Barbara Vine - The Chimney Sweeper's Boy

At this point, she understood something. It was so clear and obvious, a child would have seen it, but she hadn’t until this moment. Only if Ken Applestone was not to be found could she seriously begin to think of him as her father. The harder it became to find him, the more likely he was to be her father.

That evening, she phoned all the Applestones in the London phone book. There weren’t many. One of them, the last she phoned, said that her father had mentioned cousins called Donald and Kenneth and that the woman to get in touch with was another cousin, a woman named Victoria Anderson, who lived in Exeter. Sarah got this woman’s phone number from directory assistance, then dialed it and encountered an answering service. She left her name and number and a brief explanation of what she wanted, and half an hour later the phone rang.

A voice said, “Ms. Sarah Candless?”

It hadn’t sounded feminine, but still she said, “Victoria Anderson?”

“No, should it be? I sort of wish it was. My name’s Jason Thague, and anything’s better than that. I’m Joan’s grandson.”

It was three days since she had been to Ipswich, but she was sure he was going to reprove her. She imagined him saying, “How dare you come here and upset my gran? She’s an old lady. She’s not strong. Who do you think you …”

“What can I do for you, Mr. Thague?”

“Jason, please. I don’t think anyone’s called me Mr. Thague before. Ever.” His wasn’t a Suffolk voice; rather, the accent dubbed in the eighties “Estuary English.” “It’s more a case of what can I do for you,” he said.

She hesitated. “Can you do anything for me?”

“I don’t know. I hope so. My nan’s told me about you and what you’re doing. That was the first I’d heard of her having a little brother who died. The first my dad’d heard, come to that.” He paused, then said in a stronger tone, “The fact is, I’m permanently strapped for cash. I’m a student, if you know what that means.”

“I should,” she said. “I teach them.”

“Right. I thought—I’d like —to give it a go at finding your dad for you. Who he was, I mean. I think I’d be good at it. I’m in the right place, for a start. I know the place, worse luck. But I do know it. If he came from around here, I reckon I could trace him, and if there’s any more to be gotten out of Joan, I’m the man to do it.”

“You would want to be paid, of course?”

“I’m doing it for the money,” he said simply.

She realized only now, late in the day, that attempting to find her father’s origins had brought her a chronic distress. She hated it, the phone calls, the visits, the search through records. The excitement was all gone. Because it was her father, whom she had loved and honored and who, she had lately constantly felt, might not be worthy of even common respect.

“All right,” she said. “Why not? Do you want some sort of contract?”

“I’d better. I’m tempted to take your word, but that wouldn’t be businesslike, would it? You can send me a contract and all the info you’ve got about your dad.”

The next day, she packed it all up for him: photocopies of her father’s birth certificate and documents from the Walthamstow Herald , the Western Morning News , Trinity College records. In her covering letter, she gave it as her opinion—and it hurt her to write it—that some unknown man, probably twenty-five years old, probably a trained journalist, probably born in Ipswich and a resident there till the age of ten, had in the summer of 1951 assumed the identity of Gerald Candless.

He might have attended a university somewhere, though not Trinity College, Dublin. He might have served in one of the armed forces during World War II. He was the right age. His hair had been black when he was young. His eyes were brown. He had no scars or what used to be called on passports “distinguishing marks.” She winced, writing these things to an unknown, brash young man with a common accent. She thought she could see him in her mind’s eye, short and weedy, the puddingy Candless (the real Candless) face triumphing over Thague genes, spotty skin, round glasses, shaggy brown hair to his shoulders.

She wrote, “My father used to say he put everything that happened to him into his novels, these events being subject to the filtering process and subtle metamorphosis that operates with all novelists when using autobiographical detail in their work. I am sure you are aware of this.” (She wasn’t; she was far from sure. She thought of her own students.) “It may still be worthwhile considering passages in his novels as possible pointers to his identity. I would direct you to A Paper Landscape , in which he describes life as a member of a large Irish immigrant family who he writes about very tellingly. I mean by this that the reader can easily believe in this fiction as truth.

“It may be useful, too, to look at his first novel, The Centre of Attraction. Its early chapters are about World War II, when a young man of eighteen serves in the Royal Navy in Northern Ireland and later in the Far East. You may be a fan of my father’s and have these books, but if not, I will, of course, send you copies.”

When she returned from the post office, her phone was ringing. Victoria Anderson. Anderson was her married name. She had been born Applestone, the daughter of Charles Applestone’s younger brother Thomas. Donald, Kenneth, and Doreen Applestone had, therefore, been her first cousins, though all much older than she. Doreen, the baby in Joan Thague’s account, had been twenty-one when she was born.

Sarah quickly realized that here she had come across one of those family fanatics, as passionate about genealogical entanglements as she had been indifferent. Victoria Anderson would have her own personally created family trees, one for the maternal side, one for the paternal. It would be an ongoing irritation to her that she had failed, say, to get back further than 1795. She would be maddened by her inability to find the Christian name of a woman married in the 1820s or that of the child born in 1834 and destined to live only two days.

She reflected on all this while Victoria Anderson detailed the forebears of Mitchells and Thagues, digressing to catalog the eight children born to her cousin Doreen in two marriages.

“And Ken Applestone?” Sarah prompted her.

“He emigrated to Canada.”

“When was that?”

“Ken? I thought it was Don Applestone you were interested in. Wasn’t that what you said in your message? Well, one of us must have gotten it wrong. Don married in ’forty-one, you know. He was only nineteen, but he married and had a son called Tony before he was killed in Egypt. Tony’s quite a lot older than I am, but we keep in touch.…”

“When did Ken emigrate?”

“Nineteen fifty-one.” She must have been reading all this. Probably she had it on a computer, stowed under FAM.DOC. “He went to Canada in ’fifty-one. That’s the year I was born.”

“So you got all this from someone else?”

“Naturally. My mother told me about Ken emigrating, though she’d never met him. My father knew him, but my father died ten years ago. I did try to follow Ken up.”

I bet you did, Sarah thought. “How did you try?”

“I had a friend in Montreal. She went through phone books for me.” Victoria Anderson’s voice dropped, becoming intense. “I didn’t care to have a dead end, you see. He might have married and had children; he almost certainly did. It’s quite personally upsetting to me to have gaps in my genealogical tables.”

Not as upsetting as it is to me. Sarah said impatiently, “The fact is, then, that there’s been no contact with Ken Applestone since 1951?”