Barbara Vine - The Chimney Sweeper's Boy

“He brought Mary a present—well, two presents. A box of chocolates—chocolate was still rationed, so it was a great treat to have a whole box—and a book called Young Pegasus. A book of poems. It was in the house for years. We didn’t have many books, so I remember that one.

“And I remember we all played a game. Even Mary and I were a bit old for it, but we always played it; I couldn’t remember a time when we hadn’t. And we played it to try it out on the school friends, see if they could get the point. It was a ridiculous game; it went like this.…”

“I pass the scissors crossed,” said Sarah very quietly.

“Ah.” He nodded, thought, nodded again. “So he taught you, did he?”

“Yes.”

“As I taught my children and Margaret taught hers. Somehow I have my doubts about James. By the way, Margaret is still very much alive, but James is dead. He died as your father did, of heart disease. So we’re all gone now but Margaret and me. Now, where was I? Yes, the party.

“That was the last time I ever saw your father. He said good night to us all and went to get the last bus back to Walthamstow. Not many cars about then, you know. We didn’t know anyone with a car. He went, and he was quite cheerful and normal. It was a Monday, and he said to Mother that he’d see us on Wednesday, that he’d come for his tea before he went to cover something or other. Maybe a meeting of the Leyton council, I don’t know. Oh, and he said he’d something to tell us but that it would keep; it would keep for a couple of days.”

“Something to tell you?”

“We never found out what it was. He didn’t come. John never broke promises; he was a most reliable person. They are the ones that cause the worry, the reliable people, the ones who never let you down, because when they do … My mother was worried from the first. And when he didn’t come the next day, she was desperate.”

“Didn’t she phone him?”

“We didn’t have a phone, Sarah. John didn’t have a phone, not in his room. On the Friday, she got James to go to the Independent offices—well, it was a printing plant—and ask for him. They hadn’t seen him, either. He had left without warning, though they weren’t much surprised. He had given in his notice there weeks before, as it happened, and had only a few days left. My mother thought that must have been what he meant when he said he had something to tell us, that he was leaving, that he was perhaps going to some other newspaper and that one a long way off.”

“He was,” she said. “When did you come here to Plymouth, Stefan?”

“It must have been in 1971. Why?”

“My father worked for the Western Morning News in Plymouth from 1951 till 1957.”

“Not as John Ryan?”

“As Gerald Candless.”

“Ah,” he said again. For a moment, he was silent. Then he said, “Joseph reported him to the police as a missing person, but they weren’t much interested. A young man, you know, not living at home, not a person in any sort of danger.”

“Did you—any of you, I mean—did you try to find him?”

He said rather dryly, “We weren’t the sort of people who were equipped for finding someone. No phone, for a start. And no know-how. Joseph—I don’t think I told you—Joseph was a postman. James was a motor mechanic. Margaret and Mary and I were too young to know what might be done. Besides, Margaret was preparing to go to university—another wonder for Mother and Joseph. I think, eventually, we all just accepted that he’d left us. We were sad, and we mourned him in a way, but there was nothing to be done. I believe—well, I know—that later on Margaret wrote to several provincial newspapers to inquire if he might be working for them—that is, if John Charles Ryan might be, but she always got negative replies. No wonder, in the light of what you’ve told me.

“And that’s all I know. I’ve told you everything about your father I know. It was all forty-six years ago and I never saw him again. None of us did.”

“So far as you know.”

He looked at her in surprise. “Well, yes, that’s so.”

It was time for her to leave. She would come back, of course. There was a lot more to say, a lot more to know about the family after her father’s departure, but it, too, would take hours to tell. She had been in Stefan’s company for six hours. He was tired, his face drawn with fatigue and strain and the pain of remembering. A small hammer banged in her head. She had drunk too much and now she had to drive all those miles across the moor to Tavistock and Okehampton and Bideford. But there was one more question. She was standing up, being helped into her coat.

“You’ve mentioned all the family but one, the third brother, Desmond. You haven’t said a word about Desmond.”

“No,” he said.

“He’s dead, I gathered. You said they were all dead but you and Margaret. What happened to Desmond?”

He went to the door with her. He opened the door and took her hand. She thought he was going to kiss her, but he didn’t. “I can’t tell you tonight,” he said. “I’ll tell you next time. We’re both too tired for it. Good night.”

“Good night, Stefan,” she said.

24

“Sunsets aren’t red,” she said. “The sky turns red only after the sun has gone down.”

—A MAN OF THESSALY

THERE WAS FOG ON THE MOOR. POCKETS OF FOG HUNG IN THE DIPS of the narrow road and scarves of it drifted suddenly across her windscreen. She drove slowly and shakily, uncertain how much of her loss of control was due to drink and how much to the unleashing of emotion. It seemed that for hours now she had held a quantity of unshed tears throbbing and prickling behind her eyeballs. At the same time, she was growing very afraid of falling asleep at the wheel, skidding, involuntarily letting her foot slip off the brake, of plunging into fog and thence into some stream or pool or through a gate.

She had probably drunk almost a liter of wine, for Stefan had certainly not drunk more than the contents of the small carafe. And then there had been the brandy. Jason Thague’s words came back to her and she thought, But if I don’t drink, how will I get through my days? How could I have gotten through this evening? Oh, I want my father, I want him. I never drank so much while my father was alive.

It seemed an interminable journey. Once or twice, she thought of parking the car under a hedge, of lying down to sleep on the backseat with her coat and the car blanket over her. She would be afraid in this wild, deserted place. It was strange, because she never was afraid of the dark or who might be out and about in the dark or of being attacked. What she had learned this evening had made her vulnerable. A skin had been pulled off her and the tender places exposed. She drove on, glad when, as occasionally happened, she saw the lights of another car, the lights of the empty towns as she passed through them.

Lundy View House was in darkness when she reached it, the sea a shining pan of ink, a glittering expanse between invisible headlands. A tiny segment of moon showed between bluish swollen clouds. She let herself in and went straight upstairs in the dark, in the familiar place, her father’s house, where no light was needed to find her way.

Ursula came up to her and kissed her. It was an unprecedented act in the morning, and though she knew she should have been more trusting, she was suspicious. A favorite phrase of her father’s, quoting from The Taming of the Shrew , came to mind: “I wonder what it bodes.”