Barbara Vine - The Chimney Sweeper's Boy

“Oh, no. No, I couldn’t. And I’m sure Hope couldn’t. It would be terrible—can’t you see it would be terrible?”

“Perhaps. If you say so.”

“You’ll be all right, won’t you? You can have your friend and … well, anyone else you’d like to ask.”

“I can have my friend,” said Ursula.

After lunch, she tried Stefan again, and again the machine was on. Had he said he was going away? Had he said something about visiting his son? She couldn’t remember. She left another message that she would like to see him the following Friday. That way, she would have to come down; she would be here on Saturday.…

Afterward, she hardly knew what had made her phone Hope. She never phoned Hope from Devon. Even before she made the call, she knew she wouldn’t tell Hope their mother meant to sell the house. She’d be afraid to do that over the phone, afraid of Hope’s explosion, her wail of wrath and misery. But now she had Hope on the line, she had to say something to her.

“I’m bringing some stuff of Dad’s back. D’you know why he didn’t keep any reviews of A White Webfoot ?”

“He didn’t like them. The critics said he’d written a thriller. You won’t remember. You know you were away.”

“You told me it was based on the Highbury murder.”

“That’s what they said, the Ryan murder case.”

“The what ?”

“The murder of Desmond Ryan. I don’t know if it was. That’s what they said.”

That evening, when she got back from Devon, she went straight to Hope. Fabian wasn’t there and for once her sister was alone.

“It was years before we were born,” Hope said. “One of the critics said 1960, I think.”

“He was Dad’s brother,” Sarah said. “One of his younger brothers,” and she told her sister about Stefan and the Ryan family. Hope listened, not interrupting. The color came up into her face, burned her cheeks, then faded away as fast as it had come.

“You’re saying that after all those years, Daddy based a novel on his brother’s murder?”

“It looks like it.”

“But if that’s true, Daddy had left his home and all of them behind for almost ten years before Desmond was murdered.”

“He’d still have known about it, wouldn’t he? If it was in the papers. D’you know the circumstances?”

“I don’t know anything about it,” Hope said. “I’ve read A White Webfoot —of course I have, and so have you. But that won’t be a faithful reporting of the case; it’ll be the way Daddy always did it. The filtering process, the changing to disguise it and make a better story. I don’t really understand why you want to know. You’re going to write about Daddy, aren’t you, not his family?”

“He is his family. I can’t leave them out.”

“ I would. You know who he was now, his real name, and that he took the new one in 1951—isn’t that enough?”

“I don’t know why he did,” Sarah said.

“Well, it wasn’t because his brother got himself beaten to death or whatever nine years later, that’s for sure. Ma phoned me this afternoon—did I tell you? No? She says she’s going to sell the house. I wasn’t surprised; I thought she would.”

“Don’t you mind?”

“It’s funny,” said Hope, “but I’ve been thinking about it a lot. I mean, before she told me. I even thought that maybe you and I could raise the money, get huge mortgages or something, and buy it from her, and then I thought, What’s the point? I couldn’t bear to be there. I can’t bear the place. I can’t bear to be in the rooms. Not without Daddy.” She looked at her sister, with tears streaming down her face. “I loved him too much, you know. I loved him too much for my own good.”

The FOR SALE sign was discreet, white with austere black Gothic lettering. But passersby stopped to look at it. There weren’t many on foot at this time of year, but even cars stopped. The estate agent had asked what Ursula would think of advertising the house as the former home of Gerald Candless. “Anything that sells it,” she had said recklessly.

The study was empty of his papers now. The books remained. It looked, she thought, like the room in a writer’s house that has been preserved as a museum, the rows of reference works, the shelf of his own books facing the desk, the typewriter uncovered. She had laid a sheet of A4 paper beside it and a fountain pen across the paper, then taken them away again. Stupid game playing—what was the point?

Sarah had taken the first edition of Hand to Mouth. She was glad to see it no more, the black moth on its yellow spine, the woman on the front cover that the artist had given black hair and a full red mouth but in whose face she could always see her own. The rest of them, the four that Hope didn’t want, she intended to hand over to Sam. A Man of Thessaly was the next one Gerald had written and the patient typist in Ilfracombe deciphered. She remembered, with distaste for her own pettiness, the quiet pleasure she had taken in witnessing his struggles with the unwieldy mass of paper, scrawled all over as by a planchette needle gone wildly out of control. Once a week, he had grabbed handfuls of it, stuffed them into giant brown envelopes, and driven off to Ilfracombe.

He had never said a word to the girls. Nor had she. And they had never known, as evinced by Sarah’s surprise that her mother hadn’t read A White Webfoot. Gerald went on tour to the United States for A Man of Thessaly , but she stayed at home. He told anyone who cared to know that his publishers weren’t prepared to pay her airfare.

The angina began the following year. He had never walked much and now he walked even less, for any climb left him fighting for breath. While at the hospital for tests, actually during a cardiogram, he had a heart attack. Not much of a one, but alarming.

Once again, nothing was said to the girls. The woman who no longer cared about him bore the brunt of his health problems, while the women who loved him were left in ignorance. As far as they knew, their father might live for twenty years.

The year of Phantom Listeners was the year he got the OBE. She went to the palace with him and sat in the audience next to Robert Postle. Afterward, he told Robert that the queen had asked him how many books he had written and whether he was working on one now. They had lunch in Charlotte Street and Robert asked what he had said to the queen about writing another book, as he, Gerald’s publisher, would very much like to know.

“I may give up writing,” Gerald had said. “I may retire.”

“Writers don’t retire. Not at sixty.”

“Some should when they’re thirty,” said Gerald.

Robert hadn’t taken the threat seriously. And that was wise of him, because Gerald had begun work on A White Webfoot the following week. Ursula hadn’t known its title and hadn’t cared to find out, but the girls knew and talked about it. There was no escaping involvement with his work in that house.

He bought Sarah’s flat when she had her first job in London, and Hope’s a year later. South Kensington or Bayswater was what he would have liked for them, but they had to settle for Kentish Town and Crouch End, the best he could afford. Not that they had been anything but rapturous, touchingly grateful; they realized their own luck, aware of their friends’ mortgages. The new book progressed slowly. She wondered if he was ill, if he lay on the sofa in the study, racked with angina pain, instead of writing. Something was making the process very slow for him, as if the pages he produced were not the result of a melding of invention and imagination, but of a hand-to-hand battle with a demon that must be daily wrestled to the floor. And when he finally appeared, to sit reading in the living room or come for his meal, he looked gaunt and ghost-ridden, his eyes staring, black shadows under them like inky fingerprints.