Barbara Vine - The Chimney Sweeper's Boy

“Perverts” and “inverts” got in touch with one another through elaborate codes in film and pornographic magazines. Accounts followed of recent prosecutions, the imprisonment of a clergyman for what the chairman of a quarter sessions had called “one of the most terrible offenses in the world.” Public conveniences were a notorious meeting place for these “sick men,” and there they even indulged their disgusting and degraded practices. Such behavior was common across the metropolis, though it seemed to have begun in Soho, and to have spread its “abominable tentacles” outward, through Finsbury, Islington, and Highbury, Lisson Grove, Kilburn, and the respectable northern suburbs.

Sarah couldn’t see where Desmond Ryan came into all this until she reached the proceedings at the central criminal court, the accounts of the trial of George Peter Givner for his murder. Here, in the national newspapers, the process was again heavily veiled under prudery and euphemism, but she could make out Givner’s role and Desmond’s. Givner had been his lover, had rented the Highbury Crescent flat for him and occasionally lived with him there. On the evening in question, according to the police, Givner had arrived at the flat, let himself in with his key, and found Desmond Ryan there with another man. There had been a violent quarrel, during which the other man fled and which culminated in Givner first striking Ryan with a table lamp, then using an eighteen-inch-high marble statuette of a male nude to beat him to death. Much was made in the report of this bronze figurine of Apollo.

The next day, the witness, the other man in the flat, James Henry Breech, a private soldier, gave evidence of Givner’s arrival, his verbal abuse of Ryan, and the quarrel. He had not witnessed the murder, but he had seen Givner pick up the statuette and strike Ryan with it. Then he had fled, run down the stairs and out into the street. He denied a sexual relationship with Ryan, describing the two of them as “close friends,” but the police found letters from him to Ryan in the flat, misspelled, punctuation-free effusions of love combined with offers of payment for favors.

Among these letters was one other, a literate piece of work, written in a spidery, sloping hand and signed only with the letter J. It was dated one week before, but there was no address on it and no clue as to the sender. This letter was read in court just as Breech’s letters were and the newspaper gave them all in full, the soldier’s, Sarah suspected, for the pleasure of offering its readers examples not so much of the man’s depravity as of his brutish ignorance. J’s letter was quite another matter.

Desmond ,

You will know who this is from. I need not explain. It has taken me eight years to find the courage to write it. I have hated you and I have blamed you. Through you I lost everything that mattered to me. I think it may be possible you can understand why, after what happened, I could never go back. But it was no more your fault than it was mine; it was no one’s fault. And now I need to see you and talk to you and see if we can forgive each other and teach ourselves to forget. So I am asking you to let us meet. I will phone you in a week or so. J.

The court seemed to regard this letter simply as further evidence of Desmond Ryan’s propensities and no great weight was attached to it. The prosecution’s next witness was the man who had found the body the following morning, and who described the wreckage of the room, the smashed furniture, a rug dyed almost entirely red, and the blood splashes on the walls. After that, the court adjourned until the following Monday.

Sarah looked in vain through the following Tuesday’s newspaper for the progress of the trial. Instead, in the next issue, she found a paragraph to the effect that George Peter Givner had committed suicide in his cell. During the Sunday night, he had removed his shirt and his underclothes, torn them into strips, plaited them into a rope, and hanged himself.

* * *

The file on Gerald Candless, alias John Ryan, now had the thickness of a telephone directory. Sarah added her newspaper photocopies to it and sat down to read the rest of A White Webfoot. She had abandoned it a month before because it seemed to have so little relevance to her father’s situation, and she had had the more recent Less Is More to study. Opening the earlier novel again, halfway through, she felt frightened by disturbing pictures, the white walker, half beast, half bird, and its webbed prints in the snow, and she was aware of real but ridiculous fear, the shiver of the child reading a ghost story in an empty house. Then she came to the dream, the man in the tunnel who finds the exit ahead blocked and who, on turning around, is confronted by a stone wall where the entrance had been.

It got dark so early at this time of the year. After a while, when she reached the chapter in which the murder happens, she put more lights on. She went to fetch herself a bottle of wine and drank the first glass straight down.

She could see what the critics had meant when they called the novel a thriller. In none of his other books had her father so graphically described violent death. Here was the battle between George Givner and Desmond Ryan—Harry Merchant and Dennis Conlon in the book—one man armed with an object that might have been designed as a weapon, the other defenseless but for the cable, a lamp cord, the author put into his hand. Gerald Candless, with characteristic Candless imagery, compared the two to Roman gladiators, the man with the sword and the man with the net.

Sarah flinched from it as she had never before recoiled from her father’s work. When the blood was described, flying like red birds smashing into glass walls, she had to look away from the page. The damage to Desmond-Dennis’s beauty dismayed her, the long, painful, passionate dwelling on his ruined face, the bloody cavern in his skull, his broken hands. She skipped paragraphs after that, then came to the discovery of the body and at last to Givner-Merchant’s piteous self-inflicted death, the lonely suicide, the long, cold hours that passed before the dead man was found.

No mention of letters, Mark the boyhood friend not mentioned for two chapters, then described only as reading an account of all this in newspapers. Just as she herself had done. The thriller element of the novel soon disappeared. There was no more suspense, no mystery, only a long examination of Mark’s guilt and conscience, as he blames himself for Dennis’s death.

Sarah had been refilling her glass as she read, and by the time she reached the last chapter, she was fuddled with wine, the print starting to dance. She had learned nothing new, only that her father must have been made to suffer painfully from his brother’s death. She fell asleep in the chair and the book fell to the floor.

By the time Ursula was prepared to work and qualified to work, there were no jobs. It was the late eighties. And Gerald, if not exactly ill, had a heart condition, which meant he needed to care for himself and be cared for. She learned to cook the right sort of food for him; she encouraged him to take a walk around the garden, on the level ground, every day. If he had been able to climb the cliff, he could have joined her in her beach walks, but climbing the cliff would probably have killed him.

Not a word to the girls. He was insistent about that.

“They love me,” he said. “I am blessed in that two beautiful, brilliant women love me. What have I done to deserve that? Am I to reward them by making them unhappy?”

Ursula thought that he had done plenty to deserve it. Gotten up in the night to tend them, hugged and kissed them, told them stories, given them everything they wanted, spent large sums of money on them, bought them their homes, but she didn’t say so. He drove himself to the hospital for regular checkups, dropping off chapters of The Mezzanine Smile at Rosemary’s. Ursula wasn’t allowed to drive him; he didn’t think women made good drivers, Sarah and Hope necessarily being the exceptions.