The Chimney Sweeper's Boy (33 page)

“Okay, okay, I'm not knocking your grandmother.”

He spoke to someone in the house where he was, some fellow tenant. “Will you turn down that radio? Sorry, but I can't hear myself speak. Sarah, she's going to try and think. See if there's any way she can check. If she can't remember his name, there are a lot of things she does remember. Hang on, will you, and I'll get my notes.”

Sarah hung on. The radio, which no one seemed to have turned down, was providing the sort of music companies play to callers awaiting attention. She half-expected a voice to say, “Our agents are aware of your call and will attend to you soon.” The music tinkled out “Für Elise.” Jason, she thought, why was it such an awful name? Jason was a hero; he captured the Golden Fleece, gained a kingdom, and married Medea. David, who was also a hero and whose name was almost an assonance of Jason, didn't sound ridiculous, nor did Adam.…

He came back. “I was telling you what she remembers. For instance, that the day her brother died was April twentieth, a Wednesday. He was taken ill on Monday the eighteenth and died on the Wednesday. The doctor came several times, but he wasn't taken to the hospital. He died at home.

“On Thursday, the twenty-first, the sweep came. He was booked to come. The winter fires were over and Kathleen Candless, my great-grandmother, that is, wanted to start her spring-cleaning, which she couldn't do till the
chimneys were swept. Nan says he came to the door at eight on the Thursday morning and she was sent to tell him to come back another day. Then her dad came out and told him his son had died the day before and that he should come back the following week.”

“If she doesn't know his name, does she know whether he had children?”

“She doesn't know much about him except that he was a man who was usually black with soot and who rode a bike. He carried his brushes with him on a bike.”

Sarah had started to say that they must find out this man's name, that there must be ways, when Ursula walked into the room. She changed her tone to one more brisk and businesslike. “I've put your check in the post. I'll phone again tomorrow or the next day.” The gentle smile on Ursula's face made her unreasonably indignant. She said like a hectoring parent to a child, “Where have you been?”

Ursula started to laugh. She and Gerald, united for once, had made a point of never asking the girls that question. Sarah looked peevish and her compliment sounded grudging.

“You look wonderful. You look ten years younger.”

“I've been in London to see Robert Postle. I met a friend and decided to stay on another day.”

“Have you had something done to your face?” Sarah peered closely, decided she was close enough for a greater intimacy than interrogation afforded, and planted a kiss on her cheek. “You must have been having a great time. The house was absolutely freezing. I did phone yesterday—well, I phoned a lot of times, but you weren't here.”

“I'll get us something to eat, shall I?” Ursula had been disarmed by that kiss, found her spoiled child amusing, felt at once lighthearted. She looked at herself in the mirror, at her flushed face, the brightness in her eyes, the upturned corners of her mouth, and was inspired to ask, “Can you take me back with you on Sunday? To London, I mean. I have to go back.”

“Yes, if you want.” Sarah was staring. “Ma, I think Dad's father was a chimney sweep. Does that mean anything to you?”

Ursula nearly said she didn't know and she didn't care. But, as always, she remembered her daughters' great love for Gerald, and how the knowledge
of that love always checked her, so that she was ever prevented from derogation of him.

“Let's go and see what there is for supper,” she said.

He was sitting at a table with Vicky and Paul and Tyger when Sarah came in. She had dressed herself up in total black, a minimal black skirt, fishnet stockings and knee boots, and a black sweater that was too small for her and which she had found in Hope's room. Tyger looked her up and down and said, “Going on somewhere, are you?”

“You have to be meeting someone, sweetheart,” said Vicky, “done up like that.”

“I felt like it,” Sarah said, and gulped her wine rather fast. “I felt a bit wild.”

He didn't say a word. Alexander came in and then Rosie. They were all for going on to the club at once; they were tired of this pub. You could eat at the club and drink till forever and it was raffish and pretty. Everyone drank up and Vicky put her coat on. Sarah also put on her coat, which was a hip-length black mock marabou and also Hope's.

“You'll be lucky if they let her in,” Adam said suddenly. It was the first time he had spoken. “She looks as if she's on the game.”

Vicky gasped. Sarah turned her eyes on him coldly. “What did you say?”

“You heard. I grew up in this town. Some of my family lives here. I can't afford to be seen about with whores.”

“For God's sake.” Alexander put out one hand, interposing it between them, as if he feared their coming to blows. “What's with you? What have you got against Sarah? This isn't the first time.”

“He hasn't anything against me,” Sarah said. “He's a shit. He talks like that because he's too fucking stupid to make normal conversation.”

“And you, woman, are a university lecturer who is too ignorant to manage invective without lacing it with obscenities. No wonder education is in the state it is. Do you let your students see you dressed like that?”

“Now, come on,” Vicky said. “For God's sake, cool it. Are we going on to the club or aren't we? I think you ought to apologize to Sarah, Adam.”

“Over my dead body,” said Adam.

He picked his jacket off the back of his chair and walked out. Sarah was almost too excited to move. Her speech was choked. The others thought she was upset, that once more his rudeness had cut her.

“I think I'll go, too,” she said.

“Oh, come on. You shouldn't let it affect you. It's Saturday night.”

“No, I'll go home. I'll see you all in a couple of weeks.”

She ran out the back way, staggering. He was leaning against her car. She looked at him, said, “Where are we going?”

“Caravan site. I've borrowed someone's van. The cottage is full of family. But a field first. I can't wait.”

“Will you drive?”

“No,” he said. “You must drive. I want to touch you while you're driving.”

