Barbara Vine - The Chimney Sweeper's Boy

Stefan was silent for a moment. “And you think this is based on fact?”

“All his books were. He said so. But facts changed, were filtered, processed. The places were changed and the names, of course, and the relationships of one character to another. You can never quite tell what is fact and what is imagination, but you can always be sure the emotions were real. He had felt them or someone he knew had.” Sarah got up, went over to the bookcase, and brought her eyes close to the row of her father’s paperbacks, the line of black moths, chimney sweeper’s boys. She turned around quickly to look once more at this man who was her uncle. “I think my father wrote the letter the police found.”

“The letter?”

“Among Breech’s letters was one from a man who signed himself J. It was read in court.”

“None of us went to the trial. While it was on, we wouldn’t have newspapers in the house, for my mother’s sake. Then Givner died and that was an end of it.”

“The letter seemed to be saying J wanted some sort of reconciliation. It’s not very explicit, but it does seem to suggest that J wanted to come back to his family after an absence of eight years and could do so only by talking to Desmond. Does that mean anything to you?”

“No, it doesn’t. I wish it did.”

“He says in the letter he’ll phone Desmond after about a week. The letter was dated a week before the murder. Perhaps he did phone. Perhaps a date had been set for a meeting. But then Givner killed Desmond.”

“I wonder what he wanted to talk about.”

“Perhaps he wanted to tell someone why he had left, where he’d been, why he’d changed his name. Perhaps he wanted to prepare the way via one family member for returning to the family. But he does say that he and Desmond had somehow done each other a great wrong.”

“Are we ever going to know what that was, Sarah?”

“I don’t know. Somehow I feel we aren’t.”

She thought, but didn’t say aloud, If he had met Desmond and talked to him, would he have reverted to being John Ryan, gone home again to Goodwin Road, been reunited with his family? Terrible questions reared up. Would he ever have written another book? Or if he had, would he have written the books he had written?

Would he have met her mother and married her? Would she, Sarah, ever have been born?

On the doorstep, saying good-bye, Stefan wished her a Happy Christmas.

In her headlights, the FOR SALE sign gleamed whitely. No one bought houses in the midwinter, though; there was time yet. It would be a long time before a sale happened. Before the house was no longer there, she thought, for that was how it would feel when it was gone from them and owned by others, as if it had disappeared. As if a mighty spring tide had come and swept it away, drawn it off the cliff into the depths of the sea. Like another Lyonesse or Dunwich, it would lie down there, intact but unreachable, inaccessible to anyone.

A foolish fantasy. Her mother had gone to bed, though her bedroom light was still on. Sarah thought that there must be people of her age, perhaps most people, who under these circumstances would have opened that bedroom door, put a head out, said something cheerful, pleasant, inquiring, or gone up to the woman reading in bed and kissed her. She half-wanted to do some of that, but she couldn’t. She stood for a moment outside the door, hesitating, in a dilemma about something so trivial, so absurd, then finally called out, “Good night!” and ran into her own room.

Psychologists said that it is best if a child models itself on the parent of the same sex. She and Hope had modeled themselves on the parent of the other sex and couldn’t undo it now, wouldn’t want to undo it now. How unhappy he must have been, her poor father, she thought as she lay in bed. While he was alive, she had never thought of his happiness or unhappiness, only of him as her father and sometimes, often, of her luck in having this father, so clever, so talented, so successful, so generally admired, so good to her and Hope, so generous and so loving.

But he carried with him always some terrible thing. Oh, why didn’t he tell me? Once we were grown-up, Hope and I, why didn’t he tell us? We would have comforted him; we would have made it better, because we loved him so much.

There was nothing to do the next day. If only she had thought of that, anticipated it, she wouldn’t have come down until this afternoon, would have stayed in a hotel in Plymouth. It was too cold to go out unless going out was essential, as it would be in the evening. Her father’s study was stripped and emptied. It was painful to be in there. She thought of a line he had quoted somewhere: “The flesh, alas, is sad and I have read all the books.” It was true about the books, but her flesh wouldn’t be sad tonight, no matter how cold it was, and how much she reflected and wondered and mourned.

The rapport she and Hope had seemed to establish with their mother a few months back had faded. She hadn’t kissed her and thought she never would again. Whatever burden her father had carried through life, her mother should have helped lighten it. Sarah was sure she hadn’t. She had left him to bear it unhappily alone while pursuing, like the woman in Hand to Mouth , her own selfish and petty interests.

Overnight, her heart had hardened against Ursula and it was with wonder and some self-disgust that she looked back on her journey of the evening before across the moor, when she had speculated on the single state of Stefan and her mother and had considered the possibility of bringing them together. The deceased husband’s brother. Once, and not so long ago, historically speaking, marriage between them would have been against the law, would have counted in some bizarre way as incest.

She had nothing to say to Ursula and said nothing. In the afternoon, a rather wonderful thing happened. Vicky phoned. She sounded embarrassed and rather nervous. Adam Foley was down for the weekend and wanted to join them in the pub, but she had wondered how Sarah would feel—he was for some reason so antagonistic to her, could be so rude—and if it would spoil Sarah’s evening, she, Vicky (her voice strengthening and growing indignant), was quite prepared to call him back and tell him no.

“I’ll be fine,” Sarah said, and she grew tense with excitement. “I don’t mind, you know. I hope I’m tougher than that.”

The outrageous dressing was becoming a habit. She no longer had so many doubts. This time, she painted her mouth blue as well as her fingernails. She plundered Hope’s wardrobe for black stockings, not tights, a skintight miniskirt that would show those stocking tops if she bent over. The shoes, with four-inch heels, were her own. She couldn’t imagine why she had bought them but was glad now that she had. It would be better if her hair were extravagantly long or shorn to her shapely skull, but that couldn’t be helped now.

It was still only half-past six. She sat in her bedroom, reading the one book of her father’s his house now held, the copy she had brought with her, Purple of Cassius. His family was in there—she knew that now—not only Chloe Rule, who was his mother, but Peter, who must be Stefan as a child and perhaps James as an adult, Catherine, who was an amalgam of Margaret and Mary, and the strict God-fearing neighbor, who was another version of Jacob Manley, another face of Joseph.

It wasn’t possible to concentrate on what she was reading. Sexual desire drives out everything else, she thought, takes over, fills the body and expels the mind, turns the blood into some steamy substance, changes the heartbeat, sets the skin on fire.

Ursula looked at her mouth and her shoes, said nothing. She said nothing at the sight of her bent over at the drinks cupboard with her stocking tops showing. But when Sarah poured two inches of whiskey into a tumbler and took a swig of it, she did speak.