Barbara Vine - The Chimney Sweeper's Boy

“You found an O’Drida?”

“Better than that,” he said. “I’ve found your uncle.”

“My uncle?”

“That’s what I said. Your father’s youngest brother, and he’s very much alive.”

For a moment, a frightening instant, she didn’t want to know. She wanted to stop. There was something dreadful waiting, a dark, shapeless thing that hovered behind a door, and now the door was opening; she had her hand on it, pushing it outward. Children dream of such things living in cupboards; she had dreamed of them, and screamed for her father. He had always come and always comforted her, but now he wouldn’t come. She reached for her drink and had it to her lips when the bell rang again. Hope and Fabian. Jason watched her go to answer it, conscious, it seemed, only of his own triumph.

Hope was wearing a large chocolate-colored velvet hat. She and Fabian were still laughing indignantly about the hat and the trouble it had caused in the cinema. The woman behind Hope had said she couldn’t see and had asked her to take it off, and Hope had pointed out that the cinema was three-quarters empty and the woman could go and sit somewhere else. She kept her hat on because it was cold. The woman said she had a right to sit where she liked and a right to an uninterrupted view of the screen, while Hope had no business to keep an enormous hat on under those circumstances.

At this point, Sarah introduced Jason. Hope acknowledged him vaguely in passing. She obviously hadn’t realized who he was. His name wasn’t enough to recall to her his function in Sarah’s memoir.

“Oh, how do you do?” She barely looked at him. “So Fab started telling her the law on rights to sit where one likes and that sort of thing. It was hilarious. And then a guy in the row in front turned around and told us that if we wanted to talk, we should stay at home and watch the telly, and a great swearing match started, and in the middle of it I quietly took off my hat, and it was amazing—everyone just shut up and went back to looking at the movie, which was the great bore of the year, anyway, wasn’t it, Fab?”

“Jason is doing research for me for my book,” Sarah said.

Perhaps it was that which did it. Sarah remembered too late that Hope had said she didn’t care for the idea of strangers rooting about in their father’s past. And now she looked at Jason like one who rather dislikes animals might look at the dog curled up on a friend’s sofa.

“May I have an enormous glass of that red?” she said, and then, smiling, opening her eyes wide, added, “Are you a professional researcher?”

“I don’t know,” Jason said. “I don’t know what that is.”

Hope raised her eyebrows, looked down, put on her Mrs. Justice Candless look. She said to Sarah and Fabian, “Let’s get him to play the Game.”

“What, now?”

“Why not?”

Sometimes Hope could be very clever. It never did to underrate her. Sarah poured the wine and went to look for scissors. The kitchen pair had disappeared, so they settled for the silver-handled nail scissors that had been part of a manicure set inherited by Sarah when Betty Wick died.

“What is this game?” Jason said.

“You’ll see. Give him a drink. He’s going to need it.”

“Will you?”

“You could put some gin in this water. Just a little.”

“You have to pass the scissors crossed or uncrossed,” said Fabian. “There’s a way of doing it right, just one way. We’ll tell you when you get it right, but you have to show us you know why. Okay?”

“Yep. I guess.”

“I pass the scissors uncrossed.”

“I receive the scissors crossed and pass them uncrossed,” said Sarah to Fabian.

“I receive them uncrossed and pass them uncrossed.”

Hope took the scissors. “I receive them uncrossed and pass them uncrossed.”

“I receive the scissors uncrossed,” said Jason, turning them over and opening them, “and pass them crossed.”

“No, you don’t,” said Sarah. “I’ve just seen something. It’s easier for women, isn’t it?”

“Daddy noticed that when he was only a little boy. He told me. But he had a brilliant mind. I bet he got it at once. He never said, but I bet he did. I receive the scissors crossed and pass them uncrossed.”

Jason, who had been leaning forward with his legs apart, crossed them, said, “I receive the scissors crossed and pass them crossed.”

Hope said, “You do, but do you know why?”

“Sure I know why. It’s your legs. When your legs are crossed, you pass the scissors crossed, and when they’re not, you pass them uncrossed. Simple, my dear Watson.”

Hope turned pale. “I don’t believe it.”

“Why not? It’s obvious. It’s a game meant for kids, isn’t it? Surely everyone soon gets it.”

“No, they don’t. It takes them years. How long did it take you, Fab?”

“I don’t know, weeks. But I’m not very bright. Typical lawyer, I am, good memory but no brain.”

“I can’t believe what I’ve just seen,” said Hope.

It occurred to Sarah while Hope was putting her hat back on that she might get them to take Jason with them; Fabian might even be induced to drop him off at Liverpool Street, but then she wouldn’t hear about the O’Dridas. And suddenly, she wanted to know. Her fear had passed, the monstrous thing behind the door had retreated, and a new respect for Jason had replaced it. No one, after all, had ever gotten the point of the Game so fast.

“I’ll never believe you weren’t shown it as a child,” Hope was saying. Ungenerously, Sarah thought. “You’ve probably got repressed-memory syndrome.”

Jason shrugged and smiled. Fabian said, “Can we drop you somewhere?”

“No, he mustn’t go. He’s got something to tell me.” Hope’s lifted eyebrows angered Sarah. She said defiantly, “I’m going to give him another drink and hear our family’s secrets. Off you go. I’ll phone.”

Jason waited until the front door had closed. “Your sister shouldn’t have made such a song and dance about that hat. It’s antisocial, that kind of behavior.”

“Maybe. Tell me about—did you call him my uncle ?”

The notebook was brought out. Jason looked at it, glanced up, said, “You got upset last time. It’s all a bit emotional, this, isn’t it? Will you be okay?”

“Of course I will.”

“All right, then. Here goes. There’s just one O’Drida in the Dublin phone book. He’s eighty-five years old and Anne Ryan was his half sister. She and her sister were born in Hackney, if you remember, but when the mother died—Mrs. O’Drida, that is—the father went back to Ireland, leaving his daughters with their maternal grandmother, who lived in Ipswich. She brought them up. O’Drida settled in Dublin, remarried, and had several children, and the last remaining of them is this Liam O’Drida, whom I talked to. He told me all that. He’s quite compos mentis.”

“But he isn’t my uncle; he’s my … well, my great-uncle maybe.”

“I’m coming to your uncle. Bear with me. Liam O’Drida never knew his half sisters. He was much younger, for one thing. But he did know or know of James Ryan. Liam’s daughter came to London as a student nurse in the sixties, and while she was there, she looked up her aunt’s son or her half aunt’s son. He was the only person in London she had any connection with. She visited him and his family a few times.”

Sarah said thoughtfully, “This was the next brother to my dad, my uncle James?”

“Was. He’s dead, according to Liam. The sisters are alive, Liam thinks, Margaret and Mary. He says there was something odd about Mary, but he doesn’t know what, or can’t remember. It’s the youngest one, Stephen, I mean when I say your uncle.”