F
EELINGS AND MEMORIES SHE THOUGHT FORGOTTEN WERE REVIVED BY
these photographs. Apart from that quick glance at her wedding album, it was years since Joan Thague had bothered to look at these records of the past, but now she had begun. The young lady whose name couldn't really be Candless had done that for her. She and, through her, Jason. These past few days, she had made a perusal of the albums an evening ritual.

Jason wanted a memory, though he didn't know which one. A name, the name of a long-dead man. She thought she had given him all her memories, but now she was no longer sure. The most unexpected things came back to her. She would sit down with the album, not on her knees, but open on the table in front of her, study a photograph, then close her eyes and let all the associations of that picture flow into her mind.

She had begun with her grandparents and, as a result of studying this formal studio portrait of them at their golden anniversary, recalled her visits to their cottage, the two old people facing each other from armchairs on either side of the graphite range, the sight, always daunting, of their gnarled hands like tree roots in a picture book, for both were arthritic, even the smell of the place, a compound of stewed food and lavender. Looking at the photograph brought back their voices, the rich Suffolk speech, and the strange words:
pytle
for “meadow” and
sunket
for “a sick child.” Her grandmother, she remembered, had called poor Gerald sunket when she came over and saw him that Monday morning.

Joan looked at the picture of her parents' wedding, her mother and Auntie Dorothy, her bridesmaid, in satin hobble skirts. Her mother's wedding dress hung for years in the wardrobe in a calico bag, to be looked at by special permission but never to be used for dressing up. When Gerald was dead, though there seemed no reason for doing such a thing, Kathleen Candless took the dress out of the wardrobe and had it dyed black. As if she could have worn a fifteen-year-old wedding gown for mourning. She never did wear the dress, and Joan had no idea what had become of it.

Here was the beach photographer's snapshot Miss Candless had stared at so … well, rudely, in Joan's opinion. She had had a very good idea of what the girl was thinking—that these people looked poor and old-fashioned and ugly and their children clodhoppers. It was that as much as anything that had made her cry and had, at any rate, moved the girl to say she was sorry. Joan wasn't going to cry now. She looked calmly and sadly at Gerald's round, happy face, his curls, his bright eyes, his hand in their mother's hand as he skipped along. There was another snap of him on the next page, or rather, a snap with him in it, for the Applestone boys were there, too, all sitting on the low wall of a front garden. Was that the Applestones' house, dark brick, with small windows, and steps up to the front door? She couldn't remember.

Noticing for the first time that all these photographs had been taken outdoors, she realized what she must once have known very well. In those days, an ordinary camera couldn't cope with interior shots. There was insufficient light. A flash mechanism didn't exist, or if it did, it wasn't available to the likes of them. You depended on sunlight, as her father must have when he had taken this shot of her mother and herself and Gerald on a day out by the sea. The background looked like Southwold, but she couldn't be sure. How had they gotten there? No car for them, of course; she couldn't remember anyone her parents knew having a car. Probably they had gone in a charabanc, as coaches were called then.

It was the last picture taken of Gerald, though eight or nine months before his death. You took photographs in the summer then, on your holidays; a camera was a luxury. She studied the little boy's smiling face, wondering how he would have looked if he had lived and grown up. If, for instance, he had been able to come to her wedding. And then she thought, with a little inward tremor, that if Gerald had lived, she might never have
met Frank, let alone married him. For it was only because the house and its surroundings had been so hateful to her without her brother that she had left home and gone to Sudbury in the first place.

Joan closed her eyes and slipped into a reverie. When she was young, people told you not to dwell on painful things, to forget them, put them behind you. Unpleasantness must be buried, or at least hidden from public view. So she had never talked to Frank about Gerald's death or even allowed herself to think about it. She had shut it off when it arose in her mind unbidden. But it had always lain there, asleep yet menacing, and now she had awakened it, or the pictures and the girl who wasn't called Candless had. And Joan understood with relief that it was better for her and somehow better for Gerald now that she could confront it and remember.

When he was dead, they let her see him. For hours and hours before that, twenty-four hours, she hadn't been allowed in his sickroom. Dr. Nuttall came and went and came and there was talk of a nurse. But her mother had been a nurse and wanted no other. Outside his room, unseen, Joan sat on the top stair of the steep flight. It was dark there; it was always dark until they lit the gas. She listened to the murmur of the doctor's voice and the higher-pitched sound of her mother talking, and then Gerald's cries—“My head hurts, my head hurts.” When he shouted with the pain, she put her hands over her ears, but when he began to scream, she ran downstairs and hid in the hall cupboard among the brooms. The long silence that followed was broken by the old lady coming, though she talked in whispers. She came to lay out the body, though Joan didn't know that then. Dr. Nuttall came back and then Joan's father took her into the room where her mother was and the doctor was and where Gerald lay, his closed eyes looking up to the ceiling, his face white as a wax candle. They told her she could kiss him, but she wouldn't; she shook her head wordlessly. Later, when she was grown and had children of her own, she thought they shouldn't have asked her to kiss a dead boy.

It was evening, night perhaps; it must have been. They hadn't drawn the bedroom curtains. The sky over Ipswich now was a bronzy red color, but then it had been a deep dark blue with stars. Gerald was going to lie there till the morning while her mother sat at his bedside. Joan couldn't remember the night or what her father did, no matter how hard she tried. But she remembered the morning and her mother there in the kitchen, getting breakfast for
the man of the house, as she always did, as she would have if she herself were dying.