Barbara Vine - The Chimney Sweeper's Boy

“Have a last drink,” she said, and on an impulse, while filling his glass, she added, “I’ll give you your taxi fare to Liverpool Street.”

“Thanks. I’ve missed the ten o’clock, but there’s a last train at eleven.”

“You have a lecture in the morning?”

“I don’t exactly go to classes anymore.” His eyes avoided hers. “I thought you might have realized. I … well, I dropped out. That is, I never went back after the Easter break.”

“I see.” She didn’t quite. “So your grant—what are you living on?”

“You,” he said. “You’ve been a godsend.” He looked at her then. “In more ways than one.”

She went into the kitchen and found her purse, came back with two ten-pound notes, a good deal more than his taxi would cost—but what the hell.

He took the notes gratefully. “Nan doesn’t know. I reckon she’d stop feeding me if she did—just when I need it most. And giving me baths. I ought to make myself wash in cold water, but I guess I don’t have the willpower, as Nan would say. My parents don’t know. They think I’m still trying to cope with psychology. But something’ll happen, I reckon. Something usually does.”

She thought with distaste that anyone these days can keep himself clean. Heat water in a kettle, have a stand-up wash, go to the launderette. If she told him so, he would only tell her she’d never experienced it. Which would be true.

“Look, I thought I’d keep on at the O’Drida angle,” he said. “I’ll keep at it.”

She saw him to the door, then, on second thought, went down with him to the street and waited until a taxi came. From the window, he waved to her with enthusiasm. She returned upstairs, shivered at the stuffiness in the flat, and began opening windows. Absurdly perhaps, but with a real distaste, she didn’t want to touch that glass, but at last she did, having first put on a rubber glove. Even so, she picked it up gingerly between thumb and forefinger and carried it out to the kitchen at arm’s length, the way one might remove a dead spider.

A bound proof of Less Is More arrived the next day from Robert Postle. The cover design, as Carlyon-Brent pointed out on the back, was not that which would appear on a finished copy. An empty city street by night, a photograph, not a drawing—it looked more like somewhere on the continent than London. The back cover of the proof also bore quotations from highly laudatory reviews of the author’s previous works and commendations from Malcolm Bradbury and A. N. Wilson.

At the foot were a few lines informing the reader that publication would be on January 29, 1998, the price £16.99 in hardback, its size 5½ by 8¼ inches and its length 256 pages, all this followed by the ISBN number. A short biography inside told Sarah a few things she now knew to be false about her father, such as his status as an only child and his education at Trinity, and something painfully true, that he had died in July 1997.

The dedication, as so many dedications had been in the past, was to her and her sister. “For my daughters, Sarah and Hope.” Tears prickled Sarah’s eyes once more. She remembered his asking the two of them for their permission.

“As is proper,” he had said, and then added, “may I have the honor of dedicating the new one to you?”

A Messenger of the Gods , she remembered, had been dedicated to Colin Wrightson, another one—was it Hand to Mouth ?—to Robert Postle, and Time Too Swift “In memory of my mother,” while the early books had no dedications. It occurred to her then to wonder why not a single book had been dedicated to his wife, to Ursula. And why hadn’t she noticed that “In memory of my mother” before? He hadn’t been remembering Kathleen Candless, but Anne Ryan.

Did that mean Anne Ryan had died around the time of Time Too Swift ? Or had died when he began to write it? Sarah went to her collection of her father’s works, found that novel, and saw that its publication date was 1975. She had been nine or ten at the time, but of course she had no clear memory of the book’s being published. Come to that, though she had read it, as she had read all his works, she couldn’t recall anything about it. She must read it again, as she must reread all his books before writing her own.

Perhaps Anne Ryan had died in 1973 or 1974. If he knew of her death, it must be because, to some extent, he kept up with his true family. From a distance, he had made himself aware of what happened to the members of that family. Had he also known some of his O’Drida connections? Ryan and O’Drida—her father had been, in anyone’s estimation, an Irishman. And was that why, when choosing a university for himself, he had picked Trinity?

Sarah wrote a note to Jason Thague, asking him if he could trace the record of Anne Ryan’s death in the early seventies and to find if there were O’Dridas in the Dublin telephone directory.

When Sarah’s letter came, Jason was in his room in the tall white brick house in Ipswich, reading A White Webfoot in the paperback edition she had sent him. Both letter and book smelled of Sarah, of a musky and faintly bitter French perfume. The cover of the book also reminded him of her, though he would have had difficulty in saying why, as the design on it was an impressionistic painting, streaks and veils of white mist half-covering a pallid blue sky and a blurred white sun, while Sarah invariably dressed in black.

Jason could have done without all these long descriptions of fenlands and wildfowl sanctuaries on the Suffolk coast. It began to get better when the story moved to London and sex raised its more attractive head. One of the young men the novel was about apparently lived by prostitution and enjoyed it and had entered into the whole gay life with verve and gusto. Dennis had a steady boyfriend who kept him and a great many others he picked up, mostly in public conveniences in parts of London unknown to Jason. And he had his old school friend, Mark, a man who refused to admit his own sexual orientation and who underwent all sorts of treatment aimed at turning him into a lover of women.

The idea of homosexuality as a disease was common at the time. Some saw it as a moral sickness to be resisted by greater self-control, others as a curable mental disorder. Jason looked back a couple of chapters and found that the date when the action was supposed to be taking place was 1960. While Mark entered treatment, first by being given massive doses of estrogen and later by aversion therapy in a mental hospital, Dennis, who regularly had secret encounters with a string of young “rough trade” boyfriends, was moving into an apartment paid for by his lover. The guilty feelings of one man and the carefree brashness of the other were starkly contrasted.

Mark became a voluntary patient in a psychiatric ward in South London. There electrodes were attached to his body and shocks administered each time a picture of homosexual erotica was shown on a screen. The treatment had no effect but to make him deeply miserable and to contemplate taking his own life. Jason was very taken aback by all this, wondered if such things could really have gone on in his own parents’ lifetime. How had Gerald Candless known about it anyway?

Earlier, when they were boys, there had been some kind of encounter between Mark and Dennis, though the details of this were never spelled out. Mark, fresh from his failed treatment, met Dennis again by chance, discovered the kind of life he was leading, and became obsessed with the idea of a confrontation between them, an explanation. Was Dennis to blame for his fate or he for Dennis’s? He knew he must either thrash this matter out or kill Dennis, for while he lived, there could be no peace for him.