Barbara Vine - The Chimney Sweeper's Boy

“She used to say to the children, as a joke I suppose, when they were being trying, that she’d had enough, that she was going to put her hat on and go and throw herself in the Orwell. That’s the river there. Well, after my father died, she said she really thought of doing it, that it was a punishment for making such a wicked threat. She was very religious, my poor mum was. Of course she didn’t do it; she had six children to think of.”

“Can you remember the Candlesses?” Sarah asked.

“I’m not sure I understand you.”

“There was a family in Ipswich named Candless. My grandfather”—she smiled as she said it—“swept their chimneys. You don’t remember?”

He shook his head. “That’s where he took the name from?”

“Their son died. He was the same age as my father.”

That made him pause for thought. “Yes. I see.”

“Tell me, Stefan”—she managed to say the name, and it didn’t seem absurd—“tell me, how did you all get to London?”

“My mother’s cousin offered her a home. She hadn’t been very close to him, I gather. He was closer to her sister—”

“That would be Catherine O’Drida?”

He laughed. “You’ve found that out. My aunt Catherine told him about her sister’s … plight. He wrote to her and offered her a share in his house, her and all her children. Out of pure Christian charity and kindness of heart, I think. He was a good man, if a bit stern and remote. Conscious of his virtue, I could say, though of course I wasn’t aware of that for years and years.

“His name was Joseph. We little ones called him Uncle Joseph. He was a widower and childless. I’m inclined to think I shouldn’t have said that about his conscious virtue—still, too late now, I’ve said it. If it hadn’t been for him, John would have left school at fourteen, probably would never have attended a school in London at all, and I and my sisters would have been denied our education. Really, he saved us all.”

“That must have been just before the Second World War started.”

“A few weeks before, yes. Leyton isn’t exactly inner London, but it suffered a good deal of bombing. My three brothers and my elder sister were all evacuees—that is, they were evacuated to the country with their schools. Mary and I and Mother and Uncle Joseph, we stayed where we were. There wasn’t any choice about it; we had nowhere else to go.”

She had picked up on one name. “Leyton?”

“In East London. E-ten. That was where our house was, in Goodwin Road, Leyton.”

Her expression must have told him what she wouldn’t say. He said quickly, “You’re thinking it was hardly ‘our’ house. It was, though. Uncle Joseph and my mother got married. Later on, years later, after he was dead, my sister Margaret told me they got married because in those days it wasn’t considered the right thing for a man and a woman to live under the same roof without being married. People would have talked.”

“Victorian,” said Sarah.

“Yes, well, it was only with the war that things began to change much. I don’t know if my mother loved him or he her; he wasn’t very lovable, though he was good.”

“He was a cousin, but he wasn’t a Ryan or an O’Drida, was he?”

“His name was Joseph Eady. My mother was Anne Elizabeth Eady.”

They went out to eat at an Italian restaurant two streets away. Stefan said to the proprietor, “We’ll have a carafe of your house white. We’ve something to celebrate.”

Sarah, catching sight of her own face in the mirror behind Stefan’s head, thought again that she looked like her mother. It was Hope who was like Stefan, and suddenly she understood how much like. Some reconstructing process in her mind put long dark curls on him and makeup and—of course—a big black hat. That made her laugh. He put up one of Hope’s black circumflex eyebrows.

“I was thinking how much like you my sister is.”

“So there are more of you?”

“One more. Two years younger. She’s a solicitor.”

He nodded. He seemed momentarily to have gone away into thought, and revelatory thought at that, for he smiled to himself, then looked up at her. There was something of wonder, of growing amazement, in his eyes.

“You may not believe this—you may think it’s hindsight—but in many of your father’s books, when I read them, I used to come across familiar things, things that reminded me of my family. I never made the connection—I’m not saying that. I never for a moment thought it might be my brother writing. It was rather that I felt so much in sympathy with this author. He became pretty well my favorite author. He seemed to look at things the way I looked at them and write about the kind of people I knew. Chloe Rule, in Purple of Cassius , you know, she was so absolutely my mother, and Jacob Manley in—I can’t remember the name.…”

“Eye in the Eclipse.”

“That’s right. Eye in the Eclipse. He was so like Joseph, and then, of course, the first novel, The Centre of Attraction , the chap who joins the navy. I can’t remember his name.…”

“Richard Webber.”

“Right, Richard Webber. He did all the things my brother John—your father—did, served in Northern Ireland, went out to the Philippines, believed his life was saved by the dropping of the first atomic bombs and suffered terrible pangs of conscience afterward.”

“That was my father?”

“Well, wasn’t it?”

“I don’t know. I want you to tell me. But he came to Plymouth, you know, did a signing and a reading in a bookshop. About, I don’t know, twelve, fifteen years ago.”

“I know. I meant to go to it, but I was away on holiday with my family.”

“Would you have recognized him?”

Stefan shrugged. “When he … disappeared, I was fourteen. We didn’t have any photographs of him—well, maybe a couple of snapshots. Thirty years do a lot to a face, and I wouldn’t have had any reason to suspect. I daresay I might have thought he was rather like our family, but then, so might any passerby be.”

She drank her wine, remembered that sometime tonight she would have to drive right across the county, then decided not to think of that now. Their food came. Stefan refilled her glass.

“Were you”—she had been going to ask if he had loved her father, but she couldn’t—“fond of him?”

Stefan was bolder, less inhibited than she perhaps, despite the difference in their generations. “I loved him very much,” he said simply, and then added, “He was like my father.”

“But you had Joseph.”

“No. No, I didn’t. Not really. Joseph was good to us. He spent what money he had on us; he made sure we went to church, that we were properly fed and dressed and went to school, that we ‘minded our books,’ as they used to say. But I don’t think he liked children’s company; he had nothing to say to us. He did his duty.” Stefan smiled. “He was Jacob Manley.”

“And my father did more than his duty?”

Stefan laid down his fork. He broke a piece off a roll and picked at it, making crumbs. “He loved children. All of us. You know the eldest of a big family sometimes feels it unfair to have to do so much child-minding, resents it because the children aren’t his—they’ve been thrust upon him. John—your father—wasn’t like that. He was completely different from James, for instance. That was the brother closest to him in age. James couldn’t be bothered with Mary and me—we were babies—but John never had enough of us—well, all of us. He used to tell us stories, wonderful stories.” That spark of revelation came back into his eyes. “Yes, of course, I see now. Did he tell you stories?”

“Oh, yes.”

“He adored us. That was what made it so strange, so terrible, that he went away from us.”