Barbara Vine - The Chimney Sweeper's Boy

That was when she said the memoir would be sensational and the Jason chap laughed and put his arm around her and said that was an understatement. Now that he had the manuscript there before him, he began to feel apprehensive. No, that was an understatement. He was afraid of it. Of course, this wasn’t an unfamiliar feeling; he was quite used to having it. Publishers are habitually afraid of possible libel, defamation, ludicrous mistakes, gross inaccuracies, and blatant falsehood from their authors. Not to mention plagiarism. It seemed possible that all those causes of fear might be found in Sarah’s book, and therefore he was afraid.

The two cardboard folders that contained it, fastened together by an elastic band, looked innocuous lying there. Only paper, after all, five hundred sheets of paper with words printed on them. But paper and print always look innocuous. Nothing in this world was more deceptive when you considered what the printed word could and did do.

He was going away on holiday on Saturday. With his wife and those of the children who still lived at home. Carlyon-Brent’s senior editors were expected to take their main holidays in August, the silly season. One of those manuscripts he would read now and the other take with him to the Luberon. Which?

Perhaps obviously, one read the shorter first, the less welcome, the one to be gotten out of the way. Using a phrase of Freddie Cyprian’s, he said to himself that a couple of hours would wrap it up. Then Sarah’s, later. On a hotel terrace in the warm shade or at a table outside a café … Was there a photograph in existence of Gerald with his two girls when they were small?

He seemed to remember one Carlyon-Brent had in its archives. It would do admirably for the jacket.

He put Titus Romney’s The Spoiled Forest in his briefcase and after dinner, after the nine o’clock news on television, took the manuscript out of its cardboard folder and began to read.

29

1

The forest might be green and wild to the north, a real woodland of grassy dells, but here it was dusty, it was shabby, and even in spring the trees looked weary of the struggle to remain standing. Along a path, into the depths, it grew quieter, a little more like the country. The sound of traffic from the conjoined roads faded; the light was left behind. The sky was a luminous gray, not really dark, a mass of broken, shining, variable cloud, from which the moon emerged and retreated and appeared again.

John was quite near home. Both his own home, where his mother was and his brothers and sisters, and the house he lodged in. One house was in a street half a mile to the west, the other a little farther away to the south. He decided he was far enough away. They wouldn’t come here, any of them. Only one sort of human being came here after dark, the sort he had come to find.

The directness of this thought caught him up, frightened him. He told himself he should not have put it so boldly, even to himself He had come merely to look around, to see if what he had heard said was true. On the paper, in the office and the press, the rumors moved around. He had no idea where they came from, but they were there, mentioned by the older men with worldly wisdom or sniggered at. Not, of course, if girls were present. He had listened to the stories and he, too, had sniggered or cast up his eyes in the required way. But he remembered, he stored up his information.

The forest, they said. Up by the reservoir. Forest Road, Grove Hill, around the back there. That’s their stamping ground. You go up there, lad, and you want to keep your back to a tree.

Only he didn’t want to. He didn’t want to express it, either. He had just come to take a look around. Because it was a possibility for the future, something to think about and consider the pros and cons, whether this way of life was for him. The others were not possibilities. Not the baths—probably not the baths—and never, never, the other choice. As soon as he’d known about those subterranean places, as soon as that boy at school had told him, he had stopped ever using a public lavatory. He never went near one after that. It was no problem in the navy—there were other problems, God knows!—but since becoming a reporter … He always had to go home or use the one in the office or go into a pub, or if all else failed, go behind a tree somewhere.

He had come, here, to the only option. Now he was in the depths of this triangle of spoiled forest, in the middle probably, approaching the little cluster of ponds, he asked himself how it would be for him if nothing happened. Would he feel relief or disappointment? Must it even be one or the other? What he could not face was going on as he was. Taking Sheila about, squeezing his eyes shut before he kissed her, imagining always something quite other, fantasizing. Looking at his brothers, envying James his normalcy, his desire for his pregnant bride, envying Stephen for being still a child. And what of Desmond—what did he feel for him? Speculation. Doubt and certainty. Wondering always if Desmond, so young still, so handsome, might be the same way inclined?

It was sequestered in here, yet it was open, the trees scattered, the ponds so many bright eyes, looking back at the sky. The seat, no more than a bench, was in the open but with the enclosing woodland behind it. You go up there, lad, you want to keep your back to a tree. It was silent and still, no wind, but he was aware of movement somewhere. Nothing he could hear—rather, a vibration through the earth, a sense of not being alone. He might have been imagining it.

He sat down on the bench. For the first time, now, he looked about him, really looked. Across the water, behind him through the trees and between their trunks into the darkness, ahead, up to where the path met an intersecting ride. The moon had sailed out into a clear patch of sky. Up by the ride was another bench and a man was sitting on it. A person, anyway, but it wouldn’t be a woman. Not a woman in here, alone, at night.

After a moment or two he turned his gaze away from the figure on the other bench. He lit a cigarette. He would give himself ten minutes, the time it would take him to smoke that cigarette. Then he would go. Not to his room but back to the house down by the Midland arches, see them all, lie down to sleep on the settee, and, before he slept, decide. What to do. Never to go out with Sheila again, that was the first thing, the kind thing. It wasn’t fair on her, the way he had been behaving, because he could never, never … Never again. Those times in the Philippines came back to him and he banished the memory by a physical effort of clenching his hands, opening them, pressing his fingers against his head. He drew long and deeply on his cigarette.

He would go to the doctor. Not his doctor, of course, not the doctor where Mother went and the boys and the children. Whatever doctors might say about the sacredness of patients’ confidences, he would never trust to it. If anyone told his mother, he would kill himself Another thought to be suppressed, crushed, deadened. He would go to a doctor not in the National Health and pay him and the doctor would send him somewhere to be cured. The cigarette was more than half-smoked. He looked across the water, the smooth surface of the ponds, each of them reflecting a picture of that tumbled sky. And then he became aware that the man on the other bench had moved.

How was he aware of it? He hadn’t looked. He had sensed only a disturbance of the space to his left, just as earlier he had been warned of another’s presence by a vibration through the earth. Now he looked. The man was coming this way. Perhaps he should go. He put out his cigarette, ground the stub into the clayey soil, looked down at his own knees. The man would come up to him and ask him something, ask him for a light most likely. And he would get out his lighter and snap on the flame and in it see a young face.…