Barbara Vine - The Chimney Sweeper's Boy

His mother was the best cook in the world. He liked to tell her that and see her pleasure. She had had a hard life. But her big family of loving children was her reward. There must be plenty of women, he thought, who would like to have a lot of children if only they could have them already big and sensible and independent. She had brought hers up the hard way, six children, never much money, and, after his father died, perhaps not much love. Well, not much of that sort of love. You only had to look at Joseph to know that.

Joseph was at home; he always was. John couldn’t remember a single evening when Joseph had taken his mother out anywhere. They stayed at home with the children, who weren’t Joseph’s but might as well have been. He treated them as his own. Stephen, Mary, Margaret, Desmond, James, and himself. Aged fourteen, nearly sixteen, eighteen, twenty, twenty-two, and the one who had been away and seen the world and come back, oh, so thankfully.

Joseph said grace. He was a devout Catholic but behaved more like a nonconformist, reciting “For what we are about to receive” and reading the Bible every evening. Desmond wasn’t there. At work, his mother said. Desmond worked in a London hotel, doing what, John didn’t know, perhaps as a porter. He was always vague about what he did. John missed him; he liked everyone to be there.

James’s wife of a month sat between him and Mary. Her pregnancy had begun to show. John thought he longed for the coming baby almost more than its parents did, perhaps really more, for James and Jackie had had to get married and very likely wouldn’t have if she hadn’t been pregnant. But he knew his mother rejoiced in the prospect of her first grandchild and Joseph did, too, after his first anger was over.

It had been left to John to explain things to Stephen. He was going to use this evening to do that, take him aside after tea and have a quiet, reassuring word. Joseph had made Stephen feel the disgrace of it. He had spoken with his customary measured gentleness, but the words he used were harsh. James and Jackie had committed a sin and now must make restitution, must marry, never mind their feelings—those had nothing to do with it. They had to marry and come to live with James’s mother and stepfather, inconvenient though it might be, crowded though it would certainly be, for they had nowhere else to go. Sin, Stephen was told, must always be paid for, and the payment was unpleasant and painful.

John, of course, took a different line. They went up to the bedroom Stephen shared with Desmond, ostensibly for John to look at Stephen’s cigarette-card collection. There, first of all, he told Stephen to remember he owed Joseph a lot; he must always love and respect Joseph. But he need not take everything he said too seriously. This wasn’t the big tragedy Joseph said it was and it certainly wasn’t some exceptional crime that every right-thinking person condemned.

“Uncle Joseph called it a sin,” Stephen said.

“I know. But, believe me, this is something that happens all the time. Some of the strongest feelings we have when we’re young are our sexual feelings and they are the hardest to resist. I think Uncle Joseph has forgotten that. James and Jackie couldn’t resist their sexual feelings and the result is that they’re going to have a baby. That doesn’t sound like a crime, does it?”

Stephen asked thoughtfully, “What would be a sin, then?”

“To harm someone or to betray him, to tell lies, to be unkind. The most important in all this is the baby who’s going to be born and that he or she has a family and plenty of people to be loved by. We’ve had that, haven’t we, all of us?”

Stephen nodded.

“A family is a sacred thing, Stephen. To break up a family and destroy it, that’s a sin.”

John believed all that when he said it, knew it was true, but when he spoke about sexual feelings, he felt his voice begin to falter. He had consciously to keep it firm and strong. Later that evening, when he was back in his rented room, he had never before been so powerfully aware of the pressure and insistence of a desire for sex. He did what he had done with the man in the forest, his eyes closed, imagining the man there with him in the dark.

Would he always close his eyes in the act of sex? For him, while mostly enjoyed in solitude, it was always the act of darkness. He was twenty-five years old and he had only once had sex the way he really wanted it, with a man, and then it had been incomplete. It had been a glimpse of something that might be wonderful, and then the curtain had fallen.

5

His interview with the editor of the newspaper that might or might not offer him a job was the next day. It was on the outskirts of London, a highly regarded paper, but still only a weekly. The other one, the one he was still waiting to hear from, was a daily and prestigious, but a very long way away, in the West Country. Being away from them all in the navy had been bad enough. Could he face it again? The train journey took five hours; he would be cut off from them for weeks on end, would maybe come home for a weekend once in every four.…

Still, he hadn’t yet heard from that one, while the editor of the weekly wanted to see him that afternoon. It was a mere bus ride away. Was he damaging his career prospects for the sake of his family? Perhaps, if he had a career in newspapers at all, if being a journalist was really what he wanted.

He thought of his half completed novel lying in a canvas bag under his bed, the novel he could never make time to finish.

He was nearly late for the interview because before he left he had to check up on a story about a Leyton man who planned to row across the Atlantic, get a photograph, have a look at the boat. Nearly late but not quite. The editor seemed impressed by some of the things he had done and by his shorthand note. But he didn’t offer John the job there and then, only said he would let him know. John went back by tube instead of on the bus, and when the train came to the Bank station, he got off and changed on to the Central line. He had a job later, no more than picking up the details of a residents’ association meeting from the secretary, but it was in Leyton and he thought of going to see his mother first. And maybe Desmond would be at home. It was a couple of weeks since he had seen Desmond. But instead of going on to Leyton, he got out of the train at Mile End.

All day long, he had forced himself not to think about the baths and the things those men had said in the coffee bar. He had constantly deflected his thoughts, and that hadn’t been too difficult with the job question uppermost in his mind. Now, in the train, it had come back. He told himself he was only going to have a look. He would look at the outside, case the joint, see who went in, check, for instance, if it really was men only this evening.

The baths were easy to find. They were where the man on the phone had said they were. Opposite, on the other side of the wide arterial road, was a little café with an uncurtained front window and glass panels in its door. John checked that a window table was free and went in.

He had to eat, after all. He couldn’t expect his mother to feed him every evening. He asked for a cup of tea and sat at the table in the middle of that quite big window, from which the baths could clearly be seen. It was a long building of brown brick with a flight of wide steps at the front leading up to swing doors. He ordered shepherd’s pie with peas and carrots, apple crumble and custard. If he saw any obvious queers going in, he’d eat his food and go and never come back.