Barbara Vine - The Chimney Sweeper's Boy

The first man went in after about five minutes. He was tall and heavily built, wearing an old blue pinstriped suit and a shirt without a collar. John could see plainly from his window. Another man with his hair cut very short all over his head, the way the GIs’ had been, was next. Both of them looked like ordinary, normal men, husbands and fathers. But John couldn’t eat. He was too excited, too keyed up.

Three more men went in, two of them quite old. John hadn’t expected people like that, not elderly men with bald heads and big bellies, one of them with a white moustache, the other in a long overcoat, even though it was June and warm. Their seniority reassured him, though. They seemed to make the place respectable. These were municipal baths, after all, people went to them for all sorts of reasons. He wasn’t sure that he wanted respectability; indeed, in a way, he knew he didn’t but he wanted things to look proper, to look as if this was what all normal men did, like going to the pub.

He paid for the food he hadn’t eaten, crossed the road, and approached the steps. It was nearly seven o’clock and he had to pick up the residents’ association meeting agenda at eight, so it was too late to go in. Or he told himself it was. He told himself that he’d go another time. When he had more time. His heart beat with a heavy rhythmic plodding, the way it had in the forest. He began walking around the building, down the street on the left, looking us at windows far too high for anything behind the glass to be seen. Along the street behind where the facade was, there was a plain high brick wall, slightly sinister because it was windowless, up the right-hand street, and out again into the main road. Next week, then. Next Tuesday or Thursday. He went back to the tube station.

6

The way to manage it was by not thinking. Or by thinking of other things. Forcing it. He thought of the possible jobs. The editor of the weekly had written, offering him the job, and he had accepted it. Anything to get away from the Independent and those sniggerers and that rabid editor, the hot, stinking press, the rush and panic. Of course, it might be as bad in the new job, but at least it would be different.

And then there was the West Country daily. They had written suggesting Saturday for an interview. He had liked that, because it meant they understood he had obligations here, couldn’t simply get on a train when he chose and travel 220 miles. They were allowing him a weekend. That might well mean they were keen to have him. And in spite of telling the weekly he would join them in July, he was keeping his options open. He wasn’t obliged to take the job just because he had accepted it. That sort of thing was standard practice if something better turned up. But could he contemplate going 220 miles away from them all?

These speculations served very well to keep his mind off the baths until he was on the steps, walking up toward those swing doors. Then a torrent of feelings descended, of fear, and a very real sense that he might be undertaking something that would damage him, that he would always regret. But he pushed open the doors and went in.

He was in a hall or foyer. On the left was a cash desk and above it a hanging sign that listed the price of a bath, the use of the swimming pool, the steam bath, and the days which were for men and those for women. A woman of about sixty sat at the receipt of custom. He hadn’t expected women here, and the sight of her made him feel better. She wasn’t in the least like his mother—she was older and much shorter and fatter—but he fancied she had a motherly look, placid, sensible, calm. She wore a blue sweater and a checked crossover overall.

He paid for the steam bath. She gave him a ticket and directed him toward a pair of green rubber doors. On the left was an opening like a serving hatch. A man, the very man with the crew cut John had seen the previous week, was handing in his ticket, so John did the same. It was easy when you knew how. Would all of it be easy?

Behind was a very big room in which stood three long wardrobe rails with wire baskets on hangers swinging from them. On each basket was a metal disk with a number on it. The crew-cut man went into a changing room and John followed. Out of sight, he pressed his hand against his heart and felt the steady, rapid pounding. But as he held his hand there and breathed deeply, the pulsation slowed.

He copied what the other man did, took off his clothes, put them into the basket, his jacket over the hanger, his cigarettes and matches into one of his shoes, the change from his pocket into his handkerchief, which he knotted twice and put into the other shoe. The towels he had taken he arranged as the other man did, one around his body up to his waist, sarongwise, the other draped across his head and shoulders. An attendant had appeared, and when John turned away from his basket, he told him to keep the disk on its band with him, either as a wristband or on his ankle. John put it around his left wrist.

The next room was full of chairs made of Bakelite or perhaps one of the new plastics, brown-and-white chairs. People sat about having cups of tea. That was another sight which surprised John, these old men decorously toweled, sitting chatting and smoking, drinking tea out of thick white china cups. He had expected something like a cross between the school swimming bath and a Roman orgy.

The place was lit by greenish fluorescent strip lights and the walls, tiled in white, had turned grayish, or perhaps the harsh light had discolored them. But it was pleasantly warm. The way it had been most of the time he was in the Philippines, warm and close and damp. The old men had horrible bodies, all bulges and folds of flesh, the skin mottled white like a fish on a slab, their legs seamed and knotted with dark gray veins. But they brought him reassurance. It couldn’t be for sex that they came, and when he saw one of them looking at him, he put that covert gaze down to simple interest at the sight of a newcomer.

Another hatch had a tea lady behind it, younger than the other one, but middle-aged and respectable-looking. He would have been disconcerted by some dizzy young blonde. You could buy buns and sweets as well as cups of tea and this was where you bought your soap and shampoo.

More doors, one with STEAM above it, another labeled MASSAGE, SHOWER, COLD PLUNGE. When the left-hand door opened, steam billowed out, clouds of it accompanying the young man who emerged, making for the next room. John followed cautiously. More old men here and some beautiful young ones. The atmosphere of respectability was fading. John felt it recede, to be replaced by a sense of danger, of tension.

The man he had followed, who was about his own age, also had a towel wrapped around him and he walked erect, slowly, showing himself off, heading for the cold-water pool. A group of onlookers watched. Not one of them could be under sixty. What went through their minds? Did they think a man like that proud walker could be in search of a father figure? Some hopes!

The young man let his towel drop to the floor and stepped into the cold water. John couldn’t take his eyes off him. It was all so unlike what he had expected. The young man had white skin and light hair, butter-colored. He came out of the water, picked up his towel, and went into the shower room, followed by another man, older but still young. John went in there, too. He told himself he must do something, have a shower perhaps, something innocent.

The blond was washing himself with soap on a loofah. His companion—if he was his companion—said to him, “Want me to do your back, mate?”