Barbara Vine - The Chimney Sweeper's Boy

Jason Thague always took a long time answering because the phone was downstairs in that tall old house and he had to be fetched or shouted for. At last, someone came, a woman who agreed grudgingly to summon him. But after Sarah had listened for some minutes to the sounds of the house, wind rattling the windows in Ipswich just as it was in Kentish Town, a door slamming, a radio blaring out soul music, the receiver was lifted.

“Ta for the check.”

She winced. He had the voice of a disc jockey on a local radio station. “Can you find some moth or butterfly books and look these up for me? Or get hold of someone who’d know? You haven’t got an entomology department at your university, have you?”

“I doubt it,” he said. “Now, if it was business management or computer technology …”

“Well, it’s not. These moths are called Odezia atrata and Epichnopterix plumella. ”

He said to spell, please, and she did, following her father’s rules, which they had thought so amusing and witty while in their teens: E for epistemology, p for pomoerium, i for ichthyic …

“Yeah,” he interrupted her, “or how about p for patronize and i for ignoramus ? Would you stop being clever for a moment and just spell it?”

It felt like an insult to her father’s memory. She became stiff with him and cold, spelled the names clearly and slowly. “Have you got that?”

“Yeah, sure,” he said. “I’ll give it a go. What about A White Webfoot and the Highbury murder?”

“You can leave that for now. Concentrate on the moths. I’ll call you from Devon on the weekend.”

She would research the Highbury murder herself. She contemplated the green cardboard folder Fabian had given her, feeling an inexplicable unwillingness to look inside. But not perhaps so inexplicable. Moths were safe; moths were harmless—they didn’t even sting. Murder, on the other hand, anyone’s murder, was dangerous, she thought. Even to read about it could conjure ugly suspicions and speculations. There could be no question of her father’s being involved, certainly no question of his having changed his identity on account of some involvement, for the murder had taken place years after he went to work for the Western Morning News and became Gerald Candless. But he had written a novel whose plot bore such strong similarities to the Highbury murder that critics had commented upon it and continued to do so even though he denied a connection.

He had waited more than thirty years before writing that book. Did that mean he had waited until certain people involved were no longer alive? Or that it had weighed upon him and oppressed him so that at last he had to exorcise it, or attempt to exorcise it, by writing a novel with a plot similar to life? Get it down on paper, clear his mind of it. But of what?

Not of guilt—of that, she was sure. Of fear, then? Of pain? It is always helpful, when we have some dreaded task to perform, to tell ourselves that preliminary work must first be done, the ground prepared. Postponement could thus be entirely justified. Sarah, after the manner of her father when he had some paper or document, the very sight of which triggered apprehension, did as he always had and covered it up with something else, in this case the folder of Mellie Pearson’s notes.

Out of sight, out of mind. At least for the present. She would prepare herself by rereading A White Webfoot. It was the story of two boys who had first met while at school in Norfolk, in the fenlands. Dennis’s father was an agricultural laborer, Mark’s the warden of a wildfowl sanctuary, before such places became commonplace, for the time period of the book was the aftermath of World War II and the fifties. The boys loved each other without knowing it, or at least without expressing their love in word or deed. Dennis understood his homosexuality, and that it was unchangeable, when he was very young, only fifteen. Mark denied his.

They were growing up in a world and under a legal system whose ideas had changed very little since the previous century. Homosexuality was still unmentionable in polite society. To reactionaries, it was evil, a crime on a par with murder, while the more liberal saw it as a sickness, a mental disease, invariably the result of the subject’s weakness and corruptibility.

While some sort of life was possible for the practicing homosexual in London, in a country village, he was obliged to be either a eunuch or an unwilling, perhaps repelled, lover of women. Dennis chose the former course for a while, but left home as soon as he could, Mark the latter. Not that it was a choice—it seemed to him a bowing to a miserable inevitable.

As she read, the book came back to her. But she felt as she had the previous time she’d read it, that for the first time surely her father was writing of something quite outside his experience. And she looked again at Mellie Pearson’s notes, reading once more of Psyche casta , the strange winged creature that for some reason abstained from sexual activity.

17

It is very hard to come to terms with the fact of someone simply not liking you.

—THE FORSAKEN MERMAN

THEY WENT TO A RESTAURANT NOT FAR FROM WHERE URSULA was staying and over dinner she told Sam things about her marriage she had never told anyone. He told her about himself, and when these exchanges were over, he asked her what it was she wanted.

“What do I want?”

“Out of life. For your future. What do you want now?”

“To get rid of that house,” she said. “To go back to the name I once had and to try to have a relationship with my daughters. Oh, and to forget Gerald. But that will be very hard.”

“Perhaps you shouldn’t try. The past may be less painful if the present gets better.”

“I don’t know. I think of the past a lot. I wish I didn’t.” She looked searchingly at him, experiencing as she had all evening the sexual pull she had first felt on the sands at Gaunton. With it came a sense of time wasted, of chances lost. “So tell me what you want?”

He said simply, “Oh, me, I want to be in love.”

“What?”

“I liked it so much the last time. Well, that was also the first time. I want it again. Is that so strange?”

“It’s not something people say,” she said.

“No, they say they want sex or they want to find someone. I want to be in love. I want to be possessed and obsessed by it. I want the sky to change color and the sun to shine all the time. I want to long for the phone to ring and pace the room when it doesn’t. I want to be breathless at the sound of her voice and tongue-tied when I first see her. I want to be her and make her me.”

“You are an extraordinary man!” Ursula laughed aloud; she couldn’t help herself. “Have you made many attempts?”

“Let’s say I haven’t succeeded. Come, I’ll take you back to your hotel.”

He left her in the foyer after they had made an arrangement to have breakfast together. He would come at nine. She went up to her room, had a bath, and, in the absence of nightclothes, wrapped herself in the terry-cloth robe the hotel provided. The next day, she thought, she would tell Sam about Mrs. Eady. It would be someone to tell; yet as she thought of it, she wondered what she would have to tell and whether that encounter would have meaning for anyone but herself.

And did it even have meaning for her?

She was so polite. She was so gracious. When she saw a stranger there, an overdressed young woman with a pale, anxious face, she said good morning and asked if she could help her. Ursula said who she was in a stammering voice. She could hardly speak. She had never in her life feared fainting, but now she did.