Barbara Vine - The Chimney Sweeper's Boy

Very little is more irritating than the speech patterns of someone we know to be intelligent yet who is ignorant of grammar and correct usage.

—A MESSENGER OF THE GODS

JASON THAGUE WAS VERY MUCH AS SHE HAD PICTURED HIM. There was something uncanny about this, because we don’t expect people to be the way we imagine them. Life isn’t like that, but perverse and contrary. She had envisioned a short, skinny boy with a round, spotty face and glasses and long, curly, not very clean hair, so by the time she got to Ipswich, she knew she was going to see a heavyset, smooth-faced man with a crew cut. Her original idea was almost what she got, and it made her laugh.

Except that he was older. Nearly as old as she, perhaps, his face formed and set in its permanent shape, the spots departed, having left pits and scars. It was a hungry face, perhaps literally hungry for food.

He had a room in a terrace on the outskirts, the opposite side of the town from Joan Thague’s outskirts. The house was Victorian, one of those Suffolk town houses of white brick without gable or bay on its facade, but still four stories high, and the room he had was on the top at the back. A room such as students have, dirty, a dump of paper and books, clothes and used cups and glasses, with an unmade bed, a view of rooftops, slummy backyards, and garbage cans, an Oasis poster on one wall and a Modigliani woman on another.

He offered her coffee, and she said yes so as not to be standoffish, but she winced when he found a mug under the bed and held it for a moment under a running cold tap. Unaccountably, he kept biscuits in a glass jar. They were chipped around the edges like old plates, and she quickly shook her head at them, too quickly perhaps, for she got a puzzled look before he began eating them himself. It was only later that it occurred to her he had saved them for her.

“Right,” he said. “I’ll tell you what I’ve found out.”

“Dr. Nuttall?”

“He had two sons,” he said. “He was easy to find, but of course he’s dead. One of the sons is dead, too. Natural causes, I guess. He’d have been eighty if he were alive. The other one—his name was Kenneth—was born in February 1921.”

“All these Kens,” she said.

“As you say. It must have been the sexy name. These days, Kens are all Chinese cooks. But this Ken would have been a bit old to be your father. I mean, in 1951, when your dad changed into someone else, Ken would have been thirty, not twenty-five. D’you reckon he’d have taken on the identity of someone who’d have been five years younger than himself?”

“More likely than taking on the identity of someone five years older,” said Sarah. “He’d want to be younger, wouldn’t he? People always want to be younger than they are.”

“Do they?” said Jason Thague, seeming unconvinced. “Could your dad have been seventy-six when he died?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. People vary, they grow old at different rates. How would I know? I just accepted he was the age he said he was.” As she had accepted everything else he said, as we mostly do accept. “Can we find this Kenneth Nuttall?”

“I don’t know. It’s not being able to find him that we want, isn’t it? I can have a go. I will. His father, the doctor, died in Ipswich, and so did his brother. I can start with the phone book. Now, there’s something I want to ask you.”

She looked at him. Coming here, talking to Jason Thague, had brought her suddenly to a feeling that she must give this up. She couldn’t account for it; it was illogical, absurd. The man was doing his best, had done wonders. But now it was as if she realized the impossibility of what they were trying to do. They had made too many assumptions, based everything on the tottering premise that the man who became Gerald Candless had known the dead Gerald Candless or known of him.

“Yes, what?” She sighed.

“Those books you sent me. I haven’t read any of them yet.”

Sarah shrugged. She was accustomed to the apparent paradox that students, who, of all people, have to do with the printed word and with learning, often make such heavy weather of having to read a book.

“I suppose you have your course work.”

He didn’t answer. “I haven’t read them, but I’ve had a look at them. What’s the point of that butterfly thing on their covers?”

“Butterfly? Oh, you mean the black moth.”

“Is that what it is. Why’s it there?”

She didn’t know. She had never asked; she had never thought much about it. “That silhouette, he had it on the heading of his stationery, on his cards, and, of course, on his books. I don’t know why. Does it matter?”

“It might. I’m in the business of looking for clues, aren’t I? How do you know it’s a moth and not a butterfly? I mean, I suppose there’s a difference. I don’t know what, but maybe you do.”

“He called it a moth,” Sarah said. “He used to talk of the emblem as ‘my black moth,’ but I don’t know why.”

“Could you find out? Ask your mother, maybe?”

“She wouldn’t know. I suppose my sister might. Is there any point in all this, Jason? Shouldn’t we just give up?”

He made a face. It was odd, but some women found that pockmarking attractive. Well, they must have, when you considered how many film actors had pitted faces. Of course, the actors didn’t otherwise look like Jason Thague.

“Is that why you came here, to say we should give up?” he asked.

No, she had just thought of it, she said. It had suddenly seemed to her so hopeless. Without anything in his books, in the papers he left behind him—or in any memory of what he might have said—to provide them with a lead, what chance did they have?

She said, thinking aloud, “You’re a bloke. What would you do? About changing your identity, I mean.”

“I’ve thought of that. It was the first thing I did when I started on this. I’d do it legally. But that means it gets published in the papers. Your dad had some reason for doing it secretly. Now, I don’t much like my name. I don’t like Jason or Thague. Chasin’ Jason. Facin’ Jason. Hasten, Jason, with the basin. So I’d change to names I really like. Say Jonathan. If I ever have a son, I’m going to call him Jonathan, so I’d have that. And then I like monosyllabic surnames that aren’t too common, so I’d have Dean or Bell or King. There you are—how about Jonathan King?”

“You’re saying my father’s favorite names were Gerald and Candless?”

“Not likely, is it? But Gerald must have been a favorite name with Kathleen and George Candless or they wouldn’t have named their son that.”

“If you’re right,” said Sarah, “we shall never get anywhere, because we can’t know why. I mean, you don’t know why you’d like to be called Jonathan King, do you?”

“I like the sound of it.”

“There you are, then,” said Sarah.

To Robert Postle, she wrote a cagey, cryptic sort of letter. Reading it in his office in Montague Street, reading it for the second time and reading between the lines, Robert thought she meant she was growing bored with the idea of the memoir. What else was meant by “presently insurmountable problems” and “difficulties in establishing a true picture of my father’s ancestry”?

He had just returned from lunch with Sarah Candless’s mother and Carlyon-Brent’s publicity director. They would be publishing Less Is More , Gerald Candless’s nineteenth and last novel, in January, and the publicist, Elaine Kirkman, wanted Ursula to help with its promotion. Ursula was in the publicity department with her now, talking about giving interviews to newspapers and magazines, attending literary lunches, and appearing on television. The aghast look on Ursula’s face had told him of her disinclination to do any of this, of her shock at being asked. The poor woman probably thought she had been fetched up to London to talk about a design for the book jacket or whether Gerald’s photograph should still be used on it.