Barbara Vine - The Chimney Sweeper's Boy

“And you, woman, are a university lecturer who is too ignorant to manage invective without lacing it with obscenities. No wonder education is in the state it is. Do you let your students see you dressed like that?”

“Now, come on,” Vicky said. “For God’s sake, cool it. Are we going on to the club or aren’t we? I think you ought to apologize to Sarah, Adam.”

“Over my dead body,” said Adam.

He picked his jacket off the back of his chair and walked out. Sarah was almost too excited to move. Her speech was choked. The others thought she was upset, that once more his rudeness had cut her.

“I think I’ll go, too,” she said.

“Oh, come on. You shouldn’t let it affect you. It’s Saturday night.”

“No, I’ll go home. I’ll see you all in a couple of weeks.”

She ran out the back way, staggering. He was leaning against her car. She looked at him, said, “Where are we going?”

“Caravan site. I’ve borrowed someone’s van. The cottage is full of family. But a field first. I can’t wait.”

“Will you drive?”

“No,” he said. “You must drive. I want to touch you while you’re driving.”

19

“There’s no knowing why we remember some things and forget others,” Laurence said. “If Freud had been right, we’d block off all the bad things and our minds would be storehouses of bliss.”

—PURPLE OF CASSIUS

FEELINGS AND MEMORIES SHE THOUGHT FORGOTTEN WERE REVIVED BY these photographs. Apart from that quick glance at her wedding album, it was years since Joan Thague had bothered to look at these records of the past, but now she had begun. The young lady whose name couldn’t really be Candless had done that for her. She and, through her, Jason. These past few days, she had made a perusal of the albums an evening ritual.

Jason wanted a memory, though he didn’t know which one. A name, the name of a long-dead man. She thought she had given him all her memories, but now she was no longer sure. The most unexpected things came back to her. She would sit down with the album, not on her knees, but open on the table in front of her, study a photograph, then close her eyes and let all the associations of that picture flow into her mind.

She had begun with her grandparents and, as a result of studying this formal studio portrait of them at their golden anniversary, recalled her visits to their cottage, the two old people facing each other from armchairs on either side of the graphite range, the sight, always daunting, of their gnarled hands like tree roots in a picture book, for both were arthritic, even the smell of the place, a compound of stewed food and lavender. Looking at the photograph brought back their voices, the rich Suffolk speech, and the strange words: pytle for “meadow” and sunket for “a sick child.” Her grandmother, she remembered, had called poor Gerald sunket when she came over and saw him that Monday morning.

Joan looked at the picture of her parents’ wedding, her mother and Auntie Dorothy, her bridesmaid, in satin hobble skirts. Her mother’s wedding dress hung for years in the wardrobe in a calico bag, to be looked at by special permission but never to be used for dressing up. When Gerald was dead, though there seemed no reason for doing such a thing, Kathleen Candless took the dress out of the wardrobe and had it dyed black. As if she could have worn a fifteen-year-old wedding gown for mourning. She never did wear the dress, and Joan had no idea what had become of it.

Here was the beach photographer’s snapshot Miss Candless had stared at so … well, rudely, in Joan’s opinion. She had had a very good idea of what the girl was thinking—that these people looked poor and old-fashioned and ugly and their children clodhoppers. It was that as much as anything that had made her cry and had, at any rate, moved the girl to say she was sorry. Joan wasn’t going to cry now. She looked calmly and sadly at Gerald’s round, happy face, his curls, his bright eyes, his hand in their mother’s hand as he skipped along. There was another snap of him on the next page, or rather, a snap with him in it, for the Applestone boys were there, too, all sitting on the low wall of a front garden. Was that the Applestones’ house, dark brick, with small windows, and steps up to the front door? She couldn’t remember.

Noticing for the first time that all these photographs had been taken outdoors, she realized what she must once have known very well. In those days, an ordinary camera couldn’t cope with interior shots. There was insufficient light. A flash mechanism didn’t exist, or if it did, it wasn’t available to the likes of them. You depended on sunlight, as her father must have when he had taken this shot of her mother and herself and Gerald on a day out by the sea. The background looked like Southwold, but she couldn’t be sure. How had they gotten there? No car for them, of course; she couldn’t remember anyone her parents knew having a car. Probably they had gone in a charabanc, as coaches were called then.

It was the last picture taken of Gerald, though eight or nine months before his death. You took photographs in the summer then, on your holidays; a camera was a luxury. She studied the little boy’s smiling face, wondering how he would have looked if he had lived and grown up. If, for instance, he had been able to come to her wedding. And then she thought, with a little inward tremor, that if Gerald had lived, she might never have met Frank, let alone married him. For it was only because the house and its surroundings had been so hateful to her without her brother that she had left home and gone to Sudbury in the first place.

Joan closed her eyes and slipped into a reverie. When she was young, people told you not to dwell on painful things, to forget them, put them behind you. Unpleasantness must be buried, or at least hidden from public view. So she had never talked to Frank about Gerald’s death or even allowed herself to think about it. She had shut it off when it arose in her mind unbidden. But it had always lain there, asleep yet menacing, and now she had awakened it, or the pictures and the girl who wasn’t called Candless had. And Joan understood with relief that it was better for her and somehow better for Gerald now that she could confront it and remember.

When he was dead, they let her see him. For hours and hours before that, twenty-four hours, she hadn’t been allowed in his sickroom. Dr. Nuttall came and went and came and there was talk of a nurse. But her mother had been a nurse and wanted no other. Outside his room, unseen, Joan sat on the top stair of the steep flight. It was dark there; it was always dark until they lit the gas. She listened to the murmur of the doctor’s voice and the higher-pitched sound of her mother talking, and then Gerald’s cries—“My head hurts, my head hurts.” When he shouted with the pain, she put her hands over her ears, but when he began to scream, she ran downstairs and hid in the hall cupboard among the brooms. The long silence that followed was broken by the old lady coming, though she talked in whispers. She came to lay out the body, though Joan didn’t know that then. Dr. Nuttall came back and then Joan’s father took her into the room where her mother was and the doctor was and where Gerald lay, his closed eyes looking up to the ceiling, his face white as a wax candle. They told her she could kiss him, but she wouldn’t; she shook her head wordlessly. Later, when she was grown and had children of her own, she thought they shouldn’t have asked her to kiss a dead boy.

It was evening, night perhaps; it must have been. They hadn’t drawn the bedroom curtains. The sky over Ipswich now was a bronzy red color, but then it had been a deep dark blue with stars. Gerald was going to lie there till the morning while her mother sat at his bedside. Joan couldn’t remember the night or what her father did, no matter how hard she tried. But she remembered the morning and her mother there in the kitchen, getting breakfast for the man of the house, as she always did, as she would have if she herself were dying.