Barbara Vine - The Chimney Sweeper's Boy

Sarah said, “You must be the most uncouth bastard in the West Country.” Someone gasped.

“And you are quite a bitch yourself,” he said.

She was trembling. “Good night,” she said, her voice shaking. “Good night, Rosie darling. Good night, Vicky, Alex. Nice to have met you, Tyger.” She rushed off around the back, under the old coaching arch, into the yard, into the car park. She stood by the car for a moment, for a whole two minutes in the cold. Then she got into the car, reversed, and drove out by the exit into a side street. She was sick with excitement, with terror, choking with it.

He was in a doorway, leaning against the wall, smoking a cigarette. She pulled across to him and he got into the car in silence. No kisses, no touching, no words. Why couldn’t it always be like this? she thought. Perhaps it could. That made her draw in her breath with a sound, but he took no notice. After a moment or two, as if she were his hired driver, he told her to take Bishop’s Tawton Road and there, about a mile out, to turn into the hotel that stood at the end of a long drive.

It was eleven at night and they had no suitcases, but the reservation was confirmed and no comment was made. Once inside the bedroom, he closed the door and locked it, then turned out all the lights but one small lamp. From opposite sides of the room, they moved toward each other, and, taking her face in one hand, he began to lick her mouth, her lips first, forcing them apart, then penetrating to touch her teeth, her tongue, as if he meant to eat her alive. But slowly, with infinite time and relish. With wide-open eyes, she looked into his cold, expressionless ones. Then her eyelids fell as his did. They touched and felt each other in silence.

Hope’s taxi got her home half an hour later. Her mother and Pauline had gone to bed. She poured herself a large whiskey, thought about adding water to it but added a single lump of ice instead. For some reason, she thought the door to her father’s study might be locked, but it wasn’t. It smelled of him; it was full of him. She had continued to sit on his lap until a week before his death. Never mind what people thought. She sat on his lap and wound her arms around his neck and he put his arm around her waist and held her hand. Often she had come in here, knowing he would have finished work, and found him sitting in the big armchair, reading over what he had written. And she always kissed his cheek and sat in his lap, sometimes without speaking. If anyone had asked Hope what love was, she would have said what she had for her father and he had for her.

She sat down in his armchair in the dark. She kicked off her shoes, wrapped her coat around her, her warm coat, which she could fancy as comforting as strong arms. The tears began to fall, but she drank her whiskey, curled her legs up under her, and soon fell asleep.

14

Faith is believing in what you know to be false.

—TIME TOO SWIFT

NOT A DISAPPEARANCE, NOT A VANISHING into another country, but a death. Ken Applestone had died of cancer four years before. His son had been expansive to Jason Thague on the phone, had talked for twenty minutes, offering unasked-for details, a painful description of his father’s final year, the burnt-out lungs, the cigarettes snatched between the gulps of oxygen.

Sarah didn’t want to hear that. It was disquieting to her even thirdhand. “He was quite old, surely.” But her father, not much Ken Applestone’s senior, had been too young to die.… “Did you ask your grandmother about the family doctor?”

“I asked her about all sorts of callers at the house,” Jason said. “There was a chair mender. He came to redo the cane seats of chairs. A Mr. Smith—he’s going to be a breeze to trace, isn’t he? The vet came. They had a dog that got distemper—I reckon we’d call it something else, wouldn’t we?—and the vet came, but it was no good and the dog was put down. She couldn’t remember what the vet’s name was. Or the milkman’s or the postman’s, if she ever knew. The doctor was named Nuttall. Dr. Nuttall.”

“Did he have a son the same age as your great-uncle?”

“My what? Oh, right, yes, I suppose that’s what he was, poor little kid. Or would have been. My nan doesn’t know; she knows he had children, but she can’t remember their sexes. Amazing to remember the name, don’t you think?”

“Yes, I do.” Sarah suppressed the rather unkind remark she had wanted to make, that Mrs. Thague would be unlikely to remember the name of someone who had come to the house yesterday. “So can we find this Dr. Nuttall?”

“He’d be at least a hundred if he was alive.”

“Right, but can we find his descendants? Can’t we look him up in Crockford ?”

“That’s not doctors,” said Jason, “that’s vicars. I’ll find out what it is for doctors and I’ll find him.”

She was beginning to wonder. Perhaps her father’s origins would never be found. A letter had come from Robert Postle, asking her how she was getting on and suggesting they should meet and discuss her progress, but she hadn’t answered it. She didn’t know what to say. After a tutorial the previous week, one of her students asked if she was “anything to do with” Gerald Candless, and she had said, yes, she was his daughter. But even as she had said it, she had this uneasy feeling about his name, her name, their claim to it. Would she ever feel right about her father, not just his name and his deception, but her father , if she couldn’t find who he was? Would she feel content then?

She had begun rereading his books. If everything he wrote had its origins in historical fact, how much filtering, adapting, altering, twisting, distorting, flattering, debasing, glamorizing, and mutilating of that fact took place before it found its way onto paper? How could you tell? It might be that the ambitious artist daughter from the large Liverpool family in A Paper Landscape was a substitute or replacement for the ambitious writer son from a large Ipswich family, family size and the spur of fame being clues. Or that he had had a father or stepfather or uncle who was a religious fanatic, like Jacob Manley in Eye in the Eclipse.

But he might not have been writing about himself here, only about someone he knew. Was he one of the children uprooted from his home on the death of his father? Was he the man who married for the sole purpose of becoming a father? You might as well say he was the man who killed his lover in A White Webfoot. Or even imagined himself the dead man.

It was a beautiful book to look at, this one. Jacket designs, she thought, had taken such a turn for the better in the eighties, and this one with its painting of a silvery blue marsh landscape and white wading birds under a sky of clouds as delicate as feathers, the colors muted, the finish matte, was one of the finest examples. But the moth at the foot of the spine, incongruously black, made a sharp contrast to those watery shades. She wondered what had happened to the original—why hadn’t he possessed it, as he had possessed the original designs for Hamadryad and Phantom Listeners ?

She would ask Robert Postle, get in touch with him by the end of the week, say something to delay a meeting, make some excuse but not tell the truth. She wasn’t going to reveal her father’s secret to Postle, not, at least, until she had found out what that secret was. And if she had to abandon the attempt … Nevertheless, she would phone him. Something brought into her mind at that point the phone call made by a man called Sam something or other and that she had promised to get her mother to call him back. Still, it very likely wasn’t important, and he would have called back if it was. She couldn’t remember the number he had given her, anyway.