The Chimney Sweeper's Boy (32 page)

“I pass the scissors uncrossed.”

“No, you
don't
, Mummy.”

“You don't see, do you, Mummy?”

“All right. Try again. I pass the scissors crossed.”

“Wrong again,” said Gerald. “That's enough for today. Come along, my little lambs, we're going on the beach.”

Could she take his children away from him?

He wasn't like an ordinary father. Not only did he worship the girls, but he had done everything for them. She had been like an upper-class woman whose children are cared for by nannies. If she took them away, it would ruin his life; it might kill him. Did she care? Strangely, after everything, she found that she did, still did.

Also, she would have to earn her own living. She would be morally bound to do so, if not actually. If I could have foreseen such feelings ten years ago, she thought, if I could have imagined at my wedding the person I'd become in this short time … She could type. She had no other skills. Even if she stayed with Gerald, she ought to do something more with her life.

The first thing that came out of those beach walks was a decision to educate herself, and the next day she signed up for an art history evening class. She told Gerald, but she didn't think he heard, and if he noticed she was out
on Tuesday and Thursday evenings, he certainly didn't miss her. Later, of course, she knew he had heard, had been busily making notes.

At art history class, she met new people and made some friends. Until then their friends had been Gerald's, but now she saw the possibility of having her own. But at the same time, she withdrew even more from her children. It seemed the natural result of their indifference to her, their overwhelming preference for their father and their tendency, Hope's especially, to ignore her. Perhaps she should have persevered, treated these clever, bright girls as if they were handicapped children who needed constant stimulus and the knowledge of unquenchable love. But they got that from their father, and she couldn't compete, scarcely knew how to, lacked the heart. Instead, she turned to her new friends, and to one man in particular.

It was at about that time, a few days before Easter, that she found the newspaper cutting in Gerald's study. He had gone to Exeter to give a lecture at the University of the Southwest. She went into the study to find the chapter he had written the day before, part of
Time Too Swift
, with the character spitefully based on Betty Wick. It was lying on his desk, the usual higgledy-piggledy pages of scrawled, crossed-out, margin-scribbled prose, indecipherable to all but her.

She picked it up and in doing so lifted too much, a letter from a reader that lay underneath it, an invitation to take part in an arts festival, and under that the cutting from a newspaper, probably the
Daily Telegraph
, though all that appeared at the top of the row of columns was the date: Monday, April 16, 1973.

These were deaths. He hadn't told her that a friend of his had died. But he told her so little. Only a fraction of the death announcements was there, for the paper had been cut, not lengthwise but across, to leave only the top entries in each of the first two columns. Baker, Brandon, Bray, Burton; Daynes, Denisovic, Docker, Durrant, Eady …

She read it over and over. It aroused in her a powerful, undirected, almost-hysterical rage. Without knowing what she was doing, acting on angry impulse, she began tearing the newsprint into pieces. She saw, as she cooled, that she had torn it into scraps like confetti. She swept them into her hand, then into an envelope, took the envelope to the kitchen, and thrust it into the bottom of the waste bin.

If he noticed the absence of the cutting, he said nothing about it.

I
T MUST BE SOMETHING OUT OF THE ORDINARY FOR
J
ASON
to phone her at college. She was surprised he knew where she worked, because she couldn't remember telling him. Perhaps he had set himself to find out things about her.

“I'm in London,” he said. “I've just come from the Natural History Museum.”

“You sound excited.”

“You will be, too, when you hear. Can we meet? I want to tell you face-to-face.”

She sighed. He must have heard the sound. “What time is it?”

“Just gone four.”

He would want to come to the flat. Then she would have to have him there again—obviously enjoying the unaccustomed luxury, the warmth, the drink. And once more have to remind him of his last train, once more pay his taxi fare all across London.

“I'm not very far away,” she said. “Why don't we meet somewhere for a drink? Say in an hour?”

“Could we meet for a meal?” he said.

“You can't get meals at five in the afternoon.”

“That's all you know,” he said. “If you go to cheap places, you can get meals all round the clock.”

She would have much preferred a pub. She liked pubs. The place he chose was hardly a restaurant in her eyes, more a café that dispensed nothing more select than hamburgers and pizza. At least it was licensed. That was the first thing she looked for, cautiously stepping inside. Bottles of wine
from Chile and what supermarkets rather oddly called “the New World” were lined up behind a counter with a till on it and doughnuts in cellophane packets.

The place was very warm and quite crowded for the time of day. Jason was already there, sitting at a table by the window, without even a drink in front of him. He looked gaunt and pale. She hadn't previously noticed how thin he was, but she saw now that he was a thin, almost-emaciated man. The incongruous thought came to her that if he had a girlfriend, she would find it very uncomfortable to sit on his knees.

“Let's have a drink,” she said, and when the waitress came over, she said, “We'll have a bottle of the Chilean Semillon.”

“Not unless you'll drink it all yourself,” he said. “I'm going to have a beer.” He directed his next request to Sarah. “And please may I have the pizza casalinga and chips and some bread first, bread and butter?”

“Pizza casalinga and a side order of french fries?” said the girl, looking from one to the other of them. “Ciabatta or focaccia?”

