Barbara Vine - The Chimney Sweeper's Boy

The undertakers were to come and take Gerald away. Had someone told her that? Surely not. She must later have known it was what would have happened. But no, for when there had come that knock at the front door, her mother had said it must be the undertakers; she had said the undertaker’s name, though Joan had forgotten what it was. Just as she had forgotten the chimney sweep’s name. The knock at the door, and her mother had said it was the undertakers, then recalled they weren’t coming till nine and it was only eight. She had sat down heavily, the teapot in her hand, looked at Joan’s father with such black despair, such hopeless grief, and said, “It’s the sweep. I can’t be doing with the sweep today, not today.”

Joan had never seen the slightest sign of demonstrative affection between her parents, not a kiss, not a touch. But now her father went awkwardly to her mother, took the teapot from her, and laid an arm around her shoulders. He stood there with his arm around her, his hand patting her shoulder, and said to Joan, “Go and open the door, there’s a good girl, and tell him he can’t come today. You tell him why. You tell him about your brother and to come back another day.”

She had gone and had gotten the door open, but her father must have thought better of it, for he came himself and talked to the sweep while Joan stood by and heard for the first time the word meningitis , a word that was to have a special dreadful meaning for her forevermore, worse than the worst expletive or curse, a significance of evil and pain and loss.

The sweep must already have cleaned one chimney by that time, for his face was blackened and his clothes were sooty—they looked as if soaked in soot—but his brushes were clean, the tools of his trade, somehow shaken and wiped free of chimney dirt after every use. He had left his bicycle resting up against their fence. Thieves didn’t steal bicycles in those days, the way they did later on. She could only see its handlebars, but somehow she knew now, because she had seen it before or seen it afterward, that along a metal sheet fixed to the crossbar was painted in black letters on white, or white letters on black, his name, with his initials and his trade.

Remembering what that name had been was another thing altogether. She tried and tried, but failed. Yet she could still hear her father saying, “Meningitis, meningitis” and the sweep saying he was sorry and that he’d come back another day, next week, whenever they said. And she could remember another caller that day: the sweep’s wife.

It was in the afternoon. They had taken Gerald’s body away by then, hours before. Auntie Dorothy came and brought Doreen with her, but not the boys. Young as she was, Joan knew that though men went to funerals, death itself was somehow for women and girls to concern themselves with, not for men, just as birth was and marriage was. Doreen was only two, but she was a more appropriate person to be there than Ken or Don. Neighbors had been coming to the door all day to pay their respects and offer their sympathy, and her mother thought it was another of them when someone knocked after Auntie Dorothy had been there half an hour.

Auntie Dorothy went to the door and came back with the tall lady. She must have said her name, or perhaps she only said whose wife she was, for that was what Joan remembered. Her husband had come home after his work and told her and she had come to say she was sorry; she wanted to express her sympathy for Mrs. Candless’s great loss.

Joan’s mother or Auntie Dorothy, one of them, had offered her a cup of tea. Joan remembered that clearly and she remembered the lady talking to Doreen and Doreen immediately taking to her the way little children do to people who show an interest in them. But she had refused the tea and said why—and now her reason came back to Joan in a flash of illumination. She had said she couldn’t stay, that she must go at once, because she had brought her children with her, or some of her children, and left them outside. It wouldn’t have been fitting to bring them in, it wouldn’t have been suitable.

Any impression she might once have had of those children was almost entirely lost, though she had gone to the door with the lady, had been sent to see her out. She had opened the door herself and had glimpsed those children—three of them, was it, or four?—standing outside the gate where that morning their father’s bicycle had leaned. Boys or girls? How was it possible not to remember a fact like that?

Then Joan, opening her eyes and returning to the album, recalled that she had from that time forward felt a liking for the chimney sweep and his wife, a kind of mild gratitude for their kindness, and that this had led to something or other. She had done something or arranged something because of that liking, but what?

The recovering of memory tired as well as gratified her, and these evenings she went early to bed. But on the following day, after she had had her tea, she was back with the photographs, to her marriage and the war and the children. And she was carried away by them, by herself with Frank on their honeymoon, Frank in his army uniform, Peter, her firstborn, in his pram. There was a photographer who hung about outside the clinic and took pictures of the babies when their mothers wheeled them out and down the steps. He must still have been there two years later, for here was just the same sort of photo of Anthony.

Quite forgotten until now was the studio portrait of the whole family taken a year after Frank was discharged: herself sitting down and holding the baby, Patricia, a little boy on either side of her, their father standing behind. She was more enthralled by their young faces and by the clothes that still seemed to her desirable and elegant than she could have been by any television program. It was days now since she had even turned the telly on. But even as she was transported into the past and immersed in the emotions of the past, she was aware that this was not the way to find what she was looking for. Clues to it didn’t, couldn’t, lie in the early years of her marriage or in the family she and Frank had created.

She was afraid then that those clues, if clues there were, must have lain somewhere in the sparse and few photographs taken in the years before Gerald’s death. But she had been through them and found little or nothing to help her. It was the chimney sweep, after all, that Jason was interested in, and the purpose of this search of hers had been to find something that would trigger the memory of his name. Again she closed her eyes; again she rested her head back and transported herself back to that day, the day after Gerald’s death, to the sight of the sweep on the doorstep, the handlebars of his bicycle showing around the end of the hedge, his dirty face and clean brushes. To his tall wife with her kind face and her sweet way with Doreen. Mrs. something, they must have called her, her mother and Auntie Dorothy. Will you have a cup of tea, Mrs. something? Good-bye, Mrs. something.

Unless the pointer to the name lay somewhere in the past, before Gerald died, or even in the future, after he was dead. The sweep must have come every April to sweep the chimney before spring-cleaning, but Joan could recall no previous visit. Perhaps she had been at school when he came. And afterward?

It wasn’t much more than two years later that she went away to Sudbury. The sweep must have come in those two years, but she couldn’t remember his visits, only the emptiness of the house without Gerald and the loneliness. Perhaps the chimneys hadn’t been swept again, for her mother lost interest in the house and the cooking and her husband and her daughter and for a long time retreated inside herself, into that place where perhaps her dead child still lived. Because of this, her father was always out, at his men’s club. And Joan went to live twenty-two miles away, a distance that would be nothing now but was considerable then, the other end of the county.