Barbara Vine - The Chimney Sweeper's Boy

I wept when I remembered how often thou and I,

Had tired the sun with talking and sent him down the sky.

The next day, his obituary was in the Times.

Gerald Francis Candless, OBE, novelist, died July 6, age 71. He was born on May 10, 1926.

Gerald Candless was the author of eighteen novels, their publication spanning a period from 1955 to the present. He will probably be best remembered for Hamadryad, which was short-listed for the Booker Prize in 1979.

His novels were unusual in that, though literary fiction, they were, in the middle years, at any rate, both popular with the public and highly regarded by critics. It was only from the mid-eighties onward, however, that his fiction regularly appeared on best-seller lists, a phenomenon that seemed to coincide with a cooling of enthusiasm on the part of reviewers. It was suggested that his books were “too plot-driven” and sometimes that they resembled the “sensation fiction” of a hundred years before. Nevertheless, in a list compiled by newspaper reviewers in 1995, he was named as one of the leading twenty-five novelists of the second half of the twentieth century.

Candless was born in Ipswich, Suffolk, the only child of a printer and a nurse, George and Kathleen Candless, and grew up in that town. He was educated privately and later at Trinity College, Dublin, where he obtained a degree in classics. After university, he worked as a journalist for various weekly and provincial daily newspapers, first the Walthamstow Herald in East London and, more notably, the Western Morning News in Plymouth.

It was while in Plymouth that he wrote his first book, at the age of twenty-eight. Many years later, in an interview for the Daily Telegraph, he said he had followed the example of Anthony Trollope, got up at five every morning and wrote for three hours before going to work. The novel , The Centre of Attraction, was accepted by the third publisher to whom Candless sent it and was published in the autumn of 1955.

Three more books appeared, to increasing acclaim, before Candless was able to live by his writing. It was a long time, however, before he abandoned journalism altogether, as in the early sixties, about the time of his marriage, he became a fiction reviewer for the Daily Mail, and later, for a while, its book-page editor, then deputy literary editor of the Observer.

He was at this time living in London, in Hampstead, where his daughters were born. Later, he moved with his family to a part of the country that had been a favorite with him since Plymouth days, the north Devon coast between Bideford and Ilfracombe. There, on the outskirts of the village of Gaunton, he bought Lundy View House on the clifftop above Gaunton Dunes, where he lived and worked from 1970 until his death.

Candless became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1976 and was awarded the OBE in the 1986 Birthday Honours. His death was from coronary thrombosis. He is survived by his widow, the former Ursula Wick, and by his daughters, Sarah and Hope.

There were not many at the funeral. Gerald Candless had no relatives, not even a cousin or two. The girls were there, and Fabian Lerner, who was Hope’s boyfriend, as well as Ursula’s widowed sister and her married niece, Pauline.

“When my mother was young, women never went to funerals,” said Daphne Batty, washing sherry glasses. Old Mrs. Batty was ninety-three. “They called it ‘following,’ and women didn’t follow.”

“Why not?” said Ursula.

“They was the weaker sex, and it could have been too much for them.”

“Aren’t they the weaker sex any longer, then?”

“They’ve been getting stronger through the years, haven’t they? You know that.” Daphne looked over her shoulder, checking that she wasn’t about to be overheard. “That Fabian only came because he’d never been to a funeral before,” she said. “He told me. He wanted to see what it was like.”

“I hope it came up to expectations,” said Ursula, thinking of Hope’s display when the coffin was lowered into the AstroTurf-lined pit. For a moment, she had thought her daughter was going to throw herself in on top of it like Laertes in Ophelia’s grave.

Gerald’s publisher had thought so, too. He took a step forward and she heard him mutter, “Oh no, no.”

But Hope had only crouched down on the glittering green plastic stuff and wailed while she watched the last of her father disappear into the earth. Wailed, and when Pauline—Why her? Who asked her to do it?—threw a handful of gravel in on top of the coffin, she sobbed and flung herself backward and forward, clutching handfuls of hair from under her black velvet pancake hat.

Sarah said, “She’s taken it very hard. We all have. It’s just as real for us, but we don’t show our emotions the way she does.”

Ursula didn’t say anything.

“He was the most wonderful father anyone could have had. When I think of the fathers of other people my age … When we were little—but I can’t talk about it. I can’t yet. I just start crying. I’m as bad as Hope, really.”

“You’re not as ostentatious,” said Ursula.

Sarah looked closely at her mother, who was sitting at the kitchen table with a mug of coffee in front of her. Ursula was a sturdy, straight-backed woman with rather pretty but not memorable features, a still-unlined, smooth face, calm blue-gray eyes, and untidy fairish gray-streaked hair that was always coming loose from its knot. Long hair done up in a bun from which strands constantly escape looks charming on a young girl, thought Sarah, but on an older woman, it’s just a mess. But there were few people to see her mother, no one really now that Gerald was gone, except Daphne Batty.

That put her in mind of what she wanted to say. Not exactly what she wanted to say, but what she thought she should say. “You know I can’t stay on here. And Hope can’t. Not after tomorrow. So would you like to come back with me?” It didn’t sound very gracious. She tried again. “I’ll be happy to have you. You can stay as long as you like. You could stay in and have a quiet time while I’m at work, or you could go shopping and … well, have your hair done.” She thought of adding that Hope would come over in the evenings, but she couldn’t be sure if this was true.

“You could go shopping at Camden Lock,” said Sarah. “You’re a great walker. It’s a nice walk to St. John’s Wood.”

“It’s a nice walk along the beach to Franaton Burrows,” said Ursula. “It’s very good of you, Sarah, but I shall be quite all right here. I think I should be alone. I should get used to it.” She didn’t say she had been alone in all important respects for three decades. Having someone else in the house, a large, clever, overbearing yet indifferent presence, mitigates loneliness not at all. But she didn’t say it, because she had never said such things to her daughters or, indeed, to anyone. “In any case,” she said, “Pauline is going to come and stay with me for a few days.”

Although she cast up her eyes, Sarah made no adverse comment on this solution to what she saw as Ursula’s problem. She and her mother were so unaccustomed to telling each other what they really felt, so habituated to the utterance of platitudes or casual remarks, that she didn’t now say, “Rather you than me.” Or “Why are you doing penance?” She said only, “I suppose she’ll be company for you.”

Pauline was company. She was more company than Gerald had been, because it didn’t really matter much what you said to her, or if you said anything at all half the time. She was thirty-eight and had often come to stay when the girls were little. She was just sufficiently older to enjoy looking after them. And like all young girls who came to the house, the house in Hampstead and later this one, she had thought Gerald Candless the nicest, kindest, loveliest grown-up she had ever known. When she was fourteen, she had been in love with him. Then there had been that trouble. No one knew exactly what kind of trouble except Pauline and Gerald, but whatever it was, he had gotten over it and she had, and when she got married at the age of twenty-one, she asked him to give her away, her own father being dead by then.