Barbara Vine - The Chimney Sweeper's Boy

The difficulty was when. It sounded like one of his old excuses, born of fear and self-doubt, but it wasn’t. They were busy on the paper and he didn’t have the time. It didn’t occur to him that leaving as he planned to leave, about to give in his notice, he could neglect his job, not bother. He pursued the stories he was doing with his old zeal. Tuesday was when he could have gone to Mile End, but every fourth Tuesday the housing committee met and he had to be there. No one else had his fast shorthand.

He went home to tea on Wednesday evening, just dropped in really, because he had a school play to cover. He wouldn’t have bothered to be there except that a once-famous actress and friend of the headmistress was coming down to attend the performance. Desmond was at home, too, had come back from work to change before going on somewhere. He was tremendously well dressed, in a light gray suit and jaunty trilby hat. They walked as far as the bus stop together and, leaving him, Desmond winked and said he had a date. John saw him get into a taxi.

On Thursday, he thought the time had come and he could make it that evening. It was either now or waiting till next Tuesday, because the women’s days were out and he couldn’t go on Saturday. He had promised to take Mary and Stephen to the zoo. The paper went to press on Thursdays and it was a busy day because all the reporters took a hand—it wasn’t a union shop—and journalists handled the lead, putting headings into the dummy, and photographic blocks, too. One of John’s jobs was to set up the weekly chess problem.

He was doing this when the chief sub came over to him and asked if he could go out to Woodford at seven and cover a political meeting. The man who usually did Woodford was off sick. Sylvia Pankhurst would be speaking. John said he thought Sylvia Pankhurst was dead, but the chief sub said no, that was her mother, and he was afraid there was no question about it—John would have to do it.

Why didn’t he say, “Do it yourself; I’m leaving”? He could have. He should have. He was going to write his letter of resignation tomorrow, anyway. Instead, he shrugged, said yes, okay.

A refusal would have saved his life, but how was he to know that?

The letter from the Devon daily paper, offering him the job and with a much higher salary than the weekly one, came on Friday morning. He had almost definitely decided not to take it, but to take the other one. He wrote his resignation and posted his letter on Saturday morning, on his way to his mothers to pick up the children.

His mother put her arms around him and kissed him, which naturally didn’t happen each time he went home. She said he looked tired, a bit strained—was anything worrying him? It was then that he nearly told her about his change of job, but he didn’t because he hadn’t quite decided which one he was going to take.

On their way to the tube station, Mary said her friend’s mother had told her she had been on elephant and camel rides down the Broad Walk of Regent’s Park and could they do that? John said, “If it’s possible,” but when they got to the zoo, they found the rides in the park no longer happened, though both children got to sit on an elephant. A tall, thin young man was feeding the lions. He had lion-colored hair and tawny eyes, was shaped like the statue of the discus thrower, and that night he came into John’s fantasy and then his dreams, wearing only a loincloth, which he dropped onto the marble as he stepped down into a shiny white pool.

8

It would be easy telling his mother and Joseph and the children about the North London job because it really would make very little difference to them. He could even go on living where he lived now and see them just as often. By the time Monday came, he had decided to stick to his decision and take the job on the weekly, though he still hadn’t replied to the letter from Devon. A couple of days’ delay wouldn’t matter.

The chief sub came into his cubbyhole of an office on Monday afternoon and said he was very disappointed to have gotten John’s resignation. The editor would have something to say about it when he got back from his holiday.

“I’ll be gone by then,” John said.

“No, you won’t,” said the chief sub. “You’ll reconsider your decision.”

“I wouldn’t bank on that if I were you,” John said.

He finished the diary note he was writing and caught the bus to Chingford, where he had a cup of tea and a bun in a carman’s café and went on to the meeting of the Chingford Mount Residents’ Association. It went on much longer than he had expected, very little real business was done, and it made John wonder how much more of this backstreet parochial stuff he could stand to cover. Whereas down in Devon, on a daily … But he had decided. North London it was to be.

It was nearly eight before he got to his mother’s and Mary’s birthday party. She had two school friends there, a nice one and a pretty one, giggly sixteen-year-olds. Mary never giggled; she was grave, quiet, sweetly affectionate. John gave her the presents and she smiled and rolled her eyes at the chocolates, but when she had unwrapped the poetry book and looked inside, she came over to him and put her arms around him and kissed him.

That made the friends giggle. One of them looked inside Young Pegasus and made a face, asked with more giggling if John had ever read Forever Amber. John nodded. It and various other works of mild (very mild) heterosexual pornography had been among the books he had made himself read a few years back in one of many attempts to reorientate his inclinations. Now, eyeing the girl who had inquired, he thought how good-looking she was, a real beauty, a Leyton Lana Turner, old for her age, appearing at least nineteen. Her beauty left him cold. He found her utterly undesirable.

The whole family was there, Stephen finishing his homework in the corner, Margaret seeming mature and grave in the presence of the younger girls, Desmond over by the wireless, listening to Phil Harris singing “The Darktown Poker Club.” Joseph still sat at the table, behind the remains of Marys birthday cake, looking quite genial for him. Mary was his favorite, the only one of them he referred to as his own child, instead of his stepdaughter or stepson.

It was Desmond who suggested they play the Game. Someone was bound to; they couldn’t have had any sort of gathering without playing the Game. Desmond switched off the radio and said to the two girls, the beauty and the nice one, “This game is called I Pass the Scissors. You have to see if you can do it right.”

“Do we have to?”

The beauty could hardly keep her eyes off Desmond. They would have made a handsome couple, John thought dryly, only Desmond was no more likely to be drawn to her than he was. She pouted at him, yearning for a flirtation, but all Desmond did was say, “Yes, you have to. You’ll like it.”

Margaret fetched her mother’s sewing scissors. They were steel, the metal worn to a deep gunmetal color, the handles bound in tape to keep fingers that constantly used them from getting sore. For years, their mother had made all the children’s clothes. Mary, the birthday girl, took the scissors, opened them, and handed them to her sister.

“I pass the scissors crossed.”

“I receive the scissors crossed and pass them uncrossed,” said Margaret, shifting her position at the table.

“I receive the scissors uncrossed,” said the beauty, “and pass them uncrossed.”

“No, you don’t. …”