Barbara Vine - The Chimney Sweeper's Boy

“You’re not eating,” she said.

“No. I’m finding this too … emotional.” He drank some wine, ate a piece of bread, then shook his head and laid his knife and fork side by side across the plate. “I’m remembering what it was like when he … went. It’s forty-six years, but all very clear when I talk about it. Painful. I’m sorry.”

She waited, allowing him to recover himself. He drank his wine carefully, as if it had been measured out, as if it were medicine. Then he shook himself, his head, neck, shoulders, the way a cat does when it has landed from a height and readjusts its balance.

“He wasn’t living at home, of course,” he went on. “He hadn’t been for two years, and between ’forty-three and ’forty-five he’d been away in the navy. But just the same, he was always at home—he was always there, to be with us.”

“Did he—did he go to a university?”

Stefan seemed surprised. “Not unless he did after he disappeared. When he left school at seventeen, he went to work for the Press Association as a telephonist.”

“A telephonist ?”

“The telephonist would go out with a reporter to phone in his copy. No recording devices then, no E-mail.”

“And that’s what he did?”

“It was a way of getting started in journalism. But he left to join the navy. We missed him but—well, I suppose we vaguely knew where he was and we knew he’d come back. And he did. He lived at home with us and got a job on a local newspaper. I remember my mother was very proud of him. He was the first member of our family to have a—I don’t know if you’d call it a profession, not to work with his hands, anyway, to have what the Americans call ‘a white-collar job.’ ”

“Was it the Walthamstow Herald ?”

Stefan shook his head. “The Herald was their rival paper. John worked for the Walthamstow Independent. He was a general reporter. He used to cover courts, local meetings, county councils, that sort of thing. His shorthand was very good, very fast.”

“Was it?” she said wonderingly, reflecting that she had very little idea what shorthand actually was. “I didn’t know.”

“He used to come home and tell us his adventures. Some quite exciting things used to happen, even in Leyton and Walthamstow. Then he left home and got a room in Walthamstow.”

“Why did he do that if he was so fond of you all?”

“My brother James got married. He was only twenty-one, but his girlfriend was pregnant.”

She looked blankly at him, as one who is confused by what seems a total non sequitur. That made him laugh. It was cathartic laughter, and when it was over, he seemed freed of some burden. He even looked younger. Color had flooded his face.

“My dear Sarah, the world has changed so much. How can I explain? It was very disgraceful; it was still disgraceful in 1949. I was only twelve, but I was made to feel the disgrace of it, the shame. Joseph, not my mother, explained to me what had happened and what must happen: James and she must be married as soon as possible. They didn’t like the girl; even James didn’t much like the girl, but that had nothing to do with it. They had to marry and come back and live with us. There was an acute housing shortage, and they had nowhere else to go.

“John—I suppose I should call him Gerald—said he’d move out. He was the only one who didn’t make a big tragedy out of the situation. He even laughed about it. He said to me that this was something that happened all the time and I was to remember that; it wasn’t some exceptional sin that every right-thinking person condemned.

“It’s funny how clearly I remember our conversation, but I do. I remember him saying that there were some things that were sins, crimes that could never be forgotten, but that wasn’t one of them, whatever Joseph might say. The most important factor in all this, he said, was the unborn child. A child deserved two parents and a sound family background; that was all they should be thinking of. A family was a sacred thing, he said. To break up a family and destroy it, that was a sin. I’ve always remembered that.”

“What did he mean, sacred?”

“I don’t know, Sarah. I was only twelve. The most important factor to me was that a strange woman would be moving in and my brother, who was nearer to a father, would be moving out and I couldn’t stop it.”

“But he came back often to see you?”

“Three or four times a week, and at the weekends he sometimes stayed over and slept on the settee downstairs. Even without him, we were crowded. James and Jackie and eventually the baby took over the front bedroom, which had been my mother’s and Joseph’s, while they had their bed down in the erstwhile dining room, Margaret and Mary were in the back bedroom, and I had the tiny box room with two bunks in it.” He looked up at her. “Would you like anything else to eat?”

“Just coffee,” she said.

“Just coffee. And shall we have another half carafe?”

“Why not?”

What she wanted to ask him wasn’t relevant, but she very much wanted to know. Of course she knew that those who have had a happy childhood—and many of those who have not—see their parents as sexless beings, physical relations between them being unimaginable. And her father, while so extremely physical, had seemed more asexual, as far as she could tell, than most. She couldn’t remember seeing him kiss her mother or even touch her hand. And then there swam into her consciousness a memory from Holly Mount days, of going into his bedroom, as she always did in the very early morning, and of finding him not alone but with her mother, the two of them in the bed with their arms around each other.

“Did he have girlfriends himself?” she asked Stefan abruptly.

They were walking back from the restaurant, up the hill in the lamplight. He pursed his lips, shrugged.

“There was a girl. I think she worked on the newspaper, too. Sheila? Shirley? I was too young to know about these things, but I don’t think it amounted to much. He never brought her home. I don’t know now how I knew she existed. Maybe I saw them out together in the street.”

“Tell me about when he disappeared.”

Stefan unlocked the house door and let them in. It was 9:30, according to the clock in the hall, which struck a single note as they went back into the living room. He said, “Can I get you anything? A drink?”

“I mustn’t. I’ve got to drive.” Her head was already swimming, but she thought longingly of brandy. “Well, a very small brandy, if you have it.”

“Sure I have it.”

She sat thinking about her father and his youth and his love for these brothers and sisters and knew she wouldn’t be able to sleep. There was no point in hurrying home to sleeplessness. She might as well stay and hear the rest, not postpone it till another day. He came back with the brandy, an amount no one could call small, in a balloon glass.

“Thanks,” she said, and, out of character, raised the glass. “The Ryans!”

He smiled. “Well, there are some of us left. My children. James’s two and Margaret’s two.”

“Mary didn’t have any children?”

“Mary became a nun.”

Sarah made a sound she hadn’t uttered for twenty years. “Wow!”

“Wow indeed. I’m used to it, but it still seems a little strange. She had a true vocation, I suppose you could say. One could say. Joseph certainly could and did say. He was overjoyed. She’s dead now; she died five years ago. We’re not really a long-lived family. But I was going to tell you about when John disappeared.”

“Yes.”

Stefan sat down opposite her. He leaned back for a moment, contemplating the ceiling, then sat up rather stiffly, as if bracing himself for an ordeal. “It was in the summer. The summer of 1951. Mary’s birthday was July the second and John came over for that. He wouldn’t have missed something like that. She didn’t really have a party—we couldn’t afford it—but she had two of her school friends to tea. She was sixteen. We were all there—well, James was working nights, but Jackie was there and their baby, Peter. John, your father, he came along at about eight, after he’d been to cover the annual general meeting of some society or other. I can’t, needless to say, remember what.