Barbara Vine - The Chimney Sweeper's Boy

“He was gay.”

“Yes.” Stefan looked at her inquiringly. “You’ve been reading about the trial?”

She nodded.

“I didn’t know, of course. Not then. None of us did. It’s impossible to imagine what Joseph’s reaction to such a thing would have been. You, at your age, probably don’t realize how the general public felt about homosexuals in the fifties. And I, at mine, just have a sort of muddled recollection of horror at the very idea. This was many years ago, before the act that made homosexual relations between consenting adults over twenty-one legal, and feelings were as strong as they had been at the time of the Oscar Wilde case.”

“I didn’t know. But I’ve read some newspaper accounts since then.”

“Then you’ll know judges and magistrates were describing homosexuality as the worst evil known to man, as a hideous crime, and, above all, as a deliberate, calculated viciousness. The most liberal, the really enlightened, took the view that it could be cured, that it was a kind of madness or sickness. Right on during the sixties, men were being put into mental hospitals and given aversion therapy to ‘cure’ their disease.”

“There’s a lot about that in A White Webfoot. ”

“Is there now? I knew nothing about homosexuality until my brother Desmond came up in court in 1955. He was found guilty of an act of gross indecency in a public lavatory and sent to prison for six months.”

Sarah wanted to ask what gross indecency was but as quickly decided not to. Instead, she said very tentatively, for she was bewildered, “You don’t mean with a child, with a minor?”

“He was twenty-four and the other man, so far as I remember, was over thirty. It was a crime in those days, Sarah, with anyone of any age. Fortunately—I think I can fairly say fortunately for him—Joseph was dead before it happened. He had died the previous year. National newspapers were quite reticent about cases of this sort, but local papers weren’t, and it was all in the Walthamstow Independent , which my brother John had worked for. All there for my mother to read.”

“What did he do for a living? Desmond, I mean.”

“He had had various jobs. He’d been a messenger and worked in a shop behind the counter. A gentlemen’s outfitters. He’d been a barman, and at the time of his arrest he was working as a receptionist in rather a dubious sort of hotel in Paddington. But he always had money, far more money than he could have earned by the sort of work he did. We never noticed or we never made the connection. We were innocent.

“After he came out of prison, he didn’t come back to live with us. He got a flat of his own. It was in Highbury and he was set up in it by the man who killed him. There was no question of my mother not wanting to see Desmond; she wasn’t like that. None of us would have rejected him, but he just didn’t come back. And I don’t think he ever again had a regular job. He’d call in sometimes to see her and he’d bring her presents. He was always well dressed. And he was always happy.”

“Happy?”

“You might think there wasn’t much for a homosexual man to be happy about in the fifties, but he was. Gay wasn’t in any way a misnomer for him. In fact, gay in its older sense really described him; gaiety expressed him. He was nice and sweet and lovable. I don’t think he was in the least bit ashamed of the kind of life he led. You might say, why should he have been? The answer to that is that everyone was always telling gay men they should be ashamed, that they were sick, that they were vicious, that they’d either chosen their way of life or else they were mentally disturbed.”

Sarah considered. “Did he talk to you about it?”

“You have to understand that we didn’t meet much. I went away to university in ’fifty-five, the year he went to prison, and I wasn’t home much after that, except for the holidays. But he did talk to me on a couple of occasions. That’s how I know he wasn’t ashamed. I’m sure people would have said then that in telling me these things he was trying to corrupt me—the powers that be were very big on corruption in those days—but of course he wasn’t. He wouldn’t have wanted me to follow his way of life—why should he? He was he and I was I and we were different. I think he recognized, even then, that some are born gay and some straight, just as some have blue eyes and some brown. He never went into physical detail, anyway, only told me about love affairs he’d had. And he talked about clubs he went to and baths.”

“You mean steam baths, Turkish baths?”

“He was very big on that. I think he enjoyed showing off his body. He liked the old men who went there looking at him. He never mentioned Givner to me—not by name, that is. It was quite simple and straightforward, you know. Givner loved him, provided him with that flat, spent money on him, and he was unfaithful to Givner. What else did the man expect? He must have been living in a dream world. You’ve read about the trial, you said?”

Sarah nodded. “Givner hanged himself in his cell while on remand.”

“Yes. It was a terrible thing for my mother. The loss of Desmond, the trial. Everyone knew, of course. The neighbors knew.”

“If Desmond had been a respectable heterosexual with a wife and children, she’d have gotten sympathy, but because he was gay and things had come out about his way of life, it was quite different?”

“That’s right. By that time, James and Jackie had two children and had moved into a house a couple of streets away. Mary was serving her novitiate. Margaret and I were both teaching nearby and both living at home. But it was John my mother wanted. I’ve told you how we tried to find him. We advertised for him, but we didn’t get any response. And Mother said we never would; she knew she’d never see him again.”

“And eventually you came down here?”

“I didn’t think I’d actually get the job. It was a good school, a better school than I could have hoped for in London. And I loved the place, not so much Plymouth as the countryside around it. So I left and Margaret stayed. She stayed because someone had to. She was a prime example of the single woman who sacrifices herself for a parent.”

“ The Mezzanine Smile ,” said Sarah.

“Well, yes, maybe. Yet Mother didn’t want it; she didn’t expect it. Margaret was engaged, and she kept the man she was engaged to waiting for seven years. Then Mother insisted, said to go and get married, to leave her, and in the end, Margaret did.”

“What became of your mother?”

“She died of cancer in the spring of 1973. She was ill for a long time, was in and out of the hospital; she had a mastectomy and a hysterectomy. The cancer went to her lungs. It was an awful death. If John—Gerald—if he’d known, perhaps he might have … But there it is—he didn’t. Why did you want to know if I’d read A White Webfoot ?”

She wished now that she had brought a copy with her. She had taken it for granted that such a self-confessed fan of Gerald Candless would have the paperback in the house. It was half-past six. If it had been earlier, they could have gone out and bought a copy. In the bookshops in the shopping center above the Hoe, they would be bound to have A White Webfoot. Still, it was too late now.

“It’s about two boys growing up in the fens,” she said. “They have some sort of sexual encounter at school; it’s rather glossed over, no details. They grow up—one becomes a practicing and promiscuous homosexual and a happy one; the other is haunted by his … his orientation.”

“Ah,” said Stefan. “I begin to see. Why is it called that?”

“ A White Webfoot ? It’s a quotation from something, a poem—I can’t remember what. Mark, who’s one of the protagonists, has a recurring memory of web-footed creatures walking in a marsh. And he has a dream of being in a stone passage with one end sealed off, and when he turns around, the entrance has also been blocked. I suppose it’s a trap dream, an expression of a need to escape while knowing there’s no escape. Mark is married; he has a sympathetic wife and two sons. He sees Dennis and observes him, follows him, but they never meet. When Dennis is murdered by his lover and the lover kills himself, Mark blames himself for both their deaths. He feels sure that if he had told Dennis the truth years before, that he loved him and wanted to live with him, none of it would have happened. The rest of the novel is about guilt and self-realization.”