“Not for me,” said Sarah. “I don't want anything at this hour. I'd better just have a glass of wine, a large glass.”

He looked at her. “You can take the cost of the pizza off my next check if you like.”

“For God's sake. You said yourself it was cheap.” She opened and shut her hands impatiently. “Now, what have you got to tell me?”

“You're going to like it. It's the first real step along the way to knowing who your father was.” He took a small notebook from his jacket pocket. “You know how we thought of all those people who might have come to the house, regular callers who'd know about the little boy's death?”

“Of course I do. The butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker. The milkman. The doctor. The dentist who never was. But I thought you were researching moths.”

His beer came and her wine. She drank greedily. Waiting until she had set her glass down, he said, “I was. I have. This is about the moth. It's the moth that gives the clue to your father's father's occupation, or that's what I think. See what you think. There are two moths, right? Both black.” Jason referred to his notes. “The big one,
Odezia atrata
, is blacker, and one of the books
about them says of the little one,
Epichnopterix plumella
, I quote: ‘It is not quite true to nature, however, that he should be less densely black than his master, since the latter would ordinarily see to it that his fag did an abundant share of the work, and the boy-nature of the latter would consider even a modified cleanliness as somewhat of a weakness.' ”

“Should I know what you're talking about? When was that written?”

“In 1903.”

“What fag? What master?”

“These moths don't just have Latin names; they have common names, too.
Odezia atrata
is commonly known as ‘the chimney sweeper,' and
Epichnopterix plumella
as ‘the chimney sweeper's boy.' How about that?”

She had never appreciated what “tucking in” meant until she saw Jason eating his mammoth pizza. He passed her the basket of chips, but she shook her head. Another glass of wine was more necessary. Wine to blur despair and wine to settle excitement.

“You're saying, aren't you, that Dad's father, my grandfather, was a chimney sweep? That somewhere he'd come across this moth and been amused by its name, by the appropriateness of its name for someone who actually was the sweep's boy, the sweep's son.”

“Right.”

“You're brilliant, Jason, you really are. I don't know what I'd do without you.”

He had demolished half the pizza. He looked up at her and grinned. When he smiled, you could see the outlines of his skull under the stretched pocked skin. “Is there anything you can remember to … well, back it up, if you know what I mean?”

“There is something. My father used to tell my sister and me this story. The hero—well, the boy in it—used to go up chimneys. The story was about his adventures. When I was older, I thought it came from Kingsley's book
The Water Babies
, and I'm sure it did in part, but I think some of it was based on fact.”

“Your dad wouldn't have gone up chimneys, not in the 1930s he wouldn't.”

“His father would have. His father did. Or stuck his brushes up chimneys, or whatever they did. And he was his boy. The black moth was a secret joke.”

“One he didn't share with you.”

Sarah disliked being reminded of that. The picture she formed of her father discovering this insect, its Latin name and then its common name, his amusement, perhaps a wry amusement, his decision to have it on his books as an emblem, esoteric, intensely personal, utterly private—all this was displeasing to her. Silently, to herself, she admitted she was jealous. Jealous of an insect?

“Jason,” she said, “your grandmother would remember the sweep, wouldn't she? She'd know his name, maybe a lot about him?”

“I'll give it a go,” he said.

Lundy View House was empty. Never before had Sarah arrived to find it empty. It was a piece of luck she had brought her key. The central heating was off and the house was cold. She found it all rather unnerving. It had begun to rain, the wind was getting up, and a high tide pounded against the foot of the cliffs. She checked the garage, saw that her mother's car was gone, and thought about road accidents. Then a sense of grievance overpowered mild anxiety. She had never before come home with no one to welcome her, offer her a drink, food, ask about her week. If her father had lived … Immediately, the tears threatened. She rubbed her eyes angrily and poured herself a stiff whiskey. Then she switched on the heat.

At any rate, she could now phone Jason Thague without an audience. And Ma could pay for the call, which would be a long one. She took her whiskey and the phone and sat down in “Daddy's chair.” But it was a little while before she dialed the Ipswich number.

Since the discovery of the black moth's common name, she had felt both closer to her father and further away. Closer because of the thought processes his connection with this small black emblem revealed, because, knowing him so well, she could imagine his researches, his perhaps grim amusement, and his response to those who asked why. “A private matter,” he might have said. “An in-joke shared only by myself with myself.” What would he have said if she had asked? If Hope had asked? This was what distanced
her from him now, the secret he had hidden from her and hidden so successfully. She touched the arms of his chair. His own hands had worn the velvet almost bald. Her hands lay for a moment where his had lain, and then she picked up the phone.

It rang so long, she thought no one was there to answer it. She was on the point of putting the receiver down when his voice said, “Hello?” Absurdly, she thought he should have sounded breathless, should have exerted himself to get to the phone. But his voice was calm, almost indifferent.

“I've asked my nan. She remembers they had the sweep, but she can't remember his name. It's a bit much to expect her to remember.”

“She remembered the doctor,” Sarah said.

“Look, she's a marvel, considering. I just hope you and me'll have our marbles the way she has when we come to wrinkleland.”