula couldn’t remember it now. She had always thought of her and spoken of her as “the woman.”

The woman was highly qualified, very competent, brisk, and efficient. She knew her job. She despised Ursula and made that plain, but Ursula, from a distance of thirty years, from any distance, come to that, couldn’t have accused the woman of stealing her children’s love. Gerald did that. When she read Hand to Mouth , she understood that it wasn’t an accident, that it wasn’t chance, but a deliberate act. He said so in the book.

Sometimes she wondered whether things would have been different if she had managed to take Betty’s advice and pull herself together. If she had asserted herself. But a black depression settled over her, as if a blanket had been dropped to envelop her; she retreated into its folds and curled up and shut her eyes.

The woman didn’t sleep in the house, but went home to Edgware. There would have been room for her if Gerald had slept in Ursula’s bedroom, but he had moved out so as not to disturb her, he said, when one of the children woke. He had Hope’s cot beside his bed. Every morning, he took Hope in to see her, but he could detect her indifference to the baby, and later, looking back, she thought she could remember his satisfied expression, his pleasure.

She had made so many mistakes. But she hadn’t thought it was a question of correctness or mistakes. It wasn’t an examination. In her depression, she was so helpless. All interest in anything was lost, all desire to move, even to open her eyes. For a time, she wasn’t even ashamed of how she felt; she was beyond shame, beyond love or guilt or hope. Her mother made her bathe or she would never have washed herself. She grew thin and weak.

Then the depression lifted. One day, she was in darkness, in despair; the next, she had come out of it and stood in the light. She felt better: Optimism returned and her strength came back. She was never able to account for the change. As she grew well again, able to get up and go downstairs, she tried to love Hope as she loved Sarah. But Hope cried a lot; she was a colicky baby who regurgitated a milky part-digested dribble of every feeding. Ursula’s mistake, one of her mistakes and not the first, was to tell Gerald how she felt.

“ I love her,” he said, “so it doesn’t matter.”

“It’s unnatural not to love one’s own child. A little baby, Gerald. What’s wrong with me?”

“Strange,” he said, and he looked at her as he sometimes did, like a scientist scrutinizing a specimen. “I wouldn’t call you a masculine woman, yet it’s men who feel like that. Many men feel like that about their own children when they’re babies.”

“But not you.”

“No, not I.” (He would never have said “not me.”) “Just as well, isn’t it?”

It was love she had wanted, and reassurance. She wanted someone—him—to say, “You’ll soon come to love her. Hold her every day, take her cot into your room, have her with you more, cuddle her, and kiss her.” He only said she was strange. She was unnatural. What she would have liked was for them all to sit together, perhaps on the big sofa in the living room, with Sarah on her lap and Hope in his arms, but close, all touching one another, an entwined family group. And then it would get better. She would love her baby; she would be happy. If Gerald would love her, she would love them, all of them.