Barbara Vine - The Chimney Sweeper's Boy

For a few weeks, they had reached a point where they ceased altogether to speak to each other. Total silence between people who share a home might have been possible on his side; it wasn’t on hers. Gradually, they began once more to exchange remarks about their children, the weather, the condition of the sea and his health.

One evening when she was coming out of a racking migraine, she looked at him and thought he seemed worse than she was. “You are very ill,” she said.

“It’s in the mind,” he said, “only in the mind,” and then he laughed, presumably at that “only.”

“If I were you, I’d make an appointment with the doctor.”

“And if I were you,” he said, “I’d want me to die. The sooner the better.”

It took him two and a half years to complete his new novel. Within a few months of its reaching Robert Postle, a rough of a proposed jacket design arrived. The white, gold-shot mist—rather, the dazzling whiteness barely broken by streaks of saffron and blue—reminded Ursula of an Impressionist painting, a Monet without a motif. Gerald hated it. His feelings about it, violently expressed, came near to generating a real conversation between them. He sent it back to Mellie Pearson, the artist, with demands for change, but even the final version, with birds and a sun and a pale waterside, was always to be a cause of deep dislike that almost amounted to phobia. The original in a pastel gray frame, presented to him at the novel’s launch party, he afterward returned to the artist.

The critics called A White Webfoot a thriller. One newspaper had its crime-fiction critic review it. Another described it as “a murder story dressed up in Dostoyevskian pretensions.” Gerald Candless, said the Evening Standard , no longer able to dredge up plots out of his own imagination, had based his new novel on the Ryan case, a notorious and sordid murder that was of interest today solely because of its place in the history of the campaign for homosexual-law reform.

Gerald had had very little experience with bad reviews. Even Half an Hour in the Street had met with nothing like this. He didn’t want his daughters to see the newspapers, but he was powerless, in Hope’s case, to prevent it. Sarah, as it happened, was out of the country. Hope, of course, flew to her father’s defense and would have written impassioned letters to several newspapers if Gerald hadn’t gently persuaded her that this would do more harm than good.

His last book, the last, that is, before the one that would be posthumously published, he wrote in four months. No one could have called The Mezzanine Smile a thriller (Gerald said) and no one did. Reviewers wrote four hundred words about it rather than the established eight hundred and it passed quietly into number twenty on some newspaper’s best-seller list. Ursula, in tune with her resolve of nine years before, didn’t read it.

“And I still don’t know what it’s about,” she said to Sam, taking the book down from the shelf and handing it to him.

“A man who works on a provincial newspaper but who gets up at five to write plays and a woman who loses her chance of marriage because she stays at home to look after her old parents.”

“You can take them to London with you. I must stay here for Sarah at the weekend and then I’ll come up and maybe …”

“You won’t go back?”

“I shall have to tell the girls, Sam. I don’t think they’ll mind. They’re not very interested in what I do. Shall we go for a walk on the beach?”

* * *

The sea was a dull slate blue, its color the reflection of dark clouds with gaps of clear sky between them. Mussel shells, ground into powder by the tides, made chevron streaks on the pale, flat sand, and the razor shells lay everywhere, some split and splintered, others perfect open blades. The air was clear and cold, the sun a pool of yellow light between bulges of cloud low on the horizon.

“Have you ever noticed,” she said, “how sunsets aren’t red? The sky never goes red until after the sun has gone down.”

“Your late husband pointed that out in one of his books.”

“Did he? You know his work better than I do. But I’m not surprised; he pointed everything out. Somewhere he said that people never shiver from fear or emotion, only from the cold, though writers are always saying they do.”

“Hold my hand,” he said.

They walked along the water’s edge, where the sand was firmest, hard as setting mortar. Gerald had never written about this sea that for twenty-seven years had been under his windows. He had enjoyed it only on the finest days. She thought, as the trickling tide crept close to her shoes, as she stepped aside and he jumped aside, laughing, I will do my best never to think about Gerald again; I will try to shut off my past.

At the gap in the dunes, they turned back. The hotel, which had been dark for long weeks, now had lights in many of its windows and, as they watched, more came on. They were going to eat their Christmas dinner up there. It is where we met, she thought, turning her face to him, smiling. He bent over and kissed her.

She wanted to ask him something. She remembered what he had said soon after they met, how he wanted to be in love, and she knew that if she asked him, she would get an honest answer. Why am I so greedy for punishment? Haven’t I had enough? She asked herself those questions but asked him nothing, and they watched the sun go down and the red color gradually seep across the sky.

25

The judge praised William for punching Mark in the face. He said that this seventeen-year-old set an example to all men who were approached by another man for sex. Mark’s nose was broken and he lost a tooth. In a facetious tone, the judge described the damage as “cosmetically disfiguring.”

—A WHITE WEBFOOT

WITHOUT ANY GROUNDS FOR HOPE, SHE HAD HALF-EXPECTED A LETTER from Jason to be waiting for her when she got back, an apology, a request for more work. There was nothing, and on an impulse, she sent him a check for the amount she had been paying him weekly when he was still her researcher. He was loathsome and clumsy, but his cry of hunger sometimes still echoed in her head. She considered a covering letter, something to the effect of hoping he was all right, but she couldn’t find suitable words, and in the end, she put the check by itself into the envelope.

In his absence, she had to do it herself. She went to the British Newspaper Library in Colindale. Hope had given her the approximate dates. It was a slow business, finding the appropriate newspapers, waiting for them to be brought to her, and it made researches at St. Catherine’s House seem simple. But at last, when she had been there more than two hours, she found what she was looking for.

The death of Desmond Ryan had taken place in the autumn of 1959. In October. The Evening News was the first newspaper to carry a report of it. A body had been discovered that morning by a friend who had a key to a flat in Highbury Crescent. It was identified as that of Desmond William Ryan, twenty-eight, of that address. Police were treating the case as a murder.

The following day’s papers all carried similar accounts. All were brief, cagey, somehow veiled. It didn’t take a particularly suspicious mind to detect a contrived cover-up. The local weekly, the Walthamstow Independent , was less reticent. On the following Friday, when it came out, it carried a much fuller story and a long article about what it described as a “perverts’ ring” and a “network of corruption.” Its tone was one of almost incredulous moral outrage. The word homosexual was never used, nor was gay. Perhaps gay hadn’t come into use then, Sarah thought vaguely. The piece told of large-scale investigations by the police and the uncovering of a “web of vice” unparalleled in British history.