Barbara Vine - The Chimney Sweeper's Boy

If Pauline hadn’t been there, would he have taken the unprecedented step of being absent from home for a whole day and a night and half the next day? Would he have done this not once, but twice, if this eager, bossy, patient, and managing child hadn’t been in the house to supervise the happiness of his daughters?

The private detective had been on Gerald’s tail for a few months by then. He was expensive, and he had found out practically nothing. Ursula, who had expected some dashing gumshoe, a Philip Marlowe, asked herself what she was doing when she walked up the uncarpeted wooden staircase to the rooms over a theatrical costumers on the Soho fringes and found two middle-aged portly men in an office full of cigarette smoke and a bent white-haired secretary, at least old enough to be their mother. Later on, Ursula discovered this secretary was the mother of one of them.

Dickie Parfitt was polite, urbane, and knowing. Indeed, he was too knowing, for he assumed from the first that this was what he called “divorce work.” Most of what he and Mr. Cullen did was in connection with divorces. Ursula had to explain that she wished to know only where her husband went, that there was no thought of ending her marriage. But afterward, as she walked back to the Tottenham Court Road underground station and the Northern line, she considered what Mr. Parfitt had said. He had put ideas into her head.

His first report reached her a week later. Gerald was referred to as “the subject.” Better than Mr. X, Ursula supposed. Dickie Parfitt had followed him while he was out with Sarah and Hope and pursued him all over Hampstead while (like Shelley) he had made paper boats and sailed them on the Vale of Health pond, visited the geese and peacocks in Golders Hill Park, and bought ice creams in the Finchley Road. Another time, he went to Canfield Gardens in West Hampstead and was inside a house with the children for four hours. Mr. Parfitt was pleased with his find, but Ursula knew Gerald had only gone to the home of a university teacher and poet he knew named Beattie Paris, who, with his girlfriend, Maggie, had two daughters of similar age to Sarah and Hope.

That was before Pauline came. Pauline thought it amusing to see Gerald wheeling Hope about in a stroller, and she said so.

“My father says that’s a job for a woman,” she said.

Gerald laughed. He didn’t seem to mind. He treated most of Pauline’s gnomic utterances as if she were the soul of wit. When she saw him sitting with Sarah on one knee and Hope on the other, an arm around each, she again quoted a parent.

“My mother says you can overstimulate children.”

“Oh, can you now?” said Gerald, laughing. “And what happens to them when you do that? Do they break things or have fits? What do they do?”

Pauline said she didn’t know, but she stared at him and his daughters with envy. A little later on, she went and stood by Gerald’s chair. She leaned against the wing of the chair, then shifted herself to lean against his shoulder. Gerald was telling the girls his story about the chimney sweeper’s boy. Installment fifteen or something like that, it must have been by that time. Pauline stood there listening.

The chair was big and Gerald was big. There was plenty of room. Gerald looked up into Pauline’s wistful face.

“Come and be overstimulated,” he said.

He hoisted Hope up onto the arm of the chair so that her cheek was close enough to his cheek to brush it, and he made room for Pauline on his knee. His arm went around both of them. Pauline perched there awkwardly at first, but eventually she relaxed. Ursula watched them. Probably few men today, in the nineties, that decade of lost innocence, would do what Gerald had done and take a tall, precocious ten-year-old girl onto their knee. Probably Gerald himself wouldn’t. But no one thought anything of it then. Except Ursula, and what she wondered was how it had happened that children all preferred Gerald to her, how it was that she was apparently no good with children, that even her own only suffered her, sometimes let her kiss and hold them, but wouldn’t, she believed, have missed her had she been gone.

They missed Gerald when he disappeared for those two days. “I want my daddy” was the continuous refrain. But before that happened, Dickie Parfitt had followed him to an address Ursula didn’t know, a house that belonged to no one she knew. Gerald had gone out alone, telling her he was doing research for an article he intended to write. When he went out, he always told her where he was going. Or, rather, he half-told her. That is, he would say it was for the purposes of research or to see his publisher or visit a library, but he never said what kind of research or why he had to see his publisher or which work of reference he required.

“I’m going out in about an hour,” he said. “There’s something I need to check.”

Dickie Parfitt, alerted by a reluctant, near-nauseous Ursula, was waiting for him, lurking in the neighborhood of the underground station in Heath Road. He followed him into the train and changed with him on to the Central line at Tottenham Court Road. Gerald got out of the train at Leytonstone and walked westward along Fairlop Road, turned left into Hainault Road, and crossed into Leyton at Leigh Road. Ursula, reading Dickie’s account, had no idea where any of these places were. She had barely heard of Leyton and Leytonstone but had a vague idea of them as dowdy eastern suburbs.

The street for which Gerald was heading was called Goodwin Road, near where the London Midland railway line passed over Leyton High Road. It sounded unattractive, even slummy, though Dickie made no comment on the charms or otherwise of the neighborhood. Gerald stopped about halfway along the street and fixed his eyes on a house on the opposite side. A van was parked near where he was standing. It was empty. He positioned himself behind the cab in such a way, according to Dickie Parfitt, as to be able to see the house he was watching through the windows on the driver’s side and the passenger’s side of the cab, yet not be seen himself.

It was a fine day, and standing a hundred yards off, watching Gerald Candless watching a house, wasn’t an unpleasant task for Dickie, who had done much the same thing in driving rain and snowstorms. But after half an hour, he began to wonder how long “the subject” would stick it out. Until the driver of the van returned?

Then something happened. The front door of the house under observation opened and a woman came out. Dickie gave no detailed description of her, but he said she was “elderly” and pushing a shopping basket on wheels. She was not, unless Gerald Candless’s secret was that he was a gerontophile, his lover, but he took a photograph of her all the same. He watched her pass along the street in the direction of Leyton Midland railway station. Once she was out of sight, Gerald began walking in the opposite direction, toward Leigh Road. He simply retraced his steps, got back into the underground, and returned home.

It occurred to Dickie that if all Gerald Candless wanted to do was watch a house, he could have done so far more easily from inside a car. This he bore in mind. Meanwhile, he had high hopes for Gerald’s plan to be away for a day, a night, and half the next day. He followed Gerald into the underground once more. This time, he changed at King’s Cross on to the Circle, getting out at Paddington, where, in the main-line station, he bought a first-class return ticket for Barnstaple. Dickie, behind him in the queue, bought an economy-class ticket.

By this time, Dickie confidently expected Gerald would be joined on the train by a “young lady,” and he walked through to carriage H to check. But Gerald was alone, reading a book and eating a Mars bar. They changed at Exeter, but there was no young lady there, either, then commenced (Dickie’s word) the long, slow journey to Barnstaple. And there Dickie, inevitably, lost him. For Gerald was met at the station by a man in a car, an ordinary sort of man driving a green Volvo, while Dickie waited in vain for a taxi.