Barbara Vine - The Chimney Sweeper's Boy

She remembered Joan Thague with a shudder. At least the woman hadn’t turned out to be her aunt, and that was something to be thankful for. And now an uncle, who might be just as bad, awaited her, no more than twenty miles away. She had just driven along the coast road and through Dawlish and it was already getting dark. December, her thirty-second birthday next week, a couple of weeks to go before the shortest day, then Christmas. The first birthday without her father and, unthinkable, the first dreadful Christmas. She wouldn’t go home for it, that was for sure, and Hope wouldn’t. Would Adam?

It was just after five when she approached Plymouth. All the lights were on and Sainsbury’s supermarket with its roof of sails gleamed like a fleet of white ships. Up to the right for Mutley. She drew the car into the curb where there were no yellow lines, parked, switched off the ignition, and looked at her face in the rearview mirror. This was something she never did, repowdering her face and relipsticking her mouth like an old woman, like her grandmother Wick used to, but she did it now. And she ran her fingers through her hair and tossed it and ran a wet finger under each eye in case there were mascara smudges.

For an old schoolteacher. She must be mad. If they took a sample of her DNA and his and compared them, they would be able to see a close relationship. As close as to her father, she thought, or was that wrong? And those children of his who had children of their own, they were her cousins. She might have seen that woman in the street in Fowey or Truro and never known. The one who lived in York—Sarah had done some of her postgraduate work at York University and could have passed her every day, met her eyes, even noticed some vague, unlikely resemblance.

His house was part of a Victorian terrace. It was all late Victorian up here, biggish houses or small, three up, two down, a bathroom, a kitchen, and a scullery. Sarah had had a school friend who lived near here and her grandmother had called it a scullery, the dark hole of a minikitchen with a copper in it. All the rows of houses had gardens behind and alleys running between them, parallel to the streets and linking them as the streets did, flagstone passages with high stone walls. Something struck a chord in her mind. Where had she read recently about a stone passage, a tunnel in someone’s dream? It would come back to her.

The houses themselves were dark gray granite, solid as the rock itself dug out of Dartmoor. She went up the path and rang the bell. Immediately, a light came on in the little porch. She expelled her breath heavily. It was ridiculous to be so nervous. She tried to relax, drop her shoulders, loosen her tense hands. The door was opened and she saw what she hadn’t anticipated, what she had forgotten she might see, something that had never crossed her mind.

It might have been Gerald Candless standing there.

Younger, of course. He was Gerald as he had been when Sarah herself was twenty-one, his hair nearer to black than gray, his thick, curly hair. This man was lighter, thinner, even a little taller. The massive impression her father had made—the bearlike figure, heavy shoulders, big head—that was absent. But his features, the wide, curved mouth, the big hooky nose, the broad forehead, all framed by that bushy hair … For a moment, she had a dazed feeling of faintness; the little hall seemed to spin. She clenched her hands, swallowed, then said too brightly, “It’s good of you to see me.”

The voice was a little like her father’s. “You look as if you’ve seen a ghost.”

“Yes,” she said. “You’re like him.”

He took her into what probably had once been a seldom-used parlor but was now part of a room extending from the front of the house to the back. He had lit a coal fire and the place looked comfortable, somewhat untidy, lived in by someone busy and interested. She turned to look at him again, noting that he even dressed like her father, the same baggy cords, check shirt, Fair Isle pullover.

“Why didn’t he come himself?”

She remembered then that she hadn’t told him. Would it be a shock? Hardly, after forty-six years. “My father’s dead.”

“Ah,” he said.

“He died last July.”

“Yes. Well. I’m sorry. For you, I mean. How old was he?”

“Seventy-one.”

“I shouldn’t have to ask. He was eleven years older than I am.”

“It was a shock.”

He nodded. “Come in. Sit down.”

She sat on a sofa that had a stack of books on one arm, the Guardian and a left-wing periodical on one of the seat cushions. “What do I call you?” she asked.

“Not Mr. Ryan. Not Uncle. God forbid.” He smiled. “My friends call me Stefan. My wife was Polish, you see, and that was her name for me.”

Constructing her image of him, a compound of Joan Thague and Frederic Cyprian, she had half-expected to be asked to call him Uncle Steve. “I am Sarah. But you know that. And it’s not Mrs. Candless.”

She hesitated, looked around the room. The wall facing her was lined with bookshelves, but she turned her eyes quickly away from it, from trying to detect one of her father’s books from the color of a spine or that tiny black moth logo. This man would know; somehow she understood that. The name would not bewilder him as it had those others.

“I’m Sarah Candless,” she said, “and my father, your brother, was Gerald Candless.”

“The same name as the writer. Is that why he picked it?”

“He was the writer.”

He drew in his breath, said, “My goodness,” then added, “the novelist? You mean the novelist Gerald Candless?”

“Yes.”

“Gerald Candless was my brother?”

“Yes.”

He got up, walked across to the window, then turned back to face her. “How amazing.”

“I know.”

“I’ve read most of his books. I’ve got most of them—well, in paperback. Oh—wait a minute; this is really extraordinary—my daughter wrote her M.A. thesis on his work.”

“He would have been very pleased if he’d known.”

“How did it—I mean, how did John Ryan get to be Gerald Candless?”

“I’m hoping you can tell me that,” she said, and then she told him all about her father, everything she knew.

“It’s your turn now.”

He nodded. “I’m going to give you a drink and get myself one. We’ll go out to eat, if that’s all right with you. But I’ll start the … the family history first.”

He was outside a long time, much longer than it took to open a bottle of wine and put glasses on a tray. She read an article in his New Statesman , had a look at his books. The fire needed making up. She had never made up a fire in her life and that suddenly seemed odd, given the fact her grandfather had been a chimney sweep. There were logs on the hearth and she picked one up gingerly and then another and put them on the dying embers. He came back as the fire began to crackle and flame.

“Sorry to have been so long. I found I needed to be alone for ten minutes and I thought you’d understand.”

“I did.”

“I was thinking about him,” he said, “and about what I could tell you. Let me give you a drink.”

He turned off the overhead light, left on the two table lamps. They sat in a dimmer, golden, less revealing light. At first, she didn’t look at him while he spoke—he looked too much like her father.

“I was a baby when my father died,” he began. “He had tuberculosis, a form of tuberculosis. Lung damage from the soot, I suppose, though apparently the doctors wouldn’t admit it. It’s hard to imagine what it must have been like for my mother. She had six children, the eldest thirteen. She was a Catholic; we were brought up Catholics. Your father was an altar boy. It’s a wonder really that she didn’t have more children. We lived in a rented house, more a cottage. She went out cleaning; that was our only income. Of course, I know all this from her and from what my brothers told me.