Barbara Vine - The Chimney Sweeper's Boy

Ursula had often noticed that when a woman speaks to others of a friend, the assumption will always be made that that friend is female. She had wondered if things had changed among the young and if this rule no longer applied, but apparently it still persisted, for Sarah said, “If your friend lives this side of London, I can drive you to her place.”

“It’s his place,” Ursula said.

“I’m sorry?”

“My friend is a man, Sarah. He lives in Bloomsbury and I am staying in a hotel. You won’t want to go so far east, so if you’ll drop me somewhere on your way, I can get a taxi.”

“It was all rather absurd,” she said to Sam the next day, “because surely most daughters would have asked about this mysterious man, would have teased their mothers about a thing like that, made some comment. It made me realize, if I hadn’t known it already, what a thin sort of relationship we have.”

“Perhaps she didn’t want to probe.”

“No, it wasn’t that. She didn’t care. She was thinking about something else.”

“It’s made you unhappy?”

“No,” she said, “not at all. Because when I got here, you were here, and that was wonderful for me. It made me forget her. I forgot all about it till now.”

He had been there, waiting. He had put his arms around her and kissed her as if they had known each other for years. Yet there was none of the custom and indifference of years. They had a late supper in the hotel and drank a lot of wine and he took her up to her room and kissed her again. And the next day, she went to the shop with him and looked at his books, saw Wrightson and Pallinter and Arthur first editions among his books, and these brought her a strange feeling that was a combination of familiarity and extreme distance. There was no Gerald Candless among them, and he said that at present he hadn’t a single copy in stock.

Lunch was in the restaurant next door and in the afternoon, which was fine and unseasonably warm, they went for a walk in Victoria Park. She had barely heard of Victoria Park and hadn’t known where it was. He had grown up near there at Hackney Wick and kept a sentimental affection for this park, which was the biggest in London but which people shuddered at for its location between Homerton and Old Ford. He laughed at her when she said she had never been on a London bus and he said that in that case, they would go on one.

The grass in the park was a true emerald green and the scattered lakes looked a clear blue on this fine day. He took her arm and hooked it into his—and that, too, was something new for her, to walk arm in arm with a man. But she didn’t tell him so, for he was already making her feel, by introducing her to these simple and ordinary pleasures, that up to now, she had hardly lived at all.

He lived on two floors over the shop and there he cooked their dinner. No more restaurants, not that night. Later, she couldn’t have said who made the first move, for there had been moves all evening—her hand suddenly clasped and held, his arm around her waist, laughter between them, so that she spontaneously turned and hugged him. A light kiss and then another, and that one changing its character and deepening into a conjunction, a special kind of sexual act. By the time they went into the bedroom and into his bed, they had already made love, quite naturally and easily and as if from long-established habit. Nothing like those early couplings with Gerald or the excitement of the weekly renewed adventure with Edward Akenham.

But the second time, in the early hours, was quite different, and afterward as they held each other and she was still amazed and wondering, it no longer occurred to her to make comparisons.

“Nan asked him to come and stand outside the church when she got married,” said Jason. “For luck. She’d forgotten, but the photo brought it back.”

“She did what? ”

“It was lucky for a bride to see a sweep on her wedding day, and sweeps earned a bit extra by appearing at weddings. They got paid for it. She’d liked this guy Ryan for some reason, so when she got married, she asked him. Great-granddad gave him five shillings—that’s twenty-five pee, but it was a lot then. And Nan had met his wife and his kids—well, she’d seen his kids. His wife came over to say she was sorry about the boy dying, and her kids were with her. Left out in the street.”

Sarah felt a thrill touch her spine, like a cold finger running down the vertebrae, tapping each bone. One of those children had been her father. The chimney sweep’s boy.

“How long was that after the little boy died? Her wedding, I mean.”

“About six years. She was nineteen. But now comes something that’ll interest you. He died, that sweep, that J. W. Ryan. The following year. Nan remembers now. Her mother told her. He died of tuberculosis, or maybe it wasn’t that; maybe it was some disease you get from inhaling soot. And the family moved away.”

The shiver touched her again. “Jason, it’s in A Messenger of the Gods. You haven’t read that, have you? It’s the novel where the father dies of silicosis and the mother’s left to bring up this family. And it’s in Eye in the Eclipse , too. They’re taken in by an uncle, the father’s brother. He lives in London; he’s a widower. How many children did the Ryans have?”

“Nan saw three that day, but she says there were more. Five or six.”

“Jason, I love you. I really love you. You’re a marvel. Your check’s in the post. You’re going to find out where they went and what happened to them, aren’t you?”

Their conversation restored her excitement at the prospect of her book. She imagined herself writing the moving story of the Ryan family, their undoubted poverty, the father’s premature death. Perhaps she would need to put in some research into chimney sweeping. A short history of chimney sweeping would have its place in maybe chapter two. That kind of research was what gave her pleasure, not all this tracing of births and deaths in registers, but a genuine investigation in libraries, a trawling through old works of literature, a returning through the distant past to sources.

To match this history with the theme of Eye in the Eclipse would give an added literary dimension to her memoirs, something she thought her readers would expect from her. And, of course, she would use also in that first chapter, perhaps even as her opening paragraph, Gerald Candless’s own happier version of The Water Babies , which he used to tell to her and Hope when they were little.

“Once upon a time, there was a chimney sweep who had two sons.…”

20

Insensitive people are powerful and the thoroughly thick-skinned are the most powerful. They make the best tyrants.

—HALF AN HOUR IN THE STREET

SARAH LET HERSELF IN TO LUNDY VIEW HOUSE AT TEN ON FRIDAY NIGHT. Ursula came out to her, came into the hall, and, emboldened by recent demonstrativeness, put out her hands tentatively. Sarah gave her a very practical but very light kiss on the cheek.

“How have you been?”

Ursula might have said she hadn’t been there very much. She might have said that while she had been there, she had gone so far as to look in at the windows of two estate agents without actually going inside. But a habit of wariness is hard to break. With a glass of whiskey beside her, Sarah settled herself in an armchair. The paperback that lay open and facedown on a small table beside “Daddy’s chair” was evidence that she had been sitting there before Sarah arrived.

“You’re reading Titus Romney,” Sarah said.