Barbara Vine - The Chimney Sweeper's Boy

A towel was spread out on a bench and a vigorous soaping began. Was this a pickup or did all men , normal men, behave like this at the baths? Perhaps. John took a shower. When he came out, the loofah massage was still going on. The older one said, “Was that okay, mate?”

“Great, thanks,” came the answer. “You want to get done?”

They went together into the shower. John moved away. But they weren’t long. One said to the other, “Fancy a spell in the hot room?”

John followed them in. In a quarter of an hour, he felt he had received more education than could ever have come to him from advice or books, if such books existed. The hot room was like a kind of amphitheater. Or he thought it must be. He couldn’t see the highest levels of the terracing, for the steam was too thick up there. The two young men had disappeared into the mist.

It was like walking into a hot cloud—at ground level, the pale mist of a summers morning, but up there it was white, dense, rendering everything invisible. Then, with a return to that heavy beating of his heart, he thought he could discern up on the fifth level, in one corner, a sensuous movement. No more than that. No one was on the fourth level, though there were one or two on the third.

Somehow, he knew he mustn’t hesitate too long. Two old men sitting on the second level were gazing at him with hope; he could tell it was that. They were hoping he would come over, pass near them. It was a new world he had entered, something he had no idea existed. Quite slowly, with a deliberate tread, beginning to enjoy this, he walked toward the old men and, starting to mount the steps, passed between them. Each step was at least two feet six and the old men couldn’t climb them, couldn’t ascend beyond the second level. He felt their eyes following him, deriving a sensuous pleasure and a bitter pang from the sight of his movements as he climbed into the thick white fog.

There was no stopping him now. The steam was like burning cotton wool. He spread one of his towels and lay down on the fourth level. Would someone come to him? He didn’t know whether he wanted this or not. In a way, he felt he had done enough, learned enough. He lay on his back, with one leg stretched out onto the step below, the other bent, his right arm behind his head, his left resting lightly across his body. The other towel covered him decorously—temptingly? He closed his eyes. In the heat and the dense white fog, with his eyes shut, he thought how wonderful it would be were someone to approach, to be there looking at him. To touch him.

All the time he lay there, he sensed that he was watched. Not just by the old men on the lower levels. He doubted if they could even see him. The young and the beautiful watched him, just making out his shape and his youth through the veiling, titillating whiteness. A net, a gauze, an all-enveloping disguise.

After about half an hour, he got up and descended the steps. Perhaps because he had made up his mind that nothing would happen, nothing would happen this time, he was surprised and a little shocked when one of the old men reached out a hand as he passed and touched his leg. He bent down and pushed the hand away. He showered again, dropped his towels into the bin, dressed, and left.

Once outside in the air, he felt cold, though it was a mild night and getting on for midsummer. He also felt tired, exhausted as much by the assimilating of new experience as from the heat. Next time, things would happen. If there was a next time.

Robert had been absorbed by Titus Romney’s manuscript and hadn’t noticed the time. Now, at the end of chapter six, he saw that it was midnight. The rest must wait for tomorrow and he would finish it the night before he was due to go away.

On his way up to bed, the strange ideas that his reading had aroused all returned to him for review. If he hadn’t been sent this by Titus Romney’s agent on behalf of Romney, he would have guessed it to have been written by the late Gerald Candless. He wouldn’t have put it among Gerald’s best work; he wouldn’t even have put it among Gerald’s finished work. He would have placed it, because much of it read like a synopsis, as a first draft or even an experiment.

As far as he knew, Titus Romney and Gerald Candless hadn’t known each other. They might have met at some publisher’s party or a book festival, but that was all. So was Romney, consciously or unconsciously, aping Gerald’s work? Had he perhaps read A White Webfoot and been powerfully influenced by that book?

Robert got into bed beside his sleeping wife but lay awake a long time, thinking about the two novelists and remembering suddenly that Titus Romney had said in an interview in the Radio Times that his problem was not the writing but finding something to write about.

7

The impression he made on the editor was a good one. He could tell. He wouldn’t have been surprised if he was offered the job there and then, but this didn’t happen. It was the usual “We’ll let you know,” and in a way, John was relieved. What would he have said if told to start in two weeks’ time?

After all, he had accepted the other job. His aim was to get to Fleet Street, that or become a novelist, a real full-time novelist, and he thought he could attain either or both as well from a weekly on the outskirts of London as from a provincial daily. But still he wasn’t sure. He kept thinking of his family.

This reminded him that his sister Mary’s birthday was in just over a week’s time. Monday, July the second. She would be sixteen. He had already gotten her a box of chocolates, having saved up his coupons. Chocolate was still rationed, even though the war had been over for six years, and a box of Black Magic was a rare treat. But she ought to have something else, as well. With seven pounds a week coming in, he wasn’t poor and could have gotten her a sweater or a dress length, but Mary wasn’t interested in clothes. On his way to the station and the London train, he went into a bookshop and bought her a book of poetry called Young Pegasus.

He dreamed that night. But he dreamed every night now, falling asleep to the rhythm of a fantasy and sliding from visions of beautiful young men to dreams of them, so he hardly knew where one ended and the other began. All were either in the dangerous darkness of the spoiled forest or in various versions of the baths. Their naked bodies were spread on ziggurat levels or temple steps or they walked, proudly and sensuously, down the inclines of pyramids, and they were veiled in a mist that deepened and thinned, moved, lifted momentarily, swung back in a descended cumulus cloud.

Sometimes the mist closed in so completely as to blind his waking or dreaming eyes. He would be suspended, sightless, in a blank whiteout that was not only opaque but stifling, too. A woolpack, a cloud bank. And then, when he thought he must lose consciousness and cease to breathe, the vapor thinned and lifted, disclosing once more beauty and youth, clearer now than before, no longer merely display and promenade, but embracing, enfolded, and, in the later dreams, passionately conjoined.

He knew somehow that he would be an involved participant in these fantasies and dreams only when he had himself, in reality, done everything they did. And he was ready for that now, aware that the time had come. All ideas that maybe he wasn’t really homosexual, that there was a way out, some avenue that could be taken where you learned to be a lover of women, all those ideas were gone. He felt committed. He had set his foot on this path, not that one, and he couldn’t go back. As soon as the chance came, he was returning to the baths.